MARIN, Michel-Ange. Adélaïde de Witsbury ou la pieuse pensionnaire.

An English Nun in Spain

MARIN, Michel-Ange. Adélaïde de Witsbury ou la pieuse pensionnaire. Limoges: Eugene Ardant et Cie. [Not before 1868.]

12mo. Publisher’s white cartonnage richly decorated in red, blue, and bronze, upper board with chromolithographic vignette after Raphael (see below); pp. 120; lithographic frontispiece depicting Adelaide entering the convent; endcap chipped, short split to upper joint but holding firm, corners bumped; very light foxing to a few pp.; else very well preserved.

Rare Limoges-printed edition of this eighteenth-century moral work for young women, detailing the life and education of a fictional Englishwoman at the Convent of St Eugenia in Valladolid, this copy in a beautiful cartonnage binding.

Adélaïde, the daughter of the Catholic Earl of Witsbury, died at the age of eighteen; the novel, first published in 1744, is presented as a lecture to young novices, narrated by the seventy-nine year old Mother Superior, who had been friends with Adélaïde in her youth. Marin (1697-1767) joined the Order of Minims in 1714, and was the author of multiple moral works on for young women, including La Parfaite religieuse (1752), Virginie, ou la vierge Chretienne (1752), Agnes de Saint-Amour, ou la fervente novice (1762), and Farfalla, ou la commedienne convertie (1762).

The striking central panel to the upper board is a rendering of Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola. Eugene Ardant published approximately ten editions of Adélaïde between 1856 and 1895, all very rare.

OCLC finds no copy of any Ardant edition in the US or UK.

SKU: 2126033