Le Roman de la Rose
“Le Roman de la Rose was the first French 'classic'; it is the quintessential medieval novel” (C. Marchello-Nizia, In French in the Text).
Le Roman de la Rose printed in 1503, adorned with around a hundred woodcuts.
In-folio of 151 leaves (out of 154); Gothic script in 2 columns of 45 lines per page.
Glazed calf, double frame of gilt and blind-stamped fillets around the covers, large blind-stamped motif in the center, spine with raised bands richly decorated, decorated edges, gilt-tooled inner roll, gilt edges. Binding by C. Smith.
257 x 190 mm.
Lorris, Guillaume de. Meung, Jehan de. Le Roman de la Rose. This is the Romance of the Rose, moralized, clear and neat, translated from rhyme into prose By your humble Molinet.
Lyon, Guillaume Balsarin, 1503.
Precious Gothic edition of theRomance of the Rose.
Tchemerzine, IV, 234; Brunet, III, 1176; Bourdillon, 65-66.
A romance of love and an initiatory courtly quest, the Romance of the Rose was written in the early 13th century by Guillaume de Lorris; about forty years later, nearly 18,000 verses by Jean Clopinel, a native of Meung-sur-Loire, completed the poem and contributed to its immense popularity.
This work, which exerted a considerable influence on all French literature, is the allegorical tale of a love for a rosebud.
Le Roman de la Rose was the most famous work of the Middle Ages and the first French "classic".
This precious and very rare Gothic edition features the famous "moralized" prose version given around 1500 by Jean Molinet, historiographer for the House of Burgundy and librarian to Margaret of Austria. (Claudin, III, 525).
The illustration consists of a large woodcut with a superb historiated initial at the head of the prologue and about a hundred woodcut figures very well suited to the text.
This edition, extremely rare, was lacking in the collections of Rothschild, Fairfax Murray, De Backer, Brunschwig, and Barbier.
“TLe Roman de la Rose, a poem in octosyllabic verse, was begun by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230. It was continued by Jean de Meung around 1270. The part written by Guillaume de Lorris is an initiatory courtly quest, but allegorized; the part composed by Jehan de Meung constitutes a kind of secondary allegory.
The Romance of the Rose was the most famous work of the Middle Ages. It is the first work in French to have been glossed. The Romance of the Rose was the first French 'classic.'
Read, copied, quoted, glossed, and admired constantly through the centuries, it is the medieval romance par excellence”
(C. Marchello-Nizia, En français dans le texte, 18).
Provenance: Libraries of Frederick Perkins and Maurice Hewlett, with ex-libris.
