HOFFMEISTER, Johann.

Loci communes Rerum theologicarum, quae hodie in Controversia agitantur, ad regulam, & consensum vere, catholicaeque Ecclesiae, è S. Patrum sententiis confecti …

      [colophon:] Ingolstadt, Alexander Weissenhorn, 1547. Small 8vo, ff. [viii], 205, [2]; sewing-guards from a thirteenth-century gothic manuscript; early ink inscriptions (cropped) to the title, endpapers, and inside covers and occasional marginalia, sometimes cropped, but still a good copy, bound with another work in a contemporary German tacketed binding in a wallet-style vellum cover, ink lettering to spine. First edition. In the dedication to the present work, Hoffmeister (1509–1547), one of Luther’s resolute adversaries, and Vicar General of the Augustinians in Germany, explains that there are people around people who wish, bono fortasse zelo, (i.e. perhaps with a healthy enthusiasm), to find the truth for themselves and who hope that it may be possible from so many controversies to decide what is true and pious. ‘They are too self-confident and become entrapped in wretched errors; for this reason I think it often happens that deprived of correct instruction they lean, as one says, against a collapsing wall’. Hoffmeister aims to provide the support they need and observes that by following the Holy Fathers men have evaded the chimaeras which beset them.

After the dedication there follows a short preface by Vincent Lirinensis, a Frenchman, in a more robust and militant register, entitled ‘Against profane innovations’. Then Hoffmeister lists a catalogus patrum of some forty patristic authorities from whom he cites opinion, and throughout his text places in the margin the name of the authority on whom he is there relying. Virtually all his paragraphs have one or more references to patristic texts with chapter and page cited, taking points which may have been in dispute and setting out the Catholic position with support from the Fathers or sometimes from the decisions of a Council.

The binding uses a structure borrowed directly from late-medieval archival binding practice, with transverse twisted tackets and the sewing reinforced by support-stiffeners made from short lengths of brass rod. It is certainly north German, probably Westphalian. Bound with the Hoffmeister is a rare, early edition of John Caspar Rutland’s similarly-titled Loci communes Theologici, qui hodie potissimum in controversia agitantur … (Antwerp, Willem Simone, 1560), pp. [viii], 146, [1], with Q1 torn away.

Very rare: VD16 H 4269; not in BM STC German Books, 1455–1600; this edition not in Adams (which lists five later editions); OCLC locates a copy at Emory University only; on the binding, see Nicholas Pickwoad’s chapter ‘Tacketed bindings: a hundred years of European bookbinding’ in ‘For the Love of the Binding’: studies in bookbinding history presented to Mirjam Foot, ed. David Pearson (British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2000).