Strasbourg: Joannes Knobloch, 1516.
Popular German-language epitome of Bolognese astrologer and chiromancer Bartolommeo della Rocca Cocles's Chiromantie ac physionomie anastasis. Cocles discusses, in 23 short chapters, the fundamentals of physiognomy: the nature of the four principal "complexions" (humors), and how to determine the character of a person by not just.....

Wittenberg: Josef Klug, 1529.
Caspar Huberinus, a Bavarian transplant to Augsburg, was a late but ardent supporter of Luther and the Protestant cause: Huberinus's first book, a kind of commiseration and admission of confraternity with "secret Protestants"—incipient reformers still in the closet, as it were—did not appear until 1525. The.....

Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1551.
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.....

Nuremberg: Johann Petreius, 1529.
First Edition. Remarkable ephemeral pamphlet on the horrors of the highly transmissible and routinely fatal scourge of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries known as sudor anglicus. The English Sweating Sickness, named for its source and its chief symptom, was known in five major outbreaks.....