Giambattista Vico, Eugene of Savoy and Hugo Grotius’sDe jure belli ac pacis, 1719

Abstract

The following article discusses an edition of Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (1625), issued without a place of publication or publisher in 1719. The article focuses on the claim first advanced by Dario Faucci and repeated by several others that the edition was published in Naples with the collaboration of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). The article examines a wide body of bibliographical evidence in response to the attribution, including the distinctive dedicatory epistle and binding of a presentation copy in Vienna within the library of Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736), printers’ ornaments used in Naples in 1719, and a variety of donatory and ad usum inscriptions in several extant copies of this remarkable edition of Grotius’s masterwork.