First and only 16th-century edition of Johannes Leo Placentius (also known as Jan Leo Struyven, ca. 1500-1548) Latin chronicle of the bishops and the wider ecclesiastical history of the dioceses of Tongres, Maastricht and Liège, bringing the narrative up to the year 1506. Long regarded as an essential early source for the religious and cultural development of what is now the south-eastern Netherlands and north-eastern Belgium, it stands among the foundational printed histories of the Low Countries.
Placentius born in Sint-Truiden, educated in Louvain and later a Dominican in Maastricht, was a versatile Neo-Latin author. His writings include a verse chronicle, a celebrated 253-hexameter tautogram, and the satirical Pugna porcorum ("The battle of the pigs"), a sharp portrait of student life at Pig College (Collegium Porci) of the University of Louvain, published in 1546 under the pseudonym Publius Porcius.
The present work, dedicated to Cardinal Everard van de Marck (1472-1538), bishop of Liège from 1505 until his death in 1538, predates the better-known De Leodiensi republica of 1633, edited by Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn (1612-1653), and preserves a uniquely early perspective on the regions ecclesiastical identity. It is particularly notable for its rich visual and typographical programme.
The title page carries the coat of arms of Cardinal van de Marck within a four-piece woodcut border, while further into the work appear two exquisite woodcuts: Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child, enthroned in a Gothic interior, and a bishop reading in his study, with a distant landscape visible through an open window. The woodcuts, some derived from 15th-century blocks, lend the work a distinctive blend of late-Gothic and early-Renaissance style.
Printer Willem Vorsterman (d. 1543) employed refined and varied typesetting, using two sizes of Roman type, Aldine-style italic for the preliminaries and the concluding poems, and even including a page set in Greek.
Bibliographers have long admired the work for its account of the ancient Tungi (Tungri), the early people inhabiting the region around Maastricht and Liège on both sides of the Rhine.
With a small (library?) stamp and the number 122 in manuscript on the front board, the stamp repeated on the recto of the first flyleaf and with two bookplates, one mounted on the first endpaper ("34, III, 7728, A.F. Schoy, E. Vermorcken"), belonging to Auguste Félix Schoy (1838-1885), Belgian architect, professor at the Academy of Antwerp, writer, and archaeologist, noted for his theoretical and historical works on architecture. Schoy was a member of the Central Society of Architecture of Belgium and a corresponding member of the Royal Commission for Monuments and Sites. Édouard Vermorcken (1820-1906) was a Belgian-Dutch woodcarver, copper engraver, printmaker, and illustrator. The second bookplate, mounted on the first flyleaf recto, ("Ex libris P.M. Cogels, Omnia fert aetas"), likely belonging to Paul Marie Cogels (1845-1912) from Antwerp. The binding is slightly rubbed, some leavesslightly stained in the outer margins, and the final page with the printers device is browned. Otherwise, in very good condition. Nijhoff & Kronenberg 1726; BMC STC Dutch, p. 170; Machiels 931; 176; USTC 404768, 407352 & 430366; ; WorldCat 457855752; for Plancius: J. IJsewijn, "The real name of Johannes Placentius", in: Humanistica Lovaniensia XXV (1976), pp. 283-284.