Histoire de Pierre de Provence, et de la belle Maguelonne.

8vo (167x100 mm.). 46, [2] pp. Collation: A-C⁸. With woodcut title vignette and three woodcut illustrations in the text. At p. [47] the “Extrait de la permission”, dated 1738. Modern wrappers. Little hole on p. 29, ll. occasional foxed and browned but all in all a good and genuine copy.

Rare and interesting popular edition of the Histoire de Pierre de Provence, a novel that narrates the adventures and loves of Pierre de Provence, son of the Count of Provence, and Maguelonne, a Neapolitan princess. The Histoire is a French novel bestseller circulating throughout Europe from the 15^th century, also translated into modern Greek. Pierre de Provence is one of the many classical medieval chivalric texts republished in Troyes and Rouen by the publishers of the “Bibliothèque bleue”. These editions were characterised by their material aspects: the poor quality of the paper, of the illustrations and of the composition of the texts themselves. The ‘Bibliothèque bleue' was a publishing formula used to reprint classical works on a large scale and at low cost, which means that the majority of copies were not well preserved (or not at all). A comparative study of the various editions of Pierre de Provence shows that the text has undergone numerous modifications: the first editions were more similar to the first version of the writing appeared at the end of the 1400s, and were printed in Gothic script, with different coloured inks, specially designed woodcut initials and on a good quality paper. From the 16^th century onwards, the quality of the editions deteriorated, and the text was altered with modernisations, misreadings, omissions of verses, events and chapters. The most striking example is the edition published in 1700 by the Rouen publisher Jacques Besongne, who, to reduce publication costs, reduced the original four folios of the novel, corresponding to 64 pp., to three folios, 48 pp. In order to do this, he removed four whole chapters and some parts of other chapters. Thus, the process of reprinting creates different traditions and plots of the work even very different from the original novel. It should be noted, however, that these revisions and abridgements, as well as the low quality of the editions themselves, were due to the publishers' desire to produce works that could be widely distributed and at a lower cost of the printing, making some of the literary classics more accessible to people and not just to the privileged families. Our edition, printed in Troyes in 1738, is one of these popular editions and, given its 48 pp., is probably derived from the edition published by Besongne in 1700.

OCLC, 929830239; Romina Luzi, Reading the late byzantine romance a handbook, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 101-124; Helwi Blom, Pierre de Provence et la réception des romans de chevalerie médiévaux dans la France du XVII^e siècle, Cahiers de Recherches Medievals 2, 1996, pp. 51-60. 

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