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