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.....
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.....
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.....