Lutetiae Paris., Jean Moreau, 1628.
Small 8vo [171 x 109 mm] of (12) pp., 150, (1). Old handwritten ex libris in ink crossed out on the title-page. Small owner’s stamp on the title-page. Bound in contemporary full limp vellum, flat spine with handwritten title.
First edition of this « rare volume ». (Brunet) Brunet, Supp. II, 10; Double, Cabinet d’un curieux, 93.
Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653), is a famous French bibliographer and one of the most educated men of his time. After finishing with success his philosophy studies, he started to study medicine. « Since his youth, Naudé had shown a vivid passion for books; he could satisfy it early, because he barely turned twenty when president Mesmes gave him his library management. However Naudé had to give up soon a position that was not letting him time to take his medical courses, and he went in 1626 to finish them in Padua. His father’s death recalled him to Paris, and in 1628 the Faculty of Medicine chose him to deliver the closing speech of the exams and the eulogy of the new graduates. This speech, in which the age and the glory of the Faculty (‘De Antiquitate et dignitate Scholae medicae Parisiensis’) were developed with a real oratory, drew the attention to his author. The scholar Pierre Dupuy put him in touch with the cardinal Bagni, who took him to Rome, and entrusted him with his book collection. » (Nouvelle biographie générale, 37, col. 513)
Naudé delivered this eulogy full of erudition in 1628, on the occasion of the closing of the exams at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris.
« In one of these ceremonial speeches, so frequent at the time that we are going to study, Gabriel Naudé (‘De Antiquitate et dignitate Scholae medicinae Parisiensis’) describes throughout it with a peculiar kindness the columns, the statues, the pilasters, the festoons, the astragals, that the Faculty doesn’t have, but could. On the other hand, the picture he gives of the premises occupied by the Faculty depicts it generously and comfortably equipped. A large courtyard, a vast room for the solemn debates, others for the daily lessons, a nice chapel, a rich furniture, a library full of the most precious books, a laboratory for the drugs preparation, accommodations for all the employees, a botanical garden with all the plants used in medicine… » (M. Raynaud, Les médecins au temps de Molière, p. 6)
« This work of Gabriel Naudé is written in excellent style, with this fine 17th century Latin which tradition had still been preserved in our University until the last and regrettable reforms. » (Double)
An attractive and pure copy of this rare work, preserved in its contemporary limp vellum.
No copy of the present work has appeared on the market in the past thirty years. ABPC doesn’t list any copy of it.
