The Sea of Chronicles
GAGUIN, Robert.
La mer des croniques et mirouer hystorial de France jadis compose en latin … et nouvellement traduict de latin en vulgaire francoye et hystorie par chascun livre le quel traicte la source & origine des francoys et les faitz belliqueux de tous les Roys de france … Paris, [Bernard Aubry for] Jacques Nyverd, to be sold by Galiot du Pré, [(colophon:) 23 August 1530].
Folio, ff. [x], CCXXVIII; bifolium O1.6 misbound around quire D; lettres bâtardes, title printed in red and black within a woodcut border incorporating Aubry device, woodcut initials, full-page woodcut illustration to a5v, 16 other woodcuts (some repeated), genealogical charts on m5r and q5r containing three roundel woodcut portraits, woodcut Nyverd device to final verso; carefully washed, some light stains to a2r, else an excellent copy; twentieth-century burgundy morocco by Marcel Godillot (front turn-in signed in gilt), spine lettered directly in gilt, edges gilt, marbled endpapers.
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La mer des croniques et mirouer hystorial de France jadis compose en latin … et nouvellement traduict de latin en vulgaire francoye et hystorie par chascun livre le quel traicte la source & origine des francoys et les faitz belliqueux de tous les Roys de france …
Very rare Paris vernacular edition (first 1518) of an illustrated history of the French monarchy, a seminal work of French historiography, devised as a scholarly account of France in the style of the classical historians.
Gaguin (1433–1501) was general of the Trinitarian Order and a diplomat in the service of Louis XI and Charles VIII; his chronological history of the French kings, from the origins of the French state under Clovis, was first published in Latin as Compendium de origine et gestis Francorum in late 1495, just as Charles VIII began his military campaign in Italy. Gaguin added the text about Louis XII before his death, then his work was translated into French by Nicolas de La Chesnaye, and continued up to the reign of François I by Pierre Desray. Editions in French began to appear in 1518.
The text is weighted towards the Hundred Years’ War and the Italian Wars, as befitting the original author’s personal knowledge, and proved to be a significant source for these events for both historians and novelists. One later episode mentioned by Desray involved ‘sept hommes saulvagues’ from a new land, named as Oran in Algeria but in fact North America; the source used by Desray talks of Oran and the seven men separately, which Desray has conflated. The title as it appears here was first used in 1518, though the text was also adapted for the book entitled Les grands chroniques (Bechtel G-1).
This seems to be an unrecorded issue with Galiot du Pré’s name in the imprint; other booksellers involved in the edition were Jean Frellon, Ambroise Girault, François Regnault, and Gilles de Gourmont. There was also a 1530 edition by Philippe le Noir, though with changes to the text.
We have located only two copies of any issue in the US (Harvard and Pennsylvania) and two in the UK (NLW, Rylands).
Bechtel G-13; BP16 106299; USTC 41702 (with only Nyverd named in the imprint); cf. Fairfax Murray, French 184 (1518 edition); not in Mortimer, Harvard French (372 is the 4-volume Mer des hystoires of 1517–1518). See Masse, ‘Newness and discovery in early-modern France’ in The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700 (2011), p. 177.