Search Results: Authors starting with O from Bernard Quaritch Ltd

Uncommon and significant edition of one of the most important fourteenth-century commentaries on the Psalms, hailed as excellent for its method and clarity and first put through the press in 1491. The significance of this edition lies in the context of its publication. Ludolphus was notable for developing, in his commentaries, the spiritual sense of biblical text. His emphasis on contemplation, and on the affective functions involved in meditating words and events was pivotal in the development of techniques of Christian meditation. Picturing the biblical scene and immersing oneself in it (already championed by Aelred of Rievaulx and St Bonaventure) became a method with Ludolphus, and contributed to the spread of the Devotio Moderna. One of Ludolphus's works, the Vita Christi, was translated into Spanish in 1502 and printed in Alcala, popularizing the method. Only a few years after the printing of our Lyon edition, St Ignatius of Loyola used these techniques in his Spiritual Exercises, published in… Read More

12mo, pp. 35, [1]; a little browned; pp. 13/14 shaved by the binder, with some loss; in full cloth, original printed wrappers (trimmed and reinforced with tape) bound in; private ownership stamp to front wrapper, title and final page. Apparent first edition of Olesha's autobiographical sketch. Olesha (1899–1960) is best known for the short novel Zavist' (Envy, 1927), which was fêted by both Soviet and émigré critics and established the young writer's reputation almost overnight. 'A writer of great distinction, … as subtle – and sometimes as elusive – as the best representatives of that Western psychological school with which he had so many affinities, … Olesha wrote comparatively little …, and when the volume of his collected works was published in 1934, it contained all his fiction. Yet his one novel and the several short stories and plays are a more remarkable and lasting phenomenon of modern Russian literature than the many bulky tomes of more fortunate and more popular Soviet… Read More

First edition, a copy of notable provenance, of perhaps the most successful early Spanish translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, by Pedro Sánchez de Viana (1545–1616), published along with his substantial commentary. In the age of Cervantes (another master of literary transformations), Ovid exerted wide and lasting influence on Spanish literature, uniquely able, among the Latin poets, to echo and clothe in myth and beauty the ambitions and anxieties of a generation of poets caught in a world of deep change. The re-elaboration of themes such as madness, desire, doubt, and self-knowledge in Cervantes and his contemporaries rely on Ovid's imagery and language, and de Viana's translation proved an important cultural transposition. Set out in hendecasyllables in alternate rhyme, the text itself is vivid and memorable. It is the commentary, however, which especially commands attention: sources for interpretation range from classical writers to Medieval scholastics, to more recent philologists including… Read More