BALE, John [BADE, Conrad]

A beautiful copy of this rare and most influential translation into French, by the celebrated protestant publisher and author Conrad Bade, in a most elegant French binding. The binding, exceptionally well worked in gilt using fine crushed red morocco, is very much in the style of Derome the younger (see British Library Shelfmark c42c9 with his ticket). However it is almost certainly the work of the highly skilled if little known Jean-Baptiste Gosselin (whose niece married Michel Derome) and who, it is claimed, executed special bindings for Louis XVI. According to Erick Aguirre, who himself supplied this information, Gosselin bound several copies of the Bale for the bookseller Guillaume-Luc Bailly in about 1785. M. Bailly’s price codes are in very small letters at the foot of the final end-paper. Mr. Aguirre has also identified this copy as lot 3913 in the 1803 Méon sale (little red numbers on foot of t-p) where it was purchased by Morel de Vindé.

Bale (1495-1563), a former Carmelite monk who converted to protestantism, later bishop of Ossory, was one of the most outspoken English Protestants of the first half of the C16. After the fall of his patron, Thomas Cromwell in 1540, he fled to Germany, where he busied himself in composing the bitter diatribes which earned him the nickname “Bilious Bale”. On the accession of Edward VI he returned to England to share in the triumph of the reformers and publish in London the works composed in exile. Bale initially wrote this work in Latin and it was first published in Basel in 1558. It was translated into English, with additions by John Studley, as ‘The Pageant of Popes’ in 1574. The French is the first translation into the vernacular. Conrad Bade is justly recognised as a hugely important publisher just for the publication of his friend Calvin’s works but was also a satirical author in his own right. He published his most famous satirical work the ‘Alcoran des Cordeliers’ in 1556 and followed this with another attack on the abuses of the Church with his ‘Satyres Chrestienes de la Cuisine Papale’. “The third polemical work which Badius printed was a translation from Bishop John Bales history of the Popes, Acta Pontifcum Romanorum. Its most interesting feature to us is Bale’s preface in praise of Geneva as it appeared to him in 1558. In this work, which was produced in 1561, Badius reveals himself as a poet, by his versification of the various rhymes in the original,… Like so many who tried their hand at verse in this period, he was never a great poet, yet he was at least spirited and readable which is more than could be said of most of his contemporaries.” Lewis Lupton ‘Conrad Badius’.

A very fine copy of this extremely rare work from William Beckford’s library. William Thomas Beckford (1760 – 1844) extraordinarily wealthy English novelist, art critic, travel writer and politician, now chiefly remembered as the author of the Gothic novel Vathek and builder of the remarkable Fonthill Abbey, the enormous gothic revival country house, largely destroyed. Beckford’s fame rests as much upon his eccentric extravagances as a builder and collector as upon his literary efforts. The opportunity to purchase the complete library of Edward Gibbon gave Beckford the basis for his own library, which was extensive, and dispersed over two years in 1883-4.