Étienne DOLET. Les Gestes de Francoys de Valois Roy de France. Dedans lequel Œuvre on peut congnoistre tout ce qui a este faict par les Francoys depuis Lan Mil cinq cents treize, iusques en Lan mil cinq cents trente neuf. Premierement composé en Latin par Estienne Dolet : et apres par luy mesmes translaté en langue Francoyse. In-4, red morocco with double framing of triple fillet and corner fleurons, spine with 5 ornate nerves, interior roulette, gilt edges (Koehler). Brunet, II-797 // Cioranescu, 7917. 78-(1f.) / A-K4 / 142 x 211 mm. Rare first edition. French typographer and humanist Étienne Dolet (1509-1546) was a shining light and martyr of the Renaissance. The illegitimate son of a woman from Orléans and an unknown father, who for a time was wrongly assumed to be François I, Étienne Dolet came to Paris at the age of twelve, where he studied. He then went to Italy in 1526, where he stayed until 1530, before going to Toulouse to study law. There he studied the works of Cicero and became involved in the Ciceronian quarrel, which was a movement in favour of a return to the purity of Cicero's language. He moved to Lyon in 1535, where he had his Commentariorum Linguae Latinae printed, and then obtained from François I the privilege of printing for ten years. He published numerous works in various genres: theology, literature and medicine, and edited the works of Marot and Rabelais. Accused of printing books tainted with heresy, he was first imprisoned for fifteen months at the Conciergerie in Paris and in 1543 saw thirteen of his works condemned to the flames by the Paris Parliament on the grounds that they spread a damnable, pernicious and heretical doctrine. Arrested again in Lyon, he fled to Italy, returned to Lyon, published a translation of Plato's Asciochus in which Plato says to Socrates: After death you will be nothing at all and was declared, for this denial of the immortality of the soul, to be a relapsed atheist. Sentenced to the stake, he was executed on 3 August 1546 and burnt with his books. His Gestes de Francoys de Valois roy de France recounts the history of François I from 1513 to 1530. The work is to the glory of the king and the account of the disaster of Pavia is as glorious for him as the victory at Marignan: Le Roy... ne s'espargnoit aulcunement & se monstroit plein d'un cueur invincible. But in the end, through an adverse destiny and bad fortune, the French army was defeated, and the King's horse was destroyed beneath him, and he was taken prisoner while fighting magnanimously... Such was the will of God... The work was first written in Latin by Dolet and then translated into French by him. It is decorated with the printer's mark on the first and last leaves and 5 superb initials, 2 of which are repeated, with foliate motifs and figures on a sifted background. A very good copy, despite small, slightly darker stains on the binding.