| Summary: | Michael Laird Rare Books description: This attractive and uncommonly large manuscript is devoted to the health and healing of cattle, composed from a part devoted to their anatomical description and a part devoted to their illnesses and remedies. The title is surrounded by an armorial shield, probably made here for decorative purposes because it does not seem in any way to refer to the frontispiece of any printed edition that we could locate. The preface addresses the "benign reader" and declares the author's ambition to print this manuscript. In fact, this preface, the author explains he used and augmented a previous manuscript, unfinished on account of the death of the original compiler, a veterinarian who wanted to "darlo alle stampe" (i.e. give it to the printer), and to have also added material from both ancient and modern authors. The first 84 pages, containing the corpus of the work, are numbered and written by the same hand; the following 4 pages (maybe originally left blank) are written by a different second hand; the Index is written by the author and the last 3 pages (probably blank, containing seven other recipes written by the second hand). Contemporary not identified signature Bartolomeo D. on recto of first fly-leaf. Over the signature a kind of "complaint": Genitor ingrato Genitor ingrato (Ungrateful father, Ungrateful father), repeated twice; Signature Lorenzo Fer[r]aris on the recto of the first not numbered leaf. The surname Ferraris is largely diffused only in Piedmont and this confirms its provenance from the area in which it was rediscovered; Blue bookplate Ex-libris Piergiorgio Borio Medico on first inside front cover. PIERGIORGIO BORIO (Biella, Piedmont) is a still living Italian phsyician and collector of medicine books, whose collection was dispersed in 2014.
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