HULSIUS, Levinus.

This copy was purchased in Basle by Luigi Rusca (fl. first half of the C17), a poet from Como. His compositions were influenced by the Renaissance pastoral tradition; his ‘Pastor Infido’, printed in Como in 1622, was deemed ‘for stylistic elegance not inferior to [Guarini’s] “Pastor fido”’ (‘Il rusco’, 7). The long inscription on the fep, written by Rusca in 1627, provides an account of the reconquest of Wolfenbüttel during the Thirty Years’ War. He writes that on August 15 he was travelling on the boat of General Pappenheim heading towards Wolfenbüttel, ‘the fortified city of the Duke of Brandenburg’ then occupied by the army of Christian IV of Denmark. The siege started on August 28 and they entered the city on Christmas Eve. Rusca was injured on January 1, being on the verge of death for a month; he was ‘martyrized’ (‘fui martirizato’) with three blood-lettings to treat his high temperature, and had to live on beer for eight days as it was the only nourishment he managed to retain. It was impossible to find chicken or veal even by promising good money. Due to his health he was first left at Wolfenbüttel and only later sent for by his fellow soldiers even though he was still unwell. The uninviting ointment recipe on the fep may therefore relate to his illness: olive oil, jasmine, oats, a drop of urine, rat’s blood and willow leaves. His full account of the siege, not including his later illness, was published in the same year, in Como, as ‘Historia di Luigi Rusca dell’assedio della fortissima città di Volfenbutel’, dedicated to Cardinal Borromeo.

Rusca would have made good use of his dictionary during the military expedition—an important linguistic instrument, here in the scarce first edition, and one of several, including some for French, produced by Levinus Hulsius. Born in Belgium, Hulsius (1546-1606) settled in Nuremberg in the late 1580s, became a notary, one of the earliest traders in mathematical-astronomical instruments, and, from 1596, also a writer and publisher of scientific books, dictionaries and geographical works such as a Latin and German edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Description of Guiana’. This dictionary included a short grammatical introduction to Italian and German, here removed—probably by Rusca as it would have been of less practical use—and two sections (German into Italian and Italian into German) with words commonly used in everyday conversation. Of great use to Rusca would have been the dozen kinds of fevers listed (‘erratic’, ‘daily’, ‘tertian’, etc.) in Italian, with their German translation, and specific military terms like ‘soldiers in a garrison’.