Epitoma Chyromantico di Patritio Tricasso da Cerasari Mantouano:

by TRICASSO, Patricio

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Book Description

Venice: Agostino de Bindoni, 1538. Second Italian edition. Octavo (6 x 4 inches). [1-7] 8-344 pp. A-X8, Y4. Complete. With seventy-eight full page illustrations of palms, a large woodcut illustration on title and woodcut illustration of a teacher on the verso. Printer's device of a bull on the colophon. Contemporary vellum with manuscript spine lettering. Contemporary jottings on front endpaper. Light browning and foxing throughout. Title page a little dust soiled but, overall, a very clean and tight copy in a contemporary binding. A scarce and important title with only four copies located by OCLC and no copies appearing at auction in the last twenty-five years. Tricasso, Dominican and mathematician (d. 1550), based his work, first published in 1522, on the writings of Aristotle and other ancient writers. Together with other works on chiromancy, his writings were placed on the Index by Paul VI in 1559. "It is perhaps just as well to make a short historical and cultural deviation at this point to say something about the practice of chiromancy within the Jewish communities of Europe. The practice of chiromancy within Judaism seems to appear first within Merkabah mysticism, the esoteric theosophy of the Jewish tradition that, many centuries later, gave birth to the cabala. Cabalistic teachings themselves seem to have begun to flourish from about the twelfth century onwards, achieving currency within Spain and the Provence area of France by the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Merkabah mystics originally utilised chiromancy as a means of ascertaining whether a man was fit to receive esoteric teachings. Their approach took the form of looking for mystical signs and symbols by looking into the palms for sacred letters of the Hebrew script formed by the lines of the hands themselves. We can see that both the esoteric context and the esoteric content of this practice reveals how much Hebrew chiromancy was bound up with cabalistic teaching. Cabalistic teachings flourished within Judaism in Europe especially in the period between 1500 and 1800 and had a strong influence within sixteenth century France and Italy and seventeenth century England. Indeed, even a Christian version of the cabala was created by the Italian scholar Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494). By the sixteenth century, several cabalists had made specific attempts to correlate chiromancy with the teachings of the cabala, in the same way that European chiromancers were correlating chiromancy with astrology at this time. The text by Joseph ibn Sayah 'Even sha Shoham' published in Jerusalem in 1538 and the work 'Sefer Hanokh' by Rabbi Gedalia ibn Yahya of 1570 are explicit attempts to synthesise the teachings of the cabala with the practice of chiromancy. In addition to these primary texts, other Hebrew books on chiromancy were printed during the sixteenth century, summarising the approach taken in the Latin, Italian, German and French chiromancies that we have been considering. This again shows some point of contact between these different intellectual traditions and reveals at least some mutual impact and exchange of influence. That this was the case is reflected in the fact that at least some Jewish chiromancy was in line with European thinking in utilising Hellenistic astrological symbolism. However, it would also seem that the European chiromant's practice of looking in the palm for symbolic letters is a direct transmission from the Jewish tradition of handreading. For whereas this approach has an eminent feasibility in the context of the ideographic form of the Hebrew script, it is hard to see how this method would have been developed by European minds alone, given the non-amenability of Romanised script for such an endeavour! The practice of looking for symbolic letters in the lines of the palm, such as we saw in some of the early manuscripts and in the writings of authors like Tricasso, seems to have derived wholly from Jewish, and hence cabalistic, traditions of chiromancy. Caillet 10830. STC Italian, p. 680. 

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