Heures en Francoys & Latin a l'usaige de Romme, corrigées & augmentées de plusieurs Suffrages & Oraisons. Avec Figures nouvelles, appropriées chascune en son lieu.

Bookseller Notes

A very scarce edition of this richly illustrated mid-sixteenth-century book of hours (first published 1548). The text within ornate borders featuring grotesque, mythological and hooded figures, in addition to fifteen full-page woodcuts illustrating scenes from the New Testament, by the Huguenot artist and engraver Pierre 'Vase' Eskrich (c. 1518-90). Born Pierre Krug, Eskrich was known by various epithets which played on French iterations of his German name, Vase being the most common. This was the first collaboration between Lyonnais 'merchant publisher' Guillaume Rouill (c. 1518-89) and printer/bookseller Mac Bonhomme (fl. 1536-69). Rouill was a canny businessman; although he understood the mechanics of book production, having been apprenticed to a Venetian printer, he outsourced physical production to focus on content and distribution. He was driven by the conviction that 'a book should be correct, beautiful, ordered, and convenient' (Davis. p. 98), and understood that his readership comprised 'a lay audience of merchants, professionals, and their wives, of cultivated seigneurs and members of the court' who demanded a variety of texts both sacred and secular (ibid p. 90). He subsidised his sumptuous illustrated productions - such as the present and previous works - with a prolific output of legal and scientific textbooks (ibid p. 89).This copy with Dijon ownership: 'Berbisey', and 'M. Brocard' appear on the title (alongside: 'Cat. Ins[criptus] 1722'). The Berbisey-Brocard families were prominent in Dijon, linked by the marriage of Antoine Brocard (accountant of Dijon) and Marguerite Berbisey. OCLC lists just two copies of this edition, both in Paris (BnF and Bibliothque Mazarine).See: Natalie Z. Davis, 'Publisher Guillaume Rouill Businessman and Humanist' in R. J. Schoeck (ed.) Editing Sixteenth Century Texts: Papers given at the Editorial Conference University of Toronto October, 1965 (U Toronto Press, 1966) 72-112.