Johannis Hardouini Societas Jesu Presbyteri Chronologiæ ex Nummis antiquis restitutæ prolusio de nummis herodiadum

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">Small 4to. pp. 208, [3]. Signatures: A-O⁴. Near-contemporary vellum-backed and cornered marbled boards. With contemporary manuscript notes on front pastedown and flyleaf.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">First edition of a celebrated, if notorious, contribution to the extreme sceptical movement in 17th-century classical studies. Although already a notable, and formidably industrious editor of ecclesiastical records, this remarkable text constitutes the earliest appearance of Hardouin’s venture into the mad world of universal disbelief (see A. Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as a Revelation. Cambridge, Mass., 2001, pp, 181-207). Claiming to have discovered, in part from his intense research into numismatic evidence for all western history – although he credited much of his work to an anonymous critic – that the only truly genuine classical texts extant were a few by Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Virgil (but the Georgics alone: ‘the thought of writing the Aeneid never entered Virgil’s mind’) and Horace (Satires and Epistles only), he went on to casually dismiss as abject fakes by a mysterious sodality (Arnaldo Momigliani calls them ‘a gang of Italians in the fourteenth century’) ‘the whole range of written texts from antiquity, which modern critics strove so desperately to reconcile with one another’ (Grafton, p. 188). As the first to detect the true nature of virtually all Greek and Latin literature known to immediate posterity, and to discredit entirely such revered masterworks as Augustine’s Confessions, Hardouin thus introduced, and spent a scholarly lifetime recapitulating, the incredible notion that nearly every major and minor writer from Homer and Hesiod onward was simply a figment of latter-day fictive invention, and that ‘the classical and patristic heritage was not only incomplete but largely spurious.’ </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">Hardouin continued to work on his astounding theories ever after, but the 1693 Chronologiæ was no doubt his greatest, or most outrageous evocation of them. The volume appears never to have been reprinted entirely as such (Grafton tells us that on 7 January 1693 a delegation of Jesuits led by Father Hurault, rector of the Jesuit College of Louis le Grand, invaded the printing shop of Jean Anisson and confiscated all copies of the book lodged there, which may account for its evident rarity). For rare it is, and not to be confused with Hardouin’s similarly-titled works of 1697 (Chronologiæ ex nummis antiquis restitutæ specumen primum: numismata sæculi Constantiniani) and 1699 (Chronologiae veteris Testimenti [...] et nummis antiquis [...] specimen alterum, see Bib# /Fr# 344).</span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/permalink/01JHU_INST/1lu78g9/alma991007281729707861" rel="nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a></span></span></p>