Andrew ( translator ). Aucassin and Nicolette.

by LANG

£300 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

LANG, Andrew ( translator ). Aucassin and Nicolette. London: David Nutt . 1887. 8vo. Contemporary red crushed morocco by Riviere Son (ticket to front free endpaper) with publisher’s illustrated wrappers printed in red and black bound at end, spine lettered directly in gilt, raised bands, turn-ins richly roll-tooled in gilt, top-edge gilt, other edges uncut; pp. [4], xx, 70, [2], with engraved frontispiece signed ‘P. J.-Hood; text printed in red and black; extremities gently rubbed; the odd mark, else an excellent copy. First edition, one of 550 copies (of which 500 for sale) on Japanese paper, of this translation of this French medieval romance by Andrew Lang, author of The Lang’s Fairy Books (including The Blue Fairy Book), this copy in a fine contemporary binding. Written in Old French by an anonymous author in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, Aucassin and Nicolette is the only known example of a chantefable (literally ‘sung story’), a hybrid form combining prose and verse. The text survives in a single manuscript, discovered and published in 1752 by French medievalist Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye. A playful parody of the medieval romance, it recounts the tale of Aucassin, son of Count Garin of Beaucaire, whose love for Nicolette, a Saracen captive raised as a daughter by one of the count’s vassals, leads him to forsake chivalry and even to refuse to defend his father’s lands against attack. Scottish anthropologist, classicist, and historian Andre

• Binding: Hardcover

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