At the top of the page is a decorative headpiece consisting of three rows of stylized floral printer's ornaments (fleurons). Below this, the text begins with a large historiated initial 'Q' set in a square frame, featuring a central figure surrounded by dense scrolling foliage and vine patterns.

PROEM.

What often happens to travelers who, straying from the military road, find themselves lost in a vast field where no access to return to the royal highway presents itself, and no path lies open to reach their intended goal, might be applied in some way to those who have wandered into that most ample and most pleasant theater of wisdom, and who, being mortal themselves, delight in having their thoughts intent upon immortal and Divine things, insofar as it is given to human reason, clouded by many mists, to penetrate them. For these people, deterred by the breadth of the subject, the gravity of the object, and the darkness of the human intellect, hesitate, doubt, and do not sufficiently know themselves where to enter or what path to take. This subject is indeed most worthy of mortal minds, yet it is joined with no small difficulty. For in this consideration of Divine matters (the words are those of Seneca Roman Stoic philosopher, that wisest of the Romans), man leads his mind away from the body and dwells much with the better and divine part, Letter 78, just as Ovid Roman poet sang regarding Pythagoras Greek philosopher, Metamorphoses Book 15:

By his mind he approached the gods, and what nature denied
to human vision, those things he drank in with the eyes of the heart.