[DUPIN, Jean]

The Virtuous Field of Good Life called Mandevie Paris, Michel Le Noir, [ca. 1505] A RARE EXAMPLE OF A FRENCH GOTHIC, IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BINDING WITH LONG TITRAISON In-4 (180 x 123mm). Initials engraved on wood COLLATION : A-C6 D4 E-X6 y-z6 &6 ILLUSTRATION : a large woodcut on the title page ANNOTATIONS : some old notes on the title page Eighteenth century binding. Red morocco, gilt decoration, triple fillet in frame, long spine decorated with grotesque vertical titling, gilt edges Upper margin a little short Only three copies of this work are recorded in public institutions, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (RES-Y2-761), in the Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles (Goujet in-4 5) and in the British Library (85e18). The catalog of the library of the Duc de La Vallière (Paris, 1783, n° 2770) mentions a copy - "in 4. goth. m.r." -, without further description. -, without any other description. One can imagine, given the refinement of the binding of this one, that it is indeed the La Vallière copy. Jean Dupin, born in Bourbonnais in 1302, was a monk in the abbey of Vaucelles, a Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Cambrai. He imagines, in Le Champ vertueux de bonne vie, that a knight named Mandevie presents to him, in a dream, the different states of society: the pope, the kings, the cardinals, the bishops, the merchants and the craftsmen. The clergy is not spared, in this satire written a century before Rabelais, by a monk belonging to an abbey whose first stone had been laid by Bernard de Clairvaux. BIBLIOGRAPHY: USTC no. 47466 -- Brunet, II, 891 -- Bechtel, D-427: gives a different description than our copy