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#1. Travel
631J
Sandys, George, 1578-1644.,
Sandys travels : containing an history of the original and present state of the Turkish Empire, their laws, government, policy, military force, courts of justice, and commerce, the Mahometan religion and ceremonies, a description of Constantinople, the Grand Signior’s seraglio, and his manner of living : also, of Greece, with the religion and customs of the Grecians : of Ægypt, the antiquity, hieroglyphicks, rites, customs, and discipline, and religion of the Ægyptians : a voyage on the River Nylvs : of Armenia, Grand Cairo, Rhodes, the Pyramides, Colossus, the former flourishing and present state of Alexandria : a description of the Holy-Land, of the Jews, and several sects of Christians living there : of Jerusalem, sepulchre of Christ, Temple of Solomon, and what else either of antiquity, or worth observation : lastly, Italy described, and the islands adjoining, as Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicilia, the Æolian Islands, of Rome, Venice, Naples, Syracusa, Mesena, Aetna, Scylla, and Charybdis, and other places of note : illustrated with fifty graven maps and figures.
London : printed for John Williams junior, at the Crown in Little-Britain, 1673. $2,900
Folio , 32 1/2 x 20 cm. . Seventh edition. Signatures: A3 B-X6 There is an extra engraved title page as frontis, double-page map of eastern Mediterranean to Caspian Sea, Arabia, Black Sea, fold-out panorama of part of Constantinople, and a total of 50 engravings including costumes, plans, views. This copy is bound in a beautifully perserved 17th century panel calf binding. With an old and expert rebacking.
“In 1615 Sandys published an account of his travels, with the title ‘The Relation of a Journey begun an. Dom. 1610, in Four Books.’ The volume was dedicated to Prince Charles, under whose auspices all Sandys’s literary work saw the light. Sandys was an observant traveller. Izaak Walton noticed in his ‘Compleat Angler’ (pt. i. ch. i.) Sandys’s account of the pigeon-carrier service between Aleppo and Babylon. His visit to the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem inspired an outburst of fervent verse—‘A hymn to my Redeemer’—whence Milton derived hints for his ‘Ode on the Passion’ (stanza vii). The volume was adorned with maps and illustrations, and at once became popular. Editions, with engraved title-pages by Delaram, are dated 1621, 1627, 1637, 1652, and 1673.
An extract, ‘The Relation of Africa,’ i.e. Egypt, appeared in Purchas’s ‘Pilgrimes,’ 1625, pt. ii. Sandys’s accounts of both Africa and the Holy Land figure in John Harris’s ‘Navigantium et Itinerantium Bibliotheca,’ 1705 (vols. i. and ii.).(DNB).
He also took great interest in the earliest English colonization in America and in 1621 sailed to Virginia with his niece’s husband, Sir Francis Wyat, who had been appointed the new governor. Sandys took the position as colonial treasurer of the Virginia Company and when Virginia became a crown colony, he served as a member of the council. Illustrations include plans, views and architecture of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Pompei’s pillar, the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, the Virgin’s Sepulchre and the mysterious
Bastions of Christendom, and the Holy Land, are represented in great detail; regions where Islam is prevalent are sketched in with minimal detail. This is likewise the case for the perceived backwaters of Christendom. The North and East of Europe, spreading into Asia, remains comparatively sparse. Some of the perceived idiosyncrasies are simply matters of convention for the day. The moniker “Part of ____” might appear at first to be an insult to the Africans and the Arabians. This, however, is a common usage in contemporary maps of this era, demonstrating a lack of detail on un necessary locals.
ESTC R18550. WING S680.
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#2) Witchcraft/Exorcism
Elizabethan Exorcisms
752J Darrell, John 1562- 1602
A detection of that sinnful, shamful, lying, and ridiculous discours, of Samuel Harshnet. entituled: A discouerie of the fravvdulent practises of Iohn Darrell wherein is manifestly and apparantly shewed in the eyes of the world. not only the vnlikelihoode, but the flate impossibilitie of the pretended counterfayting of William Somers, Thomas Darling, Kath. Wright, and Mary Couper, togeather with the other 7. in Lancashire, and the supposed teaching of them by the saide Iohn Darrell.
[England?]: Imprinted [by the English secret press?], 1600. $6,000
[Imprint conjectured by STC.]
Octavo 18 x 12.5 cm. Signatures: π1, A2 B2,A3,B4, C-Y2, Aa-Zz2, Aaa-Ggg2. (lacking 4 un-numbered pages table of contents). Title and first leaves extended; otherwise, a very good copy. Text is predominantly clean. First edition. Binding: Full recent calf with blind tooled rulings. Spine in six compartments of raised bands with gilt title.
Darrell (1562-1602) was an Anglican clergyman noted for his Puritan views and his practice as an exorcist, which led to imprisonment. As one of England’s most famous exorcists. In 1586 he was called to help by Isabel Foljambe and he exorcised a girl in Derbyshire, and published an account of his work. In 1596–1597 he conducted further exorcisms, mainly at St Mary’s Church, Nottingham, where he was appointed curate by Robert Aldridge, but also in Lancashire, where with others he exorcised demons from seven members of the household of Nicholas Starkey in Tyldesley on 17 and 18 March 1597 and in Staffordshire. Many were skeptical about these cases, especially when Darrell claimed he knew of 13 witches in the town. “After some controversy regarding the exorcism of William Somers, Darrell was summoned to London and imprisoned for over a year. ‘After being imprisoned for more than a year, Darrell and More were found guilty of fraud by the commissioners for ecclesiastical causes, in late May 1599. The two ministers were deprived of their livings and returned to prison to await sentencing. An acrimonious controversy ensued which lasted for four years and provoked more than a dozen books. Darrell’s opponents, led by Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London, and his chaplain Samuel Harsnett, were well placed to sponsor sermons and printed attacks on Darrell and to suppress works defending him. But Darrell clearly enjoyed well-organized support since works championing him poured from foreign and clandestine presses. Although Darrell was quietly released in the summer of 1599, he went underground and by the end of 1602 had published five works on his own behalf. His career as an exorcist, however, was finished’ (DNB).
His career was highly controversial at the time; one of his first exorcism clients admitted fakery was involved, and his continued practice drew criticism from prominent members of society. This work is part of a pamphlet war that raged between Darrell and one of his chief accusers, Samuel Harshnett, who would become the Archbishop of York. In 1599 Darrell was questioned at Lambeth Palace, pronounced an imposter, defrocked, and given a year in jail. The remainder of his life was passed in obscurity, with copies of his book being burned, making this a very rare volume., Because of the intense public interest and the fierce arguments in Nottingham, John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, ordered an investigation. As a result, Darrell was accused of fraudulent exorcism. The prosecutor was Samuel Harsnett, who was to end his career as Archbishop of York. Harsnett’s views about Darrell were published in A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures in 1603.
Shakespeare read it, and King Lear contains the names of devils, like Flibbertigibbet and Smulkin, taken from Darrell’s book. Darrell himself maintained that there was no fraud in his activities. What he wanted to prove was that Puritans were as capable as Roman Catholics in the matter of dispossessing evil spirits.
Darrell was deprived of holy orders and sent to prison but released in 1599.
Provenance: Ex Libris Isabel Somerset Reigate Priory Lady Henry Somerset (nee Lady Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks; 1851-1921) was a British philanthropist, temperance leader and campaigner for women’s rights.
STC (2nd ed.), 6283; ESTC (RLIN); S109292
cf: Marion Gibson, Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006, ISBN 9781851965397
Brendan C. Walsh, The English Exorcist: John Darrell and the Shaping of Early Modern English Protestant Demonology, New York; NY: Routledge, 2021
Copies – N.America Folger, Harvard, Huntington Newberry, Trinity , Yale.
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#3). A philosophical treatise writ in America
637J. Franck, Richard. (1624-1680?)
A philosophical treatise of the original and production of things writ in America in a time of solitudes by R. Franck.
London : Printed by John Gain, and are to be sold by S. Tidmarsh at the King’s Head in Cornhill: and S. Smith at the Prince’s Arms in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1687. (But arguments have been made—most lucidly by Worthington Ford that it might be Boston. or Cambridge) Price $5,700
Octavo,16 ½ x 10 ½ cm. Signatures: A-M8 N2. Only edition. This copy is bound in modern quarter calf
\ by none other than Benjamin Harris, who, having been recently liberated from gaol, may have “borrowed” John Gain’s identity as a safe, obscure, respectable unbrella under which to resume publishing. Ford, writing in The Boston Book Market 1679-1700, examines the history of the publication of The New England Primer, and not incidentally considers Franck’s book:
“Who was this “Master John Gaine” who thus holds the first claim to the title New England Primer? He must have been a member of the Stationers’ Company, for he is styled “master,” and presumably was a bookseller but without a known place of business. His name does not appear in the Term Catalogues, and it occurs in the Stationers’ Registers so infrequently as to suggest an unenterprising publisher. […] In 1687 he issued R. Franck’s Phylosophical Treatise of the originall and Produccon of things. Writ in America in a Time of Solitude. On the titlepage of that work [Gain] is a printer. With this second venture pertaining to America [Gain] disappears. […] In 1683 Benjamin Harris had been out of prison a year or more, and his situation would lead him to print over his own name as an advertisement of his reentry into the field. […] Later, when safe in New England, it may be imagined that Harris may have seen the possibilities attached to such a title, and deliberately made Gaine’s still-born proposition his own—an early instance of a pirate publisher on American soil.”
Franck, was a captain in Cromwell’s army during the Battle of Dunbar and other Scots campaigns, lived for a few years in America in the 1680s, during which time he composed his Philosophical Treatise, a strange, euphuistic meditation on God, Mosaic Creation, and the wonders of nature—especially fish and fishing. Franck’s book is now regarded as the first work of philosophy written in North America, though it is a confusing, unfocused text complicated by grossly ornamental language—”the vaporings of a disordered mind,” Charles E. Goodspeed said in his 1943 monograph on Franck. Goodspeed regards Franck as an enigma, and though he researched him deeply, Goodspeed was unable to pinpoint the exact years Franck was in the Colonies, or even where he lived. The most compelling passage relating to America occurs on p. 75, where the Franck asserts:
“The Americans can tell you that Trees grew naturally where the Native Indians never had a being; and were it not for Europes agriculture, and industry; her florid Fields, and flourishing Pasture, would soon feel the fatal stroke of disorder; so become Forrests, and barren Desarts, fit only for bestial and savage inhabitants.”
On p. 34 Franck implies that he actually battled with Native Americans.
And on page 112, Franck, an avocational angler (who is better known for his piscatory Northern Memoirs, published at London in 1694), refers to a fish called the American snite, a term on which the OED is silent.
The imprint of A Philosophical Treatise is London: John Gain, 1687, but arguments have been made—most lucidly by Worthington Ford—that the book might have been printed in Boston, by none other than Benjamin Harris, who, having been recently liberated from gaol, may have “borrowed” John Gain’s identity as a safe, obscure, respectable unbrella under which to resume publishing.
During the late 1680s colonial printers often closely mirrored London imprints, and visual evidence suggests that A Philosophical Treatise could indeed be a Boston printing, especially the layout of the title page. But more rigorous typographic examination must be performed to support this assertion. Richard Franck, for his part, probably returned to England in the early 1690s, but at some point may have journeyed back to America. Cotton Mather, in his diaries, remarks:
“There is an old Man in the Town, who was a Souldier in the Army of my admirable Cromwel, and actually present in the Battel of Dunbar; he is now come to eighty-eight; an honest Man, and in great Penury. I must releeve him, and look after him.”
Wing F2065; ESTC R20723; Sabin 25467; Alden-Landis 687/65; Barrett, Wendell, ed., Cotton Mather, the Puritan Priest, New York: Dodd; Mead, 1891, p. 244; Ford, Worthington Chauncey, The Boston Book Market, 1679-1700, Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1917, pp. 29-33;
Goodspeed, Charles E., “Richard Franck,” Bookmen’s Holiday: Notes and Studies Written and Gathered in Tribute to Harry Miller Lydenberg, New York: NYPL, pp. 151-187.
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