£295.00
D’Avrigny (Hyacinthe Robillard). Mémoires chronologiques et dogmatiques, pour servir à l’Histoire Ecclésiastique depuis 1600 jusqu’en 1716, avec des Réflexions & des Remarques critiques. Tome Quatrième, 1739.
An eighteenth-century French ecclesiastical history covering the religious and doctrinal developments of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This is Tome IV, the concluding volume of the work, printed in 1739.
With attractive woodcut and typographical ornaments, decorative initials and red-stained page edges. The title page bears a nineteenth-century blue institutional provenance stamp, “The Legacy of E. H. Millington”, dated 1878, with reference to Baltimore, Maryland.
Bound in period full calf. The binding is heavily worn, with extensive surface loss, cracking and deterioration to the spine and joints, and areas of exposed board and binding structure. Corners and extremities worn. Internally considerably better preserved, with generally clean eighteenth-century paper showing expected age toning and occasional spotting. An unrestored copy retaining considerable historical character.
Author: Hyacinthe Robillard d’Avrigny (1675–1719)
Year: 1739
Edition: Later Edition, Tome IV
Publisher: Not stated on the title page
Language: French
Published in 1739, Mémoires chronologiques et dogmatiques looks back over more than a century of profound religious and political upheaval in Europe.
Its author, the French Jesuit historian Hyacinthe Robillard d’Avrigny, constructed a chronological history of the Church from 1600 to 1716, combining historical events with commentary upon the theological controversies that accompanied them.
The period encompassed disputes over papal authority, the rise of Jansenism, conflicts involving the Jesuits and some of the most consequential doctrinal arguments within seventeenth-century Catholic Europe.
This particular volume subsequently travelled well beyond France. Its title-page stamp records its presence in a Baltimore collection by 1878, giving the book a tangible transatlantic provenance and another chapter in its nearly three-century history.
A genuine eighteenth-century theological and historical volume dating from 1739, retaining its period binding and particularly attractive red-stained edges.
The binding is unquestionably distressed, but the book has not been cosmetically transformed into something it is not. Its worn calf, early typography, ornamental printing and nineteenth-century American provenance give it the physical character expected of a book that has survived almost 300 years.
An affordable and visually evocative example for collectors of early printed books, European history, Catholic history and Jesuit scholarship.
