De magnete, seu rota perpetui motus, libellus.
Augsburg: [Philipp Ulhart the Elder], 1558. First edition, of the greatest rarity, of the earliest European treatise on magnetism — written in 1269 but not published until 1558, more than four decades before William Gilbert’s De Magnete and more than three centuries before the science it inaugurated was joined to electricity. A wonderful copy in an exquisite, strictly contemporary dated binding, bound with three rare sixteenth-century works on astronomy and astrology to form a sammelband of exceptional coherence. Couched as a letter to a friend in Picardy, dated 8 August 1269 from the siege of Lucera in southern Italy, the Epistola de Magnete of Petrus Peregrinus is the first systematic investigation of the properties of the lodestone, the first use of the term polus for the magnetic pole, and the first description of the pivoted compass needle — the instrument that made oceanic navigation possible. Roger Bacon, who had known Peregrinus personally at Paris, praised him in the Opus Tertium as the only man of the age who deserved real credit for experimental investigation. Dibner, in Heralds of Science (no. 52), recorded twenty surviving copies. RBH lists no copy since Honeyman in 1978 (lot 2447, £11,000 to Quaritch — for comparison, the Honeyman sale’s three copies of the first edition Principia made £12,500, £8,000, and £7,000). Almost nothing is known of Peregrinus’s life beyond what can be inferred from the letter. He studied probably at the University of Paris and graduated with the highest scholastic honours; his surname comes from the village of Maricourt in Picardy, and the appellation Peregrinus (Pilgrim) from a journey to the Holy Land as part of a crusading expedition. In 1269 he was serving in the engineering corps of the French army besieging Lucera, which had revolted from the authority of Charles of Anjou, and was assigned to fortify the camp, lay mines, and construct engines for projecting stones and fireballs. It was in the midst of these warlike preoccupations that he conceived the idea of a mechanism to keep an astronomical sphere in uniform rotation — a project that led him, through the problem of the driving motor, to the systematic investigation of the lodestone. He hastened to communicate his findings to a friend at home, one Sigerus de Foucaucourt; that the friend was not a man learned in the sciences is a fortunate circumstance, since it produced the lucid and methodical exposition that Peregrinus might not have thought necessary for a more expert audience. The Lucera siege of 1268–69, in which Peregrinus served, is itself a notable historical setting. Lucera, in Apulia, had been since 1224 the seat of a transplanted Saracen colony established there by Frederick II as a counterweight to papal power in southern Italy; after Frederick’s death the colony continued under his Hohenstaufen successors, and after the defeat of Manfred at Benevento in 1266 it became one of the last redoubts of resistance to Charles of Anjou’s consolidation of the Kingdom of Naples. The 1268 revolt of the Saracen garrison was the proximate cause of the siege at which Peregrinus wrote, and the city would fall to Charles in August 1269, just days after the date of the letter; the Muslim community would be definitively destroyed in 1300 by Charles II. That so foundational a text of medieval European science was composed in the engineering camp of a thirteenth-century Apulian siege, addressed by an Angevin engineer to a Picardian friend, is a small but striking instance of the way in which the technical knowledge of the age was carried by the practical professions across the political boundaries of the medieval world. The letter is divided into two parts. Part I, in ten chapters, is theoretical. Peregrinus describes how to identify the poles of a lodestone by placing a needle at various points on its surface and tracing the lines of convergence — the first explicit description of what a modern physicist would call a field mapping. He establishes that like poles repel and unlike attract; that a broken magnet produces two new magnets, each with its own north and south pole; that a lodestone floating in a vessel of water will orient itself along the north-south meridian and return to that orientation whenever forcibly displaced; and that the attractive power of a lodestone can be transmitted to iron by contact, magnetising the iron so that it behaves as a magnet in its own right. He further shows that the polarity of a magnetised needle is reversible: if the north pole of a lodestone is brought into contact with the north pole of a needle, it converts the latter to a south pole. These observations, formulated as explicit rules and verified by experiment, constitute the foundation of the science of magnetism, and every one of them remained valid when Gilbert returned to the subject in 1600. Peregrinus’s inquiry into the source of magnetic force (chapter 10) reveals the limits of thirteenth-century natural philosophy. He correctly rejects the popular belief that mines of lodestone in northern regions cause the compass needle to point north — pointing out that lodestone is found in many parts of the world, that the polar regions are uninhabitable, and that a magnet orients to the south as well as the north. But in place of the earthly explanation he substitutes a celestial one: the poles of a magnet receive their virtue from the celestial poles, and every part of a spherical lodestone corresponds to the part of the celestial sphere that lies above it. To test this claim, he proposes the construction of a spherical magnet mounted on pivots at its poles and aligned with the meridian, which, if the celestial hypothesis is correct, should commence to rotate on its axis in imitation of the daily motion of the heavens — a perpetual clock driven by the cosmos. The experiment could not work, but the reasoning that led to it — the formulation of a testable prediction from a theoretical hypothesis — is recognisably that of the experimental method, centuries before Bacon (Francis, not Roger) codified it. Part II, in three chapters, is practical. Peregrinus describes three magnetic instruments. The first is a floating compass considerably improved over those then in use: an oval lodestone encapsulated in a wooden case, floated on water in a vessel whose rim is divided into four quadrants of ninety degrees each, with a sighting rule carrying perpendicular pins at either end. With this instrument — perhaps the first mariner’s compass with graduated divisions — not only could the direction of a ship be determined but also the azimuth of the sun, moon, and stars. The second is a dry, pivoted compass: a magnetised iron needle mounted on an axis inside an enclosed vessel with a transparent lid on which the cardinal points and ninety-degree divisions are marked. This is the first known description of such an instrument, and it became the standard mariner’s compass. The third is the perpetual-motion wheel: a toothed wheel positioned so that each tooth is alternately attracted by the north pole and repelled by the south pole of an oval magnet, maintaining continuous rotation. The device could not work, but the attempt to harness magnetic force for mechanical purposes is significant in the history of engineering. The Epistola circulated in manuscript for nearly three centuries; at least thirty-one manuscript copies survive, attesting to its popularity in the Middle Ages. A partial first printing appeared in 1520 embedded in Raimundus Lullus’s De secretis naturae, but it omitted the most important chapters and supplied no illustrations. The full text would have to wait another thirty-eight years for the Augsburg edition before us. Meanwhile, the Epistola did not escape Gilbert, who cites Peregrinus by name in the De Magnete and draws upon him to build his own empirical rules of magnetic polarity and induction. The Jesuit writers Cabeus (Philosophia Magnetica, 1629) and Kircher (De Arte Magnetica, 1641) also knew and cited it. Less honourably, Jean Taisnier transferred a great part of the text verbatim to his own De Natura Magnetis (1562) without a word of acknowledgment — a plagiarism that went undetected long enough for Taisnier to acquire considerable celebrity, which testifies, as later commentators observed, to the meritorious character of the work he unscrupulously copied. The text was first brought to print in full by the Lindau physician Achilles Pirmin Gasser (1505–1577), famous for contributing the preface to Georg Joachim Rheticus’s Narratio Prima of 1540, the first published account of the Copernican heliocentric theory. Gasser was a major scientific intermediary of the Reformation period — the friend and correspondent of Melanchthon, of Jakob Milich, of the elder Ramus, and of the Augsburg humanists around Hieronymus Wolf — and his editorial activity is one of the underappreciated channels through which medieval Latin scientific manuscripts entered the world of printed scientific literature. His introduction to the Peregrinus, dedicated to Emperor Ferdinand I, discusses Magellan’s circumnavigation, the history of Arab and Western seafaring, and the benefits of the marine compass for navigation and future exploration. The four woodcuts illustrating Peregrinus’s instruments — the floating compass, the pivoted compass, the perpetual-motion wheel, and the spherical lodestone — were commissioned by Gasser for this edition and supply the first printed images of the apparatus that Peregrinus had described in 1269. The relation between Peregrinus and Roger Bacon is one of the more pleasing minor mysteries of thirteenth-century intellectual history. Bacon, writing in the Opus Tertium some three years after the date of the Epistola, mentions a single anonymous master of experimental philosophy whose researches in mathematics, alchemy, optics, and the lodestone he praises in the highest terms; the description has long been identified with Peregrinus, and the implication is that the two men knew one another at Paris, perhaps when Bacon was in residence there in the 1240s and 1250s. Bacon’s judgement that this unnamed master was the only contemporary to deserve real credit for experimental work is, if accepted, a contemporary endorsement of the highest order, and gives the Epistola a place in the prehistory of scientific method that is both retrospectively obvious and freshly impressive each time the text is read. Provenance: (1) Johannes Delicasius (Theilenkäs) (1513–1563), from Pozsony near Pressburg (now Pezinok near Bratislava), who enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1513, obtained his doctorate in civil law at Ingolstadt in 1549, and served as vicar general and canon of the Regensburg Cathedral Chapter — his blindstamp on the upper cover (dated 1561) and full page of annotations in what is probably his hand. Delicasius was a close friend of the historian Aventinus. (2) Manó Wagner (1857–1929), city councillor in Pest and Hungarian Royal Chief Advisor, with his library stamp on the title page and shelfmark label inside the upper cover. (3) Dr Eszter Tóth (1948–2022), Hungarian physicist and educator who worked with the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner in the 1980s and was in close contact with Edward Teller in the 1990s; acquired by the previous owner directly from her descendants. The sammelband preserves three additional sixteenth-century rarities, each of considerable interest in its own right. Al-Qabisi (Alchabitius), ed. Valentinus Naibod, Enarratio elementorum astrologiae, Cologne, Heirs of Arnold Birckmann, 1560: first edition of Naibod’s commentary on al-Qabisi’s al-Madkhal, the most influential medieval textbook of genethlialogy — the astrological science of casting nativities. Al-Qabisi flourished in Aleppo in the mid-tenth century; his al-Madkhal was translated into Latin by Joannes Hispalensis in 1144 and, together with the writings of Abu Ma’shar and Sacrobosco’s Sphaera, served as Europe’s authoritative introduction to astrology from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Naibod (1523–1593), professor of mathematics at Cologne and Erfurt, supplied a commentary relying on Ptolemy, Bonatti, and Regiomontanus; the work was banned by the Catholic Church. RBH lists three copies. Masha’allah ibn Athari, De elementis et orbibus coelestibus, Nuremberg, Johann Montanus and Ulrich Neuber, 1549: the most complete edition of this introduction to astronomy by the eighth-century Persian Jewish astrologer and astronomer Masha’allah, combining Peripatetic physics, Ptolemaic planetary theory, and astrology in a manner that suggests the influence of the Harranian school to which al-Kindi and Abu Ma’shar were also attracted. Masha’allah postulated a ten-orb universe rather than the Aristotelian eight or the medieval nine, and illustrated his ideas with comprehensible diagrams aimed at the lay reader. The Latin translation is by Gerard of Cremona; RBH lists two copies in the last half-century. Abu Ali al-Khayyat (Albohali), ed. Joachim Heller, De Iudiciis Nativitatum, Nuremberg, Johann Montanus and Ulrich Neuber, 1549: first edition (second issue; first, 1546) of the book on nativities by the Arabian astrologer Abu Ali al-Khayyat (c. 770–835), a pupil of Masha’allah, translated into Latin by John of Seville in 1153. The work is in the mainstream of the Arabian astrological tradition, emphasising the Lord of the Time, triplicity rulers, house rulers, and concurrent use of special parts for judgement of specific matters. Edited by Joachim Heller, Nuremberg’s official calendar writer in the 1550s, with a dedicatory letter to Melanchthon. RBH lists three copies of the first issue, none of the second. The four works form a coherent thematic ensemble. Three of them are foundational texts of the medieval Arab astrological and astronomical tradition reaching its sixteenth-century European reception; the fourth is the first European treatise of experimental physics, written by a thirteenth-century French engineer who acknowledges no Arab source but must, as a Paris graduate of the period, have been familiar with the same intellectual stratum. The contemporary collector who assembled the volume at Augsburg or Pezinok in the early 1560s gathered, in effect, the textual underpinning of the science of physics in its Mediterranean and Latin western forms at the moment when the great revisions of the Copernican century were beginning to displace it. Peregrinus’s letter stands at the head of what remained, for nearly six hundred years, an independent natural science. Magnetism was joined to electricity only in 1820, when Ørsted observed that a current in a wire deflects a compass needle, and to light only in 1865, when Maxwell identified light as an electromagnetic wave. The two other foundational texts in that long-deferred unification are Huygens’s Traité de la lumière of 1690 and Galvani’s De viribus electricitatis of 1791. Faraday’s experimental researches in the 1830s, building on the work of Ørsted and Ampère, would supply the empirical bridge from the static magnetism of Peregrinus and Gilbert to the dynamic electromagnetism of Maxwell, but the kinematics of static magnetic interaction, as set down by Peregrinus in 1269, remained the foundation on which the entire later science was built. That the original printed text of so consequential a work has come down through five and a half centuries in only a small handful of copies is a measure of the bibliographical rarity that distinguishes the present volume. References: [Epistola] Wheeler Gift 46 — Dibner, Heralds of Science 52 — Sarton II, 1030–32 — Honeyman 2447 — Norman 1691 — VD 16, P 1885 — Smith, ‘Petrus Peregrinus’ Epistola: The beginning of experimental studies of magnetism in Europe’, Earth-Science Reviews 6 (1970), pp. A11–A18 — [Libellus Isagogicus] VD 16, N 14 — Houzeau and Lancaster 4882 — [De elementis] VD 16, ZV 10470 — Houzeau and Lancaster 1121 — [De iudiciis] VD 16, A 58. 4to (199 × 152 mm), pp. [56], with a heraldic woodcut border to the title-page and four half- to full-page woodcuts in the text showing instruments and mechanical devices (insignificant dampstain to the fore-edge margin; the three works bound before the Peregrinus with occasional browning due to paper stock; the Libellus Isagogicus with professional restoration of some old worming at the top of the gutter to about twenty leaves). Contemporary German blind-stamped pigskin over wooden boards with stamped Latin legend on the upper cover dated 1561 (lacking the clasps; extremities only slightly rubbed). A wonderful copy of an extremely rare and important book, in a strictly contemporary dated binding.
Item #6212
Price: $400,000.00
