MEMORABLE EMBASSIES TO JAPAN
[MONTANUS, Arnoldus.]
Ambassades mémorables de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales des Provinces Unies, vers les empereurs du Japon. Contenant plusieurs choses remarquables arrivées pendant le voyage des Ambassadeurs … Le tout enrichi de figures dessinées sur les lieux, et tiré des mémoires des ambassadeurs de la Compagnie.
Amsterdam, Jacob van Meurs, 1680.
Two parts in one vol., folio, pp. [6], 227, [9], 146, [6]; with additional engraved title, folding map, 25 double-page and folding plates, and numerous engravings within the text; title in red and black, engraved initials, head- and tailpieces; small worm track to inner margins pp. 59–82, closed marginal tears to pp. 207/8 and 219/20 (repaired), repairs to tears along folds of plate facing part II p. 130, some browning, a few light marks; a good copy in recent red morocco, spine and covers gilt to style, gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers.
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Ambassades mémorables de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales des Provinces Unies, vers les empereurs du Japon. Contenant plusieurs choses remarquables arrivées pendant le voyage des Ambassadeurs … Le tout enrichi de figures dessinées sur les lieux, et tiré des mémoires des ambassadeurs de la Compagnie.
First edition in French of an important and influential study of Japan by the Dutch theologian and historian Arnoldus Montanus, based on eyewitness accounts from two Dutch East India Company (VOC) missions to Japan in 1649 and 1661.
Although Montanus never left Europe, his publications contributed greatly to the growing European understanding of non-European cultures, then being advanced by the twin forces of trade and the missions. This, his major study of Japan, was first published as Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen der Oost-Indische Maetschappy in’t Vereenigde Nederland, aen de Kaisaren van Japan in 1669, and was based on journals, reports, and information which Montanus procured from employees of the VOC. The work was quickly translated into English (as Atlas Japannensis) and German (both 1670) and, as here, into French, and remained the standard reference work on Japan until the publication of Engelbert Kaempfer’s posthumous History of Japan in 1727. Unsurprisingly Kaempfer himself, a German by birth who joined the embassies of the Dutch, had a copy of Montanus’s important work in his library. Like the Dutch original, this French translation was published by Jacob van Meurs, a noted Dutch publisher and engraver who specialised in heavily illustrated large folio works, particularly within the fields of geography and travel. As a result, this edition retains the impressive plates and illustrations of the Dutch original.
Cordier, Japonica 385; Landwehr VOC 525.
