A fine, extensive manuscript fragment

[Medieval dictionary]. [Vocabularius ex quo].

€ 3.500,00

A fine, extensive manuscript fragment of this popular dictionary, preserved as waste paper used in a 17th-century binding.

The Latin-German dictionary known as the "Vocabularius ex quo" was widely used throughout the late medieval world. Today, it survives in around 290 manuscripts and almost 50 incunabula, which are kept in over 105 libraries, archives and museums. This exemplar includes sections from letter M ("motare") to N ("nigromantia") and from P ("pistare" to "prebenda"), which, some time after 1621, were used as binding waste for a book printed in Frankfurt in that year. Usual at the time, the practice of lining and reinforcing boards and spines with fragments from older books is responsible for the survival of countless "disjecta membra" which would have been otherwise lost.

The Vocabularius emerged in the 14th century and was first printed in 1467 by the Bechtermünz brothers (according to tradition, with the help of a now-bankrupt Johannes Gutenberg). As an easy-to-use and cheaper alternative to the larger scholarly Latin dictionaries, it gave the middle classes an opportunity to read the Scripture and other Latin texts directly. By the 17th century, the circulation of the text in print might have rendered the medieval manuscript obsolete, explaining its use as binding waste. Paradoxically, this allowed the present section of the dictionary to be preserved safely until its discovery in Broumov, in 1911.

Possibly through the selling of the library of folklorist and bibliophile Eduard Langer (1852-1914), the manuscript later made its way into the hands of the Viennese bookseller Heinrich Hinterberger (1892-1970, active 1935-1960s), who sold it in 1957 to Professor Gerhard Eis (1908-1982), a specialist in medieval history at Heidelberg University.