Nobilissima Disceptatio

Leuven: Theodoricus Martinus (Dirk or Thierry Martens). 1517.

First edition, small quarto 188x130mm. Unpaginated, ff.26, a-e4, f6. Lacking c4 which has been supplied in manuscript in the nineteenth century. Some contemporary marginal annotations in ink and two later ones in pencil. Bound in nineteenth century quarter calf, marbled paper covered boards. Spine chipped and worn with about one inch of the binding missing. Corners and edges rubbed and worn. Internally, waterstaining to leaves f5 and f6 and an ink mark on the verso of f4 and recto of f5 but otherwise a very good copy. USTC locates copies in four UK institutions, two in France and one in Denmark. Only the Colbert copy appears in the auction records.
Sir Robert Wingfield (1464-1539) was a diplomat from the distinguished Suffolk family who served the courts of Edward IV and Henry VII. In 1510, Sir Robert was appointed to be the English Ambassador to Emperor Maximilian I in which role he was preoccupied with attempts to secure an alliance against France. ODNB describes this period thus: "During his seven-year embassy Sir Robert became a good if too trusting friend of the emperor, and perhaps in consequence remained fiercely anti-French throughout his life". Anglo-French spikiness is the subject of Nobilissima Disceptatio. Ostensibly the book is an account of the debates at the Council of Constance (1414-18) at which France objected to the presence of the English on the grounds that England was an insufficiently important nation. Wingfield used the preface to Nobilissima Disceptatio to note that "whether in arms or in faith ... the English nation always surpassed the French, nor could it be judged inferior in the dignity and antiquity of its inhabitants, the size and greatness of its lands, or the character and learning of its people". So, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, the recounting of Anglo-French history descended into polemical point-scoring.
Among the many people Wingfield met during his time as Ambassador was Erasmus, through whom, perhaps, he met Dirk Martens who, as well as printing more than fifty of the great scholar's works, had, in 1516 printed the first edition (in Latin) of Thomas More's Utopia. More and Erasmus's eirenicism may have been alien to the combative Wingfield but the Martens imprint ties this little book to the mainstream of Renaissance humanist culture.