DOLET Etienne Orationes duae in Tholosam. Eiusdem epistolarum libri II. Eiusdem carminum libri II. Ad eundem epistolarum amicorum liber.

Longeon, Bibliographie des œuvres de Dolet, 1; Brunet, II, 796; Baudrier, VIII, 38-39; Graesse, II, 418; Gültlingen, V, 52: 243; Adams, D-768.  

First edition.

Born in Orléans on 3 August 1509, the humanist and printer Etienne Dolet, who displayed a rare freedom of spirit throughout his life, died at the stake at the age of 37. He came from a middle-class family, which he describes as ‘a family of honourable and remarkable quality’. He received a highly-developed literary education and, after completing his humanities in Paris, travelled to Italy in 1526, in particular to Padua and Venice, where he became secretary to the ambassador Jean de Langeac, Councillor to the Grand Council and Master of Requests in the household of King François I. On his return to France in 1530, Dolet studied jurisprudence in Toulouse. At the time, the Catholic and traditionalist University of Toulouse was in the throes of serious upheaval due to the success of Protestantism. Hostility arose not only towards the new religion, but also towards the new conception of culture coming from Italy. The Faculty of Law was particularly affected. Dolet became close to Jean de Pins, Bishop of Rieux, who was his most loyal protector, and befriended his professors, such as Jean de Boyssoné and his pupil Jean de Caturce, who was burnt at the stake as a heretic in 1532.

Dolet enjoyed a flattering reputation and was praised by Guillaume Budé, and was chosen by his French fellow students to be their spokesman. Unfortunately, he was to distinguish himself by delivering two harangues, the boldness of which provoked a very lively uproar. Denounced as a seditious Lutheran, he was arrested and imprisoned on charges of inciting students to revolt and attacking parliament. He was soon released thanks to the intervention of Jean de Pins, but was nevertheless expelled from Toulouse in 1534. At the age of 25, he moved to Lyon, where he worked alongside the learned printer Sebastien Gryphe as an erudite philologist and printer, corrector and proofreader. 

He immediately decided to publish his two speeches from Toulouse, and Gryphe was naturally commissioned to print the volume, which was his first book. The first 74 pages of the work are taken up by the two Oratio, themselves preceded by two letters, one from Simon Finet to Claude Cottereau, which describes the conditions of publication, and an Ode from Guillaume Scève to Etienne Dolet. They are followed, on pages 75 to 176, by letters from Dolet and his friends, and finally, on pages 177 to 246, by Poésies de Dolet, poems whose grace was already underlined by his contemporaries.

The verso of the last leaf contains Étienne Dolet’s typographical motto, which appears here for the first time. Dolet went on to write no fewer than fifteen works.

A great admirer of Cicero, he did not fail to take part in the great Ciceronian quarrel that was then stirring up the irritable world of the literati. 

In Lyon, he led a troubled life and in 1536 a murder inaugurated the long series of setbacks he had with the authorities; he fled to Paris where he obtained a pardon from François I, but on his return to Lyon, he was imprisoned until 21 April 1537. A year later, Dolet obtained a printing licence from the king. He then set up on his own and published his own books; a series of works, including Galien, Rabelais and Marot, did not fail to attract the attention of the ecclesiastical censors. After the publication of Erasmus’s Manuel du chevalier chrétien, a book that was found to be heresy, he was imprisoned again in 1542. After several attempts to escape, he was recaptured in 1544 and transferred to Paris where, after two years of proceedings, the parliament found him guilty of blasphemy, sedition and exposing prohibited and damned books and, on 2 August 1546, sentenced him to death after being tortured and strangled. The following day, 3 August 1546, Dolet was taken to the Place Maubert where he died at the stake.  

Small stains on the title, a few old notes in the margins.  

Provenance: Library of the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome (stamp). Long celebrated for its fabulous library, now dispersed, the basilica houses Michelangelo’s Moses.