FIRST EDITION. Title with woodcut printer's device, woodcut decorative initials, occasional spotting, particularly to title, lightly and uniformly toned, occasional early ink marginalia; pp. [14], 148, [2]; [6], 123, [1], small 8vo; contemporary blind-stamped pigskin spine, with biblical vignettes, and paper-backed boards using part of a fifteenth-century liturgical manuscript, spine in compartments; piece missing from pigskin of upper compartment and a smaller piece from lower compartment, lacking 1 of four leather ties, some staining but good. In a pleasing contemporary binding of blind-illustrated pigskin and manuscript waste, are these sixteenth-century dictaminal treatises by the humanist scholars and giants of the field, Verepaus and Macropedius. Simon Verepaeus (or Simon Vereept, c.1522-1598), was a priest and educator from the Habsburg Netherlands, whose works on prayer, Latin grammar, and Latin composition continued to be reprinted until the early nineteenth century. The present work is his anthology of excerpts of correspondence by famous authors, for use in schools. The second work is the treatise that became known as the Epistolica (first publuished Antwerp 1572), the most famous work by the Dutch schoolmaster and playwright Georgius Macropedius (born Joris van Lanckvelt, 1487-1558). Along with other humanists such as Brandolini and Erasmus, and Vives, Macropedius and Verepaeus influenced the formal practice of letter writing across the Continent and in Britain until well into the nineteenth-century. Scarce in commerce. See: Lawrence D. Green, 'French Letters and English Anxiety in the Seventeenth Century.' Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 3/4, (2003) 26374.
