An excellent book of Homilies of many saints and other most famous teachers on the Gospels of the Seasons and the Saints, with certain of their sermons added, polished with verbal ornament and with weighty and fruitful sayings scattered all over it: printed in the mercurial workshop of Nicolas Kessler at Basel (the most illustrious Maximilian the Unconquered, King of the Romans, being Emperor). Do not therefore, impelled by the sting of malice, rage against the compiler with the small satirist’s fang of correction; but rather, not ungrateful for a benefit, turn to the offerings before you the dovelike eyes of discretion. In the year of the Lord’s incarnation 1498, on the tenth of the Nones of August, happily finished.
It is to be feared that the pay of a fifteenth-century “corrector,” when he was paid at all, was far from princely. It is pleasant, therefore, to find that at least one printer, the veteran Ulrich Zell, was so genuinely grateful to a friendly priest who had helped him in seeing Harderwyck’s “Commentaries on Logic” through the press as to make most handsome acknowledgment in his colophon and in verses added to it.
Commentarii in quatuor libros noue logice processum burse Laurentiane famosissimi Agrippinensis Colonie gymnasii continentes per honorabilem virum artium magistrum necnon sacre theologie licentiatum Gerardum Herdarwiccensem actu in eodem regentem, ex diuersis et potissimum Magni Alberti comentarius collecti, et per Udalricum Zell prope Lyskirchen impressoria artis in sancta Coloniensi ciuitate protomagistrum fabre characterizati. Anno virginalis partu Millesimo quadragintesimo super nonagesimum quarto in profesto Conuersionis euangelice tube Pauli Apostoli ad finem optatum sunt perducti, de quo sit deo uni et trino laus honor et gloria per infinita seculorum secula. Amen. Ex quo in hoc tomorum stromateo opere non paruo adiumento mihi fuit honorabilis dominus diue memorie Iacobus Amsfordensis, artium liberalium et sacrarum litterarum professor dum vitam in humanis ageret profundissimus, Ecclesie sancti Iohannis Baptiste pastor, mihi ut frater amicissimus, decreui in calce horum titulum sepulcralem, trito sermone epitaphium appellatum, quem prestantissimus et generosus dominus Rodolphus Langius, vir omnium litterarum laude cumulatissimus, ecclesie Monasteriensis Canonicus, in eundem defunctum, precibus amicorum impulsus, exornauit subjungere, ut dum hunc quos ab errore salutari exhortatione reuocauerit legerint apud altissimum pro anima eius vitificum sacrificium offerant.
The notes on the four books of the new logic containing the process of the Laurentian bursary of the most famous school of Cologne, by an honorable man, master of arts and licentiate of sacred theology, Gerard of Harderwyck, president at that function, brought together from divers notes and specially from those of Albertus Magnus, and by Ulrich Zell, near the Lyskirche, chief practiser of the printer’s art in the holy city of Cologne, skilfully set in type, in the year of the Virgin Birth 1494, on the eve of the Conversion of the Gospel-trumpet, the Apostle Paul, have been brought to their wished-for end, for which to God the One and Three let there be praise, honor, and glory through infinite ages of ages. Amen. And because in this laying down of volumes I received no small help from an honorable master of sacred memory, Jakob of Amsfort, while he lived among men a most profound professor of liberal arts and sacred literature, minister of the church of Saint John Baptist, and to me as a most friendly brother, I determined to subjoin at the end of all this a sepulchral inscription, commonly called an epitaph, which the most excellent and well-born Dom. Rudolph Lange, a man of great distinction in every kind of literature, canon of the monastic church, urged by the prayers of friends, furnished in honor of the dead, that while those whom by his wholesome exhortation he recalled from error read this, they may offer before the Most High the life-giving sacrifice for his soul.
And the Epitaph duly follows, though it need not be quoted here.
