Devotional Works

A rather tatty copy, unrestored in a contemporary vellum binding, of a learned recusant treatise first published in 1629. Edmund Lechmere was a Worcestershire-born Catholic divine who went to study at the English College at Douai, where he was also known under the alias of Stratford. He studied the course of divinity under the famous theologian Dr. Kellison and publicly defended it on 1st August 1617, after which he was appointed professor of philosophy. After spending some time in Paris where he attended the lectures of Dr. Gamache,he was persuaded by Kellison to return to Douai and take up the chair of divinity, which he held for some eight years. He was ordained to the priesthood in Douai in 1622. His works have always been admired for their intellectual clarity and depth of learning and he stands out among his contemporaries for the brilliance of his controversial writings in particular.
‘Edmund Lechmere astonished his contemporaries with his natural genius, and outstripped them all in the progress he made in the studies... Towards the close of Panzani’s mission to England, the names of several of the most eminent clergymen suitable for the episcopacy were sent up to Rome, in 1635, and, though the youngest on the list, Dr. Lechmere was most highly recommended for his ability, learning, and piety... ‘The works he left behind him,’ says Dodd, ‘are a lasting monument of his extraordinary qualifications, and have merited a preference to all our controversial writers for acuteness and just reasoning’... From his epistle in this remarkably learned work, it appears that the author had long been engaged in private controversy with his Protestant adversary’ (Gillow, Joseph, A Literary and Biographical History, or Biographical Dictionary of the English Catholics, IV, 174-175).
This is one of three editions of Lechmere’s treatise, all published in Douai, the first appeared in 1629 printed by Marck Wyon. The present and subsequent edition of 1640 were printed by Mark Wyon’s widow. ESTC lists copies of the 1629 first edition at BL, Cambridge, Downside, Lambeth Palace, NLS, Bodleian, Society of Jesus Library and Trinity College; no copies located outside the UK. This second edition (ESTC s108397) is more common, well held in British libraries and in America at Emory, Folger, Harvard, Huntington, Union Theological Seminary, Illinois and Texas. Rare at auction, with the last copy we can trace being 1969 (bought by Thorp for $100).

¹ ‘Recusant Literature’, New Catholic Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia.com, 28 Feb 2022, .

A scarce philosophical work by the 'Dutch Socrates', Frans Hemsterhuis, a Dutch aesthete who lavished as much care in the design of his works as he did in their composition. He wrote a number of essays and dialogues on moral philosophy which brought him into contact with Goethe, Herder and and his life-long friend, Princess Amalia von Gallitzin, who did much to strengthen his reputation amongst the German intelligentsia and encourage the translation of many of his works. Hemsterhuis' ideas influenced some of the greatest German thinkers, including Kant, Novalis, Schlegel and Schiller.
As with all of Hemsterhuis' works, Aristée was privately printed and distributed. The printing is typically elegant, the text block measuring 93 x 47 mm, a small and dense block of text within wide margins, in the present copy measuring 167 x 96 mm. The elaborate green morocco binding on this copy is probably by Thomas Van Os, a leading binder of the last quarter of the eighteenth century in the Netherlands. Van Os was commissioned by Hemsterhuis to create bindings for some of his later works, alongside Christiaan Micke, who bound so many copies of Hemsterhuis’ earlier works for presentation. Of the two, Van Os is more associated with the flat spin, as here, in addition to which this binding bears many similarities with the two bindings (particularly fig. 7) by Van Os reproduced in Jan Storm van Leeuwen’s article in The Book Collector (see The Book Collector, Summer 2001, figs. 6 and 7, pp. 215-216).
'So, let this stand as a charge to collect Hemsterhuis', writes Roger Stoddard in conclusion, 'to look more closely at his books, to solve their mysteries, and to connect the careful designs of his bookmaking with the philosophical texts they embrace and convey with such eloquence. This is just a way of asking you to leave your place marker here to honour Hemsterhuis who always provided a ribbon place marker in the bindings he commissioned for presentation' (p. 189).

A charming copy of this scarce and somewhat eccentric work in which the lives of Moses and Homer are compared in an attempt to demonstrate the divine inspiration of Homer. Quattrehomme’s argument is essentially that Homer, with his exquisitely tuned mental capacity and a moral sense not found in other men, must have had a divinity about him. As he could not have had access to the Pentateuch, it follows that he must have been descended from one of the Jews who had received the manna, and therefore had a direct line to that physical manifestation of divinity. He argues furthermore that there was an astrological connection between the two men, even though the absence of an available horoscope prevents his proving that they were born under the same astrological configuration.
‘Pour [Quattrehomme], il n’y a pas de relation historique entre ses deux héros, la second n’a rien connu du premier, mais par un mystérieux décret de la Providence, il s’est trouvé présenter des similitudes frappantes avec lui. ‘Suivant en ce la commune opinion’, écrit il, ‘nous croirons qu’Homère n’a eu aucune notion des livres de Moïse, le Pentateuque de ce temps-là étant inviolablement gardé par les Hébreux’. Cependant, pour expliquer l’esprit et les moeurs affinés d’Homère, ses ‘sentimens mieux assaisonnés’ et son ‘cerveau mieux timbré’, que chez les autres hommes, notre auteur se ‘persuade que quelques Hébreux par succession de temps étant retournés en Egypte, eurent affaire à quelques Egyptienne, duquel accoupiement enfin vint Homère’. Notons que c’est au pouvoir de la manne qu’est attribuée la supériorité des Hébreux et, par voie de conséquence, celle d’Homère. Et à l’appuie de sa thèse sur la similitude de Moïse et d’Homère, cet imaginatif assez plaisant invoque l’astrologie: si l’on pouvait dresser l’horoscope de Moïse, conjecture-t-il, on le verrait soumis qux mêmes configurations astrales que celui d’Homère’ (Noémi Hepp, ‘Les Interprétations religieuses d’Homère’, in Revue des sciences religieuses, 1957, p. 37).
This copy, although it collates as the British Library copy (online at https://dds.crl.edu/page/download/12115/2), does appear to lack the preface. Of the copies listed on OCLC, those at the BN and Trinity College, Cambridge are catalogued as having the preface (BN: ‘In-12, préface, 330p; Trinity College: pp. [6], 329); the copies at the Bibliothèque Mazarine and Princeton make no mention of the preface but may have it (both are catalogued simply as pp. 329) and the Lyon copy notes that it lacks the preface.
The catalogue of Trinity College Library, Cambridge notes that their copy has an extra copy of pp. 241-242 and pp. 263-264 bound in at the end, with the text of the second version of p. 263 having been reset, with the last characters of the first four lines in superscript. This latter piece of information suggests that there must have been two printings of this text, leading one to surmise that the preface may have been suppressed. Internal evidence in this copy suggests that something has been removed and perhaps the title reattached in the manner of a cancel title. Further research into the limited copies available might yield some answers.

A scarce little devotional manual for saying the Rosary, addressed to the Augsburg confraternity of the Brotherhood of the Rosary, an ancient confraternity originally founded in the late fifteenth century. Following the devotions on the Rosary are various prayers, litanies and hymns, including German versions of the Pange Lingua and the Salve Regina. A popular work to aid in private devotion, this was many times reprinted though it remains scarce in any edition. The verso of the title-page contains a printed form with gaps for filling in the date and devotional details of the reader. In this copy it has been completed in a contemporary hand, dated 1828.
For more information on the Marian cult in Augsburg, see Bridget Heal, The cult of the Virgin Mary in early modern Germany, Cambrige, 2007 and Anne Winston, Tracing the Origins of the Rosary: German Vernacular Texts, Chicago, 1993.

A very scarce edition of the Louvain version of the Bible printed in Troyes by Nicolas Oudot, the younger of the two founder brothers of the dynasty of printers in Troyes. It is a small format printing, consequently a fairly chunky book, which is illustrated throughout with charming woodcut illustrations. The BN has a later edition published by Nicolas Oudot, Troyes 1678, which is also the Louvain version, edited by François Véron and revised by Antoine Girodon (Chambers 1453). While this copy has suffered rather rough and ready solutions to maintaining its integrity - no easy matter considering its considerable girth - it remains an appealing object, if not one in original condition. Internally, it is fairly clean and the woodcut illustrations are charming.

A delightful copy of the scarce first German edition of Fordyce’s Sermons. First published as Sermons to Young Women in 1766, the work was an enormous publishing success and became a symbol of proper reading-matter for young ladies. Highly conservative in nature - criticised by Wollstonecraft as insulting to women - Fordyce’s tracts encourage a meek femininity in women and suggest that they should stick strictly to their own domain. The reading of novels came in for particular condemnation: ‘What shall we say of certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful... can it be true that any young woman, pretending to decency, should endure for a moment to look on this infernal brood of futility and lewdness?’. This passage threw the gauntlet down to novelists for years afterwards and the work became a byword for dull propriety. In Sheridan’s The Rivals, Lydia Languish ostentatiously leaves a copy of it lying around while she hides her illicit reading material under the cushions and in Pride and Prejudice, Mr Collins famously subjects the sisters to a reading from it, much to another Lydia’s outspoken irritation.
This is a fabulous copy in contemporary German bindings of green goatskin. The bindings are distinctively gilt with a flamboyant rococo design and were presumably commissioned for presentation. Both volumes are dated at the foot of the spine, ‘M.v.A. den 17 Februar 1774’. Two further editions of this German translation were published in Leipzig, in 1768 and 1774 and are similarly scarce.

An important plea for religious tolerance based on the study of demographics and the writings of Malthus. Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the persecution of protestants, the mass exodus of some 8% of the population had far-reaching consequences. About 100,000 French people left the country, exporting about 60 million livres, which had crippled French commerce, at the same time as augmenting foreign economies and armies. Turmeau de la Morandière stresses the cumulative dangers arising from this depopulation and concludes that the revocation itself was ‘trop étendu, trop sévère, trop précipité dans certaines de ses dispositions’, that it led to hardship in France and prosperity in England, Germany and Holland (I., 157). He argues that the only remedy for France is to adopt a policy of religious tolerance and to allow the protestants to return to France. His reasoning is economic more than humanitarian and is based principally on an an assumed link between increase in population and economic prosperity.
Turmeau de la Morandière is also credited with a rare treatise on the prostitutes of Paris, Réprésentations à Monsieur le lieutenant général de police de Paris [Antoine de Sartine] Sur les courtisanes à la mode & les demoiselles du bon ton, Paris, ‘Impr. d’une Société de gens ruinés par les femmes’, 1760. His focus in this treatise is with the demographic problems of begging, homelessness and prostitution in France. His other works include Police sur les mendians, les vagabonds, les joueurs de profession, les intrigans, les filles prostituées, les domestiques hors de maison depuis long-tems, & les gens sans aveu, Paris, Dessain Junior, 1764 and Appel des étrangers dans nos colonies, Paris 1763 (reprinted 1973).
The first edition was published in Paris by Valleyre in the same year. To begin with it was published anonymously but the author’s name was added at some point in the printing process and copies exist with the author’s name in the either or both volumes. This Amsterdam edition is anonymous in both parts. Cioranescu lists only a later edition of 1768.