Indiculus universalis, rerum fere omnium, quae in mundo sunt, scientiarum item, artiumque nomina; aptè, breviterque colligens | L'univers en abregé, où sont contenus en diverses listes, presque tous les noms des ouvrages de la nature, de toutes les sciences, & de tous les arts, avec leurs principaux termes

by François Pomey

Liège: Guillaume Henri Streel, 1680

[24], 276 p. | 12mo | a^12 A-L^12 M^6 | 135 x 81 mm

An early edition of the French Jesuit’s bilingual guide to learning Latin vocabulary, which first appeared at Lyon in 1667, also as a bilingual Latin-French work. It went through dozens of editions, in multiple language combinations, through the middle of the 18th century. ¶ In his preface, Pomey opines that the most difficult obstacle to learning Latin is “ignorance of certain words and terms, which usually fall into colloquial speech [discours familier]. These are the names of nearly all the things that we see and touch every hour and every moment” (a4r). Pomey here aims to help the French student learn these words, providing terms in French with their Latin equivalents. He organizes everything not alphabetically, but conceptually, dividing the entirety into three broad categories: the world and its creation, humans and their attributes, and cities and their parts, this final section including knowledge disciplines and the arts. ¶ We find no copies of this particular edition in North America, but we won't try to convince you it's a rare book. Other early editions are readily available.

PROVENANCE: But ours does have something to recommend it. It stands out for being interleaved and lightly annotated—and not in French or Latin, but in German. Most of the inserted blank leaves remain that way, but a few do bear notes. On the blank page facing p. 218, for example, a reader has provided the German word for island (insel) keyed by line number to the printed text (L’isle. Insulae, arum), and similarly defined Bruges (stadt in Brabant) and the counts of Artois and Hainaut. Facing 263 is a list of more than two dozen handwritten German terms keyed by number to their printed equivalents in French and Latin (e.g., handwritten zimmerman for charpentier, materiarius). ¶ Title page with three early ownership inscriptions, two of them struck through, the third belonging to one Jos. Wolff Hönigh. We’re unable to make out the inscription at the head of the title page. The inscription at bottom, however, begins Cornelis—presumably the same Cornelius Gerardus, a canon at one St. Paul’s, perhaps on the Moselle River, who’s penned ownership inscriptions on both leaf a12r and p. 1. The former records the book given to him by one Bernard Hönigh of Westphalia, 4 August 1686. Also with an early inscription on the front fly-leaf ending gefindet ist, perhaps a curse? ¶ Given the surnames and placenames in our inscriptions, we’re inclined to put this in the hands of a native German speaker studying French and/or Latin rather than the reverse. If our early owners were indeed near Westphalia or the Moselle River—eastern Germany, near Belgium—then the combination of languages may not seem all that surprising. Whatever the case, the book is telling evidence of the linguistic complexity and flexibility that can be found among language learners in early modern Europe.

CONDITION: Contemporary parchment over boards, the interleaved sheets watermarked with a large lion rampant. ¶ Very faint dampstaining in the fore-margin; last page a little soiled, likely due to removal of the rear fly-leaf. Binding soiled and worn at the extremities, but solid.

REFERENCES: William Jervis Jones, “In search of dictionaries: some findings from the bibliographical project German Lexicography in the European Context (GLEC),” Words, Lexemes, Concepts—Approaches to the Lexicon (Gunter Narr, 1999), p. 334 (“Pomey’s thematically classified Indiculus universalis was gratefully received across Europe: Latin-French editions date from 1667, Latin-French-English from 1679, Latin-Italian from 1681, Latin-French-Dutch from 1689”)

Item #448