THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE IN FOUR PARTS: I. His Complete Masterpiece, to which is added The Family Physician; II. His Experienced Midwife; III. His Book of Problems; IV. His Last Legacy.

An enlarged edition, embellished with several fine engravings. Contemporary full sheep. 360 pp. Half title. Frontispiece and seven further illustrations to the Complete Masterpiece; The Experienced Midwife with another three illustrations; Book of Problems and Last Legacy are not illustrated. A good or better entirely unsophisticated example, the binding firm but worn especially at the corners. The contents, with marginal tears to the two pages (133 and 212), the odd corner crease or stain to the blank margins, are otherwise clean throughout. Binder's waste visible to the gutter after the endpapers, front and rear.

A scarce York printing of the four popular pseudo-Aristotelian manuals on procreation, gestation, and childbirth. Aristotle's Complete Masterpiece, the most influential of these texts, was the first sex manual in English when it first appeared in 1684, and was reprinted multiple times throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It discusses various topics, from the purpose and pleasures of sex (groundbreakingly acknowledging women's sexual pleasure), to virginity and fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and 'monstrous births' (exemplified by the woodcuts on pp. 69-72). Aristotle's Experienced Midwife (first published in 1700) was apparently 'translated' (i.e. edited, with some of the text drawn from Nicholas Culpeper) by the self-trained popular empiric William Salmon (1644– 1713), a prolific author of domestic medical treatises. The Book of Problems was a medieval compilation of questions and answers on natural history, with only a few devoted to reproduction. The final part, Aristotle's Last Legacy, first appeared around 1720, and was in effect a digest of the Masterpiece. These texts were all frequently reprinted, but early printings are now uncommon.