[HEGENDORFF, Cristoph]. ERASMUS, Desiderius.

Fascinating sammelband of two vanishingly scarce editions of works on the moral education and upbringing of children, both with contemporary French marginalia: the first the extremely rare Troyes edition of a moral guide to youth by the German reformer Christoph Hegendorff (1500-40), a lawyer, pedagogist and great admirer of Erasmus, first published 1529; the second an even rarer Lyon edition of Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium, first published 1530. It is generally considered to be the first work addressed directly to a child, as opposed to being about children.

Erasmus wrote De civilitate after his move to Freiburg from Basel in 1529. It is addressed to Henry of Burgundy, the eleven-year-old son of Adolph, Prince of Beere (1489-1540), to whose house Erasmus was a frequent visitor, and whose elder son Maximilien Erasmus had advised on his scientific education. Erasmus addresses the importance of wearing modest clothing and keeping respectable company, on appropriate behaviour in church, and the benefits of conviviality and play, but also having a quiet study room. There follow Latin poems and epigrams on the nativity and youth of Christ, some by Erasmus, and two of which memorialise the educational programme of Erasmus’s close friend John Colet (1467-1519), espoused by St. Paul’s School in London and based on Erasmian ideals, which Colet had re-founded in 1512.  

Hegendorff was a devoted admirer of Erasmus and begins his work by comparing Erasmus to the ancient Roman writer Quintilian, as an author for the instruction of youth. Hegendorff takes a far more overtly religious line in its advice to children, taking the form initially of a series of brief lectures on the Ten Commandments There follow a series of ‘paraeneses’ or exhortations to good living, several in the form of instructive maxims, giving advice on: keeping one’s hands clean; what to wear; what to keep in mind and what to look for; a formula for saying grace; how to occupy oneself between meals; caring for the soul and resisting the devil; avoiding despondency; on diet and temperance; and moral advice including suppression of anger, avoidance of foul language and contumacy, and modesty. Appended is the Italian Tudor historian Polydore Vergil’s (d.1555) brief line-by-line commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, with a dedicatory letter of 1524 to Saint John Fisher (c.1469-1535), then Bishop of Rochester, appearing in Vergil’s collected works from 1525. In it he condemns ornate services and lazy priests.

Troyes had printing before either Lyon or Paris, and lays claim to having established the earliest paper mill in France, in 1338. In later centuries it became the centre for popular French print culture, called the Bibliothèque bleue, producing almanacks, ballad and song books, prayer books, etc.  

The name of Sapte is later associated with English Huguenots, but there is evidence of a family with this name in the Conques region of Southern France during the mid-sixteenth century, who established a weaving manufactory and owned a château there. Pierre de Sapte is recorded as having given money to the local abbey.