Special Collections
Book of the Month, October 2008
Legenda Aurea
Jacobus de Voragine
Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 11 Aug. 1478
Incunabula 129
Except for the Bible, the Legenda Aurea (‘Golden Legend’) was the most widely-read book in mediaeval Christendom. Over 800 extant manuscripts have been identified, and the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC) records 152 editions published to the end of the year 1500. It was translated into Provençal and Bohemian as well as the more standard western European languages, and was a significant source of inspiration for art, extending from frescoes and sculpture to church windows and altar pictures. The Legenda Aurea’s popularity declined sharply with the Reforming zeal of the sixteenth century, but its status as a classic of popular devotional literature of the Middle Ages and as an expression of mediaeval mentality is undisputed. The work’s 182 chapters cover world history (11 chapters), Christian mysteries (16 chapters), and saints’ lives (155 chapters). Over 200 Christian saints feature, some of whom share chapters, while others have two or more chapters devoted to them. While most lived before 700 A.D., the biographies span almost thirteen centuries, from Christ’s apostles and the earliest disciples to Peter the Martyr (1205-1252), whose life overlapped with that of the Legenda Aurea’s author, the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine (c.1229-1298).
The edition featured is the earliest of five Latin editions produced in Nuremberg by the largest European publisher/printer of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Anton Koberger (1445-1513). It fitted well into his output: Koberger specialised in large folios, and he published primarily familiar, established works, depending on mass appeal for business success.
Senate House Library received this volume in the academic year 1976/7 as one of five incunabula from the library of New College, a theological College within the University of London which was closing down. It had been given to New College by Alfred Cave (1847–1900), who graduated from there in 1870 and was a professor and Principal of Hackney College, with which New College later merged. He would have bought the book in 1870 from the Sotheby’s sale of the ‘bibliotheca typographica’ (‘typographical library’) of Friedrich Georg Hermann Culemann (1811-1886), whose label is pasted on one of the contents leaves. Culemann was a senator and owner of a printing establishment in Hanover. He in turn acquired the book from a Professor Nitsch at Halle. The book is one of ten copies recorded in the British Isles. The Senate House Library copy stands out among the Senate House Library incunabula for containing some illumination and for retaining its fifteenth-century binding.
The work was catalogued online in early 2008 as part of a project to catalogue the incunabula at Senate House Library.
shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk 
020 7862 8470
