QUINTILIAN.

A very good, well-margined, clean copy of the second Aldine edition of Quintilian’s most influential manual of rhetoric. Edited by Naugerius and G.B. Ramusio, it includes a new table of Greek words, absent in the first. The text is modelled on that of the 1515 Giunta edition. Quintilian’s ‘Institutio Oratoria’ was the main text for the study of classical rhetoric until way into the C18 – ‘the most complete and detailed collection of the historical development of theories and techniques of communication in Greece and Rome up to the first century’ (Celentano, p.361). Written in the 1^st century AD and rediscovered in 1416, it introduced students to the basic principles of rhetoric, e.g., orations, their elements, tropes and figures of speech. Issued without the editor’s preface, it begins with Quintilian’s own letter to his publisher, Trypho, who had allegedly been pressing him to finish his work – the result of 20 years of teaching – on the best education of the orator. The 12 books deal with preparatory material, the nature of rhetoric and its elements (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio), the character of the orator, and how he should study, prepare and argue his cases. ‘The Institutio has been described as four major works blended into one: a treatise on education, a manual of rhetoric, a reader’s guide to the best authors, and a handbook on the moral duties of the perfect orator’ (Murphy, p.59). Innocentio Doion was likely a member of the influential aristocratic Doglioni family, from Belluno. In 1625, he is recorded as one of the witnesses at the reading of the Bishop of Belluno’s will.