Apologie pour les grands hommes soupçonnez de magie

"Dernière édition", enlarged with remarks probably due, according to Dorbon, to its publisher, the "spirituel libraire hollandais Jean Frédéric Bernard" (Bibliotheca esoterica, 3227), and illustrated with a frontispiece engraved by Jan Lamsveld, two headpieces and an initial.

Contemporary full blue calf signed C. Smith, double gilt fillet border to covers, gilt fleurons at corners, spine with five raised bands richly gilt, gilt title, gilt roll to board edges, shell-marbled pastedowns, all edges gilt. Light rubbing, upper cover very slightly faded at upper margin, occasional light foxing.

A pleasing copy bound in blue calf, with the imprint of Jean Frédéric Bernard, publisher and presumed author of the remarks that attune this early 17th-century work to the taste of the dawning Enlightenment.

Provenance: bookplate to the front pastedown and stamp to the title page of Alfred Mauger; ownership inscription to the title page, probably "de Blaru".

This work by Gabriel Naudé, the future librarian of Mazarin, was first published in Paris in 1625, when he was only twenty-five, under the title Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de magie. It set out to clear of this charge the great men whom rumor, chroniclers and demonologists had numbered among the sorcerers: Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristotle, Plotinus, Virgil, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Popes Sylvester II and Gregory VII, Savonarola, Agrippa, Paracelsus and Nostradamus. The work distinguished diabolical magic from natural magic and made the critical examination of testimony, that of historians first and foremost, the principal weapon against credulity. Translated into English in 1657, it went through several editions in the 17th century and in 1671 prompted a reply from the Capuchin Jacques d’Autun, whose L’Incrédulité sçavante et la crédulité ignorante condemned both the skepticism of the erudite and popular superstition.

This 1712 edition was issued in Amsterdam under two imprints, that of Pierre Humbert and that of Jean Frédéric Bernard, the latter being the one borne by our copy. It was notably on this second imprint that Dorbon relied in attributing the remarks added to the text to this Huguenot refugee bookseller, the future publisher of the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde. These notes occasionally correct Naudé’s quotations and set him against the more recent scholarship of Stanley and Le Clerc: the humanist plea of 1625 is thus reread in the light of the learned criticism of the early 18th century, at the dawn of the Enlightenment.