Descriptiones, quotquot extant, regionum atque locorum

Key Properties

Author: Paolo Giovio (Paulus Jovius, 1483-1552)

Title: Pauli Iovii Descriptiones, quotquot extant, regionum atque locorum

Place and printer: Basel, [Pietro Perna]

Date: 1571

Format: 8vo

Edition: Second Basel edition, issued as the closing volume of Perna’s collected Giovio

Provenance: Waldemar Schwalbe, silhouette bookplate dated 1937

Collation & Technical Description

8vo. Two parts in one volume, the second part containing the Moschovia.

Condition

Later half calf (around 1900) over marbled boards, spine gilt in compartments and lettered Paulus Jovius, later curl-marbled endpapers. Joints and extremities lightly rubbed, marbled paper on the boards somewhat worn. Internally crisp and clean; title page evenly browned with minor soiling; a few early ink and pencil numberings.

References & Bibliography

Cf. VD16 G 2058 and USTC 602783 (the Basel 1561 first edition); Graesse III, 490.

Description

Second Basel edition of the collected geographical writings of Paolo Giovio, bishop of Nocera and historian to the Medici popes, first issued at Basel in 1561. The volume unites his descriptions of Britain, Scotland, Ireland and the Orkneys, his celebrated account of Muscovy, the description of Lake Como, and the treatise on Roman fish.

The centrepiece is the Moschovia, first published in Rome in 1525 as the Libellus de legatione Basilii Magni Principis Moscoviae. Giovio composed it from his conversations with Dmitry Gerasimov, the envoy sent by Grand Duke Vasily III to Pope Clement VII, and it stands among the very first detailed accounts of Russia to reach the European reading public, a generation before Herberstein. Giovio describes the religion, court ceremonial, trade in furs and sables, manners and geography of Muscovy, and famously corrects Strabo and Ptolemy by declaring that the fabled Riphean Mountains do not exist. The 1571 printing carried this foundational Russia text to a new generation of readers alongside Herberstein's enlarged compilations of the same decade.

This Basel 1571 printing was issued, as the title states, to complete the collected edition of Giovio’s writings then coming from the press of Pietro Perna. It was seen through the press by the Basel humanist Johannes Herold, whose dedication to Servatius Iraeneus, abbot of Bellelay, opens the volume, followed by Giovio’s Roman epitaph. The Descriptio Britanniae closes with genealogical tables of the English kings, and the Moschovia carries its own divisional title, likewise dated Basileae M.D.LXXI.

Historical Significance

The foundation text of Western knowledge of Russia. Giovio's report, based on the firsthand testimony of a Muscovite envoy, shaped the European image of Russia throughout the sixteenth century and fed directly into the cartography of Muscovy from Battista Agnese onwards. Its rejection of the Riphean Mountains marks an early triumph of contemporary observation over classical authority.

Provenance

From the library of Waldemar Schwalbe, with his silhouette bookplate dated 1937 on the front pastedown.