New acquisitions: Morisot's history of the sea, 1643, and Chatelain's Atlas Historique on the Empire, 1718
Two large folios have joined the collection, both concerned with the way seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe tried to put the whole world into a single work: one through the history of the sea, the other through maps and family trees.
Claude-Barthélemy Morisot's Orbis maritimi, printed at Dijon by Pierre Palliot in 1643, is the first and only edition of what has been described as the first comprehensive book on naval history. In two books Morisot follows man's relationship with the sea from the fleets of antiquity to the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, Gerrit de Veer and Walter Raleigh. The present copy retains all 23 engraved maps, among them three for the Americas, the 11 illustrations of ships and other vessels, and the large folding plate of a Roman naumachia, a staged naval battle in a flooded arena. The title-page carries the stamp of the Chartreuse du Val de Bénédiction at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, the charterhouse founded in 1356 by Pope Innocent VI and suppressed at the Revolution.
The second is the first part of the second volume of Henri Abraham Chatelain's Atlas Historique, Amsterdam, L'Honoré & Châtelain, 1718, devoted to Germany, Prussia, Hungary and Bohemia. Its 39 engravings combine maps, genealogical tables, historical scenes and views of towns, so that each sheet is meant to be read as well as looked at. It joins the Asia volume of 1719, already in our collection.
Both books are described in full, with photographs, in the collection.