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A striking and beautiful single sheet of brokatpapier, with devotional images printed in gilt in a style usually associated with Augsburg. This uncut sheet may have been destined for endpapers, each image neatly fitting an octavo-sized book.

Hollar’s small format plates of European women and their costume are dated from 1642-4 and followed his successful series Ornatus muliebris Anglicanus of 1640. The plates were obtained by eighteenth-century printseller Robert Sayer, who issued them several times (with captions in English added) right up until his death in 1794. His widow may also have continued issuing and selling them into the early nineteenth-century. They are one of the best sources for seventeenth-century lay female dress and include several English subjects (A Noble Woman, a Merchant’s Wife of London, an English Gentlewoman, A Merchant’s Daughter, Lady of the Court, a Countrywoman etc) together with women of France, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Belgium and Austria. Three of the plates at the end depict men of religious orders. cf. Colas 1466 (second edition of 1643); Lipperheide 30.

A Tours-printed miniature Imitatio Christi.

FIRST EDITION, EACH OF THE THREE PARTS SIGNED AND HAND NUMBERED BY THE ARTIST, number 25 of 30 copies, each handcoloured by Madeleine Smets-Lefrancq. An extraordinarily dramatic graphic interpretation of Revelation, with linocuts by the Franciscan monk and sceptic Fieullien (1903-1976), who had studied at l’Académie de Bruxelles under the Belgian painter Oswald Poreau. He worked in sculpture, stained glass and paint, but his best work was in his remarkable illustrated books, with their idiosyncratic lettering and unsettling (occasionally lurid) religious imagery.

FIRST EDITION, a charming collection of Flemish madonnas printed in gold and colours. Jeanne Hebbelynck illustrated several children’s books, often with a devotional aspect.

First edition. Fragerolle had been Erik Satie’s co-pianist at the Chat Noir, composing most of the music for its revues. This is his delightful collection of old French Christmas carols, with ornaments to the wrapper, endpapers and text by Georges Auriol, also a member of the Chat Noir circle and friend of Satie. The wrapper, printed separately by Eugène Verneau and with trademark Auriol lettering, is particularly scarce.

First edition, inscribed by the artist to a young girl: ‘à ma chère amie Marguerite bien affectueusement. E. Moreau-Nélaton’. An unusual illustrated book of saints dedicated to his children, with plates in a distinctive gauzy style by painter, prodigious art collector and art historian, Moreau-Nélaton. His style was influenced by Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. OCLC lists the Bibliothèque nationale copy only.

An attractive Bohemian daily prayer book, evidently made for a girl, with simple illumination depicting the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion and St John in the wilderness. The format and decoration are of a type familiar in Southern Germany at this date, but Bohemian examples are less common.

First edition. Marsh, biblical critic and later bishop of Peterborough was born at Faversham, Kent, on 10 December 1757 and educated at Faversham grammar school and the King's School, Canterbury, before going up to Cambridge. He travelled in Egypt, Arabia and Europe before returning to Cambridge for his BD. The Authenticity of the five Books of Moses, defending Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was one of his qualifying sermons.

First edition of the Chevalier’s massive treatise on public administration largely composed in 1769, at the seat of his friend the fifth Earl Ferrers at Staunton Harald. Now disgraced as Louis XV’s secret foreign correspondent in England, D’Eon became a consistently colourful figure; his celebrity as a high-living transvestite sometimes obscuring his military, political and literary achievements. Throughout the 1770s in London, doubts were expressed about D’Éon’s sex, and wagers were made, although he himself professed to be indignant at the suggestion that he was not a man.

A volume is devoted to the commerce and affairs of Russia. Between 1755 and 1760 D’Eon had pursued a secret mission in Russia on behalf of the French government, aimed at establishing private lines of communication between Louis XV and the Empress Elizabeth. He was sent to London as a diplomat and spy in 1763, where his career initially flourished before he became entangled in the plots and rumours which were to bring him down. He became an expert in British statecraft, reflected in two of the volumes here. One of the British volumes in the collection is devoted partly to Scottish and partly American affairs.

A sumptuous Didot production, richly illustrated with the publisher’s state-of-the-art chromolithography and photogravure. Both first and second editions appeared in 1877. Uncommon in such fine, bright condition.

A manuscript collection of devotional texts by (or about) the first official mistress of Louis XIV, who, after her fall from favour, retired to a Carmelite convent in 1674 and took the veil. Her penitence, lasting until her death in 1710 was widely discussed and generated many accounts as well as her own Réflexions sur la Miséricorde de Dieu, first published in 1680, frequently reprinted and forming the last part of our manuscript collection. Réflexions bears the strong influence of Bossuet, her teacher, but is also a semi-autobiographical work, considering the mercy of God for sinners, especially for courtesans who have renounced their sexual sins, done penance, and exiled themselves from the excesses of the court. The author appeals, in particular, to feminine figures of repentance and sanctity in the New Testament, notably Saint Mary Magdalene, as paradigms of the conversion she has undergone.

The texts in this manuscript copy (in an unusual and probably female hand) hand all seem to have been collected from printed sources. Contents:

—L’Abrégé de la vie de la pénitence de Madame la duchesse de La Vallière. pp. 1-22
—Lettres de la soeur de la Vallière à Monsieur le maréchal de Bellefond soit avant soit depuis son entrée aux Carmélites. pp. 22-107
—Elévations de coeur à nôtre Seigneur Jesus-christ par rapport à la sainte Communion composées par la soeur Louise de la Miséricorde et tirées mot à mot de l'extrait écrit de sa main. pp. 107-118
—Lettre circulaire des Carmélites. pp. 118-141
—Sermon de messire Jean-Louis de Fromentières (...) pour la vêture de Madame de La Vallière. pp. 142-207
—Sermon pour la profession de Madame Françoise de la Baume Le Blanc de la Vallière duchesse de Vaujour prononcé en présence de la Reine le 4 juin 1675 dans l’Eglise des carmélites du fauxbourg saint Jacques. pp. 207-271
—Réflexions sur la Miséricorde de Dieu en forme de prières. pp. 271-350.

First edition, Charles Wesley’s verse epistle to his brother John, written during the crisis of the Methodism in the 1750s on the subject of the movement’s separation from the Church of England. For the the Methodist conference of 1755 John had prepared a paper entitled, Ought we to separate from the Church of England? in which he urged that, ‘whether or not it was lawful, separation was not expedient, believing that as a result Methodism would dwindle into an ineffective sect’ (Oxford DNB).

First edition. The passages of scripture ‘in the style of Ossian’ are in prose and verse and include ‘The Song of Deborah and Barak’, ‘Saul’s Death and David’s Lamentation’ and ‘The Tears of Salem’. The subscribers are mainly local to Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. Not in Jackson or Johnson. Scarce: ESTC: BL (2), Edinburgh, NLS, Bodley, Keble College, LC and Yale.

First editions of all three parts. The Poetical Essay ‘rehearses arguments from order and design to refute the teachings of Aristotle and Epicurus. It rewrites Lucretius’s apostrophe to Venus as an address to conscience, and ends by illustrating the providence of God through a brief, polemical, and strongly anti-Catholic history of the English church in the sixteenth century. The poem went through three editions, and was reprinted in Roberts’s Poems, editions of which appeared in 1774 and 1776’ (Oxford DNB). Jackson, pp. 9-10.

First edition, dedicated to ‘the people called Methodists in general—more especially to the Reverend the Clergy, and the Lay-Preachers in Connection with the Rev. John Wesley’.

Kershaw was an itinerant Methodist preacher from Halifax, who accompanied Wesley on some of his journeys to the North of England, and Scotland. In about 1770 he settled at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, where ‘much of his leisure... was devoted to writing. In 1780 he published An Essay on the Principal Parts of the Book of the Revelations. The same year his epic poem The Methodist Attempted in Plain Metre was published in Nottingham. Wesley’s disapproval was less on the grounds of its lack of literary merit than for fear that it brought reproach on the Methodists and would hinder the sale and reading of more profitable literature. As a result, the Methodist conference of 1781 decreed that in future no preacher should publish until the text had been seen and edited by Wesley, and that any profits from such publications should be paid into a common fund’ (Oxford DNB). Not in Jackson; no in Johnson.

First edition. ‘Arabert, a young ecclesiastic, retired to the content of La Trappe, in obedience to a vow he had taken during a fit of illness: Leonora, with whom he had lived in the strictest intimacy, followed her lover, and by the means of a disguise, obtained admission into the monastery, where a few days after she assisted at her lover’s funeral’ (Advertisement).

‘Mr. Jerningham has once more paid his court to his favourite muse Melpomene, and solicited her auspices in another tender tale. We have had so many occasions to speak of this gentleman’s poetical merit, that we shall now rest satisfied with letting his works speak for themselves’ (Monthly Review). Jackson, p. 8.

First edition, dated Fort St George, 1 January 1775. A discussion of the Hindu practice of sati, when a widow immolates herself on her dead husband’s funeral pyre, something the poet had witnessed for himself. Born in Calcutta to Irish parents, Irwin served the East India Company in a civil capacity at Madras, before posting to China for two years and a return to England. Jackson, p. 43.

An attractive pocket bible.