Search Results: Titles starting with Q from Asher Rare Books

[8], 44 pp. including the frontispiece.Rare first and only edition of a Latin doctoral dissertation for the University of Jena on the medical use of cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum). The author (Rhein working under his professor Krause) describes the countries of origin, horticultural care of the plant, harvest and the medical procedures to turn cardamom into a pharmaceutical remedy in the Middle East, the Arabian peninsula and India. It identifies first and foremost the neurological uses of cardamom, and presents a number of recipes and methods involving cardamom in the treatment of epilepsy and memory loss. It also elaborates on the possibility to use the plant to treat paralysis. It further stipulates that the herb has a positive effect on guttural functions and the digestive system in case of constipation and flatulence. The specific smell of cardamom, it concludes, can have an aphrodisiac effect on patients as well.With water stains in a few leaves (including the frontispiece), but otherwise in… Read More

[47], [1 blank] ll.Rare Deventer post-incunable of a devotional book on the four extremes (“quattor novissima”): death, the last judgement, hell and heaven. This work is ascribed to Gerardus de Vliederhoven , who wrote the Latin work De Vier Utersten (‘The four extremes’) at the beginning of the 15th century, but also Dionysius Carthusianus wrote on this topic. This work is even, however unfounded, ascribed to Geert Grote. It is most likely to ascribe the text of this postincunable, or at least the very original of the text on which this copy is based on, to Gerard van Vliederhoven. Despite all these ascriptions to different authors, this work played a crucial role in the Dutch reform movement the Modern Devotion, in which piety and moderation are great virtues with regards to Judgement Day. With some manuscript notes in different hands on the endpapers and in the margins, the one on the last contemporary endpaper dated 1598-1600. Also with some 17th- or 18th-century ownership’s entries on the… Read More

[8], 170, [2] ll.First and only Aldine edition, in the original Latin, of all eight surviving books of Quintus Curtius Rufus's history of Alexander the Great, here with the title-page in its first setting, omitting the “r” in “Curtius”, which has been corrected by stamping an R between the U and T. We know almost nothing about Quintus Curtius Rufus with certainty. Literary parallels and linguistic and stylistic evidence suggest he lived in the Roman Empire in the 1st century CE. Curtius Rufus is particularly known for the present work, the only extant extensive Latin account of Alexander the Great written during Roman antiquity and a major source of information about him for Rufus’s contemporaries, but also for scholars in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.The present Aldine edition is rarely offered for sale, confirming Renouard's description of the volume as "rare".With a 17th-century owner's inscription in brown ink on the title-page (“ex libris Dom: de Thomasus”) with some marginal… Read More