MONTE ROCHEN, Guido de.

Very rare second Wynkyn de Worde edition of this popular manual for priests by the fourteenth-century Spanish cleric and canonist Guido de Mont Rochen, first printed in England by Pynson around 1500, and by de Worde in an earlier edition of 1502. This copy has excellent provenance, being from the library of Estelle Doheny, originally purchased from the York Minster Library by private treaty in 1930 by A.S.W. Rosenbach, with evidence of early English ownership (see Leslie A. Morris, Rosenbach Abroad (Philadelphia: 1988), p. 59, no. 55).
Monte Rochen's book went through hundreds of editions in the late medieval period and circulated widely in manuscript: It sold twice as many copies as Gratian s Decretum, three times more than Thomas Aquinas s Summa theologiae, and six times more than Boccaccio s Decameron or Augustine s City of God. Yet Guido de Monte Rochen and his manual for priests have long been overlooked by historians of the period (Michael Milway, Forgotten Best-Sellers from the Dawn of the Reformation in eds Bast, Gow and Oberman, Continuity and Change (Leiden: 2000), p. 117). It was finally superseded by the establishment of the Roman Catholic catechism in the Council of Trent in 1566.
The manual is divided into three parts: the first covers the chief sacraments of baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, marriage, extreme unction, and the ordination of holy orders; the second covers penance and confession; the third contains crucial doctrines to be conveyed to the people: the Lord s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, etc. Monte Rochen is particularly concerned with when things go wrong, for example noting the penances associated with mistreatment of the Eucharist, such as spilling the chalice, or when someone vomits up the Host because they are ill or, worse, drunk.

Another major concern is the baptism of a child who is in danger of immediate death, a crisis regularly encountered by midwives as well as priests. Monte Rochen notes that in such cases, not only women but also atheists, Jews, pagans and heretics can baptise a child. However, only pure water should be used: children should never be baptised in meat broth, he says, but baptism in a well is allowed in extreme circumstances. The early owner of this copy merely noted that children should not be baptized a second time, and that prayers should be said over them in church.