CAVICEO, Jacomo

by Jacomo Caviceo

£9,750 · Offered by Sokol Books

Rare, beautifully printed and illustrated popular edition of Francois Dassi s French translation of Caviceo s Libro del Peregrino , first published in the author s native Parma in 1508, and remarkably popular, both in Italy and France, where it went through more than twenty editions during the following fifty years, though it has not been reprinted in its entirety since 1559, perhaps due to its robust attitude to physical love. Caviceo introduces his romance with the appearance of Boccaccio s shade who praises the book s dedicatee, Lucrezia Borgia; unsurprisingly the Peregino is full of echoes of Boccaccio s writings, and is also imbued with the atmosphere of the Ferrarese court of Ercole I d Este which Caviceo knew well. He appears also to have used Colonna s Hyperotomachia as a model, as the Peregrino similarly contains a multiplicity of digressions on a diverse range of subjects in a Latinate prose full of classical allusions. As the title suggests much of the romance is concerned with travel, based on the author s own experiences, including voyages to the middle east, Mount Sinai and Cyprus. These adventures often serve as a pretext for a display of humanist erudition, courtly speeches, with disquisitions on natural philosophy and neo-platonic theories of love. A good deal of the work is comic, sometimes unsubtle, as in the episode when Peregrino steals, via a sewer, into what he believes is his ladies chamber only to discover, at a critical moment, that he entered a neig

• Binding: Hardcover

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