Singularis liber de nobilis et studiosae juventutis institutione

by Augustinus Alstenus Bloemert

Amsterdam: Louis Elzevir, 1653

[12], 344, [2] p. | 12mo | *^6 A-O^12 P^6(-P6) | 142 x 79 mm

Only edition of this conduct book-cum-drama for young students, p. 277-344 containing an untitled play featuring Machiavelli, a Bacchian chorus, a dead man, and an atheist. Bloemert doesn’t claim authorship, but simply remarks that he stumbled upon it (incidi) when collecting material for his conduct book. We find this play nowhere else in the vast digitized corpus.  ¶ "The only merit in this volume consists of its beautiful typographic execution," Willems remarks. “The educational treatise is nothing but a collection of platitudes, and we waste our time looking for something else in it.” Bloemert does lean heavily on classical sources exhaustively tapped for similar work. But then Willems devotes an entire column to the curious three-act tragicomedy tacked onto the end. It opens with an exchange between Machiavelli and Impiety, and then follows the actions of an atheist who chances upon a skull, and carelessly kicks it aside. “Who cares?” the atheist says to his more cautious friend. “If I’ve offended the dead man, I invite him to dine this evening.” Lo and behold, the dead man comes to the feast and eventually takes the atheist’s life. “The piece is written in an archaic Latin,” Willems complains, “often not very intelligible.” Bloemert says the play was publicly exhibited to the applause of a full audience (leaf *3r: publice exhibitum, cum frequentissimae concionis applausu). For Willems, it just “proves that at that time the public was hardly fussy.” Sick burn, bro.  ¶ In the trade at least, a rare Elzevir imprint. We find no auction records.

PROVENANCE: A few early inked letters on the front paste-down.

CONDITION: Early stiff parchment; title in gilt on the spine, over a colored background, we suppose to approximate the look of a leather label. ¶ Final blank leaf removed; text block splitting in a couple of spots, and at the hinges, but everything holding together, nothing falling out or hanging by a thread. Spine a little cocked and parchment lightly soiled; parchment with a small split in the rear joint, along the tooled portion of the spine.

REFERENCES: Alphonse Willems, Les Elzevier (1880), p. 292; Graesse, Trésor de livres rares et précieux, v. 7 (suppl.), p. 27; “Annales theatri Belgo-Latini: Inventory of Latin Theatre from the Low Countries,” Humanism in the Low Countries (Leuven Univ, 2015), p. 233 (“Contains an untitled drama in three acts on Machiavelli”)

Item #580