Obstreperous Scottish itinerant recusant professor arrives in Pisa. 1 U.S. copy.

[Recusants]. Thomas Dempster. Licitatio Professorum sive Praefatio solemnis habita Pisis postridie Kal. Nouembris M. DC.XVI. Ad Illustrissumum Reverendissimumq[ue] Virum D. Franciscum Bonicanum Archiepiscopum Pisanum Sardini[a]e ac Corsic[a]e Primatem Legatum Apostolicum in iis natum. Pisis: Apud Ioannem Fontanum, 1616. 4to [20.1 x 14.9 cm], [9] ff., [1] f. integral blank, with woodcut arms of Boncianni on title page, woodcut head-piece, initials, and Medici arms on final page. Bound in modern card covered with musical leaf. Binding well preserved. Very well preserved internally.

Rare (1 U.S. copy: Emory) first and only edition of this inaugural lecture delivered in 1616 at the University of Pisa by the Scottish scholar Thomas Dempster (1579-1625), who had just been appointed Professor of the Pandects and used the occasion to introduce himself to the university.

Dempster dedicated the lecture to Franciscus Boncianni (d. 1620), Archbishop of Pisa, remarking that “you have opened that library of yours, most select, most instructive, prepared at great expense but with greater judgment, for my use, by which I do not know what greater benefit you could have conferred” (“… es bibliothecam illam tuam selectssimam, intructissimam, maximis sumptibus, sed maiori iudicio paratam in meos usus ape ruisti, quo quod maius beneficium conferre potuisses, ignore”).

Dempster led a colorful life of an itinerant scholar. He studied classics at Aberdeen, and, forced by a family feud to flee Scotland, he arrived at Pembroke College, Cambridge, then traveled to Paris and thence to Rome, where he became a seminarian, but shortly thereafter he took an MA in Douai. Back in Paris, he took a doctorate in canon law before becoming a regent at the Collège de Navarre. He was professor of humanities at Toulouse, professor of eloquence at Nîmes (a Huguenot college, where he concealed his Catholicism), regent in the four Paris colleges of Lisieux, Grassins, Du Plessis, and Beauvais, Professor at Pisa, at Bologna, etc., etc. His moves often were motivated by ideological spats, physical fights, accusations of heresy, etc.

Dempster is best known for his 1613 edition of Rosinus’s Antiquitatum Romanorum corpus, which he dedicated to James VI and I of Scotland and England. The king seems to have appointed Dempster Historiographer Royal for England, making him the first holder of this office. In Pisa Dempster began work on his study on the Etruscans, De Etruria regali, which was published posthumously in 1723-24. His Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum was published in Bologna in 1627.

OCLC and KVK locate 1 U.S. copy of Dempster’s Licitatio Professorum (Emory).

*Alexander du Toit, “Dempster, Thomas (1579–1625), writer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Roberto Cantagalli, “Bonciani, Francesco,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 11 (1969).