Printer-Martyr.- Dolet (Etienne) Genethliacum, collation: A-C4, woodcut device on title, large woodcut criblé initial, some side-notes shaved, modern marbled boards with gilt-lettered blue morocco label to upper cover, 4to (195 x 130 mm.), Lyon, apud eusdem Doletum, 1539.
⁂ First edition of a minor classic of neo-Latin verse, the eminent scholar-printer's celebration of the birth of his son Claude. Dolet, a crypto-Protestant and Christian-rationalist whose anti-monastic epigrams and Ciceronian/Erasmian moral writings earned him a trial for atheism and blasphemy, and death, after torture, by strangulation and burning, has been famously regarded as 'the Martyr of the Renaissance' (R. C. Christie's still-standard bio-bibliography of 1899); these perceptive verses - Dolet's earliest self-published work - epitomise his creed in the form of moral advice to a first-born infant.
A translation of Genethliacum into French, assertedly 'par un sien ami', also published by Dolet in 1539, is sometimes attributed to Dolet himself (cf. Christie, pp. 346 ff.), but the Latin version is certainly the original, 'premierement composee en latin par le pere'. The 'ami' would otherwise be Claude Coterau, to whom Dolet dedicates the Latin text, and who provides on C2r two gratulatory poems, followed by four others by Jean des Gouttes (the translator of Ariosto), Maurice Sceve (poet, musician, painter, friend of Marot), Barthelemi Aneau (later murdered by a mob for supposedly heretical opinions), and Pierre Tolet (fellow student and friend of Rabelais at Montpellier).
Genethliacum is (predictably) a rare book: Claude Longeon, Bibliographie des oeuvres d'Étienne Dolet (Geneva, 1980), no. 50, locates ten copies in all, at the Bibliotheque Nationale (2), Aix-en-Provence, Amiens, Nantes and Lyon in France; at the British Library and Manchester/Rylands (Christie collection); at Hamburg; at Rome; and at Harvard; USTC adds copies at Grenoble, Troyes, and Rome (Biblioteca Angelica). Longeon identifies two states of the text, one with 'plusieurs coquilles' in sig. B uncorrected, but cites only BN Res. m. Yc. 777 of this supposed earlier state, and gives no details, so that may as well be a proof. The other BN copy (776) is interleaved and marked up for the reprint of 1540, as Christie (no.6, pp. 522-23) explains; but BN-Opale itself inexplicably describes both copies as having only eleven leaves, not twelve, an erroneous collation perpetuated by Cioranescu 7919. The 1540 reprint (Christie 11, Longeon 51) seems to be even rarer than 1539 (four copies only on USTC); a facsimile of 1539 issued by Techener in 1830 (Longeon 52) is sometimes confused with the original.