Philosophia ad rerum naturalium intelligentiam comparata. Opera et studio J. Felicis Lugdovici Demonclard in collegio sanctissimae Trinitatis philosophiae professoris. Scripta et studiose relecta a N. Joanne Rouher.
Lyon, [collège de la Trinité], 1752.
Manuscript in Latin. Two quarto volumes. 441-[8] pp. (index) and 543 pp. Two engraved title pages with decorative borders and two printed plates (Jérôme Vallet, Paris); 26 plates hors-texte, 24 of which are pen-and-ink drawings; small drawings and diagrams within the text.
Contemporary or slightly later full marbled sheepskin binding; covers framed with a blind-tooled fillet; spine with five raised bands, decorated with gilt compartments featuring floral motifs; red morocco title and volume labels; gilt roll-tooling on the board edges; marbled page edges and endpapers; green silk bookmarks.
A complete philosophy course recorded in Lyon at the Grand Collège de la Trinité by the student Jean Rouher, under the instruction of Father Louis Demonclard a Jesuit born in Avignon in 1718 who was thirty-four years old at the time. The text, dictated and carefully reviewed (as stated on the title page), follows the standard order of the Institutiones philosophicae used in Jesuit colleges: logic, metaphysics, and natural theology in the first volume; physics in the second.
This is precisely what makes this type of manuscript, highly sought after by historians of education, so significant: the lectures given by Jesuit philosophy professors were rarely published and survive only through their students' notebooks. The Collège de la Trinité, run by the Jesuits from 1565 to 1762, was one of the kingdom's most important intellectual centers, this course, dated 1752, dates from the final decade of Jesuit administration, ten years before the Society's expulsion.
Father Demonclard emerges here as an educator well-versed in the science of his time. The section on physics deals at length with cosmological systems (Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe), the Gregorian calendar reform, the nature of air, statics, and ballistics; beneath the Scholastic terminology, one senses the influence of experiments by Boyle, Torricelli, and Newton—whose name reappears in the pages devoted to gravitation.
What strikes the viewer first, however, is the quality of the manuscript itself. Jean Rouher wielded a pen with a regularity and elegance rare in a student: chapter titles in large, calligraphic "bâtarde" script; a main text in a compact yet perfectly legible cursive hand; planetary symbols and zodiac signs drawn within the body of the text; and diagrams inserted in the margins (such as the logical square of oppositions and cosmological systems). The twenty-four pen-and-ink plates illustrating the second volume—numbered and cross-referenced to the course text—are veritable miniature hand-drawn engravings: suns with human faces, lunar phases, planetary orbits, thermometers and barometers in their vessels, pendulums held by hands, levers, and a fine ballistics plate showing a cannonball tracing a parabolic arc between two galleons. A large engraving of a galleon concludes the volume. The delicacy of the hatching and the sureness of the line reveal a student with exceptional drawing talent.
The two engraved title pages and the two printed geometry plates originated from the shop of Jérôme Vallet, Engraver to the King, located on Rue Saint-Jacques at the sign of "L'Effigie de Louis XIV." This particular example depicts Philosophy enthroned upon the clouds, striking down Ignorance with a thunderbolt, surrounded by a gallery of medallions ranging from Thales and Pythagoras to Descartes, and including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Ockham. The entire curriculum of a Jesuit college is encapsulated in this frieze.
A very fine copy—complete and remarkably fresh internally—in its decorated binding.
De Backer-Sommervogel V, 1203.
Condition: Spine ends worn with small losses, corners bumped, a few wormholes on the covers and spine, dark stain on one cover of Volume I; some light foxing and signs of handling, without affecting the text or illustrations.
