SANTAREM, Pedro de.

Tractatus de assecurationibus & sponsionibus mercatorum nunc primum in lucem datus, cum repertorio & summariis.

Venice, Balthazar Constantini, 1552. Small 8vo, ff. 52, [7]; printer’s device to title; a little light spotting in places, else a fine copy in recent vellum, ink lettering to spine. First edition of a very rare treatise on insurance by the Portuguese lawyer, Pedro de Santarem (Petrus Santerna); it was frequently reprinted in the sixteenth century with Stracca’s De Mercatura and further separate editions appeared well into the seventeenth.Santarem’s work has been praised by many specialists in the history of insurance, calling him the first writer on assurance. Although principally dealing with marine insurance, the work is still of interest in the context of life assurance for the insight it gives into the legislation of insurance in the sixteenth century. ‘Santarem laid down with remarkable precision the principal foundations of the assurance contract: that it is a contract drawn in complete good faith and that it is not a way for the assured to get rich, but only for him to avoid losses’ (preface to 1961 Lisbon edition). Santarem made full use of cases that were considered anomalous in this contract of assurance in the face of Roman law, and which even today are anomalous. Topical also is the determination of the circumstances in which there is or in which there is not the right to reclaim the assurance premium.STC Italian, p. 608; Kress 68; Mansutti 1349; see Adams II, 181; not in Goldsmiths’, Institute of Actuaries, Matsuda, or ‘Utrecht’; RLIN locates the Harvard copy only; not in OCLC.

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