book contains forty-five chapters of barbarous Latin rhymes, the literary merit of which is clearly enough set before us in Chatto's faithful translation of four lines of the preface:
Predictum prohemium huius libri de cotentis compilaui
Et propter pauperes predicatores hoc apponere curaui
Qui si forte nequierunt totum libri sibi comparare
Possunt ex ipso prohemio si sciunt historias predicare.
This preface of contents, stating what this book's about,
For the sake of all poor preachers I have fairly written out.
If the purchase of the book entire should be above their reach,
This preface yet may serve them, if they know but how to preach.[1]
In many features, the Speculum resembles the Bible of the Poor. As the designs are in the same style, and as the engravings show the same mannerisms, it has been supposed that both books were made by the same printer; but this conjecture is opposed by many facts and probabilities.
The illustration at the beginning of this chapter is a fac-simile of the upper part of the first pictorial page. In the compartment to the right may be seen the Fall of Lucifer. The rebellious angels having been transformed into devils, and by swords and spears thrust over the battlements of Heaven, are falling into the jaws of Hell, which is here represented, in the conventional style of medieval designers, as the mouth of a hideous monster filled with forks of flame. In the next compartment is the Creation of Eve in the garden of Eden. Here we see that the designer has modified the biblical narrative to suit his own notions: Eve is not formed from the rib of Adam, but is emerging from his side. At the bottom of this picture is this legend in abbreviated Latin, God created man after his own image and likeness.
- ↑ Jackson and Chatto, Treatise on Wood Engravings p. 83.
The book was written for the instruction of the traveling mendicant friars who had, since the thirteenth century, gradually monopolized preaching and the pastoral work of the settled clergy. Provided with nothing but a little Church Latin, and therefore too ignorant to derive their discourses from original sources, they felt the want of homiletic and catechetical assistance as an aid to their understanding and memory. Picture books, with a brief explanatory text, were the best means of supplying this want. Hence originated representations of the mystic relation between the Old and the New Testament, of which the Biblia Pauperum is the first fruit. Van der Linde, Haarlem Legend, p. 3.
