Getty Museum

Opuscula

Date

December 31, 1481

Medium

Ink, tempera colors

Culture

Swiss

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

The name of this printed volume, *Opuscula*, comes from the Latin word for “work,” opus. Opuscula in general are minor literary works, but in this case, the term is specifically used as the title for a collection of writings by Vincent de Beauvais, a thirteenth-century theologian and scholar affiliated with the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont in France. The owners of this late fifteenth-century copy were the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Maximin in Trier, in modern-day Germany, revealing the continued importance of Vincent de Beauvais’s writings to Christian religious communities in late medieval Europe. The volume specifically features five Latin texts, as follows: *Book of Grace (Liber gratiae)*; *Praises of the Virgin Mary (Laudes Virginis Mariae)*; *Praises of John the Evangelist (De sancto Johannes Evangelista)*; *On the Education of Royal Children (De eruditione filiorum regalium)*; and *A Letter of Consolation for the Death of Friend (Tractatus consolatio pro morte amici)*. The book includes attractive pen-and-ink decorated initials in blue and red, all of which were executed by hand. These initials accompany the openings of the four books of the *Liber gratiae* and all the other works. Works printed before the year 1500 are referred to as incunabula, and this paper example shows how the manuscript tradition still informed book design even after the widespread development of the printing press in Europe. From the printed Gothic typeface to the use of headers and red initials (called rubrics) to designate the start of text sections, this first edition of the *Opuscula* is almost indistinguishable in terms of its format from manuscripts of the same period. Although the Getty Museum does not typically collect examples of early printing, this incunabulum entered the collection because of its association with a manuscript that was acquired in 1983 (but later deaccessioned in 1988). Medieval manuscripts were frequently recycled as binding materials in printed books, and this one at one point housed several leaves from a ninth-century Latin Bible.

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