Alzog names thirty-eight manuals, including five by Keisersperg, with his sermons and expositions of doctrine, and seven in Low Saxon dialect, interesting as showing the peculiarities of spelling in certain districts at that time. The form of the title is almost unvaried in all: “In the name of the Lord. Amen. Here follows a Plenarium according to the order of the holy Christian Church, in which are to be found written all epistles and gospels as they are sung and read in the ceremony of the holy Mass, throughout the whole year, in order as they are written in the following.” The two earliest mentioned by Alzog are of 1470-1473. They are adorned with title-pages or frontispieces, Scriptural or allegorical subjects. In the University Library of Freiburg is a small folio with a wood-cut of our Lord, his right hand uplifted in the act of blessing, and his left carrying an imperial globe, the ball surmounted by a cross, such as may be seen in pictures of the old German emperors. Round the four sides of the print runs the following curious inscription, unfortunately clipped short in part by the binder: “This portrait is made from the human Jesus Christ when he walked upon the earth. And therefore he had hair and a beard, and a pleasant countenance. Also a ... He was also a head taller than any other man on the earth.” The first edition mentioned by Panzer and Hain as containing a glossary on the Sunday gospels is of the year 1481, printed at Augsburg, but the four editions between 1473 and 1483 all had uniform glossaries.
The mention is worded thus: “A glossary will be found of each Sunday gospel—that is, a good and useful teaching, and an exposition of each gospel, very useful for every Christian believer (or believer in Christ) to read.” In 1488 Weislinger and Panzer point to a book printed at Baden by Thomas Ansselm, called Gospels with Glossaries and Epistles in German, for the whole year; also the beginning; the Psalm (the “Judica” and Introit) and the Collect of each Mass according to the order of the Christian Church. Another book of 1516, printed at Dutenstein, has the same title with this addition: “for the whole year, with nothing left out.” A very elaborate manual, of which a copy (1514) is in the University Library of Freiburg and is mentioned in Panzer’s catalogue, is called
“The Plenarium, or gospel book. Summer and Winter parts, through the whole year, for every Sunday, Feria, and Saints’ days. The order of the Mass, with its beginning or Introit. Gloria Patri, Kyrie Eleyson, Gloria in Excelsis, Collect or prayer, Epistle, Gradual or penitential song, Alleluia or Tract, Sequence or Prose. Gospel with a glossary never yet heard by us, and ended by fruitful and beautiful examples.[[63]] The Patrem or Creed, Offertorium, Secreta, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Communion, Compleno and Ite Missa est or Benedicamus Domino, etc. And for every separate Sunday gospel a beautiful glossary or Postill, with its example, diligently and orderly preached by a priest of a religious order, to be seriously noticed and fruitfully applied for the greater use of the believer, who in this quickly-passing life can read nothing more useful....” At the end are these words: “To the praise and worth of Almighty God, his highly-praised Mother Mary and all saints, and to the use, bettering, and salvation of men.... Printed by the wise Adam Peter von Langendorff, burgher of Basle. 1514. In folio.”
The book contains four large wood-cuts of some artistic merit, Christ crucified, with a landscape in the background, and two groups, one of four women on one side, the other of four men on the other, and the following legend beneath, taken from Notker’s famous hymn Mediâ Vitæ, which “wonderful anthem or sequence,” says an Anglican writer, is “so often mistaken for a psalm or text”[[64]]: “In the midst of life we are in death: whom shall we seek to help us, and to show us mercy, but thou alone, O Lord, who by our sins art righteously enwrathed? Holy Lord God, holy strong God, holy, merciful, and eternal God, suffer us not to taste the bitterness of death.” The other wood-cuts, respectively indicating Christmas day, Easter eve, and Whitsunday, represent the Adoration of the Infant Jesus by Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, with a landscape in the background; the Resurrection; and the Descent of the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues. The book contains many smaller wood-cuts.
Another Plenarium (Strassburg, 1522) boasts of being “translated from the Latin into better German,” and another, of the same year (Basle), announces “several other Masses, never hitherto translated into German,” as well as a register with blank leaves. Keisersperg’s sermons “in the last four years of his life, taken down word for word from his own mouth,” are printed at Strassburg in 1515, and are qualified in the title-page as “useful and good, not only for the laity, and never hitherto printed.” His Postill, or “Commentaries on the Four Gospels,” is printed in four parts in Strassburg in 1522, also his Lenten sermons, and some additional ones on a few saints’ days, “written down from his own mouth by Henry Wessmer”; but the most curious work mentioned is a folio volume of his sermons, without title, and containing other treatises with fanciful titles and bearing on mysterious subjects. “The Book of Ants, which also gives information concerning witches, ghostly appearances, and devilish possession, very wonderful and useful to know, and, further, what it is lawful to hold and believe touching them”; also, “the little book, ‘Lord, whom I would gladly serve,’ in fifteen parts of fine and useful doctrine; finally, the book of ‘Pomegranate,’ in Latin Malogranatus, containing much wholesome and sweet doctrine and advice.” This dates from 1517 (Strassburg, John Greinninger). For the sake of the language the manuals printed in Low Saxon, chiefly in Lübeck, are among the most interesting specimens. The titles are much the same as the German, but generally more concise. Panzer remarks of one of them, printed by Stephen Arndes at Lübeck in 1496, and adorned with several fine wood-cuts, that he has seen three other editions, printed in 1488, 1493, and 1497. A few of the peculiarities of spelling, and of the indifferent use of various forms of one word, will be seen in the following examples: book, in the contemporary High-German, spelt buch or buoch, is here spelt boek, boeck, bok, and boke, this last a form often found in Old English writers; holy, heylig, heilig, or hailig, is here spelt in five different ways: hilgen, hylgen, hylligen, hilligen, and hyllyghen; and birth, geburt, is bort and borth. Das (the) becomes dat; endigt (ends) is turned to ondighet; and the o’s and n’s are in general used the reverse way to that common in High-German.
The contents of the Plenarii show the peculiarities of the liturgy as used at that time. The same epistle and gospel sung or read on Sunday was repeated on Monday, Tuesday (which the oldest manuals call After-Monday), and Thursday. Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year had separate epistles and gospels, and Saturday is not mentioned, unless it is indicated by the “third day,” which the later editions speak of as “having a separate epistle and gospel throughout the year.” Each day of Lent had a separate one. Some of the books of 1473 contained special Masses—that of the Wisdom of God for Mondays, the Holy Ghost for Tuesdays, the Holy Angels for Wednesdays, the Love of God for Thursdays, the Holy Cross for Fridays, and the Blessed Virgin for Saturdays. There followed Masses for rain, for health, for sinners, for fair weather, and for “all believing souls.” The glosses on the gospels in the earlier editions are interesting from their simplicity and directness. Even the preface of the Basle Plenarium of 1514, though less simple, is a good specimen. It is noteworthy that the Immaculate Conception is implied in the text. The heading is from Luke xi. 28: “Blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.” The preface runs thus:
“Jesus Christ is the Word of the Eternal Father; the Word is made flesh (understand by that, man) in the womb of the immaculate, holy, and pure Virgin Mary, that we too may be saved. From this Word, as from Christ the Son of God, flows Holy Scripture, which is the life-giving flow of the blessed paradise of the highest heaven, penetrating and making fruitful on this earth the paradise of the holy church to the use of all believers. And in order that man may better know and acknowledge his Lord, he has at hand the help of Holy Scripture, which is the source of all knowledge and wisdom, of whom all knowledge is the servant and follower, and which teaches and admonishes us, through the wonderful works of God, to worship the Maker of all; for Christ the Son of God is the wisdom of the Eternal Father, and in him and through him are all creatures made, and, indeed, so wonderfully made and hidden that no human wisdom can fully penetrate into these secret recesses. Such is the teaching of Holy Writ.
“To confess God, to avoid sin, to do good, and to show ourselves diligent in the love of God and our neighbor—this is a spiritual pharmacy of all sweet-smelling and precious medicine. Although many prophets and other saints have written Holy Scripture and divine truth, each one according as it was given to him by the Holy Ghost, yet are the strength and truth of the holy gospels above every other Scripture, as says St. Augustine in his Concordance of the Gospels. And Holy Scripture is so fruitful, wise, and unfathomable that we can never fathom it till the end of this passing life on earth, and till we come to the place whence Scripture itself floweth ... and ourselves read in the great Bible—that is, the Book of Life.
“And because many men do not understand Latin, and yet can read German, therefore this book of the gospels, with its belongings, has been translated into German, to the glory of God and the use of such as shall feed their souls on it. For man liveth not on material bread alone, but on the spiritual bread which is the Word of God, as Christ says by the mouth of the evangelist Matthew, in the fourth chapter.”
Much more follows; for instance, an enumeration of the nine graces that a diligent reader of Scripture receives, in which much good but rather trite advice is given, and of the five kinds of men who read Holy Writ, only two of whom do it to advantage. These conceits belonged to the age, and, indeed, survived the age, as we find in the Presbyterian sermons of two centuries later in Scotland and the Puritan sermons of New England. Keisersperg was profuse of them, and some of the quaint and rather strained combinations and coincidences which he imagined are a curious illustration of the sort of pulpit eloquence popular in the fifteenth century. The prominence given among saints to the four evangelists grew naturally out of the reverence paid to the four gospels as the noblest part of Scripture. The Plenarii often contained allegorical representations of them under the conventional figures known to art, and undertook to explain the reason of these figures being applied to them, connecting them with the four living creatures of Ezechiel’s vision and those of the Apocalypse. But, beyond the constantly-received explanations, they sometimes contained details calculated to astonish readers of a later day. Such is the idea of the fitness between St. Mark and the symbolic lion, derived from the belief that lion whelps were awakened the third day, by the roaring of their mother, from the sleep or trance in which they had been born, which was interpreted to refer to the fact that St. Mark chiefly dwells on the resurrection of the Lord on the third day after his death. The Basle manual from which the foregoing preface is quoted has special prayers in honor of the evangelists, chiefly to the end that they would help the faithful to a better understanding of, and acting up to, the principles of the Gospel. The wood-cuts which distinguish these as well as the Latin missals took the place of the illuminations of the older books in manuscript, and, though wanting in the finish and delicacy of the latter, were designed on the same models and in the same spirit. The Latin missals now in the University Library of Freiburg, of 1485 and 1520, are rich in this kind of ornamentation, the latter having as title-page the Crucifixion, with a group of many figures, and around the illustration representations of the seven sacraments, whose grace flows from the atonement of Christ. The same idea is conveyed in the often-repeated allegorical representation in mediæval pictures of two angels collecting in golden cups the blood that flows from the outstretched hands of the Saviour on the cross.