Aritmetica Prattica... tradotta da Latino in Italiano dal Signor Lorenzo Castellano patritio Romano. Reuista dal medesimo padre Clauio con alcun e aggiunte.    Rome, heirs of Nicolo Muzio, 1602

£5,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A fascinating copy with important Jesuit associations, being a gift from the author, the famous mathematician Christopher Clavius, to his student Ivan Vreman who would also become a gifted mathematician and a missionary in Macao. Christopher Clavius (1538-1612), a German Jesuit from Bamberg, taught mathematics at the Collegium Romanum for decades and published textbooks of great influence: his Euclid was translated into Chinese by Matteo Ricci and used in China. Epitome arithmeticae practicae had originally been composed for internal use in the Collegium and goes back to before 1580. The Latin text was published first in 1583 and it would seem that the translator Castellani, a pupil of Clavius, was intimately connected with it from the beginning as he had urged its publication to the wider world (see note in Baldini (2003) p. 71). The Italian translation of his textbook, intended to bring the work to an even wider readership, was published in 1586 in Rome. This is the second revised edition and is rare with copies located by OCLC in UK/USA only found at Cambridge, Brown, Columbia, and Duke. There were further editions, 1613, 1618, 1626 (Rome) with a number of Venetian editions up to 1738. Castellani explains that he has on occasion and for clarity slightly expanded the text. Various works by Clavius made their way to China and were translated into Chinese. In a letter to the Jesuit General Acquaviva dated 22 August 1608 Matteo Ricci writes that this little work on practical a

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