MONTE ROCHEN, Guido de.

by Guido de Monte Rochen

£25,100 · Offered by Sokol Books

Very rare second Wynkyn de Worde edition of this popular manual for priests by the fourteenth-century Spanish cleric and canonist Guido de Mont Rochen, first printed in England by Pynson around 1500, and by de Worde in an earlier edition of 1502. This copy has excellent provenance, being from the library of Estelle Doheny, originally purchased from the York Minster Library by private treaty in 1930 by A.S.W. Rosenbach, with evidence of early English ownership (see Leslie A. Morris, Rosenbach Abroad (Philadelphia: 1988), p. 59, no. 55). Monte Rochen's book went through hundreds of editions in the late medieval period and circulated widely in manuscript: It sold twice as many copies as Gratian s Decretum, three times more than Thomas Aquinas s Summa theologiae, and six times more than Boccaccio s Decameron or Augustine s City of God. Yet Guido de Monte Rochen and his manual for priests have long been overlooked by historians of the period (Michael Milway, Forgotten Best-Sellers from the Dawn of the Reformation in eds Bast, Gow and Oberman, Continuity and Change (Leiden: 2000), p. 117). It was finally superseded by the establishment of the Roman Catholic catechism in the Council of Trent in 1566. The manual is divided into three parts: the first covers the chief sacraments of baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, marriage, extreme unction, and the ordination of holy orders; the second covers penance and confession; the third contains crucial doctrines to be conveyed to the peopl

• Binding: Hardcover

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