WHITE, Richard.
£15,000 · Offered by Sokol Books
Finely bound, complete set of this account of ancient British history. One of the rarest books in the whole class of English history when containing the whole Eleven Books (Heber catalogue, p.294). The work is very seldom found complete, most of the copies wanting the latter parts, especially parts X and XI, which are extremely scarce (Lowndes). Books X and XI are very difficult to find; a complete set is paid very dearly in England (Brunet). Indeed. Richard White of Basingstoke (1539-1611) studied at Oxford, Louvain and Padua, where he became doctor in utroque . After converting to Catholicism, he fled to Douai, where he was university professor, and later rector and comes palatinus . Historiarum Britanniae , his greatest work, traces the origins of Britain from its mythical foundation by the Trojan Brutus to the last ancient Briton/Welsh king, Cadwallader, and the early Anglo-Saxon rulers. Following mainly the traditional account of Geoffrey of Monmouth, based in turn on ancient Welsh bardic songs, it reports, with White s commentary, the deeds of ancient Briton kings, including Lear and Arthur. An original point is his identification of Arthur with Riothimius, the king of the Britons who reached Gaul in 468AD, according to Jordanes s Historia Getica . White engaged with the historiographic debate, of great political importance in Tudor England, on the so-called British History , started by Polydore Vergil s criticism of Geoffrey s narrative in the 1530s. This opposed the l
- Binding: Hardcover
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