Advanced search

Continental

Contact Alex Day, Andrea Mazzocchi, Jonathan Harrison or Sally Deegan

Our Continental department specialises in incunabula, Greek and Latin classics, early vernacular imprints, and notable texts from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early modern era, with a specific section devoted to medieval manuscripts, fragments, and illuminations.

We regularly issue lists and catalogues, offering a wide variety of literary, historical, and philosophical books printed in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, and Russia.  Woodcuts, early engravings, notable bindings, notable marginalia, rare manuscript or printed survivals, and books with a remarkable provenance are among our keenest interests and feature regularly in our stock.

 
Sort by
Author
Price
Date
Title

  1. [BLASPHEMY.] 

    Handlu[n]g eynes Ersamen weysen Rats zu Nürmberg, von dem grossen laster der Gotsschwür und zutrinckens, verpotten. 

    [Altenburg, Gabriel Kantz,] 1526.

    First edition, very rare, of a short pamphlet against blasphemy and drunkenness printed at a small press in Germany at the beginning of the Reformation.

    £1500

  2. BOETHIUS, Severinus.

    [De consolatione] Duplex commentatio ex integro reposita atque recognita in Boetium.

    [Lyons, Claude Davost for Simon Vincent, 1506.]

    Annotated copy of a scarce edition of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae edited and commented on by Jocodus Badius Ascensius, with another commentary once attributed to Thomas Aquinas. The annotations, contemporary with the book, are carried out by two hands, one in brown and one...

    £7000

  3. [BOOK OF COMMON ORDER.] 

    [The CL Psalms of David in Metre, with the Prose.  For the Use of Kirk of Scotland …] 

    [Middelburgh, Richard Schilders, 1602.] 

    A substantial fragment, the main text largely complete, of an attractive Dutch printing of the Scottish Book of Common Order.  Originally drawn up by John Knox in Geneva for the use of the English-speaking congregations there, the liturgy known as the Book of Common Order quickly made its way...

    £2250

  4. [BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.]

    La Liturgie. C’est a dire, le formulaire des Prieres publiques, de l’Administrations des Sacreman;...

    A Londres, pour Jean Dunmore & Octavien Pulleyn le Jeune … 1667.

    First edition of this translation, printed for the use of ‘toutes les Eglisses Paroissiales & dans les Chapelles de Isles de Jersey, Guernsey, & autres Isles adjacentes’, as well as for the French congregation at the Savoy in London.

    £750

  5. BOOK OF HOURS,

    in Latin, from the Hours of the Virgin and including the beginning of Psalm 97.

    Flanders or northern France, early 14th century.

    An exquisite leaf from an exceptionally early Book of Hours. The defective parent manuscript, which also contained a Vie de sainte Marguerite in French rhyming verse, was lot 76 in Sotheby’s sale ‘Western Manuscripts and Miniatures’ of 17 December 1991, subsequent to which the leaves were...

    £2250

  6. BRUNFELS, Otto. 

    Precationes Biblicae sanctoru[m] patrum, illustrium viroru[m] et mulierum utriusq[ue] Testamenti. 

    Strasbourg, Johannes Schott, 1528.

    First edition, rare.  The earliest Protestant prayer-books, of which this is perhaps the most notable example, often comprised prayers taken directly from (or adapted from) the Bible.  Brunfels’s Precationes Biblicae appeared in the same year in German translation (Biblisch Bettbüchlein...

    £3500

  7. CADOGAN, William Bromley.

    The Felicity of God’s Children, considered in a Sermon, preached upon the Death of a Lady, in the parish...

    Reading: Printed and Sold by Smart and Cowslade; and sold by J. Rusher, Reading; Messrs. Robinsons, V. Griffiths ... & J. Matthews ... London;...

    First edition, a funeral sermon by the popular preacher William Bromley Cadogan, a friend of John Newton, for the local widow Maria Littlehales, printed at the request of her children. A younger son of the third Earl of Cadogan, the well-connected churchman was vicar of St. Giles, Reading, and rector...

    £75

  8. CAMBOUT, Sébastien Joseph du, and John EVELYN (attributed translator)].

    The moral Practice of the Jesuites. Demonstrated...

    London, Printed for Simon Miller, at the Star at the West-end of St. Paul’s, 1670.

    First edition in English of La morale pratique des Jesuites (1669), a polemical Jansenist critique of Jesuit practices intended to ‘inspire the World, and the Jesuites themselves, with horror at their detestable Morality’ (p. [4]).

    £700

  9. [CANONS REGULAR OF THE LATERAN.]

    Regula et constitutiones Canonicorum Regularium congregationis S. Salvatoris, Ordinis Sancti...

    Rome, apud Paulum Bladum, 1592.

    The most complete edition, rare, of the Rule and Constitutions of the Order of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine of the Congregation of the Most Holy Saviour, printed on vellum, with two seemingly unrecorded cancels, from the library of a former Abbot General of the Order. 

    £25000

  10. CARO, Annibale. 

    Rime del commendatore Annibal Caro.  Col privilegio di N.S. PP. Pio V. et dell’illustrissima signoria di...

    Venice, Aldus Manutius the Younger, 1569. 

    First edition of the poetry of Annibale Caro, offering a scathing yet humorous critique of his greatest poetic rival, Ludovico Castelvetro. 

    £650

  11. [CARTHUSIANS.] 

    [GUIGO DE CASTRO, compiler.]  Repertorium statutoru[m] ordinis cartusiensis per ordinem alphabeti. 

    Basel, Johann Amerbach, 1510. 

    First printed edition of the Statutes of the Carthusian Order, printed at the expense of the editor, Gregor Reisch (c. 1467–1525), author of the Margarita philosophica, for distribution to members of the Order only. 

    £8000

  12. CASAL, Gaspar do.

    Axiomata christiana ex divinis scripturis & sanctis patribus.

    Coimbra, João da Barreira and João Alvares, 1550.

    First edition of Gaspar do Casal’s major work of theology, which informed his participation in the Council of Trent, from the library of another participant in the Council.

    £2500

  13. [CHARITY.]

    Costituzioni della Congregazione della Carità di Parma sotti gli auspizi di San Filippo Neri rinnovate nell’anno...

    Parma, Stamperia Reale, [1778].

    Uncommon set of constitutions for the Congregazione della Carità of Parma, printed after its refoundation in 1777. After a brief introduction, the constitutions set out the procedures for the election of the confreres and their reception, the times and order for meetings, discipline within the...

    £300

  14. CHARRON, Pierre.

    Les trois veritez. Seconde edition reveue, corrigée, & de beaucoup augmentée.

    Bordeaux, Simon Millanges, 1595.

    Second, much enlarged edition of Charron’s first book, which sought to prove the existence of God, man’s need of religion, and – in the main part, with a heavy debt to Montaigne’s Christian scepticism – the truth of Catholicism against Protestantism.

    £1400

  15. [CHARTONNET, Antoine-François.] 

    Considerations sur les devoirs des personnes qui sont engagées par leur état à servir les...

    Paris, chez Edme Couterot, 1695. 

    Rare first edition of this religious manual of instruction aimed at those caring for the sick in hospitals, exhorting carers to look after the bodily and spiritual needs of their charges ‘with charity, gentleness, compassion, patience, diligence, zeal, respect and humility’. 

    £275

  16. CHEVALIER, André-Joseph, professor; A.J. BERENTS, compiler. 

    ‘Tractatus De Fide, Spe et Charitate Dictatus ab...

    [Douai, 9 March – 4 August] 1787. 

    A manuscript treatise concerning the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity as expounded in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, compiled by a student at the University of Douai from lectures by André-Joseph Chevalier. 

    £375

  17. [CHINA.]

    Précis des nouvelles reçues des missions de Chine et des royaumes voisins, en 1819.

    [Paris, Adrien Le Clere, 1819?].

    An extremely rare summary of the state of French Christian missions in Su-Tchuen (China), Tong-King (Vietnam), Cochinchine (Vietnam), Siam (Thailand), and Pondichery (India) in 1819.

    £180

  18. CHRYSOSTOM, John. 

    [Opera: Homeliae.]  Que in secundo Ioannis Chrisostomi volumine continentur: Super Mattheum homelie 89 …...

    Venice, Stagnino & de Gregoriis, 1503. 

    First edition of Chrysostom’s Opera omnia, the second volume (of two), annotated throughout by two critical readers. 

    £2800

  19. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (Titus Flavius CLEMENS). 

    Omnia opera. 

    Paris, Sebastien Nivelle, 1572. 

    A thoroughly annotated copy of this early edition of the complete works of Clement of Alexandria, in the Latin translation of Gentian Hervet.  Clement lived and wrote in the second and third centuries, one of the most important interpreters of Christianity within an established Greek philosophical...

    £4750

  20. [COMMON PRAYER.] 

    The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church,...

    London, Millar Ritchie for J. Good and E. Harding, 1794. 

    A splendid copy of the Good and Harding Book of Common Prayer, in a striking masonic binding by John Lovejoy. 

    £1850