PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, Giovanni Francesco.

£19,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Libro detto Strega, o delle illusioni del Demonio. Rare first edition in Italian, and the first treatise on demonology to be printed in the Italian language. A translation of Pico's Latin work Strix (1523), this book made witchcraft knowledge accessible for the first time to the wider public, who could not read Latin. Rare in commerce, with only two other copies recorded at auction in the past 50 years.The treatise was composed after a ferocious witch-hunt that took place in Mirandola (near Ferrara) between 1522 and 1525. Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola (1470-1533), distinguished humanist and nephew of the famous philosopher, was ruler of the city at the time. He became involved in the trials of dozens of people, ten of which were burned on a pyre. These death sentences caused such a widespread resentment among the public that Pico felt forced to justify them; composed in less than ten days, Strix sive de Ludificatione Daemonum was meant to serve this purpose. The original Latin was almost immediately translated into Italian and published in the present edition by Leandro Alberti, Dominican friar of the Congregation of Lombardy and later inquisitor of Bologna. Alberti rushed to make the treatise accessible to a "bourgeois and peasant audience" by "paraphrasing difficult vocabulary and explicating most of its arcane references. Along with implied readers, Alberti envisioned implied listeners, unable to read even simple Italian yet capable of comparing their folkloric w

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