Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555) Author: Olaus Magnus Title and contents | Next >>
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Preface to the electronic edition

This "Description of the Northern Peoples" in the Latin language was first published in Rome in 1555 (MDLV), after the Lutheran reformation had made its author Olaus Magnus and his brother Johannes Magnus, who was the archbishop of the Catholic church in Sweden, go into exile. (Olaus was also granted the title of archbishop.) The richly illustrated volume is organized in 22 books, each having several chapters. Many later editions and translations exist. Read more in Wikipedia.

Google has digitized two copies of this first edition, one from Bibliothèque jésuite des Fontaines in Lyon, France and one from Ghent University, Belgium. Project Runeberg has in January 2012 copied scanned images and OCR text from Nasjonalbiblioteket, Norway.

The initial acknowledgements and index are not paginated in print, but have been given Roman page numbers for Project Runeberg's electronic edition, starting with 1 (i) at the title page. The Norwegian page images in colour have a resolution of 400 dpi. Unfortunately, images were missing of the four pages lx, lxi, lxvi, and lxvii. These have instead been copied from Google at 300 dpi black-and-white. When proofreading, the long s (ſ) is changed into the common short s (s). Capital V and lowercase u (GENTIBVS, naues) are kept, as printed.

Index rerum - Liber I - II - III - IIII - V - VI - VII - VIII - IX - X - XI - XII - XIII - XIIII - XV - XVI - XVII - XVIII - XIX - XX - XXI - XXII - Appendix

This volume was scanned by the Norwegian National Library, from where the scanned images were copied to Project Runeberg. We very much appreciate that they have made this possible and want to encourage other digital library projects to follow their example. Read more about Project Runeberg's image sources.

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