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.

 
  1. QUINTILIAN, Marcus Fabius, and Pierre GALLAND (ed.).

    M. Fabii Quintiliani … de oratoria institutione livre XII....

    Paris, Thomas Richard, 1554 [– 1550-1561].

    A mixed edition of Pierre Galland’s Quintilian, a hugely successful project from its first appearance in 1538. This copy joins the Institutio oratoria with the (now believed to be spurious, if contemporary) Declamationes, and conforms with the copy held at the Arsenal.

    £700

  2. QUINTILIAN, Marcus Fabius, and Jacques-Louis d’ESTREBAY (editor).

    Compendium libri secundi, tertii, et quinti institutionum...

    Paris, Thomas Richard, 1558.

    Very rare third edition of this compendium of Quintilian’s oratory by Jacques-Louis d’Estrebay (or Estrebee, 1481–1550?), humanist, translator, professor of Rhetoric at Rheims and subsequently at the College of Sante-Barbe in Paris, and a proof-reader for the Estiennes. The title-page indicates...

    £350

  3. QUINTILIAN, Marcus Fabius.

    Institutiones oratoriae, ac Declamationes, cuiuscuius sint, summa accuratione nuper recognitae, cum...

    [Paris,] Badius Ascensius for Ascensius and Roigny, August [– September] 1533. 

    Rare reprint of Badius’s successful 1528 Quintilian, with the commentary of Peter Schade, German humanist author of an important work on rhetoric. 

    £1250

  4. RHOADS, James Evans.

    Autograph letter signed (‘James E. Rhoads’) to Henry Horniman.

    Philadelphia, 22 July 1869.

    A letter from the first president of Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. Rhoads (1828–1895) helped establish the college as a nondenominational, internationally respected school, and the first higher education institution to offer graduate degrees to women.

    £100

  5. RICCI, Giovanni and PORTA, Ercolano.

    Storia della missione francescana e del Vicariato Apostolico del Hunan meridionale dalle sue...

    Bologna, Stabilimenti tipografici riuniti, 1925.

    First and only edition of this history of the Franciscan Mission in South Hunan from its establishment to 1924, with particular attention to the persecution of the Christians during the Boxer Rebellion and the following years of restoration and progress of the mission. The appendix comprises letters,...

    £450

  6. RICH, Jeremiah. 

    The Whole Book of Psalms in Meter.  According to the Art of Short-Writing … 

    London Printed and are sold by Samuel Botley Teacher of the said Art … and nowhere els.  [1660?]. 

    First edition, the issue with Samuel Botley in the imprint – an extremely attractive miniature Psalms in shorthand by a ‘skilled and celebrated’ practitioner whose work was known to Pepys (though Pepys himself employed a rival system). 

    £4250

  7. RIDOLFI, Luca Antonio. 

    Aretefila, dialogo, nel quale da una parte sono quelle ragioni allegate, le quali affermano, lo amore...

    Lyons, Guillaume Rouillé, 1562. 

    Annotated copy, once owned by a music book collector, of the third edition (first 1557) of a remarkable Renaissance philosophical dialogue on the nature of love which marked the culmination of the very divisive ‘questione d’amore’ hotly debated in sixteenth-century literature. 

    £2800

  8. [RIEZ, diocese of.]

    Officia propria sanctorum ecclesiae Regiensis a … Ludovico Donio d’Attichi, episcopo Regiensi, ac domino,...

    Aix-en-Provence, Charles David, 1675. [bound with:] Hymni in honorem Bti. Maximi Regensis episcopi. Die XXVII. novembris. In I. & II. vesperis...

    Very rare edition of the sanctorale for the diocese of Riez in southeastern France, bound with an unrecorded printing of hymns to St Maximus, the first bishop of Riez, and with thirty-two pages of related manuscript notes.

    £550

  9. ROMANA, Provost.

    Nell’aprirsi della nuova chiesa dalla veneranda, antichissima Confraternita de’ Disciplinanti in Dogliani...

    Mondovì, Pietro Francesco and Luiggi Rossi, [1756].

    Unrecorded provincially printed broadside celebrating the opening of a new church of the Confraternity of the Disciplinants of Dogliani.

    £275

  10. ROSSI, Ottavio, and Bartolomeo FONTANA, compiler.

    Lettere del Sig. Ottavio Rossi. Raccolte da Bartolomeo Fontana ...

    Brescia, Bartolomeo Fontana, 1621.

    First edition of over 150 letters by the poet and scholar Ottavio Rossi (1570–1630), printed in his native city of Brescia and including a letter to the painter Palma Giovane, our copy with a contemporary manuscript note on the artist’s final moments written mere days after his death.

    £1250

  11. [ROUSSEL DE LA TOUR, Claude Pierre GOUJET, and Abbé MINARD, editors.]

    Extraits des assertions dangereuses et pernicieuses...

    Paris, Pierre-Guillaume Simon, 1762.

    First edition of this systematic selection of Jesuit writings intended to demonstrate the many dangerous ideas endorsed by the Order, arranged under headings including probabilism, simony, blasphemy, sacrilege, magic, astrology, idolatry, perjury, homicide, and regicide.

    £1500

  12. [ROZIER.] 

    Le rozier historial de France contenant deux roziers.  Le p[re]mier rozier contient plusieurs belles rozes et boutons...

    Paris, [Gilles Couteau for François Regnault,] 26 February 1522 [i.e. 1523]. 

    First edition, the very handsome Fairfax-Murray copy, of the Rozier historial de France

    £25000

  13. ‘SANCTA CLARA, Abraham a’, i.e. Johann Ulrich MEGERLE.

    Coraggio e viltà, l’uno nella virtù, l’altra nel vizio....

    Trento, Giovanni Parone, 1717.

    Scarce first and only Italian edition of Abraham a Sancta Clara’s emblematic moral treatise Huy! und Pfuy! der Welt, printed in Trento with one hundred striking – albeit somewhat provincial – woodcuts after the engravings in the first German edition of 1707.

    £2250

  14. [SARPI, Paolo (pseud.).] ‘Pietro Soave POLANO’. 

    Historia del Concilio Tridentino di Pietro Soave Polano.  Seconda...

    Geneva, Pierre Aubert, 1629. 

    Second edition, the first to omit the extraneous additions of the 1619 edition introduced by Marco Antonio de Dominis, of the influential and groundbreaking history of the Council of Trent by Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), described by Milton as ‘the great unmasker’. 

    £450

  15. SARUM BREVIARY,

    in Latin.

    England, 1st quarter of 15th century.

    A fragment of 21 leaves from a portable Sarum Breviary, with nineteenth-century Staffordshire provenance.

    £4250

  16. [SAVONAROLA]. POLITO, Ambrogio Caterino.

    Discorso … contra la dottrina, et le profetie di Fra Girolamo Savonarola.

    Venice, Giolito, 1548.

    First edition, very rare (‘raro e ricercato’, Bongi), of a condemnation of Savonarola’s theology, doctrine and prophecies by a former Savonarola acolyte, ‘one of the most fiery Catholic polemicists of his times’ (ibid., our translation), who four years earlier had published a...

    £1500

  17. SBRUGLIO, Riccardo. 

    Richardi Sbrulii equitis Foroiuliani Cesareiq[ue] poete ad magnificu[m] atq[ue] illustrem Maximilianu[m]...

    [Colophon:] Augsburg, Hans von Erfurt, 1519.

    First, very rare, edition, of Sbruglio’s Latin poems addressed to Maximilianus Transylvanus, published in the year that Charles V became Holy Roman Emperor.  A native of Cividale in northern Italy, Sbruglio (c. 1480 – after 1525) studied and taught at Wittenberg (where the rector compared...

    £1800

  18. SCHEFFER, Johannes Gerhard. 

    Constantini Opelii de fabrica triremium Meibomiana epistola perbrevis ad amicum. 

    ‘Eleuteropoli’ [Freistadt?], 1672. 

    First edition of this treatise on the ancient oar-driven warships known as triremes by the noted German philologist and archaeologist Johannes Scheffer (1621–1679), written as a critical response to the De fabrica triremium liber of Marcus Meibom, which had appeared in Amsterdam the previous...

    £875

  19. SENECA, Lucius Annaeus.

    L. Annei Senecae opera, et ad dicendi facultatem, et ad bene vivendu[m] utilissima, per Des. Erasmum Roterod....

    Basel, ‘in officina Frobeniana’, 1529 [(colophon:) Basel, Johann Herwagen, March 1537].

    Second Erasmus edition of the moral essays and letters of Seneca, owned and annotated by Ludovicus Carinus (d. 1569), friend and later foe of Erasmus himself.

    £5000

  20. SENECA, Lucius Anneus. 

    Tragoediae pristinae integritati restitutae, per exactissimi judicii viros post Avantium & Philologum … 

    Paris, Badius Ascensius, 1514. 

    First edition edited by Erasmus and Badius Ascensius, a landmark in the history of Seneca’s textual tradition.  This key work, the product of a collaboration between two wholly committed humanists, cannot have been accomplished without some friction: Erasmus had allowed Badius to make use of...

    £1750