DOES, Dirk van der et al and SCHOOCK, Martin

by Dirk van der et al and SCHOOCK, Martin Does

£1,650 · Offered by Sokol Books

Scarce first edition of this entertaining miscellany of 'echo' poetry, edited by the humanist translator Dirk van der Does (1580-1663), with poems in Latin, Dutch, Greek and English, including by Sir Philip Sidney, to which is appended a scholarly treatise on the echo by the young Dutch polymath and mathematician Martin Schoock (1614-1669), known for his virulent attacks on René Descartes. Dirk van der Does's father, known as Janus Dousa, was a famous humanist poet, translator and historian, who was the first curator and librarian of Leiden University. In 1603 Janus published a poetical miscellany called Echo, of which this is an imitation; his Latin poem by this name, along with a selection of his shorter poems and satires from that volume, are reprinted here. The form of Dousa’s poem, which became a popular rhetorical game in the Renaissance, involves either the whole or a portion of the last word of each line, couplet or epigram being repeated as an ‘echo’, which often takes the form of an answer to a question posed in the preceding line. His son Dirk adopts this form for poems on gardening, wine and beer, Greek philosophers, and a salacious poem punning on ‘horns’, etc. There follow contributions or excerpted poems, all following the echo form, in Greek, Latin, Dutch, French, German, Italian and English, including anti-papist verses in Dutch, what appears to be a German imitation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, poems in French by du Bellay and du Bartas, etc., and Latin poems by

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.