ACCIDENTS AND ARSON
LUBLER, Johannes.
Tractatus de incendio antehac nunquam editus in quo omnia ac singula ad hanc materiam pertinentia dilucide proponuntur ac succincte deciduntur … omnibus tam in theoria quam praxi versantibus utilissimus, cum indice materiarum copiosissimus.
Liège, Lambert Thonon, 1701.
8vo, pp. [viii], 353, [37 (index)]; slight dampstain to upper corner of early leaves, nonetheless a very good copy; bound in contemporary calf, spine richly gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, edges speckled red and green; extremities worn, endcaps chipped, short splits to upper joint.
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Tractatus de incendio antehac nunquam editus in quo omnia ac singula ad hanc materiam pertinentia dilucide proponuntur ac succincte deciduntur … omnibus tam in theoria quam praxi versantibus utilissimus, cum indice materiarum copiosissimus.
Rare second edition of this legal study of fire and its consequences, the only known work of the German jurist Johannes Lubler.
We know very little of Lubler, other than that he lived and worked in Cologne and that he was a licensed jurist; his Tractatus de incendio, first published in Cologne in 1608, appears to have been his only published work and the sole source of any later citations (cf. Allgemeines gelehrten Lexicon (1750), p. 2555). In the work itself Lubler is interested in fire from a legal rather than a natural philosophical perspective, as is to be expected. In chapter I, he defines ‘Incendio’ as ‘damnum igne datum’ (p. 6), the damage caused by fire. In the following four chapters which make up the rest of the work, he discusses the four causes of fire – fire caused by accident, by criminal intention, through human negligence, or finally cases in which the cause of the fire is unknown – as well as their resulting legal implications. The work appears to have been an important contribution within its admittedly narrow field and was cited regularly by jurists – particularly German jurists – throughout the seventeenth century.
This edition retains the same text as the first and copies the – now inaccurate – notice ‘antehac numquam editus’ on the title, but omits the prefatory poems by the jurist Gabriel de Bruyn a Blanckavaert, the theologian Melchior Hittorp, and the (original) publisher Conrad Butgenius. A third edition appeared in Nancy in 1733.
OCLC records only two copies outside Continental Europe (BL and LoC).
