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. BIANCHINI, Giuseppe. 

    Enarratio pseudo-Athanasiana in symbolum ante hac inedita, et Vigilii Tapsitani de Trinitate ad Theophilum...

    Verona, Pierantonio Berno, 1732. 

    First edition, presented by the author, of this scarce work on the Apostles’ Creed by the Veronese Oratorian, Biblical and liturgical scholar, and librarian Giuseppe Bianchini (1704–1764), with a delightful frontispiece depicting the city of Verona. 

    £675

  2. [BIBLE.]

    The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New, newly translated out of the originall Tongues and with the former...

    [Cambridge,] Printed by Roger Daniel, Printer to the Universitie of Cambridge, 1648.

    A seemingly unrecorded Cambridge-printed Bible with metrical Psalms in an elaborate English binding of gilt green vellum with morocco onlays and highly unusual gilt and gauffered edges painted with flowers, birds, and animals.

    £3750

  3. [BIBLE.]

    Erläuterte Bibel mit Fragen, das ist, die ganze Heilige Schrift, Alten und Neuen Testaments, nach der teutschen Ubersetzung...

    Altdorf, Joh. Adam Hessel for Ernst Friderich Zobel, 1751.

    A German Bible with extensive apparatus, divided into five volumes and strikingly bound in a book-shaped pull-off case.

    £2750

  4. [BIBLE.]

    Τα Βιβλια, τουτεστιν, η Θεια Γραφη της Παλαιας τε και Καινης Διαθηκης...

    Moscow, the Holy Synod Press for the Russian Bible Society, 1821.

    First edition printed in Russia of the Septuagint and Greek New Testament, published likely with political motives in the year of the Greek Revolution.

    £1500

  5. [BIBLE.]

    The Holy Bible. The Old Testament (& New Testament), embellished with Engravings, from Pictures and Designs by the Most...

    London, Printed for Thomas Macklin, by Thomas Bensley, 1800.

    A wonderful set, in an extremely attractive contemporary binding by Staggemeier and Welcher, of this monumental feat of British printing, the grandest and most ambitious of all English Bibles.

    £9500

  6. [BIBLE, New Testament.]

    Pauli Apostoli epistolae … Epistolae Catholicae … Apocalypsis Beati Ioannis.

    Brescia, Damiano and Giacomo Filippo Turlino, May 1537.

    Scarce Brescia edition of the Epistles of St Paul, St James, St Peter, St John, and St Jude, and of the Book of Revelation, in the Vulgate version, with a remarkable metalcut depicting St Peter and St Paul holding a Holy Shroud bearing the face of Christ, owned by an Italian Protestant-sympathiser.

    £2500

  7. BIEL, Gabriel.

    Sacri canonis Missae lucidiss. expositio … cum assertionibus in margine sacri Conc. Trid. et annotationibus necessariis....

    Brescia, Pietro and Tommaso Bozzola, 1576.

    Brescia edition of an exposition of the Canon of the Mass by the important German scholastic philosopher and theologian Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), with a sixteenth-century printed label threatening with excommunication anyone who would remove this volume from the library.

    £350

  8. BLANCHON, Jacques.

    Iacobi Blanchoni Ucessiensis adversus Ludovicum Beneventanum abbatem Selestensem defensionum liber.

    Lyons, Jean de Tournes, 1550.

    First edition of a very rare work of sixteenth-century Lyonnese Neoplatonism, an elegantly printed de Tournes edition.

    £950

  9. BOLZANIO, Urbano or URBANUS BELLUNENSIS.

    Institutionum in linguam Graecam grammaticarum, libri duo …

    Basel, Johann Walder, September 1535.

    Basel edition of this popular grammar commissioned and first published by Aldus in 1497. Bolzanio’s full exploration of the Greek language was the first book in which the principles of Greek grammar were explained in Latin – after the publication of the all-Greek grammar of Constantinus Lascaris....

    £2000

  10. [BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.]

    La Liturgie. C’est a dire, le formulaire des Prieres publiques, de l’Administrations des Sacreman;...

    A Londres, pour Jean Dunmore & Octavien Pulleyn le Jeune … 1667.

    First edition of this translation, printed for the use of ‘toutes les Eglisses Paroissiales & dans les Chapelles de Isles de Jersey, Guernsey, & autres Isles adjacentes’, as well as for the French congregation at the Savoy in London.

    £750

  11. BOOK OF HOURS,

    in Latin, from the Hours of the Virgin and including the beginning of Psalm 97. 

    Flanders or northern France, early 14th century. 

    An exquisite leaf from an exceptionally early Book of Hours.  The defective parent manuscript, which also contained a Vie de sainte Marguerite in French rhyming verse, was lot 76 in Sotheby’s sale ‘Western Manuscripts and Miniatures’ of 17 December 1991, subsequent to which the leaves...

    £1800

  12. BORSO D’ESTE, Duke of Modena, Duke of Ferrara.

    Letter in his name in Italian, addressed to Feltrino Boiardo.

    Modena, 3 July 1453.

    A letter from early in Borso d’Este’s rule as first Duke of Modena. It is addressed to the condottiero Feltrino Boiardo, instructing him to raise taxes from the territories of Casalgrande, Dinazzano and Montebabbio for the support of a brigade of men-at-arms.

    £750

  13. [BOUCHET, Jean.]

    Les triu[m]phes de la noble et amoureuse dame, et l’art de honnestement aymer, compose par le Traverseur des...

    Paris, Estienne Caveiller for Pierre Sergent, 6 June 1539.

    Unrecorded issue of Jean Bouchet’s contemplative vernacular work of moral theology in prose and verse explicitly intended for a female readership, following the personified Soul in dialogue with several virtues as she attempts to combat the forces of earthly temptation with the power of divine grace....

    £4500

  14. [BREVIARY.]

    Sarum Breviary, in Latin.

    England, first quarter of fifteenth century.

    A fragment of twenty-one leaves from a portable Sarum Breviary, with nineteenth-century Staffordshire provenance.

    £4250

  15. BRUNFELS, Otto. 

    Precationes Biblicae sanctoru[m] patrum, illustrium viroru[m] et mulierum utriusq[ue] Testamenti. 

    Strasbourg, Johannes Schott, 1528.

    First edition, rare.  The earliest Protestant prayer-books, of which this is perhaps the most notable example, often comprised prayers taken directly from (or adapted from) the Bible.  Brunfels’s Precationes Biblicae appeared in the same year in German translation (Biblisch Bettbüchlein...

    £3500

  16. BUXTORF, Johannes.

    Epitome grammaticae Hebraeae, breviter & methodice ad publicum Scholarum usum proposita. Adjecta succincta de...

    London, Roger Daniel, 1653.

    Second edition (first Cambridge, 1646) of Buxtorf’s Hebrew grammar to be printed in England, here preserving a fragment of a sixteenth-century English-French grammar as endpapers and with a student’s manuscript Hebrew transliterations.

    £650

  17. CADOGAN, William Bromley.

    The Felicity of God’s Children, considered in a Sermon, preached upon the Death of a Lady, in the parish...

    Reading: Printed and Sold by Smart and Cowslade; and sold by J. Rusher, Reading; Messrs. Robinsons, V. Griffiths ... & J. Matthews ... London;...

    First edition, a funeral sermon by the popular preacher William Bromley Cadogan, a friend of John Newton, for the local widow Maria Littlehales, printed at the request of her children.

    £75

  18. CAESAR, Gaius Julius.

    C. Julii Caesaris quae extant. Accuratissime cum libris editis & MSS optimis collata, recognita & correcta....

    London, Jacob Tonson, 1712.

    First edition of the celebrated Tonson’s Caesar edited by Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), ‘the most sumptuous classical work which this country has produced’ (Dibdin).

    £9500

  19. [CAESAR.]  RAMUS, Petrus (Pierre de la RAMÉE). 

    Liber de militia C. Julii Caesaris, cum praefatione Joannis Thomae Freigii. 

    Frankfurt, heirs of Andreas Wechel, 1584. 

    An attractively bound copy of Ramus’s uncommon treatise on Caesar’s military tactics, with unusual edge decoration.  The humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) published widely on classical history and grammar while teaching at the Collège de France.  He was briefly forced from his post after...

    £450

  20. CALMET, Antoine Augustin.

    Commentaire litteral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament. Les deux livres d’Esdras,...

    Paris, Pierre Emery, 1712.

    First edition of the commentary on the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, and Esther by the French Benedictine Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757), from the library of the last male descendant of the distinguished Colbert family.

    £450