Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius.

Ibid. De incertitudine & vanitate scientiarum & artium… declamatio. [Cologne:] September 1532

2 works in one volume, 8vo (154 x 101mm.), nineteenth-century vellum-backed boards, small paper flaw in 2 leaves of first work in volume, single small wormhole in last 2 gatherings of second work

Henry Morley (1822-1894), biographer of Agrippa, bookplate, who bequeathed it to; Hampstead Public Library, release stamps on first title and at the end

rare second edition of agrippa’s earliest work, about the superiority of women, written to win the favour of Margaret of Austria. Composed in 1509 while Agrippa was at the university of Dôle and shortly before he was denounced as a heretic, it was not finally published until 1529. Invoking great women of the past such as Eve, Pope Joan and Joan of Arc, Agrippa blames only masculine tyranny and monopoly of education for the modern woman’s failure to reach such heights. The first work in this volume is an early edition of Agrippa’s most famous work of the vanity and uncertainty of science, which had been first printed in September 1530.