Anghiera, Pietro Martire d' [Peter Martyr]: Oviedo, Gonzalo: Ramusio, Giovanni:

$50,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

SUMMARIO DE LA GENERALE HISTORIA DE L'INDIE OCCIDENTALI. From the collection of R. David Parsons. This important collection of voyages and narratives is the work of several authors, although most bibliographers attribute it to Peter Martyr, a translation of whose work makes up the first section. The present volume is one of the earliest attempts to assemble a group of accounts of travel and exploration. It was most likely assembled for publication by Giovanni Ramusio of Venice, later famous for his much larger collection Navigationi, which began publication in 1554.The Historia is divided into three books. The first part is made up of material from the Decades of Peter Martyr, drawn from the edition of 1530, the first complete publication to present all eight Decades. The second and most important part of the Summario is drawn from the first published work of the great historian and chronicler of the early West Indies, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's De la Natural Hystoria de las Indias (Toledo, 1526), which presented the first accurate reports of New World plants and animals. Since that pioneering work of American natural history – a completely different book from Oviedo's later Historia General – is virtually unobtainable today, the present 1534 publication is the only form in which the first work of Oviedo can be acquired. Oviedo also provides one of the first accounts of Bermuda, where he tried to land while en route to Spain in 1515, only to be driven off by adverse winds.

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