The Liber Epistolaris of Richard de Bury

Printed for presentation to members of the Roxburghe Club, Oxford, first edition, 1950. Edition of 100 copies of which 50 were offered for sale. Roxburghe quarter-morocco and boards, large 8vo, 35 x 25 cm,. lxvi, 383 pp, 7 collotype plates. The volume presents some 541 letters in Latin with English introduction and annotations.From the introduction: "The Liber Epistolaris is a collection of Latin letters written throughout, it is thought, in the hand of Richard de Bury, the later Lord Chancellor, Bishop of Durham, diplomat and bibliophile. In this volume Bury stands revealed twenty years before the Philobiblon was written, as a calligrapher, a careless copyist, and no textual critic. This judgement undoubtedly reflects upon some of the more extravagant claims put forward on behalf of Bury as a scholar, or even as a 'humanist'; to what extent it has also a bearing on the authorship of the Philobiblon must be left to the editor, when he appears, of the definitive edition of that work. The letters are real letters, usually with the dates omitted and the names reduced to initials. They were not composed by Richard de Bury nor, with one exception., addressed to him. It is doubtful if more than one or two ..concern him at all. He merely collected and copied them. It is not an official compilation, but a volume compiled by Bury for his own use - an epistolary common-place book; rather more of a formulary than a 'letter- book'. Five-sixths, approximately, of the letters are of English provenance or are letters sent to Englishmen from the court of Rome. Most of these are from the foreign correspondence of Edward I and II. None of the official letters is known to be other than a Great Seal letter, hence all are in Latin. It is Chancery work, not, even if the Wardrobe had a hand in composing some of the letters, Privy Seal." The Introduction comprises the following sections: (1) The Liber Epistolaris (2) History of the Manuscript (3)Technical Description (4) Bury As A Scribe (5) Marginalia (6) Documents That Occur Twice (7) The Present Edition and Its Plates (8) Early Life of Richard de Bury (9) Belles-Lettres (10) the Gascon Section (11) Acknowledgements. The copy of Charles Travis Clay, Librarian of the House of Lords from 1922 to 1956 and a member of the Roxburghe Club from 1941, with his bookplate on the front pastedown endpaper and his name printed in red in the List of Members. Boards and spine-ends a trifle rubbed, otherwise an exceptional Fine copy.