AUGUSTINE, Saint, of Hippo; HEALEY, John (translator).

Of The Citie of God:

with the learned comments of Jo. Lodovicus Vives, Englished first by J.H. and now in this second Edition compared with the Latine Originall, and in very many places corrected and amended.

Stock Code

107412

London, Printed by G. Eld and M. Flesher, 1620

£9,500

First printed in 1610, this is the second edition of John Healey's translation into English of Saint Augustine's masterly City of God.

Contrasting the earthly with the divine, Augustine wrote to counter a narrative that looked to blame Rome's embrace of Christianity for its defeat at the hands of the Visigoths in AD 410. The resultant treatise is a conscious work of political philosophy, standing as a Christian rejoinder to Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. 'At its heart is a powerful contrarian vision of human life, one which accepts the place of disaster, death, and disappointment while holding out hope of a better life to come, a hope that in turn eases and gives direction to life in this world' (Encyclopaedia Britannica). It is therefore fitting perhaps, that within a short-generation of its publication in 1620, England would too be ripped apart by civil war, and Augustine's vision of a

Description

Second edition in English; folio, (33 x 22.5 cm); woodcut vignette to title, inscription to title upper margin 'Jno Poley de Boxted 1711', contemporary neat annotation to front blank (a short biography of Augustine), occasional dust-soiling; near-contemporary speckled calf, blindstamped initials 'W.P.' to front board, some light wear, lacking rear endpaper, front free endpaper wormed and soiled to margins, front hinge cracked, otherwise a remarkably fresh example; [20], 861 [i.e. 860], [4]pp.