LALLEMAN, Pierre, & Michel-Jean Sedaine.

£2,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Le pot-pourri de Loth, First editions of two licentious songbooks, bound together as usual, here featuring a red and green streaked design on the covers. Lalleman and Sedaine's lyrics combine devilries, fantasy, and eroticism and are brought to life by detailed and animated engravings.Lalleman and Sedaine's text was published during a "moment in French literary history when erotic freedom paired with intellectual liberty" (Ganofsky p. 231). As libertine writers, their contemporaries included the Marquis de Sade and Choderlos de Laclos. Like many erotic texts of the time, Le Pot Pourri de Loth and Le Tentations de Saint Antoine are subversions of Christian tales. This appropriation of sacred stories may appear merely to be intended to shock and titillate. However, in a typically libertine manner, the authors had a secondary aim, to demonstrate "a certain audacity and independence with respect to what is traditionally and institutionally held as sacred", and thereby to "highlight that libertinism stems from intellectual emancipation" (Ganofsky, p. 231).

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