BOEMUS, Johann.

by Johann Boemus

£19,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

A very good copy of the rare and important first English edition of books one and two of Omnium Gentium Mores, Leges et Ritus translated by William Waterman; the Fardle of Facions is considered the first scientific approach to ethnology, (in English) portraying a pleasant variety of things and yet more profit in the pith (Cox I, pp. 69-70). Johann Boemus (c.1485-1535) was a German humanist, canon of Ulm Cathedral, traveller, and Hebraist. His work, first published in 1520, was reprinted multiple times in the sixteenth century, with later additions, accumulating related treatises by other scholars. It influenced Sebastian Muenster s Cosmography, and inspired the Hauptchronik of Sebastian Franck. It helped set the stage for subsequent investigations of the connections of law to culture, including Paul Henri Mallett s Northern Antiquities. Johannes Boemus s popular Latin work on the manners, laws, and customs of peoples ancient and modern, Omnium Gentium Mores was first published in Augsburg in 1520. By the early seventeenth century it had appeared in twenty-three editions and five languages, including the English, The fardle of facions. Although he has been called the first anthropologist, Boemus draws primarily on older sources such as Herodotus rather than incorporating recent eyewitness accounts of the New World. His account of Indian blackness draws on Aristotle s one-seed theory of conception, whereby the child s appearance is determined by the father alone. Loomba A., Rac

• Binding: Hardcover

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