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. [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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  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. BERNARD of Clairvaux.

    Opera omnia, tam quae vere germana illius esse nemo inficias eat, quam quae spuria & supposititia (quanquam...

    Paris, [Nicolas Bruslé for] Sébastien Nivelle, [1571-] 1572.

    A rare Parisian edition of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, beautifully preserved in a contemporary Spanish plateresca binding with elaborate fore-edge lettering.

    £3750

  6. BIANCHINI, Giuseppe. 

    Enarratio pseudo-Athanasiana in symbolum ante hac inedita, et Vigilii Tapsitani de Trinitate ad Theophilum...

    Verona, Pierantonio Berno, 1732. 

    First edition, presented by the author, of this scarce work on the Apostles’ Creed by the Veronese Oratorian, Biblical and liturgical scholar, and librarian Giuseppe Bianchini (1704–1764), with a delightful frontispiece depicting the city of Verona. 

    £675

  7. [BIBLE.]

    Erläuterte Bibel mit Fragen, das ist, die ganze Heilige Schrift, Alten und Neuen Testaments, nach der teutschen Ubersetzung...

    Altdorf, Joh. Adam Hessel for Ernst Friderich Zobel, 1751.

    A German Bible with extensive apparatus, divided into five volumes and strikingly bound in a book-shaped pull-off case.

    £2750

  8. [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

  9. [BIBLE.]

    The Holy Bible. The Old Testament (& New Testament), embellished with Engravings, from Pictures and Designs by the Most...

    London, Printed for Thomas Macklin, by Thomas Bensley, 1800.

    A wonderful set, in an extremely attractive contemporary binding by Staggemeier and Welcher, of this monumental feat of British printing, the grandest and most ambitious of all English Bibles.

    £9500

  10. [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

  11. 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

  12. 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

  13. [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

  14. 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

  15. [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

  16. 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

  17. [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

  18. [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

  19. BRUNFELS, Otto. 

    Precationes Biblicae sanctoru[m] patrum, illustrium viroru[m] et mulierum utriusq[ue] Testamenti. 

    Strasbourg, Johannes Schott, 1528.

    First edition, rare.  The earliest Protestant prayer-books, of which this is perhaps the most notable example, often comprised prayers taken directly from (or adapted from) the Bible.  Brunfels’s Precationes Biblicae appeared in the same year in German translation (Biblisch Bettbüchlein...

    £3500

  20. 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