£1,250.00
Formey, Johann Heinrich Samuel. Le Philosophe chrétien. A Leyde: De l’Imprimerie d’Elie Luzac, 1752.
Seconde édition, revue et augmentée.
Four volumes. Engraved devices to titles.
Contemporary mottled calf, manuscript spine titles, later paper shelf labels.
General rubbing and wear, some loss at headcaps, internally clean with institutional stamps.
Year: 1752
Edition: Second Edition, revised and expanded.
Publisher: Elie Luzac, Leiden
A substantial mid-eighteenth-century continental printing of a major Protestant philosophical text, issued from the press of Elie Luzac at Leiden in 1752. Works of this character were central to the intellectual negotiations between reason, faith, and natural law that shaped European thought in the decades before the Revolution.
This set survives in its period bindings, bearing the marks of long institutional preservation. Library shelf labels remain to the spines and there are ownership stamps within, quiet witnesses to the journey of the books through organised collections rather than private hands.
Handsome, dignified, and entirely usable today, it represents the kind of scholarly foundation upon which later theology and moral philosophy continued to build.
Formey was a key transmitter of Enlightenment religious philosophy, associated with the Berlin Academy and the broader Republic of Letters. Editions printed by Luzac in Leiden occupy an important place in the dissemination of Protestant intellectual culture across Europe. Complete multi-volume survivals in period bindings remain increasingly difficult to source.
