DE LATINITATE FALSO SUSPECTA. [with] DE PALUTI LATINITATE DISSERTATIO

[Geneva]: Henri Estienne, 1576. FIRST EDITION. 145 x 100 mm. (5 3/4 x 3 7/8"). 8 p.l., 400 pp.
Contemporary calf with triple blind-ruled fillets, neatly rebacked (using original leather), raised bands ruled in blind, endpapers (said in a pencilled note to be) from a Strassburg incunable, ca. 1470. Printer's device (Schreiber Device 16) on title. Front pastedown with the bookplate of Magdalen College, Cambridge, with their cancellation stamp. Renouard, p. 144; Schreiber 198; Adams S-1763. ◆Rear cover with a group of small (but rather deep) gouges, minor abrasions and scratches to the leather elsewhere, light wear to spine, but the binding quite secure and nicely restored; contents in excellent condition, with just the occasional trivial mark or light dampstain.

This is a pleasing example of a 16th century scholar's portable volume that features the first edition of the first work in a trilogy decrying the fanatical Renaissance cult of Ciceronianism, written by the renowned classical scholar Henri II Estienne. As Schrieber observes, there was during the author's time a "fanatic adherence . . . to the vocabulary and idiom of Cicero, with the exclusion of any words or expression not found in his writings." But in "On Latin Wrongly Regarded as Suspect," Schreiber says Henri "demonstrates that some Latin words, although suspect by the Ciceronians, because they appear superficially to derive from French, are actually well attested in ancient Latin texts." Among those texts are the plays of Plautus (ca. 254-184 B.C.); in the added treatise here, Estienne notes, "the French love the Latinity of Plautus more than any other people do, for in many respects, his speech has greater affinity with theirs than with anyone else's." He emphasizes the influence Plautine Latin appears to have had on the development of French. Grandson and namesake of the founder of the printing dynasty, Henri II (1528-98) was a brilliant classicist best known for producing a Greek lexicography ("Thesaurus graecae linguae," 1572) that was the standard reference for 300 years. His standing as a humanist and his influence on classical studies was recognized by the 2022 printing of nine of his essays in English and the original Latin (Henri Estienne, "On Books"), including an excerpt from the present work. The contemporary binding here incorporates recycled leaves from an incunable, which a pencilled note attributes to "Strassburg ca. 1470." The fragmentary text appears to be a commentary on the Bible..