AMBROSIUS, SAINT
Opera [edited by Johann Amerbach, with additions by Johannes de Lapide], vol. 1 (of 3), EDITIO PRINCEPS, 305 leaves, 52 lines plus headline, gothic type, full-page woodcut of St Ambrose in his study on title, capital initials, paragraph marks, etc. supplied in red ink throughout, small wormhole to right margin of title page, and to upper margin of first few leaves occasionally touching the text, neat paper repair to lower right margin of title, fifteenth century manuscript pastedowns, contemporary blind-stamped calf over wooden boards, sides panelled with 4 borders of repeated rosette and decorative tools, rebacked in pigskin, worn with some of calf to upper cover, lacks bosses and clasps, faded manuscript title on spine [ISTC ia00551000; BMC III 753; Goff A551; HC 896*], folio (310 x 210mm.), [Basel, Johann Amerbach, 1492]
Footnotes:
Provenance: St. Michael's Abbey, Bamberg (former Benedictine monastery), inscribed on title 'Ad Biblioteca Montii S. Mich[ael] Arch[angelus] O.S.B. [Ordo Sancti Benedicti] Bamberga' and on fol.2 'Montii S. Mich[ael] Archang[elus] Bamb[erg] O.S.B. [Ordo Sancti Benedicti]'.

The manuscript leaves used as pastedowns were taken from a manuscript copy of the Liber ordinarius Hirsaugiensis, a monastic breviary, most probably already present in the Library of the Abbey in Bamberg when this volume was bound. For a similar manuscript of the same text, written in a very similar hand see the late fourteenth-/early-fifteenth century Codex 290 (183), today in the Oberösterreichischen Landesbibliothek in Linz. St. Michael's Abbey followed the Hirsau Reforms, which explains the reason they held copies of this version of the Liber ordinarius.

The pastedown leaves also bear small manuscript notations and an inscription in a near contemporary, but different hand, reading 'anno millesimo quingentesimo primo' [1501].
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