Prodigiorvm ac ostentorvm chronicon: quae praeter naturae ordinem, motum, et operationem, et in superioribus & his inferioribus mundi regionibus, ab exordio mundi usque ad haec nostra tempora, acciderunt. partim ex probatis fidesque dignis authoribus Grecis atque Latinis, partim etiam ex multorum annorum propria observatione ... conscriptum per Conradvm Lycosthenem Rvbeaqvensem
Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1557.
Price: $18,000.00
Folio: 28.3 x 19.7 cm. [12], 670, [2] pp. Collation: a4, b2, A6, B-C4, D-Z6; Aa-Zz6; AA-II6, KK4, LL6.
FIRST EDITION.
Bound in 17th c. English calf, rebacked in the 20th c. (wear to extremities, corners bumped, some light wear to boards. A very good copy with blemishes as follows: Light marginal staining to the lower corner and occasionally to the outer margin of the opening gatherings, scattered light foxing or light browning, a few inkspots. Light damp-staining to the lower portion of leaves towards the end of the volume (beginning at about p.480), never offensive but with a noticeable tide-line in some places. Last four leaves with minor marginal repairs (not affecting any text or illustrations).
With the 18th-century armorial bookplate of John Towneley (1731-1813), a prominent English book collector, trustee of British Museum, and from 1797 a fellow of the Royal Society of London. Towneley's library was dispersed in a series of sales in the 1810s, and catalogued in Bibliotheca Townleiana. A Catalogue of the Curious and Extensive Library of the late John Towneley, London, 1814-7.
The text is illustrated with 1,500 woodcut illustrations (including some repeats) showing monsters, “savages”, human and animal deformities, plagues, earthquakes, floods, violent meteorological phenomena, comets, eclipses, meteors, the “earliest depiction of a UFO”, and the oft-reproduced double-page image of the ocean filled with whales, sea serpents, and monstrous crustaceans assailing sailors and swimmers. Some of the woodcuts are the work of Hans Rudolf Manuel Deutsch (1525-1571) and David Kandel (1520-1592), the latter of whom provided the rhinoceros woodcut, based on Dürer’s. Among the events for which there exists hard evidence is the Ensisheim meteorite (depicted on p. 500) that fell on 7 November 1492. The massive (280 lbs.) meteorite is preserved in Ensisheim’s Musée de la Régence.
Sole edition of the Swiss humanist Conrad Lycosthenes’ “Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents that have occurred beyond the right order, operation, and working of nature, in both the upper and lower regions of the World, from the beginning of the World up to the Present Times”. In 1552 Lycosthenes had supplemented and published an edition of Julius Obsequens’ fourth-century “Book of Prodigies”. Five years later, he published his “Chronicon”, a work of far-greater ambition and scope, in which he documented (with illustrations) and interpreted every marvel from the appearance of the snake in the Garden of Eden to the birth of a microcephalic child born at Basel in 1557. Events from 1496 (the appearance of the Roman monster on the banks of the Tiber) up to the date of publication make up about 20 percent of the book. The description and image of the purported UFO, seen over Arabia in 1479 appear on page 494. Due to his anti-Catholic interpretation of a number of portents (including the “Pope-Ass” and “Monk-Calf”), the “Chronicon” was put on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. (See Daston and Park, “Wonders and the Order of Nature”, p. 183 ff.)
Human Prodigies (and Shakespeare’s cannibals):
In his opening chapter, Lycosthenes describes various types of exotic humans who either lived in distant antiquity or were said to still exist in the 16th century in far-flung corners of the world. These various groups were produced by God after the fall of the Tower of Babel and the resulting “confusion of tongues”. In Africa there are the hirsute, forest-dwelling Cynnamini, the tree-dwelling Ilophagi, and the Spermathophagi, who lived on fruit, all most likely forest-dwelling primates. Africa is also home to the Androgynes (a race of hermaphrodites), the four-eyed Aethiopes, and the beaked, stork-necked Eripeans. In Asia there are horse-hoofed men, cyclopes who eat only the meat of wild beasts, and werewolves.
The “Blemmyes”: Lycosthenes also describes and illustrates the two types of cannibals described by Shakespeare’s Othello: “And of the Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders.”(Othello 1.3.139-44) The former are shown chopping up victims with meat cleavers and roasting them on a spit. There are also the single-footed Scipodes, the feathered and mouthless Astomi, six-armed men of India, dog-men, pygmies, and more.
Thorndike VI, 489; Garrison-Morton 534.50; Adams W-250; Durling, NLM, 2878; Wellcome I, 3917; Zinner, Geschichte und Bibliographie der Astronomischen Literatur 2177; Ackermann I, 565