PALLET, Jean.

A good, clean copy of the second edition of the first French-Spanish bilingual dictionary, originally published in Paris in 1604. The French Jean Pallet (or Palet, fl. late C16/early C17) was physician to Henry IV of France and translator from the Italian of Discours de la beaut é des Dames (1568). An influential lexicographer, he published his bilingual dictionary only a few years after Hornkens s French-Spanish-Latin of 1599. Even more than Hornkens, Pallet was catering to the Belgian aristocracy, generals and officers who, upon the Infanta s marriage with Archduke Albert in 1596 and the greater administrative autonomy over the Low Countries granted to them by her father Philip II, found themselves having to deal with a Spanish-speaking court ( W√∂rterb√ºcher , 2977). The printer Velpius was granted a privilege by the Archduke. Whilst the French-Spanish part was mostly based on Hornkens, the Spanish-French section drew on Antonio de Nebrija s Spanish-Latin dictionary (1492-5) and Crist‚àö‚â•val de Las Casas s popular Tuscan-Castilian dictionary of 1570.

In 1607, this copy was in the library of the Flemish physician Sebastianus Egbertus, professor of anatomy at Amsterdam and author of a commentary on Dodoens s Herbal (1640); he was deemed a man of great learning by the anatomist Nicolaes Tulp, famously portrayed by Rembrandt. In 1638, it was in the possession of the lawyer Johannes Carlier (c.1612-48), owner of a substantial library of which the inventory unusually specifies the colour of the shelves and their arrangement in the room (de Jong, p.151); in 1649, the copy was inherited by Johannes Spillieurs, probably the same registered as a student at Leiden.