"Vocabularium italico-arabicum". Arabic-Italian dictionary.
4to (174 x 219 mm). Arabic and Italian manuscript on paper. 494 pp., 19 lines per extensum, paginated throughout from right to left. Near-contemporary full leather with blindstamped oriental rosette stamp and corner decorations to both covers.
€ 18,000.00
Manuscript dictionary comprising some 9,000 Arabic terms and their Italian translations. It was formerly owned by the German oriental scholar and Franciscan priest Arsenius Rehm (1738-1808), who lived in Cairo between 1769 and 1776, building a large collection of manuscripts, which he brought with him when he worked for some time at the Franciscan abbey of Frauenberg at Fulda, Hesse. After his death his collection remained at the monastery until it was purchased by the Benedictine Abbey of St Boniface (Munich) in 1852. The present volume, which had not been part of the collection proper, remained in Frauenberg, whose library was dispersed in 2021 by the Franciscan Province. "The library includes a fairly extensive Arabic dictionary of his, though not written by him. It offers only the Italian translation of the Arabic words. In the Arabic style it begins, from our perspective, at the end" (cf. Bihl).
Old stamps of the Frauenberg Abbey library on the final leaf, with attribution to Arsenius Rehm in indelible pencil (ca. 1900).
Binding somewhat rubbed and scuffed; remains of old spine labels. Interior shows only occasional light staining; very well preserved.
Michael Bihl, Geschichte des Franziskanerklosters Frauenberg (Fulda, 1907), p. 137.