Panarion, hoc est Arca medica variis divinaee scriptinae priscorumque patrum antiolotis adversus animi morbos instructas?

Lyon edition of 1609, published at the expense of Jean Pillehotte, the second edition of Busaeus’s Panarion after the original edition issued in Mainz in 1608, and the first known French edition of the text, still in Latin.

Engraved frontispiece-title, presenting an allegory of the seven deadly sins figured as monsters surrounding the risen Christ, his feet set upon a seven-headed dragon, with the motto Vincenti dabo manna absconditum from the Book of Revelation. A few faint spots of foxing and traces of rubbing, a brown stain of approximately one centimetre on the lower board, and a small hole in the lower margin of leaf 553.

Rich contemporary binding in full blond morocco, smooth spine decorated lengthwise with three gilt tools within a double-roulette frame; covers richly framed and stamped at the centre with a large gilt escutcheon surmounted by a crown: two eagles, one of them crowned, on the upper cover; full quartered arms on the lower cover. Gilt edges, traces of ties. Headcaps and joints formerly restored. An early manuscript inscription, not identified to date, appears at the head of the engraved title.

A very fine copy in a high-quality armorial binding.

The Panarion of Busaeus, a Jesuit theologian who taught for twenty-two years at the University of Mainz, offers a singular moral encyclopaedia of vices and virtues -eighty-three of the former and seventy-five of the latter - each accompanied by remedies drawn from Holy Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, for the use of confessors, preachers and religious. The title borrows that of the heresiological Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, redirecting it here to spiritual and moral ends.

A binding of the highest quality, with rich armorial decoration of Italian inspiration, here enhances a rare Jesuit text of the Rhenish Counter-Reformation, published for the first time in France by one of the great Lyon publishers of his time.