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.....
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.....
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: 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.....
Amsterdam: Paulus Aertsz. van Ravesteyn, 1611.
Only edition of a lexicographic collection of 5806 witticisms, maxims, and proverbs, which the author, the little-known gentilhomme malinois Gomès de Trier, claims to have amassed and/or devised, and which he asserts are all of French origin. In fact the book is de Trier's.....
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.....
Burgos: Alonso de Melgar, 1523.
The Requerimiento of 1513 gave the Spanish monarchy full divine license to exploit, enslave, and fight Indios, the collective term used to describe Mexica, Inca, and other native populations in the New World. Following the conquest of the Mexica and the establishment of New Spain.....
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.....
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.....