ROSIÈRES, François de.

Six livres des politiques, contentants l?origine et estat des cités, condition des personnes, economie, & police des monarchies & républiques du monde, tant en temps de paix, que de guerre, avec l?institution du monarch, & les moyens de conserver & destruire la chose publique en toutes especes de gouvernement tant droict que defectueux, ensemble des magistrats, & loix, desquelles on y doit user, selon le jugement des anciens & modernes philosophes . . . Plus, de l?origine . . . & utilité de l?art politique.

      Rheims, Jean de Foigny, 1574. - Small 4to (205 x 150 mm), ff. [10], 132; mild damp-damage to upper margin of last few leaves, affecting the headlines and a few letters of the final two, but a very good copy in seventeenth-century mottled calf; upper joint cracked. First edition. A rare treatise on government, society and economy, written during the French Wars of Religion by the archdeacon of Toule. Rosières enjoyed the patronage of Charles, the Guise cardinal of Lorraine, to whom this book is dedicated. In 1580 he published Stemmatum Lotharingiae ac Barri ducum libri septem, which, on fraudulent documentary evidence, attempted to prove that the house of Lorraine (of which the Guise was a branch) was the rightful claimant to the French crown: unsurprisingly the book was suppressed, but, thanks to his Guise connections, Rosières suffered no more that a short term of imprisonment (see NBG).INED 3904. Not in Adams or BM French. OCLC locates five copies (Iowa, Newberry, Oxford, Leiden, BSB).