Isidore of Seville

£95,000 · Offered by Sokol Books

Provenance: Made to be a fine and handsome volume, almost certainly prepared for use in a monastic or cathedral library, with marginal annotations in medieval English hands demonstrating its use up to the sixteenth century at least. The most common hand among these is sixteenth century and writes in Greek as well as Latin (see fol. 19r for an example). It would have entered private ownership at the Reformation, and was used for scribal practise and sums on four occasions by an eighteenth-century English hand. Among the scrawls on the back pastedown the name ‘Leathersons’ appears. Recently coming to light in an American private collection. Text: No other encyclopedic text in the Western world has had anything like the impact of that written by Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636). Its author was one of the last humanist polymaths of antiquity and one of early Christianity’s most influential scholars. He was part of the intellectual renaissance in the seventh-century Visigothic court, and was notably close to King Sigebut (c. 565-620/1), to whom the first version of this work was dedicated. It has been suggested that he composed it as a form of summa for his recently-civilised barbarian masters, but it quickly found other readers in mainland Europe and became the most widely consulted scientific reference work of the Middle Ages. It survives today in nearly a thousand manuscripts (Barney et al., Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 2006, p. 24). The present codex distinguishes i

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.