A book containing forty-eight separately printed orations or speeches from the late 15th and early 16th centuries might not at first seem to be a particularly appealing one. The speeches have, at some point, been gathered up and bound together in a book measuring 22.1 x 15.6 cm (about the size of a modern paperback) and consist of a total of 596 pages. There is, though, much of interest in the book.
Binding
The binding can tell us something of the book’s history. It is an early 18th-century English binding of dark red goatskin, gold-tooled in a distinctive style known as “Harleian” (Figure 1). The Harleian style of decoration consists of a large central lozenge-shaped ornament made up of the impressions of many small tools, surrounded by a broad border of different tools. The name derives from the books of the Harleian library formed by Robert Harley (1661-1724) and his son Edward (1689-1741), the 1st and 2nd earls of Oxford.
Not all books bound in this style came from the Harleian Library, but this one did. The gold-tooling, especially a roll of alternate flower heads within nearly complete circles and a fern on the board edges and turn-ins, has been identified by the bookbinding historian Howard M. Nixon as being the work of the London binder Thomas Elliott (fl. 1703-1763). Elliott, whose workshop was in Portugal Street, near Lincoln’s Inn, was one of the leading bookbinders of the day and bound many of Edward Harley’s books.
Provenance
On Edward Harley’s death in 1741, the Harleian Library consisted of about 7,600 manuscripts and 50,000 printed books, plus a huge quantity of other material.
The printed books were sold in 1742 to the bookseller Thomas Osborne for £13,000, which is said to have been less than what Harley had spent on having them bound, let alone what he had paid to buy them in the first place.
Osborne sold the books off gradually in a series of sales lasting until 1748. This book was priced at £1.5.0 by Osborne, who wrote the price in pencil on the front fly-leaf. The upper corner of the fly-leaf is cut off, a feature seen in some of Harley’s printed books. It has been suggested (by the bookbinding historian J. Basil Oldham) that this was done by Osborne for his third sale of Harley’s books in 1745.
The book was acquired at some point by John Spencer, 1st Earl Spencer (1734-1783). Spencer’s armorial bookplate has been pasted into the book, containing his coat of arms and those of his wife Margaret Georgiana Poyntz (1737-1814) (Figure 2). Spencer was a book-lover and built up a fine library at Althorp, his country seat in Northamptonshire. The shelfmark “B / C.5” written on the bookplate is presumably its location in Althorp’s library. The book then passed to Spencer’s descendants until the entire Althorp library was bought in 1892 by Enriqueta Rylands for the John Rylands Library.
The Speeches
The forty-eight speeches gathered together in this book were printed separately, all but one in Rome, by printers such as Bartholomaeus Guldinbeck, Andreas Freitag, Johann Besicken, Johannes Bulle, Eucharius Silber, Johannes Schomberger, Sigismundus Mayer, Ulrich Han, Georgius Lauer, and Petrus de Turre. The earliest one dates from 1475 and the latest from 1505. The majority of them are very short, only 4-10 pages, though the longest consists of 40 pages.
Most of them are speeches of obedience, pronounced on behalf of Christian sovereigns and rulers on the occasion of the accession of a new pope. They were delivered by embassies sent to Rome to greet and pay homage to the new pope. The collection includes several orations presented to Pope Innocent VIII on his elevation to the Papal seat in 1484, from rulers such as Ferdinand V and Isabella I of Spain, Charles VIII of France, Ferdinand I of Naples, plus heads-of-state such as the Dukes of Ferrara, Milan, Bavaria, Savoy, and Brittany. There are also a number of similar speeches delivered to Pope Alexander VI in 1492.
One particularly interesting speech in the collection was delivered by the Portuguese diplomat Vasco Fernandes de Lucena (d. 1499) in Rome before Pope Innocent VIII on behalf of King John II of Portugal on 9 December 1485 (Figure 3). Known as the Oratio de obedientia ad Innocentium VIII, the speech was designed to impress the Pope, plus the assembled cardinals and ambassadors of Europe, with Portuguese achievements. It contains the first mention in print of Portugal’s maritime exploration of West Africa, announces that navigation between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean was possible, and holds out the prospect of (to Europeans) unknown lands and peoples further east:
“Lastly, to all these things may be added the by no means uncertain hope of exploring the Barbarian Gulf, where kingdoms and nations of Asiatics, barely known among us and then only by the most meager of information, practice very devoutly the most holy faith of the Saviour. The farthest limit of Lusitanian maritime exploration is at present only a few days distant from them, if the most competent geographers are but telling the truth.”
Another pamphlet in the collection consists of letters of praise written by Jacobus Alpharabius, of Leonessa in Italy, to Louis XII of France and to Ferdinand II and Isabella I of Spain, dated 1501 (Figure 4). Included in the text of the letter to the rulers of Spain is a brief note on the recent “discovery” of the New World.
Patauino pro Bertutio Lamberto canonico Concordiensi liberalium artium
insignia suscipiente. Oratio. Modena: Dominicus Rocociolus, 1494. JRL 2864.49
The final pamphlet contained in the volume is the only one not printed in Rome (Figure 5). Printed in Modena by Dominicus Rocociolus in 1494, it consists of a speech given by Cassandra Fedele, accompanied by letters of praise addressed to her by the scholars Ludovico da Schio and Angelo Tancredi, and a Sapphic ode in her honour by the Venetian man of letters Francesco Negri.
Cassandra Fedele (1465?-1558) was an Italian humanist and the most renowned
female scholar of the late 15th century. Born in Venice, she received a humanist education, was fluent in Latin and Greek, wrote elegant verses, composed orations and epistles, and discussed science and philosophy with her fellow humanists. She achieved great fame at the age of twenty-two when, in 1487, she delivered a Latin speech entitled Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto in praise of the arts and sciences at her cousin’s graduation at Padua. Thereafter she regularly corresponded with the king of France, the lords of Milan and Naples, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, and for ten years exchanged letters with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. She then disappeared from public life before, in 1556, being invited to deliver an address in Venice to the visiting Queen of Poland. The Queen rewarded her with a necklace which Fedele, judging herself unworthy of such a tribute, delivered to the Doge the following day.