Bomgharde.

Dyt is unser leuen vrouwen bomgharde [ISTC: Unserer Lieben Frau Maria Baumgarten].

[Lübeck, Stephanus Arndes] c. 1498.

[23]p. (see below). Gothic type (92 text, 172 headings), 21 lines per page, two- and four-line ?metalcut initials.

20th-century vellum over boards, flat spine.

?FIRST EDITION OF THIS 15TH-CENTURY MIDDLE LOW GERMAN MARIAN PROSE DEVOTIONAL TO BE READ SILENTLY ALONE AND SHARED IN SONG WITH OTHERS.
            An extended appeal to the Virgin Mary, The Orchard (pp. [1]-[14]) belongs to the spiritual allegorical literature of the enclosed garden, popular from the late 13th to the mid-16th century with female lay and cloistered religious communities. Repeated references to young women make plain its audience, whose communities were largely only literate in their regional language. The imagery of an orchard filled with flowers evokes virtues particularly associated with Mary. The close laments the neglected garden overgrown with weeds, the storms of winter and summer and pleads for grace. The text is a prose adaptation of a verse original which circulated in manuscript, itself descended from a Middle Dutch verse manuscript tradition.
            FIVE PROSE HYMNS COMPLETE THE BOOKLET. They include two (of the four) Marian antiphons, a sequence (Congaudent angelorum chori) and the anonymous Ave redemptoris mater and Recordare virgo mater. Stenzing makes a close connection between the north German Beguines and the demand for late 15th-century Low German liturgical works. The printer Arndes catered to this market. Small format prayer collections, meditation manuals and Hours of the Virgin, all well suited to these women readers, make up nearly a third of his Lübeck vernacular codex production.
            For more than one hundred years, only three copies of this enigmatic booklet were recorded (Copenhagen (lacking two leaves), Leipzig, Göttingen). These, and the present recently discovered example, consist of two quires, signed b (8 leaves) and c (4 leaves). Though Borchling suggested in his 1902 Reiseberichte that the Orchard formed part of Arndes’ 1495 Boek von der bedroffenisse Marien (The Sorrows of Mary, ISTC ib00766200), he had abandoned this view by 1931, and no subsequent bibliographic authority has taken it up. Our text appeared in print once more, in 1498, in a collected volume with sixteen other long and short works (ISTC ib00766250; three complete and two defective copies). Fold of the inner bifolium of the final quire guarded, soiled, blank lower marginal stain.
¶GW 4640; Borchling, Niederdeutsche Reiseberichte III (1902) 241,8; Borchling & Claussen, Niederdeutsche Bibliographie 261; Madsen, Katalog over det Kongelige Biblioteks inkunabler 787; Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur des Spätmittelalters: am Beispiel der Gartenallegorie pp. 53,35, 72,11 & 216-17; Schmidt, Der Lüstliche Würtzgarte 67-8; Hess, Social Imagery in Middle Low German 394; Stenzing, “Die ‘Marientiden’ der Hamburger Beginen (Hamburg, SUB Cod. conv. 2) und die zugrunde liegenden Elemente der ‘offiziellen’ (lateinischen) Liturgie” in Die Hamburger Beginen bei St. Jacobi im Kontext ihrer Handschriften und Kultur edd. Müller & Müller 163; ISTC ib00843300.

Item #12597

Price: $14,500.00

Status: On Hold