Enrolling Madame Dacier as literary arbiter. 1 U.S. copy.
[Madame Anne Le Fèvre Dacier] / [Literature] / Giovanni Giuseppe Orsi. Prima [Seconda, Terza, Quarta] Lettera Indirizzata Alla dottissima, e chiarissima Dama Franzese Madame Anne la Fevre Dacier Dal Marchese Giovan Gioseffo Orsi in proposito del suo Libro intitolato Considerazioni sopra la Maniera di Ben Pensare. In Bologna: per Costantino Pisarri sotto le Scuole all’insegna di S. Michele, 1705. 8vo [19.6 x 12.8 cm], 184 pp., with woodcut initials. Bound in contemporary vellum, title (“Giunta alla maniera di ben Pensare”) and shelfmark in manuscript on spine, blue edges. Only minor rubbing and edge wear to binding. Abrasion to margin of title page, likely the removal of a stamp, the occasional minor spotting, otherwise very well preserved internally.
Rare (1 U.S. copy: Univ of. Chicago) first edition of the poet-critic Giovanni Giuseppe Orsi’s (1652-1733) four letters addressed to Madame Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1647-1720)—the venerable scholar, translator, and editor of the classics, including the Iliad and the Odyssey—enrolling her as an arbiter in “the most fundamental cultural and literary fight of the later seventeenth century” (Minor, p. 32), today known as the Orsi-Bouhours debate. The international literary world’s esteem for Madame Dacier was so vast, that Orsi freely dedicated his work to her, a Frenchwoman, even in this quintessential debate concerning Italian traditional and French modern tastes.
“In 1687 a Jesuit lexicographer and literary theorist, Père Dominique Bouhours [1628-1702], published in Paris a series of four dialogues entitled La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit. To the unprejudiced reader it is an agreeable attempt to apply certain standards of taste and reason to the analysis of poetry, with examples drawn from the literatures of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy compared to similar passages in classical authors … The work went through seven editions before 1691, and at last came to the attention of a group of Italian scholars and authors who read it with resentment. Prominent among them was the Marchese Giuseppe Orsi of Bologna … In 1703 Orsi published an entertaining series of seven dialogues or Considerazioni, refuting Bouhours’ charges, and by 1705 was engaged in a controversy on the subject with Mme. Dacier” (Corrigan, p. 101).
“Bouhours’s anti-baroque polemic was fuelled by his contention, fostered by the combination of a Cartesian rationalism with a Jesuitical theology, that the excess of metaphor and literary ornamentation in many seventeenth-century ‘ouvrages d’esprit’ had led to folly and indulgence, and had distracted from a language which could encapsulate and represent truth … Orsi (1652–1733) defended the Italian tradition and attacked aspects of Bouhours’s La Manière ... While, Orsi acknowledged, the baroque aesthetic had got out of hand, man still dealt with the world of verisimilitude, or the appearance of truth, and in a sense artifice, a middle-state between truth and falsity” (Mithen, p. 443-44).
OCLC and KVK locate 1 U.S. example of this work (University of Chicago).
*Collated against the BSB copy; E. Itti, Madame Dacier: femme et savante du Grand Siècle, 1645-1720; C. Viola, Osservazioni sul canone nell’età dell’arcadia e tradizioni letterarie a confronto nella polemica Orsi-Bouhours; V. Varano, “Orsi, Giovan Gioseffo Felice,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 79 (2013); B. Corrigan, “Italian Renaissance Drama in the Eighteenth Century,” Comparative Drama, vol. 10, no. 2 (1976), pp. 101-15; F. Klaus, Polemik Orsi-Bouhours; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der literarischen Beziehungen zwischen Italien und Frankreich um die Wende des 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert; C. Viola, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto: Italia e Francia nella polemica Orsi-Bouhours; Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste, esp. pp. 32-35; Nicholas Mithen, “A Taste for Criticism: ‘Buon Gusto’ and the Reform of Historical Scholarship in the Early Eighteenth-Century Italian Republic of Letters,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters, vol. 4 (2019), pp. 439-467.