Exceedingly scarce work on the chase and falconry, one of the earliest and most important of those written in Spanish; the work focuses on the laws of hawking and hunting in 16th-century Spain. It was the first Castilian printed book on hunting and the first to deal with its legal and moral aspects. It has here been bound with a work about Spanish law. The 1593 edition of the Aviso is very rare, as we have only been able to trace it in two sales records of the past 100 years.
The treatise was first published in 1543 in Alcala and is now scarce. According to Carter: "Avendano wrote the Aviso to show the Castilian aristocracy its responsibilities regarding hunting. He argued that hunting was made legal by natural law and ius gentium and could be controlled by the monarch only when hunting threatened the public interest". The present work is the second edition, published 50 years later, of which Uhagon writes (translated): copies of this second edition are perhaps even rarer than those of the first. Indeed, Iberian books lists far more copies of the first than the second edition (31 and 8 respectively). An interesting fact about the second edition is that it was printed by the same workshop that printed the first edition of Don Quichote (1605) and has the same printer's device on the title-page.
Pedro de Nuñez de Avendaño (ca. 1490-1560) was born in the province of Castilla-La Mancha. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Law from the University of Salamanca and likely obtained his doctorate at the University of Valencia. He worked as a lawyer for the Dukes of Infantado and was a member of the ducal council. He later became a lawyer at the Real y Supremo consejo de Castile, or the Royal council. His son Diego inherited that position from him and continued to publish his works after his death.
With two ownership annotations on the recto of the first flyleaf, an annotation at the foot of the title-page, and a crossed out annotation in the middle. The vellum is slightly creased and stained, with a few light scratches on the back, the sewing supports in the back have broken, affecting the structural integrity of the binding. Ad 1 is slightly browned, with minor spotting, and a waterstain in the lower outer corner of some of the leaves, slightly affecting the text, lacking the final blank leaf. Ad 2 is somewhat browned and spotted throughout, with some leaves affected more than others, brown stains in the text on pp. 217 and 219, with annotations in the margins on some of the leaves, the top outer corner of the front flyleaf until p. 92 has been torn, without affecting the text, the top outer corner of the title-page has been restored, as well as a small portion of the lower margin of p. 260 and the lower inner and outer corner of p. 361, without loss of text. Otherwise in good condition. CCPB, CCPB000018859-X; Ad 1: Harting 235; Iberian books 58914/ IB 13741 (8 copies); Palau 197084 (other ed.); Porbase 226339 (0 copies); Schwerdt II, p.46; Souhart 354; Uhagon 296; WorldCat 433978856 (1 copy); cf. Carter, J.M., Medieval Sport. In Journal of Sport History, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 1982, p.71. Ad 2: Iberian books 58927/ IB 13742; Palau 197089; Porbase 226342 (2 copies); WorldCat 807886964, 45670188, 82325465 (5 copies).