Censorship in action

Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Epistola ad Rhomanos. Paris: Henri Estienne, 1512. Fol.

The first edition of two Latin versions of the Pauline Epistles, edited by Jacques Lefèvre d’ Étaples, the leading figure of the Humanist movement in France. His elaborate comments on the letters show that he read them in a spiritual rather than a dogmatic sense. In this copy bearing the original shelf mark B78, bound in the Carthusian Monastery of Marienlager at Wedderen, near Dulmen in Westphalia (Germany), these comments have been censored in many places by pasting in paper slips or by deleting them in ink. It is interesting to know that there exists a second copy, in which the same passages were censored, from the same monastery (shelf mark B77); that copy was formerly owned by William Morris (sold by Blackwell’s, London in 2014).