Special Collections
Book of the Month, February 2007
Mundus Alter et Idem
Joseph Hall
[Hanau]: Haeredes Ascanii de Renialme, 1607
[D.-L.L.] Bb.4 [Hall]
Joseph Hall’s early text Mundus Alter et Idem was a mistake – or more accurately, from the author’s point of view, its publication was. Hall’s friend William Knight, whose name appears at the end of the preface, had the work published without the author’s consent and possibly against his wishes. The language of composition (Latin) and the nature of the work’s humour, which depends on scholarly allusion and complicated philology, indicate that Hall wrote Mundus Alter et Idem as an exercise in University wit, for closed academic circles. Nonetheless, it proved popular, and a loose English translation appeared in 1609. Later the work was to gain fame for being condemned by John Milton, who described its fatal flaw as a total loss of moral purpose, and for inspiring Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Mundus Alter et Idem is a satire on contemporary European vices, based on Hall’s view of the innate degeneracy of the human race. It describes a journey to the Antipodes, as seen by Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator, in the ship Phantasia. The traveller, Mercurius Britannicus, moves from bodily to mental vice as he discovers the four nations of Crapulia (gluttony), Viraginia (women), Moronia (folly) and Lavernia (deceit). Each province, city and university through which he travels represents a different aspect of that folly, underlined by the place names, which are glossed in the index (for example, Lisonica is glossed as Spanish Adulatio’, the land of flattery, reached from the land of wanton extravagance).
This particular copy has distinguished provenance, with the armorial book label of the book collector Sir Mark Masterman Sykes (1771-1823), of whose library Elizabethan literature was a strength, and the armorial bookplate of the philanthropical Leeds physician John Deakin Heaton (1817-1880). Thence it passed into the possession of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, and hence the University of London: the Durning-Lawrence Library also contains an edition printed in London tentatively dated by the STC to 1605, the first English translation (with a conjectural date of 1609), and the 1658 German edition published together with Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun.
More about Mundus Alter et Idem appears in:
Richard A. McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982);
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