De uteri partiumque eius confectione
Publisher Information: Strasbourg: H. Sybold.
Bonaccioli, Ludovico (1475-1536). De uteri partiumque eius confectione. Eiudsem. Quonam usu in absentibus etiamnum Venus citetur. Quid, quale, undeque prolificium semen, unde menstrua etc. 8vo. [72]ff. (signatures A – I8). Strasburg: H. Sybold, n.d. [1530]. 156 x 98 mm. Vellum ca. 1530, spine repaired, traces of worming on front and rear endpapers. Minor foxing and dampstaining, but very good.
First Separate Edition of the first three chapters of Bonaccioli’s Enneas muliebris, first published in 1502. The 1502 edition, which was the first significant book on gynecology, is extremely rare. Bonaccioli, who taught philosophy and medicine at the University of Ferrara, was one of the first to write about the clitoris and the hymen, which he appears to have been the first to describe accurately. He followed Galen and Mondino’s error regarding the anatomy of the uterus, describing it as seven-celled.
Bonaccioli was Lucrezia Borgia’s personal physician, and he dedicated the Enneas muliebris—his only published work—to her. “An entirely new composition, [Bonaccioli’s work] was unusual not so much in being dedicated to a woman . . . but in eschewing a therapeutic focus for a more discursive, compendious survey of scientific opinion on generation” (Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine, p. 266). This edition of De uteri partiumque also contains another tract on reproduction, Aristoteles de signis quae puerorum seminis emissionem, puellarumque viripotentiam preveniunt. Leonardo, History of Gynecology, pp. 189, 278.
Book Id: 45498Price: $4,500.00