AN EARLY ENGLISH BESTSELLER

t I ^HE Library has recently acquired on the Beinecke Fund an I interesting English incunable printed on the continent. It is -A. John Mirk's Liber festivalis land} Quattuor sermones (in English) printed at Rouen by Martin Morin for Jean Richard and dated 22 June 1499, apparently the fifth known copy of this edition. E. Gordon Duff in his Fifteenth Century English Books (Oxford, 19 17), cites copies in the Bodleian (perfect), at the Cambridge University Library (lacking three leaves), and at Cranmore Hall (a copy now in the British Museum Library lacking twenty-three leaves). David A. Ramage, in his A Finding List of English Books (London, 1958), reports an additional copy at the University College, Swansea. Our copy lacks the first two leaves of gathering Z, and has a few words from the last three leaves of text supplied in nineteenth-century manuscript; the woodcut on the final leaf containing Jean Richard's publisher's mark has been mounted, and a few headlines are partly cut away. It was at one time in the collection of Thomas Astle (17351803). Mirk's "Liber festivalis" and "Quattuor sermones" have separate collations and colophons in their early editions, but surviving copies are usually in one volume. They were probably intended to be sold either separately or together according to the wishes of the original purchaser. In the edition represented by our copy the two works have separate colophons (a bow to tradition?) but the continuous collation indicates that they were designed as a single volume. For the purposes of this article, references to Mirk's work will assume that the editions cited contain both the "Liber festivalis" and the "Quattuor sermones." The "Liber festivalis" seems to be based on quotations in English from Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea, a work that was tremendously popular in Continental Europe, one hundred editions being cited in Frederick R. Goff's Incunabula in American Libraries (New York, 1964). The work is divided into two parts, "De tempore" giving important days of the church year, and "De sanctis" arranged according to saints' days. In our copy a nineteenth-century owner (unidentified) has written on a preliminary leaf: