AUGUSTIN D'HIPPONE - SAINT AUGUSTIN (354-430) Lot n° 37

ERRATUM: The last leaf has been reassembled and obviously comes from another copy. De civitate Dei. [Strasbourg, Johann Mentelin, not after 1468]. Two parts in one folio volume (388 x 283 mm), (335) ff [a-e¹⁰ f⁸ g-r¹⁰ s⁸ t-z10 A¹⁰ B-C⁸ D-K¹⁰ L⁸ M5]. Without the last blank leaf. 2 columns, 47 lines (part I: text) and 57 lines (part II: commentary), types 2:112 (text) and 5:92 (commentary). Jansenist midnight blue morocco on broad aisles, flat spine, gilt title, triple gilt fillet on the edges, spine boards edged and framed with triple gilt fillet, gilt edges (unsigned English binding attributable to Charles Lewis, ca 1835). Modern lined slipcase. Second incunabula edition and first commented edition of St. Augustine's masterpiece. Published one year after the first incunabula edition given by Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Panartz in Subiaco, this is the first edition with commentaries, by the English Dominicans and Oxford professors Thomas Waleys (1318-1349) and Nicholas Trivet (1297-1334). The City of God, a central work of Latin Christianity and the object of many references in medieval culture, was not, however, the subject of a full-fledged commentary until the beginning of the 14th century. The printing of the commentaries by Waleys and Trivet constitutes a new textual event. The edition is undated, like most of Mentelin's editions. The terminus could be restored from the rubrication date of 1468, which is found in the copies of Lindau, Manchester and Osaka. Mentelin, the first great editor of Saint Augustine. His edition of The City of God was the model for all subsequent editions until the Amerbach edition in 1494. It is composed of two parts, the text followed by the commentaries. It is the first to fragment the presentation of the table: the summaries of books XIX to XXII are indicated at the head of each of these four books (Gustave Bardy, introduction aux Œuvres de Saint Augustin, Desclée de Brouwer, p. 50). In five years, Mentelin printed the other major texts of the bishop of Hippo: the De arte praedicandi in 1466, the princeps edition of the Confessions in 1470 and the Epistolæ in 1471. A fresh copy, rubricated and decorated with numerous watermarked initials with antennae in red, blue and green ink. PROVENANCE Marginalia in ink by a fifteenth-century proofreader (see his annotation at the bottom of f. 252 dated: "Anno &c Ixxvij. di martis penulti[m]a Julij. Eystet." [July 30, 1476, Eichstatt]); Library of the Episcopal Principality of Eichstatt (seventeenth-century inscription in the lower margin of the first f.: "Ad Bibl: Aul: Eystettensem"); Edward Herbert, Earl of Powis (bookplate); Estelle Doheny (bookplate; purchased in Rosenbach, October 23, 1942). REFERENCES Goff A1239; H 2056*; Pellechet 1554; GW 2883; ISTC ia01239000