This copy of Ovid’s De arte amandi and De remedio amoris (On the Art of Love and On the Remedy for Love) has passed though many hands since its printing in 1512. One of the book’s owners has seen fit to add to the title page a warning to the unwary reader about the perils of love, taken from a poem by the German humanist Heinrich Bebel:
In genus omne mali per mille pericula rerum
Scandere non fugiat quisquis amare cupit.
Magnanimum calidae Veneris commercia poscunt,
Non sunt haec pavidis arma petenda viris.
“Whoever wishes to love may not avoid climbing through a thousand perils into every kind of calamity. Boldly they seek traffic with lustful Venus -- these arms are not to be sought by fearful men.”
Bound together with Ovid’s love poetry is a much sterner work: Johann Wigand’s Syntagma, seu corpus doctrinae veri & omnipotentis Dei. Wigand was a Lutheran theologian, and his Syntagma covers various religious topics, with a heavy emphasis on sin. The inclusion of two such disparate works within a single binding is no doubt meant as a joke.
- Tim
Ovid. Compendiosa et uberrima elucidatio in Ovidium De arte amandi et Remedio amoris. Lugduni: Johannes de Platea, 1512 . MU Ellis Special Collections Rare PA6519 .A8 1512