De electione & oratoria collocatione verborum libri duo

by Jacques-Louis Strébée (Jacobus Strebaeus)

Lyon: Sébastien Gryphe (Sebastianus Gryphius), 1541

259, [1] p. | 8vo | a-p^8 q^10 | 178 x 106 mm

The fifth and penultimate edition of the dedicated Ciceronian’s rhetoric manual, which first appeared at Paris in 1538. The author taught at the Collège Saint-Barbe in Paris and was a published commentator on Cicero. Núñez González calls this work “the first monographic treatise on oratorical rhythm” and one “that would have a large circulation.” ¶ Strebée offers nearly fifty chapters here, with more than a dozen on word choice—obscene words, rustic words, sublime words. Rhetoric was vital to humanists, to the educated broadly, “the art of arts and science of sciences,” as Anthony Grafton puts it. On a fundamental level, it was (and is) power and influence: the ability to persuade others. Little wonder its proper instruction occupied so many, and that so many endeavored to publish their own methods for wielding it.

PROVENANCE: Ownership inscription of an English national college on the title (Collegii Anglicani). These national colleges date to the middle ages, when international students at certain universities would organize under a common language or geographic origin. The Reformation drastically changed their tenor, as universities aligned themselves with one confession or another. “As student mobility intensified in the second half of the sixteenth century, clergy and students gathered together to establish colleges in order to provide shelter, discipline, and corporate identity. They were usually set up to avail of access to Catholic institutions of learning, often Jesuit schools and universities, and in towns with traditionally strong mercantile and cultural links to England, Ireland, and Scotland” (Chamber and O’Connor). The Jesuits were indeed especially successful in this regard, rapidly outpacing the establishment of other national colleges. Rome was naturally the epicenter, where the German College, taking in Catholics from the geographic heart of Lutheranism, became the paragon. “They educated young men for the priesthood so that they might return to their native lands to offer strong clerical leadership in Catholic lands lacking it, or to minister to persecuted Catholics, sometimes to suffer martyrdom” (Grendler). We suspect our unspecified English College was part of this network, offering a Catholic education to English Recusants unable to find one at home. As a teacher in Catholic Paris, Strebée’s text surely would have been welcome. ¶ Also lightly annotated in an early hand, with marginalia on some 15 pages. These are fairly standard notes of the wayfinding or aide-mémoire variety, briefly paraphrasing the content of the printed text, presumably elements the reader wanted to remember, return to, or considered notable. There is, however, one longer annotation that stands out as a relatively uncommon example of an early reader offering personal reflection on the printed text. On p. 61, Strebée gently chastises people for carelessly quoting the ancients, calling out “the error of those who believe that whatever they find in writers of accepted rank is true, virtuous, and suitable” (error illorum, qui quicquid in receptae dignitatis scriptoribus reperiunt, verum, probum, idoneum arbitrantur). Strebée includes Plautus among those writers too frequently quoted, and suggests using only those who flourished in Cicero’s time. Our annotator disagrees: “Here Strebaeus seems an insufficiently reasonable critic, as he limits the time for us…and I do not know for what reason he disparages Plautus” (Hic Strebaeus parum aequus censor videtur, ut tempus nobis circumscribit...nec scio qua ratione ut Plautum vituperat). When so much early marginalia are impersonal, these expressions of personal opinion—“rare in Rosenthal’s collection,” according to H.J. Jackson—are to be celebrated. They are wonderful and unexpectedly revealing. “As the reader evolves ideas of his or her own out of the material of the text, registering the process step by step in marginalia, we seem to be witnessing—albeit on a small scale—a dramatic event” (Jackson).  ¶ The initials C.A. and B.C. have rather curiously been penned beside page numbers 50 and 100, respectively. We might consider these readers’ initials, if oddly placed, but they’re written in the same hand. Speaking of curiosities, our reader has extensively used a distinctive marginal mark, resembling three dots above a large comma. This reminds us of something William Sherman wrote: “With modern readers, their handwriting is going to be distinctive while their symbols will tend to look pretty much like other people’s symbols. For early modern readers it is the other way around—their symbols, and in particular their pointing hands, are more likely to be recognizably theirs.” There’s an undeniable charm to it, and such marks “must have played an important role in the personal process of making a book meaningful.”  ¶ Early ownership signature on rear fly-leaf of one Joannes Bassolinus. This doesn’t sound very English, but perhaps an Italian (Giovanni Bassolino?).

CONDITION: Quarter 19th-century cloth and marbled boards; old title in ink on the bottom edge. ¶ Wormed, mostly marginal, but affecting some text; last several leaves with mild marginal dampstaining; title soiled. Spine a trifle cocked, the cloth worn and faded; corners bumped and marbled paper worn. A sturdy copy.

REFERENCES: USTC 140150; James J. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric (1981), p. 276, #768.A ¶ On the content: Juan María Núñez González, “Las cláusulas métricas Latinas en el Renacimiento,” Latomus 53.1 (Jan/Mar 1994), p. 90-91; Kees Meerhoff, “Rhétorique, poétique et poésie remarques sur le commentaire rhétorique dans quelques arts poétiques français de la renaissance,” Seizième siècle 13 (2017), p. 332 (taught at Saint-Barbe), 338 (with Étienne Dolet, Strebée “is among his [Cicero’s] most ardent promoters” in France); Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Harvard, 2001), p. 168; Carlos Eire, Reformations (Yale, 2016), p. 69 (“Rhetorical skills were highly prized by humanists, not for their own sake, but for the power eloquence can have in moving people to action”); Peter Bayley, French Pulpit Oratory 1598-1650 (Cambridge Univ, 1980), p. 23 (“nothing in the educational theory or practice of the time leads us to think that rhetoric was considered as anything other than essential and serious”) ¶ On the provenance: Brandon G. Withrow and Menachem Wecker, Consider No Evil: Two Faith Traditions and the Problem of Academic Freedom in Religious Higher Education (Cascade, 2014), p. 50 (“Originally, colleges were more akin to residence halls, at times created by church authorities with the poorer student in mind. Colleges were also places where students were organized by nation. In Bologna, these national colleges were by specific country of origin; in Paris, they were based on four regions.”); Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor, “Introduction,” Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568-1918 (Brill, 2018), p. 2 (“Medieval student mobility had encouraged the establishment of corporate structures, including colleges, for foreign students in some European universities…The Reformation dramatically reoriented medieval patterns of student migration in the course of the sixteenth century, with the creation of confessionally-demarcated universities, many of them founded from the 1550s onwards. As states imposed educational restrictions in order to uphold emergent confessional identities, Catholics who found themselves in Protestant jurisdictions increasingly moved abroad to attend universities and other centres of learning. Unsurprisingly, English and Scottish universities excluded Catholic students…English, Scots, and Irish Catholic students became increasingly visible, therefore, in the influential centres of Counter-Reformation learning in Western Europe, notably in Spain, Spanish Flanders, France, and Rome.”); Simona Negruzzo, “The Tridentine Proposal for the Formation of the Clergy: The Seminaries,” The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Trent (Cambridge Univ, 2023), p. 212 (“While in Rome other ‘national’ colleges were opening, the Jesuit ones substantially increased in number in the cities of Europe: from 160 in 1580, they rose to 444 in 1626”); Paul F. Grendler, Jesuit Schools and Universities in Europe 1548-1773 (Brill, 2019), p. 48 (“A unique version of the Jesuit boarding school was the national college, which was a seminary for future secular priests from a specific linguistic region or political state in Europe. Historians usually call them national colleges, although they might also be called linguistic colleges or national seminaries…The most influential national collections were located in Rome…The first, largest, and most important Roman national college was the German College.”); William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (UPenn, 2008), p. 52; H.J. Jackon, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale, 2001), p. 48 (“Expressions of personal opinion or literary judgment are rare in Rosenthal’s collection, though they do occur (p. 202), and there is some evidence that they too would have been encouraged as part of the learning process”), 50 (“The fact that personal opinions appear at all, however, suggests that it was not force of example merely that conditioned a reader’s behavior in the early years of print. Private ownership and the expectation of continued possession also played a part, affecting readers’ attitudes toward books and their ideas of the uses that might be made of them.”), 210 (cited above)

Item #701