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HAEDUS Petrus Anterotica sive De Amoris Generibus.

VENDU

Trevise, Gerardus de Lisa, 1492 13 octobre 1492

4to (181 x 135 mm) 6 nn. ll., 97 num. leaves (without last blank). Recased into sixteenth-century blindstamped pigskin, red edges.

Catégories:
9500,00 

1 in stock

The earliest work on the psychology and physiology of sex

Hain-Copinger, 8343; BMC, VI, 885; Goff, H-2; Polain, 1843; IGI, 4642; Wellcome, 3040.

First and only incunable edition of this his Humanist treatise on the dangers and delights of carnal love.

This book is written in the form of a dialogue between the author, Emiliano Cimbriaco and Antonino Filermo, in which the three discuss marital relations, sexual desire, and whether it be sinful to enjoy being raped, among others subjects, including such things as hairdressing and jewelry. Intended as advice for the author’s nephew, a college student, this philosophical treatise on the types of love is particularly concerned with the dangers of erotic passion. Through a dense web of classical allusions, Haedus explores love, passion, and pride as the moderator in his own dialogue—beginning, of course, in the library. The two other interlocutors are priest Antonius Philermus and poet Aemilius Cimeriacus (who contributed an introductory poem). The poet makes the case for the beauties and pleasures of love, and a priest warns against the consequences of indulging in carnality.

The “conversation” encompasses representations in the art of love, sexual attraction and desire, the state of marriage and the relations between the sexes, and forays into peripheral concerns like fashion and personal grooming.  A virtuosic work of Humanist learning and human experience, it is also a remarkably beautiful example of the printer’s art. Regarding the types, Schulderer notes “a quite original face, with its wealth of curves and serifs, and its greatly prolonged ascenders and descenders, which gives his volumes a flavor of fine printing, admirably consonant to their small bulk and format.”

The author was friends with the printer, Gerardus de Lisa, who had immigrated to Italy from Flanders.  Little is known of Haedus (1427-1504), other than that he was born Pietro Cavretto, served as a priest, and wrote an earlier book (“Amores“) in reaction to being rejected by his beloved. It is not surprising that one disappointed in romance would compose a work entitled “against the erotic”. “The earliest of the series, a brief tract on the upbringing of children, entitled De Liberorum educatione and completed 11 September 1492, has for its author Jacopo, Count of Porcia, or, as he called himself, Jacobus, comes Purliliarum, a castle not far from Pordenone about midway between Udine and Treviso… Only a month after the first edition of De Liberorum educatione – on 13 October 1492 – Gerardus completed the printing of a book by a common friend of his own and the Count’s, the Anterotica (or De Amoris generibus) of Petrus Haedus, which is the Latin style of Pietro Cavretto, a priest of Pordenone who has already been mentioned as the translator of the Constitutions of Friuli executed by Gerardus at Udine in 1484. In the prefatory epistle to the latter, he addresses Gerardus as ‘diligentissimus amigo’ while the correspondence of the Count, who was his near neighbour, contains half a dozen letters directed to him on various occasions” (Victor Schoelderer, Fifty Essays in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Bibliography, p. 113-125).

Petrus Haedus (1427-1504), or Capretto, or Del Zochul which in the dialect of Friuli signifies the same thing, was a priest in the town of Pordenone in Friuli. Emiliano Cimbriaco was professor of Greek at Pordenone, and has written a Hendecasyllabicon at the begining of the text as a tribute to his friend Haedrus, and set his book in this very distinctive and elegant type.

First quire washed and first leaves restaured but generally a fine copy with several contemporary annotations in the margins.

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