BOCCACCIO Giovanni Von etlichen Frowen von denen Johannes Boccacius in latin beschriben hat und doctor Hainricus Stainhöwel getütschet. [De claris mulieribus, in German].

Goff B720; H 3333*; Schr 3506; Schramm V p. 18; Pell 2476; CIBN B-516; SI 804; Sajó-Soltész 695; Coll(S) 235; Günt(L) 3061; Voull(B) 2617; Borm 526; Walsh 885; Oates 1151; Pr 2497; BMC II 521 ; Brown, Virginia. Introduction. Famous Women. By Giovanni Boccaccio. Edited and translated by Virginia Brown. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pages xi-xxiii ; Flood, John L. “Parallel Lives: Heinrich Steinhöwel, Albrecht von Eyb, and Niklas von Wyle.” Early Modern German Literature 1350-1700. Edited by Max Reinhart. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. Pages 779-796.

First edition in German translated by Heinrich Steinhöwel printed by the first printer in Ulm, Johann Zainer. Illustrated with 79 wonderful woodcuts by the so-called Boccacio Master in magnificent contemporary colouring.

Written in 1361/2, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (About famous Women) is the first collection of female biographies in Western history, it contains the biography of 106 women.

Inspired, by Boccaccio’s own admission, by reading his friend Petrarch’s De viris illustribus (About famous Men), this work offers a reasoned compilation of the ‘stories’ of remarkable women, both pagan and Christian, whose excellence, for better or for worse, Boccaccio highlights, even if it means drawing the appropriate moral lesson from their ‘bad’ deeds. It therefore features great figures described by Livy, Pliny the Elder and Suetonius, but also by Saint Jerome and the Bible (the book begins with a ‘biography’ of Eve).

The woodcuts, by the eponymous Boccaccio Master, are the earliest series of Ulm woodcut illustrations. They are the same blocks, with the omission of 4 cuts and the addition of one new one, as Zainer’s Latin edition. This German edition is generally considered to predate the Latin edition (published without a date by the same publisher) given the more primitive state of the woodcuts (according to the Catalogue of Incunabula of National Libraries B-513); as the dedicatory epistle is dated 14 August 1473, and the engraving on the verso of f. 138 is also dated 1473, Goff dates this edition ‘not before 15 August 1473’.

Recased in its first binding. Leaves 65, 66 et 97 slightly shorter , coming from another copy.