Anatomy of a Collection Item: De re vestiaria libellus ex Bayfio decerptus

In the next instalment of our new blog series, Anatomy of a Collection Item, Louisa McKenzie takes a look at a 16th-century book on costume with a very special binding. Read on to learn more about the tradition of binding books with waste manuscripts, as well as what’s between the covers of this particular volume. 

The Item

Lazare de Baïf, De re vestiaria libellus ex Bayfio decerptus. Addita uulgaris linguae interpretatione, in adulescentulorum gratiam atq., utilitatem, Lyon 1539. Classmark COD 50 (Rare Books Room). 

The Binding

When you’re browsing in a bookshop or library, what makes you pick up a particular book? More often than not, today we rely on the book cover and spine title to give us some idea of what a book is about. This was not always the case in the 15th and 16th centuries, and even later. Books could be bound in spare pieces of manuscript, or, later, printed materials. This practice is known as waste binding. In some cases, waste manuscripts were also used as parts of the internal binding, for example as endpapers or within the spine. Some rare manuscripts, and even some believed to have been lost, have been rediscovered thanks to their use as binding materials.[1]

The Warburg Library’s 1539 copy of Lazare de Baïf’s De re vestiaria libellus is a good example of manuscript waste binding of the exterior of a book. Although the text is about ancient clothing, the book is bound with a leftover manuscript of liturgical music. The leather and vellum in which you might expect a book to have been bound were expensive items. It made economic sense, therefore, to bind a book with materials one had to hand – like manuscripts no longer in use. The Reformation in England, for example, with its shift from Catholicism to Protestantism and the accompanying dissolution of the monasteries and their often-magnificent libraries, provided a ready source of such manuscript material for bookbinders – though there is no reason to suggest that this book was bound in England. Vellum or parchment – types of animal skin prepared and used for writing – were often the material on which manuscripts had been written. It was sturdy enough, especially when doubled or otherwise folded. This is the case with the binding of De re vestiaria - musical notes and letters from the other side of the folded paper are also visible. 

The Illuminated Initial 

This book is a particularly lovely example of manuscript waste binding. An illuminated initial ‘I’, decorated with a man’s profile, holds a central position on the front cover, showing the care taken by the binder in using the manuscript’s own design to its full potential. Given that the manuscript in question is for sung liturgical music from the Christian Church it is reasonable to suppose that this man is meant to be a monk. Liturgical manuscripts used by monasteries and abbeys were often decorated with small portraits of monks. These portraits sometimes commemorated real monks from the religious foundation in question. The outline of a creamy-white hood is visible in an arc around the man’s profile. Potential colour degradation aside, this might suggest a monk belonging to the Cistercian order.[2] The text was published in Lyon, and, while it is impossible to know where it was bound, the Cistercians were an order both founded and popular in France. 

The Manuscript

The use of a manuscript for binding naturally raises the question – can we identify which liturgy is detailed on the manuscript? Some words, such as ‘Quoniam’ (‘since’) or ‘exaudi’ (the imperative form of ‘hear’ or ‘harken’) are visible. However, these appear with such frequency in a variety of liturgical contexts that it is impossible to identify the manuscript from these visible fragments. 

The Text

Although it bears no relation to the binding, the edition of Lazare de Baïf’s De re vestiaria held by the library has its own points of interest. De Baïf was a diplomat under French king François 1er, as well as a humanist scholar. His work, De re vestiaria, published for the first time in 1526, was the first standalone work dedicated to the subject and was responsible for popularising the topic among readers across Europe – including figures such as Erasmus.[3] As such, it was published in multiple editions. The edition held by the Library is one that was revised, restructured and added to by Charles Estienne, a French antiquarian (first published in Paris in 1535).[4] Estienne’s innovation was to divide the text into categories of clothing linked to parts of the body, from head to toe.[5]

The Warburg Copy

This book came into the Library from the collection of Eugénie Droz, scholar of Renaissance literature and founder of publishing house Librairie Droz. 

The Edition

Date 1539

Publisher Sebastian Gryphius

Publisher’s logo On title page: griffin clutching the top ring of a chain which pierces a block. Suspended on the chain under the block is a winged orb. Device framed by the motto ‘virtute duce, comite fortuna’ (‘led by virtue, accompanied by fortune’). 

There is a further illustration of a griffin, seen in a landscape, on the last page. 

Size / number of pages 65 pages 

Condition Good general condition. 

Where to Find Further Reading in the Library

Bookbinding

Early Printed Books

Liturgical Music

Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Cistercian Order

Dominican Order

Costume History

References