Nov 03, 2006 - Sale 2092

Sale 2092 - Lot 120

Price Realized: $ 4,080
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
SILVATICUS, MATTHAEUS. Liber pandectarum medicinae. [302] (of [307]) leaves; lacks the 5 preliminaries, but the main text is complete. Gothic type. Folio, 390x270 mm, modern 1/4 pigskin with morocco lettering piece; several tiny wormholes through opening leaves not impairing legibility, first text page darkened and spotted, with institutional stamp, few leaves toned in middle of volume, blank upper inner corner of last leaf reinforced, otherwise a clean, wide-margined copy. [Strassburg: Adolf Rusch, circa 1480]
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Materia medica originally published in 1474, drawing on writings by Avicenna, Mesuë, Serapion, Galen, and Dioscorides, and containing over 700 entries, with plant names given in Latin and transliterated Greek and Arabic. Silvaticus (d. 1342), an Italian physician, botanist, and lexicographer, "kept a botanical garden at Salerno, which is the earliest garden of its kind known to us, if conventual herb gardens are not taken into account. In that garden he cultivated not only domestic but also foreign plants . . . He seems to have traveled extensively, and to have observed plants in many localities and collected information on them" (Sarton). BMC I, 64; Klebs 919.6; Goff S514; Sarton III, 816.