Editions
Three years after the death of de Thou, Pierre Dupuy and Nicolas Rigault brought out the first complete edition of the Historia sui temporis, comprising 138 books; they appended to it the Mémoires, also in Latin (1620). A hundred years later, Samuel Buckley published a critical edition, the material for which had been collected in France itself by Thomas Carte (1733). De Thou was treated as a classic, an honour which he deserved. His history is a model of exact research, drawn from the best sources, and presented in an elegant and animated style; unfortunately, even for the men of the Renaissance, Latin was a dead language; it was impossible for de Thou to find exact equivalents for technical terms of geography or of administration.
As the reasons which had led de Thou to forbid the translation of his monumental history disappeared with his death, there was soon a move to make it more accessible. It was translated first into German. A Protestant pastor, G Boule, who was afterwards converted to Catholicism, translated it into French, but could not find a publisher. The first translation printed was that of Pierre Du Ryer (1657), but it is mediocre and incomplete.
In the following century the abbé Prévost, who was a conscientious collaborator with the Benedictines of Saint-Maur before he became the author of the more profane work Manon Lescaut, was in treaty with a Dutch publisher for a translation which was to consist of ten volumes; only the first volume appeared (1733). But competition, perhaps of an unfair character, sprang up. A group of translators, who had the good fortune of being able to avail themselves of Buckley's fine edition, succeeded in bringing out all at the same time a translation in sixteen volumes (De Thou, Histoire universelle, Fr. trans. by Charles le Beau, Le Mascrier, the Abbé Des Fontaines, 1734). As to the Mémoires they had already been translated by Le Petit and Des Ifs (1711); in this form they have been reprinted in the collections of Petitot, Michaud and Buchon.
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Famous quotes containing the word editions:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)