Le Philocope de Messire Jehan Boccace florentin, contena(n)t l’histoire de Fleury et Blanchefleur, divisé en sept livres traduictz d’italien en françoys par Adrian Sevin. Paris, D. Janot, 24 FebruarY

£9,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A handsome copy of the illustrated, first French edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filocolo , owned by a sixteenth-century French countess, Anne d’Humières (b.1565), with her inscription to the title page. The French translation here of Boccaccio’s story of star-crossed lovers, Florio and Biancafiore - itself borrowed from the French medieval story of Floir and Blancheflor - is by Adrien Sevin, whose ‘epistre du translateur’ prefacing the text is dedicated to the powerful lady-in-waiting and mistress of King Francois I, Claude de Rohan-Gié, Contesse de Sainte Aignan (1519-79). Sevin’s epistre also fittingly recounts another romance, in order, he writes ‘to better encourage you [his readers] to love steadfastly’; that of Burglipha and Halquadrich. Sevin’s legend of two, doomed noble lovers appears to have Italian origins, in Masuccio Salternitano’s Mariotto e Ganozza , a text that would indirectly inspire Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet fifty years later. The woodcut illustrations and their interchangeable borders here are from the blocks cut to illustrate another romance printed by Janot two years earlier, in 1540, the chivalric love story of Amadis de Gaula; they would prove a useful set to illustrate other romances printed around the same time (see Mortimer, French, no.18). Made imprimeur du roi in 1543, the oeuvre of prolific printer Janot included emblem books – such as Le Théâtre des bons engins by Guillaume de La Perrière (1534), as well as works produced by either side of

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