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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.

 
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  1. [HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR.]

    Royal order in French authorising payment to various officials engaged in raising a levy (‘aide’) at...

    Paris, 30 March 1415.

    A royal order to pay officials involved in raising a levy at Avranches, issued a few months before the battle of Agincourt.

    £1750

  2. HURTADO, Eugenio, scribe.

    [Missal for feast days.]

    Madrid, 1827.

    An extraordinary and enormous liturgical manuscript with painted and stencilled decorations, in a remarkable binding on wheels for ease of movement

    £9500

  3. HYGINUS Gromaticus, attributed, and POLYBIUS.

    De Castris Romanis, quae extant. Cum notis & animadversionibus …

    Amsterdam, Jodocus Pluymer, 1660.

    First edition thus, with annotations by the politician Radboud Herman Scheele (1622–1662).

    £1000

  4. [HYMNAL.]

    Neu-vermehrt- und vollständiges Gesang-Buch, worinnen sowohl die Psalmen Davids, nach D. Ambrosii Lobwassers, Uebersetzung...

    [Likely Swabia, for] Philadelphia, Ernst Ludwig Baisch, 1774.

    First and only edition thus of this German hymnal, issued in Philadelphia by Ernst Ludwig Baisch under his own imprint but printed in Germany, bound by an itinerant German Pennsylvanian binder with printed waste from Charles Cist’s Americanische Stadt und Land Calender for 1797, with inscriptions...

    £3500

  5. IBN VERGA, Solomon; Georg GENTIUS, translator.

    Historia Judaica res Judaeorum ab eversa aede Hierosolymitana, ad haec fere...

    Amsterdam, Pieter Niellius, 1651.

    First Latin edition of Solomon Ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah, an important account of persecutions suffered by the Jews and a reflection upon the origins of antisemitism, from the library of the distinguished French savant and bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet with annotations in his hand.

    £3750

  6. [INCUNABLE SAMMELBAND.]

    Sammelband of ten works.

    Rome, Stephan Plannck and Eucharius Silber, c. 1481–1491.

    A sammelband of ten Roman incunables, nine of which printed by Stephan Plannck, covering subjects from astronomy to usury, holy water to marriage, and ending with St Antoninus’s manual for confessors, our copy with early annotations and partially preserving its original binding.

    £25000

  7. [INDULGENCE.] 

    Letter of Indulgence (in Catalan), incipit ‘A Honor …’, granted by Cardinal Luis de Milá,...

    [Lerida, Heinrich Botel, c. 1498.] 

    Extremely rare incunable indulgence in Catalan granted by Luis de Milá, Bishop of Lérida, in favour of the living (as opposed to the dead, see below) to gather funds for the repair of the old cathedral of Lérida, printed at Lérida, the second city of Catalonia, about one hundred miles...

    £34000

  8. [INDULGENCES.] 

    Indulgencias concedidas a los congregantes de la inmaculada concepcion de Maria SS baxo el titulo de la corona...

    [Barcelona, 1793.] 

    Very rare broadside detailing the indulgences granted to members, of both sexes, of the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception, established under the title of the Crown of the Seven Joys of the Virgin at the Franciscan convent in Barcelona.  In 1792, Pope Pius VI had formerly linked the Congregation...

    £175

  9. ISIDORUS A CRUCE. 

    Devoti admodum et consolatione pleni confessionales Psalmi septem in quibus peccator divinam pro criminibus...

    Dillingen, Johann Caspar Bencard, 1675. 

    Rare illustrated edition of this work devoted to confession and seeking forgiveness for sins by Isidorus a Cruce (d. 1681), abbot of St Charles the Great in Prague. 

    £450

  10. ISOCRATES.

    Orationes et epistolae gravitatis et suavitatis plenae de Greco in Latinum pridem conversae, nunc recognitae, per Hieronymu[m]...

    Paris, Michel de Vascosan, 1553.

    A handsome Latin edition of twenty-one works by the Athenian orator Isocrates whose work was highly influential on later education, oratory and writing. Isocrates (436–338 BC) studied under Socrates and the sophists, before establishing a famous school of rhetoric which attracted pupils from...

    £750

  11. [JACOBUS DE GRUYTRODE, (attr.)]. 

    Lavacrum conscientie [omnium sacerdotum]. 

    [Colophon:] Cologne, Heinrich Quentell, 1504.

    Rare edition of this popular late medieval treatise widely ascribed to the Carthusian monk Jacobus de Gruytrode (c. 1400–1475). 

    £750

  12. JACOBUS MEDIOLANENSIS. 

    Stimulus divini amoris Sancti Bonaventurae. 

    Venice, Stefano Nicolini da Sabbio, April 1535. 

    Rare edition of the Stimulus divini amoris, a popular medieval devotional treatise long attributed to St Bonaventure but in fact composed by the thirteenth-century Franciscan Giacomo da Milano. 

    £550

  13. [JESUITS.]

    The Travels of several learned Missioners of the Society of Jesus, into divers Parts of the Archipelago, India, China,...

    London, for R. Gosling, 1714.

    First English translation of twenty-two letters by major French Jesuit missionaries in Asia and the Americas, taken from Charles Le Gobien’s Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1711–13). The Jesuits largely dominated seventeenth and early eighteenth-century missionary activity in the...

    £1250

  14. JOHN OF FREIBURG.

    Summa confessorum [and] Tractatus de instructione confessorum, in Latin

    France, mid-fourteenth century.

    From a large and well-decorated manuscript containing the Dominican theologian John of Freiburg’s massive Summa confessorum (written in 1297–8) and his smaller Tractatus de instructione confessorum (also known as the Confessionale and written shortly after the Summa)....

    £1500

  15. JUSTINUS, Marcus Junianius, and Lucius FLORUS. 

    [Epitome historiarum:] Justini historici clarissimi in Trogi Pompei historias...

    [Venice, Bartolomeo Zani, 3 February 1503]. 

    A thoroughly annotated copy of a greatly influential compendium of Trogus’s monumental forty-four-book Historia of the world from Babylon to the Augustan era. 

    £3800

  16. JUSTINUS, Marcus Junianus; Cornelius NEPOS.

    Trogi Pompei externae historiae in compendium ab Justino redactae. Externorum imperatorum...

    Venice, ‘in aedibus Aldi et Andreae Asulani soceri’, January 1522.

    First Aldine edition of Justinus’ abridgement of the lost Historiae Philippicae of Pompeius Trogus, and of Nepos’ De viris illustribus, with a decorated initial to the opening of the text, likely executed in the early nineteenth century when the work was bound in Rome.

    £1850

  17. JUVENAL.

    The Satires … translated: with explanatory and classical Notes, relating to the Laws and Customs of the Greeks and Romans …

    London: Printed for J. Nicholson, in Cambridge; and sold by S. Crowder … and J. and F. Rivington … 1777.

    Third edition of this parallel-text translation edited by Thomas Sheridan, first published 1739.

    £1250

  18. JUVENAL, Decimus Junius, and Aulus Persius FLACCUS.

    Satyrae.

    London, J. Brindley, 1744.

    First Brindley edition, edited by the Irish classical scholar Usher Gahagan (d. 1749). John Brindley began to publish his series of well-printed duodecimo classics in 1744, for which Gahagan edited eleven works before his arrest and conviction for high treason, having become embroiled with a...

    £650

  19. JUVENAL, Decimus Junius.

    Argumenta Satyrarum Iuvenalis per Antonimu [sic] Mancinellum. Cu[m] quattuor co[m]me[n]tariis … Sebastianus...

    [(Colophon:) Milan, Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler for Giovanni da Legnano, 17 August 1501.]

    Rare edition of Juvenal’s Satires with commentary by the Italian humanists Antonio Mancinelli, Domizio Calderini, Giorgio Merula, and Giorgio Valla, edited by the Greek scholar Sebastianus Ducius, with extensive early annotations and corrections to both the text and commentary.

    £5000

  20. [KAMES, Henry HOME, Lord].

    Grundsaetze der Kritik, aus dem Englischen übersetzt, von Joh. Nikolaus Meinhard.

    Vienna, Johann Thomas Edlen von Trattnern, 1785-6.

    A Viennese reprint of the first German translation of the Elements of criticism, by Meinhard with the approval of Lessing, first issued in 1763-66, instrumental in the dissemination and reception of Kames’s aesthetic theories in Germany and a seminal publication in the formation of pre-Romantic aesthetics.

    £250