LIEBAULT, Jean

by Jean Liebault

£3,750 · Offered by Sokol Books

First French edition (translated from the Latin De sanitate, faecunditatae et morbis mulierum of the same year) of this gynaecological handbook by Jean Li ébault (c.1535-1596), doctor and agronomist. It was one of the very first vernacular works, designed for the laywoman, about the female physical condition. Li ébault was born in Dijon but moved to Paris to study medicine, where he became a successful doctor, highly esteemed by both colleagues and patients. He married Nicole Estienne, daughter of the great Parisian printer Charles Estienne (1504-1564), who had himself studied medicine under Jacob Sylvius alongside the young Vesalius. Li ébault completed and translated his father-in-law's Praedium rusticum into French as La maison rustique (1564); a translation of Gesner's Quatres livres des secrets de m édecine followed in 1573. Trois livres de la sant é was the first of two works on feminine health and beauty he published in 1582: De l'ornement beautez des Femmes is advertised in the present work. Madame Li ébault, a noted femme des lettres, was herself the author of Misères de la femme mari ée, mises en forme de stances, and the manuscript Apologie pour les femmes, contre ceux qui en m édisent. She predeceased her husband by some years; the contemporary diarist Pierre de L'Estoile records that Li ébault died suddenly, after sitting down to rest on a stone in the rue Gervais-Laurent. Li ébault's introduction to the present work laments the infinite number of maladies which

• Binding: Hardcover

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