The work a Catalan polymath, copied and bound in 15th century Tyrol

Llull (Lull), Raymond. Proverbiorum libri Raimundi.

€ 85.000,00

A finely executed, early 15th century manuscript of the great proverb collection assembled by the philosopher and theologian Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1315).

The Majorcan-born polymath Llull was known at the time as "Doctor Inspiratus" and "Doctor Illuminatus" for the visions he experienced (Bonner, 18), or as "Arabicus Christianus" (Zicanelli, 5) for his outstanding, multilingual erudition. Among his many interests, linguistics figures prominently, and he assiduously cultivated the genre of proverb collections, where lexicography and modern cultural studies can be said to intersect. Llull's compendium of Proverbia offers maxims on topics from divine, natural, and moral science, to be employed in preaching and disputation alike. "Most compendia of proverbs from the Middle Ages offer moral adages exclusively, but Llull provides several encyclopedic collections that effectively restate the entire range of his theological and philosophical knowledge in sententious form. In practice, he thus imitates those popular preachers who created their own proverbs or sententiae as needed to embellish their discourses" (Johnston, 102).

The "Liber proverbiorum" was composed in either Catalan or Latin around 1296-99, while Llull was in Rome, and was first printed in 1493 by Pedro Miquel in Barcelona. While the Catalan version has been edited on several occasions, the Latin textual tradition, which survives in some 35 (mostly partial or incomplete) manuscripts, was not printed after 1738. The work is usually divided into three books of up to a hundred chapters each, arranged hierarchically, each chapter containing twenty maxims on a specific topic. The present manuscript is complete, comprising 102 chapters in the first book, 100 in the second, and 62 in the third.

This volume is bound in elegant leather covers that preserve the original brass bosses and clasps. The decorative stamps identify it as the work of the bookbinder Cristan Eriber, active mostly in Innsbruck, but also throughout Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Southern Germany around 1444-62. Eighteen books bound by his hand survive in Austria, held at the Innsbruck University Library and the Cistercian monastery in Stams. Handwritten ownerships indicate that the manuscript was kept at the library of the St. Georgenberg-Fiecht monastery, the oldest extant monastery in Tyrol, during the 17th century. Today, St. Georgenberg retains three Llullian manuscripts, one (Codex 146) with near-identical ownership inscriptions. The present volume was later sold by Edwin Tross, one of the foremost rare book dealers of Paris during the mid-19th century (the Schoenberg Database alone records 114 manuscripts that passed through his hands).