Paris: Gilles Couteau for François Regnault, 1522.
First edition. An unusual illustrated chronicle centering on the history of Europe's relationship to Flanders, Hainault, and Artois, and their inhabitants, printed in a robust gothic fount by Gilles Couteau. No single author claims to have written the Legende des flamens, and indeed.....

Rome: Minucio Calvo, 1526.
First edition. A remarkable book of firsts in card games and gambling. Francesco Berni, born in Tuscany in the village of Lamporecchio about 1497, was court secretary to Leo X and Clement VII, a world of "glittering literary productivity, where the lines between poet, cleric, and.....

Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1532.
Following his victory in the Battle of Marignano in September, 1515, Francis I of France, barely 21 years of age, negotiated with Pope Leo X to form what would become known as the Concordat of Bologna. It was signed in Rome on August 18, 1516.....

Paris? 1578?
A request directed to Henri III of France to reduce the tax burden on the good subjects of Burgundy, arguing by virtue of case studies of suffering Burgundians that existing taxes and obligatory tributes are too large a strain on the tax base. The treshumble request is framed.....

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.....

Lyon: Sebastian Gryphius, 1539.
The Almshouse and Charity Hospital at Lyon, chartered in 1531, was, from the start, a  complicated and multifarious institution. A signal drought that affected most of France starting in 1529 created a paucity of wheat, and famine conditions began to emerge, which were especially harsh in.....

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? 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.....

Paris: Ambroise Girault, c1530.
A compact edition, with an unrecorded imprint, of the most popular of all Christian devotionals, the Imitation of Christ, printed at Paris by Ambroise Girault about 1530. Known in more than 210 manuscripts antedating the handpress era, with dozens of stemmae, at least 76 incunable editions.....

Basel: Peter Perna, 1581.
Later edition (first 1569) of the Swiss physician and philosopher Johann Jakob Wecker's two-part work on medicine and wine. The first part contains medical remedies (including many to treat plague) that Wecker learned in his years as a practicing doctor in Basel, which degree he acquired.....