Compe[n]dium Michlol.

FIRST EDITION thus. 4to. pp. (viii) 141 (i). Roman and Hebrew letter. T-p with woodcut printer’s device and headpiece, further headpieces. Light waterstain to lower blank gutter, diminishing, and small waterstain to upper blank margin, very light marginal foxing to first and last few ll. A good, very well margined copy in c.1700 limp vellum on five alum-tawed supports, recased, edges sprinkled red. First edition of this scarce Latin compendium of Hebrew grammar, edited ‘for the first time’ from the famous medieval Jewish grammarian David Kimchi by a Cambridge Hebraist, Ralph Baines (c.1504-59), Catholic bishop of Lichfield and Coventry under Mary I. He was professor of Hebrew at the Royal Collège de France in Paris between 1549 and 1554. This book is a Latin abstract or paraphrase of the first part of Kimchi’s Hebrew grammar, dealing with the alphabet and accents, nouns and their conjugation, verbs, changes in punctuation, some account of pronunciation and reading, prefixes and suffixes, and numbers. Ralph Baines was ‘one of the chief restorers of Hebrew learning in [England]’ (Gillow). He was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he opposed Latimer. He returned from Paris on the accession of Mary, became Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry in 1554, and received his DD from Cambridge the following year. After Elizabeth ascended the throne, he was deprived and imprisoned in 1559, and died the same year. ‘Dodd, in his Church History, states that he was “a divine of great note, very dexterous in expounding the Scriptures, and remarkably skilled in the three sacred languages”’ (Gillow). Steinschneider I, 777.4524. Renouard 107.9. Gillow I, 111.2. BM STC Fr., p. 129. USTC 151444. Not in Adams.…