Warmund Gottlieb Pseud (1 results)
More imagesPublished by Bayreuth: Johann Gebhart, 1664, 1664
- First Edition
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United KingdomPeter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB.
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£ 2,500.00
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Add to basketFirst edition of this rare work on the cash shortage in Germany and its causes during the Thirty Years' War. The author identifies 22 causes of the money shortage and offers a critical examination of the economic, legal, political, and social foundations of German society. War is placed as the core factor resulting in cash short…age, a stalling economy, and poverty. Civil wars are the most pernicious in creating recessions, as manners become brutal, education is abandoned, and population is decimated. War economics, based on looting and direction of resources to armed parties, prevails over civil exchange. However the author goes beyond the circumstances of war, tracing Germany's economic downturn to pre-war systemic failures, such as serfdom, money lending practices and interest rates, taxation, laws, nobility, inheritance, and the rising absolutism. Comparisons are drawn with the Ottoman and the Russian empires. The broader political and philosophical scope of the work is typified in the symbolic engravings of the frontispiece, each with a brief motto engraved in a cartouche: overt allegories of peace, industry, legality, and fraternity. Authorship is still debated, and, alongside previous attributions to Gottlieb Hosmann and Johann Lyser, it is now credited to either Erasmus Francisci (1627-94) or Johann Friedrich Schweser (1606-1681). Francisci was also one of the first Germans to write extensively on current affairs and news from the world, seen as a forerunner of modern journalism. The jurist Schweser (1606-1681) was a court councillor in Bayreuth. Octavo (156 x 90 mm). Double-page frontispiece with 12 emblematic engravings. Nineteenth-century half sheep, spine lettered in gilt, marbled sides, blue speckled edges. Bound without terminal blank. Neat ink shelf mark to front pastedown and 19th-century library stamp and signature to title. Rubbed, contents toned, occasional faint peripheral staining, terminal leaf with upper outer corner restored wit loss to a few letters, preceding leaf with short closed tear. A very good copy.
