SANDYS, Edwin [with] BOCCALINI, Traiano [and] D ESTAMPES de VALEN√áAY, L éonore

£2,250 · Offered by Sokol Books

An interesting collection of controversial treatises on early seventeenth-century religion and politics, two of which bear a false imprint to elude censorship. The opening work is the first and only Italian edition of an influential Stuart treatise on the situation of religion in Europe. An able politician and pioneering investor in North America, Edwin Sandys (1561-1629) completed his studies in Oxford, befriending his tutor Richard Hooker. Later, he travelled in Europe and in Venice wrote this anti-Catholic report with the help of the Venetian scholar Paolo Sarpi. The Relation was first published in 1605 against the author s will and then expanded until 1637. This remarkably early Italian translation is variously attributed to the pen of Sarpi or Giovanni Diodati the famous Calvinist pastor and scholar of the Bible and was almost certainly printed in Geneva (where a community of Italian immigrants, religionis causa, was settled). According to a recent reattribution, the translator may well have been William Bedell (1571-1642), chaplain to the English ambassador in Venice Sir Henry Wooton and later translator of the Bible into Irish. Although the peculiar printer s device on title shows a dolphin twisting around an anchor like the famous Aldine device, the Latin motto is incorrectly Festina tarde instead of Festina lente . The second work is a very early edition of a mordant political parody, printed several times in the course of 1615 and later on in the century under a fic

• Binding: Hardcover

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