HERODOTUS.
Historiae Libri IX: et de vita Homeri libellus. Illi, ex interpretatione Laurentio Vallae adscripta; hic ex interpretatione Conradi Heresbachii: utraque ab Henr. Stephano recognita. Ex Ctesia item excerptae historiae …
Frankfurt, Heirs of Andreas Wechel (Claude de Marne and Johann Aubry), 1594.
Folio, pp. 44, 341, [1], [26 (index)]; woodcut publisher’s device to title-page; small marginal wormtracks at front, some occasional browning else a good copy in contemporary English calf, joints and edges dry and rubbed, traces of green silk ties, manuscript title to fore-edge; large gilt arms to covers of Sir Robert Jermyn (1539–1614), his ownership signature to title obscured in later pen, ownership signature of his son Thomas Jermyn, scattered marginal markings throughout, indexical annotations to front endpapers and marginal notes up to c. p. 50.
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Historiae Libri IX: et de vita Homeri libellus. Illi, ex interpretatione Laurentio Vallae adscripta; hic ex interpretatione Conradi Heresbachii: utraque ab Henr. Stephano recognita. Ex Ctesia item excerptae historiae …
Freidrich Sylberg’s edition of Herodotus in the Latin translation by Lorenzo Valla, based on the text published by Estienne in 1566, along with extracts from the Greek physician Ctesias’s Persika, a history of Persia, and Indika, the first book to be devoted entirely to India, Estienne’s Apologia pro Herodoto, defending Herodotus’ reliability as an ethnographer and historian against his detractors, and the pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer. Sylberg had moved to Frankfurt as an editor for Wechel in 1583 and his Herodotus was first published there in 1584, in octavo. Wechel’s heirs issued a 16mo in the same year as this folio.
The unprecedented scale and comprehensiveness of Herodotus’s Histories of the struggle between Greece and Asia from the time of Croesus to Xerxes’ retreat from Greece in 478 BC prompted Cicero to call him the ‘father of history’, and his narrative, written in a simple and graceful style, still makes engrossing reading. During the Reformation Herodotus was frequently co-opted as a proto-Christian historian – Estienne’s Apologia attempted ‘to demonstrate that Herodotus was himself pious in a manner that cohered with Christian conceptions of god, morality, predestination, and divine providence’ (Ellis, ‘Herodotus magister vitae, or: Herodotus and God in the Protestant reformation’, in Histos suppl. 4, 2015) – which would have endeared him to readers like the Jermyns.
Provenance:
1. Sir Robert Jermyn (1539–1614), of Rushbrooke in Suffolk, was an uncompromising puritan who had played host to Elizabeth I on her tour of Suffolk in 1578. Removed from the judicial bench in 1583 for his religious views, he served several times as an MP. In 1595 he endowed the church of St James, Bury St Edmund’s, with thirteen works by Calvin, all bound as here with his arms (see British Amorial Bindings database); he also left bequests to Trinity, St John’s, and Emmanuel, Cambridge. He had been indefatigable in support of the ‘protestant crusade’ against the Spanish in the Netherlands, where his son, (2.) Sir Thomas Jermyn (1573–1645), fought under Essex in the 1590s; he was later a prominent courtier to James I, member of the Privy Council from 1630, and Comptroller to the household of Charles I in 1639–1641.
3. More recently in the collection of the Dowager Lady St Oswald (d. 2023), of Nostell Priory (West Yorkshire).
Adams H-407; USTC 662241; VD16 H 2517.
