SETTLEMENT AT VIENNE UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF THE ARCHBISHOP—RENEWAL OF INTERCOURSE WITH THE PUBLISHERS OF LYONS—SECOND EDITION OF PTOLEMY.

It was while resident at Charlieu that Villeneuve again met with Pierre Paumier, now Archbishop of Vienne, Dauphiny, whom he had known in Paris, who indeed had been among the number of his auditors when he lectured on geography and the science of the stars. Paumier had the reputation, well deserved as it appears, of being a lover of learning for its own sake, and fond of the society of men learned like himself. Thinking, we may presume, that one with the accomplishments of his old professor would be an addition to the society of the archiepiscopal city of Vienne, when he heard of Villeneuve’s presence in Charlieu as a practising physician, he sought him out, and pressed him to quit the narrower for the wider field. This, under such auspices, we can well imagine Doctor Villeneuve was nowise loth to do; so that we next hear of him installed at Vienne, with apartments found him in the precincts of the Palace, and so under the immediate patronage of the Archbishop.

Not overburthened with professional work at first, Villeneuve appears to have renewed, if he had not kept up, his connection with the publishers of Lyons; and, as a means of income, continued his literary labours in various directions for more than one of the fraternity. Among other works, the edition of ‘Ptolemy’ he had supervised for the Trechsels, when in their service in 1535, being exhausted, a second was required; and their old editor having already proved himself abundantly competent, overtures were made to him to undertake the work anew. A proposal of the kind we need not doubt was gladly received, and the Trechsels having set up a branch establishment at Vienne, and the Archbishop consenting to accept the dedication of the new ‘Ptolemy,’ our editor had an opportunity of saying something pleasant to his patron, and of showing himself advantageously to the public around him in connection with a handsome volume from a press of their own city. The work accordingly was entered on with alacrity; and as the editor was not only countenanced, but assisted by the Archbishop, himself no mean geographer, the new edition made its appearance in the course of 1541, amended and improved.51

If the first ‘Ptolemy’ of Michael Villanovanus had been seen as an improvement on its predecessors, his second was a marked advance upon it, and is interesting to us on many accounts. Though much lauded and commercially successful, the first edition, in a literary point of view, was still far from what it was capable of being made. The ornamentation of the volume, though profuse, was not highly artistic, and the wood-cuts had already done duty in various other publishing ventures. There was ample room for improvement both in the direction of greater accuracy of text and of better taste. In the re-issue, consequently, we find various alterations, and two or three omissions that are highly significant. It is printed on better paper, too, and new maps are added; the coarse wood-cuts are left out, and the text in various parts is amended. Altogether the volume is a very handsome one, and was obviously produced with every care to secure accuracy and elegance.

In his Dedication to the Archbishop, we have an assurance that life among the polished circles of Vienne had already had a mollifying influence on the hot-headed Michel Villeneuve of Parisian days. The polite terms in which, beside the Archbishop, all and sundry of mark and name in the city are spoken of, are particularly notable. We know how little there was of compliment in the words with which he took leave of his Swiss opponents, and imagine the sting there must be in the paper with which he bade the Parisian Faculty farewell. But now, beneath the wing of the great church dignitary, and referring to the time when as professor of geography and astrology he had had him among the number of his auditors, Villanovanus tells us that he is especially encouraged in his purpose to produce a more correct edition of the great geographer’s work, by the permission he has received to dedicate it to his patron, as well as by the assistance he has had from him in the amendment of numerous faulty passages.

‘For you,’ continues our Editor, addressing the Archbishop, ‘are the one among our church dignitaries I have known who, loving letters and favouring learned men, have given particular attention to geographical science. I am also incited to my work by the many favours I have received at your hand. Under what patronage but yours, indeed, could this work, amended, and printed at Vienne, appear, student as you are of ‘Ptolemy,’ and head of our Viennese society? Nor, sooth to say, will our ‘Ptolemy’ want a welcome from others about us interested in geography; among the foremost of whom I may name your relation John Paumier, prior of St. Marcel, and Claude de Rochefort, your vicar, both of them highly accomplished men, commended of all, and to whom I may say that I myself owe as much in my sphere as students of geography owe to ‘Ptolemy.’ I must do no more than mention Joannes Albus, prior of St. Peter and St. Simeon; for I am forbidden to speak of his virtues. Neither must I make other than a passing allusion to the noble triad, your officials; for words would fail me to speak worthily of their great qualities; and of Doctor John Perell, your physician, my old fellow-student in Paris, so learned in philosophy and skilled in the languages—I can only say that one more apt than I were required fitly to speak his praise.’

From this we learn that Michael Villanovanus, all in laying on flattery somewhat thickly, could still show himself the grateful man; as ready to acknowledge kindness as we have known him apt to take fire at opposition and ready to resent what he held to be unworthy usage. But the matter is even more interesting to us, as giving us to know the kind of society Servetus frequented in Vienne, and the consequent esteem in which he must have been held. The ‘noble triad’ referred to, we imagine, may have consisted of M. Maugiron, the Lieutenant-General of Dauphiny; M. de la Cour, the Vibailly; and M. Arzelier, the Vicar-General.

Among the alterations and omissions to be observed in the new edition of the ‘Ptolemy,’ the most notable occur under the heads of Germany, France, and JudÆa. The edition of 1535 was set about and produced shortly after he had been so unhandsomely received, as he thought, by the Swiss and German Reformers; and we are therefore sorry, though not surprised, to find that disappointment and pique had left him with little inclination to say much in praise either of themselves or their respective countries. Hence the generally evil report he makes of Germany, and the notice of Switzerland as remarkable for nothing but the production of butchers! All this is either suppressed or toned down in the edition of 1541. The editor had had time for reflection; and under the soothing influences of the archiepiscopal city and professional success, he now makes a more favourable report of the countries and peoples he had formerly gone out of his way to decry and defame. Instead of the forest-encumbered and swampy land with its inclement sky of the former edition, Germany is now a regio amoena, with a coelum satis clemens—a pleasant country with quite a temperate climate, and all the damaging statements in regard to its several divisions and their peoples are omitted.

The graphic account we had formerly of the boastful, ignorant, and superstitious people of Spain is also left out in the reprint; but we have an added notice of the people of France which shows us how little nations change in the course of three hundred and fifty years. ‘Not only in the cities and country places,’ says our editor, ‘but even in single families, every Frenchman seems to think he has a right to rule over everybody else. The assertion of individual superiority is so universal that every one among them would have every one else to do his bidding, he himself feeling bound to do the bidding of none.’

The Church and her favoured sons, the hierarchs thereof, having still thriven in the shadow of the throne, as Villeneuve was now living amid the clerical society of an archiepiscopal city, it was thought that the few words in the former edition, which seemed to question the efficacy of the ‘Royal Touch’ in curing scrofula, would be out of place. They are, therefore, now found modified. For the ‘I did not see that any were cured,’ we find ‘I have heard say that many were cured!’ The new edition, moreover, being dedicated to the Archbishop of Vienne, it was felt that any word in dispraise of the Holy Land would seem disrespectful and improper. All that is said in connection with the map of Palestine contradictory to the Bible account of JudÆa as a land flowing with milk and honey, or as of signal beauty and fertility, is accordingly entirely expunged from the new impression.

These changes have been said to be due to warnings given by friends to Servetus, on the presumption, probably, that he could hardly have been living on terms of intimacy with many persons of note, both lay and clerical, without betraying something of the sceptical element that distinguished him at the outset of his career, and that got the mastery of him with such disastrous consequences at last. But we have no positive intimation that Servetus ever failed to keep his counsel, or that he was known to a soul in Vienne, save as M. Michel Villeneuve, the physician. Calvin certainly knew him by no other name in Paris when they met there in 1534, a date at which we have surmised he had not yet read the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis,’ and so escaped having his suspicions aroused through the sameness of the views propounded in that work, and those expressed by his acquaintance, Villeneuve, that he had its author, Michael Serveto, alias RevÉs, bodily before him.

That this was really the case is confirmed by the statement which he makes on his trial at Vienne, to the effect, that he had only been challenged by Calvin in the course of their correspondence, begun as many as fourteen years after the publication of his first book, with being no other than Servetus. Having read the ‘De Erroribus’ subsequently, Calvin did not fail to discover Michael Serveto under the cloak of Michael Villanovanus, his correspondent of Vienne, and may consequently, some time after the year 1546, have written to Cardinal Tournon, as said by Bolsec,52 or hinted to a friend in Lyons, that they had an egregious heretic, the writer of the work on Trinitarian Error, living among them under an assumed name. But of so much as this we have no reliable assurance, and even if we had, it could have no reference to the year 1541, the date of publication of the second edition of Villanovanus’s ‘Ptolemy.’53