Revised and expanded edition of one of the more ambitious historical works of the early Netherlandish Renaissance, accompanied by a newly composed work on the Doges of Venice. Hadrianus Barlandus (1486-1538), a native of Baarland in Zeeland and an important figure in the intellectual life of Louvain, belonged to the circle of Northern humanists around Erasmus. Educated in Ghent and Louvain, he briefly served as the first professor of Latin at the Collegium Trilingue. His Rerum gestarum, first published in Antwerp in 1526, combined humanist scholarship with a critical approach to the history of the Low Countries.
The present 1532 edition is substantially revised and expanded. Barlandus reworked his history of the Dukes of Brabant and divided it into three books. He structures his account according to the successive reigns, but omits several early rulers whose histories he considered insufficiently reliable. Drawing on classical authors including Horace, Livy, Cicero and Quintilian, Barlandus also uses historical examples of virtue and vice to provide moral lessons for rulers and readers. At several points he adds events he had witnessed himself, giving the later parts of the work the character of a contemporary chronicle.
The third book greatly broadens the scope of the work, recording memorable events from the birth of Christ to Barlandus's own time. It includes natural disasters and unusual phenomena alongside political events: floods in the Low Countries, comets and other celestial phenomena, as well as the rise of Maximilian as regent, the reign of Charles V (1500-1558), and events throughout the Habsburg Netherlands and beyond. Barlandus even records the death of his own mother in 1531. Particularly noteworthy in the present edition is the addition of the De ducibus Venetis, a newly composed history of the 75 Doges of Venice.
With some contemporary annotations on the recto of the first leaf of the first book and on leaf [78], both commenting on the text. The inner gutter of the first leaves is exposed, quire B1-7 is detached, but still present, the gutter of quire B1 has been reinforced. Some staining and browning throughout. Otherwise in good condition. Bibl. Belgica B 276; CCPB000001215-7; Machiels B-113; Nijhoff & Kronenberg 237; Pettegree & Walsby, NB, no. 3022; STCV 12917767; USTC 410275; not in Adams.