Bidspirit auction | [HISTORY] - Osorio on Civil

[HISTORY] - Osorio on Civil & Christian Nobility (Florence, 1552) - OSORIO, Jeronimo - Hieronymi Osorii Lusitani De Nobilitate Civili Libri II. Eiusdem De Nobilitate Christiana Libri III. Florence, Lorenzo Torrentino, MDLII ( 1552 ). 4to (the leaf 218x145 mm), original limp vellum, with manuscript title finely calligraphed on spine and on lower edge; a clean, unsophisticated copy with wide margins. Torrentino’s woodcut device on title-page, pp. 295, 1 blank. As the collation of the present edition is given as pp. 246, 2 blanks, we have to state that unfortunately the printer (or the bookbinder) has forgot to add here the last 6 pages of the ‘De nobilitate Christiana’, which stops here at p. 240, inserting meanwhile the final pages 241-295 from the work “De gloria” (by the same author Osorio), as well printed in Florence by Torrentino in 1552. So the text “De Nobilitate civili” is here complete, and the twin text De Nobilitate Christiana is almost complete but for the last 6 pages. Rare second edition of Osorio’s first works. Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca (1506 – 1580) was a Portuguese Roman catholic humanist bishop, historian and polemicist. Born in Lisbon, of aristocratic lineage, at school in Portugal, showed such prodigious ability in Latin that in 1519, when aged 13, his mother sent him to Salamanca in Spain to study civil law, and then in 1525, he went to Paris to study Aristotelian logic and Natural philosophy, where he became a near associate of Peter Faber, in the close cicle of Ignatius of Loyola. Returning to Portugal, Osório next proceeded for Theology to Bologna, immersing himself in the study of Church Fathers and St Thomas Aquinas and making a higher study of Cicero, Demosthenes and Plato. He made such a name that King John III invited him in 1536–1537 to lecture in the reorganized University of Coimbra, where he expounded on Isaiah and on St Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Before the age of 30 he had begun his twin treatises De Nobilitate Civili and De Nobilitate Christiana (the present works): their publication in Lisbon in 1542 rapidly won him international acclaim; his mastery of Latin style earned him the name ”The Portuguese Cicero”. Adams O-378; BMC STC it. p. 478.