LICETI, Fortunio De natura primo-movente libri duo: in quibus ex Aristotelis doctrina diligenter ostenditur Primi-Moventis nomen & rationem proprie convenire finali caussae generatim, coelo seu mundo, intelligentiae cuique coelo assistenti, ac summo Deo... Padua, Giulio Crivellari, 1634
4to (198 x 144 mm), pp [xvi] 193 [7], with Liceti’s woodcut emblem on title; a fine, crisp copy in contemporary Italian vellum, old stamp of the Propaganda Fide on title and later bookseller’s stamp. £1750
First edition of Liceti’s treatise on the primum mobile of Aristotle, published in response to the subversive ‘modern’ ideas concerning the origin of movement in the universe such as Galileo’s Dialogo 1632.
Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657), a friend and adversary of Galileo, was an Aristotelian university man ‘“of great reputation” (as one can read in [Galileo’s] Dialogue), the great teratologist, professor of philosophy and medicine at the University of Bologna. Professor Liceti had an incomparable intellectual grounding in medicine, literary and archaeological erudition, and astronomy and natural philosophy. He knew a good twenty-two hypotheses on comets and all the theories of Aristotle’s commentators on the nature of light...’ (Redondi, Galileo: heretic pp 20-21).
NUC: DNLM CtY NN; OCLC adds Harvard
£1750
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