Macarius (of Egypt, Saint) Homiliae quinquaginta, collation: *², A-Z⁸, a-m⁸, n⁴, Greek text, early ink marginalia, contemporary French calf, blind-stamped fillets, gilt corner and centre-pieces, spine repaired, rubbed, 8vo (165 x 100 mm.), Paris, apud Guil. Morelium, 1559.

⁂ Editio princeps, edited from a manuscript in the Royal Library, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Saint Macarius 'of Egypt' or 'Aegyptus' (= 'the elder', = 'the Great'), c.300-390 A.D., was one of the most famous early Christian solitary ascetics, a disciple of Saint Anthony, and the founder of a monastic community in the Scetic or Nitrian desert. The present fifty sermons, though attributed to him throughout the middle ages, and still half credited by some modern authorities (e.g., Schaff-Herzog), are most probably of much later composition, perhaps the work of the tenth-century Byzantine hagiographer Symeon Metaphrastes. The legends of Macarius himself have been re-examined in recent years: Dom Aelred Baker, e.g. ('Pseudo-Macarius and the Gospel of Thomas', Vigiliae Christianae 18:4 (1964), 215-25), concluding inter alia that he was a Syrian, not a native Egyptian. The Homiliae remain widely admired, however, for the mystical aspects of their theology, and for their supposed early (and 'desert') origin, via a critical edition of 1964 (ed. H. Doerries, E. Klostermann, and M. Kroeger), and new French and English translations. USTC locates no copies in America.

Provenance: the Earls of Macclesfield (South Library bookplate and small embossed stamp to first 3 leaves)