The Fourth Recorded Copy of Gibert de Montreuil’s Medieval Romance in a Superb Bauzonnet-Trautz Binding

[Gibert de Montreuil]. Lhistoire de tres-noble [et] cheualereux pri[n]ce Gerad co[m]te de neuers [et] de rethel [et] de la vertueuse et tres chaste pri[n]cesse euriant de sauoye sa mye. Paris, Hémon le Feure, 1520.

The earliest known edition of the medieval romance Gerard de Nevers, printed in Paris in 1520 and surviving in only four recorded copies. This exceptionally rare volume, the very copy cited by Brunet, is preserved in a magnificent nineteenth-century jansenist binding by Bauzonnet-Trautz and boasts one of the great provenances in French bibliophily: Giraud, Solar, Firmin-Didot, Gougy, Cortlandt Bishop, and Edmée Maus.

Edition & Bibliographic Information

a–s4-8 t4 = 112 leaves.

With printer’s device on title, 11 woodcut illustrations (including one repeat), 51 floral initials on black ground, and 4 grotesque initials, all in woodcut. Small quarto (186 × 127 mm).

This edition represents the earliest known printing of Gerard de Nevers, derived from the anonymous fifteenth-century prose adaptation of Gibert de Montreuil’s early thirteenth-century verse romance Roman de la Violette. Only two medieval manuscripts of the original verse text survive, and only two manuscripts of the later prose adaptation are known.

The edition was probably printed by Gilles Couteau for Hémon le Feure and was already regarded by nineteenth-century bibliographers as extraordinarily rare and difficult to obtain. Brunet cited only the present copy. Moreau knew merely three surviving examples.

Physical Description & Binding

Nineteenth-century wine-red morocco binding à la janséniste by Bauzonnet-Trautz over four raised bands decorated with blind fillets. Spine compartments framed with triple blind fillets and gilt lettering in the second and third compartments. Covers with triple blind fillet borders; board edges with double gilt fillets.

Particularly magnificent are the dark blue morocco doublures divided into eleven gilt compartments and richly decorated with delicate floral and pointillé ornament. Additional marbled endleaves and entirely gilt edges over marbling throughout. The doublure signed:

“Bauzonnet-Trautz”

a form of signature used only between approximately 1840 and 1851.

Several leaves expertly and almost invisibly remargined during a mid-nineteenth-century bibliophilic restoration. The result is a remarkable example of historicist French restoration culture, where textual rarity and luxurious rebinding combined to create an idealized Renaissance object for elite collectors.

Gibert de Montreuil and the Medieval Romance Tradition

Written around 1227–1229, Gibert de Montreuil’s Roman de la Violette belongs among the most charming and influential French romances of the High Middle Ages. The story centres on Gerard de Nevers and the virtuous Euriant of Savoy, whose fidelity is falsely questioned after the discovery of a violet-shaped birthmark becomes the basis of a wager. After trials involving giants, enchantment, adventure, and accusations of infidelity, the lovers are finally reunited.

The romance achieved enormous later influence. Its narrative echoes appear in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and ultimately Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe.

The eleven woodcuts of the present edition are executed in a bold and direct outline style characteristic of early sixteenth-century Parisian vernacular printing. Most striking is the large introductory woodcut, showing the author seated at his lectern surrounded by books beneath an angel unfurling a blank scroll. The image was originally adapted from a 1485 Danse Macabre.

Giraud, Bauzonnet-Trautz, and the Great Age of French Bibliophily

The modern bibliophilic history of the volume is equally extraordinary.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the book entered the library of Charles-Joseph-Barthélemy Giraud (1802–1881), jurist, medievalist, deputy director of the Académie française, and briefly Minister of Public Instruction during the Second Republic. Giraud was particularly devoted to romances of chivalry, rare editions, and magnificent bindings — qualities perfectly united in the present volume.

For Giraud, the book was transformed through an ambitious programme of restoration and rebinding into a supreme object of French bibliophilic taste. Once elevated into this highest sphere of collecting, it never left it again.

Its subsequent owners included Félix Solar, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Lucien Gougy, Cortlandt F. Bishop, and the Swiss collector Edmée Maus, whose library was later catalogued by Paul Jammes.

Provenance

Charles-Joseph-Barthélemy Giraud (1802–1881), his sale Paris 1855, lot 1903.
Félix Solar (1815–1871), Paris sale 1860, lot 1887.
Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1790–1876), Paris sale 1878, lot 595.
Lucien Gougy (1863–1931), Paris sale 1934, lot 123.
Cortlandt F. Bishop (1870–1935), New York sale 1948, lot 131.
Exhibited in Dix Siècles de Livres Français, Lucerne, 1949, no. 87.
Edmée Maus (1905–1971).

Literature

Not in Adams; Bechtel G-64; cf. BM STC French (only the 1526 edition); Brunet II, 1546; De Bure, Belles-Lettres II, 159, no. 3843; Ebert 8356; Graesse III, 56; Lonchamp, Français II, 180; Moreau 1520, 2340; Rahir 440.

For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 74:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II