Everyman and Others, Part II: The Bandinel Fragments

This is the second part of a two-part essay on the collection and identification of early English printed fragments, and their use toward printing history and the establishment of literary texts. Part I treated the chronology of their preservation, as artefacts, from John Bagford in the late seventeenth century to the ‘new bibliographers’ of the early twentieth century. Part II discusses a newly recovered group of twenty-five such fragments originally assembled by Bodley’s librarian Bulkeley Bandinel (1781-1861), eight of them from books unrecorded in STC. Amongst them (and here wholly or partly transcribed and/or reproduced in facsimile) are two hitherto unknown leaves of the first edition of the morality play Everyman (Pynson, 1518-19); a leaf of the lost Rastell printing of Skelton’s Ware the Hawk (1528?); and two leaves, with unrecorded woodcuts, of Wynkyn de Worde’s illustrated folio of Melusine (1510), known up to now only from two other leaves at Bodley.