Disputationum de Sancto Matrimonii Sacramento, Tomi Tres.

Antuerpiæ [Antwerp]: Apud Jacobum Meursium, 1652. 3 vols. bound as 1, folio, pp. [xx], 488, 392, 396, [62]. Contemporary panelled pigskin over bevelled wooden boards, spine divided by raised bands, edges red. Worming throughout, almost all small holes, many touching text but with no loss of sense, some scattered browning and foxing, running marginal dampmark to lower corner. Boards wormholed and rather soiled, leather damage to head of spine, clasps and corner pieces sometime removed and leather repaired. Contemporary ink ownership inscription of Michaelsberg Abbey, Siegberg, to title-page. The most celebrated work of the Spanish Jesuit canon lawyer Thomas Sanchez (1550-1610), the first volume of which appeared in 1602, the second and third volumes being published the following year. Its casuist treatments of aspects of matrimony were so comprehensive that it attracted some critical opprobrium from within the church, with the third volume appearing on some iterations of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and as late as 1880 in their Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, McClintock and Strong write that the work ’occupies a high place in Jesuitical casuistry. It treats of every variety of obscene and immoral questions, and is justly regarded as indirectly contributive to the very immorality which it formally condemns.’ (McClintock and Strong vol. 9, p 330). STCV 6609643.