Ind N Ed (7 results)

Condition: Fair. This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has soft covers. In fair condition, suitable as a study copy. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,500grams, ISBN:9780749443993.

Condition: Good. This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has soft covers. In good all round condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,500grams, ISBN:9780749443993.

Condition: As New. Unread book in perfect condition.

Condition: New.

Condition: As New. Unread book in perfect condition.

Condition: New.

Paperback. Condition: Very good. A SAMMELBAND OF ANCIENT GEORGAPHY BY AND FOR RENAISSANCE HUMANISTS. Vienna: Johann Singriener for Lucas Alantse, 1520 (Mela: [1520]). Octavo (8 3/16" x 6", 208mm x 154mm). [Full collation available.] Bound in contemporary green laced and stabbed vellum with yapp edges. Traces of ink (titling?) to the spine. Vellum cockled and a little splayed, with some rubbing to the green pigment. Ties perished. Dark stain to the front board. Worming to the end-papers, but happily extending no further. Scattered foxing, mostly marginal. A small (lacquered pig-skin?) tab to the recto of the final page of the Solinus by way of a thumb-tab. An utterly unsophisticated volume. Although Ptolemy, who flourished in the AD IIc in Alexandria (Egypt), was the principal framework for expanding knowledge of the world from the end of the XVc, his appearance on the broader stage of European thought was quite late. Because his Geographical Guidance (?????????? ????????) was written in Greek, it was largely inaccessible to Continental scholars before it was translated into Latin in 1406. Pomponius Mela (d. AD 45) and Caius (Gaius) Julius Solinus (fl. ca. AD 225) together were the twin stars of Roman (i.e., Latin) ancient geography through the medieval period, and far more influential. Both texts had attracted extensive commentaries and indices (by Joannes Camers (Giovanni Ricuzzi), Joachim Vadianus, Johannes Roserius and Hermolaus Barbarus (Ermolao Barbaro)) -- like the later Nomenclator of Ortelius, a sort of gazetteer of places mentioned -- that made them part of curricula throughout Europe. Humanists -- particularly of the Northern Renaissance -- therefore, had a robust corpus of scholarship as well as the original texts with which to interact as they grappled with the results of voyages and explorations by sea: the world was far larger than their ancient sources had described. Solinus, Mela and Ptolemy would provide a scaffold onto which new information could be supported, and the study of those ancient authors proved vital to updating long-held conceptions about the world. Mela was born hard by the Strait of Gibraltar; it is no accident that as a resident of the end of the known world, he was the first Roman geographer whose work survives. A frequent source of Pliny (whose Historia naturalis has geographical components but belongs properly to a different genre), Mela bridges the gap between the Greek geographers (Eratosthenes, Ptolemy) and his successors; his knowledge of the expanding Roman Empire in western and northern Europe surpasses that of his predecessors. Solinus wrote his treatise De mirabilibus mundi (On the wonders of the world) -- also called the Polyhistor (?????????; "very learned"), as here -- in the first half of the third century of the current era. Although it draws on the work of Pliny and Mela, it sets its observations on customs and peoples in a firmer chorographical-cartographical framework. In the same year as the present Sammelband (the date of the second treatise is inferred from the colophon of the first), the same printer-publisher team brought out a deluxe edition of Solinus with the commentary of Camers, and illustrated with an epochal map by Petrus Apianus, the second (after a 1507 Waldseemüller map that exists in a single example) to name the newly-discovered continents America. The present volume might be thought of as the scholar's version, humbler in scale but fuller in indices and its focus on the ancient text. The green vellum binding -- probably dyed with verdigris -- is quite unusual, especially at this date (there was a vogue for it in the XIXc, but this is doubtless contemporary with the text). Both works are quite rare; VD 16 locates only two copies of the Solinus and three of the Mela, all in German libraries. Solinus: VD16 S 6965; Mela: VD16 M 2312.