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Description
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Avicenna. [Übers.: Gerardus Cremonensis]. [Hrsg. Petrus Rochabonella.] [Korr. Prosdocimus Mutius.]., Canon medicinae. [Strasbourg, the R-Printer (Adolf Rusch), before 1473]. A beautifully illuminated single leaf from one of the earliest (if not the earliest) complete printings of the Canon, in the translation of Gerard of Cremona. The earliest dated edition of the complete Canon was printed in Milan, with the date 12 February 1473 at the colophon of Book III. This edition is not dated, but is most often described as "before 1473." The text of this leaf begins with the end of Book III, fen 7. The illuminated initial (G) marks the beginning of fen 8, and the text ends in the middle of Cap. 12 of the same fen. The subjects are the teeth, the gums, and the lips. This leaf was originally part of the now fragmentary copy in Aberdeen University Library (William Smith Mitchell, Catalogue of the Incunabula in Aberdeen University Library, 1968, No. 5). Other single leaves from the same copy are in Caius College and St. John's College, Cambridge, and Cambridge University Library. At one time the volume was in the library of Coventry School, a pencil note on this leaf giving a seventeenth-century date for the provenance. RARE: ISTC records only the British Library and John Rylands Library copies in the UK (besides the fragmentary copy in Aberdeen and the Cambridge leaves mentioned ab ove (except St. John's College); in North America only two complete copies (Harvard and Pierpont Morgan Library). The illumination in the copy in Aberdeen University, and hence in our leaf, is English and strictly contemporary, which makes it interesting to speculate on its original provenance. Incunabules illuminated in England are rare. H *2197; BMC I, p. 65; GW 3114; Klebs 131.3; Goff A1417; Horblit, 7 "(not after) 1473"; printing and the Mind of Man II.red bindig:, Main Heritage Display General, R128 .A95 1473, Book, Item-ID: i10069641, BIB-ID: 1008600 |
