Beschreibung:

JOHANNES Glogoviensis (ca. 1430-1507), commentary . Johannes de SACROBOSCO. Introductorium compendiosum in tractatum spere [sic] materialis... per magistrum Joannem Glogoviensem...recollectum . Cracow: [Johannes Haller], in die sancti Vitalis martyris [28 April], 1506. Chancery 4 o in 6s (213 x 153 mm). Collation: a-m 6 (a1r title and Epigrammata ad lectorem , a1v full-page woodcut, a2r commentator's introduction, text with commentary, m5v colophon, m6r table of solar declinations, m6v blank). 72 leaves, unfoliated. Gothic type in 2 sizes. Full-page woodcut of armillary sphere (a1v), three-quarter-page woodcut of the celestial spheres (b1r), 12 smaller woodcut astronomical diagrams in text. (Fols. a1.6, a2.5 and m6 rehinged, slight dampstaining to outer blank foremargins with traces of mildew, faint discoloration to last 2 quires, very minor marginal chip to first 4 leaves.) Modern boards covered in paper from a 15th- or early 16th-century printed Latin Bible with commentary. Provenance : several detailed contemporary study notes with scientific, geographic and historical references, undoubtedly by a Polish scholar (reference to Casimir, King of Poland and the Church of St. Catherine in Cracow on d1v) (a few marginalia cropped); trace of removed bookplate. FIRST EDITION of this commentary, AN EXCEEDINGLY RARE AMERICANUM, unknown to Sabin, Harrisse and Church. Johannnes of Glogau, professor of mathematics and philosophy at the University of Cracow, whose students included the young Copernicus, published this edition for the use of his students at the urging of the scholar-printer Johannes Haller. The passage on the New World occurs on folio g2v, and refers to Vespucci's (putative) expeditions of 1501 and 1504. Refuting Sacrobosco's assertion that the torrid zones between the two tropics and the area beyond the Arctic circle are uninhabitable due to the extreme temperatures, the commentator cites the island of Trapobana (Ceylon), which is situated on the equator and yet densely populated, and continues: "And the same thing is confirmed by those who in the year 1501 and similarly in the year 1504 were sent by the King of Portugal to discover the origin of pepper and other aromatic spices. They sailed beyond the equator and saw both celestial hemispheres and their stars and they found the origin of pepper in a place which they called the New World which was hitherto unknown." Glogau goes on to state, erroneously, that Dom Nicolaus Germanus (ca. 1420-ca. 1490), the Benedictine cartographer and editor of Ptolemy, had traveled to the Arctic regions, where he had seen "many people and islands which were unknown to any mortal man and were not described by the ancient cosmographers". Although not himself an explorer, Nicolaus Germanus was responsible for the dissemination of important new cartographical information and concepts, mainly through the publication in Ulm in 1482 of his edition of Ptolemy (based on his own manuscript atlases), the first to include his five modern maps and the first to show Iceland and Greenland. Glogau's description of him here as "Reformator studii Cosmographie" shows that his achievements were already recognized by his contemporaries. This important edition of Sacrobosco's popular cosmographical textbook testifies to the preëminence of the University of Cracow in the study of astronomy and geography in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Although 7 copies of this edition are now recorded in American institutions, its rarity caused it to be overlooked by both Harrisse and Sabin, who also failed to note the later editions of 1513 (Cracow) and 1518 (Strassburg). No copies appear to have been sold at auction in the past 50 years. Alden-Landis 506/6; Houzeau-Lancaster I, 2339 ("fort rare"); JCB Catalogue, Additions (1973), p. 3; Thorndike IV, 449; Wierzbowski, Bibliographica Polonica XV ac XVI ss. , 10; Yarmolinsky, Early Polish Americana: a bibliographical study 10.