A Bespoke Scribal Emblem Book for a Courtly Lady, 1628
This gorgeous pocket-sized manuscript contains short, textual emblems on virtue with two exquisitely hand-colored illustrations in striking tones of red, blue, and green, all bound in a lavishly decorated gilt-tooled binding with green-silk ties, totally befitting a young courtly lady.
This manuscript, titled “Declarations de certaine anagramms & emblems,” was a gift in a fine, bespoke octavo vellum binding with gilt fleurs-de-lis and large original green-silk ties, dedicated to the “vertueuse et prudente damoiselle Susanne de Verité.” The dedicatee was possibly of the gentry Picardy Verité family, whose solar armorial is reflected in each of the two original emblems rendered on specially painted parchment pages in this manuscript. Unique and apparently un- published, Susanne de Verité’s self-professed servant—possibly her private tutor—Pierre Bourgeois, presented to this young unmarried woman the essential concepts necessary for devising complex emblems, a tradition spearheaded by Andrea Alciato in the mid-sixteenth century.
The author’s central theme seems to have been the importance of learning how to signify particular virtues that the composer might better understand and aspire to attaining through her creative contemplation and complex rendering of them in visual and literary forms. Perhaps to encourage his young dedicatee in this creative enterprise, Bourgeois had dozens of blank pages bound in at the end of this luxurious duodecimo vade mecum. Alas, all have remained blank; not one of them records evidence of the young girl’s application and diligence or emblems of her own invention.
The didactic manuscript text began with meaningful anagrams composed from rearrangements of the fifteen letters of Susanne de Verité’s full name (“N’est dure, en la vie,” “En vertú sans idée”). Bourgeois then depicted common symbols of virtues, such as the olive branch (l’olivier) as a symbol of peace, before proceeding to more complex classical literary analogues such as the golden bough (la branche d’or) described in Virgil’s Aeneid (6.98–6.636). Bourgeois recounted the Cumaean sibyl Deiphobe’s instruction to Aeneas to gather the bough for his journey to Hades, which he found with the aid of two doves sent by his mother Venus for presentation as a gift (much like this 1628 presentation gift book) to Pluto’s queen, Proserpina, at the gloomy walls of Dis.
From these foundations, Bourgeois then led his young reader into an imaginative hortus con- clusus, an enclosed garden of the virtues filled with “divers parquets de fleurs, et bien garni d’herbs odorants,” including roses and hyacinths symbolic of various natural and incorruptible virtues. His anagram of Susanne’s name, “En vertú sans idée,” places his patroness in the very middle of that garden, surrounded by conventional symbols of the four cardinal virtues—Fortitude (column), Justice (scales), Prudence (serpent), and Temperance (woman pouring water between ewers). Susanne herself is dressed as Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, holding in her right hand the symbolic light of the Verité family’s armorial sun, whose rays shine down and nourish the garden below.
This charming, petite, and extremely fine volume was formerly part of the vast early manuscript collection of the quintessential nineteenth-century bibliomane Sir Thomas Phillipps. This is clearly indicated by the collector’s telltale “Sir T.P.” Middle Hill book stamp with an English lion rampant permanently inked on one of the blank verso parchment pages bearing Bourgeois’s exemplary full-page emblems. This particular Phillipps manuscript was apparently purchased early on in his collecting career at the February 1824 auction of the library of the celebrated Parisian bookman Charles Chardin. In Chardin’s sale, Phillipps acquired multiple volumes through his London agents, Priestley and Weale, including several important early manuscripts from the great Bavarian library of the Augustinian canons at Rebdorf, which had been formerly dispersed after its secularization.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Tamara Gogelin, “Early Modern Emblems Books as Memorial Sites,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 69:1 (Autumn 2007): 43–70; John Manning, The Emblem (Reaktion Books, 2002), esp. 27–36; Alison Saunders, “French Emblem Books or European Emblem Books: Transnational Publishing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 61:2 (1999): 415–27
