RESERVED

Very rare third incunable edition of the first printed dictionary of materia medica, by the medieval physician Simon of Genoa, first published 1472 in Ferrara. This copy was lot 6797 in the sale of the Bibliotheca Pinelliana (p. 266), the library of the Venetian bibliophile Maffeo Pinelli (1736-85), which took place in London between March and May 1789, purchased by the preeminent eighteenth-century English collector of incunabula Michael Wodhull (1740-1816).

Simon, born in the late thirteenth century, served as personal physician to Pope Nicholas IV, to whom this work is dedicated. Little else about him is known and no complete manuscript copy of his work survives. The Clavis Sanationis was, however, one of the most influential late medieval medical texts because it synthesised Greek and Arabic medicine into a standardised and practical medical vocabulary. ‘As medicine began to emerge from the dark ages, the medieval student was confronted with an amazing variety of new words. Many of these words were of Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, or Syriac origin and the medical student was especially interested in mastering the meaning and composition of the new drugs whose uses were important in his practice. Thus it is not surprising to find that dictionaries were among the first books to be printed’ (Heirs of Hippocrates, p. 29). Simon’s dictionary, the first to be printed, is in many cases purely etymological, simply giving the Greek equivalent for Latin terms or an Arabic derivation. However, Simon quotes his sources in many of the definitions, citing Galen, Dioscorides, Demosthenes, Pliny the Elder, Avicenna, etc. Occasionally they are more detailed, such as that for the drug pompholyx, which gives a long description of its preparation.

Pinelli’s library, built up by several generations of his noble Italian family, was especially well provided with incunabula and early editions printed on vellum, as well as manuscripts and a fragment of Egyptian papyrus. The two sales held by the London booksellers who purchased it en bloc for £6000, held in 1789 and 1790, achieved high prices. The purchaser, Michael Wodhull, was ‘one of the great book collectors of the eighteenth century’ (BOO) and ‘the first English translator of the complete works of Euripides … He attended every London sale from 1764 to 1800, and bough with great judgement. He specialised in incunabula, and brought together a small and choice library’ (De Ricci, English Collectors (1930), pp. 81-82). Dibdin said of him: ‘a better informed or more finished bibliographer existed neither in France nor England’ (Fletcher, English Book Collectors (1902), p. 264). After duplicate sales in 1801 and 1803 (from these books, Wodhull cut out his habitual bibliographical notes from the upper corners of the flyleaves (De Ricci, p. 83)), his library was finally dispersed at auction by Sotheby’s in 1886 (Fletcher, p. 264).

All early editions are very scarce. Of this ed. ISTC records only 3 copies in the US, at Harvard, Yale, and Mundelein Seminary, IL. Of the first ed., ISTC notes only the Bodleian copy (fragment), and of the 1473 Milan ed., only 3 copies in the US, at NLM, Duke, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.