WINGFIELD Robert Nobilissima disceptatio super dignitate et magnitudine Regnorum Britannici et Gallici.

Adams, W-209.

First and only edition.

Robert Wingfield (ca. 1471-1539) whose family had been seated at Letheringham since the 14th century is reckoned to have been the 7th son of a brotherhood of 12. In 1492 he and his step-father lord Scrope were included in the army raised for war with France, and in the troubled year 1497, while Scrope helped to raise the siege of Norham castle, Wingfield served with his brother Richard against the Cornish rebels.

He and his brother left for a pilgrimage to Rome in March 1505 and eventually to Jerusalem which yielded him the title ‘knight of the Holy Sepulchre’. Having returned to England Wingfield was employed almost continuously in diplomacy. His hatred of the French seems at times to have blinded him to all other considerations. In 1517 he published, under the title Nobilissima Disceptatio super dignitate et magnitudine Regnorum Britannici Gallici, the debates at the Council of Constance in 1416 when the French had maintained that the English were not a sufficient nation to be represented at the Council; the English reply, remarked Wingfield in his preface, made plain that ‘whether in arms or in faith … the English nation always surpassed the French, nor could it be judged inferior in the dignity and antiquity of its inhabitants, the size and greatness of its lands, or the character and learning of its people’ ex quo fit ut veluti armis & fide (absit verbo invidia) natio Anglicana semper praestit Galliacae…].

The book was printed in Louvain by Theodoricus Martinus (Thierry Martens), Erasmus’s printer, who had just completed the first edition of More’s Utopia. The title page is decorated with a large architectural border, the last leaf bears the printers’ device on the verso.

Fine provenance

Copy having belonged to Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) with his coat of arms on the covers and the mention “Bibliotheca Colbertinae” on the title.

Magnificent copy of this rare book, unknown to USTC. No copy located in continental Europe or in the United-States. 

Provenance : Colbert (coat of arms on covers and manuscript note on the title “Bibliothecae Colbertinae”, sale Paris, 1728, vol 2., n° 5498) – Dukes of Devonshire, Chatsworth (bookplate; Catalogue of the library at Chatsworth, 1879, vol II, p. 45).