BOOK, Printed by Froben, 1521.

Cyprianus / Erasmus Roterodamus (ed.):

Opera.

Basel, Froben, 1521. Folio. 31 x 20 cm. [24] + 516 + [32] pp. Title within broad historiated woodcut border by Ambrosius Holbein (signed AH top right corner), dedication leaf with woodcut border, woodcut initials throughout. With Froben’s woodcut device on final page (affected by worming).

Contemporary blindstamped pigskin over wooden boards, worn, clasps missing, very richly annotated throughout (partly on loose pieces of paper), three bookplates (John Dautzenberg, Carl Winter / Heidelberg, Lütgendorff-Leinburg). Worming toward end, mainly confined to margins but affecting several words and letters of index, and the printer’s device; last quire a little loose.

With 15 leaves of handwritten annotations loosely inserted.

Erasmus’ second edition of St. Cyprian (c. 200-258), bishop of Carthage and an important early Christian writer, with a dedicatory epistle to Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci. Beautifully printed by Johannes Froben (c. 1460-1527), the celebrated Basel printer and publisher. Froben was a close friend of Erasmus, who lived in his house when in Basel, and not only had his own works printed by him, but also edited Froben's editions of the Church Fathers (including this edition of Cyprian).

“In February 1520 Froben published Erasmus' edition of the writings of St. Cyprian. A folio volume of over 500 pages, it was a marked improvement over the preceding Paris edition of Cyprian in 1512, for Erasmus not only used additional manuscripts to emend the text or show variant readings (in the margin), but he added several treatises not previously published, and he identified and separated works wrongly attributed to Cyprian. Erasmus subsequently produced for the Frobens three revised editions - in November 1521, in 1525 and in 1530" (John C. Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus , p. 41).

See description.