Hermes Trismegistus / François Foix de Candale
Pimandras utraque lingua restitutus, D. Francisci Flussatis Candallae industria … — Bordeaux 15743.750 €
Pimandras utraque lingua restitutus, D. Francisci Flussatis Candallae industria … — Burdigalae, Apud Simonem Millangium Burdigalensium, Typographum via Iacobea, 1574. (Bordeaux, Simon Millanges, 1574).
First edition thus
4to (215 x 128 mm). ✝︎6 A-O4 P6: (64) ff.
Foxed (see photos); title-page spotted. 18th(?) century doeskin. Two vertical paperstrips pasted left and right of the device, reading Solius domini; Veri domini sum.
Provenance: Ioannis Baptista de Bononio on title; ex-libris on paste-down. It seems that the upper frame of the device has a tiny ownership-entry, something like Io: Ant: Spor: – Adams H-347; Hoffmann II2 208.
A new translation into Latin by François Foix de Candale (1512-1594). „Foix-Candale is an important figure in the history of Neo-Alexandrian Hermetism, the ensemble of esoterically oriented commentaries of the Greek Hermetica in general, and of the Corpus Hermeticum in particular … Between his book on Euclid and his book on the Eucharist, he published three further texts. As noted by Frances A. Yates, all three [i.e. the present one, a French translation printed in 1574 also, and a new edition of these accompanied by philosophical expositions in 1579] mark ’new heights of ecstatic religious Hermetism‘ … Foix-Candale’s intellectual make-up was profoundly influenced by his study of Hermetic philosophy. At the beginning of his 1574 edition, in the dedicatory epistle to Emperor Maximilian II, he writes that Hermes Trismegistus possessed knowledge of the divine equal to the Apostles and the Evangelists …“ (Dict. of Gnosis …, 376f.)
Foix-Candale’s important emendations of Turnebe’s Greek text – suggested by the younger Scaliger and other humanists – are printed in the margins.