RUSCELLI, Girolamo [with] POLITI, Adriano

£1,850 · Offered by Sokol Books

An unusual, charmingly bound two-volume set comprising a work on Italian poetics and an abridged Italian dictionary. The first is the third edition of Girolamo Ruscelli s work, also called Rimario , a lexicon of vernacular verse composition. Ruscelli (1518-66) was a polymath whose interests spanned mathematics, cryptography, cartography, rhetoric and literature. Originally published in 1558, Del modo di comporre begins from the nature of the act of speaking, the syntactic and metric nuances of which are illustrated through synonyms. He proceeds to discuss the perfect poem, vernacular meters and their effect on the ear (e.g., versi tronchi and sdruccioli), the pronunciation of vowels, and most interestingly specific forms like the ottava and terza rima, ballate , canzoni and sonnets, with examples from the likes of Ariosto and Petrarch. The second part is devoted to a Rimario , a dictionary of words accompanied by suitable rhymes, and the third to a dictionary of all the words contained in this work, which might need explaining. The work is full of Ruscelli s sophisticated and engagingly written comments on the language of his time an important witness to C16 literary taste. The second work is the second edition of an abridgement, originally published in 1614, of a revised version of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612). Edited by the lexicographer Adriano Politi (1542-1625), it made the Vocabolario the first dictionary of the Italian language, in its Tuscan fo

• Binding: Hardcover

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