Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1560.
Only edition. Historian of French grammar and lexicography Odile Leclercq states unequivocally: Le premier dictionnaire, à notre connaissance, monolingue [est], le Dictionnaire en théologie, rédigé par un anonyme en 1560. Bilingual dictionaries preceded monolingual throughout Europe, as the former served a more essential and immediate function.....
First editions. Jacqueline D'Escoman, demoiselle d'honneur to Marie de' Medici at the court of Henri IV, had accused Henriette d'Entragues, the marquise de Verneuil, and Jean Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, the duc d'Épernon, of conspiring to influence François Ravaillac to assassinate the king. Ravaillac, a gullible, lapsed Jesuit.....
Paris: l'Huillier, 1578.
Only edition of a kind of speculum principum comprised of instructive essays based on Plutrach's Lives, composed by the historian Bernard du Haillan. The author was a student of Dorat, and a friend of Boiastuau and Montaigne. In spite of a reportedly disagreeable personality and a tendency.....
Paris: Jean Bienné, 1574.
The only edition of an epic on the Passion in vers héroïque, by Michel Foucqué, vicar of Saint-Martin de Tours. Foucqué was clearly inspired by the great epics of the Matter of France, though with textual modernizations for a post-Ronsard readership. Foucqué's knowledge of New Testament.....
London: Henry Herringman, 1656.
Gioachino Greco, known as Il Calabrese, or The Calabrian, was considered by Soviet World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik to have been the first professional chess player. Born around 1600 in Celico near Cosenza, Greco was by age 19 considered one of Europe's strongest players. A pioneer of.....
Basel: Oporinus, 1550.
In the 1549 first edition of the Initia doctrinæ physicæ—essentially the first scientific textbook of the Reformation—Philipp Melanchthon refutes the heliocentrism of Copernicus with a single blow, invoking Ecclesiastes 4:5: “The earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets.” Moreover, he writes, referring to Copernicus.....
Paris: Richard Breton, 1559.
First edition. It's not surprising that Abel Matthieu, in advocating a return to a more elegant and balanced French language, chose to have his argument printed by Richard Breton in Philippe Danfrie's civilité type, which itself was a celebration of the beauty of an earlier French.....
London: J. Legat and J. Okes, 1639.
A fine pairing of first editions of the English scientist and husbandman Gabriel Plattes's first two books: A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, a pioneering work on idealized solutions to agriculture problems, and A Discovery of Subterraneall Treasure, one of the first major works.....
Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, c1551.
The remarkable case of young Margaretha Weiss [1529-?], a girl from the village of Rode outside of Speyer, who, for three years following her tenth birthday, reportedly neither ate nor drank, yet seemed to grow more or less normally, play with her friends, talk, laugh, and.....
Mexico or Spain: Cabildo of the Cathedral of Puebla, c1650.
First edition. Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, the Spanish viceroy to Mexico and Bishop of Puebla de los Ángeles, is arguably best remembered for the long legal battle he fought with the Jesuits over jurisdiction of the wealth-producing doctrinas. Since.....
Entrecasteaux: 1785.
An unpublished manuscript primer on arithmetic and commercial mathematics, composed, calligraphed, and decorated by the mathematician Louis André Simon as a commission for l'écolier Jean-Antoine Bech, young son of the Duc de l'Entrecasteaux. The text begins with two one-page livrets—a multiplication table and a list of the names.....