# 42339

Rhodes, Alexandre de (1593-1660)

Relation de ce qui s’est passé en l’année 1649. Dans les royaumes où les Peres de la Compagnie de Jésus de la province du Japon, publient le Saint Evangile.

USD $3,000

[Dediee a la Reyne de Pologne et de Suede. Par le P. Alexandre de Rhodes de la mesme Compagnie. A Paris, chez Florentin Lambert, M.DC.LV.]. Octavo (165 x 100 mm), modern panelled red calf, spine lettered in gilt; engraved frontispiece (not found in other examples), 120 pp; clean throughout, but lacking the title-leaf and the 6-page dedication to the Queen of Poland and Sweden.

As this Relation was written in the period following the Sakoku Edict, it necessarily limits itself for the most part to recent events in Indochina, and it contains much detailed information on Cochinchina and Tonkin. It was authored by the French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes (1593-1660), who worked for many years as a missionary in Indochina. He compiled the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, the first trilingual Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, which was published in Rome in 1651.

The present example, though defective in other respects, has a frontispiece engraving not present in other copies (cf. the online digitised copies in the BnF and the University of Waterloo, Ontario). The unsigned engraving is a cathedral interior with service in progress.

Cordier, Japonica, col. 370; Streit, v. V, p. 565; Sommervogel, v. VI, col. 1721