HAWKINS (Thomas):

The Origin of the English Drama Illustrated In Its Various Species, Viz. Mystery, Morality, Tragedy, And Comedy, By Specimens From Our Earliest Writers: With Explanatory Notes. By Thomas Hawkins, M. A. of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Oxford, Printed at the Clarendon Presss, For S. Leacroft..., 1773. FIRST EDITION. 12mo, 173 x 111 mms., pp. [viii], 317 [318 blank, 319 Epilogus, 32o blank]; [ii], [5] 6 - 352; [iv], [7] 8 - 337 [338 blank, 339 ms. "The Epilogue," 340 blank], including half-title in volume 1, 3 woodcut illustrations in volume 1 bound in contemporyar half plum morocco, marbled boards, gilt spines; some minor foxing, very slight wear to binding, but a very good set with the book label of the Weston Old Rectory on the front paste-down end-paper of each volume. The Anglican priest Thomas Hawkins (1729 - 1772) edited the second edition of Thomas Hanmer's edition of Shakespeare's works, which appeared in 1771. The present work appeared shortly after his death; in the course of his research for the Hanmer volumes, he also he attributed The Spanish Tragedy to Thomas Kydd, and the attribution is still accepted. Among other journals, The Monthly Review for 1773 asserted that "These specimens will be very acceptable to a new species of antiquarians, which have lately sprung up among us, and who would catch at a pun of Chaucer's with the same avidity that a learned society would purchase his old shoe.... Mr. Hawkins...has selected his specimens with judgment, and his observations are judicious and pertinent." The Critical Review, probably by Tobias Smollett, embarked upon specific commentaries on most of the plays and concluded: "These pieces were printed off; and nothing remained, except committing the dedication and the preface, already finished, to the press, when a violent disorder put a period to the life and labours of the learned and ingenious editor.... We can only add, that this work appears to be executed with accuracy and judgment." i

John Price Antiquarian BooksProfessional seller

Book number: 9851

Catalogue: Scholarship

Keywords: scholarship literary history prose

PETRARCH

Il Petrarca con l'Espositione d' Allessandro Vellutello. Di nuovo ristampato con le figure ai Trionfi, con le Apostille, e con piu cose utili aggiunte.

In Venezia appresso Vincenzo Valgrissi, 1560. Large 8vo, 216 x 147 mms., unpaginaed, collating *8, **4, A-Z8, AA - DD8, a total of 228 leaves, with register on recto of last leaf, printer's ornament on verso, woodcut title-page with medallion portraits of Petrarca and Laura facing each other, a vignette repeated on the top margin of the verso of leaf *5, bound in contemporary quarter calf, vellum boards, all edges gilt; spine a bit dried, boards slightly soiled, but an attractively-printed text, with the armorial bookplate of Sir Rowland Hill (1772 - 1842) "Avancez," on the front paste-down end-paper, and a name in a later hand, probably 18th century on the title-page, "? Rtapotheye". From The Oregon Petrarch Open Book(https://petrarch.uoregon.edu/apparatus/commentary/14670: "Alessandro Vellutello's Commentary, Il Petrarca con l'espositione di M. Alessandro Velutello, was first published in 1525 and was more successful than the other Cinquecento's commentaries. It was reprinted 26 times until the end of the century. Vellutello's was not a professional letterato as he admits; however, his commentary has unprecedented humanist qualities as he quotes the Latin sources of Petrarch, from Vergil to Horace, from Propertius to Ovid, from Cicero to Plinius. Furthermore, his commentary includes accurate references to the Bible and the Provençal poets. Vellutello's commentary is extremely original as it completely changes the original numbering that Petrarch gave to his poems based on biographical and geographical considerations. He wanted to recreate the identity and life of Francesco and Laura. To this goal he wrote three important introductory essays explaining his new approach to Petrarch's Rvf. The first essay declares the new order that he gave to the poems, Trattato de l'ordine de' sonetti e canzoni mutato; the second is a short biography of Petrarch, Vita e costumi del poeta; finally the third essay reconstructs Laura identity, l'Origine di madonna Laura con la discrizione di Valclusa e del luogo ove il poeta di lei a principio s'innamorò. In this perspective, the first edition of Il Petrarca con l'espositione di M. Alessandro Velvtello includes a wonderful map of the geography of Petrarch's poetry, focused on Vaucluse and its surroundings. Vellutello's commentary was soon translated into French and became instrumental in the formation and diffusion of French Petrarchism. The complete French translation of Petrarch's Rvf by Philieul included in the OPOB (Toutes les euvres vulgaires de François Pétrarquet, contenans quatre livres de M. D. Laure d'Avignon, sa maistresse, jadis par luy composez en langage thuscan et mis en françoys par Vasquin Philieul avecques briefz sommaires ou argumens requis pour plus facile intelligence du tou. Avignon, Barthelemy Bonhomme, 1555) is based on Vellutello's numbering of Petrarch's poems."

John Price Antiquarian BooksProfessional seller

Book number: 9585

Catalogue: Scholarship

Keywords: scholarship poetry literature

POLIZIANO (Angelo):

Angeli Politiani Operoum. Tomus Primus. Epistolarum libros XII, ac Miscellaneorum Centuriam I, complectens.

Luguduni Apud Seb Grypiaum, 1539. 12mo, 161 x 100 mms., pp. [xx], 699 [670 blank], with the engraved vignette of the printer Sebastian Gryphius on the title-page, contemporary (or near contemporary) panelled calf; front joint cracked but holding, and with a recent "Ex Libris" of Gwenc'hlan Le Scouëzec (1929-2008), Breton writer and scholar, "the fifth Grand Druid of our time" (Wikipedia). The Italian scholar and classicist Angelo Ambrogini (1454-1494), known as Poliziano, was, as Wikipedia puts it, "instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance (or Humanist) Latin from medieval norms and for developments in philology. His nickname, Poliziano, by which he is chiefly identified to the present day, was derived from the Latin name of his birthplace, Montepulciano." Anthony Grafton in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (1994) writes that "By treating the study of antiquity as completely irrelevant to civic life and by suggesting that in any case only a tiny elite could study the ancient world with adequate rigor, Poliziano departed from the tradition of classical studies in Florence. Earlier Florentine humanists had studied the ancient world in order to become better men and citizens. Poliziano by contrast insisted above all on the need to understand the past in the light of every possibly relevant bit of evidence and to scrap any belief about the past that did not rest on firm documentary foundations. [But] when he set ancient works back into their historical context Poliziano eliminated whatever contemporary relevance they might have had." Poliziano's works were published in three volumes in Lyon in 1533, though there are also records for volumes 1 and 2 having been published in 1512. The provenance inscription shows this volume to be from the library of Gwenc'hlan Le Scouëzec (1929-2008), Breton writer and scholar. He was "the fifth Grand Druid of our time", according to Wikipedia. He was prominent also in the history of Freemasonry, as, in November 1993, "he united a group of Freemasons", forming a "lodge of the stone, to preserve the masonic forest rites" (Wikipedia). Gwenc'hlan Le Scouëzec was born in Britanny, son of the painter Maurice Le Scouëzec, but grew up in Madagascar and Paris, among other places. Educated at the Sorbonne, he later joined the French Foreign Legion. He was also a fully qualified doctor, and a Breton separatist. Why he owned this gorgeous sixteenth-century tome by Poliziano will, however, need to be determined by some scholar more adept in understanding the minutiae of Neo-Druidism, Masonry, or the movement for Breton separatism. It should be noted that the Bretons are Celts: "Brittany and its people are counted as one of the six Celtic nations. Ethnically, along with the Cornish and Welsh, the Bretons are Celtic Britons" (Wikipedia). Thus the movements and agitations of the Bretons are not entirely unrelated to those of Celts of our time in the British Isles and Ireland. Poliziano's works were published in three volumes in Lyon in 1533, though there are also records for volumes 1 and 2 being published in 1512.

John Price Antiquarian BooksProfessional seller

Book number: 9318

Catalogue: Scholarship

Keywords: scholarship provenance literature

QUINTILIAN.

M. Fabii Quintilliani De Institutione Duodecim ad Codicum Vetrum Fiden Recensuit et Annotatione. Explanavit Georg. Ludovicus Spalding....

Lipsiae Sumptibus Siegfried Lebrecht Crusii 1798, 1803, 1803, 1816 4 volumes, Royal 8vo, 228 x 127, beautifully bound (by John Clarke, the partner of the binder Francis Bedford), with stamp in blind on lower margin of front paste-down end-paper in volume one) in contemporary full purple morocco, with the gilt emblems of the Reverend Theodore Williams (d. 1827) on each cover, spines gilt, gilt dentelles, all edges gilt, and with the bookplate of the distinguished British book collector Frances Mary Richardson Currer (1785 - 1861) on the front paste-down end-paper of each volume. A clipping from either an auction house or a bookseller, probably around 1960, has this note "The best and most complete of all the editions. It was undertaken with such a quantity of valuable materials as no critic had ever possessed, and is published with unprecedented care and industry; the critical marks are so happy and the explanations so apposite that it is generally considered the chef d'oeuvre of German criticism. Furhman." Furhman is probably the German classical philologist Manfred Fuhrmann (1925 - 2005). The German Georg Ludwig Spalding (1762 – 1811) began producing this edition of Quintilian in 1798 and was the editor of the first three volumes. Philipp Karl Buttmann (1764–1829) published the fourth volume after Spalding's death, and there were two further volumes by Karl Gottlob Zumpt (1792–1849) and Eduard Bonnell (1802–1877).

John Price Antiquarian BooksProfessional seller

Book number: 10393

Catalogue: Scholarship

Keywords: scholarship binding prose