Macerata: Michele Arcangelo Silvestri, 1704.
A curious Italian-vernacular edition of a venerable text on practical and economic mathematics. Based loosely on the commerical section of Fibonacci's Liber d'abaco, which was composed about 1220 (the earliest of the 19 extant MSS is dated 1237), the Libretto, at just sixteen octavo pages.....
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Netherlands or Flanders: c1819.
A fascinating manuscript visual aid to confession for deaf children, very likely copied from a lost archetype produced by an institution for hearing-impaired youth, perhaps located in the Low Countries. Throughout the days of the early church and into the Middle Ages, the Deaf and hearing.....
Madrid: Matheo Blanco, 1711.
First edition of Spanish physician Miguel Marcelino Boix y Moliner's first book, a defense of Hippocratic medicine and rejection of Galenism, composed when the author was in his seventies. The work distanced him from colleagues at Madrid, where he had already been under fire for practicing.....
Mantua? Francesco Bruschi? c1518.
Only edition of this celebration of the life and deeds of the mystic and Dominicana Osanna Andreasi of Mantua. Composed by the pro-feminist writer, Mario Equicola, on the occasion of the announcement by papal bull in 1515 of Osanna's feast day, Equicola recounts the well-known episodes.....
Paris: Guillaume Merlin, 1538-1558.
An early French-gothic edition of this series of fifteen meditations on the moments of suffering in the life of Christ, by the Franciscan divine Philip of Aquila. Each effusion is illustrated with a tiny, well-executed woodcut, two of which are signed "G.M.," which is unlikely to.....
Venice: Eredi di Francesco Rampazetto, 1581.
First edition. One of the first chivalric romances composed by a woman, and a strident response to the Renaissance querelle des femmes. Moderata Fonte was born Modesta Pozzo in the Republic of Venice in the plague year 1555. Her parents succumbed to the Black.....
Agostini Grisei: Venice and Macerata, 1646.
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.....
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.....
Krakow: Matthias Scharffenberg, 1536.
A most unusual Neo-Latin poem, written in 1536 as a kind of lament in the voice of the lands of Podolia and Pokuttya in what is now southwestern Ukraine. Composed by the Polish humanist Georgius Ticinus (Jerzy of Tyczyn), the poem is actually a Polish lament.....
Cologne: Peter Quentell, 1528.
A fine, compact edition of Johannes Liechtenberger's Pronosticatio latino, and the first to feature Anton Woensam von Worms's lively integral woodcuts. Liechtenberger's reputation as an astrologer and seer has always been suspect (even when he was alive), but his book's renown as a publishing phenomenon is.....
Milan: Gottardo da Ponte, 1527.
Only edition of the Milanese parish priest Giovanni Magagni's vernacular libro dell'animo, told in the form of a dialogue between a physician and an ailing nun. Illustrated with an engaging and quite realistic narrative title woodcut in two parts: on left is the interior 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.....
Louvain: Maes & Zangre, 1596.
First Edition. That men and women could transform into lupine humanoids and devour the innocent under cover of night was a superstitious contagion that swept through Central and Western Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It was a theological issue, a medical.....
Paris? Jean Petit, 1514.
A fascinating French vernacular "art of war" vade mecum by the largely unknown Remy Rousseau, dedicated to Charles de Bourbon in the final years of the War of the Holy League. The work, which is divided into ten chapters, draws heavily on Frontinus's Strategemata, with direct.....
A fascinating Sammelband of ten mid-18th-century Spanish-language disaster reports. Two of the publications are dispatches printed in Spain on the infamous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Four others report the destruction and privation from the same catastrophic event in the cities of Seville, Granada, and the Algerian city of Oran. The.....
Ghent: Anna van den Steene, 1632.
A handbook of the customary laws regulating wine imports, taxation, adulteration, and smuggling in Southern Netherlands in 1632. The brief pamphlet was printed by Anna van den Steene, official printer to the Council of Flanders, and the only woman in the region for more.....