PATRIZI Senese, Francesco /AURIGNY, Gilles D!

Le livre de Police Humaine, contenant brieve description de plusieurs choses dignes de memoire: si comme d!un gouvernement d!un Royaume, et de toute administration de la Republique, ou sont assemblees par un recueil succinct, maintes bell

      Paris: Charles l!Angelie, 1544. Extremely rare of the first French edition of this digest of the two political works by Francesco Patrizi (1413-1494) marking the first appearance in French ! and in any vernacular ! of passages from his work on monarchies. Patrizi!s treatises on governments are considered precursors of Macchiavelli!s Prince and have been proven to have served as models for Thomas Elyot!s Governor (1531), yet Patrizi remains a curiously understudied figure.Born in Siena, Patrizi studied alongside Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, and entertained friendships with humanists like Panormita, Filolfo, Tranchedini and Battista Guarino. He entered political life in his native city and served as ambassador to Florence, Rimini, Emperor Frederick III and the Holy See. Implicated in a charge of treason, he was imprisoned, tortured and then exiled. He took on ecclesiastic robes and, when Piccolomini became pope, was pardoned and made Bishop of Gaeta in 1461.Patrizi is !a man of wide interests and broad attainments [who] has never been studied comprehensively.! (Schmitt) His literary output is virtually unstudied. In politics, his two main works are De institutione reipublicae, finished between 1465 and 1471, and its counterpart on monarchies, De regno et Regis institutione, written between 1481 and 1484. His political works show off the encyclopedic scope of his studies, covering the arts, sciences, agriculture, commerce, architecture and town planning, gymnastics, horse-riding and hunting, games and theater. Throughout, Patrizi!s approach is practical, investigating the effects these pursuits have on the citizens and rulers of a state, and how they can be employed to maximize the public good. Although the two works appear contradictory, Patrizi!s vote ultimately comes down on the side of republics, and his work on princes is above all a cautionary manual on how to avoid the pitfalls of absolute power. Even in De regno, Patrizi defends freedom and the freedom of opinion.Patrizi!s individualism is tempered by a strong social conscience. He attacks usury and defends the !middle class,! as well as servants, whom he writes one should not regard as slaves: no man may enrich himself at the expense of another. His rationalist and pragmatic approach leads to arguments that appear to be well ahead of their time, such as his defense of the right to abortion and contraception. In the judgment of one scholar, he is !typical of the passage from the transcendental medieval world to the naturalism and voluntarism of the Renaissance. Patrizi announces Macchiavelli in many points, who will be better understood when his precedents are illuminated.! (Battaglia, p.x) De Reipublicae was widely disseminated in France throughout the sixteenth century, but curiously not in Italy, where it was never published in its entirety. Domenico Bassi suggests that both works were used in schools in France. The first edition of De Reipublicae came out in 1494 and was followed by nine others between 1518 and 1594. The manuscript of De Regis was brought over to France by Jean Prevost, counselor in the Paris parliament, and first published in 1519. French editions of De Reipublicae appeared in 1520 and 1532, but it was not until 1577 that De Regis saw a vernacular edition. The present work, drawn from both of Patrizi!s texts, is therefore the first appearance of his writings on monarchies in the vernacular. The first English edition appeared in 1576, meaning that Thomas Elyot, whose Book named The Governour is directly modeled on De Regis, must have read Patrizi either in Latin or French. The editor, Gilles d!Aurigny (d. 1553), was a French poet, !who tends to work like a parasite on others ! he contributed to the edition of Martial d!Auvergne!s Arrests d!Amours, adapts Erasmus to monarchist ends in his edition of the Institution du Prince, dabbles in religious verse [!] d!Aurigny is a late rhetoriqueur.! (A Literary History of France, II, pp. 121-2) The work appeared in a variant issue by the same publisher the same year under the title: Le guido[n] de police humaine and was reissued in 1546, 1549, 1550, and 1553. OCLC locates only one copy (LC) of any edition of this work (the variant, either issue, Le guido[n] de police humaine); we have also located copies at the Harvard Law School and Yale. OCLC : LC (Le guidon de police humaine). For earlier French editions of De Reipublicae, OCLC lists LC (1520) and Chicago (1532). For earlier Latin editions of either De Reipublicae or De Regis, OCLC lists Chicago (1519), UCSD (1520), Newberry, Duke, Georgetown (1531), Duke (1534), Newberry (1534), Maryland (1543).*Adams P-450; Graesse I.257 ; Brunet I.571Bassi, Domenico, !L!Epitome di Quintiliano di Francesco patrizi Senesi,! Rivista di Filologia d!istruzione classica, XXI (1894), pp. 385-470; Battaglia, Felice, Enea Silvio Piccolomini e Francesco patrizi : due politici senesi del quattrocento. Florence, Olschki, 1936; Schlotter, Joseph, Thomas Elyot!s !Governour! in seinem Verhaltnis zu Francesco Patrizi, Kaiserstuhl, Wild, 1938; Schmitt, Charles B., Cicero Scepticus: A study of the influence of the Academia in the Renaissance, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1972.. 8vo [16 x 10.5 cm], (8), 101, (11) ff. with 3 woodcuts and numerous woodcut initials. Bound in 18th-century? polished calf, spine gilt with black morocco title label, joints and corners worn. Ex libris of J.E. on front end pastedown, and library stamps on fly-leaf and title. Some spotting and dampstaining on scattered leaves; but overall good.