Continental

Contact Alex Day, Andrea Mazzocchi, Jonathan Harrison, Charlotte Miller 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. BEAUMONT, Joseph.

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

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

    First edition of this lengthy religious epic representing the journey of the personified Soul from England to the Holy Land and back, written by Beaumont, one of the Royalist fellows ejected from Cambridge in 1644.

    £1250

  2. 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

  3. BELLARMINO, Roberto.

    De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis liber unus. Adiunctis indicibus undecim, & brevi chronologia ab orbe condito...

    Paris, Sébastien Cramoisy, 1658.

    An uncut copy of Bellarmino’s bibliography of ecclesiastical writers, with extensive eighteenth-century annotations and additions.

    £1250

  4. BELLINTANI, Mattia. 

    Quattro prediche dell’istesso R. P. F. Mattia Bellintani Capuccino, della risurrettione.  Della manifestatione...

    Brescia, Vincenzo Sabbio, 1598. 

    Very rare collection of sermons by the Capuchin friar Bellintani (1535–1611), illustrated with attractive woodcuts. 

    £750

  5. BESSE, Pierre de.

    Conceptions theologiques sur tous les dimanches de l’année, preschées en divers lieux par Me Pierre de Besse...

    Paris, Nicolas du Fossé, 1609.

    Very rare editions of two works by the noted French priest and preacher Pierre de Besse (1567–1639), in a contemporary devotional binding.

    £1500

  6. [BIBLE.]

    Τα Βιβλια, τουτεστιν, η Θεια Γραφη της Παλαιας τε και Καινης Διαθηκης...

    Moscow, the Holy Synod Press for the Russian Bible Society, 1821.

    First edition printed in Russia of the Septuagint and Greek New Testament, published likely with political motives in the year of the Greek Revolution.

    £1500

  7. BIBLE.

    Biblia cum concordantiis veteris et novi testamenti et sacrorum canonum: necnon & additionibus in marginibus varietatis...

    [(Colophon:) Lyons, Jean Marion, for Anton II Koberger in Nuremberg, 19 August 1520.]

    A handsomely printed Bible in a contemporary Silesian or Bohemian binding, richly annotated by a Protestant scholar and with numerous woodcuts in contemporary colouring.

    £5500

  8. [BIBLE, New Testament.]

    Pauli Apostoli epistolae … Epistolae Catholicae … Apocalypsis Beati Ioannis.

    Brescia, Damiano and Giacomo Filippo Turlino, May 1537.

    Scarce Brescia edition of the Epistles of St Paul, St James, St Peter, St John, and St Jude, and of the Book of Revelation, in the Vulgate version, with a remarkable metalcut depicting St Peter and St Paul holding a Holy Shroud bearing the face of Christ, owned by an Italian Protestant-sympathiser.

    £2500

  9. BIEL, Gabriel.

    Sacri canonis Missae lucidiss. expositio … cum assertionibus in margine sacri Conc. Trid. et annotationibus necessariis....

    Brescia, Pietro and Tommaso Bozzola, 1576.

    Brescia edition of an exposition of the Canon of the Mass by the important German scholastic philosopher and theologian Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), with a sixteenth-century printed label threatening with excommunication anyone who would remove this volume from the library.

    £350

  10. BLANCHON, Jacques.

    Iacobi Blanchoni Ucessiensis adversus Ludovicum Beneventanum abbatem Selestensem defensionum liber.

    Lyons, Jean de Tournes, 1550.

    First edition of a very rare work of sixteenth-century Lyonnese Neoplatonism, an elegantly printed de Tournes edition.

    £950

  11. [BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.]

    La Liturgie. C’est a dire, le formulaire des Prieres publiques, de l’Administrations des Sacreman;...

    A Londres, pour Jean Dunmore & Octavien Pulleyn le Jeune … 1667.

    First edition of this translation, printed for the use of ‘toutes les Eglisses Paroissiales & dans les Chapelles de Isles de Jersey, Guernsey, & autres Isles adjacentes’, as well as for the French congregation at the Savoy in London.

    £750

  12. BOOK OF HOURS,

    in Latin, from the Hours of the Virgin and including the beginning of Psalm 97. 

    Flanders or northern France, early 14th century. 

    An exquisite leaf from an exceptionally early Book of Hours.  The defective parent manuscript, which also contained a Vie de sainte Marguerite in French rhyming verse, was lot 76 in Sotheby’s sale ‘Western Manuscripts and Miniatures’ of 17 December 1991, subsequent to which the leaves...

    £1800

  13. [BOUCHET, Jean.]

    Les triu[m]phes de la noble et amoureuse dame, et l’art de honnestement aymer, compose par le Traverseur des...

    Paris, Estienne Caveiller for Pierre Sergent, 6 June 1539.

    Unrecorded issue of Jean Bouchet’s contemplative vernacular work of moral theology in prose and verse explicitly intended for a female readership, following the personified Soul in dialogue with several virtues as she attempts to combat the forces of earthly temptation with the power of divine grace,...

    £4500

  14. BOUTMY, C.

    ‘Exercitium quotidianum dedicatum perillustri domino domino vice comiti de Haro et d’Enghien &c a C. Boutmy 1760’.

    [Belgium, 1760.]

    An attractively bound unpublished devotional manual composed by one C. Boutmy (unidentified) for his patron Henri vicomte de Haro et d’Enghien.

    £450

  15. [BOUTREUX D’ESTIAU, Jacques de.]

    De la puissance roialle sur la police de l’Eglise.

    Paris, Pierre Durand, 1625.

    A pair of uncommon works defending the French king’s authority over the Church, in a binding for Jacques-Auguste II de Thou and later in the renowned Caumartin library.

    £950

  16. [BREVIARY.]

    Sarum Breviary, in Latin.

    England, first quarter of fifteenth century.

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

    £4250

  17. [BREVIARY, Use of Passau.]

    Breviarium s[ecundu]m chorum alme Ecclesie Pataviensis.

    [(Colophon:) Venice, Petrus Liechtenstein for Vienna, Lukas and Leonhard Alantsee, 25 May 1515.]

    A rare Passau breviary with numerous woodcut illustrations in a contemporary Austrian binding, printed in Venice for the Austrian market.

    £4500

  18. BURNET, Gilbert.

    A Vindication of the Authority, Constitution, and Laws of the Church and State of Scotland. In four Conferences....

    Glasgow, Robert Sanders, 1673.

    One of three editions, all of the same year, of a ‘decidedly aggressive’ (Stewart, p. 40) tract in dialogue on the powers of the state in church affairs and on the subject’s right to resist.

    £500

  19. BUXTORF, Johannes.

    Epitome grammaticae Hebraeae, breviter & methodice ad publicum Scholarum usum proposita. Adjecta succincta de...

    London, Roger Daniel, 1653.

    Second edition (first Cambridge, 1646) of Buxtorf’s Hebrew grammar to be printed in England, here preserving a fragment of a sixteenth-century English-French grammar as endpapers and with a student’s manuscript Hebrew transliterations.

    £650

  20. CADOGAN, William Bromley.

    The Felicity of God’s Children, considered in a Sermon, preached upon the Death of a Lady, in the parish...

    Reading: Printed and Sold by Smart and Cowslade; and sold by J. Rusher, Reading; Messrs. Robinsons, V. Griffiths ... & J. Matthews ... London;...

    First edition, a funeral sermon by the popular preacher William Bromley Cadogan, a friend of John Newton, for the local widow Maria Littlehales, printed at the request of her children.

    £75