Books

[Venice: Simon de Bevilaqua, 1498].. [38] leaves. Eighteen woodcut initials. Small quarto. 19th-century three-quarter calf and marbled boards, spine gilt. Boards lightly edgeworn and rubbed, small separation at lower joint of front board. Bookplate of David P. Wheatland and Kenneth Nebenzahl on front pastedown. Small ink stain in upper margin of first four gatherings. Early manuscript notes on four pages, including at the colophon. Very good. Eighth edition, and the third edited by Barbarus, of the most popular geography text of the Renaissance. Pomponius Mela is often taken as an accurate sum of European geographical knowledge before the discovery of the New World. Mela's text is the earliest surviving Latin work on geography, and the only Roman treatise devoted exclusively to that subject. Barbarus, the editor of this edition, was a professor of philosophy at Padua and Venice. The publications of Mela and Ptolemy were incentives for further exploration, and in particular Mela's…

De situ orbis is an early geographical work by Pomponius Mela, providing detailed descriptions of the world as known to the Romans in the 1st century AD.