?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 8,000
Muntaner, Ramon (1265-1336) Chronica, o Descripcio des Fets, e Hazanyes del Inclyt Rey Don Jaume Primer Rey Darago.
Valencia: en Casa de la Viuda de Joan Mey Flandro, 1558.
First edition, folio, large woodcut armorial device to title, final leaf blank but for a different large printer's woodcut device present, large historiated woodcut initials used throughout, printed in roman letter, single column throughout, a few marginal wormholes, occasional spotting and browning, a few marginal manuscript notes in brown ink; bound in full slightly later limp parchment, likely mid-17th century; lacking alum-tawed ties, housed in a custom cloth phase box, 10 3/8 x 7 1/2 in.
Catalan chronicler Muntaner was personally acquainted with the Kings of the Houses of Aragon, Mallorca, and Sicily. Meeting Jaume I as a child inspired his own career as an Almogavar mercenary. As a writer, his style is that of a direct oral interlocutor with firsthand experience of his own tales. This work was an inspiration to Cervantes as well, who read the Valencian Tirant lo Blanch, a work drawn mainly from Muntaner, with great enthusiasm. These medieval chivalric works are based on and inspired by historic events, but simultaneously mark an essential phase in the development of the western novel by way of Cervantes.
