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St Albans Press

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The St Albans Press was the third printing press set up in England, in 1479. It was situated in the Abbey Gateway, St. Albans, a part of the Benedictine Monastery of St Albans. The name of the printer is unknown, only referred to by Wynkyn de Worde in a reprinting of one of the St Albans books as 'Sometime schoolmaster'. He has sometimes been identified as John Marchall, master of St Albans School; however, a passage written by Worde in 1497 implies that the printer was deceased, and Marchall is known to have lived until 1501. Recent research has produced the name John Haule as a possible candidate for the Schoolmaster Printer. He presented the school with its first printed textbook, the Elegantiolae, which was the first book printed at the press, and he was a printer, probably in St Albans in 1479.

Contents

Works

There are eight known printed works which came from the press:

  • Elegantiolae, Augustinus Datus (Agostino Dati, 1420–1478), about 1479. This work was a standard school text of the period, printed in very many editions.
  • De modis significandi, seu Grammatica speculativa, Thomas de Erfordia, 1480.
  • Margarita eloquentiae, sive Rhetorica nova, Laurentius Gulielmus Traversanus de Saona, 1480. The author Lorenzo Guglielmo Traversagni (1425–1503) was a Franciscan and humanist, and this work was a shorter version of his book on rhetoric.
  • Quaestiones super Physica Aristotelis, Johannes Canonicus, 1481. The author was writing in the 1320s.
  • Exempla Sacrae Scripturae ex utroque Testamento collecta, Nicolaus de Hanapis, 1481. This was a work from the 13th century; the author, a French Dominican, became Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
  • Scriptum in logica sua, Antonius Andreae, about 1481-82.
  • The Chronicles of England, about 1486. This was an enlarged edition of William Caxton's Chronicles, with additions from the Fasciculus temporum of Werner Rolevinck.
  • Book of Saint Albans (Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry), not before 1486.

    • Current usage

    The Press now exists as a holding company, John Insomuch Schoolmaster Printer 1479 Ltd, incorporated 1996, owned by St Albans School.

    References

    St Albans Press Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA