[TAUTOGRAM]. HUCBALD of St. Amand.

De laude calvorum ad Carolum Calvum Imperatorem, mirabile opus centum triginta trium versuum, in quo omnia verba à litera C incipiunt ...

Louvain, Heironymus Wellæus, 1562. 12mo., pp. [8]; roman letter, woodcut initials, last page a little dusty, but a very good copy in modern blind-stamped calf; the Hauck copy. A poem of 148 lines in praise of baldness, also known as “Ecloga de calvis”, dedicated to Charles the Bald, Holy Roman Emperor in 875-7. F.J.E. Raby calls it “the only philosophic treatment of the subject which has ever been produced”. As the title-page explains, every word in the poem begins with the letter C, a remarkable literary device known as “paramoion” (equivalent to the “tautogramme” of the modern Oulipo movement). In a dizzy maze of alliterations Hucbald sets out to prove “that the best and greatest men have had the honour of being bald – dignitaries of the Church, saintly eremites, men of learning, poets, kings, soldiers and physicians, to say nothing of Elisha and Paul. Perhaps the best passage is that in which Hucbald sets forth the skill of bald physicians …” (History of secular Latin poetry in the Middle Ages, vol. I, pp. 249-50).Hucbald or Hugbaldus was a ninth-century Benedictine monk, whose De harmonica institutione (written c. 880) was the first systematic work on western music theory, though later, similar works are also doubtfully attributed to him. From 872 he was headmaster at the convent school of St. Amand, where he also wrote several hagiographic works.De laude calvorum was first published in Mainz in c. 1496. This edition is very rare, not listed on RLIN, KvK, COPAC or OCLC.

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