Compendiaria dialectices ratio.

£2,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

This work was first published in 1520 by Melchior Lotter in Wittemberg and Leipzig, this is one (possibly the first) of the numerous reprints which quickly followed from presses all over the German Protestant world; it was not used in the Catholic areas and indeed Ignatius Loyola is said to have deprecated its use in a letter to the Jesuit Peter Canisius. The German humanists were enthusiastic in their take-up of Agricola’s De inventione dialectica published first by Martens in Louvain in January 1515, a work which St John Fisher was reading in May of that year as he mentions in a letter to Erasmus remarking that he would rather have written it that have an archbishopric (Allen Opus ep.ii, no. 336). This work, published decades after Agricola’s death (27 October 1485), had circulated in manuscript form and one which disappeared and then re-appeared in 1528. On 1 May 1528 Alardus of Amsterdam writing to Nicolas Cleynaerts (Clenardus, 1495-1542) speaks at length about the work writing that in his opinion that not even Proserpina carried off by Pluto was more eagerly sought by Ceres than this manuscript which he hopes to publish in Cologne (this detailed letter, referred to by P S Allen in his article in EHR xxi 1(1906) is printed in N. Clénard, Correspondance ed. A. Roersch, Brussels, 1940, I pp. 1-7; II, 1-13 (notes)). It was eventually printed in 1539 in Cologne edited by Alardus (VD16 A1080). The work and its influence is discussed fully by Lisa Jardine in chapter 3 (pp. 83-

• Binding: Hardcover

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