Osma. Quicunque vult, c. 1478

PEDRO MARTÍNEZ DE OSMA (d. 1480).
Co[m]mentaria magistri Petri de Osoma in simbolu[m] Quicunq[ue] vult saluus esse.
Paris: Ulrich Gering, [c. 1478]. (07040)

This commentary on the Athanasian Creed is the only work by Pedro de Osma that survives in a fifteenth-century printed edition. Once a highly respected Dominican theologian at the University of Salamanca, Osma was prosecuted by the Inquisition after he claimed in his Tractatus de Confessione (c. 1476) that indulgences and confession were unnecessary for salvation.

Bridwell Library’s copy of Osma’s Commentaria was inscribed on its final leaf by “Robert Huette,” a sixteenth-century Englishman. This early ownership suggests that this may be one of the copies from Gering’s edition that the Parisian bookseller Pierre Levet imported to Oxford in 1480. A fifteenth-century English rubricator carefully added red and blue paragraph marks in the spaces preceding each verse of the Athanasian Creed, but his efforts call his Latin literacy into question, as these spaces actually were intended for the initial letters of each verse. For example, the passage of the Creed beginning “[E]ternus pater” (“Eternal father”) reads “¶ternus pater” instead.

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Printing in France
Osma. Quicunque vult, c. 1478