Golden Calendar Book of 1526
Stuttgart: Editions Medicina Rara, [ca. 1980s]. Limited Deluxe Edition. Full brown leather, hand-decorated and titled in gilt. Few minor scuffs to leather, overall fine in fine publisher's slipcase. Item #236111
Illuminated calendars did not simply track days and months: they combined sacred feast days with astrological guidance and the medical wisdom of the day. Albrecht Glockendon’s Golden Calendar of 1526 is a luminous survival from a period when body, mind, and soul were thought inseparable.This richly gilded manuscript, created in Nuremberg by a member of the renowned Glockendon family of illuminators, presents the year in poems, zodiac signs, and labors of the months––each page alive with color and burnished gold. Most striking is the "Aderlassmann"––the bloodletting man, a diagram linking the body to the zodiac in order to guide physicians and householders alike in the appropriate timing of humoral treatments. This remains a stunning record of how sixteenth-century Europeans ordered their time, their bodies, and the cosmos.
Here presented in beautiful facsimile, with plates made from the original manuscript. This facsimile was issued in 2000 numbered copies, with a deluxe subset of just 500 (this being copy LII), magnificently hand-gilded in pure gold, representing the pinnacle of Medicina Rara’s output. Among the rarest and most desirable productions of Medicina Rara.
Price: $1,200.00