Large 8vo. xli, 502, 60, 24pp, [2]. With a half tile. Printed in red and black. Elaborately bound in contemporary richly gilt-tooled red morocco, device of seated christ proffering book with Greek letters alpha and omega within ornate border to both boards, A.E.G., with eight divisional red moire cloth tabs (one partially perished), gilt dentelles, decorated endpapers. Slightest of rubbing to extremities. Internally immaculate.

An exquisitely bound late nineteenth-century Continental edition of the Roman Missal.

The Roman Missal, with origins in the high middle ages, is the liturgical book from which the text and rubrics for the celebration of Catholic Mass, with both prayers and music. One of the major advances of the Council of Trent, the Catholic counter to the Protestant Reformation, was to standardise the Missal. Pope Pius V, acting on the concilliar deciion, formalised this in his Quo Primum on 14 July 1570 - insisting that the standard form of the Missal was used throughout the Church except where a local missal could be proved to be of two centuries antiquity. Perhaps one of the most controversial Counter-Reformation decisions made at Trent, the use of a standard Missal prevented the celebration of the Mass in vernacular languages and signified a further strengthening of Papal authority: particularly as all printed editions were prefaced by the Pope's order of standardisation. The Missal of Pius V was further edited by Clement VIII in 1604, and later by Urban VIII in 1634.