Æthici cosmographia : Antonii Augusti itinerarium provinciarum

16mo. pp. [32], 353, [135]. Early calf.

The present work was long believed to be the editio princeps of the mysterious Cosmographia, edited by the Swiss humanist Josias Simler (1530-1576), and is followed by a reprint of the pseudo-Antonine Itinerary (first published by Henri Estienne in 1512), with a large index. Of two works then extant only in manuscript, claiming authorship by ‘Aethicus’ – the Cosmographia (a text purporting to represent the work of Saint Jerome, credulously reporting the effusions of one Aethicus of Istria, an otherwise unknown pagan sophist prior to or contemporary with Jerome, but now guessed to be a Scythian-born (?) impostor of the seventh/eighth centuries, from Merovingian Gaul or north Italy) and this similarly fictitious travelogue, with an entirely different literary framework – Simler chose the latter, to which he attached the first title, hence the longstanding confusion. See the extended discussion of the two texts, and Simler’s prefatory study of authorship and attribution, in F. Clark, “Forgery, Misattribution, and a Case of Secondary Pseudonymity Aethicus Ister’s Cosmographia and Its Early Modern Multiplications,” in W. Stephens & E. Havens (eds.), Literary forgery in early modern Europe, 1450-1800, Baltimore, 2018, pp. 74-98.

For an English translation of the Cosmographia, see Bib# 9736983 in this collection.

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