FUMO, Bartolomeo.

by Bartolomeo Fumo

£4,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

.A very good copy of the second edition of this pocket compendium of canon law. Legal Aldines are uncommon. The Dominican theologian Bartolomeo Fumo (d.1545), was inquisitor in Piacenza, where the Summa was first published in 1549. Popular and much reprinted, it is a compendium of cases of conscience, i.e., a manual detailing, in 504 sections, with the ethical and moral conundrums priests and confessors were most likely to encounter, and which they had to address according to ecclesiastical law. The present copy was in the library of a Franciscan monastery near Rieti, in Italy. The work is prefaced by a copious index for easy consultation. In addition to topics such as the capital sins, sacraments, excommunication and the regulations of marriage (illustrated by an arbor consanguinitatis showing the degrees of kinship between spouses allowed by the Church), one also finds hundreds of situations of family law (e.g., adultery, bigamy, financial debt towards one s spouse, inheritance), anti-social behaviour (e.g., bestiality, sodomy, fornication, incest, murder, prostitution), or activities that contravene Christian doctrines. Among these are alchemy an art that is not itself illicit, if done without fraud, nor is it a sin to sell what is produced through alchemy, unless one is selling something which is actually not what it looks like and necromancy, a mortal sin of divination through demons who take the shape of dead people . Most interesting is the section, one of several whic

• Binding: Hardcover

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