SCOTUS, Michael.

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Liber physiognomiae. Scarce early incunable edition of Scot's medieval treatise on physiognomy, the technique of deducing a person's character on the basis of physical appearance. First published in 1477, the work went through numerous reprints before 1500, all scarce in commerce. No copy of Wenssler's edition is listed in auction records, and there is no copy in the British Library.The rediscovery of pseudo-Aristotelian treatises such as the Secreta Secretorum and Physiognomonica lead to a new interest in physiognomy during the Middle Ages. Drawing from these sources, as well as from Arabic texts including the Arabic translation of Aristotle's Historia animalium and the Kitāb Sirr al-Asrār, Scot's Liber physiognomiae was "the first true work on physiognomy composed in the medieval West" (Resnick, p. 15). With no fewer than 20 editions printed before 1500, and translated into multiple languages, it became "the most widely known [treatise on the subject] in sixteenth-century Europe" (Porter, p. 112). An example of its great popularity is a direct reference to it in Canto XX of Dante's Inferno, where Scotus also appears as a character. The work exerted a major influence on the subsequent developments of the discipline, which by the fourteenth century was taught at several universities as a science. Physiognomy is of interest today for its implications in machine learning and facial recognition technology.Liber physiognomiae was composed by Scotus in the early 13th century, as t

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