Peraldus, Summa. Basel, c. 1473

GUILELMUS PERALDUS (d. 1261).
Summa de vitiis.
[Basel: Michael Wenssler, “c. 1475,”
not after 1473]. (06516)

Traditionally dated c. 1475, Michael Wenssler’s printing of this popular treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins has been considered the second edition, following Berthold Ruppel’s Basel edition of c. 1473-74. However, the final leaf of Bridwell Library’s copy bears a rubricator’s inscription that reads “Explicit 1473 apud sanctam Gallum” (“Finished in 1473 at St. Gall”). This necessitates a revised dating of the edition to “not after 1473,” and it suggests that Wenssler’s edition may have been the earliest. By the eighteenth century this copy had migrated northwest from St. Gall to Trier. Its binding includes end sheets printed c. 1735 at the University of Trier, and like several other fifteenth-century books at Bridwell Library, it features shelf marks used at Trier’s municipal library, which sold its duplicates c. 1900.