DOM CALMET (Augustin) - Traité sur les apparitions des anges - Lot 909

DOM CALMET (Augustin) - Traité sur les apparitions des anges, des démons des esprits et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de bohème, de Moravie de Silésie. Senones, Chez Joseph Pariset, 1759; in-12, XXIV-422 + XV-402 pp. bound in contemporary full marbled calf, 5-rib spines, edges painted red. All 2 volumes. Antoine Calmet, Dom Augustin in religion, was born on February 26, 1672 in Ménil-la-Horgne near Commercy, Lorraine, into a modest family (his father was a blacksmith). A keen student from an early age, he was an 18th-century exegete and scholar from Lorraine, known as Dom Calmet, a Benedictine monk from the Congrégation de Saint-Vanne et Saint-Hydulphe. In 1728, Dom Calmet was appointed abbot of Senones, the capital of the principality of Salm. It was in the great Vosges abbey that he worked and lived the latter part of his life, maintaining a correspondence with numerous scholars. He died there on October 25, 1757. Dom Calmet left an immense body of work. His best-known work is his Histoire de Lorraine, the second edition of which was written in Senones. It was also in Senones that he wrote a now-forgotten work, a 17-volume Histoire universelle, on which Voltaire collaborated for a few days in 1753; a Bible in Latin and French, with a Commentaire littéral et critique sur tous les livres de l'Ancien et Nouveau Testament (Paris (1707-1716; 26 vol. in-4). The Commentaire, a major work by the Abbé de Senones, who constantly returned to make corrections or check translations, was reproduced separately under the title Trésor d'antiquités sacrées et profanes, from 1722, in 9 volumes. The reprinting of this Histoire ecclésiastique civile de la Lorraine, Nancy, 1728, in 1745-1757, brought Dom Calmet into conflict with the censors. A famous book by Dom Calmet, and one of the first French works to deal with vampires. Together with the Marquis de Maffei's letter on magic, the Senones edition is particularly sought-after as the most complete.