[Greek title:] Epistolarum amplius mille ducentarum libri tres...accessit Latina...Iacobi Billii...Eiusdem Billii Sacrarum Observationum libri duo

Paris: G. Chaudière, 1585. Contemporary olive gilt-ruled morocco (corners bumped, light scuffs, faded) WITH THE BACHELOR ARMS OF JACQUES AUGUSTE DE THOU and his largest cipher in the gilt-ruled spine compartments (O-H-R 216, fers 1 & 3), all edges gilt.

            EDITIO PRINCEPS of two thirds of Isidore of Pelusium's letters, among the largest epistolary collections of early monasticism. The remaining letters were published in two supplements, twenty and forty years later, respectively. Isidore addressed Emperor Theodosius II about tax relief and was on a first-name basis with bishops, local monks, common soldiers and professionally literary elites. This correspondence treats Greek authors, rhetoric, Scriptural commentary, government, women, disease, Jews, sex and seduction, predestination, heretics - in short "the vicissitudes of ecclesiastical, monastic, civic and intellectual life in a newly Christianized Roman Empire" (Larsen). It is a major source for early 5th-century social customs and political and church affairs. Isidore was educated in Alexandria, taught, became a monk, and, in 408, definitively retired to the desert outside Pelusium.
           A specialist in Church Fathers, Jacques de Billy (1535-81) edited the volume and supplied the Latin translation. He relied on three manuscripts, foremostly the 13th-century codex, then in the possession of Catherine de' Medici (Medic. Reg. 2357 = Parisinus gr. 832), which preserves the first twelve hundred thirteen of Isidore's nearly two thousand letters. He also used a copy, lent by Card. Sirleto, based on the oldest surviving manuscript (Ottoboni gr. 341, dated c. 985) and a truncated version of the text given him by Maillé de Brézé. The volume's second part, forty-seven short essays on the Greek Church Fathers, secured Billy's scholarly fame.
           In good condition, (one blank margin repaired, some minor browning), from the distinguished collections of J.A. de Thou (Catalogus 34), J.J. Charron marquis de Ménars, A.-G. Rohan, Chas. de Rohan prince de Soubise (Catalogue (1788) 834), J. & J.H. Thorold (Syston Park...Catalogue (1884) 1025), Lord Amherst (Hand-List 599), Michael Tomkinson (1841-1921) and the Loverdos Library with their markings.
¶Larsen, "The Letter Collection of Isidore of Pelusium" in Late Antique Letter Collections edd. Sogno et al. 286-99; Isidorus Pelusiota, Lettres ed. & tr. Évieux I: 9-18, 50-119; Choat, "The Epistolary Culture of Monasticism between Literature and Papyri" in Cistercian Studies Quarterly 48 (2013) 227-37; Hoffmann, Bibliographisches Lexicon der gesammten Litteratur der Griechen II: 469; Cioranesco 4021.