Fabrica overo dittionario della lingua volgare arabica, et italiana, copioso de voci; & locutioni, con osservare la frase dell'una & dell'altra lingua. Raccolto dal P. Fra Domenico Germano de Silesia, dell'Ordine de Min. Osserv. Riformati sacerdote della Provintia Romana

4to (205x158 mm). [10], 102 pp. Collation: A-O⁴. Woodcut device of the Congregatio de propaganda fide on the title page. Roman, italic and arabic type. Contemporary flexible vellum. Some marginal staining and foxing, slightly browned throughout, a good, genuine copy.

First edition, dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, of this grammar of vernacular Arabic, not to be confused with an Arabic-Italian dictionary published by Dominicus three years afterwards under the similar title of Fabrica linguae Arabicae. The Arabic letters for this edition were designed and cast in the printing office of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV.

“Father Germanus (1585-1670) succeeded T. Obicini in 1636 as lector of Arabic and as collaborator on the Arabic Bible project. Afterwards he stayed for a time in Persia, and ended his life as a scholar in Madrid. There he left his manuscript of an unfinished Koran translation, […] and grammatical treatises of Persian and Turkish. Dominicus Germanus de Silesia is one of the first to have prepared a new and faithful translation with commentary of the Koran (Du Ryer's French translation, not very exact, appeared in 1647), but it is doubtful whether he could have published it: the Sacra Congregatio forbade publication of the Koran in any language. Marracci seems not to have known his translation when he published his own edition in 1698. Another manuscript translation, by Ignazio Lomellini (1560/6I-I645), which would have been prepared earlier than that of Germanus, was until recently completely unknown” (R. Smitskamp, Philologia Orientalis. A description of books illustrating the study and printing of Oriental languages in Europe. II Seventeenth century, Leiden, 1983, p. 189).

Italian Union Catalogue, IT\ICCU\BVEE\035733; Smitskamp, op. cit., no. 224; C.F. de Schnurrer, Bibliotheca Arabica, Halle, 1811 (but Amsterdam, 1968), no. 67.

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