Religious Subcultures and Reading Culture

For religious subcultures, the reading of religious books was of great importance, even for Roman Catholics, renowned for their ritual-mindedness and the prevailing limitations in terms of religious reading for laypeople. This article aims to reveal the extent to which the status and role of a subculture affected the printing history and reception of religious books. The Post-Reformation Low Countries – split into the South, where the Catholics were a dominant culture, and the Dutch Republic in the North, where they were a subculture – provides an excellent case study. A very popular meditation book serves as the source for the study, namely Sondaechs Schoole (Sunday school) (1623).

Variarum Scripturarum Exempla, Willem Silvius’ Writing-Book Discovered

This article attributes a manuscript in the collection of the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands, to Willem Silvius (c. 1520–1580), an Antwerp printer and a former writing master. The manuscript carries the title Variarum Scripturarum Exempla and contains 44 writing samples in eight different languages. It probably served as Silvius’ personal writing-book, which he used to attract customers when he was working as a writing master in Louvain. In 1562 he intended to publish the manuscript as the first printed exemplar-book in the Low Countries which contained writing models for different languages and settings. Although this publication never materialised, Silvius’ writing-book is a testimonial for the life and the achievements of one of most significant printers of sixteenth century Antwerp.

The Problematic Sales of the Spanish Ortelius Atlas after 1612

In 1612, Balthasar I and Jan Moretus II, managers of the Antwerp Plantin Press, were able to buy the copperplates and the stock of Ortelius’s atlas in various languages at the auction of Jan Baptist Vrients’s possessions. The two brothers endeavored to sell what they purchased through various means and sold the copies as if they were new editions. In this article I trace the sale of Ortelius’s Spanish atlas in detail from 1612 to 1641. After an examination of the initial period of occasional sales between 1612 and 1630, I will turn to the unexpected confiscation of some copies of the atlas in Spain in 1630. I will conclude by demystifying the so-called 1641 edition. In this way, the distribution of Ortelius’s Spanish atlas in the first half of the seventeenth century will offer a remarkable overview of the afterlife of this once influential work.

Incunabula in Communities of Canonesses Regular and Tertiaries Related to the Devotio Moderna

This contribution discusses the hitherto overlooked ownership of the earliest printed books (incunabula) by Netherlandish female religious communities of tertiaries and canonesses regular connected to the religious reform movement of the Devotio moderna. Studies of book ownership and book collections in these communities have tended to focus on manuscripts. From the last decades of the fifteenth century onwards, however, these religious women increasingly came in contact with printed books, even though the involvement of the Devotio moderna with the printing press was limited. The discussion focuses on the channels via which tertiaries and canonesses acquired books produced by commercially operating printers, the ways in which incunabula affected what these (semi-)religious women read, as well as the ratio between printed books in Latin and the vernacular, and their function(s) within these communities. Thus the essay intends to sketch a preliminary image of the role of incunabula in female convents, and advocates a more inclusive approach of female religious book ownership.

An Unknown Dutch Incunable Recovered

This article discusses and reproduces a unique copy of a hitherto unknown Dutch incunable. It was recovered at a Belgian auction after 164 years and bought by the Athenaeum Library in Deventer, the Netherlands. Thus, the book returned to the city where it was printed by Jacobus de Breda, between 27 October 1495 and 16 April 1496.