Questiones Johannis buridani super octo libros politicorum Aristotelis: nuperrime diligentissima cura correcte & emendate necnon singulis in marginibus annotate...

Paris: Jehan Petit, 1513. ARISTOTLE. Second edition (first edition [Paris, 1489] is unattainable, with only one institutional copy in the U.S.); first edition edited by Guillaume Baterel. Folio (280 x 206 mm.). [viii], 115 pp., (3 blank leaves). Text in double columns. Woodcut printer's device on title and criblé historiated initials. Lettre bâtarde and printed shoulder notes.

Original limp vellum on leather thongs (lacking ties, some light distressing), yapp edges. From the library of the Sokolovich family of Serbia, with old armorial stamp on title. A superb copy, absolutely fresh, with an initial folio in quarto quire of blanks plus all three conjugate final blanks. Housed in a custom brown mottled calf clamshell, gilt-stamped.

Buridan was one of the most prominent scholastic commentators on Aristotle in Paris, where indeed many of his works remain in unpublished manuscript. In the Renaissance, his works were among the core of popular Aristotelian commentaries widely read in Parisian humanistic circles as representing, with Ockham, the logical consequences of Peter Lombard's approach to Aristotle.

Almost all Buridan's works are in the form of commentaries or critical books of Questions on the principal treatises of the Aristotelian corpus, and most of the printed editions represent the lectures Buridan gave at the University of Paris during the last part of his teaching career in the mid-fourteenth century. The present work deals with the principles of political thought and government, and it is thought that this text, edited by Baterel, is based not on the prior printed edition but on another manuscript source.

A wonderful copy, representing the medieval and Renaissance traditions of political philosophy.

Adams B3317. STC French, p. 87. NUC locates only two copies of this edition, at the Newberry Library and Harvard.

HBS 66877.

$8,500.