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.

 
  1. [PSALTER. BRUNO, Archbishop of Würzburg, editor.]

    Psalterium.

    [Würzburg, Georg Reyser, c. 1488–1489.]

    First edition of the Psalter with the commentary ascribed to the eleventh-century Bishop of Würzburg, printed at Würzburg by Georg Reyser and in a contemporary Würzburg monastic binding.

    £24000

  2. PURSEY, Thomas.

    The last General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland.

    [Edinburgh, T. Pursey, 1900.]

    A photographic tour-de-force, assembling many hundreds of individual photographic portraits neatly incorporated into a painted scenario, and then reproduced as a photogravure, depicting all the attendees of the last General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, held in May 1900. Evidently a...

    £2000

  3. [QUARITCH.]

    Guillaume Postel (1510–1581).

    Quaritch, 2006.

    A catalogue of a collection of the works of the Renaissance scholar and Arabist, Guillaume Postel. ‘Not only does it include editions of quite exceptional rarity, to be found in few libraries on either side of the Atlantic, but it illustrates every moment of Postel’s extraordinary career and...

    £60

  4. QUINTILIAN, Marcus Fabius, and Pierre GALLAND (ed.).

    M. Fabii Quintiliani … de oratoria institutione livre XII....

    Paris, Thomas Richard, 1554 [– 1550-1561].

    A mixed edition of Pierre Galland’s Quintilian, a hugely successful project from its first appearance in 1538. This copy joins the Institutio oratoria with the (now believed to be spurious, if contemporary) Declamationes, and conforms with the copy held at the Arsenal.

    £700

  5. QUINTILIAN, Marcus Fabius, and Jacques-Louis d’ESTREBAY (editor).

    Compendium libri secundi, tertii, et quinti institutionum...

    Paris, Thomas Richard, 1558.

    Very rare third edition of this compendium of Quintilian’s oratory by Jacques-Louis d’Estrebay (or Estrebee, 1481–1550?), humanist, translator, professor of Rhetoric at Rheims and subsequently at the College of Sante-Barbe in Paris, and a proof-reader for the Estiennes. The title-page indicates...

    £350

  6. QUINTILIAN, Marcus Fabius.

    Institutiones oratoriae, ac Declamationes, cuiuscuius sint, summa accuratione nuper recognitae, cum...

    [Paris,] Badius Ascensius for Ascensius and Roigny, August [– September] 1533. 

    Rare reprint of Badius’s successful 1528 Quintilian, with the commentary of Peter Schade, German humanist author of an important work on rhetoric. 

    £1250

  7. [RAMEAUX, François-Alexis.]

    Edictum pro regis Hou-kuanensis adversus Europaeum Mou (idest adversus RR.DD. Rameaux).

    [China], [1840–1] 道光卄年.

    A letter sent by the Department of Justice to the Hubei provincial government to request an arrest warrant for the French missionary François-Alexis Rameaux (1802–1845). This is most likely a copy, being written on decorated paper as used in private exchanges, especially between lower and higher...

    £3500

  8. [RAMEAUX, François-Alexis.]

    Notice of the death of Rameaux issued by Bernard-Vincent Laribe.

    [China, 1845.]

    A circular notifying the Christian community of the death of François-Alexis Rameaux (1802–1845), Vicar Apostolic of Zhejiang and Jiangxi from 1838, issued by his friend and successor Bernard-Vincent Laribe (1802–1850), asking that prayers for his soul be practiced nightly for six months....

    £2000

  9. RENAN, Ernest (1823-1892), French philologist and philosopher.

    A collection of 26 autograph letters and notes signed, with one...

    Paris and Sèvres, 1853-1889 (and undated).

    A fine collection of letters from Renan, providing an insight into the breadth of his academic pursuits, his publications, his contacts in France and abroad, and his personality.

    £500

  10. RHOADS, James Evans.

    Autograph letter signed (‘James E. Rhoads’) to Henry Horniman.

    Philadelphia, 22 July 1869.

    A letter from the first president of Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. Rhoads (1828–1895) helped establish the college as a nondenominational, internationally respected school, and the first higher education institution to offer graduate degrees to women.

    £100

  11. RICCI, Giovanni and PORTA, Ercolano.

    Storia della missione francescana e del Vicariato Apostolico del Hunan meridionale dalle sue...

    Bologna, Stabilimenti tipografici riuniti, 1925.

    First and only edition of this history of the Franciscan Mission in South Hunan from its establishment to 1924, with particular attention to the persecution of the Christians during the Boxer Rebellion and the following years of restoration and progress of the mission. The appendix comprises letters,...

    £450

  12. RICH, Jeremiah.

    The Whole Book of Psalms in Meter. According to the Art of Short-Writing …

    London, ‘Printed and are sold by Samuel Botley Teacher of the said Art … and nowhere els.’, [1660?].

    First edition, the issue with Samuel Botley in the imprint – an extremely attractive miniature Psalter in shorthand by a ‘skilled and celebrated’ practitioner whose work was known to Pepys (though Pepys himself employed a rival system).

    £4250

  13. RIDOLFI, Luca Antonio. 

    Aretefila, dialogo, nel quale da una parte sono quelle ragioni allegate, le quali affermano, lo amore...

    Lyons, Guillaume Rouillé, 1562. 

    The third edition (first 1557) of a remarkable Renaissance philosophical dialogue on the nature of love which marked the culmination of the divisive questione d’amore hotly debated in sixteenth-century literature, our copy extensively annotated by a seventeenth-century collector of musical...

    £2800

  14. ROMANA, Provost.

    Nell’aprirsi della nuova chiesa dalla veneranda, antichissima Confraternita de’ Disciplinanti in Dogliani...

    Mondovì, Pietro Francesco and Luiggi Rossi, [1756].

    Unrecorded provincially printed broadside celebrating the opening of a new church of the Confraternity of the Disciplinants of Dogliani.

    £275

  15. ROSSI, Ottavio, and Bartolomeo FONTANA, compiler.

    Lettere del Sig. Ottavio Rossi. Raccolte da Bartolomeo Fontana ...

    Brescia, Bartolomeo Fontana, 1621.

    First edition of over 150 letters by the poet and scholar Ottavio Rossi (1570–1630), printed in his native city of Brescia and including a letter to the painter Palma Giovane, our copy with a contemporary manuscript note on the artist’s final moments written mere days after his death.

    £1250

  16. ROTHSCHILD, Boaz Raphael.

    [Sefer oniyah b’lev yam … Chelek rishon]. ספר אני בלב ים ... חלק ראשון

    Fürth, Chaim ben Zvi Hirsch, 1766.

    First part of the first and only edition of this work on the Thirteen Principles of Faith and the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy by German rabbi Boaz Rothschild, our copy presented to the Rothschild family in England.

    £450

  17. [ROUSSEL DE LA TOUR, Claude Pierre GOUJET, and Abbé MINARD, editors.]

    Extraits des assertions dangereuses et pernicieuses...

    Paris, Pierre-Guillaume Simon, 1762.

    First edition of this systematic selection of Jesuit writings intended to demonstrate the many dangerous ideas endorsed by the Order, arranged under headings including probabilism, simony, blasphemy, sacrilege, magic, astrology, idolatry, perjury, homicide, and regicide.

    £1500

  18. [ROZIER.] 

    Le rozier historial de France contenant deux roziers.  Le p[re]mier rozier contient plusieurs belles rozes et boutons...

    Paris, [Gilles Couteau for François Regnault,] 26 February 1522 [i.e. 1523]. 

    First edition, the very handsome Fairfax-Murray copy, of the Rozier historial de France

    £25000

  19. RUSCELLI, Girolamo.

    Le imprese illustri con espositioni, et discorsi …

    [(Colophon:) Venice, Comin da Trino di Monferrato, 1572.]

    Second edition of one of the finest emblem books of the sixteenth century, illustrated with over one hundred engravings depicting the imprese of notable figures in Italy and beyond, our copy bound for Giacomo Boncompagni, illegitimate son of Pope Gregory XIII.

    £2750

  20. SALLUST.

    C. Sallustius Crispus cum veterum Historicorum fragmentis.

    Leiden, ex officina Elzeviriana, 1634.

    The first small format Elzevir printing of Sallust with a contemporary ink sketch of a Peeping Tom at the rear of the volume. The volume contains the two major works of Sallust, the Jugurthine War and the Conspiracy of Catiline, along with the surviving fragments of his annalistic history of his...

    £950