Author: POLIZIANO (Angelo):
Title: Angeli Politiani Operoum. Tomus Primus. Epistolarum libros XII, ac Miscellaneorum Centuriam I, complectens.
Description: 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.

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