Cassinensis's Liber isagogicus

Cassinensis's Liber isagogicus
Uldericus Scinzenzeler, 1494
CASSINENSIS, Samuel (d. c.1515). Liber isagogicus. Edited by Franciscus Ruerus. Milan: Uldericus Scinzenzeler, 22 April 1494.

First and only edition of a Franciscan friar’s illustrated commentary on the logical works of Aristotle and Duns Scotus. The elaborate diagrams into which Samuel Cascini organizes the tools of Aristotelian logic obviously owe something to the works of Ramon Lull (himself influenced by the neo-platonist works of Scotus), whose Ars magna took the form of combinatory figures and his famous graphic arbor scientiae. “Beautifully introspective into Scotus’s doctrine and the Aristotelian problems of logic” (Dumitriu), this work is an important witness to an underappreciated aspect of the history of Aristotle in the Renaissance. Giuseppe Sassi writes that his dialogic method of teaching logic was innovative and easy to understand. No copies recorded at auction; not in the Bavarian State Library and only three other American copies in ISTC. HCR 4567; BMC VI 768; IGI 2550; Goff S-118; ISTC is00118000; Sassi, Historia literario-typographica mediolanensis 371-4. See also Charles Lohr, “Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors C,” in Renaissance Quarterly 28.4 (1975) and Anton Dumitriu, History of Logic (1977).

Chancery quarto (203 x 143mm). 80 leaves (of 82, without final two blanks). Elaborate woodcut diagrams, woodcut initials, woodcut device on final leaf (some spotting to final leaf, old paper patch in margin). 18th-century stiff vellum.