A Salisbury Missal Published in Cologne and Printed in Paris, 1514
Missale ad usum ac consuetudinem Sarum. Paris, Wolfgang Hopyl for Franz Birckmann the Elder, 1514.
One of the most remarkable survivals of early sixteenth-century European printing: a Salisbury Missal for the English market, printed in Paris by Wolfgang Hopyl for the Cologne publisher Franz Birckmann, preserved here in the celebrated Tollemache copy on vellum with extensive contemporary hand-colouring throughout.
The book embodies the intensely international character of Renaissance printing at the eve of the Reformation. Intended for use in England according to the Sarum rite, financed and distributed through Cologne, and physically produced in Paris, the Missal reflects the interconnected commercial and artistic networks that linked northern Europe in the early sixteenth century.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
Printed throughout in black and red on vellum. Folio (304 × 213 mm).
Illustrated with a magnificent three-quarter-page publisher’s device within an architectural border, repeated several times throughout the volume, together with a full-page woodcut, a half-page woodcut, and twenty-nine column-wide metalcuts, all contemporary coloured. The decorative program is completed by twenty-eight large coloured initials, hundreds of additional initials on criblé grounds, red lombards, paragraph marks, and musical notation printed in black on red four-line staves.
Eighteenth-century brown morocco binding dated 1732 with gilt decoration and later supralibros of the Tollemache family, preserving the original vellum endleaves and gilt edges.
Between Manuscript and Print
Despite being a printed liturgical book, the volume still preserves the atmosphere of late medieval manuscript culture. The hierarchy of decoration, the careful colouring, the musical notation, and the rhythm of the initials all recall illuminated manuscript production rather than purely mechanical printing.
Particularly fascinating is the fact that several leaves apparently never printed were supplied contemporaneously in manuscript directly onto vellum, making the transition between scribal and typographic culture physically visible within the object itself.
Saint Ursula and the European Book Trade
The enormous publisher’s device on the title page is among the most striking of the period. Rather than functioning merely as a printer’s mark, it unfolds almost like an independent devotional image. Saint Ursula shelters a vast multitude of virgins beneath her cloak while scenes of martyrdom and the Adoration of the Magi rise above and below within elaborate architectural framing.
The imagery was highly meaningful for Birckmann, whose commercial world stretched between Cologne and England along the great northern trade routes associated with Saint Ursula’s legendary journey.
The English Reformation Inside the Book
The Missal also preserves traces of the English Reformation directly on its pages. Although the Sarum rite initially survived Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the book appears to have been adapted for continued use during the turbulent decades that followed.
References to the pope were obscured, passages concerning Thomas Becket crossed out, and several liturgical sections deliberately rendered partially illegible. The object therefore bears physical witness not merely to Renaissance devotion, but to religious upheaval itself.
The Tollemache Copy
By the eighteenth century the volume had entered the library at Helmingham Hall, seat of the Tollemache family, whose ownership transformed the Missal into one of the great aristocratic collector’s copies of the edition.
An inscription records: “Among the Old Books at Helmingham / new Bound 1732.” The rebinding preserved the original vellum endleaves while giving the volume its distinguished later appearance.
Only two vellum copies of the edition were recorded by Bohatta, including the incomplete British Library example. The present Missal therefore ranks among the finest surviving copies of this extraordinary edition.
Provenance
Tollemache family, Helmingham Hall, until Sotheby’s, 6 June 1961, lot 26. Later Auxerre Auctions, 15 September 2007. French private collection.
Literature
Adams L 1203; BM STC 282; Graesse IV, 550; Lowndes III, 1576; Quaritch III, no. 17392; Weale/Bohatta 1419.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 17:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
