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FIRST EDITION. Folio, 298 x 208 mms., pp. [xiv], xcvi, 279 [280 blank], including half-title, contemporary vellum; half-title partially detached at inner margin, binding a little soiled, but a good to very good copy, with "1288l. Mondyar" on the upper margin of the front paste-down end-paper, "Evelyn S Procter" on the top margin of the recto of the front free end-paper, and "Thomas Stainton/ April 21/ 1868" on the top margin of the title-page. This is a nice provenance: Evelyn Emma Stefanos Procter (1897 1980) was a distinguished scholar on Spanish medieval history. She was tutor in and later head of St. Hugh's Oxford. She collaborated with Betty Kemp on a history of St. Hugh's, but it was her earlier book, Alfonso X of Castile, Patron of Literature and Learning (1951), that defined her as a scholar. ODNB notes "She was an austere scholar and when Rachel Trickett, the English tutor at St Hugh's, published a novel and the libretto of Joubert's opera Antigone she commented, 'Let us have no more, Miss Trickett, in these lower forms'." The word "Eclipse" appears several times in pencil in the margins of pages xxvii - xxxi in what is almost certainly her hand. The scholar and historian Gaspar Ibáñez de Segovia Peralta and Mendoza , Marquis of Mondejar (1628 - 1708) had a vast library, with almost six thousand books at his disposal. His historical writing was anti-mythic and based on documents and primary sources. The work marks the first real attempt to base Spanish historical writing on these principles, and its commentary of the influence of non-Spaniards, notably Jews and medieval Muslims from the Middle East as well as Greeks and Romans, was the first of its kind in Spanish historical writing. A posthumous work, it is a tribute to the determination of the Academia Valenciana to recognize the quality of Mondejar's research. Seller Inventory # 7831
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