DE PHILOSOPHICO CONSOLATUM SIVE DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIE: CUM FIGURIS ORNATISSIMIS NOVITER EXPOLITUS

Strassburg: Johann Grüninger, 1501. FIRST ILLUSTRATED EDITION. 288 x 195 mm. (11 3/8 x 7 3/4"). 10 p.l., CCXXVI (i.e., CCXXVIII=228) leaves. Edited by Sebastian Brant. With commentary and glosses attributed to Thomas Aquinas.
Contemporary pigskin over substantial wooden boards, upper cover with (early?) ink drawing of a sword, raised bands, old ink lettering to spine, two original brass clasps, text sewn onto guards made from Medieval vellum manuscript fragments, endpapers removed (exposing the book's inner structure of three channels at front and back, the channels containing sewing twine held in place with wooden pegs), the binding said by a previous source to be recased, though without evidence that we can see. Printer's device in colophon, decorative woodcut initials, and WITH four half-page woodcuts and 74 woodcut blocks, the blocks made into compositions combining two to four blocks, for A TOTAL OF 233 WOODCUT ILLUSTRATIONS. With contemporary ink inscription of first page and occasional marginalia in the same hand; first page with small ink signature of C. F. Keinath dated 1824. VD16 B 6404; Adams B-2283; Muther, "German book illustration of the Gothic period and the early Renaissance" 55; USTC 616871. See Marenbon, John, "Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/boethius/; Morford, Johann "Grüninger of Strasbourg" in: "Sacry/Papy, Syntagmatia: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature" (2009), pp. 119ff. ◆Covers somewhat stained and with many long, shallow scratches, three dozen tiny wormholes to boards and spine, but the binding entirely solid and with much antique appeal. Three bifolia a bit browned, occasional small stains or smudges (mostly marginal), insignificant worming at the beginning and end (quickly diminishing to a single small, round hole), other trivial imperfections, but an extremely pleasing copy internally--the text generally clean and quite fresh, the margins extremely wide (with some untrimmed edges), and the impressions of the woodcuts very rich.

This is the first illustrated edition of one of the most influential works of the Middle Ages, and one that, according to Marenbon, "popularized philosophy outside the universities." Born at the time of the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, Boethius (ca. 480-524) became the chief secretary to Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Such a position was not a good fit for someone with Boethius' unnatural integrity and idealism, a circumstance that led to his being maligned, imprisoned, and ultimately executed. While in prison, he wrote this "Consolation," in which Lady Philosophy appears to him and urges him to embrace a sublime indifference toward suffering and death. Called by Gibbon "a golden volume . . . which claims incomparable merit from the barbarism of the times and the situation of the author," it has had a lasting popularity and influence through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Its contemplation of the profound perplexities of existence (for example, the presence of evil in the face of a loving God, the notion of free will in the face of God's foreknowledge) make it a book with the deepest of teleological consequences for believers of any faith. Marenbon notes that "Aquinas's account of the highest good in his 'Summa Theologiae' builds on the 'Consolation,' and the definition of eternity given by Philosophy in Book V became the starting-point for almost every later medieval discussion of God and time." Some indication of the importance of the work over time can be seen in the number of translations produced in every major European vernacular language, plus Hebrew and Greek. English translations were rendered by Alfred the Great in the ninth century, Chaucer in the 14th (printed by Caxton in 1490), and Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th. Our first illustrated version comes from one of the most prominent printers in Strassburg, who had previously issued illustrated editions of Terence, Horace, and Virgil. According to Muther, the "newly designed" woodcuts here "stand significantly higher than those of Terence and Horace." The opening woodcut is a striking view of Rome that Morford says is "an early example of Vedute di Roma, in which the Aurelian walls, the temple of Minerva, Medica, Trajan's column, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Castel Sant' Angelo, and old St. Peter's can be recognized." This important book appears in the marketplace regularly, but it rarely is found as attractive as in the present case, our copy being complete, well preserved internally, and in a period binding with early manuscript fragments and exposed structural components..