The Colloquies of Erasmus are amongst the most famous and widely used schoolbooks of the sixteenth , and indeed, of other centuries. This early edition, which has a prefatory letter dated 1 January from Louvain, is a reprint of the Thierry Martens edition of March 1519, and has at the end the letter from Martens in which he speaks of reprinting this collection ‘from wherever and by whomsoever it is’. It is one of a number of editions printed in various cities in 1519, but this particular edition is recorded by Moreau (1519/2054) in one copy only at Laon. The printer Rembolt had died in 1518 and the attribution to the press run by his widow is based (by Brigitte Moreau) on the type.
The short dialogue by Ulrich von Hutten entitled Aula or ‘Court’ (‘Hof’), here edited by Joannes Ravisius Textor, was first printed in Augsburg in 1518. It is addressed to the physician Heinrich Stromer of Auerbach, and has two speakers, the chaste man and the ‘court hater’ (Misaulus). The ‘vita aulica’ or life of the court has always been ripe for criticisim and satire, and Hutten here lambasts in rich and occasionally course language, the sordid nature of this life. This copy has a few contemporary marginal annotations. At the end is a set of Latin elegiacs by Joannes Ravisius Textor De miseria aulicorum (‘On the miseries of courtiers’) addressed to a certain Hugo Viturellus.
The volume also contains four short texts by Fausto Andrelini (1462-1518), a humanist poet and scholar from Forli, who, established in France at the end of the fifteenth century, made the acquaintance of Erasmus through Robert Gaguin. Whereas Erasmus was to devote a great deal of his attention to work on the Bible and patristics, Andrelini remained very much a neo-latin poet, and whilst Erasmus’s star was in the ascendant, his waned. Andrelini, in addition to editing a number of short prose texts, was also the publisher of Latin poetry, both by himself and by others. He was a member of the circle around the consort of Louis XII, Anne of Brittany, and the poem addressed to her is surely to be dated be dated 1509 the period when Louis was himself was in Italy and after his famous victory over the Venetians at the Battle of Agnadello on 14 May when, as Machiavelli said, the Venetians lost in one day that which had taken 800 years to build. The Epistolae form a series of exercises on particular themes: ‘A friend who is reconciled should rarely or never be trustes’ ‘That the Aeneid is not understood by everyone…’; ‘Avoid the use of antiquarian or out-of-date words’; ‘Do not have business dealings with a woman’; and the like. The Hecatodistichon is a series of elegiac couplets in imitation of Cato’s Distichs, again covering a wide variety of subjects from debtors to pimps, and from types educated at the Sorbonne who may safely spurn the wealth of Hercules to the scatalogy of the ignorant doctor to death, wine and sex (reminiscent of Petronius: ‘Turpis: & est morbi species horrenda caduci, / Quum aiacet exanimis post sua furta venus’). De arrogantias sciolorum is addressed to a physician, Joannes Bartholus, and is an attack on those who have a smattering of knowledge, which they parade, and the whole of this short treatise is precisely of that genre, being full of references and gobbets of information gleaned from all sorts of reading, and written, as is stated at the end, when Faustus was sick.
Although the binding of this volume dates from the early 18th century, it seems highly likely that is simply replacement an earlier binding which contained this group of roughly contemporary and connected texts, all of them printed in Paris. Indeed, the presence of the parti-coloured silk marker may indicate that it was accorded special treatment when rebound.
Provenance: Earls of Macclesfield, Shirbuirn Castle, Oxfordshire, with North Library bookplate and blind stamp on the first title.
