![VILLON, Franois (b. 1431). Fragment of two bifolia from Le grant testament. Codicille. Ballades. Petit testament. [Paris: Antoine Caillaut, ca. 1490, before May 1491].](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/1999/NYR/1999_NYR_09178_0070_000(115053).jpg?w=1)
Details
VILLON, Franois (b. 1431). Fragment of two bifolia from Le grant testament. Codicille. Ballades. Petit testament. [Paris: Antoine Caillaut, ca. 1490, before May 1491].
Chancery 4o. Collation: a-b8 c6 d-f8 g-h6. 4 leaves (of 58), consisting of fols. c1.6 and c2.5. Type: 111B. 27 lines. The fragment preserved as pastedown endpapers (now unglued), sewn within vellum liner strip, to the lower cover of a Sammelband containing three works, as described below. (Lower portions of leaves torn away, lacking the last 6 to 8 lines of each page, lower edges severely creased and frayed, wormholes to second bifolium catching a few letters, verso of second leaf offset from turn-ins.) Catalogues rgionaux des incunables des bibliothques publiques de France, vol. V (Bordeaux, 1987), 932.
Contents of the fragment: Le grant testament, fols. [1r-2v]: lines 713-808, containing stanzas LXX-LXXXI; fols. [3r-4v]: lines 902-994, containing the last 8 lines of the "Ballade que Villon feit a la requeste de sa mere pour prier Nostre Dame" (Marot's later attributed title), the following stanzas XC-XCIII, the "Ballade de Villon a s'amye", stanza XCIV and the following "Lay" in 2 verses, and the first 5 lines of stanza XCV (line and stanza numbers following the Longnon-Foulet edition, Paris 1969).
Binding: early 16th-century Flemish or Northeastern French blind-tooled calf over wooden boards, sides panelled with 7-fillet outer border and triple fillet inner border, inner panel of repeated lozenges composed of intersecting triple fillets, sewn on 3 pairs of double cords, alum-tawed endbands, single chased brass fore-edge hasp and catch (lacking clasp, a few scrapes and gouges and one or two old patch-repairs(?) to covers, board extremities rubbed with loss to leather at corners, lower portion of spine defective, cords exposed at head and tail, pastedowns [including Villon fragment] detached at an early date).
Paper: Watermark: blessing hand with scallopped sleeve, with 7 scallops: close to Briquet 11493, Limoges 1454.
Provenance: Sebastian ?Truge, doctor of medicine from Cambrai (16th-century inscription on front pastedown, one or two marginal notes in first work); illegible signature with date 1678 (inscription on front pastedown); childishly formed letters on title and last page, a few "nota bene" marginalia and underlinings in first work, including effaced inscription on e4v).
FRAGMENT OF AN UNTIL RECENTLY UNRECORDED INCUNABLE EDITION OF VILLON. A single imperfect copy, lacking leaves a1, f8 and all of quire h, is preserved at the Bibliothque municipale de Nantes, where it was brought to light in the early 1980s by Louis Torchet in the course of his compilation of the Pays de Loire volume of the Catalogues rgionaux des incunables des bibliothques publiques de France. Torchet briefly described the Nantes copy (which is bound with two Paris imprints of the early 1490s, both popular French medieval romances) in an article in the Bulletin du bibliophile, 1984, vol. 4 (pp. 525-530). Study of the typeface permitted the attribution to Antoine Caillaut, whose press was active from 1482 to 1506, producing a variety of works, principally short and undated tracts; these include no other editions of Villon. Caillaut used his bastarda type 111 as early as 1486 for part of a French edition of Livy, printed by him but published under the imprint of Jean Du Pr (Goff L-250). The fount appears to have passed to the Angoulme printers Petrus Alanus and Andreas Calvinus at some time before May 1491, when it is found in their edition of Auctores octo, dated 17 May 1491 (GW 2778; cf. Paul Needham in the Hellinga Festschrift, Amsterdam 1980), thus establishing a terminus ante quem for this edition.
Taken page by page, the text of the Caillaut Villon follows that of the edition printed anonymously by Denis Meslier ca. 1490-91 (CIBN V-180). Both editions contain the same textual variants as compared to Pierre Levet's original 1489 edition, but their line-by-line composition differs. Caillaut's text is characterized by a greater use of contractions and is on the whole a more careless piece of printing. Although in his short article Torchet does not tackle the difficult question of the chronology of the 10 (including the present) known incunable editions of Villon, his analysis shows that the Caillaut edition probably followed Meslier's. While it has never been doubted that Villon continued to enjoy great popularity at the end of the 15th century, the discovery of a "new" incunable edition of the original pote maudit, the early editions of whose works were read to shreds and consequently survive in one or two copies each, was a significant event in French literary bibliography. Christie's discovery of a worn fragment of this recent addition to the Villon incunable corpus, preserved as binding material 15 or 20 years after its printing in a volume of extremely rare popular medical handbooks bound for a contemporary physician, is a reminder of the precariousness and inevitably fragmentary nature of our knowledge of early French vernacular printing.
CONTENTS OF THE VOLUME:
1) Trait des eaux artificielles avec leurs vertus et proprits. [Paris: Jean Trepperel, ca. 1492/1493].
4o. Collation: a-b8 c6 d8 e6 (a1r title with device, a1v woodcut, a2r incipit: Cy commence ung petit traitte des eaues artificielles et les vertus et proprietes dicelles proufitans aux corps humains, e5v Deo gratias, e6 ?colophon or device?). 31 leaves (of 36, lacking a1, b1.8, b2, and e6). 30 lines. Type: 3:99B (first state). Initial spaces, rubricated in red. Title-leaf to the third work in the volume (see below) misbound before a2. (Soiling and staining, a8 and b7 detached).
Second Paris edition, unique or possibly one of two known copies, of this popular handbook of medicinal and herbal remedies, intended for the use of lay readers as well as apothecaries and medical practitioners. The tract referred to in the title was composed, or translated from a Latin text, in the 14th century, probably soon after 1360: it is dedicated to a "comtesse de Boulogne... jadis reine de France", identified by Claude Dalbanne ("Trois ditions lyonnaises du Trait des eaux artificielles", Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 1932) with Jeanne, comtesse d'Auvergne et de Boulogne (1326-1360), queen of Jean II le Bon. Many manuscript copies of the text survive, most apparently transcribed by apothecaries who tended to add their own observations and extracts from other treatises. Thus the printed editions--each of which presents its own textual variants--contain, besides the Trait proper, a compilation of other texts on the same subject, most arranged loosely by plant or principal ingredient.
The Trepperel edition is the second known Parisian edition of the text; all but one (Vienne: Peter Schenck, ca. 1484) of the six other recorded fifteenth-century editions were printed in Lyons; of these GW 9164, by Guillaume Le Roy, is known only from its mention by Du Verdier in 1585. The chronology of the editions as presented in GW is probably incorrect: the first Paris edition, by Antoine Caillaut (GW 9167), was based either on the lost Le Roy edition or on Peter Schenck's Vienne edition (GW 9165), and it precedes that of the Printer of the Champion des Dames = Jean Du Pr (GW 9166). Like the several later 16th-century Parisian editions, Trepperel's follows, with some minor variants, the [Le Roy?]--Schenck--Caillaut text. (An abridged and very different text was published in the mid-1490s by Michel Topi in Lyons [GW 9168].) This printed tradition of the text is highly corrupt: not only are many recipes repeated, but the text has been shown to include three variant versions of an original Trait des eaux, one of which attributes the work to "maistre Jehan Himbres" [fol. d4r]. (A detailed textual analysis of the principal early printed versions is found in Dalbanne's article.)
The only record of another possible copy of this edition is the imperfect Fairfax Murray copy, whose present location is unknown. However, Davies' description (no. 140), and following it the tentative description in GW (9169), differ in significant details from the present copy: quire c is described as containing 8 leaves, with the Fairfax Murray copy lacking c4 and c5, and the number of lines per page is given as 31 instead of 30. Undescribed by Davies, the typeface was postulated by GW as "8:114G". Mme. Denise Hillard of the Bibliothque nationale de France, who has studied the incunable editions of the Trait des eaux, believes that the typeface of the Fairfax Murray copy is more likely to be Trepperel's bastarda type 99, in its first state, in use in 1492 and 1493. (The type was recast soon after: it reappears ca. 1495 on a slightly larger face, measuring 102 or 103 mm.) Trepperel's device on a1r (lacking in this copy), as reproduced in the Fairfax Murray catalogue (p. 143), is also datable to 1492/1493. While the present copy is also printed in the first state of type B99, without direct comparison to the Fairfax Murray copy it is impossible to be sure that the two copies represent one edition, GW 9169, whose date should be corrected to ca. 1492/1493.
[Bound with:]
2) ARNOLDUS DE VILLA NOVA (ca. 1240-1311), attributed to. Le tresor des poures. Sleon [sic] maistre arnoult de ville noue Et maistre girard de sollo docteur en medicine de montpelier. Nouuellement imprime a Paris: [Jean Trepperel, before May 1506].
4o (192 x 133 mm). Collation: A8 B-X6 y-z6 6 6 aa4 bb-ee6 ff4. 180 leaves (of 184, lacking M1, dd1.6 and ff4 blank). Btarde type. Title woodcut of scholar at his lectern (105 x 75 mm). 5- and 6-line woodcut historiated and ornamental initials, a few spaces for initials, some with guide letters. Initials supplied in red, paragraph marks in red and yellow. (Lower corner of y1 torn away with loss to about 10 words, short internal tear to E1 affecting rubricated initial and a few letters on verso, a few marginal tears, occasional dampstaining.)
UNRECORDED EDITION of this anonymous French translation of the Breviarium practicae medicinae, traditionally attributed to the Catalan physician Arnoldus de Villa Nova. The woodcut initials, embellished with faces and grotesque figures, belong to Jean Trepperel's stock (cf. Jennings, Early woodcut initials, p. 227). The initial on B1r appears in a slightly later state in Trepperel's edition of Guillaume Tardif, Lart de faulconnerie, dated 8 May 1506 (incorrectly listed under 1509 in Moreau). The title cut also appears in Marigny, L'Aventurier rendu adangier [Paris: veuve de Jean Trepperel & J. Jehannot, ca. 1515] (Fairfax-Murray 670). Another unrecorded Trepperel edition of ca. 1505 is known, also from a single copy, preserved in a private collection.
Jean Trepperel I was active from 1492 until his death in 1511 or 1512. Much of Trepperel's largely vernacular output is undated or unsigned, and many of the editions attributed to him survive in only one or two copies. The preservation in the present volume of two such extremely rare editions is of considerable interest.
[Bound with:]
3) ALBERTUS MAGNUS (ca. 1200-1280), Pseudo-. Liber aggregationis seu liber secretorum... de virtutibus herbarum...lapidum...et animalium. -De mirabilibus mundi. Antwerp: Govaert de Bac, 1504.
4o. Collation: a-f8.4. 31 leaves (of 36, lacking a8 and f1-4). (a1 misbound at front of first work in the volume). Gothic type. Title woodcut of an author presenting his book to a prince and two courtiers, repeated on verso. (Traces of old adhesions to title-page, affecting a few letters of first line.) The text is a compilation of extracts from De mineralibus of Albertus Magnus and other sources. Nijhoff-Kronenberg 59.
Christie's is grateful to Ursula Baurmeister and Denise Hillard of the Bibliothque nationale de France and Claudine Sainlot of the Bibliothque municipale de Nantes for their bibliographical assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.
Chancery 4
Contents of the fragment: Le grant testament, fols. [1r-2v]: lines 713-808, containing stanzas LXX-LXXXI; fols. [3r-4v]: lines 902-994, containing the last 8 lines of the "Ballade que Villon feit a la requeste de sa mere pour prier Nostre Dame" (Marot's later attributed title), the following stanzas XC-XCIII, the "Ballade de Villon a s'amye", stanza XCIV and the following "Lay" in 2 verses, and the first 5 lines of stanza XCV (line and stanza numbers following the Longnon-Foulet edition, Paris 1969).
Binding: early 16th-century Flemish or Northeastern French blind-tooled calf over wooden boards, sides panelled with 7-fillet outer border and triple fillet inner border, inner panel of repeated lozenges composed of intersecting triple fillets, sewn on 3 pairs of double cords, alum-tawed endbands, single chased brass fore-edge hasp and catch (lacking clasp, a few scrapes and gouges and one or two old patch-repairs(?) to covers, board extremities rubbed with loss to leather at corners, lower portion of spine defective, cords exposed at head and tail, pastedowns [including Villon fragment] detached at an early date).
Paper: Watermark: blessing hand with scallopped sleeve, with 7 scallops: close to Briquet 11493, Limoges 1454.
Provenance: Sebastian ?Truge, doctor of medicine from Cambrai (16th-century inscription on front pastedown, one or two marginal notes in first work); illegible signature with date 1678 (inscription on front pastedown); childishly formed letters on title and last page, a few "nota bene" marginalia and underlinings in first work, including effaced inscription on e4v).
FRAGMENT OF AN UNTIL RECENTLY UNRECORDED INCUNABLE EDITION OF VILLON. A single imperfect copy, lacking leaves a1, f8 and all of quire h, is preserved at the Bibliothque municipale de Nantes, where it was brought to light in the early 1980s by Louis Torchet in the course of his compilation of the Pays de Loire volume of the Catalogues rgionaux des incunables des bibliothques publiques de France. Torchet briefly described the Nantes copy (which is bound with two Paris imprints of the early 1490s, both popular French medieval romances) in an article in the Bulletin du bibliophile, 1984, vol. 4 (pp. 525-530). Study of the typeface permitted the attribution to Antoine Caillaut, whose press was active from 1482 to 1506, producing a variety of works, principally short and undated tracts; these include no other editions of Villon. Caillaut used his bastarda type 111 as early as 1486 for part of a French edition of Livy, printed by him but published under the imprint of Jean Du Pr (Goff L-250). The fount appears to have passed to the Angoulme printers Petrus Alanus and Andreas Calvinus at some time before May 1491, when it is found in their edition of Auctores octo, dated 17 May 1491 (GW 2778; cf. Paul Needham in the Hellinga Festschrift, Amsterdam 1980), thus establishing a terminus ante quem for this edition.
Taken page by page, the text of the Caillaut Villon follows that of the edition printed anonymously by Denis Meslier ca. 1490-91 (CIBN V-180). Both editions contain the same textual variants as compared to Pierre Levet's original 1489 edition, but their line-by-line composition differs. Caillaut's text is characterized by a greater use of contractions and is on the whole a more careless piece of printing. Although in his short article Torchet does not tackle the difficult question of the chronology of the 10 (including the present) known incunable editions of Villon, his analysis shows that the Caillaut edition probably followed Meslier's. While it has never been doubted that Villon continued to enjoy great popularity at the end of the 15th century, the discovery of a "new" incunable edition of the original pote maudit, the early editions of whose works were read to shreds and consequently survive in one or two copies each, was a significant event in French literary bibliography. Christie's discovery of a worn fragment of this recent addition to the Villon incunable corpus, preserved as binding material 15 or 20 years after its printing in a volume of extremely rare popular medical handbooks bound for a contemporary physician, is a reminder of the precariousness and inevitably fragmentary nature of our knowledge of early French vernacular printing.
CONTENTS OF THE VOLUME:
1) Trait des eaux artificielles avec leurs vertus et proprits. [Paris: Jean Trepperel, ca. 1492/1493].
4
Second Paris edition, unique or possibly one of two known copies, of this popular handbook of medicinal and herbal remedies, intended for the use of lay readers as well as apothecaries and medical practitioners. The tract referred to in the title was composed, or translated from a Latin text, in the 14th century, probably soon after 1360: it is dedicated to a "comtesse de Boulogne... jadis reine de France", identified by Claude Dalbanne ("Trois ditions lyonnaises du Trait des eaux artificielles", Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 1932) with Jeanne, comtesse d'Auvergne et de Boulogne (1326-1360), queen of Jean II le Bon. Many manuscript copies of the text survive, most apparently transcribed by apothecaries who tended to add their own observations and extracts from other treatises. Thus the printed editions--each of which presents its own textual variants--contain, besides the Trait proper, a compilation of other texts on the same subject, most arranged loosely by plant or principal ingredient.
The Trepperel edition is the second known Parisian edition of the text; all but one (Vienne: Peter Schenck, ca. 1484) of the six other recorded fifteenth-century editions were printed in Lyons; of these GW 9164, by Guillaume Le Roy, is known only from its mention by Du Verdier in 1585. The chronology of the editions as presented in GW is probably incorrect: the first Paris edition, by Antoine Caillaut (GW 9167), was based either on the lost Le Roy edition or on Peter Schenck's Vienne edition (GW 9165), and it precedes that of the Printer of the Champion des Dames = Jean Du Pr (GW 9166). Like the several later 16th-century Parisian editions, Trepperel's follows, with some minor variants, the [Le Roy?]--Schenck--Caillaut text. (An abridged and very different text was published in the mid-1490s by Michel Topi in Lyons [GW 9168].) This printed tradition of the text is highly corrupt: not only are many recipes repeated, but the text has been shown to include three variant versions of an original Trait des eaux, one of which attributes the work to "maistre Jehan Himbres" [fol. d4r]. (A detailed textual analysis of the principal early printed versions is found in Dalbanne's article.)
The only record of another possible copy of this edition is the imperfect Fairfax Murray copy, whose present location is unknown. However, Davies' description (no. 140), and following it the tentative description in GW (9169), differ in significant details from the present copy: quire c is described as containing 8 leaves, with the Fairfax Murray copy lacking c4 and c5, and the number of lines per page is given as 31 instead of 30. Undescribed by Davies, the typeface was postulated by GW as "8:114G". Mme. Denise Hillard of the Bibliothque nationale de France, who has studied the incunable editions of the Trait des eaux, believes that the typeface of the Fairfax Murray copy is more likely to be Trepperel's bastarda type 99, in its first state, in use in 1492 and 1493. (The type was recast soon after: it reappears ca. 1495 on a slightly larger face, measuring 102 or 103 mm.) Trepperel's device on a1r (lacking in this copy), as reproduced in the Fairfax Murray catalogue (p. 143), is also datable to 1492/1493. While the present copy is also printed in the first state of type B99, without direct comparison to the Fairfax Murray copy it is impossible to be sure that the two copies represent one edition, GW 9169, whose date should be corrected to ca. 1492/1493.
[Bound with:]
2) ARNOLDUS DE VILLA NOVA (ca. 1240-1311), attributed to. Le tresor des poures. Sleon [sic] maistre arnoult de ville noue Et maistre girard de sollo docteur en medicine de montpelier. Nouuellement imprime a Paris: [Jean Trepperel, before May 1506].
4
UNRECORDED EDITION of this anonymous French translation of the Breviarium practicae medicinae, traditionally attributed to the Catalan physician Arnoldus de Villa Nova. The woodcut initials, embellished with faces and grotesque figures, belong to Jean Trepperel's stock (cf. Jennings, Early woodcut initials, p. 227). The initial on B1r appears in a slightly later state in Trepperel's edition of Guillaume Tardif, Lart de faulconnerie, dated 8 May 1506 (incorrectly listed under 1509 in Moreau). The title cut also appears in Marigny, L'Aventurier rendu adangier [Paris: veuve de Jean Trepperel & J. Jehannot, ca. 1515] (Fairfax-Murray 670). Another unrecorded Trepperel edition of ca. 1505 is known, also from a single copy, preserved in a private collection.
Jean Trepperel I was active from 1492 until his death in 1511 or 1512. Much of Trepperel's largely vernacular output is undated or unsigned, and many of the editions attributed to him survive in only one or two copies. The preservation in the present volume of two such extremely rare editions is of considerable interest.
[Bound with:]
3) ALBERTUS MAGNUS (ca. 1200-1280), Pseudo-. Liber aggregationis seu liber secretorum... de virtutibus herbarum...lapidum...et animalium. -De mirabilibus mundi. Antwerp: Govaert de Bac, 1504.
4
Christie's is grateful to Ursula Baurmeister and Denise Hillard of the Bibliothque nationale de France and Claudine Sainlot of the Bibliothque municipale de Nantes for their bibliographical assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.
Sale room notice
The third work in the Sammelband, pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Liber aggregationis, is not lacking leaf a8. The correct leaf count is therefore 32 (of 36) leaves.