Beschreibung:

1477 DIONYSIUS PERIEGETES / BECCARIA, Antonia. De Situ Orbis - Venice: 1477. A very good copy in old vellum. One of a handful of geographers of the Ancient World whose writings survived through the Middle Ages in manuscript form, Dionysius Periegetes lived in Alexandria at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. He composed his work in Greek verse, and while the lack of a sufficiently wide audience, capable of reading it in the original, delayed printing of the Editio Princeps until 1512, it had already been brought to public attention through this Latin prose version by Antonia Beccaria of Verona. The first edition of Strabo's Geographia had been printed in Rome eight years earlier but this, I would suggest, is the first school geography being no more than a potted version of the original and thus clearly aimed at a less scholarly audience. In translation, it has to be said, it gained as well as lost in that it now contains material of which Dionysius could have had no knowledge. Because of the brevity of some of his entries, notably that dealing with Ireland, the translator made his own additions to the text and thus he writes ''Ea longe copiosiores equos parit. atque eos eiusmodi: ut n� videant nisi quodam suavissimo incessu deambulare a natura didicisse: ac c� quad� quasi modulatione progredi more regio.'' This can be construed as the first published advertisement for the merits of the Irish horse and was surely certainly prompted by reports of horse purchases of which Beccaria would have heard, as these were made in Ireland in the mid-15th century by the duke of Ferrara's agent. At least it can be said that De situ orbis offers a more acceptable image of Ireland for its medieval audience than that propagated by Strabo and Pomponius Mela who restricted their minuscule coverage of the island to barbarism, cannibalism and incest. Provenance: The estate of Tony Sweeney 1477 DIONYSIUS PERIEGETES / BECCARIA, Antonia. De Situ Orbis - Venice: 1477. A very good copy in old vellum. One of a handful of geographers of the Ancient World whose writings survived through the Middle Ages in manuscript form, Dionysius Periegetes lived in Alexandria at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. He composed his work in Greek verse, and while the lack of a sufficiently wide audience, capable of reading it in the original, delayed printing of the Editio Princeps until 1512, it had already been brought to public attention through this Latin prose version by Antonia Beccaria of Verona. The first edition of Strabo's Geographia had been printed in Rome eight years earlier but this, I would suggest, is the first school geography being no more than a potted version of the original and thus clearly aimed at a less scholarly audience. In translation, it has to be said, it gained as well as lost in that it now contains material of which Dionysius could have had no knowledge. Because of the brevity of some of his entries, notably that dealing with Ireland, the translator made his own additions to the text and thus he writes ''Ea longe copiosiores equos parit. atque eos eiusmodi: ut n� videant nisi quodam suavissimo incessu deambulare a natura didicisse: ac c� quad� quasi modulatione progredi more regio.'' This can be construed as the first published advertisement for the merits of the Irish horse and was surely certainly prompted by reports of horse purchases of which Beccaria would have heard, as these were made in Ireland in the mid-15th century by the duke of Ferrara's agent. At least it can be said that De situ orbis offers a more acceptable image of Ireland for its medieval audience than that propagated by Strabo and Pomponius Mela who restricted their minuscule coverage of the island to barbarism, cannibalism and incest. Provenance: The estate of Tony Sweeney