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CAMPANELLA, Tommaso.
De Monarchia Hispanica. Editio novissima, aucta & emendata ut praefatio ad lectorem indicat.
Amsterdam, Louis Elzevir, 1653.
24mo., engraved title, all edges gilt; a very attractive copy in nineteenth-century full red morocco, gilt arms of Henry J.B. Clements to the front board with the motto "Patriis virtutibus", spine banded and gilt.
A charming Elzevir edition of this utopian work by the famous Campanella, a Dominican friar. Chapter XXXI (pp. 274-288) is explicitly concerned with the New World, and he recommends building forts at the mouths of all rivers and harbours "lest the English should break in and bring heresy."
Written in 1598 or 1599, and rewritten soon after, this work prophesies the coming of a universal Christian monarchy (said to be the fifth such great monarchy in history) by the Spanish King. Curiously, it was first published in German in 1620, translated, probably by Besold, from Campanella's original manuscript: such an involved publishing history is not unlike many books in Campanella's oeuvre, testament to his unfailing trouble with ecclesiastical authorities. Orthodoxy was not his strong point. The first English edition was published soon after this Elzevir edition as A Discourse touching the Spanish Monarchy (London, 1654); an Italian edition did not appear until 1840.
Campanella's most famous work is his "City of the Sun", which was first published in 1623 but had been written during his long imprisonment by the Inquisition for sedition and heresy. The City of the Sun was a a 'regimented, highly centralised, theocratic society characterized by breeding of human beings in accordance with science, subordination of individuals to the state, and absence of private property' (Gibson, St. Thomas More). It was an early and highly influential text in the development of the utopian genre, written by an author whose twenty-seven year stretch in prison seems to be a record for utopian writers.
Gibson, 'St. Thomas More... with a Bibliography of Utopiana', 650; Sabin , 10197; Willems, 1159.
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