Continental

Contact Alex Day, Andrea Mazzocchi, Jonathan Harrison, Charlotte Miller or Sally Pettit

Our Continental department specialises in incunabula, Greek and Latin classics, early vernacular imprints, and notable texts from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early modern era, with a specific section devoted to medieval manuscripts, fragments, and illuminations.

We regularly issue lists and catalogues, offering a wide variety of literary, historical, and philosophical books printed in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, and Russia.  Woodcuts, early engravings, notable bindings, notable marginalia, rare manuscript or printed survivals, and books with a remarkable provenance are among our keenest interests and feature regularly in our stock.

 
  1. BEAUMONT, Joseph.

    Psyche: or Loves Mysterie in XX. Canto’s: displaying the Intercourse betwixt Christ and the Soule …

    London, Printed by John Dawson for George Boddington, 1648.

    First edition of this lengthy religious epic representing the journey of the personified Soul from England to the Holy Land and back, written by Beaumont, one of the Royalist fellows ejected from Cambridge in 1644.

    £1250

  2. BEAUVILLIERS, Marie de.

    Conférences spirituelles d’une supérieure à ses religieuses ... d’après un manuscrit revu et mis...

    Paris, Moquet et Cie for Toulouse, 1838.

    Scarce second edition (first 1837, also rare) of this spiritual guide by Marie de Beauvilliers (1574–1667), edited from a manuscript by the historian l'abbé Louis Gaudreau (1798–1872) and including a short biography of the author.

    £400

  3. BELLARMINE, Robert.

    De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis liber unus. Cum adiunctis indicibus undecim, et brevi chronologia ab orbe condito...

    Rome, Bartolomeo Zannetti, 1613.

    First edition of a remarkable biobibliography of ‘ecclesiastical writers’ by the great Jesuit theologian and controversialist, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), one of the most important figures of the Counter-Reformation.

    £350

  4. BELLARMINO, Roberto.

    De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis liber unus. Adiunctis indicibus undecim, & brevi chronologia ab orbe condito...

    Paris, Sébastien Cramoisy, 1658.

    An uncut copy of Bellarmino’s bibliography of ecclesiastical writers, with extensive eighteenth-century annotations and additions.

    £1250

  5. BELLARMINO, Roberto.

    Dichiarazione della dottrina cristiana ... Revista ed approvata. 

    Brescia, Bendiscioli, 1815.

    Very rare vernacular Brescia edition of Cardinal Bellarmino’s so-called ‘small catechism’ (Doctrina Christiana), composed in dialogue format for the education of children and ‘simple souls’, this copy an unusual example of a patterned paper used to cover a longstitch carta rustica...

    £350

  6. BERNARD of Clairvaux.

    Opera omnia, tam quae vere germana illius esse nemo inficias eat, quam quae spuria & supposititia (quanquam...

    Paris, [Nicolas Bruslé for] Sébastien Nivelle, [1571–]1572.

    A rare Parisian edition of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, beautifully preserved in a contemporary Spanish plateresca binding with elaborate fore-edge lettering.

    £3750

  7. BERNEY, Thomas.

    An Address presented to the honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament...

    [(Colophon:) Westminster, Vacher & Sons], [1869?].

    One of several closely related printings of a very odd work, in which the ultra-Protestant Thomas Berney (1815–1895), rector of Bracon Ash, provides testimonials of a series of prophetic visions, largely relating to untimely deaths, given to him courtesy of ‘the visible personal manifestation’...

    £300

  8. BESSE, Pierre de.

    Conceptions theologiques sur tous les dimanches de l’année, preschées en divers lieux par Me Pierre de Besse...

    Paris, Nicolas du Fossé, 1609.

    Very rare editions of two works by the noted French priest and preacher Pierre de Besse (1567–1639), in a contemporary devotional binding.

    £1500

  9. [BIBLE.]

    Τα Βιβλια, τουτεστιν, η Θεια Γραφη της Παλαιας τε και Καινης Διαθηκης...

    Moscow, the Holy Synod Press for the Russian Bible Society, 1821.

    First edition printed in Russia of the Septuagint and Greek New Testament, published likely with political motives in the year of the Greek Revolution.

    £1500

  10. [BIBLE.]

    Erläuterte Bibel mit Fragen, das ist, die ganze Heilige Schrift, Alten und Neuen Testaments, nach der teutschen Ubersetzung...

    Altdorf, Joh. Adam Hessel for Ernst Friderich Zobel, 1751.

    A German Bible with extensive apparatus, divided into five volumes and strikingly bound in a book-shaped pull-off case.

    £2250

  11. [BIBLE.]

    The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments … diligently compared and revised …

    Oxford, T. Wright and W. Gill, 1769.

    First quarto edition of the Oxford ‘standard’ Bible, as revised by Benjamin Blayney of Hertford College, Oxford (1728–1801), later Regius Professor of Hebrew. The quarto and folio editions of 1769, of which this was the first to be finished, were printed from the same setting of type differently...

    £5250

  12. BIBLE, in Latin.

    Genesis to Apocalypse, with the prologues attributed to St. Jerome and the Interpretation of Hebrew names.

    France (Paris), mid-thirteenth century.

    A handsome example of a thirteenth-century portable Bible manuscript, with an historiated initial marking the beginning of each book; from the libraries of Leander van Ess and Sir Thomas Phillipps.

    £120000

  13. [BIBLE – OLD TESTAMENT.]

    Los cinco libros de la ley divina. De nuevo corregidos y bueltos à imprimir [– Aphtaroth de todo...

    Amsterdam, ‘en casa, y a costa de Selomoh Proops’, ‘año 5478’ [i.e. 1717/1718].

    An uncommon and handsomely produced Pentateuch with haftarot, printed for the use of the Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam, our copy in an attractive binding incorporating menorahs and with richly gauffered edges featuring birds and floral motifs.

    £1850

  14. [BIBLE – OLD TESTAMENT and APOCRYPHA, Greek; Johann LONITZER, editor.]

    Της θειας γραφης παλαιας...

    Strasbourg, Wolfgang Köpfel, 1526.

    The first edition of the Old Testament in Greek to be printed in Germany, and the first aimed at a Protestant readership, with the Apocrypha separated along the lines of Luther’s German translation.

    £8500

  15. BIEL, Gabriel.

    Sacri canonis Missae lucidiss. expositio … cum assertionibus in margine sacri Conc. Trid. et annotationibus necessariis....

    Brescia, Pietro and Tommaso Bozzola, 1576.

    Brescia edition of an exposition of the Canon of the Mass by the important German scholastic philosopher and theologian Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), with a sixteenth-century printed label threatening with excommunication anyone who would remove this volume from the library.

    £350

  16. [BIGG-WITHER.]

    The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New …

    London, Bonham Norton and John Bill, 1628.

    An attractive octavo Bible, with the apocrypha, genealogies (with a map), psalms, and Common Prayer – this was the family Bible of the Bigg (later Bigg-Wither) family, including Harris Bigg-Wither, who was famously, if briefly, engaged to Jane Austen in 1802.

    £8750

  17. BISSEL, Johannes.

    Illustrium ab orbe condito ruinarum decades quatuor ... decadis primae pars prior almae congregationi academicae...

    Würzburg, ‘typis viduae Walderi’, [1762].

    Scarce later edition of the first part of a remarkable work by the Swabian Jesuit Johannes Bissel (1601–1682) on ‘ruinous’ events throughout human history, printed by ‘widow Walder’.

    £450

  18. BLANCHON, Jacques.

    Iacobi Blanchoni Ucessiensis adversus Ludovicum Beneventanum abbatem Selestensem defensionum liber.

    Lyons, Jean de Tournes, 1550.

    First edition of a very rare work of sixteenth-century Lyonnese Neoplatonism, an elegantly printed de Tournes edition.

    £950

  19. [BOIS, Paul.]

    La vie des premieres religieuses Capucines du monastere de Marseille.

    Marseille, de l’imprimerie de Dominique Sibié, 1754.

    Scarce first edition of a compendium of the lives of thirteen Capuchin nuns associated with Marseille, attributed to Paul Bois (1685–1763), curate of nearby Noyers-sur-Jabron, with a woodcut frontispiece depicting a nun before an altar.

    £375

  20. [BOIS-SEIGNEUR-ISAAC.]

    Histoire memorable et digne de foy, du sainct sang de miracle, advenue au Bois Seigneur Isaac diocese de...

    Mons, Charles Michel, 1593.

    First and only edition, very rare, of an account of a medieval miracle at the Augustinian abbey of Bois-Seigneur-Isaac, to the northeast of Mons in Belgium, published not long after the abbey had been all but destroyed during the French Wars of Religion.

    £1250