Handwritten Index

Boniface VIII (ca. 1234–1303).
Liber sextus decretalium.
Mainz: Peter Schoeffer, 5 April 1473. (06191)

On the front flyleaf of this essential compendium of canon law with commentary, a fifteenth-century reader compiled his own handwritten alphabetical subject index of the book’s contents. Although the publisher Peter Schoeffer had provided the first-ever printed subject index for St. Augustine’s De arte praedicandi in 1467, his editions of the much longer and more complicated Liber sextus decretalium (printed in 1465, 1467, and 1473) remained unindexed, and therefore were difficult to use without the solution introduced by the resourceful owner of this copy.