ABBEVILLE, Claude d’.

Histoire de la mission des peres capucins en l’isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisines ou est traicte...

Paris, François Huby, 1614.

Second edition, enlarged and revised from the first edition published earlier the same year, a handsome copy. The first written account of the Capuchin mission to Maranhão, an island on the coast of Brazil, of which, Sabin notes, this is the earliest mention. In 1612 the mission, composed of...

£30000

ALBERTI, Leon Battista.

El Momo. La moral e muy graciosa historia del Momo; compuesta en Latin por el docto varon Leon Bapista...

Alcalá de Henares, Joan Mey Flandro, 1553.

First edition in Spanish of Alberti’s Momus [or De principe], translated by Augustín de Almaçan and with an introductory 8-page Exposición by the Toledo ascetic writer and scholar Alejo Venegas (1495?–1554?).

£3800

[ALTAR CARDS.]

Two altar cards with Latin text and images of Christ and St John.

‘A Paris, chez I. Baudemont’, second half of seventeenth century.

Two seemingly unrecorded hand-coloured prompt cards for priests, bearing readings and prayers, and devotional images of Jesus and St John, comprising separately printed images, text and borders arranged together in collage fashion.

£2750

ANTONIUS de Vercellis. 

Sermones quadragesimales de XII mirabilibus Christianae fidei excellentiis [with additions by Ludovicus...

Venice, Johannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis, de Forlivio, [for Alexander Calcedonius], 16 February 1492/93. 

A remarkable copy of the first edition of Antonius de Vercellis’ sermons, owned and annotated by three contemporary Franciscans, one of whom, Andrea Alamanni, may be the confessor who administered Machiavelli’s last rites. 

£8500

APULEIUS (Julien FLEURY, editor).

Lucii Apuleii Madaurensis Platonici philosophi opera interpretatione et notis illustravit...

Paris, Frederic Leonard, 1688.

First Delphin edition of the works of Apuleius, ‘une des meillures éditions qui soient dans la collection des Ad usum’ according to Brunet, comprising the Metamorphoses, his popularisations of Platonic philosophy, and excerpts from his lectures known as the Florida. The Delphin classics were a landmark...

£350

[AQUHORTIES College.]

Abstract of the Rules and Regulations for the Students in the College of Aquhorties …

[At foot:] Edinburgh: Printed by J. Moir, Paterson’s Court. [1799?].

Broadside rules for the newly established Aquhorties College, the only Roman Catholic college in Scotland, presumably designed to be posted up around the school.

£850

ARISTIDES, Aelius. 

Orationum tomi tres, nunc primum latine versi a Gulielmo Cantero Ultraiectino.  Huc accessit orationum tomus...

Basel, Peter Perna and Heinrich Petrus, 1566. 

First edition in Latin, a remarkable copy once owned by one of the preeminent music theorists and composers of Renaissance Italy, Gioseffo Zarlino.  The translation was prepared from the Greek by the German scholar Wilhelm Canter (1542–1575), author of an acclaimed Syntagma, a systematic...

£2750

Aristotle: From Antiquity to the Modern Era.

Preface by Martin J. Gross. Essays by Benjamin Morison and Barbara Scalvini.

Lewes, D. Giles Ltd for the Martin J. Gross Family Foundation, 2021.

Aristotle’s influence towers over western philosophy and science. His astonishing range and depth – philosophy and logic, the physical and natural sciences, ethics and politics – make him indisputably the most important intellectual figure in the western tradition before the modern age.

£30

ARNIGIO, Bartolomeo. 

Rime dell’Arnigio per la ill[ustre] signora Claudia Martinenga. 

Brescia, Giovanni Battista Bozzola, 1566. 

First edition of Bartolomeo Arnigio’s collection of poems addressed to Claudia Martinengo, wife to Ludovico Martinengo della Pallata, an important association copy presented by the author to fellow poet Antonio Beffa Negrini. 

£1750

AUGUSTINUS TRIUMPHUS [i.e. AUGUSTINUS de Ancona]. 

Summa de potestate ecclesiastica. 

Augsburg, [Johann Schüssler,] 6 March 1473. 

First edition of this highly important and influential magnum opus of political theory, a defence of papal supremacy. 

£30000

AUSONIUS, Decimus Magnus.

Ausonii Burdigalensis, viri consularis, omnia, quae adhuc in veteribus bibliothecis inveniri potuerunt,...

Bordeaux, Simon Millanges, 1580.

First Vinet edition of the works of the fourth-century poet Ausonius, with interesting annotations by two early readers. Ausonius taught rhetoric in his native Bordeaux for thirty years before serving as tutor and then consul to the emperor Gratian. He was a prolific poet, employing a variety...

£1950

BACON, Francis.

Opuscula varia posthuma, philosophica, civilia, et theologica, nunc primum edita. Cura & fide Guilielmi Rawley…...

London, R. Daniel, impensis Octaviani Pulleyn, 1658.

First edition, second issue (with the imprint R. Daniel, rather than R. Danielis) of this collection of the philosophical, political, and theological writings of Bacon, including numerous essays previously unpublished, and the first appearance of William Rawley’s biographical sketch of the philosopher....

£1250

BALDI, Bernardino, da Urbino. 

La Difesa di Procopio contro le calunnie di Flavio Biondo, con alcune considerationi intorno al...

Urbino, Marc’Antonio Mazzantini, 1627.

First and only edition, very rare, of this impassioned critique of Flavio Biondo’s interpretation of Procopius, by the poet, polyglot, historian, and mathematician Bernardino Baldi, Abbot of Guastalla. 

£450

BARTOLI, Adolfo.

Scenari inediti della Commedia dell’arte. Contributo alla storia del teatro popolare italiano.

Florence, Sansoni, 1880.

Rare first edition, one of only 350 copies, of a foundational source for the study of Commedia dell’Arte. The exceptionally well-loved and widely-performed form of drama is the subject of the author’s pioneering study: he examines tropes, characters, plots, structures and lines of ‘scenarios’...

£500

[BASKERVILLE PRESS.]

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

Third and final edition of Baskerville’s octavo prayer book. The prayers for the Royal Family on cancels B8, C6, and D3 include the name of Queen Charlotte, whom George III married in 1761. This copy also includes the ‘occasional prayers’ which were only printed for part of the edition and are...

£1200

BEAUMONT, Joseph.

Psyche: or Loves Mysterie in XX. Canto’s: displaying the Intercourse between Christ and the Soule …

London, Printed by John Dawson for George Boddington … 1648.

First edition. Beaumont was one of the royalist fellows ejected from Cambridge in 1644, and he devoted his enforced retirement to the composition of this poem, a ‘religious epic’ representing ‘a Soule led by divine Grace, and her Guardian Angel ... through the difficult Temptations and Assaults...

£1250

BEAUVILLIERS, Marie de.

Conférences spirituelles d’une supérieure à ses religieuses ... d’après un manuscrit revu et mis...

Paris, Moquet et Cie for Toulouse, 1838.

Scarce second edition (first 1837, also rare) of this spiritual guide by Marie de Beauvilliers (1574–1667), edited from a manuscript by the historian l'abbé Louis Gaudreau (1798–1872) and including a short biography of the author.

£400

BEISNER, Monika.

Dante Alighieri: La Commedia in 100 tavole.

Turin, Attini, 2021.

Limited edition, one of 500 numbered sets, of Monika Beisner’s one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy, each accompanying one canto, conveying with remarkable fidelity the vivacity of Dante’s verse.

£60

BEVER, Thomas.

The History of the legal polity of the Roman State; and of the rise, progress, and extent of the Roman laws.

London, Strahan and Cadell, 1781.

Sole edition of a legal history conceived along the lines of Gibbon’s history, an account that was meant to furnish leaders of the emerging British Empire with a helpful knowledge of the past from the perspective of the evolution of legal systems.

£1500

[BIANCHI, Isidoro.]

Compendio della vita e miracoli della B. Elisabetta Picenardi del Terz’Ordine de’ Servi di M.V. E del culto...

Cremona, per il Feraboli, 1805.

Second edition (first Rome 1804) of this account of the life and miracles of Elisabetta Picenardi (1428–1468) of the Servite Order, who was beatified in November 1804 after Pope Pius VII issued confirmation of her local cultus. The work is attributed to the Camaldolese monk Isidoro Bianchi (1731–1808)....

£350