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This hybrid print and manuscript book consists of a printed edition of the fifteenth-century Franciscan mystic Hendrik Herp’s Mirror of Perfection.It is bookended by two eight-folio manuscript sections written and illustrated by Denis Faucher (1487–1562), a mystical poet and Benedictine monk, who spent the majority of his career at the Abbey of Lérins off the coast of Provence. Faucher’s poems are here mostly addressed to a scholasticate, a nun in the training period following the novitiate, and concern the attainment of spiritual perfection in the world. The poems are accompanied by two striking images, which he painted himself. The first shows a nun in a black habit being crucified, with a snake biting a heart, representing sin, entwined around her left arm, depicted here. The lit oil lamp the nun holds in her right hand represents faith and refers to the parable of the Wise Virgins (who tended their lamps).

Beginning in the 1480s, Parisian printers, working in close quarters booksellers began to produce Books of Hours for the open market. To create the miniatures of such books, artists initially trained as painters and illuminators provided designs for metalcuts, which combined the surface printing of the woodcut technique with the durability of a copper printing plate. The present edition was issued by Gilles Hardouyn, who, along with his brother Germain, formed a printing business that was active in Paris for a half century, from 1491 to 1541 and dominated the market for mass-produced Books of Hours. The major illuminator and artist responsible for the metalcut images in this book, Jean Pichore, produced twelve sets of metalcuts for Parisian printers between 1504 and 1514. These images, which frequently draw from works by Dürer and other engravers, continued to be employed for several decades.

This Prayer Book pairs a unique selection of texts with an extensive cycle of printed images, demonstrating an alternative to the Book of Hours in a period of religious foment. It contains popular devotional works by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), Marco Girolamo Vida (ca. 1485–1566), and Prudentius (ca. 348–413), copied by hand from printed sources. Within the first half of the book are also sections from the Christiad, an epic poem published in 1535, first written by Marco Girolamo Vida, a humanist bishop, at the request of Leo X, which provides a Christian counterpart to Virgil’s Aeneid. It also features works by the early Christian poet Prudentius, such as hymns, which were appreciated by Erasmian humanists for their conflation of classical Latin forms with Christian motifs. This manuscript demonstrates how readers adapted modern and ancient devotional texts, replacing the traditional Book of Hours.

This printed collection of letters by the Florentine philologist and poet Agnolo Ambrogini, known as Poliziano (1454–94), has been supplemented with hand-copied writings by him and his friends. This multipart book or sammelband was assembled in Germany, demonstrating the far reach of the humanist epistolary style in Northern Europe. The printed text of the first half of the volume was published in Antwerp in 1514 by Dirk Martens, the Flemish editor of Erasmus and Thomas More. It consists of Poliziano’s exemplary Latin letters to humanist prelates and leaders, including the Florentine rulers Lorenzo and Piero de’ Medici, the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza, the printer Aldus Manutius, and Pope Innocent VIII. Following the printed text are manuscript versions of seventeen letters sent to Poliziano or exchanged among his friends. The manuscript section also includes two orations by Poliziano.

This copy of Saint Augustine’s City of God is an example of the involvement of traditional illuminators with the new technology of printing. This third edition copy was printed in Italy by the German printers Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz. The two business partners were the first to establish a press outside of German-speaking lands, and by 1467, they had moved in search of greater economic opportunities to Rome, where the present volume was printed. Adapting to their translapine audience, Sweynheym and Pannartz abandoned the Gothic typeface used in Northern Europe, developing a semi-Roman type, followed by a fully Roman version, upon their move to the papal city. Most remarkably, this incunable’s secondary decoration was added not in Italy, but in France. The figures in the illuminated initials in particular are attributed to the workshop of François Le Barbier in the later part of the fifteenth century.

In the incunable period, it was common practice for a small number of copies of a single edition to be printed on parchment, rather than on paper. These could be specially commissioned by discerning bibliophiles, offered to prized patrons by booksellers, or given to the sponsors of that particular print run. This copy of Cicero’s Orations, printed in Venice in 1471, is an example of just such a phenomenon. Its opening page has been transformed into an elaborate architectural frontispiece by the Veneto-Paduan illuminator Giovanni Vendramin (act. 1466–ca. 1509), a prolific artist who embellished numerous other incunables in the 1470s, as well as the occasional manuscript. This incunable edition contains twenty-eight of Cicero’s Orations, edited by Ludovico Carbone (ca. 1430–85), a humanist orator in the service of the d’Este court in Ferrara.