In the early part of the seventeenth century, Dominican friar and hagiographer in Rome, Giacinto de Nobili, encountered a slender manuscript called the Speculum cerratanorum, written by the Urbino vicar Teseo Pini in the 1480s. The so-called beggar's treatise—the first with Italian roots—revealed in 40 chapters the various swindles, grifts, and deceptions in use by charlatans in city and town squares in the Italian states to lighten the purses and pockets of the unsuspecting. The manuscript's purpose was to function as a kind of handbook for travelers and merchants, but also served as one of the earliest lexica of cryptolect. De Nobili, writing as Rafaele Frianoro, published a reasonably faithful translation of Pini's book into Italian in 1621, and marketed it more generally as a vade mecum for paneuropean travelers. But, as he stated in the preface to the reader, he really meant the book as entertainment; to be read around the fire on cold winter evenings. Many editions followed, with slight variations, including our 1646 editions with 37 chapters, each devoted to a category of swindler. De Nobili's tone is wry, making some sport of the grifter whom the enlightened could never be fooled by. But the underlying sense of an established culture of chicanery borne of centuries of deperate necessity, and elevated to a kind of variable ritual theater choreographed for survival, is not lost on the modern reader. The culture of street hustlers existed everywhere of course, and books revealing their "secrets" appeared in Switzerland, England, Spain, France, Germany, and elsewhere around the same time. (The best known was the German Liber vagatorum, a 1528 edition of which appeared with an anti-Semitic preface by Luther.) But Il Vagabondo survives less as a wary traveler's guide and more as the cardinal witness to the life and language of a social class forced into petty crime and deception by the horrors of early modern privation. No copies of this 1646 edition in American libraries.

16mo with vertical chain lines, 128 x 85 x 13 mm (binding), 124 x 82 x 10 mm (text block); A-C¹⁶, 95, [1] pp. Early vellum remboîtage with combed marble ends, titled in manuscript on spine. Covers worn and soiled. Interior: Gutter margins of title and least leaf with old glue stains; leaves toned; margins a bit precious, occasionaly trimming a headline; scattered stains and soiling. 

Camporesi, Piero (ed.), Il Libro dei Vagabondi, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1973, p. 90-91; Considine, John, Small Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe, OUP, 2017, pp. 44-53; Henke, Robert, "Sincerity, Fraud, and Audience Reception in the Performance of Early Modern Poverty," Renaissance Drama, New Series, Vol. 36/37, (Italy in the Drama of Europe), 2010, pp. 159-178.

Full title: IL | VAGABONDO | OVERO | SFERZA DE BIANTI, | E VAGABONDI. || Opera nuoua, nella quale ſi ſcoprono le | fraudi, malitie, & inganni di colo- | ro che vanno girando il Mon- | do alle ſpese altrui. || Et vi ſi raccontano molti caſi in diverſi, | luoghi e tempi ſucceſſi. || Data in luce per auuertimento de ſemplici dal | SIG. RAFAELE FRIANORO. || [Woodcut ornament] || IN VENETIA, | [Rule] | Et in Macerata, per Agoſtino Griſei. 1646. | Con Licenza de' Sig. Superiori.

Agostini Grisei: Venice and Macerata, 1646.

Item #321