De statu ecclesie. De purgatorio. De suffragijs defunctorum. De corpore Christi. Libellus feliciter incipit contra valdenses qui hec omnia negant. Colophon: In egregio oppido Cunei impressum autem per me Simonem Bevilaqua Papiensem, 1510 die V Decembris

PRINTED IN CUNEO-AGAINST THE WALDENSIANS

4to (187x132 mm). [56] leaves. Collation: a-o⁴. The last leaf is a blank. 33-35 lines. Gothic type. The name of the author appears in the colophon (l. o3v): “perfectus est iste tractatulus per me fratrem Samuelem de Casinis die 26 octobris 1510”. Woodcut initial on l. a2v. Later cardboards. Label removed from title-page verso, some occasional minor staining, a good copy.

First edition of one of the very first printed treatises dedicated to the Waldensians.

On 5 December 1510, a group of dissident cardinals who were opposed to Pope Julius II, led by the Castilian Bernardino López de Carvajal, entered Milan triumphantly under the protection of Louis XII of France. Among them was Samuele da Cassine, a Observant Franciscan friar who had previously taken an unwelcome stance against Savonarola. He dedicated to Carvajal his work against the Waldensians, defending suffrage for the dead and purging of souls. The work or part of it had been published in Italian a few month earlier under the title Victoria triumphale contra li errori de valdeisi (Cuneo, 1510).

A marginal but noteworthy chapter in the context of these considerations on Carvajal's role in the fight against heresy, as well as with regard to the events of the Council of Pisa-Milan, is the dedication addressed to him by the Observant friar Samuele da Cassine in his refutation of Waldensian beliefs. The date of dedication and printing of what is nothing more than the Latin translation (De statu ecclesie. De purgatorio. De suffragijs defunctorum. De corpore Christi. Libellus feliciter incipit contra valdenses qui hec omnia negant) of a work in the vernacular published two months earlier (Victoria triumphale contra li errori de Valdesi, already addressed to the Duke of Savoy), appears to be 5 December 1510, the same day on which the dissident cardinals, led by Carvajal, entered Milan. The coincidence should not be accidental […] The place of publication was Cuneo, but the printer was Simone Bevilacqua from Pavia. The author, who had resided in the convent of Sant'Angelo in Milan but had been absent from the Lombard capital for more than six months due to the capitular congregation of the Genoese province held in April 1510, and was perhaps about to return, seems to have identified Cardinal Carvajal as the leading figure in the group of dissident prelates who had fled Rome. Moreover, Samuele da Cassine must have had more compelling reasons to try to ingratiate himself with the Spaniard because his texts against Savonarola first, and then against Savonarola's ‘living saints', may have irritated the cardinal, who, as already mentioned, also had a close relationship with the Savonarolans. The formulation, translation and dissemination of this text demonstrates how acute the problems associated with the presence of the Waldensians in the Piedmont valleys were, with an echo that may have been amplified in Milan by the presence among the royal senators of Alberto Cattaneo, canon of San Nazzaro in Brolio, brother of Giulio, secretary of justice, […] who was also a leading figure in the crusade against the Waldensians in 1487-1488. Above all, Carvajal was identified by the friar as a reference point to whom the pamphlet should be addressed, probably because, despite his conspicuous disobedience to the incumbent pontiff, his strenuous fight against any kind of heresy, deviation or diversity of belief from orthodoxy was so well known that he was considered sympathetic to further persecution of the Waldensian community (cf. E. Rossetti, Visioni di riforma. Il cardinale spagnolo Bernardino López de Carvajal e le élite milanesi nella crisi religiosa di primo Cinquecento (1492-1521), PhD thesis, University Ca' Foscari of Venice, 2017, pp. 166-168).

The Waldensians originated with the merchant Valdo of Lyon, who in 1173 decided to live as Jesus had asked the apostles to. From the 13^th to the 16^th century, the movement spread throughout much of Western and Central Europe. However, due to persecution, it survived only in Southern Europe. In 1532, the remaining Waldensians joined the Protestant Reformation, forming an independent Reformed Church in 1559. From 1562 onwards, their presence was limited to the Cottian Alps, where they were partly French and partly subjects of the House of Savoy. At the end of the 17^th century, French Waldensians who were being persecuted by Louis XIV took refuge in Germany. During the 19^th century, many Waldensians left their impoverished homeland in Piedmont to settle in America. Since the Emancipation of 1848, the Waldensian Church has spread throughout Italy and has become one of the most prominent voices of Italian Protestantism. The Waldensian Church is unique in being the only Protestant church that can be traced directly back to a “heretical”movement of the early Middle Ages.

Samuele da Cassine or Cassini or De Cassinis (lat. Samuel Cassinensis) was probably born in Cassine near Alessandria around the middle of the 15^th century. Little is known about his life, and even his baptismal name is unknown, as he abandoned it when he joined the Observant Friars Minor of the Province of Genoa. As far as his studies are concerned, we know that, after acquiring a good education in the literary disciplines in Italy, he was sent to Paris to improve his knowledge of philosophy and theology at the university there. He was a professor in France and Italy, probably in the schools of his Order, and in his mature years and period of greatest intellectual activity, he mostly lived in Piedmont and Milan. He was renowned as a profound connoisseur of Aristotelian philosophy. Around 1493, he returned from France to Italy, and the following year, he published in Milan a manual of philosophy and theology, which gained some notoriety and enjoyed a certain favour among the students for whom it was intended (Liber ysagogicus in apices Scoti theologorum principis, necnon ad investiganda Aristotelis profunda logicalia, Milan, 1494). In 1495 Cassine was still in Milan, preparing the edition of Burlifer's Formalitates, which he would publish the following year, accompanied by his own commentary. In the years that followed, he expressed his aversion to Girolamo Savonarola's prophecies, publishing the Invectiva in prophetiam fratris Hieronymi in 1497, a work that also aimed to support the anti-Florentine and anti-Savonarola policy of Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, to which Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola responded shortly afterwards with a Defensio Hieronymi Savonarolae Ferranensis (Florence, undated). Cassine replied to Pico by publishing Reseratio atque clarificatio falsarum solutionum ad argumenta Samuelis Cassinensis que facta júerunt in falsam prophetiam Hieronymi Ferrariensis (Milan, 1498), dedicated to Alexander VI. Also in 1498, he published a philosophical pamphlet dedicated to Duke Ludovico il Moro (Quaestio de immortalitate animae, Milan, 1498). A few years later, in 1505, he published, possibly in Pavia, a work on witches (Questione de le strie. Questiones lamearum). Finally, in 1510, he published the Expositio triplex librorum octo phisicorum Aristotelis in Cuneo, dedicating the work to the University of Paris, and his treatise against the Waldensians. He presumably died soon after 1510 (cf. R. Ristori, Cassini, Samuele, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, Rome, 1978, vol. 21, pp. 487-490).

Edit 16, CNCE58243; USTC, 854422; M. Bersano Begey, Le cinquecentine piemontesi, Turin, 1966, II, p. 408; OCLC, 270783894 and 62590144 (only two copies copy in the US); A. Hugon-Gonnet, Bibliografia Valdese, Torre Pellice, 1953, p. 71, no. 758 (“cordeliere inviato in missione alle Valle”); F.J. Norton, Italian Printers 1501-1520, London, 1958, p. 23.

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