EARLY AMERICANUM WITH ROYAL PROVENANCE
SIMONETTA, Bonifacio.
De Christiane Fidei et Romanorum Pontificum Persecutionibus.
[(Colophon:) Basel, Nicolaus Kesler, 1509.]
Folio, ff. [6], 156, [2]; small wormholes throughout (not affecting legibility), waterstaining to lower corner of final few leaves, else crisp and clean; a very good copy in early eighteenth-century Danish calf, probably by Johann Boppenhausen, boards speckled and tooled in gilt and blind to a panelled design, gilt fleurons to corners, spine elaborately gilt in compartments with crowned double monogram of Christian VI at head, gilt brown morocco lettering-pieces, lower four compartments gilt with Danish royal arms, marbled edges and endpapers; royal stamp to front pastedown, pencil note ‘Dupl bibl R’ to front free endpaper; nineteenth-century and later bibliographical notes to verso of front endpaper.
A beautiful copy of the second edition of Simonetta’s principal work, containing an early and intriguing reference to the New World, our copy from the library of Christian VI (1699–1746), King of Denmark and Norway, under whom the kingdom expanded its possessions in the Americas.
De Christiane Fidei, first printed in Milan in 1492 and here edited by the thirty-two-year-old Hieronymus Emser (later to become Luther’s great antagonist), gives a history of Christian persecutions, and of the popes under whom these occurred, down to Innocent VII; it is ‘very scholarly for the time and sometimes presents judicious criticisms’ (Hoefer, Nouv. Biogr. Gén, trans.). Dedicated to King Charles VIII of France, the work was published by Vérard in a French translation by Octavien de Saint-Gelais at the start of the sixteenth century. Simonetta, the scion of a noble family, was born in Apulia c. 1430, and in 1492 was abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of St. Stephen’s at Corno, in the diocese of Lodi. The long poem in his honour by Giovanni Vicenzo Biffi, a neo-Latin poet celebrated in his time, occupies the last one and a half pages of the volume).
The real interest of the book is Simonetta’s correspondence, a collection of 179 letters interspersed seemingly haphazardly throughout the text. The letters are addressed to a wide circle of Simonetta’s contemporaries, some to members of his family and close acquaintances, others to some of the greatest names of the Renaissance including Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ludovico Sforza, and Pico della Mirandola. They cover a host of topics: classical history, mythology, geography, medicine, physics, and astronomy.
On f. 155 we learn of a meteorite which fell in northern Italy in 1491. On f. 101 is a reference to the West Indies (Simonetta’s correspondent has evidently been reading Columbus’s letter): ‘Insulas in mari Hispano cultu: & divitiis inclytas: recentissime compertas ab urbe epistola missa legisse … scribis’. This last reference is somewhat intriguing. Alden cites it from this edition, in European Americana, vol. I, 509/10, but overlooks the fact that it also occurs in the first edition, printed Milan, [not before 11] January 1492. According to Cappelli, Cronologia, 11–22, the Milanese year was reckoned in the modern style from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, though still from Christmas late in the century, according to BMC VI xxiv no. 1.
It is possible that Zarotus, the printer of the first edition, simply forgot to turn over the year when leaving 1492 in the colophon, but even so there should be no trace of a ‘Columbus letter’ before March 1493 at the earliest – a puzzle, to which we do not know the explanation. Having annexed the West Indian islands of St Thomas in 1672 and Saint John in 1718, Denmark acquired Saint Croix from France during Christian VI’s reign in 1733. (All three are now part of the US Virgin Islands.) The largest town on Saint Croix, Christiansted, still bears the king’s name. Uninhabited at the time of Danish acquisition, the island had by the end of the eighteenth century an enslaved population of as many as twenty thousand.
USTC 616269; VD16 S 6542; Adams S-1184; European Americana 509/10; Proctor 14078.
