Rei Agrariae Auctores Legesque variae. Quaedam nunc primum, caetera emendatiora produent cura... Cujus accedunt Indices, Antiquitates agrariae & Notae: Una cum Nicolai Rigaltii....
Amsterdam: Apud Joannem Janssonium a Waesberge, 1674. Hardcover. Small 4to. Full calf with gilt spine lettering and rules, compartments, inner dentelles. (20pp), 360pp, (58pp index), 328pp. All edges gilt. Frontispiece, numerous engravings and woodcuts (some full page), head- and tailpieces, marbled endpapers, sewn-in green satin page marker. Very good. Binding gently edgeworn and a tad rubbed, with spine rather darkened; occasional bits of foxing; lacks three foldout plates. Item #49446
Handsome first complete edition of these two back-to-back texts, entirely in Latin, whose title translates "Authors of the Agrarian Matter and Various Laws edited by William Goesius with the Notes and Observations of Nicolaus Rigaltius...." Van der Goes used as a basis the "Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum" (Corpus of Roman Land Surveyors), a Roman Empire text about land surveying that consisted of thirty-three widely varying writings on land surveying and agricultural law that included such authorities as Siculus Flaccus, Hyginus Gromaticus, Frontinus, Marcus Junius Nipsus, Agennius Urbicus and other notables whose works span several centuries. He employed the oldest surviving manuscript version, the "Codex Arcerianus" of the seventh century housed today in Wolfenbuttel, Germany, and added to it an index, a chronicle on Roman agriculture and other related material. Delightful allegorical frontispiece depicts a Roman triumphal arch (labeled "Agraria") topped by a toga-clad figure leading a pair of yoked oxen, an idyllic rural landscape in the background. Some simple woodcuts depict options for land shapes for surveying land and garden plots, others show surveying and other implements, while engravings depict a range of agricultural buildings, bridges, all manner of tools and odds and ends, many trees and rivers in relation to their castle-like estates, etc. All in all an excellent copy of the one and only edition of a seminal text about Roman law and the resolution of land boundary issues. BRUNET IV, 1195.
Price: $950.00