In the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, in two diminutive, unadorned volumes ... a work called in one manuscript De las Propriotas de las Animancas and in the other simply Animanczas was written down in Waldensian, a Romance dialect related to Provencal. The place of origin of these manuscripts was the Cottian Alps west of Turin - a region long inhabited by a religious sect known as the Waldenses. On the more precise date of March 1, 1508, a quarto book entitled Libelleus de Natura Animalium, illustrated with fifty-six fine woodcuts astonishingly modern in appearance, came from the press of Vincentius Berrueius in the Piedmontese town of Mondovi. What might be the relationship between these two works so dissimilar in appearance, under what circumstances were they produced, for what public, and what are their contents? Such are the questions we shall attempt to answer in this study...- [Author]

Language: English

ISSN: 0076-6127