[Westminster: William Caxton, c. 1490]
Within:
Jacobus, de Gruytrode (active 1440–75) Colloquium peccatoris et crucifixi Jesu Christi [Antwerp: Mathias van der Goes, between 14 February 1487 and 21 May 1490]
This ghostly impression is the only surviving evidence of the printing of an indulgence issued by William Caxton. This is not a true impression, but rather a trial print on the last page of an entirely unrelated book. The woodcut was set with letterpress, then the whole was daubed with a brown substance, and a trial impression taken on a blank leaf of a book printed in Antwerp, presumably lying around in Caxton’s printing house awaiting sale. Multiple impressions would subsequently have been taken using printer’s ink and clean paper, but none of these survive.
Inc.5.F.6.3[3409]
Images of pity were among the most widely reproduced texts in late medieval Europe. Reflecting the intensity of Christocentric devotion at this time, the print depicts Jesus as the Man of Sorrows, surrounded by the instruments of his Passion. Beneath the image is an indulgence: a promise of partial release from the years of punishment in purgatory people believed they would suffer for the sins they had committed during their lives. Indulgences were originally bestowed upon those who participated in the Crusades or undertook an arduous pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But the yearning desire of the laity for assurance of their salvation, combined with the advent of mechanized printing, fuelled a process of inflation and commodification. By the fifteenth century, simply meditating upon an icon or reciting a series of short prayers was enough. The offer (as here) of 32,755 years of remission in exchange for repeating five Pater Nosters, five Ave Marias and the Creed exposed indulgences to the mockery of contemporary satirists, and in 1517 they were the target of the provocative protest by Martin Luther that precipitated the Protestant Reformation.
Of the vast number of indulgences printed in pre-Reformation England, only 27 survive. Most were swept up in the iconoclastic storm launched by the Henrician reformers; those that escaped have often been deliberately defaced or obliterated. This incunable is thus a rare survival. It is also a bibliographical curiosity in two other respects. It is not a carefully produced print, intended for distribution or sale at a cathedral or shrine: rather it is a trial impression roughly printed on the final blank page of another book, as if the typographer had picked up the closest piece of paper to hand to test the effect of the woodblock, creating a print that is faint, smudged, and imperfect. Secondly, this image of pity was once part of the library of Richard Holdsworth, master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, bequeathed to the university at his death in 1649. Another indulgence from his collection was unscrupulously stolen by a reader in the eighteenth century and sold, eventually passing into the possession of George III and thence into the British Museum. Many English incunables paradoxically owe their survival to early modern Protestant scholars who collected them less as typographical antiquities than as emblems of the triumph of the Reformation over a dark era of ignorance and ‘popish superstition’.
Essay by Professor Alexandra Walsham
