MENCKE, Johann Burckhard. [with] BRADSHAW, William and AMES, William. [and] ANON. [and] N.D.H.F.

A highly unusual sammelband of rare and interesting works, including two scarce works by English authors, one an extremely rare Latin paean addressed to James I and dedicated to Prince Henry, the other containing works of Puritan theology by William Bradshaw (1571-1618) and William Ames (1576-1633).

Britannia Triumphans is the first and only edition of an anonymous Latin prose paean to James I, dedicated to his son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died in 1612 and was succeeded by the future Charles I. Since the work is designed to be an ‘icon’ of James’s kingship, the dedicatory epistle to Henry invokes ancient, monumental effigies of kingship, including the colossi of the ancient Egyptians and the Greek painter Apelles’ portrait of Alexander the Great. The author suggests that as the ‘coin’ of his father’s image, he will one day accede to James’s greatness, as the conjunction of Mars and Hercules. The paean itself praises James’s unifying of the English and Scots, which his accession had achieved in 1603. The author invokes Britain’s ancient Trojan origins, the Roman invasion and wars with the Picts, as well as the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxons, thus praising Britain’s mixture of Greek, Roman, Celtic, Saxon and Norman virtues, embodied by James, a Scottish king of England with a French grandmother. At the end is a short Latin poem by the author addressed ‘Ad Cryptaeus’, possibly the creator of a medallion or other portrait of James. 

The other English book is the first Latin translation of William Bradshaw’s exposition of Puritan doctrine, first published 1605. The translator was another Cambridge Puritan, William Ames, who in 1609 delivered an infamous sermon at Cambridge denouncing the ‘heathenish’ Christmas festivities of the students. Ames left England for the Netherlands, where he became famous for debating Arminians and was installed as professor of theology at Franeker, where one of his students was Nathaniel Eaton, later first president of Harvard College. Ames’s long introductory epistle to the reader invokes the heroes and martyrs of English Protestantism, including John Foxe and William Tyndale. Bradshaw’s Puritan doctrine is then expounded in a series of short maxims, divided between what Puritans defend, affirm, maintain and censure. Bradshaw presents a typically Calvinist structure, in which God’s word is conveyed directly to the people by a self-governed church, in which no special authority is given to priests and which is autonomous from the civil magistrate, but which nonetheless follows his laws. The work is littered with Greek scriptural references and allusions to the papal Antichrist and Satan. The second part is a controversial work by Ames, a scriptural and historical attack on the Pope, in which he observes that even Lucifer occupied a position of spiritual authority before he became Satan.

The first work is the first Latin edition of Johann Burckhard Mencke's (1674-1733) entertaining satire on academia, with a wonderful title-page printed in red and a fine engraved frontispiece, in which a man on a large stage is laden with books, receiving a doctorate or other academic honour, with dubious coats of arms hanging behind him and, in the shadows of the curtain, a female figure who is possibly an allegory of false wisdom, while harlequins and a finely-dressed Black figure perform to the crowd, which includes a man in academic dress mounted on an ass. Mencke compares academics to theatrical mountebanks and medical quacks who perform and sell fake cures in public squares. A second satire, on academic applause, mocks the academic culture of mutual flattery and insincere aggrandizement. The final work is an apparently unrecorded brief 'isagoge' or introductory accompaniment to Johannes Schefferus's (1621-79) history of Sweden, summarising the Swedish historiographical tradition, presumably printed privately to accompany an academic disputation or thesis defense.