Edited by the creator of the Gymnasium educational system

Cicero; Johannes Sturm [ed.]

In hoc volumine haec continent. Rhetoricorum ad C. Herennium lib. III [...]

Argentorati [Strasbourg]: Rihelium [Rihel], 1540. Very Good. Item #26571

[Colophon imprint] Argentorati [Strasbourg]: Rihelium [Rihel], 1540. First Sturm Edition. Octavo (22.5cm.); full contemporary elaborately blind-tooled pig, spine in four compartments, contemporary manuscript paper spine label and remnants of fore-edge steel clasps; [8],245,[9]ll. (a8 a-k8 l4 m-z8 A-H8 I10, collated and presumed complete); woodcut vignettes and initials. Scuffing to extremities, most notably at corners, a few faint surface scratches, spine label partly perished, lacking endpapers, 20th century ownership ex libris to front pastedown, occasional neat contemporary marginalia in red ink to early leaves, else a Very Good, quite attractive copy. Issued without a title page as usual, text begins with the table of contents, the publisher's imprint provided on colophon in rear only.

This one of the many volumes of Cicero's works edited by the German educator Johannes Sturm (1507-1589), published just two years after the founding of his revolutionary Gymnase school in Strasbourg, in 1538. Tasked with reinventing the scholastic system at a local level, Sturm combined Church and the Reform movement by implementing a "balance between moral and religious education on the one hand and culture and intelligence on the other" (see the Musée Protestant). Among the Latin and Greek authors featured heavily on the syllabus: Virgil, Terence, Demosthenes, and, of course, Cicero.

Price: $1,500.00