Gregorio Leti - Le Nepotisme de Rome - 1669

A fascinating Baroque portrait full of court intrigues, political power plays, and passionate love affairs around the famous Elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate.

First edition. Publisher: Hacke, Leyden, 1669. Both parts in one volume. 224 + 264 pages + index, contemporary parchment binding, 14 x 8 cm.
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Rare early French edition of the famous church- and time-critical treatise by the Italian historian and satirist Gregorio Leti (1630–1701), one of the sharpest-tongued political publicists of the 17th century. The work counts among Leti’s best-known publications and deals in extensive, sometimes polemical form with the system of papal nepotism, the favoritism and enrichment of papal relatives, and the resulting political and ecclesiastical distortions within the Roman curia.

As a significant contemporary source on papal and church history, the work grants a rarely direct insight into the power structures, intrigues, and diplomatic tensions at the court of Baroque Rome and was already perceived by contemporaries as a sensational and controversially discussed publication.

With ex libris from the library of Dr. Moriz Grolig in Vienna, from the possession of the Austrian bibliographer, librarian, and book historian Dr. Moriz Grolig (1873–1949), long-time director of the Vienna Patent Office Library. Also with a handwritten bibliographical note by Grolig on the flyleaf (dated 1903), in which printing, bibliographical comparative works, and edition variants are recorded – a remarkable scholarly provenance and a charming testimony of antiquarian research history.

A collectible exemplar of one of the most influential anti-curial polemical writings of the 17th century.
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Slightly browned, otherwise clean and well-preserved copy.