Recent Acquisitions

One of only two extant copies, this book is an Elizabethan handbook on the art of dying. Such books were small and easily carried in a pocket; prefatory matter indicates that they were intended for use by ministers or by devout laymen in helping those terminally ill to die with the comfort of faith. Printed in ever increasing numbers from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, these handbooks had essentially the same purpose in the Anglican Church as the older Ars Moriendi had for the Church of Rome.

This volume, one of six North American copies, is a collection of sermons preached before King James I. While Gryffith Williams’ work stressed the importance of sabbath observance, he argued that Puritan scruples over ceremonies gave them no excuse for separation from the Anglican Church. Williams, of Welsh birth, preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral and was domestic chaplain to Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery (and later Pembroke), to whose children he served as tutor. The Seven Golden Candlesticks is dedicated to the Herbert family.

This first edition of the Works in the original Greek of the third-century Church father Justin Martyr, based on manuscripts of the French Royal Library, is bound along with the first edition of the Latin translation (Paris, 1554) by Joachim Perion. Begun by Robert Estienne and completed by his younger brother, Charles Estienne, this edition of the Greek is set in the first “grec du roi,” a type font designed a decade earlier by Charles Garamond.