Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Why It Matters for the Hypnerotomachia

The HP's quires are regular quaternions — four sheets folded to make eight leaves each. This regularity across quires a-z and A-G is what makes the signature map a reliable concordance tool, enabling deterministic folio-to-image matching for the Siena copy.

Why It Matters in Scholarship

The HP's quire structure is central to bibliographic analysis of the 1499 edition. Harris (2002) used collation analysis to identify typographical anomalies in the HP's woodcuts, and the quire structure underpins Russell's system for locating annotations across copies.

Key Passages / Evidence

• <!-- Page 7 --> to think.”48 As Augustine says in his Confessions, he did not store his ideas and concepts in his mind as single entities because these resulted “from the action of cogitation, from... [Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Fabiani_Giannetto_Raffaella_Not_before_eithe]
• ... Lascaris’s Erotemata, a Greek–Latin grammar, for roughly twice as much as he paid for the Hypnerotomachia two years later. Goodhart was able to buy the book at a reduced price because it is... [Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Pumroy_Eric_L_Bryn_Mawr_College_s_1499_editi]
• ... from that of Tertullian and Aristides, in that he had little interest in "messenger" dreams, in which the gods would communicate something of personal, social or religious impor- tance to the... [Gollnick (Apuleius dreamworld)]

Source Documents

Avesani et al. (Colonna studies); Gollnick (Apuleius dreamworld); HP primary text; O'Neill (Durham thesis); O'Neill (authorship); Priki 2009 (reception); Russell 2014 (PhD thesis); The_Narrative_Function_of_Hieroglyphs_in; Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Fabiani_Giannetto_Raffaella_Not_before_eithe; Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Pumroy_Eric_L_Bryn_Mawr_College_s_1499_editi; Wright (Alberti and HP)