HISTORIA MULIERUM PHILOSOPHARUM; Accedit ejusdem Commentarius Italicus in VII. Sonneyyun Francisci Petrarcha a re non alienus de [BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY]. MENAGIO EGIDIO (GILLES MENAGE) - 1690

Lugduni (Lyon): Anissonios, Joan. Posuel, & Claudium Rigaud, 1690. First Edition. 12mo, pp. 130, [xxvi], 131-141; [iii], 4-80, [xv], + errata leaf. Lacks the front blank. Bound in contemporary French calf, spine gilt with raised bands, little wear especially at the top of the spine). A very good clean copy. Tchemerzine VIII, 211. The OCLC locates 8 copies in the US (NYP, YUS, IBV, BAT, KFS) as well as a copy in France and one in the UK. The first published history of women philosophers. Menage (1613-1692) was a French thinker, Latinist, grammarian and lexicographer. At one time the tutor of Marie-Madeleine Ploche de al Vergne, comtesse de la Faette, he is best remembered as the satirized pendant Vadius by Moliere in Les Femmes Savantes. The first portion of the present work offers the portraits of 65 different female philosophers mentioned in the writings of the ancients. This is a kind of biographical history offering biographical and critical information as well as notes as to where the women had been mentioned in the classical texts. The second book, entitled "L. Sonetto VII di messer Francesco Petrarca" is an extended exposition of Petrarch's Seventh Sonnet.