Bernard Quaritch Ltd.

ALCIATI, Andrea. Emblematum … Libri II. [With the commentary of Sebastian Stockhammer]. Antwerp, Christopher Plantin, 1565.

16mo., ff. 119 (of 120), without the final leaf, blank except for colophon on recto; with 112 woodcuts in the text, mostly c. 35 x c. 50 mm., narrow strip cut from upper blank margin of title, some signs of use, but unwashed and unpressed, in modern vellum.

First Plantin edition of Alciati’s Emblems. The woodcuts (the blocks are at the Plantin Moretus Museum) are copies of the series originally cut for the Jean de Tournes edition of Lyons 1547.

From the library of the pre-eminent lawyer and law reporter William Bendlowes (1515-1584; see Oxford DNB); the title-page carries his name inscribed in a court hand, and on the last leaf is his reading note “Perlegi hunc libellum, 4o die Julii 1572, annoque Elizabeth[e] regine Angl[ie] 14o apud Brenthall in Fynchyngfeld in Com[itatu] Essex, Will Bendlowes”. His marginal ‘N’ (for ‘Nota’) features throughout the book, along with occasional notes or corrections. In two places (pp. 107 and 229) he has added some Latin verses, not easy to read.

The manor of Brent Hall at Finchingfield in Essex was acquired by William Bendlowes’ father in the first half of the sixteenth century. By the 1550s it had become the family seat and was later the home of his great-grandson, the poet Edward Benlowes (1602-1676).

Edward Benlowes was keenly interested in emblem literature. He was the friend and neighbour of Francis Quarles (as also of Phineas Fletcher), and was the dedicatee of Quarles’ Emblemes of 1635, the single most popular emblem book of the seventeenth century, to which he contributed a prefatory poem “Tot Flores, Quarles, quot Paradisus, habet”, dated from Brent Hall.

In a touch of cartographic conceit, the Benlowes family home, along with Quarles’ and Phineas Fletcher’s, is actually identified on the globe which features in the engraved illustration to one of Quarles’ Emblemes (Bk. V, no. 6). See Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books, (1948), p.118 note.

Voet 22.

£3000

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