LEUTERBREUVER, Christophe. ~ La Confession coupée ou la méthode facile pour se préparer aux confessions particulières et générales... Paris: Michel Vaugon 1704.
12mo (144 × 70 mm), pp. [52], 188, including full-page engraved portraits of St Peter and Mary Magdalen, each leaf of pp. 1-80 formed from 2 sheets pasted back-to-back with lateral cuts (see note). Title just trimmed at outer margin. Contemporary sprinked sheep. Several later annotations to endpapers, one giving the name of Agathe Cornot, d. 1859. Slightly rubbed. A very good copy.
An unusually well-preserved livre à système with a large number of printed slips encompassing the gamut of human wickedness according to the seventeenth-century Catholic church.
Designed as a practical aid to the sacrament of confession Leuterbreuver’s ingenious little work first appeared in 1677 and ran to many editions into the eighteenth century. Intended as a complete manual of confession, the moveable slips provided a solution to the age-old problem of making a full and detailed confession from memory. The confessor can mark the sins relevant to him or her by lifting the corresponding printed slips and then replacing them so that no-one need ever know what was confessed. In reality, the lifted slips were often folded to mark them more clearly and it is, of course, intriguing to see which of the hundreds of sins have been marked (comparatively few in this copy). The book as a whole provides an uncommonly intimate view of the seventeenth-century soul, akin to listing at the door of the confessional.
The sins are set out according to the Ten Commandments and provide a glittering array of human failings. One wonders whether the popularity of the book was as much because it provided such a panorama of the dark side of the soul. The list of sins for the ninth commandment, for example includes memoranda for ‘Avoir eu des pensées & des désirs lascifs. Y avoir eu de la délectation... Avoir prêté consentement aux illusions nocturnes... Avoit employé l’art magique des breuvages, & choses semblables, pour engager quelque personne en amour... Avoir dit des chansons lascives. Avoir dit les contes, & tenu des entretiens lascifs. Avoir fait des billets & écrits lascifs. Avoir eu, lû, & donné les Livres lascifs... Avoir jetté des regards déshonnêtes...’ WorldCat lists copies of this edition at the Catholic Institute of Paris and British Library only.