Feb 28, 2013 - Sale 2305

Sale 2305 - Lot 234

Price Realized: $ 2,040
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
FLUDD, ROBERT. Tomus secundus de supernaturali, naturali, praeternaturali et contranaturali Microcosmi historia. Double-page engraved plate in part 3; engraved and woodcut illustrations and diagrams throughout. 277, [3]; 191, [13]; [12], 199 pages, including general half-title ("Microcosmi Historia"), engraved title, and blanks 2M4 and 2b6. 3 parts in one volume * Veritatis proscenium . . . seu Demonstratio quaedam analytica, in qua cuilibet comparationis particulae . . . à Joanne Kepplero . . . factae inter Harmoniam suam mundanam, & illam Roberti Fludd . . . respondetur. 54 pages; lacks final blank. Together, 2 volumes in one. Folio, 315x200 mm, contemporary vellum boards, soiled, ties lacking; contents severely browned, paper brittle, later 19th-century owner's occasional blue pencil underscoring (and note "nihil intellexi"), top line of engraved title and text passages on m3 in first work imperfectly inked over, with oxidation causing paper cracks and slight text loss, half-title loose, rear free endpaper lacking. Oppenheim: Johann Theodore de Bry for Hieronymus Galler, 1619-21; Erasmus Kempffer for Johann Theodore de Bry, 1621

Additional Details

first edition of the complete second volume of Utriusque cosmi . . . historia, Fludd's philosophical magnum opus. Conceived as a 2-volume work comprising multiple treatises, it remained unfinished, and the various parts are not often found together. Bound in is the first edition of his reply to the critique of his theories in Johann Kepler's 1619 Harmonices mundi. In Fludd's system, "the major explanatory mechanism of the workings and order of the world is the parallel between macrocosm and microcosm . . . Fludd's metaphysics postulates a complex and all-embracing correspondence between the world of spirits and the physical world" (ODNB). Craven, pages 244-46; DSB V, 47-48; EP III, 207-08; Shaaber F157, F165.