[Dialogus creaturarum moralizatus]

4to (184 x 123mm.), ff. 153 (of 164), illustration: woodcut illustrations, woodcut initials, binding: eighteenth-century half calf, spine gilt in compartments, red morocco lettering-piece, some marginal pencil and crayon imitations of illustrations, lacking *1 (title with woodcuts on recto and verso), A2-3, B1-3, F1-4 and final leaf (with no text but three woodcuts), tears with loss to margins of first few leaves affecting last line of text on three leaves (leaves repaired), other small tears with slight loss (repaired), spotting and staining to some leaves, 2M1-4 bound after 2O4

STC 6815; Gregory Kratzmann and Elizabeth Gee (editors), The Dialoges of Creatures Moralysed: a critical edition (Leiden, 1988); Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Lateinische Dialoge 1200-1400 (Leiden, 2007)

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This Antwerp-printed but English language version of the popular late medieval text Dialogus creaturarum moralizatus is a charming fusion of text and illustration. It stood alongside Aesop and Johannes de Capua's version of the Fables of Bidpai in the early years of printing as a quintessential illustrated fable text.

Composed in northern Italy between, according to Cardelle de Hartmann, 1326 and 1400, Dialogus creaturarum moralizatus is a collection of 123 fables, divided into seven parts (on the heavenly bodies, the four elements, gemstones, plants, fish, birds and animals). Each dialogue serves to illustrate a moral or lesson. It is attributed by one manuscript tradition to Nicolaus Pergamenus and by another to Mayno de Mayneriis (d. 1368).

The first printed edition, a supremely attractive production, appeared in Gouda in 1480, published by Gerard Leeu, and the iconographic influence of the illustrative cycle contained within the first edition is still apparent in this edition of fifty years later, albeit now given a more contemporary and naturalistic twist. One of the BL copies of the present edition is bound with Leeu's edition of 9 April 1491, a much less ambitious affair than his first, and provides an illuminating insight into the evolution of illustrations within texts at this period.

This edition was probably intended as a source of exemplars for preachers as well as an attractive recreational reading book for the laity. Amongst the 123 fables are "Of the marmayde and the lechowre", "Of a beaste callyd rynoceron which despised agid folke" and "Of many creepinge wormys and beastis", and contain two-line rhymed morals such as "A man that to woman his credence wyll geve./Disdayneth a snare him selfe to myscheve".