Lot 1290 , Gildas, Gildae. - cui cognomentum est sapientis, de excidio & conquestu Britanniae, ac flebili castigatione in reges, principes, & sacerdotes epistola, vetustissimorum exemplarioru[m] auxilio non solum a medis plurimis v

° Gildas, Gildae. - cui cognomentum est sapientis, de excidio & conquestu Britanniae, ac flebili castigatione in reges, principes, & sacerdotes epistola, vetustissimorum exemplarioru[m] auxilio non solum a medis plurimis vindicata, sed etiam accessione erou[m], quae in prima editione a Polydoro Vergilio refecta erant, multipliciter aucta, London, John Day, 1568, A8 blank, lacks A3, A6, with blanks at rear, 2 woodcut initials, and full-page woodcut decoration to A7 bearing the words 'who so knoweth the Lordes will and doth it not shall be beaten with many strypes, Luke XII', later tooledcalf (probably 17th century), with front-cover near-detached, bookplate for Charles Arshur Wynne Finch 1883, small 8vo (binding measures 130 x 90 mm) STC 11894.
De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), was written by the British monk Gildas sometime during the 530s or 540s. This Tudor edition, edited by John Joscelyn, or Josselin, secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker, and an Anglo-Saxon scholar, was part of a larger project by Archbishop Parker to retrieve the dispersed manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon and early English history, publish scholarly editions of these works, and thus to legitimate the relation between the protestant church and antiquity.
£200-300