Pimandras utraque lingua restitutus … — Bourdeaux 1574

Hermes Trismegistus / François Foix de Candale

Pimandras utraque lingua restitutus, D. Francisci Flussatis Candallae industria … — Burdigalae, Apud Simonem Millangium Burdigalensium, Typographum via Iacobea, 1574.

Bordeaux, Simon Millanges, 1574

First edition thus

4to (220 x 146 mm). ✝︎⁶ A-O⁴ P⁶: (64) leaves. Some foxing. Contemporary vellum. – Adams H-347; Hoffmann II² 208; Hermes Trismegistus … Tekstgeschiedenis van het Corpus Hermeticum. A’dam 1990, no. 45.

Provenance: 1.) Above Millanges’s device in manuscript: ἐκ τῶν θρόμβου [Χριστοῦ].

2.) John Duke Coleridge (1820-1894), the English lawyer, judge and liberal politician, his note: J. D. Coleridge  1852  Bought at the Lovat Sale on fly-leaf. The library at his home in Ottery St Mary in Devon contained over 12,000 volumes, including many from the 16th century. The „Lovat Sale“ refers to a 3-day sale of the library of Archibald Fraser of Lovat (1736-1815), held by Sotheby’s in February 1852. The catalogue was entitled ‘Catalogue of a valuable portion of the singularly curious library of the Hon. Archd. Fraser, of Lovat, LLD., F.R.S., & F.S.A., deceased’. (Many thanks to Barbara Scalvini of Quaritch for the information about the sale.)

A new translation into Latin by François Foix de Candale (1512-1594), the first translation from of the editio princeps, Turnèbe 1554.

„Foix-Candale is an important figure in the history of Neo-Alexandrian Hermetism, the ensemble of esoterically oriented commentaries of the Greek Hermetica in general, and of the Corpus Hermeticum in particular … Between his book on Euclid and his book on the Eucharist, he published three further texts. As noted by Frances A. Yates, all three [i.e. the present one, a French translation printed in 1574 also, and a new edition of these accompanied by philosophical expositions in 1579] mark ’new heights of ecstatic religious Hermetism‘ … Foix-Candale’s intellectual make-up was profoundly influenced by his study of Hermetic philosophy. At the beginning of his 1574 edition, in the dedicatory epistle to Emperor Maximilian II, he writes that Hermes Trismegistus possessed knowledge of the divine equal to the Apostles and the Evangelists …“ (Dict. of Gnosis …, 376f.)

Foix-Candale’s important emendations of Turnebe’s Greek text – suggested by the younger Scaliger and other humanists – are printed in the margins.