Fifteenth-Century Hybrid Book with Manuscript and Printed Texts

St. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636). De summo bono. [Cologne: Johann Landen, not after 1493].
[Bound with:] St. John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407). De reparatione lapsi [and other texts]. Manuscript on paper. [Germany, dated 27 May 1492].
[Bound with:] St. John Chrysostom. De compunctione cordis. [Issued with:] Pseudo-Augustine. De contritione cordis. [Basel: Michael Furter, not after 1490].
[Bound with:] St. John Chrysostom. Quod nemo laeditur nisi a se ipso [and other texts by various authors, ending with the Exhortatio poenitendi]. Manuscript on paper. [Germany, ca. 1492–93].
[Bound with:] Pseudo-Augustine. De assumptione beatissime virginis Mariae. Manuscript on paper. [Germany, ca. 1492–93]. Three manuscripts, ca. 1492-1493, and two imprints, ca. 1490–1493, in a single volume. (07073)

This late fifteenth-century Sammelband, preserved in its original binding, combines two printed editions with three contemporary manuscripts. The texts bound together here include works by (or attributed to) three Doctors of the Church, two from the Western tradition (St. Isidore of Seville and St. Augustine) and one from the Eastern Church (St. John Chrysostom). As a group these texts formed a concise curriculum for the fifteenth-century theologian or priest. Isidore’s De summo bono (“the highest good”), on moral doctrine and pastoral practice, was a standard textbook of the medieval Church. Similarly Chrysostom’s De reparatione lapsi (“reparation of the fallen”) and De compunctione cordis (“the heart’s remorse”) explore basic spiritual and pastoral concerns.

In the exhibited opening, the end of a handwritten text appears on the left-hand page while a printed text begins on the right. This division marks the termination of the second manuscript section of the Sammelband, which concludes with the anonymous Exhortatio poenitendi (“exhortation to the penitent,” often attributed to St. Isidore), and the beginning of the final printed section, an edition of the pseudo-Augustinian De contritione cordis (“the heart’s contrition”). Here, the fifteenth-century binder divided the printed edition of Chrysostom’s De compunctione cordis from the accompanying pseudo-Augustinian work, and inserted the manuscript between them in order to present an uninterrupted sequence of three works by Chrysostom followed by two consecutive pseudo-Augustinian readings.