Beautifully printed edition, in a very fine minuscule Roman, in a stunning contemporary French red morocco binding by Mac é Ruette for Habert de Montmor, one of the greatest collectors of Elz évirs of the C17th. Henri Louis Habert de Montmor (c. 1600, Paris 1679, Paris) was a French scholar and homme de lettres. An avid supporter of Descartes, Habert wrote a poem on Cartesian physics entitled De rerum naturae and collected scientific instruments. He was a friend of Mersenne, who dedicated his Harmonie Universelle to Montmor, and a great friend of Pierre Gassendi, who dedicated to him his Life of Tycho Brahe. Gassendi also left him an astronomical telescope he had been left by Galileo. Three years after Gassendi s death, Habert edited his complete works in 6 volumes, writing its Latin preface. Besides Gassendi, he gathered a salon of savants and philosophers which included many of the great scholars of the day. He also initiated the bibliophilic tradition of collecting elz évirs, and amassed a remarkable collection of these little masterpieces of Dutch typography. Preserved during his lifetime in his hotel in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, the collection was dispersed in 1682. From 1620 to 1635, he acquired the volumes as and when they were published, and confided the binding to Mac é Ruette, one of the most renowned Parisian masters of his time. Six bindings with the same characteristic decoration are listed in the Catalog II of the Esmerian Library (Nos. 8 to 13). Interestingly this anti-catholic and particularly anti-Jesuit work was later at the Jesuit Seminary in Perpignan. William Ames, (born 1576, Ipswich, Suffolk, Eng. died Nov. 14, 1633, Rotterdam), English Puritan theologian remembered for his writings on ethics and for debating and writing in favour of strict Calvinism in opposition to Arminianism.. .. He served as an observer at the Synod of Dort (1618 19), at which Arminianism was firmly denounced, and as professor of theology at Franeker, in Friesland (1622 33). Encyclopaedia Britannica. While at Franeker, Ames produced his major writings, the Medulla Theologiase and De Conscienta, et Etius Iure, vel Casibus. .. Together the two books, his major contribution to seventeenth century theology, show his conviction for pure doctrine and practical divinity. As a polemicist, Ames published in 1625 the first of his Bellarminus Enerevatus, initially begun also as student disputations. It was a thorough blast against the Roman Church and its great Jesuit champion, Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542 -1621). Many protestant writers had given battle to Bellarmine Franciscus Junius, John Reynolds, William Whitaker, and James I to name a few and now Ames was taking his turn, going out like David against Goliath of the Philistines, who afflicts the forces of Israel, the army of the living God. Keith L. Sprunger The Learned Doctor William Ames . By his first wife Ames had no family; but by his second marriage with the daughter of a gentleman named Sletcher he had a son and a daughter. He appears to have died in necessitous circumstances, for his family received assistance from the town council at Rotterdam, and eventually sailed for New England, taking with them his library, which was hailed as an acquisition of great value by the theological students of the youthful colony. DNB.
