Description
The Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation), together with the Biblia Pauperum (Bible of the Poor), is the best-known mediaeval work about typology, the basic conviction of the Christian religion that Christ's incarnation and his work of salvation had already been 'preformed' (prefigured) in the Old Testament in every detail. The first manuscripts date from the early fourteenth century. 350 surviving Latin manuscripts, most of them illuminated, testify to the importance of this work, as do the prints that began in the 1460s. This manuscript shows only one coloured pen-and-ink drawing with 25 lines of text on each page, so here one chapter takes four pages at a time and not, as usual, two pages. The manuscript was acquired in 1456 by Konrad Rick, vicar at St Sebald in Nuremberg, who had it bound together with the block book (in woodblock printing) The Antichrist and the 15 Signs, printed around 1450. In 1467, Rick sold the volume together with other manuscripts to the St Mang monastery in Füssen, from where it arrived at the Oettingen-Wallerstein collection during secularisation. In 1935, the manuscript and the block book were separated again and the block book was sold at auction. Most recently, it was at the Otto Schäfer collection in Schweinfurt (signature: OS 372). // Datum: 2017