Untitled - Monoskop

PRIVILEGES IN LATIN; SPECIAL CASES
Cautum est auctoritate principali vt auctentico liquet instrumento nequis hoc
opusculum biennio proximo in regno Franciae imprimat praeter Badium aut aliubi
impressum vaenundet, sub poena contenta in eodem instrumento quod iustis rationibus
expetentibus communicabitur. . .
It was no part of his practice to provide consistently in his books the sort of
details which would authenticate the privilege. In the last-mentioned case, for
instance, he does not state which French authority had given the privilege - it
might be the chancery, the Parlement or the Prevot, I though think the latter
nor the place and date of the issue of the document, nor the
is the most likely
name of the official who it. signed The reason given by Badius in the first
example for not printing the privilege, namely its length ('cuius prolixior est
explicatio'), can hardly have been the main one in the case of a Parlement
privilege, which was only a few lines transcribing the entry in the Parlement
register, though it would be applicable to Letters Patent.
There are a few cases where some copies of an edition display a privilege
and others do not. In certain presentation copies, the privilege has been
deliberately
1
replaced or excised. But this is not always the explanation.
There are two copies of the commentary by Dionysius Cisterciensis on the
Fourth Book of the Sentences, published by Poncet Le Preux (PA 151 1, 2) in
the Bibliotheque Nationale. Neither advertises possession of a privilege on the
title-page. One copy (Res. D. 74) prints a Parlement privilege at the end of the
table of contents, the other (Res. D. 72.1 ) shows no such privilege. Possibly the
first few copies of the preliminary gathering had already been printed before
the result of an application for privilege was known. Possibly the omission was
an oversight which was noticed and rectified after a few copies had been
printed. Belated arrival of a privilege is probably reflected in the I copy have
consulted of Le Roy's Mirouer de penitence (PA 1512, 3), where a strip of paper,
with a Parlement grant printed on it, is pasted on to a page at the end of the
book. Sometimes the publisher anticipated the grant: thus in the Practica
judiciaria (CH 1515, 8) he had the Letters Patent printed, in the form he hoped
to receive them, with blanks left for the place, day and month of the grant,
which are filled in by hand. A yet more last-minute attempt to record the
grant of a privilege is possibly to be found in the first edition of Guillaume Le
Rouille'sjusticiae et injusticiae descriptionum compendium, 1520, fol., published by
Claude Chevallon: in both the copies of this very rare edition which I have
been able to see (BN Res. F. 1236 and BL 1602/147), between the last lines of
the text and the colophon, a sixteenth-century hand has inserted the
inscription 'Cum preuilegio bienio'. The book, a handsome illustrated volume
dedicated to Charles, duke of Alencon, might well have qualified for a
privilege, but the evidence seems inconclusive.
A singular case of failure to provide adequate information about a privilege
occurs in a Latin poem, Concordia Galliae et Britanniae, published without date
1 See below, pp. 160-3.
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