Laurentii Vallae Elegantiarum Latinae Linguae libri sex by Lorenzo Valla - 1551

Lugduni / Lyon: No Publisher Given, 1551. Very Good. 7.2 x 5 inches; 18 x 12 cm. Not the Gryphium edition also published in Lyon in the same year; there is no publisher given and the pagination is different from the Gryphius edition. 8vo, embossed vellum binding dated 1555, very good, light bowing of boards, light soil to binding, a few worm holes to binding, occasional very old underlining and one or two pages have a few handwritten words in the margins, pages just slightly wavy. 488 (28) with publisher's woodcut device on last page of a hand holding an axe above a fallen tree trunk, with the inscription "Durior est spectatae virtutis quam incognitae conditio" underneath -- the device of the printing firm of Etienne Dolet, a French scholar and printer (who was imprisoned for a time for the -- justifiable -- murder of an artist), but Dolet was executed in 1546 and we don't know if the firm kept going: Dolet's imprints used this device with "Doletus" underneath it, absent in this case. A rare edition of this book -- only two or three in OCLC -- and even more rare to be seen in a contemporary dated binding. Lorenzo Valla (c. 1406-1457) was one of the most important humanists of his time. In his Elegantiae linguae Latinae, an advanced handbook of Latin language and style, he gave the humanist program some of its most trenchant and combative formulations, bringing the study of Latin to an unprecedented level (information from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). There were a number of pre-1500 editions of this, from ca. 1480 on; there were also several editions in the post-incunabula era, starting in the 1520s.