Ligprædicken, Offuer Erlig oc Velbyrdig, Nu Salig Mand, Henrick Gøe til Thurebye, Som bleff Framsæt i den Helig-Aands Kircke i Kiøbenhaffn, i hans hæderlig Ligefærdt oc Sørgelig Nedsættelse, som skede der sammesteds den 12 Octobris Anno 1611. Aff H.B.H. Præst der sammesteds
Copenhagen: Henrich Waldkirch, 1611. On 28 September 1611 Henrik Gøye til Skørringe og Turebyholm died in Copenhagen at the age of forty-nine. Two weeks later his body was interred in Helligåndskirken, where the sognepræst Hans Henriksen Bang preached a sermon from Ezekiel 37; the text was set by Henrich Waldkirch, universitetsbogtrykker, before Christmas, and the printed duodecimo that issued from his shop in the closing weeks of 1611 is one of roughly 550 surviving Danish ligprædikener, and one of only three sermons Bang is known to have published. On its own terms the little book is a document of dynastic mourning within the senior Gøye line — one of the oldest and most powerful families of the Danish uradel, whose ibskaller-shield goes back to the drost Matheus de Floratorp in 1264. Yet it is also, more quietly, the first printed artefact to name the two-year-old Anne Gøye: the infant among the "Jomfruer" gathered in Bang's dedicatory preface, who seven decades later would leave behind the private library of some nine hundred volumes that became the nucleus of Karen Brahes Bibliotek at Odense — the greatest collection ever formed by a Danish woman. The present copy, bound in contemporary black calf with an IHS panel stamp and deep gauffered gilt edges, carries every mark of a family presentation copy prepared for the widow Birgitte Brahe or for one of the daughters named in the text itself. The paternal shield printed near the title, marked "H.G.F." for Henrick Gøes Faders, displays the ancient Gøye arms — azure, three scallop-shells in bend argent, with the pair of peacock-feathered shells as crest — registered in Danmarks Adels Aarbog in 1896 as one of the oldest continuously borne shields of the Danish high nobility. The facing shield, "H.G.M." for Henrick Gøes Moders, carries the seven-pointed gold star on azure of the Gyldenstierne family, through whom the deceased descended from the rigsråd Mogens Gyldenstierne (1481 – 1569), one of the most powerful councillors of Frederik I and Christian III. The pairing asserts that Henrik Gøye met the twelve-aner proof of noble ancestry on which admission to the first rank of the Danish nobility depended — in a printed ligprædiken of this period, the display of paired paternal and maternal arms performed in compact form what the great genealogical tables kept at Sorø and Herlufsholm performed at length. Henrik was the only surviving son of Eskild Gøye til Skørringe (d. 1573), lensmand on Nyborg Slot and proviantmester of Fyn during the Nordic Seven Years' War, and of Sibylle Gyldenstierne (1540 – 1611), who outlived her husband by thirty-eight years and died only months before her son. He inherited Skørringe on Falster as a minor and was raised under his mother's administration until his majority, sometime before 1598. In 1604 he exchanged Skørringe with the Crown for Turebyholm in Præstø Amt on Zealand — the property that gives the title of Bang's sermon its "til Thurebye" — and received at the same time the privilege of erecting a birketing, a seigneurial court, which lifted Turebyholm into the first rank of manorial establishments on the island. The Skørringe exchange fed Queen Dowager Sophie's livgeding and marks Henrik as a nobleman on trusted terms with the Crown without being of the office-holding first rank of lensmænd. Around 1598 he had married Birgitte Axelsdatter Brahe (1576 – 1619), whose sister Sophie Brahe was married to Holger Rosenkrantz 'the Learned'; it was at Rosenkrantz's Jutland seat of Rosenholm that the ten young children Henrik left behind would be raised and educated in the years following his death. Bang's preface, dated Copenhagen 14 December 1611, is addressed to "Erlig oc Velbyrdige Frue Birgitte, Nu Salig Mands Efterleverske" — the noble widow Birgitte Brahe — and to the couple's children, named in order as the Jomfruer Ide, Beate, Sophie, Mette, Helene and Anne Gøye, together with their young brothers. This roll-call, formulaic in the printed ligprædikener of the period, has the unexpected effect of marking the threshold of one of the most culturally productive sibling-groups in Danish seventeenth-century letters. Jomfru Mette Gøye (1599 – 1664), a girl of twelve at the time her father was buried, would grow into a learned Lutheran laywoman moving in the orbit of Sorø Academy and herself a translator of devotional literature. Her youngest sister Jomfru Anne Gøye (1609 – 1681), aged barely two in Bang's dedication, would become Denmark's foremost female bibliophile of the seventeenth century. Their brother Falk Gøye til Hvidkilde (1602 – 1653) became hofmester at Sorø Academy; their brother Otte Gøye til Turebyholm (1604 – 1642) married the Seneca-translator Birgitte Thott, who moved into Turebyholm itself as his widow and became the most learned woman in seventeenth-century Denmark. The Gøye sermon is in this sense a genealogical threshold document: the printed moment at which the generation that would shape mid-seventeenth-century Danish intellectual life first appears in the record, gathered at their father's open grave. The two-year-old Anne Gøye of Bang's 1611 dedication never married. Over her long life she assembled a private library of some nine hundred volumes at the family estates of Turebyholm and Hellerup, and on her death in 1681 the collection passed to her great-niece Karen Brahe (1657 – 1736), who combined it with her own and installed the whole in a purpose-built library room at Østrupgård. In 1730 Karen Brahe transferred the library to Odense, where it survives today as Karen Brahes Bibliotek, housed within the Landsarkivet for Fyn — one of the few intact private libraries of seventeenth-century Europe assembled by a woman. The printed Gøye funeral sermon therefore occupies a small but striking bibliographic position: a rare book that names, at the age of two, the future founder of one of the two Danish institutions where copies of it survive today. The anonymous "H.B.H. Præst der sammesteds" of the title page is Hans Bang Hafniensis — Hans Henriksen Bang (1560 – 1620), son of the Middelfart borgmester Henrik Bang. He matriculated at the University of Copenhagen in 1590, served briefly as rector of Odense Latin School, and in 1594 travelled as hovmester to the young Otte Axelsen Brahe through Germany and France — the same Brahe family into which Henrik Gøye would marry four years later. Bang held the office of sognepræst at Helligåndskirken from 1600 to 1616, and was the parish's senior clergyman when Henrik Gøye's body was brought into the church on 12 October 1611. In 1609 the Aalborg clergy had elected him their bishop, but Christian IV set the election aside in favour of the Copenhagen professor Christen Hansen, so the 'Biskop Bang' of some later accounts never in fact mounted a bishop's throne. Three printed funeral sermons from Bang's hand are on record, all preached in 1611 – 1612 for members of the tightly interlocking Brahe-Gøye-Rosenkrantz network: Otte Axelsen Brahe, Steen Olufsen Rosensparre, and Henrik Gøye himself. The Gøye sermon is the most substantial of the three and the only one to carry an elaborate genealogical personalia with dedicated heraldic woodcuts. In 1614 Bang's late-Philippist theological sympathies drew a public protest from the formidable orthodox Lutheran professor Hans Poulsen Resen, and two years later he was moved out of the capital to a provstship on Samsø, where he died in 1620. The 1611 sermon for Gøye therefore stands among the last substantial works of Bang's Copenhagen career. The scriptural text — announced on the verso of the title as Ezekiel 37:12 – 14 — is the valley of the dry bones: 'Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel … And I shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live.' This prophecy of corporeal resurrection was one of the most frequently preached dicta in Danish Lutheran funeral literature, drawing together the Lutheran doctrine of the literal resurrection of the flesh with the more political consolation that the noble estate persisted beyond individual mortality. Bang's exegesis proceeds in the manner taught by Niels Hemmingsen and codified in the Rosenkrantz circle: short doctrinal loci drawn from the text, followed by usus — the practical applications — and closing with a personalia section that sets the deceased nobleman's life explicitly within the pattern of the biblical promise. The sermon is an example of the mature genre in its Copenhagen form: theologically conservative, rhetorically plain, and genealogically dense. The imprint "Prentet i Kiøbenhaffn hoss Henrich Waldkirch" names the most important Copenhagen printer of the first decades of Christian IV's reign. Henrich Waldkirch (c. 1565 Schaffhausen – 1629 Copenhagen) was the nephew of the Basel printer-publisher Konrad von Waldkirch, heir to Pietro Perna's humanist officina and one of the minor dynasts of Swiss printing. Heinrich reached Denmark in 1586, worked for a decade as a bookseller from a stall in Vor Frue Kirke, and in 1598 set up his own press with type imported from his uncle's foundry. From 1599 until 1623 he held the post of universitetsbogtrykker, and his production defined the look of Danish learned and ecclesiastical printing for a full generation: Arild Huitfeldt's Danmarks Krønicke, Niels Hemmingsen's postils, A.S. Vedel's Saxo translation of 1610, C.C. Lyschander's De danske Kongers Slectebog of 1622, and a considerable run of the noble funeral sermons of the period. Lauritz Nielsen, in his Dansk Biografisk Leksikon entry, characterised Waldkirch's typography as aggressively Baroque, with a famous 'overdreven anvendelse af forskellige skriftarter og ornamentik' — crowded mixtures of fraktur, Schwabacher, roman and italic, often within a single ornamental woodcut border — and he was the first printer in Denmark to set movable Hebrew type. The title-page of the Gøye sermon is a specimen of the house style, alternating red and black inks across four type-sizes within a dense foliate border, and the initials and ornaments are from the Waldkirch shop. Waldkirch's first wife Kirstine Clausdatter had herself been buried in Helligåndskirken in November 1599, so the personal tie between printer and parish predates the Gøye commission by a dozen years. The Danish ligprædiken as a printed genre begins in 1559, with the funeral sermon for Christian III, extends to non-royal nobility with Niels Hemmingsen's 1565 sermon for Herluf Trolle, and becomes the dominant form of noble commemorative literature through the seventeenth century. Between 1565 and 1660 the right to print a ligprædiken was formally reserved to the nobility. Of roughly 550 Danish-language examples surviving for the whole period to 1750, some seventy-four per cent commemorate members of the aristocracy, and the curve rises steeply through the 1610s toward an eventual peak in the 1640s. G. Jacobsen's study in Historisk Tidsskrift places this sermon at the inflection point of that growth, where the mature convention of the form crystallises: dedicatory preface to the widow and children, biblical dictum with doctrinal elaboration, genealogical personalia reaching back through twelve noble ancestors, and a pair of woodcut arms for the paternal and maternal lines. In Germany, Rudolf Lenz's Marburg Forschungsstelle für Personalschriften has long exploited the comparable Leichenpredigten corpus as a cornerstone of early-modern social history; the Danish corpus — of which the little Gøye volume is a textbook example — has been opened up in piecemeal fashion by Birket Smith, by Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, and above all in C.F. Bricka's two-volume Den danske Adel i det 16. og 17. Aarhundrede. Samtidige Levnetsbeskrivelser uddragne af trykte og utrykte Ligprædikener (Copenhagen 1874, 1913), which reprints the personalia of the present sermon among its standard genealogical extracts. The binding presents the sermon in a form matching the seriousness of its occasion. Black calf over pasteboard is tooled in blind and gilt: the upper cover carries a panel-stamped frame enclosing a central oval cartouche depicting the Crucifixion with the INRI titulus, a standard Lutheran devotional motif; the lower cover carries a corresponding oval filled with strapwork arabesque; raised bands divide the spine into compartments stamped with small rosettes. Most distinctive are the edges — all three gilt and then chased with heated finishing tools into a deep repeat of rosettes, crowns, and interlocking ornament. Gauffered edges (French ciselé, German Punzenschnitt) were especially associated with sixteenth-century German bookbinding and migrated into the Baltic and Copenhagen workshops through the Hamburg and Lübeck trade, reaching Christian IV's court in the hands of the royal binders. The labour required — gilding the edges solidly first, then tooling each pattern by hand while holding the textblock compressed — marks gauffered work as a finish reserved for books of ceremonial importance. The combination of devotional panel stamp, gauffered edges, and plain IHS-fronted Lutheran programme is consistent with a Copenhagen or Hamburg-trained bindery working around 1611 – 1615, and is characteristic of family presentation copies prepared for the widow or daughters of the deceased. Anne Gøye's own library at Karen Brahes Bibliotek contains several similarly bound Gøye and Brahe funeral sermons; the hypothesis that the present copy once stood on her shelves — or on her mother's — is not demonstrable but fits the material evidence closely. Bibliotheca Danica I (Chr. Bruun); Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon, entry 'Bang, Hans'; Danmarks Adels Aarbog, slægten Gøye (Copenhagen 1896); H.F. Rørdam, Kjøbenhavns Universitets Historie; Lauritz Nielsen, 'Henrik Waldkirch,' in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon; C.F. Bricka, Den danske Adel i det 16. og 17. Aarhundrede. Samtidige Levnetsbeskrivelser uddragne af trykte og utrykte Ligprædikener, 2 vols. (Copenhagen 1874, 1913); G. Jacobsen, 'Danske ligprædikener 1565 – 1610. Køn, stand og embede i en litterær genre,' Historisk Tidsskrift 115:1 (2015); on Anne Gøye and Karen Brahes Bibliotek see Birgitte Possing's entry in Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon and the Kvinfo portal; on the genre more broadly, Rudolf Lenz, Leichenpredigten als Quelle historischer Wissenschaften, 4 vols. (Marburg 1975 – 2004); on gauffered edges, Etherington & Roberts, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books. A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology. The title is recorded in the British Library general catalogue and has been digitised via Google Books (identifier jhtlAAAAcAAJ); institutional copies are also located at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen and at Karen Brahes Bibliotek in Odense.
Small duodecimo, [164] pp. Contemporary black calf over pasteboard, tooled in blind and gilt: upper cover with a panel-stamped frame enclosing a central oval cartouche depicting the Crucifixion with INRI titulus; lower cover with a corresponding oval strapwork cartouche; raised bands on spine with blind-stamped rosettes in the compartments; two clasps wanting, pin-holes visible on fore-edge and upper cover. All three edges gilt and gauffered with a deep repeat pattern of rosettes, crowns, and interlocking stamps. Title printed in red and black within an elaborate foliate border; paired heraldic woodcuts of the paternal Gøye and maternal Gyldenstierne arms facing one another after the title; woodcut initials and ornaments from the Waldkirch shop. A few short marginal repairs to the binding; light uniform browning of the paper consistent with its age; leaves holding firmly in the original sewing. The labour-intensive finish — in particular the deeply gauffered edges — makes a family presentation copy the most probable explanation, the volume likely produced for the widow Birgitte Brahe or for one of the daughters named in Bang's dedicatory preface.
Item #6630
Price: $6,500.00
