REISCH, Gregor. (with) SÜNZEL, Friedrich.

Superb sammelband in lovely contemporary binding containing the third ‘genuine’ edition of the Carthusian monk Gregor Reisch’s sumptuously illustrated post-incunabulum textbook and encyclopaedia, featuring a folding Ptolemaic world map, and the incunable first edition of Friedrich Sünzel’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics. After the present edition the map was reduced. Almost all the woodcuts were reused, though the title-page illustration here is new, as are the small woodcuts on q5v and C6v depicting a man using a Jacob’s Staff and a group of men and women bathing in a mineral spring. The diagram with cross-section of the eye is ‘the oldest printed illustration of the structure of the eye’ (Ludwig Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (Chicago: 1920), p. 80). The final laudatory poem describes the work as a ‘cyclopedia,’ ‘probably an early instance of the word’ (Fairfax Murray, p. 571), and quite possibly its earliest appearance in print, while the Sünzel is supposed to contain the first printed instance of the term incunabulum (‘cunabulis’) to describe a book, on a1r, line 10 (see ms. note to GW entry, derived from Gilhofer and Rauschenberg Catalogue 72 (Lucerne: 1977), no. 17).

The map depicts the world according to Ptolemaic geography, with Europe and Africa to the West and India and China to the East. At the southeast corner, a caption across the traditional land bridge joining Africa to Asia acknowledges that the ancient concept described by Ptolemy was mistaken: Hic non terra sed mare est: in quo mirae magnitudinis Insulae, sed Ptolemaeo fuerunt incognitae, i.e. ‘Here there is no land but sea containing wonderfully large islands, unknown to Ptolemy.’ ‘It is unclear whether the reference is to the sea route to India, or to the finding of the West Indian islands by Columbus, or both (Rodney Shirley, The Mapping of the World (London: 1993), p. 21). This particular issue and the 1508 Schott Margarita were apparently unknown to Harisse, who included a 1509 Geoffrey Tory map with the same legend, ‘as the quotation is the first reference to the discoveries of the Spaniards and of the Portuguese to be found in a French map’ (p. 467), though noting that it had also appeared in the maps in Grüninger’s editions of 1504 and 1508. Printed separately, the map is frequently missing or supplied, often in the wrong state (later editions contained a reduced version).

The Margarita is ‘the first modern encyclopaedia to appear in print’ (Smith, Rara Arithmetica). It is a compendium of the medieval curriculum, consisting of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), as well as natural historical sciences and moral philosophy, with many fascinating discoveries, descriptions of meteorological and natural phenomena, including strange and monstrous animals, earthquakes, natural springs, mining and alchemy, etc. The second work by Sünzel, a teacher at the University of Ingolstadt, was similarly designed for an educational or university context, and is the first edition of a commentary on difficult propositions or ‘quaestiones’ contained in the eight books of Aristotle’s Physics, the most significant work of natural philosophy read in the Middle Ages, concerning the natures of living and non-living things, the soul, the cosmos, and principles of motion.