A Birth Girdle Printed by Wynkyn de Worde

Perhaps the most enigmatic product attributed to the Fleet Street press of Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/35) is a small mutilated strip of paper, printed on one side only, identified as ‘A deuout inuocacyon & prayer of all the blyssed names of [our lorde Ihesu] Chryst’ (STC 14547.5, reproduced in Fig. 1). The unique surviving copy, to which the revised Short- Title Catalogue assigns a conjectural date of c. 1520, is preserved as nos 143–44 in an album of printed scraps assembled by the English bookseller and bibliographer John Bagford (1650/51–1716) and now housed at the British Library (Harl. 5919).¹ Judging by the distinctive staining pattern, the strip must have been rescued from a binding in which it had been cut in half (with the partial loss of text) and used to line the front and back boards of a small book, evidently an octavo. Both halves of the fragment have also been cropped along the right-hand margin, resulting in the loss of approximately ten characters and the foot of a woodcut illustration of the crux commissa, or Tau cross. The text at the bottom, by contrast, appears to be complete though closely trimmed. As currently reconstituted in the Bagford album, the strip is 24.0 cm long, with a width ranging from 8.8 cm (top half) to 9.3 cm (bottom half).

To the best of our knowledge STC 14547.5 is the only surviving example of an English printed birth girdle. A kind of amulet roll intended to protect women against the dangers of childbirth, this broadside is essentially a typographical version of a manuscript birth girdle, a textual representation of a relic like the ‘Virgin’s girdle’ owned by Westminster Abbey and loaned

Fig. 1.

STC 14547.5 (reduced). British Library, Harl.5919 (143–44). © The British Library Board.

to royal and aristocratic women approaching their delivery dates.² In the present study we analyse several key features of STC 14547.5, paying special attention to its textual relationship to five fifteenth-century English amulet rolls that may have been used as birth girdles and to an unstudied Latin charm preserved in a medical codex of English provenance. We also comment on the connection between STC 14547.5 and STC 14077c.64, a broadside prayer attributed to the Southwark press of Peter Treveris. Our analysis suggests that early Tudor printers satisfied a mass-market demand for textual amulets during times of crisis. The commercialization of amulet rolls presupposed the broad acceptance in England of SS Quiricus and Julitta, the child and mother martyrs invoked as saintly intercessors in both STC 14547.5 and STC 14077c.64, as effective conduits for the curative and protective powers of Christ, most notably in childbirth.

The Cult of SS Quiricus and Julitta in Medieval England

The legend of Quiricus, a three-year-old boy, and his mother Julitta (also known as Julitta of Tarsus after the site of her martyrdom) emerged soon after the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century and circulated rapidly throughout Europe. In the fifth century pseudo-Gelasius removed them from sanctioned martyrologies for ‘hyperbole’, but their legend persisted in narrative art and Jacobus de Voragine revived their story in the thirteenth-century Legenda aurea.³ The earliest Middle English legendary version of their passio appears as ‘the lyff of Seint Quiryne’ in the Gilte Legende, a 1438 English redaction of the French Légende dorée, itself a translation of the Legenda aurea.⁴William Caxton’s two 1483 editions of the Golden Legende (STC 24873–74, printed concurrently) contain the same basic information, also naming the saint ‘Quyryne’ (sig. z3^r–v).⁵ Yet no legendary account refers to SS Quiricus and Julitta as protectors of women in childbirth.⁶

Caxton’s Golden Legende describes the widowed Julitta’s flight from Iconium to Tarsus with her son Quiricus, her capture, and her trial before the provost Alexander. With Quiricus in her arms, she refuses to...