[Rarebooks] fa: GIORDANO BRUNO - OPERE (First Collected Works) 1830 in Fine Holloway Bindings

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 4. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/yyxup2jr

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Giordano Bruno: Opere di Giordano Bruno Nolano, ora per la prima volta raccolte e pubblicate da Adolfo Wagner, Dottore. Lipsia [Leipzig]: Weidmann, 1830. First edition thus. Two volumes, 8vo (22 cm), in later nineteenth-century full calf by M. M. Holloway, London (bindings signed on the turn-ins), with spines elaborately tooled in gilt, gilt-lettered morocco spine labels, marbled endpapers and page edges; xxxvi, [2], 292, [2] pp.; [2], 437, [1] pp.; with a portrait frontispiece and in-text diagrams.

The first collected edition of Bruno's "heretical" works and the first appearance of any of them in their original language since the mid-1600s. A true Renaissance man, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a philosopher, poet, cosmologist, astronomer, astrologer, Hermetic occultist, and rogue Dominican priest who espoused pantheism. He has "the distinction of being the only known sixteenth-century philosopher to have been excommunicated from all three major confessions: Roman Catholic (Naples, 1576), Calvinist (Geneva, 1579) and Lutheran (Helmstedt, 1589)" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). He wrote most of his major works while in exile in Switzerland, England, Germany, and elsewhere. Having ill-advisedly returned to Italy, he was arrested, condemned by the Church, and burned at the stake (with a metal plate clamped over his tongue) on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome on February 17, 1600. The collection includes: Candelajo; La cena de le Ceneri; De la causa, principio e uno; De l'infinito, universo e mondi; Spaccio de la Bestia trionfante; Cabal del cavallo pegaseo; Degli eroici furori.

Bindings with mild sunning to the upper portion of the front boards, some darkening to the spines; contents with intermittent light browning and spotting, more noticeable browning to ca. 40 leaves in vol. II due to inferior paper quality, small armorial inkstamp to the title-pages ("Vertrag vom 15 Mai 1846[?]"); otherwise clean and sound, firmly and handsomely bound.