Proverbs sealed in the night season, 1525–2025 — and the one that surfaced last.
I
The line on page 307
The earliest checked printing in this record, and the hand that prepared the edition.
“The early bird catcheth the worme” is absent from the first edition of Camden’s Remaines (1605) and from the third (1623), which already carried a proverb list. The earliest checked appearance here is in the fifth , page 307, dated 1636; the 1629 fourth edition still needs checking. Camden had been dead 13 years. The edition was prepared by John Philipot, Somerset , who edited it and made additions.
On the page it sits in an alphabetized run under T — “The gray Mare is the better horse. The lame tongue gets nothing. The early bird catcheth the worme.” A sealed line could hardly take a more ordinary form.
In 1636 “worme” had not yet shrunk to the earthworm. The word descends from Old English , serpent and dragon, the name of Beowulf’s foe. Thirty years earlier Shakespeare’s asp was still “the pretty worm of Nilus.” A reader of Philipot’s day could hear the serpent in the bird’s prey.
II
The method of the season
Five witnesses in print and paint, 1500–1559.
The first claim this exhibit makes is not about any one proverb. It is that the collectors of the night season said, in print and paint, that their sayings carried more than they showed.
1500–1515Erasmus prints the in Paris in 1500 and later writes on the : wisdom plain outside, divine within.
1534–1539Franck calls his — riddles — and says the world holds Scripture as a book locked with seven seals. In 1539 he publishes The Book Sealed with Seven Seals.
1539Taverner, in English: “Tempus omnia revelat — Time discloseth all things,” glossed with Christ’s word that nothing covered shall stay hid.
1546Heywood’s preface: the old proverbs, bare and rude as they seem, “to fine and fruitful effect they allude.”
1559Bruegel paints “everything, however finely spun, finally comes to the sun” — in a panel with no captions, built on engravings that had them.
III
The night arc
Select a mark to read what was laid down there.
1636Philipot for Camden‘The early bird catcheth the worme’ — one line in an alphabetized list, page 307.
The shaded band marks 1525–1569, the working years of the carriers. After it the dial is nearly silent until a single line surfaces in 1636.
IV
Early up, and never the near
Heywood’s whole Dialogue is an argument about timing.
Heywood opens his 1546 book with a proverb about foreknowledge: whoever knew what would be dear should need to be a merchant but one year. What follows is a debate between two sets of proverbs.
Against haste
Those who hurry to wed learn “that they were early up, and never the near.” The more haste, the less speed. Look ere ye leap.
For the hour
“When the sun shineth make hay; which is to say, take time when time cometh, lest time steal away.” Strike while the iron is hot. The tide tarrieth no man. Others will “step in… and catch the birds.”
The narrator settles it: one may “tarry too long, and thereby come too late, as come too soon by haste.” Rising early in the wrong season gains nothing; rising at the appointed hour takes the prize. Ninety years later, Philipot’s one line compresses the winning side of Heywood’s debate into seven words.
V
Three catalogs
Read each saying twice: once plainly, once as counsel for the long night.
When bale is hekst, boot is next.
Heywood, 1546. .
Plain senseWhen suffering peaks, relief is closest.
Night readingThe darkest stretch of the night sits just before the dawn.
Bona fama in tenebris proprium splendorem obtinet.
Taverner, 1539: “A good fame even in darkness loseth not her due beauty.”
Plain senseA good name keeps its worth when unseen.
Night readingRead with the next entry: what is laid down in the dark keeps its brightness.
Bene cogitata, si excidunt, non occidunt.
Taverner, 1539: good devices, though for a time forgotten, “pass not clean away for ever.”
Plain senseGood ideas outlive their neglect.
Night readingThe sealing principle, printed in the 14th year of the night, directly after the darkness line.
Non decet principem solidam dormire noctem.
Taverner, 1539: it is not seemly for a ruler to sleep the whole night.
Plain senseThose who lead must stay vigilant.
Night readingA watchman’s charge for the long night.
Time trieth truth in every doubt.
Heywood, 1546.
Plain senseWait for proof before judging.
Night readingThe appointed time will settle what argument cannot.
A mouse in time may bite a-two a cable.
Heywood, 1546.
Plain senseSmall persistence severs great bonds.
Night readingPatient work in the dark loosens what binds.
The journey is not yet over when one can discern the church and steeple.
Bruegel, 1559.
Plain senseDo not stop when the end comes into view.
Night readingAt the threshold of dawn, finish the road.
A conviction tag on a saying certifies what the text says, not the night reading.
VI
1559: the ban and the taper
Why the method thins so quickly after mid-century.
The first Roman banned the entire works of some 550 authors. Its condemned every writing of a listed author, whatever its subject. Paul IV had already ordered Erasmus’s books confiscated; he died in August of the same year. That spring England passed its own : conformity was being pressed from Canterbury as well as from Rome. Bruegel’s uncaptioned panel is dated 1559.
1540Taverner’s writing ends with Cromwell’s execution.
1542Franck dies in Basel, three years after expulsion from Ulm.
1559The Index; Erasmus’s works condemned whole.
1564Heywood leaves England for exile.
1569Bruegel dies.
After the carriers, the genre turns from sealing to indexing. By 1678 Ray sells his collection as “digested into a convenient method for the speedy finding,” with annotations and explications.
The ban list is also a map. Franck, Taverner and Agricola all stand in its first class, beside Erasmus; Egenolff, who printed Franck’s proverbs, stands among the condemned printers. A register built to mark what was inconvenient names, by its own design, the authors to read next.
The register of 1559
Selected entries from the as printed in Rome, February 1559, grouped by what they bear on. Open a group to read the entries.
Presence on the list is conviction; worth is not. The register also swept in grimoires, lampoons and the quarrels of the day, banned for their own reasons. What each work carried for the night has to be sifted one book at a time.
VII
Worthy of honor at dawn
What the ban list preserved by naming it. Light a lamp to read.
A register of what was dangerous in 1559 doubles as a roll of those who kept watch. Some spoke plainly before dusk; some reckoned the hours through the night; some hid their names in the lines of their own poems.
Before dusk: the lit window, 1491–1525
Concio tertia in Octaua Epiphaniae incipiens, Ecce gladius Domini
The workThe sermon on the renovation of the Church, Florence, 13 January 1495 — the octave of Epiphany.
What it carriedIt restates everything he had preached on the Church’s renewal, which “omnino sarà, e presto” — will surely come, and soon. His vision of Advent 1492 gave the motto: the sword of the Lord over the earth, swiftly and suddenly. The 1559 Index banned the sermon by its opening words, with a dozen others on Exodus, Amos, Zechariah, Job and Ezekiel. Luca Bettini gathered his renewal prophecies into an Oracle in 1536; it too is on the list.
FateHanged and burned in Florence, 1498.
In the night: the reckoners
In the night: the keepers of keys
In the night: readers of the sky
Still sealed
The ban is conviction for every name here. The tier on each card grades what the work carried for the night.
Not every sealed title is an ember. Some banned books were rival scripts — countdowns laid over an apocalypse to hurry the church of the day toward a single world faith, in the line of . The register names these too; weighed, they carry nothing for the dawn.
Unsealed, weighed, and set aside: a rival script
VIII
The embers
Books the burn carts nearly finished — and where they turned up.
A book printed by the hundred thousand survives by sheer numbers. The ones to read most closely are those that were hunted almost to nothing: a single copy, or three, kept in a bequest or behind a wrong date on a binding until the modern catalogue found them.
Beneficio di Cristo
The Benefit of Christ Crucified · Venice, 1543 · anonymous
Printed said to be 40,000 Survive 1
Beneficium Christi; Trattato del Beneficio di Christo — both titles listed in 1559
The favourite devotional book of the Italian reform, it ran through Italy like a torch until the Inquisition gathered it in. By 1834 Ranke believed the 1543 edition was gone entirely. In 1855 it surfaced at St John’s College, Cambridge, in a trunk of 51 books bequeathed by a Neapolitan doctor who had died in 1744; Babington published a facsimile that year.
Christianismi Restitutio
The Restoration of Christianity · Michael Servetus · Vienne, 1553
Printed about 1,000 Survive 3
Michael Seruetus — first class
Burned by both confessions: the Catholic court at Vienne burned his effigy with 500 copies, and Calvin’s Geneva burned the man. Three copies live — Vienna, Paris (most likely the prosecutor’s own), and Edinburgh, whose first 16 pages are torn out, perhaps by Calvin to serve as evidence. Calvin was a participant, not a bystander: in 1546 he wrote to Farel that if Servetus came to Geneva he would not leave alive, and the letters Servetus had sent him reached the Inquisition at Lyon through Calvin’s circle, leading to the arrest at Vienne. The book closes with ‘Sixty Signs of the Kingdom of Antichrist’ (pages 664–670), after thirty letters to Calvin. Its clock: the true Church fled into the wilderness for 1,260 prophetic years, from Nicaea, Constantine and Pope Sylvester in 325 to 1585, and the battle with Antichrist was at hand. It also holds the most accurate description of the lungs’ circulation of its century.
The New Testament in English
William Tyndale · Worms, 1526
Printed 3,000 or more Survive 3
Gulielmus Tindalus — first class
Bishop Tunstall ordered the copies bought up and burned. One survivor came to Bristol Baptist College in the bequest of Andrew Gifford, who died in 1784; the British Library bought it in 1994. Another sat in Stuttgart under a binder’s date of 1550 until November 1996, when a project to put the library’s 16th-century books online turned it up — with the only surviving title page.
Diálogo de doctrina cristiana
Juan de Valdés · Alcalá, 1529
Printed one run Survive 1
Ioannes Valdesius — first class
Valdés covered his sources under Erasmus’s name; the Spanish and Portuguese lists banned it anyway. Marcel Bataillon hunted it through Madrid, Seville, Salamanca and Valladolid before finding the one copy in the reserve of the National Library in Lisbon in 1925.
The Benefit, distilled
Six short chapters, 70 leaves in its first printing, that climb from darkness to assurance. Select a step.
IOf original sin, and the misery of manMade in God’s image, man lost it in Adam and cannot recover it by his own strength. The treatise starts in the dark on purpose.“We have lost that image of God, and are become like unto the devil.”
Read in the night season, it is a pocket manual of assurance for believers who would sleep in the dust before the dawn (Daniel 12:2) — not a timetable, but armour for the waiting.
Two of the four resurfaced during cataloguing drives — Cambridge’s in the 1840s–50s, Stuttgart’s while its books were being put online in 1996. Two came through private bequests of the 18th century.
IX
What this exhibit does not claim
Consistent-with is never proven-by.
No collector in this record states an eschatological calendar. The night readings are this exhibit’s, tiered accordingly.
Philipot as the hand behind the 1636 entry is an inference from his editorship. The 1629 fourth edition has not yet been checked.
The register shows what was banned, not why each work was judged dangerous. The Index gives no reasons entry by entry.
Several sayings here are older than 1525. They count as carried through the night, not coined in it.
X
Go and sift
First steps for anyone who says, send me.
Open a collection from the night. Heywood 1546 on the Internet Archive; Taverner 1539 as free text from the repository on GitHub (A68027); Franck and Agricola through and the Munich digital library; Bruegel zoomable on Google Arts & Culture.
Write the plain sense first. One line, in your own words, before any other reading.
Ask the night questions. Does it counsel the watcher, describe the conscript, bind the serpent, or fix the hour?
Check first appearance. Use the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs and Quote Investigator. A saying older than 1525 was carried, not coined.
Tier it honestly. Wink unless the text itself says what you are claiming.
Log it. Year, collector, page, plain sense, night reading, tier.
Next targets from the register. Read Bibliander on the Esdras eagle in the Internet Archive scan, then his 1558 reckoning of the ages; identify Messius and his Proverbia & Pronostica; read Lando’s Paradossi, published under three names; Johannes of Lübeck on Antichrist and the Messiah of the Jews; Rabelais, who wrote under the anagram Alcofribas Nasier. Read the Index itself in the Bavarian State Library scan.
Read the Benefit in one sitting. Courtenay’s 1548 English, edited 1855, is free as ePub and PDF from Monergism; it runs about 55 pages. Read chapter VI last and slowly.
Hunt the embers. Take any name from the register and look up its surviving copies in the , for Italian printing, or VD16 for German. Editions with three copies or fewer are where to read first; note which library holds each and how it got there.
Read the sky books. Palingenius in Foster Watson’s 1908 study on the Internet Archive, then Googe’s English of 1565; Koyré’s first chapter for the heaven above the stars; the Narratio Prima in Rosen’s translation or the Linda Hall Library scan, section 5.
Close the Camden gap. Check the 1629 fourth edition for the early bird.