JEWEL (JOHN)

A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, Conteining an Answeare to a Certaine Booke Lately Set Forthe by M. Hardinge, and Entituled, A Confutation of &c., FIRST EDITION, Henry Wykes, 1567

Footnotes

CONTEMPORARY BINDING BY THE MOROCCO BINDER: our volume has the same centrepiece, cornerpieces and medallions as BL c24c14 (Petrarch, Basel, 1554), and some of the same spine-tooling as BL c25h3 (Homelyes, London, 1563, illustrated as plate 18 in Nixon, Five Centuries of English Bookbinding, 1978). The Morocco Binder's clients included Archbishops Parker and Whitgift, the Earls of Warwick and Arundel, Sir Robert Heywarde (Lord Mayor of London in 1571), and Queen Elizabeth I.

Another copy of the same edition of Jewel's Defence, bound by the Morocco Binder for Robert Dudley, is in the Folger Library (call number STC 14600 copy 3), who describe him as "probably the best English finisher of his time". The present binding can now be added to the 24 examples of this workshop listed by Nixon in 'Elizabeth Gold-Tooled Bindings' (Essays in honour of Victor Scholderer, 1970, pp.237-243).

Provenance: J. Walrond (possibly of Aldbourne Chase, near Swindon), near-contemporary inscription, above "Robert Cossins book bought of Mr. John Waldronde" and 4-line note mentioning "a booke of matters" and "the epistoll of philemon" also included in the transaction; George Moberly (1803-1885, Bishop of Salisbury), ownership inscription "Balliol College, Oxford, 1832" and posthumous label on front paste-down. Moberly was consecrated Bishop of Salisbury in 1869, some three hundred years after Jewel had been made Bishop of Salisbury in 1560. Following the success of A Defence, Jewel was recognised as "the champion of, and for a time the most famous bishop in, the English reformed church" (ODNB).