Vimont, P. Barthélemy:

$12,500 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

RELATION DE CE QVI S'EST PASSE' EN LA NOVVELLE FRANCE EN L'ANNEE 1642. & 1643.... First edition, first issue of the twelfth Jesuit Relation, for the years 1642 and 1643. The Jesuit Relations were a series of annual letters from the superiors of the Jesuit missionaries in New France, published from 1632 to 1673 by the French Province of the Society of Jesus. Their significance cannot be overstated. Upon the arrival of the first letters in France, the French provincial Barthelemy Jacquinot hurried them into print. Though the various print runs were large, the Relations were avidly consumed by a fascinated public, a practice which contributed to their present scarcity. "In this period, political France was beginning to look with more than casual attention at its ancient and much neglected colony. Under these peculiar conditions, the French Jesuits must have realized the importance of their Relations as the sole chronicle, regularly published, of French imperial expansion....Learned men themselves, never inhumanely detached from the intellectual interests of the world, the members of the Society could not but appreciate also the unusual service of the Relations in the diffusion of geographical and ethnological data. In addition, therefore, to the primary motive of publication there existed several reasons of force and variety for the printing of this series of narratives freshly come each year from the forests and rivers and grim little cities of New France, distant land of mater

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