¶301 Each early printed book must be treated like a manuscript; that is, as a unique copy. And, ideally, to differentiate book from book precisely, every letter in every copy needs to be compared. No bibliographer has the time or funds fully to meet these conditions. Gross structural description has to be separated from the essential detail and must inevitably be the bibliographer’s normal method. At which point overall description descends into detail must depend on the individual book and the purpose of the catalogue, but a certain amount of detail will normally be required. It is our contention that...

¶401 To examine the problem of cataloguing and inventorying printed liturgical books, we take as the principal object of our enquiry the 1493 printing of the York Breviary, printed in Venice by Johannes Hammanus, Hamman, who later called himself J. Hertzog. His printer’s device appears on the cover of the present publication. Two copies of the book and several sets of fragments remain. the book is printed in black and red, 2 columns with 36 lines each and with running headings. In the late 19th century, Lawley edited the book for the surtees society.¹ This information is probably all that...

¶501 A York book can be identified by means of the special lessons for the office of Thomas Becket (see ¶509), as well as by more conventional means such as the structure of the Office for the Dead and the sundays in Advent.¹ But a more usual method of identifying a particular Use is to examine the Kalendar and the Sanctorale. The two should agree, of course. But when new feasts were added it was clearly much easier to rewrite or reprint the Kalendar, which with its various tables fits conveniently into a signature, than to revise the sanctorale.

Eight...

¶601 In the previous section we singled out several manuscripts and early prints for some of their especially important characteristics. Here we present a more general overview of these other sources.

¶602 More than thirty manuscripts are listed in the first part of Appendix 2, with some accounting of the most pertinent secondary literature. the present location of a few – for instance those still in private ownership or known only in auctioneers’ catalogues – is not known. a comprehensive list with brief documentation is in a database of liturgical manuscripts of English Uses, compiled and generously made available for our use...

¶701 A note about facsimiles and the increasing inability of scholars to include them at reasonable cost is in ¶105 .

Unless we state otherwise, all the images are from the reproductions of the Bodleian copy, which has been microfilmed, put onto microfiche, and digitized. The relationships among those technologies, and which medium depends on a previous one, are not entirely clear: Robbins deals with the issue in Appendix 3.

In this section we will deal with the various facsimiles of our Breviary and incidentally its fellows in the liturgical and literary fields. After a review of the advantages and...

¶801 some of these recommendations will apply,mutatis mutandis, to the cataloguing of liturgical manuscripts.¹ In the conclusions, we set out a few of the difficulties, such as wartime, that may beset cataloguers. Without knowing the constraints that all cataloguers must face, we set out below some ideal conditions that could have made our task, as users, easier. we try to express these as preferences. But implicit in many is something more than a recommendation or suggestion. A few specific pointers for the cataloguing or research process itself may be useful. we include some matters that we think mandatory.

We...