BOEMUS, Joannes.

Repertorium librorum trium Ioannis Boemi de omnium gentium ritibus.

      [Colophon: Augsburg, Sigismund Grimm & Marcus Wirsung], 1520. - Folio (305 x 210 mm), ff. [6], LXXXI, without the final blank; title within an elegant historiated woodcut border; light water-stain or browning in last few leaves, small repaired damage in title (not affecting printed area); later vellum. First edition of the ?first, or at least one of the first, Renaissance collections of manners and customs . . . . Boemus made his simple purposes very clear. There were two of them. He wished, first, to make accessible to the ordinary reader an already not inconsiderable body of knowledge concerning the variety of human behavior, to arrange it on a broad geographical plan, with the geographical features subordinated to the ethnological, and to use the printed page, as others had employed the "cabinet de curiosités", for assembling and exhibiting the range of human custom, ritual, and ceremony. Second, in the interest of improved political morality, he desired to inform his readers concerning the laws and governments of other nations . . . . [His] "histories" or descriptions, written at about the same time as Machiavelli?s Prince, were intended not only to instruct his readers concerning the laws and governments of other nations, but to make it possible for them to form intelligent judgements as to "what orders and institutions" were "fittest to be ordayned" in their own lands for the establishment of perfect peace. With the ancient customs of the classical peoples spread out for contemplation and comparison, together with those of more recent practice, Boemus felt certain that Europeans could readily decide between the socially good and socially bad . . . . [The book] was an instant success, and widely consulted for well over a hundred years. Some measure of its interest to the reading public of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be inferred from the number of reissues, revisions, and translations . . . . Boemus was read by Montaigne, and may have helped to shape his ideas on the diversity of custom . . . . Moreover, as a collector of customs, Boemus initiated a literary and ethnological genre which has lived on vigorously until the present day . . . . But selected as they were from a scattered body of cultural observations in many ancient sources, this collection of ethnological traits, rituals, and ceremonies . . . throws a revealing light not only upon the concept of culture entertained by Boemus and his contemporaries but upon his idea of the classes or categories into which the traits of peoples might conceivably and usefully be assembled for closer analysis. With the clear intention of isolating major social institutions for inspection, and with some degree of orderliness, Boemus placed special emphasis on divergences in marriage and the family, divergences in social organization, in religions, funeral rites, weapons, warfare, justice, diet, and apparel . . . . The nations most fully described by Boemus were those at the farthest remove from sixteenth-century Europe . . . . Not only was far-off India favored with an amplitude of detail, but his descriptions, reflecting admiration not unmixed with incredulity, reflect also, as in a mirror, the contemporary standard of the socially good, the ultimate criterion of true civility . . . . It was impossible for [Boemus] to collect the customs of mankind without being confounded by their diversity. It was impossible for him to consider the problem of ethnological diversity as though Genesis had never been written. Yet, it is plain throughout that the Biblical solution was not enough . . . . While he refrained from adopting a theory of multiple human creations, with its corollary of original cultural diversification, he allowed himself on more than one occasion to deviate radically from the Mosaic solution. For example, he can be discovered installing the "first men" in at least two different regions. In conformity with certain classical habits of thought, they were set down in Ethiopia, where the gods were "first honoured", and sacred