John Day's first publication of the complete works of Tyndale, Frith and Barnes is prefaced by these words of John Foxe:
For therefore I suppose this science of Printing first to be set up and sent of God to mans use, not so much for temporall commoditie to be taken, or mans glory to be sought thereby, but rather for the spirituall and inwarde supportation of soulehealth, helpe of Religion, restoring of true doctrine, repayring of Christes Church, and repressing of corrupt abuses, which had heretofore overdarkened the doctrine of fayth, to revive agayne the lost lyght of knowledge to these blynde tymes, by renuing of holsome and auncient writers: whose doinges and teachings otherwise had lyen in obliuion, had not the benefite of Printing brought them agayne to light, or us rather to light by them.
These 'blynde tymes' Foxe refers to were 1573, when the reforming of England had evolved into a new kind of conflict. The controversies of the day centered around the interpretation and manifestation of reform, that is, whether it would wear an Anglican or Puritan face. As an attempt to restore unity and define English Protestantism, Anglican printer John Day had revived the writings of the beloved martyrs and learned fathers of the Reformation, William Tyndale, Robert Frith, and Dr. Robert Barnes, whom John Foxe later claimed as the 'chief ryngeleaders of thys Church of England'.
Although the Church of England that Tyndale may have envisioned in the 1520s was not necessarily that of Matthew Parker and Alexander Nowell in the 1570s, we must admire the prophetic truth of Foxe's words regarding the benefit of printing. Indeed, were it not for the printers, we would have much less evidence for discovery today. But printers are only the first step, for their work was, in essence, complete at the end of each print run. For the long lives of these precious books, we must give credit to those whose efforts are collaborative with the printers', the collectors.
As a curator of a significant private American collection, I am particularly intrigued by the relationship of the private collector to Tyndale studies. The purpose of the recent celebration over the discovery of the Stuttgart Tyndale New Testament is an apt illustration of how the individual bookcollector fits into this discipline, since the very survival of the Stuttgart Tyndale depended upon its deportation and preservation by a sixteenth-century bibliophile.
I will examine the relationship of the private collector to the study of William Tyndale in a discussion in two parts: the latter will be an examination of the discoveries and revelations relating to the age of Tyndale which may yet be had in the world of private book ownership. The first and following part is an introduction to this active, competitive, and even confounding, world of book collecting.
Part One: Wars and Rumours of Wars
The Van Kampen Collection is a repository of Biblical materials, including clay tablets of cuneiform documentation, papyrus fragments in Greek and Coptic, numerous medieval manuscripts of Eastern and Western traditions, and printed books from the dawning of moveable type to the present. The collection became open to the academic and general public in 1994, at which date I began to be asked the question, 'Where in the world did you get these things?' I am half-tempted to respond that we employ archaeological teams for the purpose of uncovering these treasures from the sands of Egypt or the nibble of English castles. But in truth, if we did acquire our items that way, we would be in considerable trouble with the government agencies of those countries whose job it is to keep national monuments at home.
Most visitors to our collection, or any other, are unaware that the rare book trade is an active and flourishing industry. At times no less hazardous than an archeological dig, the rare book industry attracts many different sorts of people: the Opportunist - who mistakenly believes that his fortune will lie in an unnoticed edition in the next bookstall: the Grave Robber - his bibliophilia borders on the perverse in its fascination with the oblique inscription and hasty ex libris of a long-since departed owner: the Disgruntled Academic Turned Bookseller -- who finds that book fairs and catalogue descriptions are preferable to the politics and administrative rigors of the university; the Novice - that prey of a certain sort of professional predator, an inevitable element in every antiquities market; and the Seasoned Collector - he who is driven nearly senseless by a passion to both consume and proliferate former bodies of knowledge, and at the same time manages not to lose his shirt. As with any publicly traded commodity, the book trade is driven as much by psychology as any other factor.
Many of the world's great research institutions were founded on the antiquities amassed by a single collector stricken with this 'gentle madness' (as one author recently has called the collecting mania in a book of the same name [1]). In England, there are the early legendary collections of Bodley, Cotton, Parker, Hatton, and Rylands, and many more. In the States, it has
been the economic prosperity of this century which has produced the great collections of the big industrialists - Morgan. Huntington, Beinecke, Pforzheimer and Folger, to name a few. But more often than not, great libraries are dispersed after the death of their founders either by the families or the institutions to which the archive was bequeathed. As regrettable as that may seem, this turning over of materials is the fuel of the trade. Often, as in the case of the Stuttgart Tyndale, items become 'lost' in large public collections of a static nature, in that they are miscatalogued or mis-shelved and forgotten over time. However, in the private realm, things are seldom lost, and a book's provenance becomes one aspect of its value.
If collecting is a passion, building a library is an art. The voracious appetite of Mr. Folger to pursue every Shakespeare folio he knew to exist was driven by the simple desire to have them all. This is the least sophisticated and most potentially hazardous motivation behind the collecting impulse. It does not take long for the artless buying habits of a newcomer to create a false inflationary market which, after a short and spiked appreciation, leaves him with a devalued library and no takers. On the other hand, the carefully chosen and specialized library, which reflects years of research and clever purchasing, will appreciate in value both to one's estate as well as to the scholarly community, whether it stays together or not. Estelle Doheney's library, built upon the sound advice of reputable academics and book sellers, did not survive her death as an archive. Nonetheless, since its dispersal in 1976, each item shines as a solitary jewel in the great and growing collections of the later twentieth century.
Those individuals or institutions who wish to sell a book, as well as those who wish to buy one, look to two primary venues for book acquisition: the auction house and the dealer. Many of the great collections, such as Countess Doheney's, are dispersed at the auction block. Many private collectors feel that they do best when purchasing in the sale rooms of the large houses because they are buying from the same source as the dealers, often bidding against those who will later market the item at a much higher price. Similarly, prices brought at auction, which are a matter of public record, serve as the benchmark for market values. But the dangers of public trading may be relieved through agency -- that is, through the services of the private dealer who can maintain his client's anonymity while providing a certain expertise and buying savvy that the private collector may not have.
One looming fault of the book industry is its inability to ascribe value to the truly valuable. Often the industry will fall over itself for an edition made rare because of a former collector's voracity, and ignore the truly unique. I
think of a sale held at Sotheby's London on Monday, 13th of December, 1993, officially known as the 'Hamlet' sale. Lot number 20, illustrated on the cover of the sale catalogue, was the talk of the book world that winter. It was a rare copy of Shakespeare's Tragedy of Hamlet, the fourth quarto edition, published sometime between 1619-30, bound in contemporary vellum. The catalogue description advertised in all capital letters, THIS IS THE FIRST COPY OF THIS EDITION OF HAMLET TO APPEAR AT AUCTION IN 75 YEARS. And later on, THERE IS NO RECORD OF ANOTHER COPY IN A CONTEMPORARY VELLUM BINDING. After arguing that this edition is the 'most authentic form of the play' by discrediting the 'Bad' but nonetheless significantly earlier and rare quarto of 1604, the Sotheby's cataloguers noted that only 20 copies of this edition of Hamlet have been located by bibliographers (to the surprise of no one, mostly in American libraries). The estimate was listed at £40-50,000. In the weeks before the sale, the queue for inspection of this book was filled with specialists, scholars, dealers, collectors, and Shakespeare pilgrims, all anxious to see and hold this latest relic. On the day of the sale, bids for lot 20 came from all over the sale room as well as all over the world by way of active phone bidding. However, once the price surpassed that of the estimate, the bidding quickly quieted down to two bidders. The rest of the participants watched - or listened if they were on the phones -- as a prestigious book house in London and an agent for a foreign collector vied for ownership of the Hamlet. The foreigner prevailed, and the fourth edition quarto of Hamlet in a near contemporary binding sold for a pre-commission price of £150,000.00 to an agent named Edwards.[2]
In the same sale, another rare book was offered as lot 289. This was Matthew Parker's De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae of 1572. Parker, Archbishop to Queen Elizabeth and proponent of Anglican stability in the golden years of the English Reformation, was a bookman. Through his scholarship and patronage, he was responsible for many of the monumental reform publications of the late sixteenth-century; most significantly, he is regarded as the principle editor of the Bishops' Bible of 1568. In 1572, Parker hired the printer John Day to bring a scaled-down printing operation to his home in Cambridge to produce the first privately-printed book in England, the Antiquitate. This work was, for Parker, the culmination of his scholarship and theology, a recounting of the history of the English church from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through to the victories of the reformers. Every aspect of this publication was overseen by Parker, for only fifty or so copies were printed. We gather from his correspondence that
Parker intended these for gifts to his closest friends and colleagues. In light of the expense he must have incurred to produce this publication, this book must have represented the finest gift he could give, and he gave it sparingly. Speaking of the book he said, 'I have not given to four men in the whole realm, and peradventure, it shall never come to sight abroad, though some men, smelling of the printing it, were very desirous cravers of the same.... For the present I purpose to keep it by me, while I live, to add and mend as occasion should serve me, or utterly to suppress it, and to burn it. [3] One copy was presented to Queen Elizabeth, but the majority of the issue was in Parker's possession at his death two years later. The RSTC[4] lists only six copies in the U.K. of this book, although there may be more. In the United States, there is only one copy - another of Mr. Folger's conquests. Like the Hamlet, the last copy of the Antiquitate to be sold at auction traded in 1920, and that copy was incomplete.
On that day in December, 1993, the crowd thinned following the momentous result of the Hamlet, but the auction carried on, for there were over three hundred more lots to sell. The majority of the remaining participants were dealers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books who were planning to attend the Fairfax Sale the next day. When lot 289, the Antiquitate, came up, very little interest was shown. When the auctioneer failed to attract a minimum bid of £4000.00, the book was 'bought in', that is, taken off the block. In spite of all the attention this sale generated, the Antiquitate went unsold. The book resurfaced in a later sale in 1994, to the same result.
The tale of the 'Hamlet' sale illustrates my thesis: in the world of private collecting, there are yet discoveries to be made. As long as there are institutions or collectors who need to liquidate their libraries, and as long as free trade is encouraged. there will be important material changing hands. The good collector survives by being as knowledgeable about the objects he collects as about the nuances of the marketplace. However, since there are many publications offering tips on successful bookcollecting, let me now turn to the topic of Tyndale in the marketplace.
All scholars of Tyndale are aware of the celebrated acquisition by the British Library of the Bristol Baptist College Library's first edition of Tyndale's New Testament. The rarity and importance of this edition is the reason for our gathering this morning. What many scholars and enthusiasts are not aware of is how many other Tyndale or Tyndale-related editions have been available on the market, have been purchased. and are now in private hands. The subsequent editions of Tyndale's Bible form important chapters in the story of the English Reformation. The virtual explosion of editions bears witness to the irrepressibility of the Scriptures in the vernacular, which was Tyndale's legacy. Many bear the scars of the persecution under which they circulated, and I will mention these further on. Nevertheless, as attested to by the existence of only two complete first editions, the survival of Tyndale's work depended on these later editions. Although less rare, the later editions of Tyndale's Bible are as valuable from the perspective of the text they transmitted at the time they transmitted it. In the last ten years, eight later editions of the Tyndale New Testament were traded at auction. Five copies of the 1553 edition - containing the Almanac - traded hands, three in 1995 when the Bute Library was sold.[5] In 1993, the Engraver's Mark 4th edition Tyndale New Testament was sold. The 1536 or fourth edition of the New Testament had three issues, now commonly known by the nature of the stone upon which St. Paul rests his foot in the woodcut which is prefixed to the epistles. One issue has the engraver's mark emblazoned on the stone, hence the name. Its complement is the Mole edition, where, yes, St. Paul's foot rests on the head of a mole, presumably a reference to the publisher Van der Haghen. In 1987, a Mole edition, of which there are only three in the States, sold to the Van Kampen collection and now resides in western Michigan. The earliest Tyndale new Testament to sell, next to the first edition, is the octavo second edition. Tyndale's New Testament was issued twice in 1534. The earlier issue was a sextessimo, which is the smallest of the Tyndales, and it contained the unauthorized changes to the text by George Joye. Only one copy is extant in the British Library. An octavo was issued as well the same year, without Joye's changes, and about a dozen of these survive. The octavo edition of the 1534 Tyndale New Testament was sold at Sotheby's in 1988, again to the Van Kampen Collection.
More rare than the later editions of the New Testament is Tyndale's Pentateuch. Only three editions of this work were printed in the sixteenth century, two during Tyndale's lifetime, 1530 and 1534, and one in 1551. By the early 1530s, Tyndale had moved to Antwerp where he employed the services of printer J. Hoochstraten. The first two editions of the Pentateuch originated from this association, the second being a correction of the first. Of that first edition of the Pentateuch, only a dozen are known to survive, not all complete. It was most likely printed in different locations, and brought together in parts. The books of Genesis and Numbers are printed in the traditional black letter gothic type of the New Testaments. Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy are printed in a Roman type. The book of Exodus contains a number of woodcuts which depict aspects of the temple as well as Aaron in his priestly attire. They are close imitations of the woodcuts in Luther's Bible. The colophon to Genesis reads that the book was printed at 'Malborow in the lande of Hesse, by me, H. Luft', an alias printer's colophon for Antwerp and Hoochstraten.
In the earlier part of the twentieth-century, J.P. Morgan owned two complete copies of this book. As was characteristic, he had them rebound in the style for which he was known, dark brown gilded calf, with gilded foredges. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, after his library was established as a public institution, a very important manuscript Book of Hours became available and the Morgan Library wanted it. Part of the transaction involved trading several duplicate copies of important books within their holdings. At this time, one of their two Tyndale Pentateuchs, the one with the final leaf supplied from another copy, was traded to Mr. Kraus of Kraus Books in New York City. For twenty years it remained in New York in the Kraus collection, occasionally offered in their catalogues. In 1995, it was acquired for the Van Kampen Collection and is the last Tyndale Pentateuch in private hands.
As one can imagine, a certain level of competition exists between the public institutions and the private collections. Building their collections within strict development budgets, institutions are not allowed the luxury of making emotional purchases, that is, paying premium prices for the things they want. As a result, there is an occasional murmur of resentment of the barn-storming, usually American, collector. As the story goes of the British Library's purchase of the Tyndale first edition, several higher bids were rejected so that the book would stay in England. The Daily Telegraph reported Bristol Baptist's Roger Hayden explaining that the British Library's lower bid was accepted because 'We felt it might end up in a Texas Vault'.[6] And yet American collections are notable for just the opposite. Unlike many of the great private collections in large houses in Europe, American libraries are often made public within one generation, to the benefit of scholars worldwide.
I conclude this section on the book trade in general by reiterating its value to the scholar of the age of Tyndale. In spite of occasional hype and marketing techniques. much may be learned from the sale catalogues of large auction houses and one-man book shops as well. The migration of material is something that scholars need to have current knowledge of, and there is no better place to become aware at a glance of material related to our studies that is often neglected in the academic canon. If discoveries are to be made, particularly pertaining to our discipline, they will generally lie in the pages of the unnoticed text. The second part of my talk this morning is dedicated to the sixteenth-century book and what it reveals about the readers, writers, martyrs, and survivors of the English Reformation.
Part Two: Discoveries and Self-Discovery The curious thing about new discoveries is that often what has been discovered is, in fact, nothing new. Sometimes, what is discovered is a new appreciation, or a new recognition of the worth of something on the part of one's self or society. One of the manuscripts most precious manuscripts in the Van Kampen Collection is a rare quarto-sized New Testament made by members of the Wycliffite rebellion. We value it for its witness to the unfailing determination of a small group of people to propagate the Scriptures in English, even in the face of brutality. However, in the sixteenthcentury, only a century and a half after the Constitutions of Oxford made owning such a manuscript punishable by death, the broad margins of this particular book were used for calligraphic exercises and penstarts by a number of Englishmen and women of the household where the book had been kept. They did not share the respect or value for the artifact of their predecessors or of us today.
Similarly, the Stuttgart Tyndale went unnoticed for centuries, although it had passed through many unknowing hands. Otto Heinrich may have known that his little English Bible was the first complete printing of Tyndale's New Testament, but his binder was oblivious of this detail, as was the librarian at the Cistercian Abbey of Schoenthal who inscribed its title page. The archival staff at King Frederick's Wuertemburg State Library in 1810/11 were unaware of the identity of the book when they placed their library stamp and shelfmarks in it, and so apparently was the facully at the University of Tuebingen. In 1935, the Tyndale remained unnoticed when it was catalogued in Stuttgart and assigned the date stamped on the binding, '1550'. Two articles were written subsequently about the bindings of Otto Heinrich's books, and still neither author found the Tyndale. It is to the great credit of the present cataloguers of the Bibelsammlung that the latest Tyndale discovery has been made.
This scenario is as much a tale of the developing consciousness of the academic world to the value of William Tyndale and his legacy as it is about the location of a precious artifact of English history. And yet, very similar items go unnoticed everyday. Many of these may be found in the book market. For instance, in 1995, three very rare editions of John Frith's works were offered in a catalogue of English Books of the Sixteenth-Century by London Bookseller Bernard Quaritch. The first and only edition of Frith's first work, the Pistle to the Christian Reader, was published at Antwerp by Tyndale's printer, Hoochstraaten, in 1529, one year before the Pentateuch. It was a landmark treatise of inflammatory anti-papist sentiment. Frith was a brilliant intellectual, as well as a friend and assistant to Tyndale in his translation projects. Frith was burned at the stake at age 30 in 1533, two years before Tyndale. The asking price for this book was one thirtieth of the price brought by the Tyndale Pentateuch the same year.
Treasures are still to be found, whether one is a collector or a scholar making use of public and private collections. I have held and catalogued many sixteenth-century books and I can say that every one bears a testimony of its era. We as scholars, of all people, should learn to recognize the value in every printed article from this era. The nature of the times and the printing industry make the sixteenth-century imprint an innovative vehicle of controversy and ideas. If one sits down, in a quiet and private place, and begins slowly and carefully to examine one of these items, the story of its making, its readership and its survival begin to unfold.
I recommend that one begins with the text. Sixteenth-century authors were emboldened by this new tool of propaganda which had only recently been wrested away from the economic control of the Church and its mediation of everything that was printed.[7] The language, on every side of every argument, is filled with emotive imagery and inflammatory sentiment. The rhetoric of More and Tyndale in their exchanges is well known. Things grew even more dramatic. The language of the exiles, coming out of Germany, Switzerland and the low countries and smuggled into England during the reign of Mary, kept the communication at a fever pitch until it was safe for all to return and speak openly. When the exiles returned from the continent, they brought with them all they had learned from the continental printers. Under Elizabeth, the Reformation was not only authoritatively supported, but elegantly propagated due to a flowering print trade. The writings of John Bale, John Foxe and others sounded a trumpet call, and Elizabethan society became flooded with the treatises, opinions and testimonies of the Reformist majority. Mass media. in a sense, was born. The texts and illustrations - we have all seen the comic parodies of the Church in woodcut - are as accessible, readable. enjoyable or irritating today as they had to have been to the Elizabethans.
But unlike our present day conveyors of mass ideology, newspapers, magazines, and paperbacks, the sixteenth-century book was constructed from materials that have withstood the damages of time and use. I suggest that during one's quiet encounter a second examination be made of the effort and choice of materials that went into making each book. Some display great attention to presentation of text and argument, an indication of the type of reader the publisher is targeting and also the level of competition. A lovely example of this is a side by side comparison of the folio editions of the Geneva and Bishops' Bibles. Other sixteenth-century books, however, are not fearfully and wonderfully made. The 1559 John Day publication, attributed to Bishop Aylmer, entitled, An harborowwe For Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, agaynst the late blowne Blaste, concerninge the Government of Women, where be confuted all such reasons a stranger of late made in that behalf with a briefe exhortation to OBEDIENCE, is actually a glorified pamphlet, hastily and simply put together in answer to John Knox's 'The First Blast of the Trumpet' - a tract along the lines of the 'Monstrous Reign of Women'. Regardless of quality or cost, the materials themselves are to thank for the survival and condition of most sixteenth-century publications. The handmade laid paper, the bindings of covered boards, the handsewn, rather than glued, technique of joining quires, are the characteristic features of the sixteenth-century book. Most sixteenth-century books, if they have not been washed by their nineteenth-century owners, bear the unmistakable marks of their contemporary readership. The study of the inscriptions, marginalia, and manicula of Reformation books has captured the attention of more than one scholar. Several recent publications are dedicated to the reader responses of sixteenth-century books, and particularly Bibles. Marking in one's book was a highly practiced habit in the manuscript era, and continued well into the seventeenth-century when it began to die out (as did other sorts of book illustration). Because of this, we are able to compare the text before us to its interpretation by a contemporary hand. Some examples: a copy of the 1571 West Saxon Gospels, a pet project of Matthew Parker, lists in the margins a half dozen occasions of sermons given at St. Paul's in London by Alexander Nowell, with text and sermon title; a first edition Taverner's Bible of 1539 has the printer's name scored through; a Bishop's Bible is collated against the Vulgate with changes marked in the margins; several later New Testaments contain a strange form of shorthand symbols, the source of which is yet unknown.[8]
Finally, when investigating a sixteenth-century book, take careful note of its binding and endleaves where marks of previous ownership usually are found. The study of prior ownership is called provenance. Contemporary provenance is not always possible to determine with these books, particularly if one faced danger for possessing it. But occasionally, as in the case of Bishop John Still's Anglo-Saxon Gospelbook, identities can be made through the investigation of inscriptions or handwriting analysis. Imagine how the notes of Philip Melancthon in his copy of Nicholas Bryling's Biblia Sacrosancta (Massachusetts Historical Society) enhance our reading of the Luther Bible. More often than not, though, the contemporary reader is a nameless scholar whose only clue of identity is the nature of his notations. However, as with the cases I've already mentioned, we have much to learn about the way the reformers read, and that was usually with a high awareness of language differential and a strong concern for textual integrity.
To illustrate my thesis, I pulled down from off a shelf one of the lessacclaimed sixteenth-century Bibles in the Van Kampen Collection. It is a 1537 Matthew's Bible, and I thought it appropriate for this discussion since the Matthew's Bible was a thinly disguised reprinting of Tyndale. We at the Scriptorium affectionately refer to this particular book as 'the Martyr's Bible'. We have several hundred visitors to the Scriptorium a month, mostly from the Grand Haven and surrounding Lake Michigan coastline communities, and this is the Bible they want to see. It was, in fact, the first Bible in the collection. It is far from our most costly book and frankly it is in terrible shape. Many leaves are missing, those which remain are badly damaged and stained. It has a poor quality eighteenth-century binding, repaired in the nineteenth-century with tape at the spine. Yet we have no plans to refurbish the Martyr's Bible because the condition is an important part of its history. The dark red stains which are found throughout the book are unusual, not only in color, but in that they appear as if they were acquired through immersion. An early hand has recorded on the front pastedown that the stains are from the blood of a martyr whose life was lost during the Marian persecutions.
I have been in my vocation long enough to know that there are those people in the world who will take advantage of one's religious sentiment for their own gain. Relic-peddlers are as old as the Church. Yet, for the sake of those who have come to love this book, we have decided not to have the stains tested. And indeed, there are enough signs in the other pages that illustrate the crisis of that dark period of English history. All the printed marginal notes have been expunged with white paint, in conformance to a 1538 decree by Henry VIII. The Prologue to Romans, Tyndale's theological masterpiece, has also been painted over in white. The majority of the reader's marks is located in the Psalms. Here, the reader has added the Latin rubrics which are missing from the English versions. The reading of these rubrics with the biblical text was virtually second nature to the sixteenth-century churchgoer. Their omission must have seemed odd, and this reader is more comfortable having his English Psalter organized in the same way his Latin one was. This suggests a process of adaptation of the old tradition to the new. There is one manicula - that little pointing hand - at Job 33. The text reads: I offended, but He hath chastened and reformed me.
*
New discoveries will continue to confirm the relevance of the private collection and the book trade to the study of Tyndale and his times. It is ironic that the private book world often provides the opportunity for an odd marriage of two normally disparate parties, that is, amassed wealth and academia. When it comes to important primary material, both parties need each other.
More striking is the parallel between the success of the Reformation in the sixteenth-century and the viability of Tyndale studies today. My initial citation of John Foxe is true: the men whose mouths were unjustly shut were heard, and their message heeded, as a result of the power of the sixteenthcentury book trade. Likewise today, the rare book market, and the collectors who fuel the trade, facilitate the research and publication of the monuments of the English Reformation through those of us who still hear the voices of the past.
Kimberly L. Van Kampen
[First given at a half-day seminar in London, 26 April 1997: Tyndale: New Discoveries]
References