Beschreibung:

HEYWOOD, John (ca 1497-ca 1578). The Spider and the Flie. A Parable of the Spider and the Flie, made by John Heywood. London: Tho[mas] Powell, 1556.
HEYWOOD, John (ca 1497-ca 1578). The Spider and the Flie. A Parable of the Spider and the Flie, made by John Heywood. London: Tho[mas] Powell, 1556. 4 o (180 x 134 mm). Woodcut title border, woodcut portrait of author, 98 allegorical woodcuts, many full-page (see below), woodcut capitals, head- and tail-pieces. (Title with marginal repair, second leaf torn and remargined with minor loss of two words, a few tiny holes or short mended tears, I2 and I3 slightly shorter, a few margins trimmed closely.) Red morocco gilt with spider web design, edges gilt by Samblancx and Weckesser. Provenance : Amor L. Hollingsworth (bookplate; his sale C.F. Libbie, Boston, 12 April 1910, lot 884); acquired from Goodspeed's Book Shop, 1973. FIRST EDITION of one of the most curious allegorical poems of the Elizabethan period and an exceptional early English woodcut book. The elaborate parable, in which the Catholics are represented as flies and the Protestants as spiders, with butterflies, ants and beetles in attendance, proved too abstruse for most of Heywood's audience and the book, with its elaborate and no doubt expensive series of highly detailed woodcuts, some depicting massed armies of insects, was never reprinted. Heywood himself had been embroiled in religious controversy. Imprisoned under Henry VIII in 1543 for denouncing Archbishop Cranmer as a heretic, he found favor during the reign of Mary I, but when Elizabeth ascended to the throne, he fled to Louvain, where he died. Pforzheimer 469 ("the illustrations and decorations as well as the general typographical excellence make this book outstanding among English work of the time"); STC 13308. Fact and Fantasy 36.