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.
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LACTANTIUS.
Opera.
[Venice,] Vindelinus de Spira, 1472.
Magnificent incunable edition of the works of Lactantius, a fine product of the first Venetian press, established in 1469 by Johannes de Spira and continued by his brother Vindelinus from 1470 until 1473. This was the fifth impression of the works of Lactantius, the hugely successful North African...
£25000
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MACROBIUS, Ambrosius Theodosius.
Somnium Scipionis ex Ciceronis libro De republica excerptum; Macrobii … primi diei Saturnaliorum...
Venice, Filippo Pinzi, 29 October 1500.
Sixth and last incunable edition of Macrobius, illustrated with a world map, with extensive early marginalia.
£9500
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JUVENAL, Decimus Junius.
Argumenta Satyrarum Iuvenalis per Antonimu [sic] Mancinellum. Cu[m] quattuor co[m]me[n]tariis … Sebastianus...
[(Colophon:) Milan, Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler for Giovanni da Legnano, 17 August 1501.]
Rare edition of Juvenal’s Satires with commentary by the Italian humanists Antonio Mancinelli, Domizio Calderini, Giorgio Merula, and Giorgio Valla, edited by the Greek scholar Sebastianus Ducius, with extensive early annotations and corrections to both the text and commentary.
£5000
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VALERIUS MAXIMUS.
Dictorum et factorum memorabilium libri novem.
[(Colophon:) Venice, Aldus Manutius, October 1502] [April 1503].
First Aldine edition, variant ‘B’ with four additional leaves in quire A, with numerous early annotations.
£2750
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JUSTINUS, Marcus Junianius, and Lucius FLORUS.
[Epitome historiarum:] Justini historici clarissimi in Trogi Pompei historias...
[Venice, Bartolomeo Zani, 3 February 1503].
A thoroughly annotated copy of a greatly influential compendium of Trogus’s monumental forty-four-book Historia of the world from Babylon to the Augustan era.
£3800
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PEROTTO, Niccolò, and Benedetto BRUGNOLO, editor.
Cornucopi[a]e nuper emendatum a domino Benedicto Brugnolo: ac...
[Milan], Giovanni Giacomo and brothers da Legnano [for Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler, 28 October 1510 (colophon)].
Scarce Milanese edition of Perotto’s Cornucopiae, an encyclopaedic commentary to the first book of Martial’s epigrams, here with a curious combination of woodcut initials and capital spaces with guide letters.
£1750
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OVID; [Philipp GUNDEL, editor].
Fastorum libri sex diligentissime recogniti. Addito calendario Romano venerandae vetustatis,...
[(Colophon:) Vienna, Hieronymus Vietor and Johann Singriener for Leonhard Alantsee, 3 October 1513.]
First and only editions, very rare, of two post-incunable Ovid recensions by Philipp Gundel, curiously bound in a strikingly archaic likely eighteenth-century binding.
£3500
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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
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[CICERO, Marcus Tullius.]
Commentarii Philippicarum Marci Ciceronis cum annotationibus Georgii Trapezuntii Philippi Beroaldi et...
Paris, Thomas Caseus for Jean Petit, [1514].
Rare edition, attractively printed and with occasional contemporary annotations, of Cicero’s Philippics, comprising Cicero’s text along with the commentaries of the Cretan humanist George of Trebizond (1396–1486), the Bolognese rhetorician Filippo Beroaldo (1453–1505), and the Perugia...
£950
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DOMINICUS DE FLANDRIA.
Dominici de Flandria ordinis predicator[um] artium et theologie doctoris in divi Thome de Aq[ui]no co[m]mentaria...
Venice, Giorgio Arrivabene for the heirs of Ottaviano Scoto, 25 January 1514.
Scarce early editions of two Aristotelian commentaries. The first, by the Dominican philosopher Dominic of Flanders (c. 1425–1479), analyses two works by Thomas Aquinas: his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (on the nature of scientific axioms), and his De fallaciis...
£3000
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ERASMUS, Desiderius.
Collectanea adagiorum.
[(Colophon:) Strasbourg, Matthias Schürer, 1519.]
Intensely annotated copy of a lifetime edition of Erasmus’ repository of Greek and Latin proverbs. The first version of the Adagia, containing about eight hundred maxims, had been published in 1500. Erasmus continued to add to his thesaurus for over thirty years, the success of this...
£5850
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VELLEIUS PATERCULUS.
Historiae Romanae duo volumina, ad M. Vinicium Cos. progenerum Tiberii Caesaris, per Beatum Rhenanum Selestadiensem...
[(Colophon:) Basel, Johann Froben, November 1520.]
Editio princeps of a summary history of Rome to AD 29 by the soldier-turned-historian Velleius Paterculus, edited from a now lost manuscript by the German humanist Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547), with tipped-in notes by a contemporary student of Roman history displaying a remarkable concern...
£2750
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FLORUS, Lucius.
Lucii Flori rerum ab urbe condita liber primus [– quartus].
[Venice, in aedibus Aldi et Andreae Soceri, March 1521.]
Florus’s epitome of Roman history, extracted from the Aldine edition of March 1521 which comprised an epitome of Livy, Florus, and Niccolò Perotti’s translation of Polybius.
£750
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APULEIUS, Lucius.
L. Apuleii Metamorphoseos, sive lusus Asini libri XI. Floridoru[m] IIII. De deo Socratis I. De philosophia...
Venice, ‘in aedibus Aldi et Andreae Soceri’, May 1521.
First Aldine edition of the works of the second-century AD Numidian novelist Apuleius, with the editio princeps of Alcinous’s second-century handbook on Plato’s philosophy in the original Greek, from the library of the great French writer Victor Hugo.
£2000
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PEROTTI, Niccolò.
In hoc volumine habentur haec. Cornucopiae, sive linguae latinae co[m]mentarii diligentissime recogniti, atq[ue]...
Toscolano, Alessandro Paganini, April 1522.
Handsome edition of the masterful Cornucopiae of the Italian humanist and grammarian Niccolò Perotti (1429–1480), printed in Alessandro Paganini’s distinctive small italic type.
£950
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JUSTINUS, Marcus Junianus; Cornelius NEPOS.
Trogi Pompei externae historiae in compendium ab Justino redactae. Externorum imperatorum...
Venice, ‘in aedibus Aldi et Andreae Asulani soceri’, January 1522.
First Aldine edition of Justinus’ abridgement of the lost Historiae Philippicae of Pompeius Trogus, and of Nepos’ De viris illustribus, with a decorated initial to the opening of the text, likely executed in the early nineteenth century when the work was bound in Rome.
£1850
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PLINY the Elder.
Historia mundi, multo quam antehac unquam prodiit emaculatius [...] annotationibus eruditorum hominum...
Basel, Johann Froben, March 1525.
First Froben edition of Pliny’s encyclopaedia, with a prologue by Erasmus and Hermolaus Barbarus’s commentary, given to Erasmus’s correspondent Bartholomaeus Latomus by his student and future patron, Johann Ludwig von Hagen.
£4800
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PLUTARCH.
...
Venice, Nicolao di Aristotile detto Zoppino, March 1525.
An attractive illustrated edition of twenty-seven of Plutarch’s lives, extensively annotated by a Papal tax-collector, in a striking contemporary binding.
£2750
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TERENCE Afer, Publius.
Comoediae sex, tum ex Donati commentariis … diligentius quam unquam antehac emendatae; Aelii Donati...
Paris, Robert Estienne, 1529.
First folio edition of Terence’s comedies by Robert Estienne. The printer had already produced a small, octavo edition of Terence’s works in 1526. Confident in its success, and through access to an excellent and ancient manuscript of the fourth-century commentary by Aelius Donatus, ‘in...
£1500
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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