Magna Carta<\/a> was on the essentials list, of course, and the Codex Sinaiticus, a codex of the Bible in Greek from the middle of the 4th century – now that is an astonishing piece of material survival.<\/p>\nBut what most took my fancy was the “Indulgentia” an A3 size sheet (landscape form) printed in 1454, possibly by Gutenberg. The display told me:
\n“Indulgences were among the first items printed in the West. [They] meant an end to the labour-intensive and costly procedure of writing thousands of letters for visits to a single town, thus maximising profits.”<\/p>\n
The purchaser had them signed, this one was for Hinrich Mais, a pastor, “and several of his female relatives”, issued at Neuss, near Dusseldorf, and could then show it to his or her parish priest as proof of the transaction – a receipt in fact, no doubt the first printed receipts.<\/p>\n
But I couldn’t help wondering how this contributed to Luther and all of that – the printing made the church’s entirely mercenary view of the transaction transparent, whereas at least when a cleric had to laboriously write out in a beautiful hand your indulgence, you were getting his time and labour, and theoretically goodwill (although possibly in practice curses) in the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m often in the British Library, but usually trying to read too many books in too little time, so it was only finally today, since I really wasn’t in a working mood, that I checked out the displays. The Magna Carta was on the essentials list, of course, and the Codex Sinaiticus, a codex of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","author-natalie-bennett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}