[Rarebooks] fa: PAOLO SARPI - HISTOIRE DU CONCILE DE TRENTE (COUNCIL OF TRENT) - 2 Folio vols. 1736

[ArCh]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, April 1 (no foolin’). Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y94j34gx

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Paolo Sarpi; Pierre-François le Courayer (trans.): Histoire du Concile de Trente, Ecrite en Italien par Fra-Paolo Sarpi, de l’Ordre des Servites, et Traduit de nouveau en François, avec des Notes Critiques, Historiques, & Theologiques. Londres [London]: l’Imprimerie de Samuel Idle in Bartholomew-Close, et se delivre chez Paul Vaillant Libraire dans le Strand, 1736. Presumed first edition thus. Two volumes, folio (35 cm), in full early/period calf; [2], lvii, [7], 612 pp.; [2], 700, [40] pp.; with the list of subscribers, two engraved portraits (by Vertue), engraved vignette, woodcut decorations and initials. ESTC T136588.
First edition of this translation of Sarpi’s influential and controversial history of the Council of Trent, first published in 1619 and here done into French by Pierre-François le Courayer (1681-1776), a religious exile from France living in England who dedicated the work to Queen Caroline, the wife of George II. The seven-page list of subscribers includes such notables as Lady Mary Worsley Montague, prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, Horatio [Horace] Walpole, the Earl of Chesterfield, the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and “Mr. Brindley, Bookseller.” Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623) was a Venetian historian, prelate, scientist, lawyer, statesman and controversialist, a friend and patron of Galileo and a correspondent of Francis Bacon and William Harvey. His writings, as here, were often highly critical of the Catholic Church and the papal curia in particular. Described by some  historians as a “crypto-protestant,” his writings influenced Thomas Hobbes and Edward Gibbon, among others, and Milton called him “the great unmasker.”
Bindings well worn with all the boards detached; dust soiling to the top edges of the text blocks, light toning and spotting to the title-pages, toning and offsetting to and from the plates, browning and light soiling to the last leaf in each volume, a few occasional small spots, otherwise the contents are very clean and bright. Front paste-downs with the bookplates of the (defunct) monastery of St. Augustine’s, Ramsgate (no other library markings).