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.....
Florence: Filippo Giunta, 1512.
The first edition of Neo-Latin poet Girolamo Angeriano's book of erotic verse, inspired by a certain Celia, who may or may not have existed. The 198 poems are each between two and twenty lines in elegiac couplets, plus a prefatory quatrain in which Angeriano quietly discourages.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
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.....