Les Discours... sur la première Décade de Tite Liue...

Machiavelli (Niccolò)

Les Discours... sur la première Décade de Tite Liue...

Traduictz d'Italien en François et de nouveau reveuz et augmentez par Jacques Gohory...

Description: with woodcut printer's device on title,woodcut initials, penultimate leaf with a woodcut portrait of Machiavelli, title-page stained, mostly as a result of the attempt to wash out an inscription, fore-edge chipped, uniformly slightly browned, ff. [viii], 179 [recte 280], [11, of 12 (lacking terminal blank), index (beginning on 280 verso), portrait], small 8vo,[bound with:] Le Prince... Dedié au magnifique Laurens fils de Pierre de Medicis. Traduict d'Italien en François auec la vie de l'auteur mesme par Jacques Gohory... [same place, printer and date], with woodcut printer's device on title, penultimate leaf of preliminaries with a woodcut portrait (the same as in the other work, here a paler impression),small stain in margin of last few leaves, ff. [8], 64, 8vo, some contemporary underlining and side notes in French, these a little cropped, somewhat rustic 19th-century ?French leather backed boards, bright marbled endpapers, red edges, extremities rubbed, the spine a little chafed

Publication Details: Paris: [printed for] Robert le Magnier, 1571

Notes: These two works were probably issued together (Brunet at any rate says so), although they seem to be universally catalogued separately. The translator Gohory is primarily important for his role in disseminating Paracelsian ideas in France, but these translations of Machiavelli were important too.'The business of the influence and reception of Machiavelli [in England] was complicated, as we know very well, by the intervention on the Elizabethan scene of the Huguenot commentator Innocent Gentillet, who in 1576 published his Discours contre Machiavel (with a Latin translation the following year)...moreThese two works were probably issued together (Brunet at any rate says so), although they seem to be universally catalogued separately. The translator Gohory is primarily important for his role in disseminating Paracelsian ideas in France, but these translations of Machiavelli were important too.'The business of the influence and reception of Machiavelli [in England] was complicated, as we know very well, by the intervention on the Elizabethan scene of the Huguenot commentator Innocent Gentillet, who in 1576 published his Discours contre Machiavel (with a Latin translation the following year). This is the first of several early sustained attacks on Machiavelli's thinking … Gentillet was responding to the horrifying Massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris in 1572 … It is quite possible that Gentillet was further influenced in his perception of Machiavellian connections in the French court by the translation of Il Principe by Jacques Gohory in 1571, the year before the massacre. Unlike previous French translations (and in a departure from his own practice in his much earlier translation of the Discorsi) Gohory refers to the Medici family in his title - doubtless a sop to Catherine (de Medici, the French queen)' (John Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli, Studies in Renaissance Literature 9, 2002).Rare: neither title in Adams; COPAC records 2 copies in Oxford, Bodleian (Douce copy) and All Souls, the 2 titles bound together), plus Les Discours only in the BL; Newberry and NYPL only in the US in WorldCat (both with both titles bound together); only 2 in SUDOC. HIDE

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Price: £4,000

Subject: History

Published Date: 1571

Stock Number: 63168

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