Del Palagio de gl'incanti, et delle gran Meraviglie de gli spiriti, et di tutta la Natura, diviso in Libri XXXXV…

First Vicenza Edition, [32], 423, [1]pp., title in red and black, woodcut coat of arms, ownership notes to title, woodcut initials and head-and tail-pieces, title reinforced, slight staining to title and subsequent leaves, corners of first few leaves restored not affecting text, faint intermittent staining, new endpapers, 20th century paper-covered boards with a spine label, 4to (210 x 150mm), Vicenza, printed by Giorgio Greco, 1605.

A rare Vicenza edition of this vast compendium of the esoteric knowledge of the era.

Strozzi Cicogna (1568-1605) studied law at Padua; a late humanist, he devoted himself to poetry and philosophy. He achieved lasting fame with Del Palagio de gl’incanti. The first edition of 1605 was published simultaneously, by four different publishers, in Vicenza, Venice and Brescia.

This treatise includes both ancient and scholastic theories on God, with a Renaissance interest towards Pagan, Christian, Hermetic and Cabalistic ideas. There are many popular anecdotes, and some that Cicogna had heard from the archpriest of Barbarano, near his hometown Vicenza, who recounted supernatural events which had happened to him. The accounts include apparitions of ghosts and spirits, the magic and spells of witches and sorcerers and the most systematic taxonomy of the demonic presences inhabiting the creation and is the most comprehensive and original treatise on angelic beings ever written in early modern Europe.

This was Cicogna’s most famous work. It was approved by the Inquisition in 1605 as a consistently safe doctrine. It was translated into Latin by Gaspare Ens in 1606; the 1607 Latin edition is an exact reprint of the first. However it was included in the Index in 1623. Robert Burton drew heavily from Cicogna’s work for his Anatomy of Melancholy.

[Caillet I, 2373-74; *Bibliotheca Esoterica*, 747 (which lists only the 1607 Latin edition edited by Kaspar Ens); *Bibliotheca Magica Casanatensis*, 307.]