Livy] Livius, Titus: (Gelen, Sigismund; Rhenanus, Beatus; Glarean, Henry, eds.:)

Historiae Principes Decades Tres, cum dimidia, longe tamen quam nuper emaculatiores [.] Annotationes. Addita est chronologia Henrici Glareani.

      Basileae [Basel]: In officina Frobeniana, 1535. - Folio, pp. 69 [vii] 244, 243 [i] 211 [i] 91 [lxviii]. A single wormhole in last 100 leaves, often touching a character but with no loss of sense. Text-block lightly ruled in red throughout. Title and last two leaves dusty and a little chipped at edges, an intermittent dampmark to margins, a little spotting elsewhere. Modern mustard-coloured calf, spine in seven compartments with raised bands between blind rules, new endpapers. Ownership inscription of Robert Smith (1814) and two illegible earlier inscriptions to title. The summation of the early-16th century improvements in the text of Livy, this is only the second edition of Livy to include books XLI-XLV, following the 1531 edition edited by Grynaeus and also printed by Froben. Billanovich suggests that three editions of Livy (this, the 1531 Grynaeus, and a 1519 Mainz edition) mark the handover of scholarship from the Italian to the Northern European Renaissance, and adds that ‘this edition is one of the cornerstones in the Livy tradition, because Rhenanus and Gelenius were able to furnish their text with such exceptional innovations that until recently it was doubted that they could be authentic’ (‘Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy’, Warburg, 1951). VD16 L 2095. Adams L1330. Schweiger II 529.