Historiarum sui Temporis..

Early edition of the influential, and highly controversial, history of Europe by French luminary Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617).

A successful lawyer and career diplomat, de Thou remained devoted to the cultivation of the mind throughout his prolific political career. He amassed an impressive personal book collection and in 1593 was appointed director of the Royal Library. Access to such abundant printed and manuscript material, selected with characteristic diligence, allowed de Thou to write a foundational history of Europe spanning the years 1544 to 1607. De Thou was horrified by the unhappy history of religious intolerance and violence that plagued his lifetime, and his history reflects this (especially the treatment of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572). The sections relating to the massacre were deemed too critical of the Holy See, and were accordingly placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609.

This is an early printing (the first edition of the first 18 books was published in Paris 1604), and is complete in 138 books in five volumes, bound here as four stately volumes. De Thou, a classicist by training, wrote in Latin during an era of vernacular scholarship and forbade translation of his opus. Numerous editions, in several European languages, appeared throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This Geneva edition includes a detailed life of the author appended to the final volume.