La Madelaine au desert de la Sainte Baume en Provence; poeme spirituel et Chretien

by Pierre de Saint Louis

Lyon: Jean-Baptiste Deville and Nicolas Deville, 1694

[24], 214 p. | 12mo | ã^12 A-H^12 I^12(-I12 blank) | 162 x 97 mm

The second edition of this devotional poem centered on Mary Magdalene, ruminating on a medieval legend that put her later years in southern France, where she was allegedly buried in a cave at Saint-Maximim-la-Saint-Baume, east of Marseille. Françoise Bardon assigns the text to a baroque taste "for caves, deserts, solitude, a natural correspondence to a certain religiosity and an attraction to the contemplative life in nature." She found one scene to have been inspired by a 17th-century painting by Charles Le Brun. Others found other things. Brunet called the work of extrême bizarrerie. He found the first edition of 1668 sold very poorly, "until a year after the author's death, which came in 1672, this poem acquired a certain celebrity, which sold every copy and necessitated a second edition." (At least two more editions followed ours, in 1700 and 1714.) Nineteenth-century Catholic historian Étienne-Michel Faillon called it a farce (poème burlesque), and "asserted with holy anger [sainte colère] that the poem was considered a parody...only calculated to cast contempt on the tradition of the Provencals" (Labroque). Théophile Gautier was no less shocked by his encounter with the epic poem. "I am convinced that it would be impossible for anyone to voluntarily write ten verses as strange as those of Father Pierre de Saint Louis," who writes with a hatred [détestable] that is "exquisite, learned, conscientious. This poem, with its bizarre verse, is the most eccentric work that has ever appeared in any language in the world." A Shakespeare scholar has even mustered the poem as context for Hamlet's "get thee to a nunnery" speech. ¶ Within the preserve of metal bindings, silver tends to dominate both the market and the imagination. So naturally we're drawn to anything that strays from that silvery standard. Early gold-hued bindings like this are typically identified as silver gilt—vermeil, en français—a technique in which a layer of gold is applied to solid silver (the same can be done to bronze and brass). Our source, a Paris auction house, described this as brass. Perhaps that's the case. Brass of course has a long association with bookbinding, with clasps, bosses, and other furniture having long been made from the material. Nor are fully brass bindings unknown. Piasa of Paris sold a fine example in 2015 (laiton ajouré, gravé et doré). We find an enamel-encrusted brass binding on a 1576 imprint, for example, and a 1681 Kempten missal in an elaborate brass repoussé binding. ¶ That said, a faint silver hue shines through some areas of our metal (see especially the birds and floral baskets). We're inclined to consider this silver gilt, which has its own long history in bookbinding, used especially in the Romanesque period. They were common enough in the 17th and 18th centuries. In Sotheby's 1985 Silver and Enamel Bindings sale, many lots from the collection J.R. Abbey, ten bindings used silver gilt—certainly a minority compared to plain silver, but enough to warrant a second look at any gold-hued metal of the period described as brass.  ¶ Whatever the case, the metal has been worked ajouré, an openwork style in which negative space is cut from a solid sheet, then additionally engraved. Metalwork covers most of the binding, though the maroon velvet ground has been permitted some enticing exposure. The arabesque design incorporates a floral basket and two birds on each cover, with clasps, spine pieces, and endcaps worked in similar style. Stylistically, ours most closely resembles lot 30 in the aforementioned Sotheby's sale, also silver gilt, with arabesques, floral baskets, and birds dominating (Swiss, ca. 1730). The cataloger finds the "binding is unusual in that the silver cagework extends round the edges of the covers," as does ours. We'll also cite lots 5 and 54 for their similar hatched borders (German, ca. 1712 and ca. 1719). J.F. Hayward found engraved bindings more common in the 17th century, embossed more common in the next, a trend also endorsed by Sotheby's catalogers. But our brocade endpapers, probably of Augsburg manufacture, could point to later in the 18th century. Makers like Johann Ledergerber (d. 1719) were indeed active during the earliest years of the century, but our paper, at least in spirit, better resembles those of Johann Georg Eder (flourished 1760-1800). That said, it's worth remarking that costly metal bindings like these, too precious to discard, were sometimes transferred to later books. It would be challenging in our case, given how the cagework wraps around the board edges, but not impossible for a book of the same size. It's also worth noting that silver bindings were overwhelmingly the work of German and Dutch craftspeople, so the endpapers may bolster the case for German production. ¶ A lustrous, golden spin on the metal binding, here on an uncommon book. We find a 1668 edition at Indiana University, but no copies of this edition in North America, and no other copies of any editions in auction records.

CONDITION: Golden-hued metal over velvet-covered boards, as described above, probably silver gilt. Two clasps; brocade endpapers; edges gilt. ¶ The text mildly foxed throughout. Velvet torn along the top and bottom inch of the rear joint; the metal a little tarnished in spots; upper corner of the inner rear cover perhaps touched up with a little liquid gold. Really in excellent condition, the velvet especially.

REFERENCES: Brunet, Manuel du libraire, v. 3, col. 1187 ¶ The content: Françoise Bardon, "Le théme de la Madeleine pénitente au XVIIeme siècle en France," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968), p. 285 (cited above), 286 (for the Le Brun influence); Tamizey de Labroque, "Une improvisation poétique De Paul Hurault de l'Hospital, Archevéque d'Aix, précedée d'un récit anecdotique de Peiresc," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 5.1 (1898), p. 102n1; Théophile Gautier, Les grotesques (1856), p. 143; Cherrell Guilfoyle, "'Ower Swete Sokor': The Role of Ophelia in 'Hamlet,'" Comparative Drama 14.1 (Spring 1980), p. 12 (citing this work as a tenuous link to Hamlet: "Magdalen is described as preaching to her former fellow-prostitutes and exhorting them to enter nunneries. With no earlier reference, this cannot be directly related to Hamlet's repeated exhortations to Ophelia to 'get thee to a nunnery,' but it is at lesat likely that the Magdalen of legend would do this, as the patron saint of reformed prostitutes and as a preacher. If so, Hamlet in the nunnery scene is opposing the repentant Magdalen to the figure of her former self which he sees in Ophelia. He not only wears Magdalen's 'nighted colour' but also speaks her words.") ¶ The binding: W. May, "Exhibition of Library Appliances and Bindings, etc.," Transactions and Proceedings of the Library Association of the United Kingdom at Their Sixth Annual Meeting (1886), p. 188 (for the 1576 imprint); Mirjam Foot, Pictorial Bookbindings (1986), p. 49 (the 1681 Kempten missal); Sotheby's, Silver and Enamel Bindings (10 May 1985), preface ("In the seventeenth century the covers were mainly engraved, often inspired by contemporary engravings by masters such as de Bry, Collaert, and others...in the eighteenth century methods somewhat changed and many bindings are more or less heavily embossed"); Exhibition of Silver, Embroidered and Curious Bookbindings (Grolier Club, 1903), p. ix ("Silk and velvet ornamented with metals have always been much used, and especially for royal bindings"); J.F. Hayward, "Silver Bindings from the Abbey Collection," Connoisseur 130 (Oct 1952), p. 98 ("The most splendid of surviving book-covers of precious metal date from the Middle Ages, and in particular from the Romanesque period, when Missals and illuminated manuscripts were provided with bindings of silver-gilt enriched with ivory plaques, enamels, jewels and filigree wire"), 99 ("in the Sixteenth Century and subsequently, the taste for silver bindings was most strongly manifested in Germany and the Low Countries...In France, however, the goldsmiths did not attempt to compete with the binders who had achieved so high a reputation for their tooled and gilt morocco bindings"), 103 ("Though there were exceptions, engraving was, on the whole, the more usual treatment of silver book covers in the Seventeenth Century, while embossing was used in the succeeding century"), 104 ("With the close of the Eighteenth Century, the silver book cover fell out of fashion. The puritanical faith of the Nineteenth Century had little sympathy with the combination of ostentatious wealth and piety which they represented."); Die phantastische Welt der Brokatpapier: Die Sammlung Adelheid Schönborn (2020), p. 66 (a fruity and floral brocade paper by Johann Georg Eder)

Item #738