An Unrecorded Copy of Wynkyn de Worde’s 1506 Edition of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God

Abstract

THE late medieval devotional prose work Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God (also known as Fervor Amoris) was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1506 (STC 21259) and reprinted by him [1519?] (STC 21260). De Worde attributed the text (incorrectly) to Richard Rolle. Only three copies of the first edition have hitherto been known: in the British Library, in the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, and in Durham University Library.1 This degree of rarity makes my identification of a further copy of some importance. There is one in the Russell Library at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth (now part of the National University of Ireland). This is a complete copy, and in generally good condition, if rather dirty and torn in places. The bottom of the final page is damaged, but the colophon with the date remains intact: ‘Enprynted at London in fletestrete in þe sygne of the sonne By Wynkyn de Worde. Anno dni M CCCCC.vi.’. The edition is bound at the end of RB 362, after a collection of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century items, eighteen in total, which were printed in London between 1685 and 1720. These have been bound together since the nineteenth century.