MDCLXXXXI (1691), Bruxelles.
2 parts bound in four volumes. I/ (12) leaves, 230 pages, II/ pages 231 to 488, (6) leaves, III/ (1) leaf, pages 489 to 696, IV/ pages 697 to 946, (4) leaves. Titles with woodcut globe device, title of volume one in red and black, third volume with burn-hole in one leaf causing loss of a few words, bookplate of the College of Saint Augustine in Canterbury.
In a contemporary binding of red turkey, by Queen’s Binder A (William Nott?), the covers tooled with an elaborate design made of strapwork, curved tools, spine, flowers, etc., within gilt ruled and dotted borders, gilt paneled spines decorated with corner tools so as to leave an unadorned diagonal stripe in a zig-zag.
Binding dimensions: 127 x 70 mm.
Although slightly later than the usual accepted dates for the work of Queen’s Binder A (William Nott?), whose main output dates from the 1670s and 1680s, it seems almost certain that these volumes came from his bindery. They bear a close affinity to two bindings illustrated in the “fine” binding section of Howard Nixon’s Catalogue of Bindings in the Pepys Library, nos 43a and 43b, and a very similar tool can be seen on a binding featured in Maggs Bros. Catalogue 1212, Bookbinding in the British Isles, item no. 54.
The Rabelaisian miracle. “Let’s talk about it, in the manner of the ‘Greek miracle’, a meeting between logic and art. ‘Miracles’ are easier to explain than the banal and the everyday. The Rabelaisian miracle comes from the unique encounter between laughter and knowledge. In this sense, it fulfills, even surpassing, a great medieval dream: the Gay Science, the junction between the North and the Mediterranean. The Gay Science results from the fact that at that moment, popular life in its new and intact freshness presents to the man of genius the figures which he can (only he) seize to say what he can and must (only he) say.” “We have presented Rabelais as a great thinker, as a philosopher. And what else did he want to say in his famous prologue, with the praise of Sacrale? What does this solemn warning mean: ‘To interpret in a higher sense what you might think is said in gaiety of heart’? The initiation to Pantagruelism goes from laughter to wisdom without one erasing the other. It covers the interval between Gaulish humor and science: a totality. What was he then? A bad monk, an anti-clerical priest, a wandering doctor? These are the superficial aspects of his biography! A bon vivant? a popular storyteller? a royal publicist? a primitive, a mage, and a mystic? an encyclopedist? Yes, all that, which exegetes, commentators, historians, biographers, scholars have shared. And something more, which belongs to him alone: his unique quality. How to see his work? A magnificent palace with corners filled with rubbish, as Anatole France said somewhere? a village inn, where one drinks small white wine in cheerful company? a landscape of vineyards, fields, and meadows? or a mysterious mountain with ruined pagan temples, medieval castles, bold modern buildings with chasms and peaks lost in the clouds? Yes. And something else unique that belongs to him alone and that we would define once again by the junction between the joy of living and lucidity. We would like here to have the space to speak at length about the cathartic by laughter and by the word, as well as Rabelaisian purity. The darkest flesh was illuminated and purified, once, in a miraculous encounter, by the Word. And the Word truly became joyful flesh. But these are things that are felt better than they are said.” (Henri Lefebvre).
Extremely rare Rabelais bound at the time in the famous workshop of “Queen’s Binder A“.
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