BATES, William (ed.).

£950 · Offered by Peter Harrington

Vitae Selectorum Aliquot Virorum. First edition of one of the earliest compilations of Latin biographies in the English tradition, "a veritable Parnassus of Europe's great minds". "The collection included biographies of great humanists and protectors of erudite, English humanism like Henry Chichele, the archbishop of Canterbury, who founded All Souls College in Oxford with Henry VI, and Thomas Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library. But it also prominently featured the humanist princes of continental Europe... we can read, in their original Latin texts, Beatus Rhenanus's Life of Erasmus, Louis Le Roy's life Budé" (Fumaroli, p. 34). Also included are the Italian literary theorist Pietro Bembo and William Camden, author of the first topographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland and of the first detailed account of the reign of Elizabeth I.It was printed by Anne Godbid (fl. 1678-1683) and John Playford (1656-1686), who entered into business in 1679 after the death of Godbid's husband. As a woman printer, Godbid "was indeed a rarity of the press but a part, nevertheless, of an elite category of distaff publishers in London during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (Cole).

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