MANUSCRIPT OF A CONTROVERSIAL PAMPHLET AND RESPONSES TO IT

Ferrier, Jérémie: [Vera Figueroa, Juan Antonio de:] [Milletot, Bénigne:] Manuscript copy of three works: 'Il Catholico di Stato' (1625), Intrichi del nostro tempo' (1635), and 'L'huomo del Papa & del Re' (dated here 1636). Italy, 18th century.

An eighteenth-century Italian's manuscript copies of a controversial political pamphlet of the earlier seventeenth century, and two responses of the time. The revisiting of these texts in the Age of the Enlightenment suggests the interest of the arguments to the secular thought of the later age. The 'Catholico di Stato' was a defence of the religious accommodation and anti-Habsburg foreign policy of Louis XIII and his minister Cardinal Richelieu, against a party that took the opposite views. The author Jérémie Ferrier (1576-1626) showed the influence of Machiavelli in separating civic morality from religious principles (Franceschi). He was ex-professor of Calvinist theology at Nîmes and a Catholic convert. He was tasked to write the pamphlet by the cardinal. Juan Antonio de Vera Figueroa y Zuñiga, Conde de la Roca (1583-1658), the sometime ambassador to Savoy and Venice, wrote a response from a Habsburg perspective, while a pamphlet in support (and against the Conde) was written either by Bénigne Milletot, a counsellor to the king from Burgundy, or possibly the royal historiographer Jean Sirmond. The first and third were published both in French and Italian.

Details

MS, 4to., writing to 635 unnumbered pages (262; 108; 175). A clean manuscript written in a neat flowing hand. Light foxing, occasional blotching, ink cuts through paper in some places at title, in all nevertheless very good. Bound in contemporary vellum boards, label red morocco gilt, edges mottled blue (some worming at head and tail).

Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, 'La genèse Française du Catholicisme d'état et son aboutissement au début du ministériat de Richelieu', Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire de France (2001), pp. 19-63, see p. 30.