In 1562, four years after the death of Reginald Pole, four
editions[1] of the De
concilio and of the Reformatio Angliae by the
Cardinal
were put in print by three presses. Although it should have been entirely
self-evident which editions were the first printings of both tracts, contrary
views have, from time to time, been set forth. The account given in the
Dictionary of National Biography
[2] states only that the De
concilio
"appeared in Venice in 1562," while Herzog-Hauck[3] claims that the Dillingen edition
is the
editio princeps. In accordance with the British Museum's
cataloguing rules,[4] the Venice
edition of this tract precedes the Roman one in its Short-Title
Catalogue.
[5] But this
arrangement is due solely to the fact that the Venetian edition is a collected
one of
opuscula
[6] and
thus is listed before the separate printings of these treatises.
It is unequivocally certain that the Roman edition of the De
concilio, dated 1562 and with ten lines of errata,
represents the first appearance in print of this tract.[7] Similarly, the Roman printing of
the
Reformatio Angliae, also dated 1562 and with a single line
of
errata, is certainly the first edition of that work.[8] This may be predicated on the fact
that
all four of the editions of the De concilio contain the preface
by
Paulus Manutius. It seems absolutely inconceivable that any printer in
Venice or Dillingen could have obtained the text of this preface
before Paolo had printed it himself. The first edition of the
De concilio having been established through this and other
evidence, as set forth in the study cited in note 7, a similar line of argument
in determining priority can be applied to the Reformatio
Angliae,[9] with the
result noted above.
That the four editions are somehow related is also indicated by an
omission common to all four. The De concilio consists of 86
questions and responses — but there is no Quaestio XXXIX in
any of them. However, the first Roman edition and the two
non-Roman ones restore the count by repeating the heading Quaestio XLI.
The second Rome edition does not repeat no. XLI, so that thereafter there
is always a numerical gap between it and the other three, this edition ending
with Quaestio LXXXVII where the others have Quaestio LXXXVI. It can
be argued, I think, that if either the V or D editions had used the second
Roman printing as their copy, the numbering would have agreed with that
edition. This suggests that V and D were either set up from R1 or that one
was set from R1 and that the other copied this.[10]
That D was set from R1 can further be shown by a number of
misprints which these editions have in common.[11] In R1 (25.b.7), one finds the
phrase: "ut
ad minutissimæ quæque legis obseruanda iidem promptos se
ostenderint." With this D agrees. However, the third word should read
"minutissima" as modifying "obseruanda" and both R2 and V have the
correct form. This is further evidence to suggest that D was set from
R1.
[12] Again, in R1 (32.a.19/21), the
text reads "habuit in ea ciuitate" which V also prints (52.a.2), though the
errata emends to the plural "habuerunt." R2, at the same
place,
offers "habuerunt in ciuitate" while D has the text of R1 as corrected by the
errata ("habuerunt in ea ciuitate"). Clearly, it is quite certain
that V was set from R1, and it is highly probable that D was here following
the corrected R1 rather than R2, though in certain other instances (as will
be shown) D follows uncorrected R1. The examples cited here demonstrate,
of course, the independence of D and V from one another.
Similar arguments can be advanced in the case of the several editions
of the Reformatio Angliae. In R1 (6.b.13), the text reads: "in
uniuersum orbem terræ primatum." Here the errata
substitutes "tenere primatum" for "terræ primatum." R2 prints the
corrected text and V (100.b.7) concurs in this reading. But D (folio 184
verso) preserves the erroneous text of R1! Since D could hardly have
arrived at this misreading by coincidence, it follows that D must have used
R1 as a Vorlage. Again, in 18.b.24, R1 has an erasure after
the
ampersand in the sequence "purgati, & [ ] qua." The compositor of R2
was apparently unaware of this correction and set the original, uncorrected
text of R1: "purgati; & ea, qua." But both D and V print the corrected
text of R1, not that of R2.
What, then, are the results of this investigation? That R1 of both the
De concilio and of the Reformatio Angliae
represent
the first printings of these texts can hardly be questioned. D and V, in turn,
are independent of one another[13]
— and both of them, together with R2, derive from R1. Which of
these
is the second edition cannot be determined from internal evidence, and no
chronological details are available to us to aid in finding the answer.
Probably the Dillingen edition is the last of these four — an opinion
largely based, and perhaps too presumptively, on the remoteness of the
German town from Venice and Rome. But whether Ziletti issued his
Venetian "piracy" before or after Paulus Manutius got around to reprinting
his editio princeps must remain a matter of speculation until
further evidence comes to hand.
