Description:
12mo (136 x 72 mm), pp. [ii], 138, [4, blank]; faint dampstain in foot of last few leaves, upper margins occasionally trimmed a little close, a few light stains, but a good, crisp copy in eighteenth-century Italian mottled sheep, spine gilt; slightly rubbed, joints cracked but holding, some minor restoration. Extremely rare first edition, fourth variant (variant 'V'), of a classic of seventeenth-century erotic literature, the masterpiece of the celebrated satirist Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–1644). Published anonymously in Venice with a fictitious Cambrai imprint, The rhetoric of whores is a ferocious anti-Jesuit work in which the 15 lessons of the standard Jesuit rhetoric textbook, Cipriano Suarez's De arte rhetorica, are turned into lessons given by an experienced old prostitute to her young disciple.'More than any of his other books, The rhetoric of whores demonstrates why Pallavicino was the only Italian author of his epoch capable of a coherent vision that integrated satire, scepticism, and… Read More