Il Ballarino

The first thing I stumbled upon at Greg Lindahl’s site was his facsimile presentation of John Florio’s New World of Words, a fascinating Italian-to-English dictionary dating from 1611. Florio (1553-1625) was the offspring of an Italian Protestant who had found refuge in England. He is best remembered for his dictionaries (his first Worlde of Wordes was published in 1598), and for his translations of Montaigne’s Essays. It took me a couple more visits before I discovered that this was just one among several works presented by Mr Lindahl: among these is a dance-manual, Fabritio Caroso’s Il Ballarino, dating from 1581, from which I lifted the following images:

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Il Ballerino (1581) is an important source of information on sixteenth century dances, containing rules for the art of dancing and lute arrangements of dance music. An expanded edition, Nobiltà di Dame, appeared in 1600. Although Nobiltà contains many of the same dances as Il Ballarino, many of them have changed or updated choreographies - source here.

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As well as Florio’s dictionary, there is also a facsimile of a Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues compiled by one Randle Cotgrave, which also dates from 1611. In addition to these, there are a few other dance manuals, and sundry books on fencing, music, cookery, brewing and needlework.

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Click on the images to see them enlarged - there are higher-resolution versions of these images on Mr Lindahls’s site.

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Posted by misteraitch at September 16, 2004 01:33 PM | TrackBack