[WORKS] Sus obras con la declaracion magistral en lengua Castellana, por el Doctor [Juan] Villen de Biedma.

£2,750 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

This is the first complete edition of Horace to appear in Spain, and with a Spanish translation and commentary. Horace was known to have been read and imitated in Spain, and yet no edition of his works was printed in Alcala de Henares or Salamanca in the sixteenth century or in the next, nor at any of the Giunta presses between 1514 and 1628. By contrast, the Ars Poetica, also present here, was a popular text, with four Spanish translations – or discussions –of it, including this one, printed between 1591 and 1600. The present work is dedicated (with the woodcut coats of the recipient’s arms) by the editor Juan Villen de Biedma to Francisco Gonzalez de Heredia (ca. 1542-1614) secretary to Felipe II Felipe III and an important administrator. Dated 30 March 1597 and followed by verses in Spanish addressed to the same recipient (‘Elogio a las armas’), the dedication contains a passage about the division of the works of Horace into four, conforming to the division of man’s life, which is slightly reminiscent of Jacques in As You Like It: the first, Odes, the games, jokes and pastimes of youth, the springtime of life; the second, Sermons; the third, Epistles; and the fourth, the instructive Ars Poetica, the equivalent of maturity and old age, in which wisdom matures and makes men teachers. The text of the poems is printed centrally in italic within the prose translation and commentary. The Ars Poetica here has a number of manuscript annotations referring to another edition by Fran

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