create pdf catalogue:
bindings
Bindings
Gower is chiefly remembered as a friend of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Confessio Amantis is frequently cited as the origin of William Shakespeare’s play Pericles (who’s story is taken from book 8 of the Confessio) but he should be accepted in his own right as one of the great pioneers of English literature. The plan of the Confessio was doubtless borrowed from the Roman de la Rose, and consists of a dialogue first between the poet, in the character of a lover, and Venus, and afterwards between the poet, in the character of a penitent, and Genius, whom Venus assigns to him as a confessor. In the conversation between the penitent and the confessor the seven deadly sins are discussed and illustrated from Gower’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Ovid, Josephus, Vincent de Beauvais, Statius, the Gesta Romanorum, the Bible, and other sources. In the eighth book, having described the duty of a king and prayed for England, the poet bids farewell to earthly love. The work is a profound meditation on human love and morality and in Gower’s own words in the Prologue it was “a boke for Englondes sake”. The work survives in numerous early manuscripts (attesting to its immediate popularity) and was first printed by Caxton in 1474. Thomas Berthelet’s edition of 1532 is considered textually superior to Caxton. Pforzheimer notes that the “edition was printed from a manuscript, resembling MS. Bodley 294, but inferior in correctness, collated with Caxton’s edition from which several passages lacking in the manuscript were supplied. In the prefatory note ‘To the reader’ Berthelet included the alternative form of the introductory lines Prologue 24-92, also from Caxton’s edition, so that on the whole this edition is textually an improvement over the earlier one. It is also a good example of workmanlike printing much above the average English work of the period” (Pforzheimer). The third edition of 1554 is merely a paginary reprint of the present. The early ownership inscription of William Sotheby is dated 1532. This copy is handsomely bound in the style of Mackinley for the Earl of Stafford, among the richest men in England at the opening of the nineteenth-century. The Earl was himself a latter-day member of the Gower family (he claimed descent in the male line from Sir Alan Gower of Stittenham, supposedly sheriff of York at the time of the conquest). Several antiquaries had previously suggested that the poet’s origins lay in the same place, so this would have been a fitting acquisition for the Earl. see full details...
Though a little younger than the University of Bologna, the university at Pisa is one of the oldest in Europe, with origins in the legal school existing in the eleventh century and fully-fledged in the twelfth century. Its importance to the early history of European law lay in part in its custody of the oldest surviving manuscript of Justinian’s Pandects, which it kept until its was taken by the Florentines at the beginning of the fifteenth-century. Pisa attracted many jurisconsults in the eleventh century (prominent among them were Opitone and Sigerdo) while no less than four professors of the Bologna law school (Bulgarus, Burgundio, Uguccione, and Bandino) were educated there. Borgo, who published a separate work on the Pandects manuscript the previous year (Dissertazione sopra l’istoria dei Codici pisani delle Pandette di Giustiniano imperatore, Lucca 1764), here traces the origins of the university as a law school long before Papal recognition was granted in the fourteenth century. Borgo was born and educated at Pisa, graduating in law in 1726 and teaching Civil Law there from 1731. His life was devoted to the study of law and of the early record of the city and university. see full details...
![[RICCOBONI, Marie-Jeanne.]](/photos/600/main/600.jpg "[RICCOBONI, Marie-Jeanne.]")
Quickly reprinted several times in French the novel was translated into English by Frances Brooke as Letters from Juliet Lady Catesby to her friend, Lady Henrietta Campley the following year. Set in England, the story is told through letters exchanged between Juliette and her cousin Henriette, and recounts the inexplicable abandonment of Juliette by her fiancé Lord Ossery on the eve of their wedding. Through a series of twists and subplots the reasons are revealed and the two lovers are eventually reconciled. A quintessential novel of sentiment, it is frequently compared favourably with Frances Burney’s Evelina and it played a major part in the vigorous literary exchange between French and English novelists of the eighteenth century. Madame Riccoboni, née Laboras de Mézières, had acted with the Comédie Italienne prior to beginning her writing career with an extension and imitation of Marivaux’s Vie de Marianne (1751), followed by her first novel Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1756). In addition to her several novels, she made translations of English novels, including Fieldings Amelia, published in 1762. She was well regarded by Voltaire and was part of the circle attending the salons of the Baron d’Holbach, where she became acquainted with Diderot, David Garrick and David Hume. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (also published in 1759), Adam Smith ranked her with Voltaire, Racine, Richardson, and Marivaux as ‘one of the poets and romance writers who best paint the refinements of… private and domestic affections.’ see full details...
![[VOLTAIRE, François-Marie Arouet de.]](/photos/433/main/433.jpg "[VOLTAIRE, François-Marie Arouet de.]")
