Tabulae totius dialectices, aliarum artium instrumenti ...

ILLUSTRIOUS AND EXCELLING IN PRUDENCE AND ERUDITION, the Lord Ludovicus à Flandria Louis of Flanders, Lord of Praet, Knight of the most high order of the Golden Fleece, President of Holland, etc., CORNELIUS VALERIUS of Utrecht, sends greetings.

Decorative drop cap letter Q featuring floral and foliate scrollwork.QUthough the greatest thanks are owed by the best right to the first inventors of the good arts, we think that some gratitude must also be held for those through whose work and study some cultivation and light of speech has been added to the often horrific and too-obscure inventions of the ancients, and a slightly more convenient method of teaching, and an easier one: to which, in our memory, many have striven, each in their own part, to cultivate neglected arts and to clarify the obscure ones with the perspicuity of language. But whether we have brought some light to the art of Dialectics, indeed a famous and most useful one, yet one obscured by many shadows and heavily burdened and impeded by a multitude of superfluous things, and whether we have achieved what we strove for with a great desire for public utility: that will be the judgment of others. Certainly, we have attempted to encompass with a certain clear and expedited method, and with language less troublesome to those who know Latin, those things which in the long books of others