About this Item
FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH. 12mo, 2 parts in 1, 149 x 77 mms., pp. [xii], 89, 61 [62 blank], contemporary half calf, marbled boards, gilt spine; title-page very soiled, some other spotting and soiling, fore-edge and margin of some leaves toward the end stained, later half calf, rebacked, rubbed, the Signet Library copy, with their gilt arms on both covers, with a note in a later hand (probably 18th century) stating, "Translated from the Italian of Bernadino Ochino by John Garfeild," on the verso of the leaf before the titlel-page. Imperfect, lacking the initial blank leaves and four leaves of text, A5 - A9, in the dedication. When it comes to really early books on polygamy in the English language, there are remarkably few. The ESTC finds only ten, in the several centuries covered by the database, and this 1657 work is the earliest by several years. The second part of the book is a dialogue on divorce (Milton's famous polemic, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, had appeared in print the previous decade, in 1643.) This 1657 work is a translation sometimes attributed to Francis Osborne (1593-1659), and the original text was Dialogo della Poligamia by Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564). Around 1650, Osborne moved to Oxford and from there published several books in the last years of his life. His Advice to a Son was immensely popular. Osborne was also a friend, and to some extent a follower, of Hobbes. As the Oxford DNB says, "His thinking shows the influence of Hobbes, whose 'great acquaintance' he was (Brief Lives, 1.370)." The DNB article on Osborne mentions the Dialogue on Polygamy, but relegates it to a short list of dubious attributions. Osborne's entry in the Oxford DNB makes no mention of the Dialogue at all. Nor is the translator sussed out by the ESTC. The book is ostensibly dedicated to Osborne, as the phrase "Dedicated to the Author of that well-known Treatise call'd, Advice to a Son" appears on the title-page. Could the translation, then, have been done by someone within Osborne's circle of friends, possibly Hobbes himself? Both the Italian language and the country of Italy play roles in Hobbes's life, and his stay in Italy with his student William Cavendish in the 1630s, as part of a Grand Tour, is among the better-documented periods of his life. The dialogues on polygamy and divorce in the present 1657 work closely concern legal aspects of these topics as well as their social permutations, and Hobbes was of course an acute legal mind; his Elements of Law circulated in manuscript as early as 1640; and in the 1670s Hobbes wrote A Dialogue between a Phylosopher and a Student, of the Common-Laws of England, which was published in the next decade under the title The Art of Rhetoric, with a Discourse of the Laws of England (1681). Of the present 1657 work, ESTC R9210 locates a preponderance of copies in Oxbridge (three copies in Cambridge and three in Oxford), but outside Oxbridge the work is scarce. Elsewhere in the British Isles and Ireland, the ESTC finds six copies, but only five of them are intact: British Library, Lambeth Palace, Marsh's Library, National Library of Scotland, the University of Leeds, and the University of Canterbury (the Canterbury copy being imperfect). For continental Europe, the ESTC finds just one copy at Gottingen. In the United States, the ESTC finds nine copies, but only two in the Ivy League: Harvard, Yale. ESTC finds no other printing of this translation in the century. Generally speaking, I do not offer imperfect books for sale, but many of the copies in university libraries are also imperfect; and the imperfections in this copy do not actually affect the main text and the argument. Seller Inventory # 9958
Contact seller
Report this item
