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.
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[BLASPHEMY.]
Handlu[n]g eynes Ersamen weysen Rats zu Nürmberg, von dem grossen laster der Gotsschwür und zutrinckens, verpotten.
[Altenburg, Gabriel Kantz,] 1526.
First edition, very rare, of a short pamphlet against blasphemy and drunkenness printed at a small press in Germany at the beginning of the Reformation.
£1500
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[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
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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...
£2250
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BORSO D’ESTE, Duke of Modena, Duke of Ferrara.
Letter in his name in Italian, addressed to Feltrino Boiardo.
Modena, 3 July 1453.
A letter from early in Borso d’Este’s rule as first Duke of Modena. It is addressed to the condottiero Feltrino Boiardo, instructing him to raise taxes from the territories of Casalgrande, Dinazzano and Montebabbio for the support of a brigade of men-at-arms.
£750
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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
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[BURROUGH, Edward].
A Declaration of the present Sufferings of above 140. Persons of the People of God (who are now in Prison,)...
London, Printed for Tho. Simmons …, 1659.
First edition, one of the earliest comprehensive ‘books of sufferings’, cataloguing the persecution of the early Quakers. Quaker identity was heavily influenced by such collections of ‘sufferings’, the word acquiring a specific meaning for the Friends, of imprisonment for non-payment of...
£400
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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
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[CAESAR.] RAMUS, Petrus (Pierre de la RAMÉE).
Liber de militia C. Julii Caesaris, cum praefatione Joannis Thomae Freigii.
Frankfurt, heirs of Andreas Wechel, 1584.
An attractively bound copy of Ramus’s uncommon treatise on Caesar’s military tactics, with unusual edge decoration. The humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) published widely on classical history and grammar while teaching at the Collège de France. He was briefly forced from his post after...
£450
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CALMET, Antoine Augustin.
Commentaire litteral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament. Les deux livres d’Esdras,...
Paris, Pierre Emery, 1712.
First edition of the commentary on the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, and Esther by the French Benedictine Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757), from the library of the last male descendant of the distinguished Colbert family.
£450
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CAMBOUT, Sébastien Joseph du, and John EVELYN (attributed translator)].
The moral Practice of the Jesuites. Demonstrated...
London, Printed for Simon Miller, at the Star at the West-end of St. Paul’s, 1670.
First edition in English of La morale pratique des Jesuites (1669), a polemical Jansenist critique of Jesuit practices intended to ‘inspire the World, and the Jesuites themselves, with horror at their detestable Morality’ (p. [4]).
£700
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[CAPUCHINS.]
Diploma conferring ‘privilegium maximum’.
‘Bojonii’, 22 October 1779.
An attractive diploma issued by Erhard von Radkersburg (1714–1798) in his capacity as Minister General of the Capuchins to one Nicolas Homont and his family, granting them the spiritual benefits of the devotions and good works undertaken by the order.
£450
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CARLI, Paolo Francesco da Montecarlo.
La Svinatura di Barbigi Mezzabarba (Paol Francesco Carli da Montecarlo) resa a miglior lezione...
Campobasso, Stab. Tip. Del Progresso, 1878.
Rare edition of a satire by poet and abbot Paolo Francesco Carli (1652–1725) ridiculing the work of his nemesis, the Tuscan priest and schoolmaster Giovan Paolo Lucardesi, who made a tremendous theological blunder in a sonnet in which he describes Christ as ‘crucified and triune’, thus undermining...
£150
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CARO, Annibale.
Rime del commendatore Annibal Caro. Col privilegio di N.S. PP. Pio V. et dell’illustrissima signoria di...
Venice, Aldus Manutius the Younger, 1569.
First edition of the poetry of Annibale Caro, offering a scathing yet humorous critique of his greatest poetic rival, Ludovico Castelvetro.
£650
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CARTARI, Vincenzo.
Le imagini con la spositione de i dei de gli antichi.
Venice, per Francesco Marcolini, 1556.
First edition of Cartari’s influential and successful treatise on the mythology of the ancients. Cartari concentrated on the iconography of the gods, explaining their guises and detailing their several attributes. His book was expressively written to aid artists, painters, and sculptors to...
£800
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CASAL, Gaspar do.
Axiomata christiana ex divinis scripturis & sanctis patribus.
Coimbra, João da Barreira and João Alvares, 1550.
First edition of Gaspar do Casal’s major work of theology, which informed his participation in the Council of Trent, from the library of another participant in the Council.
£2500
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CASTIGLIONE, Giacomo, and Giuseppe CASTIGLIONE.
Iacobi Castalionis Romani. Ios. f oratio in funere Magdalenae matris habita...
Rome, Luigi Zannetti, 1598.
Rare first and only edition, a presentation copy, on the deaths of Magdalena Castiglione and her daughter Lucretia, written by Magdalena’s husband and her son and including a woodcut portrait of mother and daughter in rich contemporary dress.
£1250
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CATHERINE OF SIENA.
Dialogo della serafica vergine, et sposa di Christo S. Catherina da Siena. Diviso in quattro trattati...
Venice, Giacomo Cornetti, 1589.
Uncommon reprint of the 1579 edition (Venice, Domenico Farri) of Saint Catherine of Siena’s famous Dialogo, thought to have been composed between 1377 and 1378, and to have been largely dictated by the saint while she was in a state of ecstasy. It is here divided into four parts, on discretion, prayer,...
£550
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CATTANI DA DIACCETO, Francesco.
Homelie … sopra la sequenza del corpo di Christo.
Florence, Lorenzo Ducale, 1559.
Uncommon first edition of a collection of eleven sermons by Francesco Cattani da Diacceto (1531–1595), bishop of Fiesole, dedicated to Cosimo I de’ Medici, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany.
£550
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CATULLUS, TIBULLUS, PROPERTIUS, ‘GALLUS’.
Opera … cum indice e diligenti vocum singularum, labore & industria Horatii Tuscanellae...
Hanau, Wechel Press, Claude de Marne, and the heirs of Johann Aubry, 1608.
Wechel edition of the standard triad of Latin elegiac poets, along with the works attributed to Cornelius Gallus but actually by the sixth-century poet Maximianus – an imposture first put forth in an edition of 1501 by Pomponius Gauricus.
£450
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CAVALCANTI, Bartolomeo.
La retorica … divisa in sette libri, dove si contiene tutto quello, che appartiene all’arte Oratoria. In...
Venice, Gabriel Giolitto, 1559.
Second edition, published in the same year as the first with a few amendments, of the earliest Italian and most innovative treatise on rhetoric. The author ‘builds an original account of rhetoric by adding Ciceronian and Hermogenean material to an Aristotle base’ (Mack, p. 172).
£2250