A CARTESIAN AND A NEWTONIAN WALK INTO A BAR …
[RAYNAL, Guillaume-Thomas, Abbé;] Johann Adam HILLER, translator.
Anecdoten zur Lebensgeschichte berühmter französischer, deutscher, italienischer, holländischer und anderer Gelehrten, erster [–zweyter] Theil.
Leipzig, Lankisch, 1762.
Two vols bound in one, 8vo, pp. [x], 292; 377, [5]; vol. II bound without terminal blank; engraved frontispiece by Johann Heinrich Meil, copper-engraved vignette to vol. I title, woodcut vignette to vol. II title, woodcut headpieces and initials, woodcut and typographic tailpieces; uniform light toning; but a very good copy in contemporary blue-grey boards; slight discolouration, extremities very lightly worn.
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Anecdoten zur Lebensgeschichte berühmter französischer, deutscher, italienischer, holländischer und anderer Gelehrten, erster [–zweyter] Theil.
First edition in German of this collection of amusing literary, philosophical and historical anecdotes on French men and women of letters from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, translated by the composer and conductor Johann Adam Hiller (1728–1804), one of Bach’s successors as Cantor in Leipzig.
Hiller, considered the creator of the Singspiel, was also the compiler of a selections of anecdotes on musicians and rulers much in the style of this gathering. Although his wide connections with contemporary high-profile musicians facilitated his success as musical manager (he staged many of Handel’s operas), Hiller did not disdain taking on occasional lucrative (if unglamorous) translation works; the present work is a translation of Raynal’s Anecdotes littéraires (first 1750), undertaken at the suggestion of a ‘man of taste’ (preface, trans.). The variety of biographies (poets, philosophers, scientists, historians) offers a canon for a contemporary Republic of Letters with both a confidently selective and an eclectic inclusive outlook.
Beginning with Guillaume Budé (whose anecdotes recall him remaining unperturbed in his study during a house fire and coolly telling the screaming housemaid to pester his wife instead), the anecdotes proceed more or less chronologically until Hiller’s own day; Rabelais is, needless to say, the source of numerous anecdotes, as are Molière and Racine (with an astonishing forty-two anecdotes each). There is a joke about a Cartesian and a Newtonian walking into a coffee-house for Descartes, and amusing snobbery from Scaliger and Casaubon: the former, upon being addressed in Scottish-accented Latin by a visitor, responded ‘I don’t speak Scots’, and the latter, on attending a Sorbonne debate, pronounced ‘Never in my life have I heard so much Latin of which I understood so little’. Six female writers are included: Henriette de Coligny de la Suze, Marie-Catherine de Villedieu, Madame de la Fayette, Antoinette Des Houlières, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, and Madeleine de Scudéry.
The editor’s note at the end mentions the contemporary publication of a French work of similar inspiration, and states the editor’s intention to translate it and publish it as a sequel to his original collection. Thus, the sequel came out in the following two years as volumes III and IV, but with the different title Merkwürdigkeiten zur Geschichte der Gelehrten, und besonders der Streitigkeiten derselben, vom Homer an bis auf unsere Zeiten; Aus dem Franzosischen übersetzt.
Outside continental Europe, OCLC and Library Hub find four copies in the US (Brigham Young, Indiana, Princeton, Yale), and three in the UK (BL, NLS, Trinity College Cambridge).
VD18 11050047; Mansell 246:267; Holtzmann & Bohatta 1727; not in Brunet.
