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HISTORY] between the Old and New Testaments (typology). Among these books the Biblia pauperum stands first. It represents pictorially the life and passion of Christ, and there exist MSS. of it as early as the 13th century, in some cases beautifully illuminated. A richly illuminated MS. of it, executed in the Netherlands c. 1400, is in the British Museum (press-mark, King’s 5), and also fragments of one of the 14th century (press-mark, 31,303). A remodelling and development of this work is the famous Speculum humanae salvationis, of which we shall speak when dealing with the blockbooks and early printed books. It was written in rhymed prose before 1324, and represents, in forty-five chapters, the Bible history of the fall and redemption of mankind interwoven with Mariolatry and legend. Of this work alone more than 200 MSS., illuminated or without pictures, are known to exist in various libraries of Europe. The National and Arsenal Libraries in Paris each possess one written some time after 1324; the British Museum has sixteen MSS. of it (eleven of which are illuminated) of the 14th and 15th centuries, written in the Netherlands, Germany, France and England, one (press-mark, 16,578) bearing the distinct date 1379 and another (press-mark, Egerton, 878) that of 1436. A work of a similar nature is the Apocalypsis, of which at least two recensions with illustrations may be pointed out. One gives the text as we know it, with or without commentary, for which cf. Brit. Mus. 17,333 (French), 18,633 (French, but written in England), Reg. 2 D. xiii. and 22,493 (French)—all four early 14th century. Another is more a short history or biography of St John, but the illustrations follow those of the former work very closely; cf. Brit. Mus. 19,896 (15th century, German). It is this last recension which agrees with the blockbook to be mentioned hereafter. Other devotional works are the Ars Moriendi, the Antichrist and other works which will be mentioned below among the blockbooks.

Block-printing or Xylography.—When all this writing, transcribing, illustrating, &c., had reached their period of greatest development, the art of printing from wooden blocks (block-printing, xylography) on silk, cloth, vellum, paper, &c., made its appearance in Europe. This art was already a great advance on writing, in that it enabled any one with a few simple tools to multiply impressions from any block of wood with text or pictures engraved on it, and so produce a number of single (paper) leaves or sheets with text or pictures printed on them in almost the same time that a scribe produced a single copy of them.

It seems to have been practised, so far as we have evidence, on cloth, vellum and other stuffs as early as the 12th century (Weigel, Anfänge, i. 10); and on paper as far back as the second half of the 14th century; while it began to be largely employed in the early part of the 15th all over Germany, Flanders and Holland in the production of (1) separate leaves (called briefs, from breve, scriptum), containing either a picture (print, prent, shortened from the Fr. emprint, empreinte, and already used by Chaucer, C.T. 6186, six-text, D. 604, printe, prente, preente, and in other early English documents; also called in colloquial German Helge, Helglein, or Halge), or a piece of text, or both together; and of (2) whole sheets (two leaves), a number of which, arranged like the MSS. in quires or gatherings, formed what are called “blockbooks,” sometimes consisting of half picture and half text, or wholly of text, or altogether of picture.

The earliest dated woodcut that we know of is the Mary engraving, discovered at Malines, and now preserved in the Brussels Royal Library. It bears the date mccccxviii. Some authors have asserted that an l has been scratched out between the fourth c and the x; that, therefore, the date is 1468.

But there is no ground for such an assertion (cf. H. Hymans, L’Estampe de 1481, Brussels, 1903). A slightly modified reproduction of it, on a reduced scale, which could hardly be placed later than 1460, is preserved in the St Gall Library. The next date is 1423 found on the St Christopher, preserved in the John Rylands Library (Spencer collection) at Manchester. In the third place comes the woodcut of 1437 preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, which was discovered in 1779 in the monastery of St Blaise in the Black Forest, and represents the martyrdom of St Sebastian, with fourteen lines of text. The date, however, is said by some to refer to a concession of indulgences. A woodcut, preserved in the same library in Vienna, which represents St Nicolas de Tolentino, has the date 1440, but written in by hand; as the saint was canonized in that year it may refer to that event. Another in the Weigel collection, representing the bearing of the cross, St Dorothea and St Alexis, has the date 1443, also written in by hand, though the woodcut is considered to belong to that period. These are the only known wood engravings with dates ranging from 1418 to 1443. But there exist a good many woodcuts which, from the style of the engraving, are presumed to be of an earlier date, and to have been printed partly in the 14th and partly in the first half of the 15th century. J. D. Passavant (Le Peintre-Graveur, 1860–1864, i. 27 seq.) enumerates twenty-seven of them, all of German origin and preserved in various libraries in Germany; 154 are recorded in the Collectio Weigeliana (vol. i., 1866), and W. L. Schreiber (La Gravure sur bois, vols. i. and ii., 1891 and 1892) enumerates over 2000 of them, some of which may be ascribed to the Netherlands, exx.g. (1) representing the Virgin Mary, with Flemish inscriptions in the museum in Berlin; (2) representing the Virgin Mary (see above) in the library at Brussels; (3) representing St Anthon and St Sebastian, in the Weigel collection (now in the Brit. Mus.); (4) a St Hubert and St Eustatius, in the royal library at Brussels; (5) representing the Child Jesus, in the library at Berlin; (6) the Mass of St Gregory, with indulgence, in the Weigel collection (cf. 1, 195), now at Nuremberg.

In these blocks, as in wood-engraving now, the lines to be printed were in relief. The block, after the picture or the text had been engraved upon it, was first thoroughly wetted with a thin, watery, pale brown material, much resembling distemper; then a sheet of damp paper was laid upon it, and the back of the paper was carefully rubbed with some kind of dabber or burnisher, usually called a frotton, till an impression from the ridges of the carved block had been transferred to the paper. In this fashion a leaf or sheet could only be printed on one side (anopisthographic); and in some copies of blockbooks we find the sides of the leaves on which there is no printing pasted together, so as to give the work the appearance of an ordinary book. Any one wanting to set up as a printer of briefs or books needed no apparatus but a set of woodblocks and a rubber. We know only three blockbooks which do not possess this characteristic, as the Legend of St Servatius in the royal library of Brussels, which may be called a xylo-chirography (see below), in which the pictures occur on both sides of the paper (with some lines of text written underneath), but apparently impressed by hand from blocks without any rubbing, there being no traces of any indentures either on the rectos or the versos; Das Zeitglöcklein in the Bamberg Library (cf. Falkenstein, p. 49); Das geistlich und weltlich Rom, in. the John Rylands Library (Spencer collection) and at Gotha (cf. Falkenstein, p. 46); but these belong to the end of the 15th century, and therefore to a later period than the ordinary blockbooks.

Formerly it was the general opinion that playing cards had been the first products of xylography; but the earliest that have been preserved are done by hand, while the printed cards date from the 15th century, therefore from a period in which woodcuts were already used for other

purposes. Some of the wood engravings and block books are supposed to have been printed in monasteries. In a necrology of the Franciscan monastery at Nördlingen, which comes down to the beginning of the 15th century, this entry occurs: “VII. Id. Augusti, obiit Frater h. Luger, laycus, optimus incisor lignorum”; and on some of the engravings we find the arms of certain monasteries, which may, however, merely mean that they were printed for, not in, those monasteries. The registers of Ulm mention several wood-engravers (formschneider)—in 1398 a certain Ulrich; in 1441 Heinrich Peter von Erolzheim, Joerg, and another Heinrich; in 1442 Ulrich and Lienhart; in 1447 Claus (Nicolas), Stoffel (Christopher) and Johann; in 1455 Wilhelm; in 1461 Meister Ulrich, &c. In a register of taxes of Nördlingen we find from 1428 to 1452 a certain Wilhelm Kegeler mentioned as brieftrücker; in 1453 his widow is called alt brieftrückerin; and in 1461 his brother Wilhelm is registered for the same craft. At Mainz there was a printer, Henne Cruse, in 1440. At Nuremberg we find in 1449 Hans (Spoerer?), a formschneider, while his son Junghans exercised the same industry from 1472 to 1490. Hans von Pfedersheim printed at Frankfort in 1459; Lienhart Wolff, priefdrucker, is mentioned in the registers of Regensburg of 1463; Peter Schott at Strassburg in 1464. A certain George Glockendon exercised the same trade at Nuremberg till 1474, when he died and was succeeded by a son and afterwards by a grandson. In Flanders a Jan de Printere was established at Antwerp in 1417; and printers and wood engravers (haute bildsnyters) worked there in 1442 (Privileges of the Corporation of St Luke at Antwerp). At Bruges printers and beeldemakers (makers or engravers of images) were enumerated in 1454 among the members of the fraternity of St John the Evangelist. The printers of playing cards seem to have constituted a separate class.

All these entries show that long before the middle of the 15th century there were men who exercised the art of wood-engraving and printing as a trade or craft. It seems also certain that wealthy persons and religious institutions were wont to possess sets of blocks, and, when occasion arose, printed a set of sheets for presentation to a friend, or in the case of monasteries for sale to the passing pilgrim. A printer of briefs or blockbooks had no need to serve an apprenticeship;