Proverbiorum libellus

by Polydore Vergil (Polydorus Vergilius)

Venice: Christophorus de Pensis, 10 April 1498

[70] of [70] leaves | 4to | a-h^8 i^6 | 210 x 152 mm

First edition of the very first humanist proverb collection. Some dozen more editions followed, through at least 1519, but Vergil's work was quickly eclipsed by Erasmus's Adagia, first published in 1500. At the time, Erasmus thought his was the first work of its kind. Someone did eventually inform him that Vergil had beaten him to it, but Erasmus stubbornly refused to believe it. "He may have seen only the third edition of the Proverbiorum libellus (Venice: Chr. de Pensis, 6 November 1500). Whatever the reason, he continued consistently to the end of his life to deny Vergil's claim to priority and to refute his charge that Erasmus was merely following in his footsteps" (Ferguson). Vergil and Erasmus even corresponded on the topic, in which the latter defended his priority. "Clearly Erasmus was quite sensitive about the issue" (Grant). While the books have some 140 proverbs in common and were similarly structured—headings with added commentary—scholars mostly agree that Erasmus did not borrow from Vergil's work. The handful of striking similarities can instead be attributed to shared sources. Both "had drawn, often without acknowledgment, on a common stock of humanistic works, such as Angelo Poliziano's Miscellanea, Ermolao Barbaro's Castigationes Plinianae, Filippo Beroaldo's Annotationes centum, and Niccolò Perotti's Cornucopiae, to name only the most significant." There is a happy ending, however. The two became friends, and Erasmus even helped Vergil usher some of his later work through publication.  ¶ This humanist squabble may seem petty—and perhaps it was—but priority was no small matter in their circles. Both works sought to satisfy a growing need. "Humanist education as it had been developed in Italy in the fifteenth century placed a great premium on gathering and ordering phrases for literary style. It was not enough to have the lexicon; students also needed a better sense of idiom, of turns of phrase" (Barker). The study of proverbs was critical to that effort, symptomatic of humanism broadly, "characterized throughout by a desire to imitate ancient authors and to emulate them in the elegance of their style, vocabulary and literary composition" (Kristeller). There's perhaps no greater testament to this than the incredible success of Erasmus's ever expanding Adagia—which earned him broad recognition, if false, as the first compiler of proverbs. ¶ For all the handwringing, neither invented the genre, even if both turned it into a humanist handbook. The early middle ages had long before inherited certain florilegia from antiquity, though medieval readers hardly rested on that inheritance. "The medieval attitude to literature was such that any book might be made to yield up memorable and useful quotes by a suitably diligent reader, who was topically likened to a pollen-gathering bee" (Taylor). The 9th-century Proverbia Senecae collected wisdom from ancient Rome long before the humanists did—even if most of it actually came from Publilius Syrus—and it was in print by 1475. It even spawned an 11th-century Christian counterpart in Otloh of St. Emmeram's Libellus proverbiorum (whose generic title may seem familiar). Nor was that pseudo-Seneca collection the only proverb collection to beat Vergil's to print. A collection of Dutch proverbs, translated into Latin as Proverbia seriosa or Proverbia communia, appeared frequently. What's more, these medieval predecessors even established certain enduring uses for the genre. Preachers were mining proverb collections for useful material by the 13th century, a role the genre probably still plays today. And the 12th-century Florilegium angelicum, which followed the rise of the epistolary manual, served as "an aid for letter-writers in episcopal chanceries" (Taylor). ¶ This epistolary context is vital. A common method for humanists to demonstrate their bona fides was to write eloquent, classically infused letters. Cicero was the paragon to imitate in this respect. “As engines of copia, compilations of quotations and exempla were of use to all who composed in Latin," correspondence included, "and sought to impress by their mastery of textual culture, both ancient and biblical" (Blair). For its part, effective correspondence underpinned many lucrative positions, from the clerical to the academic to the mercantile. Proverbs enhanced rhetoric, and rhetoric was nothing less than the power to move and control. So a collection like this was just the ticket to help one climb the various ladders in a lettered world that increasingly valued humanist training. ¶ All this said, we'd do well not to ignore the superficial side of what such compilations could help fabricate. “The humanistic education of the time has even been described as mainly a technique for turning out cocky, fluent public figures with no genuine intellectual curiosity or serious thought in their heads at all. There is some justice in this," Sarah Bakewell reflects, "and I have noticed in early twenty-first-century Britain that an ability to sling around Latin quotations while behaving like a cad can still take you a long way.” ¶ The GENESIS IN PRINT OF A TREMENDOUSLY INFLUENTIAL HUMANIST GENRE, and rare in the trade. This appears to be THE ONLY COPY WE FIND IN AUCTION RECORDS, its only other appearance in 1984 (disbound at the time).

PROVENANCE: A single, early two-word marginalium on fol. 15v, and some scattered early strokes in the margin, presumably to mark proverbs of particular interest. Foliation added in an early hand through fol. 18 (perhaps not coincidentally where the marginal strokes end). Three calculations on the final blank leaf, assessing the book's age at three different points in time: 1723, 1881, and 1984. It's kind of charming, the enduring appeal of a book simply by virtue of its age.

CONDITION: Much later boards covered in paste-paper, and much more recently rebacked in leather (and not very tastefully, if we're honest). Last leaf is blank. ¶ Leaf a1 torn a couple inches along the top of the inner margin, and space starting to open up between i4 and i5, both probably the result of an unpracticed recase job; first and last couple of leaves foxed; moderate dampstaining, largely confined to the upper and lower margins, but affecting some text areas; some worming, occasionally affecting text. Boards a little scuffed, and their extremities worn. The book is solid, and functions just fine, but we won't be offended if you insult the binding.

REFERENCES: USTC 989957; ISTC iv00147000; Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museum, v. 5, p. 471-472 ¶ Wallace K. Ferguson (annotator), The Correspondence of Erasmus (Univ of Toronto, 1974), p. 259 (compared to Erasmus: "The charge of plagiarism at least was false, as a comparison of the sources of the two collections demonstrates"); John N. Grant, Erasmus' Adages (Univ of Toronto, 2017), p. 15 ("Erasmus produced the first collection of classical (that is, both Greek and Latin) proverbs to be printed in northern Europe, and in fact he thought he was the first humanist to publish such an anthology. However, he had actually been anticipated by another scholar, Polydore Vergil of Urbino, who published a similar, though smaller, collection in Venice in 1498, entitled Proverbiorum libellus, and containing 306 proverbs."), 16-17 (cited above); Forum Antiquarian Booksellers, The Children's World of Learning 1480-1880 (1997), v. 6, p. 759, #3046 ("It was the first collection of Latin proverbs ever printed, two years before the famous 'Adagia' by Erasmus"); William Barker, The Adages of Erasmus (Univ of Toronto, 2001), p. xii (cited above), xiii (contrary to other scholarshiop we've read, he remarks that Erasmus "reluctantly acknowledged that the Italian had published before him, yet he still maintained he had come to the Adages on his own (a claim that later scholarship supports). Their little conflict shows the importance of priority in the competitive world of humanist scholarship."); Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010), p. 236 (cited above), 237 ("The principal users of humanist reference books were no doubt teachers and students in arts faculties"); Paul Oskar Kristeller, "Humanism," The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988), p. 126 (cited above); Cecil H. Clough, "Pietro Bembo's Edition of Petrarch and His Association with the Aldine Press," Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture (1998), p. 55 (“As the fifteenth century progressed, in Venice, as everywhere on the Italian peninsula, humanistic education was seen increasingly as the means to a successful career in government"); Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (Penguin, 2023), p. 75 (cited above); Barry Taylor, "Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992), p. 26 (for certain earlier proverb collections, including the Proverbia Senecae), 33 (for the Florilegium angelicum, and on 13c preacher use of proverb collections), 35 (cited above)

Item #742