Italian as a Foreign Language, Wittenburg, 1593
Horae Recreationis, sive Facetiarum et Apophtegematum Centuriae II. In usum inclyta Academia Witebergenis Italice discit, collect à Catharino Dulci.
Witeberg [i.e., Wittenberg]: Ex Officina Cratoniana, 1593.
Price: $750.00
About the item
Interleaved. A-C8 D1. INCOMPLETE, with 25 leaves only (of 40); lacking D2 through F8. 1 vols. 12mo. Italian as a Foreign Language, Wittenburg, 1593. Vellum, new endpapers. Bookplate. One interleaf bears manuscript translations into French of two of the anecdotes, in what appears to be an 17th- or early 18th-century hand. USTC 620617; not in Hunt.
Item #237686
Rare collection of sayings, anecdotes and jokes written and compiled from Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1589) by Catharinus Dulcis, for young students of Italian. Dulcis was an itinerant scholar of languages, and evidently the first professor of French and Italian at the University of Marburg, who published this work during a sojourn in Wittenburg in the 1590s. OCLC only records two copies––at the University of Leipzig, and the University of Jena–– and a thorough search of online catalogues throughout Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, and France, and Switzerland, turns up only one other copy, at the University of Gotha, of this peculiar and very interesting book - presumably the first by Dulcis - printed in Wittenberg, whose university provided a home to Martin Luther and Philip Melanchton - and where Prince Hamlet himself studied before returning to Elsinore upon his father's death. The dedicatee of Dulcis' little book makes this Danish-Wittenburg connection all the more intriguing: Dulcis dedicates his book to the learned nobleman, Doctor Holger Rosenkrantz, of Denmark.
Albeit incomplete, a rare and fascinating book.
