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This blog post was written by Anne Sieberichs and Imke Vet as part of an assignment for the MA-course Medieval Written Culture in March 2021, supervised by prof. Marco Mostert and Bart Jaski, keeper of manuscripts of Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Library (editor).

With governments restricting international travel, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has forced people to seek out alternative ways of broadening their horizons. In addition to reconstructing cancelled city trips by ‘walking’ endlessly through the streets of Prague, Rome or Paris on Google Street View, many find a sense of escapism in film and literature. Though in the case of books, it is not just their stories, but their physical forms as well, which also have the ability to transport one to a different place and time. This holds true especially for a remarkable copy of a sixteenth-century edition of Plutarch’s Moralia kept in Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Library (shelfmark ).

Bookbinding after purchase

Much like how actual travel can be a messy process, this book’s journey – from the conception of Plutarch’s Moralia  around 100 CE in Roman Greece to the final acquisition of the volume by Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� in 2018 – has been full of detours. Printed in 1542 in Basel, Switzerland, by Hieronymus Froben (1501-1563) and Nicolaus Episcopus (1501-1565), the book contains a 900-page text block featuring the collection of sixty plus essays in Greek known as the Moralia.

However, as bookbinding usually took place after purchase at the request of the new owner, not infrequently far from where the text was originally printed, it should not be too surprising that the loose quires of COKB 318 B 13 were not bound in Basel, but rather travelled to Utrecht to be provided with a binding by Michael Heynrickss in 1545. Heynrickss’ work can be identified by the design of the stamps used for the binding, as these match stamps that are known to have been used by him for the decoration of other bindings. These were published by M. Schretlen en A. Hulshof, De kunst der oude boekbinders, in 1921.

Still further back in time

It is through this binding that one is propelled back into the past with another 300 years, for Heynrickss reused leaves from a mid-twelfth-century copy of the Commentarius in Psalmos by theologian and Parisian bishop Peter Lombard (1096-1160) for the binding’s flyleaves and pastedowns. Written in Pregothic script and decorated with red-silvery initials, the fragments contain the almost complete section of Lombard’s commentary on psalms 20-21. The Commentarius was written by him before 1138, most probably prior to his relocation from Reims to Paris. The fragments appear to be the leftovers of a very early copy of his work.

Who was the first owner?

Considering the binding’s place of origin, as well as the frequent mentioning of Heynrickss in the accounts of the chapters of Utrecht, it could be suggested that this edition of the Commentarius had in fact belonged to the collection of the chapters before 1545. When Protestant ideas began to spread in Utrecht from the 1520s onwards, the chapters started selling many of their medieval manuscripts and books, well before the Reformations of the 1570s and 1580s. Perhaps Heynrickss purchased the Commentarius in order to use the parchment to support and strengthen his bindings.

As a result, the book travelled between various owners in this combined state from 1545 onwards. Unfortunately, a crossed out – and thus illegible – sixteenth-century mark of ownership on the upper part of the first page of the text block is all the information available concerning the identity of the Moralia’s first owner, the person who commissioned Heynrickss to bind the book. A mark of a second owner is found just below this first signature and reads: ‘Jacobi Regij Cortracensis / Calendae Novembris 1576’, with above it a notation in Greek: ‘The very learned Plutarchus shows the useful customs by which you have an acceptable and graceful life’ (translated by Thom van Leuveren).

Return to Utrecht

Born in Courtrai, Jacobus Regius (1545-1601), the Latinized name of Jacob de Koninck, was minister at the Dutch Church for Protestant refugees at Austin Friars, London from 1572 until 1578 and from 1585 until his death in 1601. Between 1578 and 1584 he was ‘loaned’ to Ghent, from which he returned after the Duke of Alva besieged the city. As Regius was not in Utrecht – or even on the Continent for that matter – in 1576, the circumstances of his acquiring of our copy of the Moralia are unclear. Perhaps a member of the Dutch Church in London, who had sought refuge from Utrecht or the Northern Low Countries, had either sold or gifted the book to Regius.  It is equally uncertain how the book returned to the Continent after Regius’ death. Perhaps his son Tobias took the Moralia with him when he went to study at Leiden ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� in 1601. He served as minister in Ellewoutsdijk from 1612 until 1617 and in ’s Gravenpolder from 1617 until 1653.  

A label on the inside of the front cover of the binding – which reads: “Centrale Oud-Katholieke Bibliotheek” – points towards the final leg of the Moralia’s journey. The library of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands was established in 1919, and bought collections of books from ministers. As the Old Catholic Seminary became too small for housing the collection, the library handed their collection over to Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Library as a permanent loan in 1920. However, our Plutrach was not yet included in the library’s catalogue of 1925. In 2018 Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Library was given full ownership of the collection, including 318 B 13.

Thus, one sixteenth-century edition of Plutarch’s Moralia was able to propel one from Roman Greece to Basel, to Utrecht, to Reims, to Paris, to London, to Ghent, to Leiden and back to Utrecht again, as well as from the first century to the sixteenth, to the twelfth, to the twentieth. But travelling through books is not just for those privileged enough to be allowed a visit to the special collections during a pandemic, it is also doable from your own home. Try flipping through one of the many digitised manuscripts online, or maybe even take a longer look at that one cheap paperback you bought in a thrift shop years ago – after all, who knows where it has been?