Hells for Whores, Ruffians, Soldiers, and Ignorant Compositors
DONI, Anton Francesco.
Mondi celesti, terrestri, et infernali, de gli academici pellegrini … mondo piccolo, grande, misto, risibile, imaginato, de pazzi, & massimo, inferno, de gli Scolari, de mal maritati, delle puttane, & ruffiani, soldati, & capitani poltroni, dottor cattivi, legisti, artisti, de gli usurai, de poeti & compositori ignoranti. Venice, Domenico Farri, 1567.
8vo, pp. [xvi], 429, [3 (blank)]; woodcut Farri device to title, woodcut initials and headpieces, full-page woodcut portrait of Doni to a8v; old repairs to upper margin of a6–7, else an excellent copy; bound in contemporary vellum, later manuscript lettering and paper shelf-labels to spine (somewhat rubbed), vestigial ties to fore-edge, yapp fore-edges, spine lined with manuscript waste vellum; a little dust-stained; 8-line ink presentation inscription signed ‘Comes Joan. Lerchenfelde’ to front free endpaper dated Padua, 1 April 1569, short purchase inscription on rear pastedown dated June 1567, seventeenth-century ink ownership inscription ‘Loci Capucinorum viennae in urbe’ to title-page, nineteenth-century lithographic bookplate (depicting the Cross with Armenian lettering) to front pastedown.
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Mondi celesti, terrestri, et infernali, de gli academici pellegrini … mondo piccolo, grande, misto, risibile, imaginato, de pazzi, & massimo, inferno, de gli Scolari, de mal maritati, delle puttane, & ruffiani, soldati, & capitani poltroni, dottor cattivi, legisti, artisti, de gli usurai, de poeti & compositori ignoranti.
A handsome copy of the second edition of Doni’s collected utopian dialogues, with the addition of a full-page woodcut portrait, first owned by a German nobleman studying in Padua.
Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574) addressed his dialogues to the learned society he had founded, the Accademia dei Pellegrini. The first book, containing seven worlds, was published in 1552, and the second book with its seven hells followed in 1553; they were first printed together in 1562 by Giolito, and are here joined by a large portrait of the author. The sixth world, wise and mad, is presented in a dialogue between Pazzo (madman) and Savio (wise man); some of the themes of this section would be revisited by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World.
The title lists some of the categories of people to whom the seven hells are directed: ‘scholars, the badly married, whores, and ruffians, soldiers, and slothful captains, bad doctors, lawyers, artists, usurers, poets, and ignorant compositors’.
Doni was responsible for editing the first Italian translation of Thomas More’s Utopia (Venice, 1548), entitled Eutopia (‘A good place’ rather than ‘No place’); More’s influence on I Mondi is evident, and Doni was similarly inspired by Antonio de Guevara’s utopian Relox de principes (1529).
‘Doni’s novel illustrates that while astrological predictions can be reliable concerning natural phenomena, they are inadequate for anticipating human behavior. The novel criticizes the misuse of knowledge that manipulates moral and political values for personal gain, thereby opposing the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king. Simultaneously, by highlighting the conventional nature of social ideals regarding what is considered normal and desirable, Doni underscores the improbability of accepting utopias’ (Carvalho, p. 150).
Provenance:
1. Count Johann Lerchenfeld(e); there was a noble Bavarian family with this name, and according to the Oberdeutsche Personendatenbank, a Johann Lerchenfeld of Munich studied in Ingolstadt, Tübingen, and Heidelberg between 1552 and 1561. The inscription states that on 1 April this book was given to Lerchenfeld ‘in eternal friendship’ (trans.) by one ‘Leonhardus’.
2. The Capuchin convent of Vienna, founded in 1622.
Library Hub finds only three copies in the UK (Bodley, CUL, Rylands).
EDIT16 CNCE 17713; USTC 827635. See Carvalho, Robert Burton on the melancholic Plague (2024)