‘Iacta Est Alea’
GERMBERG, Hermann.
Proverbiorum centuriae XIV. quibus adjecta est centuria una, somniorum suam interpretationem implicitam habentium. Item, epistolarum sacrarum decades V. Basel, Sebastian Henricpetri, [(colophon:) March 1583].
8vo, pp. [vii], [1, blank], 388, [2]; without final blank Cc4; printed in Greek and Latin in parallel columns, woodcut initials, printer’s device to final verso; lightly browned with some scattered spots, but a very good copy; bound in nineteenth-century red calf-backed with marbled sides and green paper tips, spine tooled in compartments in black and gold with gilt black morocco lettering-piece, edges marbled, marbled endpapers, green ribbon place-marker.
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Proverbiorum centuriae XIV. quibus adjecta est centuria una, somniorum suam interpretationem implicitam habentium. Item, epistolarum sacrarum decades V.
First edition of this compendium of proverbs, both sacred and profane, Greek and Latin, for the use of the grammar school in Korbach.
Hermann Germberg (1537–1604?) studied at the universities of Marburg and then Basel, also working as a proof corrector for the Episcopius printshop between 1578 and 1582, before being appointed to the newly founded school at Korbach (Hesse). He dedicated this work to the rector of the Korbach school, Lazarus Schöner, although his teaching was not sufficiently Ramist for Schöner and he left Korbach after a couple of years.
His dictionary of proverbs is in three parts: the first contains 1400 proverbs, the second is a list of one hundred short proverbs from the Suda, and the third contains fifty excerpts from the Greek Bible and the Vulgate, as well as from the Latin translation of the Suda by Hieronymus Wolf. Germberg also produced a Latin–German dictionary of proverbs, printed the previous year and criticised for its plagiarism.
We find just one copy in the US (Chicago), and three in the UK (BL, Bodleian, and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge).
VD16 G 1586; USTC 688035.