“EXPLICITLY HONORS THE INSTITUTIONS OF VENICE AND CELEBRATES LIBERTY”: NANI’S HISTORY OF VENICE, 1673 FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH, IN CONTEMPORARY PANELED CALF BOARDS

NANI, Battista. The History Of the Affairs of Europe in this present Age, But more particularly of the Republick of Venice. Written in Italian by Battista Nani, Cavalier and Procurator of St. Mark. Englished by Sir Robert Honywood, Knight. London: Printed by J.M. for John Starkey, 1673. Quarto, contemporary full brown paneled speckled calf rebacked and recornered, raised bands, brown morocco spine label.

First edition in English of Nani’s influential Venetian history, covering the years 1613-43, in handsome contemporary paneled calf boards.

In his Confessions, Rousseau recalls reading Nani’s History as a child in his father’s library. First published in Italian in 1663, Nani’s Historia della Republica Veneta provided a standard account of the powerful republic by a member of one of its principal families. Nani served as the Venetian Ambassador to France for 25 years and later conducted several diplomatic missions to Germany, finally being appointed as Procurator of San Marco, a position second only to the Doge. Honywood, a veteran of the Thirty Years War and a career diplomat, translated Nani’s work after being recalled to England in 1660, upon the restoration of Charles II. “There may have been a domestic political motivation in Honywood’s choice of Nani’s history of Venice. From the civil war period onwards, the government and institutions of Venice had been of especial interest to Englishmen of parliamentarian and oppositional sympathies… Such men admired Venice as a mixed polity, in which the head of state ruled in collaboration with an enlightened aristocracy, and which had, uniquely among Italian states, successfully resisted tyranny. Interest in Venice seems to have been especially intense in the middle and later years of Charles II’s reign: Honywood’s translation is one of ten books on the government of the Serene Republic to have been published by Englishmen during this period. Since Nani’s history explicitly honors the institutions of Venice and celebrates liberty, it is probable that Honywood’s translation would have carried anti-monarchical and possibly republican connotations in the fraught English politics of the 1670s” (DNB). With index. With four-page publisher’s catalogue bound in at rear. Occasional misnumbering of pages, as is common in books printed in this period. Wing N151.

Renewed endpapers. Interior quite clean, with one minuscule wormhole to bottom margin. Small open tear to leaf Mm2, two-inch closed tear to leaf Yy2, neither affecting reability. Light age wear to contemporary calf boards. A near-fine, handsome copy.