De l’hevr et malhevr de mariage: Ensemble les loix connubiales de Plutarque traduictes en François. Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1602.
16mo (112 x 77 mm). 221, [2], [1 blank] pages. Shoulder notes. Woodcut title vignette, woodcut initials, typographic headpieces. (Occasional minor foxing, a couple of small stains, a few headlines shaved.) Late 18th-century acid-mottled reddish-brown calf, covers panelled with thick and thin triple fillet, smooth spine gilt-paneled in compartments, red-speckled edges, marbled endpapers. Provenance: Alexandre Jean Mignot, abbot of Sellières (from 1755 to 1791) and royal councilor, engraved bookplate.***
A popular treatise on marriage, its contradictions, pleasures, miseries, religious justification for and social functions, containing much colorful anthropological information, by a Norman gentleman philosopher.
Dedicated to his neighbor in Le Perche, Anne Brisart, dame de la Bretonnière, the treatise breaks no new ground but is filled with classical anecdotes and dry reflections on the human condition, written in an unaffected prose prefiguring Montaigne. Arguments for and against marriage, examples of great conjugal friendship, exotic and ancient wedding ceremonies and marital customs (including Strabo’s account of the hideous “droit de cuissage” allegedly practiced among Arab nations), permissible degrees of consanguinity, how to choose a wife, female character types, duties of a husband, monogamy amongst animals, unhappy marriages occasioned by bad children or rebellious wives, the perils of jealousy, the ubiquity of the sex drive even among the chaste, syphilis and theories of its origins, are among the many topics covered with verve and exactitude.
Unlike many contemporary writers who weighed in on the "Querelle des femmes," the author displays little antipathy toward his subject. In his preface to the reader, dated from 1569 and possibly first appearing in the Rouen edition of that year, Marconville explains that his long silence was caused not by his newly wedded state but was instead the fault of the bloody state of France. A peace-loving Catholic, he curses the perpetrators of violence. In the context of civil war, marriage appears as a necessary regulator of human urges and holds a promise of peace. He views adultery as the greatest threat to this domestic peace, and devotes several chapters to accounts of the punishments, societal and divine, awaiting transgressors of the marriage vows. The book concludes with Marconville's translation of Plutarch's 49 Conjugalia Praecepta. The author's credentials are affirmed in a prefatory sonnet by François Gruget, a page of unsigned Latin epigrams, and (at the end) an elegant address to the reader by the cosmographer André Thevet, who praises his friend for his tireless services in the pursuit of knowledge.
Gruget’s brother Claude had published a French translation of Pedro Mexia’s Silva de varia lección in 1552. Marconville silently borrowed a few passages from that translation (Les Diverses leçons... ), but he used them for an entirely different purpose, using the male and female exempla which for Mexia were simply interesting anecdotes of human diversity, to argue in favor of “monogamous Christian marriage” (L. Warner, The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law [2016], pp. 148-151).
Like his essay on the "goodness and badness of women" (Traité sur la bonté et mauvaiseté des femmes), Marconville's thoughts on marriage first appeared in 1564, and were deservedly popular. At least 20 editions appeared from 1564 to 1647, according to USTC, which records four earlier Lyonese editions (from 1573), all from the Rigaud press. USTC (6900239) calls this a “lost book,” but I have had another copy (now at the Robbins Collection, UC Berkeley). Cf. Gay-Lemonnyer II: 470.
Item #4481
Price: $3,000.00
Status: On Hold