Of the Imitation of Christ; In Three Books. Translated from the Latin of Thomas a Kempis by John Payne

Published by Joseph Wright. Rice Gaddis, Printer. Good. 1815 'Published by Joseph Wright; Rice Gaddis, Printer' (Wilmington, Ohio), 4 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches tall full leather bound, 195 pp. Error in pagination in printing, with page numbers for pp. 143-144 inverted, but the text is correct. Soiling, rubbing and edgewear to covers, with bumping to the lower tips. Two-inch closed tear to blank rear free-endpaper. Light dampstaining and light to moderate foxing throughout, typical for works of this era. Otherwise, apart from a couple of pages with very slight marginal soiling, a very good copy - clean and unmarked - of this rare early American printing of a beloved Christian devotional work. OCLC (No. 36868053) locates only seven copies at institutions worldwide. ~KM5~ [1.0P] An early American edition of the popular 1785 John Payne translation of the Imitation of Christ (Copinger, 'On the English Translations of the Imitatio Christi' (1900), pp. 84-87). In the first paragraph of his lengthy preface, Payne explains that he hoped in this translation to do 'some justice to the sense of the Original; which is almost lost in the loose paraphrase of Dean Stanhope,' referring to Anglican George Stanhope's often reprinted 1698 English translation. However, Payne's translation uses the King James Version wording for scriptural quotations within the work, rather than the Vulgate edition of the Bible available to a Kempis in the fifteenth century. And Payne has edited out much from the original which he found overly 'monkish' or 'popish,' including all of Book 4, dealing with the (Roman Catholic) Mass. The Imitation was written by Catholic monk Thomas Kempis (circa 1380-1471), as four separate books completed between 1420 and 1427, at Mount Saint Agnes monastery, in the town of Windesheim, located in what is now the Netherlands.