Overview

A popular eighteenth-century Troyes edition of one of the most influential illustrated books of the late Middle Ages, preserving the Danse Macabre within the celebrated Bibliothèque bleue, the inexpensive chapbook tradition that carried classic texts to a mass readership throughout France. With provenance form the Library of a noble German family. La Danse Macabre (French) originated as late-medieval allegories expressing the universal fragility of life, while criticizing the rich and potent. Evolving from Black Death tragedies and sermons, the earliest artistic examples took the form of elaborate murals in the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris. Similar paintings popped up across Europe, depicting personified Death leading a chain of people (from popes and kings to peasants and children) toward the grave. When the Paris murals began to decay, publisher Guyot Marchant copied the poetry and commissioned woodcut illustrations, publishing the first definitive printed version, La Danse Macabre in 1485. The motif became one of Europe's enduring visual and literary allegories, reminding readers that death levels every distinction of rank, profession, age, and sex. By the eighteenth century, the work had entered the world of the Bibliothèque bleue: the inexpensive, woodcut-illustrated books printed principally at Troyes and distributed by itinerant colporteurs from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. In this new setting, a late medieval moral allegory became household reading, devotional literature, and popular picture book at once, its illustrations surviving through generations of reused and recut woodblocks. The title page identifies Jean-Antoine Garnier, active as printer-bookseller at Troyes from 1766, while the privilege printed on p. 76 reproduces the royal privilege granted in 1728 to Pierre Garnier. This juxtaposition is entirely characteristic of the Bibliothèque bleue: privileges, woodcuts, and popular texts alike passed from one generation of the Garnier family to the next, and were routinely reprinted unchanged as editions continued to be issued throughout the eighteenth century. The privilege thus records the continuity of the Troyes press rather than the date of the present impression.