Messia, Pietro - La selva di varia lettione, di Pietro Messia di Seviglia - 1555

A volume in 8º (14.7 x 10.7 cm) bound in rigid parchment from the 18th century, spine with label, damaged spine.

10 sheets, including the title page, with a wood engraving in the centre, 348 folio sheets, colophon on the back of the last.
Printing in italics, wood-engraved initials.

Silva de varia lección, originally printed in Spanish in Seville in 1540, is the most curious and most widely read book of the ‘Magnificent Knigh’ Pero Mexía, chronicler of Emperor Carlos I, born in Seville at the end of the 15th century and died in 1551. It combines erudition and amenity with an elegant style. It deals with history primarily, but it mixes fantastic stories, errors, miracles, historical inaccuracies, etc. It was a best seller across Europe. In a second edition at the end of that year it was expanded with ten additional chapters. It was reprinted 17 times in the 16th century itself and was translated into Italian (1542), French (1552) and English (1571). Overall, Silva reached 31 editions in Spanish, and 75 in foreign languages, within a century.

It is an encyclopedic miscellany or mixture of subjects of interest across the diverse repertoire of humanistic knowledge of the time. The work takes material from the Attic Nights, by Aulus Gellius; the Banquet of the Learned, by Athenaeus; the Saturnalia, by Macrobius; the Memorable Deeds and Sayings, by Valerius Maximus; the Inventor of All Things, by Polydore Vergil, the Moralia and Parallel Lives of Plutarch and, above all, the Natural History, by Pliny the Elder, as well as works by Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Good copy, very clean and in perfect condition.