G. Holonii Catharina,

£1,400 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

These three plays, printed at the same press for the same bookseller over a period of just less than a month, are by Holonius or Grégoire de Hologne (1531-1594), who taught for a number of years at the College of Saint-Barthélemy in Liège, and wrote these plays for his students. As he tells us (preface to Lambertias ) Hologne was the nephew of the humanist Lambert de Hologne, a correspondent of Erasmus (one letter see Contemporaries of Erasmus n ii, 197-198). Lambertias has a dedication to Charles de Berlaymont, knight of the Golden Fleece, whose three sons (Louis, Jean and the youngest Lancelot) Hologne taught, and who themselves also receive dedicatory epistles in the three plays. The plays are witten in Latin verse in the manner of Seneca (but influenced as their author says by Christus patiens of Gregory Nazianzenus), and all have a heavy Christian and counter-reformation message: the prologue to Laurentias , for example, speaks of the plays of the ancients and how ‘Longe magis par credidimus esse, decens Nos Christianos Martyrum Christi decus, Quocunque, licet humili, poemata edere’. The play on St. Catherine lays stress on her learning and quietly contrasts it with the lack of learning of so many of the clergy. She was also in the mid 1570s the subject of an enormously long play (it last 8 hours and needed a huge cast) by the Jesuit Johannes Sonhovius. The other subjects are St. Lambert (martyred in AD 708), who clearly has a more local ring to him, and St. Laurence, wh

• Year: 1556

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