Sextus Empiricus

Folio (11 1/4 x 7 7/8 in.; 285 x 195 mm), [8], 583, [33]pp.; last blank leaf lacking, slight marginal damp-staining at beginning and end. Contemporary vellum with gilt crowned stamp of James I, King of Scotland, on covers and initials I.6.R., small fleur-de-lys stamps on flat spine; slightly worn. 

James VI of Scotland and I of England (armorial binding) — a seventeenth-century note of price £1.2s.0d. on title-page — Note of purchase "Aug. 31 1720 Collat. & perfect" (there was a sale held at D. Browne's warehouse on this date, BL S.C.347 [1]) — Earls of Macclesfield (bookplate; Sotheby's London, 25 October 2005, lot 1871). acquisition: Purchased at the foregoing sale through Bernard Quaritch

Voet 2208; H. M. Nixon, Sixteenth-century Gold Tooled Bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan Library (NY, 1971), pp. 205-210; for Sextus Empiricus and his editions see L. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The transmission and recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford, 2002).

From the library of James VI of Scotland and I of England.
Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonism had in this translation a large circulation well before the publication of the Greek text in 1619. In 1562 Henri Estienne had published a translation of Pyrrhoniae hypotyposes with a short commentary. This is reprinted here and Gentien Hervet from Orleans has added his translation of Adversus mathematicos, which appears for the first time. His translation was made, he tells us, from a manuscript in the library of the Cardinal of Lorraine, now possibly BNF gr. 2081.

The influence of this work in the later sixteenth century was considerable, and Montaigne certainly knew Estienne's translation of the Hypotyposes as well as the translation of Diogenes Laertius' Pyrrhonis, vita which is also included here.

Plantin was the publisher of the volume and his device is found on the title but it is the Parisian printer Le Jeune who actually printed the book and his large device appears on p.[584] and at the end. Plantin was fully occupied at this time printing the great Polyglot Bible and therefore had to farm out the printing of the work. It is handsomely laid out with lineation in the inner margin of each page for ease of reference, and notes in the outer margin.

James VI (1566-1625), who became King of Scotland in 1567 at the abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots, his mother, was probably the most academically minded monarch in the history of the British Isles; his tutor was the great Scottish humanist and neo-Latin poet, George Buchanan. A manuscript in the British Library contains a list of books in his library and often the sources for them. This list, published in 1893, does not contain this particular volume, but it does contain a substantial number of books in Latin, French, English and Greek, many of them in smaller formats. 

Howard Nixon described in 1971 a binding in the Pierpont Morgan Library and listed a number of others known. Of bindings like this present one, we can now account for the following:

P. Bizarri, Senatus … genuensis … historiae. Antwerp: Plantin, 1579 (British Library);

A. Krantz, Rerum germanicarum  … chronica. Frankfurt: Wechel, 1575 (from a rubbing in the Ferguson collection in Oxford);

S. Schard, Germanicarum rerum … chronographi. Frankfurt: Wechel, 1566 (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh);

G. P. Valeriano Bolzani, Commentaires. Lyon: B. Honorat, 1576 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) 

There are also some others: Rondelet, 1554 (RCPS, see Bird 2083) bound in brown calf with arms in gilt as here; a Cicero at Parham; Xenophon, Basel, 1569 (NLS), both with arms and Thistle badge; two parts (Tenor & Superius) of a setting of Buchanan's metrical Psalms, dedicated to James VI, by the composer Servin (Lyon: C. Pesnot, 1579), the only complete copy of all five parts being at Trinity College, Dublin (Durkan 88), bound in calf with arms on sides with double tressure painted black, the first at PML and the second at the BL (Henry Davis Gift); and the four volumes of Bellarmine's Disputationes (Ingolstadt, 1601) in an elaborate fanfare binding, of which volume one (once belonging to Lord Astor) is now in the NLS (illustrated in Fine bindings 1500-1700 from Oxford Libraries no. 83), vol. 2 was in Maggs 1212 (1996) item 14, vol. 3 is in the Royal Library, Windsor, and volume 4, sold in these rooms on 25 May 1906, lot 11, cannot at present be traced.