VALIGNANO, Alessandro.

Advis de la bien heureuse mort de cinq religieux de la Compagnie de Iesus, & d’aucuns autres seculiers,...

Paris, Thomas Brumen, 1584.

Very rare first edition in French of the letter sent by the Italian Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606) in late December 1583 to Claudio Acquaviva, the Society’s Superior General, reporting on the deaths of five Jesuit missionaries in the village of Cuncolim in the district of Salcete...

£5500

[KAFKA, Franz.]

Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5695.

Berlin, Schocken Verlag, 1934/35.

Pp. 96-103 contain Kafka’s Aufzeichnungen über eine jüdische Wandertruppe, the description of his meeting with a troupe of Yiddish actors in the Café Savoy in Prague in 1911. This encounter was to have a profound effect on his writing. The passage was later published in an extended version in the...

£180

POCKLINGTON, John.

Altare Christianum: or, the dead Vicar’s Plea. Wherein the Vicar of Gr. being dead, yet speaketh, and pleadeth...

London, Printed by Richard Badger. 1637.

First edition, from the library of Robert Southey, with an ownership inscription an eleven-line note in his distinctive diminutive hand.

£3750

PRYNNE, William.

The Antipathie of the English lordly prelacie, both to regall monarchy, and civill unity: or, an historicall collection...

London, Michael Sparke, 1641.

First edition, one of numerous issues in this year, this with ‘oppressions, & anti-monarchicall practices’ in the titles, as opposed to the reverse. Prynne’s pamphlet, written during the anti-Laudian controversy of the Root and Branch Petition of 1641, was ‘a watershed in his career. For...

£1250

CALLINI, Bartolommeo.

Arrolandosi sotto le insegne di Gesù Cristo col prender l’acqua del santo battesimo nell’insigne cattedrale...

Vicenza, Tipografia Paroni, 1802.

Unrecorded broadsheet celebrating the conversion to Catholicism of Marco Mortera, a Jew from Vicenza.

£350

WILKS, Mark.

Athaliah; or the tocsin sounded by modern alarmists: two collection sermons, towards defraying the expense of the...

Norwich, J. March, 1795.

Only edition of these two sermons preached by the Norwich Methodist-turned-Baptist Mark Wilks (1748-1819) to raise money for the three radical publishers and writers newly acquitted of high treason. The climate as it now is, Wilks says, is one where even to use a French phrase is to invite suspicion,...

£300

TUCKER, Josiah.

Betydande frågor om handelen, wid tilfålle af de motsäjelser, som skedde emot den sista billen, om utlänningars...

Stockholm, Jon. G. Langes [colophon: N. v. Oelreich], 1763.

First Swedish edition, scarce, of this history on the treatment of foreign residents in Britain, Reflections on the Expediency of a Law for the Naturalization of Foreign Protestants (1751–1752). This book comprises only the main body of Part II (1752), ‘Important Queries occasioned by The Rejection...

£450

[BOLZANO, Bernard].

Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre und Religionswissenschaft in einer beurtheilenden Uebersicht.

Sulzbach, J.E von Seidels, 1841.

First edition of this critical summary of the greatest works of Bolzano, The Theory of Science and The Science of Religion, first published in four-volume sets in 1837 and 1834, copiously illustrated with citations from the original texts.

£600

[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

PSALTER,

with Canticles, Pater Noster, Te Deum and Office of the Dead

North-western Italy, perhaps Asti, mid-15th century.

A substantial and attractive office book of Carthusian Use, bearing the medieval ownership inscription of the major charterhouse at Valmanera (Asti) in Piedmont and probably made for them.

£17500

PALEY, William.

Caution recommended in the use and application of scripture language. A sermon preached July 15, 1777, in the Cathedral...

Cambridge, printed by J. Archdeacon for T. & J. Merrill (and others), 1777.

First edition. A sermon (on 2 Peter iii, vv. 15–16) preached by Paley, author of the celebrated Evidences of Christianity (1785), at the invitation of Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle. ‘Paley’s connection with the Law family greatly advanced his clerical career. He regularly spent vacations with...

£250

[LITURGY.]

Cerimonie piu’ notabili della messa privata; Cavate dalle rubriche del Missale, ed altri autori da un Sacerdote D.C.D.M....

Turin, Gianfranco Mairesse, 1739.

As far as we are aware unrecorded edition of this uncommon treatise on the celebration of the mass and its associated rituals. Dealing both with private (low) masses and with solemn mass and solemn vespers, the work explains the meaning and performance of the non-verbal aspects of the liturgy:...

£335

HORAE, B.M.V., Use of Rome.

Ces présentes heures a lusaige de Ro[m]me fure[n]t achevez lan Mil. CCCC. iiii. xx. [et] xviii. le...

Paris, Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre, 22 August 1498.

One of the most beautiful printed Books of Hours of the late fifteenth century. Fifteen of the large cuts, all attributed to the Master of the Apocalypse-Rose, belong to Pigouchet’s fine second series of Hours illustrations, first used in 1496. Seven cuts, representing Pigouchet’s third...

£15000

ANTIPHONAL.

Common of Martyrs; a complete folio leaf.

Italy, Bologna, late 13th century.

A complete leaf from a late thirteenth-century antiphonal from Bologna, with a large historiated initial.

£1800

PAPPUS, Johannes.

Defensiones duae, quibus D. Ioannis Sturmii rectoris Antipappis duobus respondetur, Maiori, & Epitomico. De charitate,...

Tübingen, Georgius Gruppenbachius, 1580.

Rare first edition of Pappus’s most important work in his pamphlet war with Johannes Sturm over the Lutheran Formula of Concord and its imposition in Strasburg. Pappus (1549-1610) studied in Tübingen and Basel before becoming professor of Hebrew and then of history at Strasburg. In 1578 he was appointed...

£950

PSEUDO-HEGESIPPUS.

De rebus a Iudaeoru[m] principibus in obsidione fortiter gestis, deq[ue] excidio Hierosolymorum, aliarumq[ue]...

Cologne, Jaspar Gennepaeus, 1544.

An early edition of this popular Latin account of the Jewish War of 66-73 AD, with a dedication by Philipp Melanchthon. The text borrows heavily from the Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, and is attributed in extant manuscripts either to Hegesippus –...

£500

KERKHERDERE, Jan Gerard.

De situ Paradisi Terrestris ... Praecedit... conatus novus de Cepha reprehenso ex Galatarum secundo capite.

Louvain, Martin van Overbeke, 1729.

First edition. Kerkherdere addresses the question of the location of the Garden of Eden, the earthly Paradise, accompanying his conjecture with a map engraved by P. E. Boultats of Antwerp; the perusal of various sources, geographical studies and toponymic considerations lead the author, an Imperial historian,...

£800

[BENEDETTI, Giovanni Battista.]

Difesa de’ missionarii cinesi della Compagnia di Giesù, in risposta all’apologia de’ PP....

‘.In Colonia. Per il Berges’, 1700

First edition of this substantial defence of the Jesuit position in the Chinese Rites Controversy. It is a rebuttal of Noël Alexandre’s Apologia de Padri Domenicani missionarii della China (published, also under a false Cologne imprint, in both French and Italian in 1699); Alexandre,...

£950

[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

CAMPBELL, George.

A dissertation on miracles: containing an examination of the principles advanced by David Hume Esq; in an essay...

Edinburgh, for A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1762.

First edition. This dissertation, expanded from a sermon preached before the provincial synod in 1760 is called by Mossner ‘the most elaborate of the eighteenth century and is further remarkable in that it drew comment from Hume himself’ (p. 292). Through an intermediary, the Reverend Hugh Blair,...

£850