[MÜLLER, Andreas (pseud. Thomas LUDEKENIUS)].
SINGLE RECORDED US COPY
Oratio orationum, S. S. Orationis Dominicae Versiones
Berlin, Ex Officina Rungiana, 1680£2,950.00
FIRST EDITION. 4to. pp. (xvi) 64. Roman and gothic letter with italic, with a mixture of letterpress and eleven etched plates depicting the Lord’s Prayer in various alphabets, good strong impressions; the alphabets include, Arabic, Hebrew, Samaritan, Syriac, Ethiopic, Chinese, Persian, various forms of Slavonic and Virginian. Woodcut initial and head- and tailpieces, typographic headpieces. Contemporary quarter calf over marbled boards, rubbed and corners bumped, spine with overlapping triple fillets in blind, rubbed with some loss at head and foot. Inscription to t-p of ‘F.H. (?) Brandes B.M.,’ identifying Müller as the author; contemporary ms. annotations, likely in the same hand, including corrections and addition of runes. Later armorial ink stamp to t-p. Foxing throughout, mostly light, a good copy.
Rare first edition of this ambitious feat of linguistics, which claimed to put the Lord’s Prayer into one hundred versions in various languages and dialects (really 75 languages in 82 versions), including: Mexican, ‘Poconchi’ (Mayan) and Virginian, the ancient biblical languages, modern European languages, African languages including Madagascan and Angolan, Asian languages, and even three examples of the new-fangled ‘philosophical’ or rational languages (grouped under ‘confictae’ or invented). The etched plates depict ‘Estrangelo’ Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Malabaric, Chinese, Gothic, Slavonic (also in Russian Cyrillic), and the first of the philosophical languages. Many languages appear as Romanized transcriptions, whereas others never appear at all: Anglo-Saxon, Malay and Berriensian (i.e. the Berrichon French dialect) appear with gaps where presumably plates were intended, since Anglo-Saxon and Malay have transliterations in Roman type present (though why Berrichon would require a non-Roman type or script is unclear), whereas Japanese appears with an apology printed in letterpress (‘Haberi non potuerunt’, etc.) explaining that no manuscript examples could be collected. Finally there is a table putting the word ‘Father’ into a Romanized form of all the languages. The collection was republished and expanded by Benjamin Motte (1693-1738), publisher of Gulliver’s Travels, in London in 1700.
Andreas Müller (1630-94) was educated in oriental languages and theology at Rostock and Wittenberg. He travelled to England to collaborate with the orientalists Brian Walton (d. 1661) and Edmund Castell (1606-85) on their polyglot Bible and Lexicon; almost a decade of their work was largely destroyed in the Fire of London. Müller was especially famous for his work on Chinese, with the Chinese version of the Lord’s Prayer given a full-page etching of the characters, along with two Romanized versions in Mandarin. Müller catalogued and purchased Chinese books for the library of the Elector of Saxony, Frederick William, and acquired a large set of Chinese types, at his own expense, then the largest in Europe.
Our annotator displays a high degree of engagement with the text and knowledge of languages: adding a text to Müller’s brief catalogue of previous collections of Paternosters (by Bonaventura Vulcanius, printed in Leiden in 1597); adding references to several titles in this catalogue by the entries for Hebrew and Amharic; making corrections to texts in French, Biscay, Gothic, English, Icelandic, Frisian, Bohemian, Polish, Livonian, Carni (Slavic dialect), Serbian, and even the second philosophical language; and finally, adding a transliteration of Danish into runic script.
Not in BM STC Ger., Sabin or Darlow & Moule. OCLC notes only the Newberry Library copy in the US.In stock
