67 BAUMAN RARE BOOKS 74CARADOC OF LLANCARFAN. The Historie of Cambria, now called Wales. London, 1584. Small octavo, late 19th-century full brown morocco gilt. $12,500 “The First And Rarest Of All Editions” First edition of this rare and important history of Wales and Welsh royalty, illustrated throughout with woodcut portraits. This work was the first to attribute the original discovery of America to the Welsh in the 12th century and contains two very early references to King Arthur. “The first and rarest of all the editions” (Sabin 40914) of this famous history of Wales and Welsh royalty from the 7th to 13th centuries and the “Princes of Wales of the blood royall of England” from Edward I to Elizabeth. Caradoc of Llancarfan, a 12th-century Welsh ecclesiastic and historian, “was a friend of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who at the conclusion of his famous British History… says: ‘The princes who afterwards ruled in Wales I committed to Caradog of Llancarvan, for he was my contemporary. And to him I gave the materials to write that book… Caradog’s chief work [“Brut y Tywysogion”] was a sort of continuation of Geoffrey’s fictions from the beginning of really historical times down to his own day. In its original form Caradog’s chronicle is not now extant” (DNB). Of “special interest for the American collector,” this was the first work to attribute the original discovery of America to a Welshman (Sabin 40914), with “a detailed account of the voyage of Madoc ap Owen Gwyneth to America in 1170, crediting that Welshman with the discovery of the New World. Montezuma told Cortez that he was descended from a group of white men who had come to Mexico many years before, and Caradoc claims that these were the followers of Madoc whom he left in America” (Rosenbach 19:107). Expert repair to joints. A very nearly fine copy, handsomely bound.
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