RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION FOR THE GRAND DAUPHIN
GOBINET, Charles.
Instruction sur la vérité du Saint Sacrement, contenant en abregé les principaux motifs de la créance Catholique sur le Saint Sacrement de l’Eucharistie ...
Paris, François le Cointe, 1677.
12mo, pp. [16], 338, [2]; initials and headpieces, text within frame ruled in red; small losses to upper corners of pp. 301-4 (not touching text), occasional light spotting and light marginal dampstaining, last few leaves toned; a very good copy in contemporary red morocco à la Du Seuil, triple gilt fillet border and frame to covers with fleurs-de-lis to corners, spine in compartments lettered and decorated in gilt, gilt board-edges and turn-ins, edges gilt, marbled endpapers; slight worming to rear pastedown; gilt stamp at foot of spine with crowned dolphin and fleur-de-lis (Olivier pl. 2522 fer 17, in reverse).
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Instruction sur la vérité du Saint Sacrement, contenant en abregé les principaux motifs de la créance Catholique sur le Saint Sacrement de l’Eucharistie ...
Scarce first edition thus, containing an explanation of the Eucharist and a defence of transubstantiation by the French writer and teacher Charles Gobinet (1613–1690), a lovely copy bearing a stamp found on bindings executed for Louis de France, the Grand Dauphin (1661–1711), eldest son of Louis XIV.
Appointed principal of the failing Collège du Plessis after it was placed under the control of the Sorbonne in 1646, Gobinet spent the next forty-three years of his life teaching and administrating at the college and writing educational treatises for his Catholic students. Some of the material in the present work first appeared in 1668 as part of Gobinet’s Instruction sur la pénitence et sur la Sainte Communion, the second part of his Instruction de la jeunesse (first published 1655). Alongside this partially revised material, Gobinet also took the opportunity to publish for the first time his ‘summary of the chief reasons for the Catholic belief in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist’.
Rigorously anti-Protestant in his tone, Gobinet uses scriptural, ecclesiastical, and patristic sources to argue that Christian belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist could be traced back to – and was therefore validated by – the very foundations of the Church; in the final chapters Gobinet also defended Catholics from popular long-standing Protestant accusations of idolatry based on their veneration of saints and belief in transubstantiation. The Instruction sur la vérité proved popular, going through several subsequent editions.
Provenance: of the attractive stamp at the foot of the spine – showing a crowned dolphin and fleur-de-lis side by side – Olivier writes: ‘Guigard … attributes to the Grand Dauphin volumes carrying stamp no. 17 on the spine … We consider that this stamp must originally have been struck on volumes destined for the Grand Dauphin, and that later it was often used simply as decoration on numerous bindings, in both morocco and calf’ (trans.).
No copies traced in the UK. OCLC records only one copy in the US, at Brown.
