gonzáles mendoza juan trans parke (1 résultats)

Hardcover. First. THE FIRST EUROPEAN BOOK TO PRINT CHINESE TEXT -- London: Printed by I. Wolfe for Edward White, 1588. First edition in English. Octavo (7 1/8" x 5 3/8", 181mm x 136mm). [Full collation available.] Bound in later (XVIIc?) paneled speckled calf. On the spine, five raised bands. Title gilt to the second panel. Blind roll to the edges of the boards. All edges of the text-block speckled red. Headpiece and fore-corners strengthened. Surface-cracking at the hinges, with some erosion to the boards (perhaps from moisture). Upper front fore-corner worn. Paste-downs renewed. Mildly evenly tanned throughout. Signs of damp to the lower margin through quire E, most pronounced to the title-leaf. Marginal ink-stain to L3-7. Paper flaws to H4 (marginal) and to M4 (about five lines high, two to three words across). Lacking the final blank. Armorial bookplate of Edward William Harcourt with a graphite shelf-mark to the front paste-down. Juan Gonzáles de Mendoza (1545-1618) was an Augustinian friar who, despite the subject of the present work, never went to China. He was, rather, appointed Bishop of Chiapas (Mexico, 1607) and then of Popayán (Colombia, 1608) -- and so might rather have become a scholar of the Americas. Indeed, the final part of the work does discuss the Caribbean and Mexico at some length, so much so that Ortelius crowns the present work the most informative in the preparation of his own atlas. In the end it was not the Augustinians but the Jesuits who made the greatest Western inroads to China, such that the opening decades of the XVIIc would see a surge in Chinese interest fueled by the publications of Matteo Ricci most of all. Yet for the curious Elizabethans, Parke's translation of the work (first published in 1585 in Spanish) -- made at the behest of Richard Hakluyt, who published a compendium of explorations (the Principall Navigations of 1589) -- was the largest window onto the kingdom of whose fifteen provinces Gonzales writes "every one of them is bigger then [sic] the greatest kingdome that we doo understand to be in all Europe" (p. 13). The second part (in two "bookes," pp. 136-237 and 238-304) expands the geographic remit with Spanish voyages to the Philippines. For all the accusations that the text is fundamentally derivative, it is still of considerable note for being the first to print, with western type, Chinese characters (pp. 92 & 93). The third part, drawn as it is from personal experience or at least personal research in "New Spain," has a more compelling authority. His description of Mexico City as a sort of Venetian Eden (p. 317) is particularly alluring. The Augustinians, like -- albeit to a lesser degree than -- the Jesuits, had a strong network of sources in the region that allowed for a comprehensive study of the region's topography, nature and people. As such, the volume is as much an important work of Elizabethan Americana (Sabin writes that it is "so rare that we have never seen it") as it is of Sinica. The volume was in the vast library (noted on p. 211 (sub Parke) of the 1883 catalogue) of Edward William Vernon Harcourt (1825-1891) of Nuneham House in Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire. Harcourt was an MP from 1878-1885 for Oxforshire and then for Henley. His library shows him to be a passionate naturalist and Orientalist; he owned in addition to this English edition two Italian editions of the work. The work is indeed rare; it has come to auction only seven times in this century (commanding prices as high as $216,600!) and only 37 examples are recorded on OCLC. Purchased at Sotheby's London 4 November 2014, lot 189. Cordier, Sinica 13; ESTC S103230; Sabin 27783.