Beschreibung:

MORE, Thomas (1477/8-1535). [ Utopia :] De optimo reipublice statu, deque nova Insula Utopia . [Paris:] Gilles de Gourmont [1517].
MORE, Thomas (1477/8-1535). [ Utopia :] De optimo reipublice statu, deque nova Insula Utopia . [Paris:] Gilles de Gourmont [1517]. 8° (156 x 100mm). Text in Roman type, and shoulder notes in gothic type; 25 lines and headline. Criblé initials. (Title evenly yellowed and with light soiling, a few leaves with small marginal losses.) Contemporary calf, sides panelled in blind with fleur-de-lys corner tools and centred with u-shaped fleurons, later red morocco spine label (rebacked preserving some of the original spine, corners and edges repaired); modern morocco case. Provenance : Gilles Gerard of Gouda ('Aegidii Girard Aurelii'; cancelled title signature with the motto 'regem non faciunt opes', and light marginalia). A VERY GOOD AND TALL COPY OF THE RARE SECOND EDITION OF MORE'S UTOPIA. More's most famous literary work, a description of an ideal commonwealth, 'was written, like Gulliver's Travels , as a tract for the times, to rub in the lesson of Erasmus; it inveighs against the new statesmanship of all-powerful autocracy and the new economics of large enclosures and the destruction of the old common-field agriculture, just as it pleads for religious tolerance and universal education' (PMM). Utopia was first published in Louvain in 1516. The English humanist Thomas Lupset oversaw the publication of this second edition for More, seemingly working from corrected copy supplied by the author. It was subsequently consulted in preparing the third edition, printed at Basel in March 1518, edited by Erasmus. This Paris edition contains a prefatory letter by Guillaume Budé and a second letter by More, but omits the map, Utopian alphabet and Tetrastichon which had appeared in the first edition. Gibson records 10 copies of this edition; ABPC records one copy selling at auction in 1976. Gibson 2; see PMM 47 (Louvain edition).