Mandeville, Jean de:

$25,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

VIAGGI DEL MANDAVILLA [manuscript title]. From the collection of R. David Parsons. An attractively produced early 17th-century manuscript abridgement of Mandeville's Travels in Italian. The date 1515 on the title perhaps indicates that it was copied from the now very rare 1515 Venetian edition printed by Melchior Sessa, preserved in only two copies, at Padua and Messina.Mandeville's work first circulated in northern Italy in the late fourteenth century in a French version. This was eventually translated into Italian, published in Milan in 1480, which became the most widely read version. The printer, Pietro da Corneno, divided the text into 182 chapters, setting a pattern which was followed in the subsequent editions. By 1500 the text of the Italian version was fixed, and Italian editions were printed in Milan twice (1502 and 1517) and at Venice eight times between 1504 and 1567. These are all rare both institutionally (each preserved in only a couple of copies) and in commerce. After 1567, the text did not appear again separately in print until Zambrini's 1870 edition. In a recent survey of the extant manuscripts of this version, Matthew Coneys located twelve examples, all produced before 1600. No later examples are recorded in the online database of Italian libraries. The present manuscript copy was presumably produced in response to the ever-increasing rarity of the narrative after the 16th century.Compared with the text of four early Venetian printings (1534, 1537, 1553, 1

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