Isidorus Hispalensis:

$450,000 · Offered by William Reese Company

ETYMOLOGIAE. From the collection of R. David Parsons. First edition of the encyclopaedia of Isidore of Seville, "of infinitely greater importance" (PMM) than contemporary incunable encyclopaedias, containing "the earliest printed map of the world" (Shirley) and comprising a singular source of information for natural philosophers, geographers, and navigators of the Renaissance. The encyclopaedia was "arguably the most influential book, after the Bible, in the learned world of the Latin West for nearly a thousand years" (Barney, p.3). Famously, the Etymologiae contains the first printed world map, a circular "T-O" mappa mundi depicting the three continents - Asia, Europe, and Africa - encircled by ocean and divided by a T-shaped inland sea. Book XIV of the encyclopaedia ("De terra et partibus"), in which it appears, remained a crucial source of medieval geographical information; it was, for example, "the most frequently cited source for the fiery wall round paradise, and for the identification of the [biblical] rivers" (Flint). Isidorus also provided a touchstone for 15th-century navigators during the heated debates on the habitability of the Antipodes; he is cited in both Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi (1410) and the correspondence of German explorer Martin Behaim (1459-1507), and he earns a brief mention in Columbus' letter to Santangel (1498) regarding the location of earthly Paradise ("San Isidro y Beda y Damasceno y Estrabon…y todos los sacros teologos todos conciertan quel

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