[THE SACRED COURTESAN - WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN SPIRITUALITY - ELABORATELY ILLUSTRATED WORK OF FLEMISH BAROQUE AND COUNTER-REFORMATION] La Magdeleine de F. Remi de Beauvais capucin de la province des Pais-Bas [La Magdeleine by F. Remi de Beauvais, Capuchin monk from the province of the Netherlands]

Remi de Beauvais [Clément Lucien Mollet] (author), Martin Baes, Cornelis Galle, Jean Collaert, and Peter Paul Rubens (artists)

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Tournay: Charles Martin, 1617. Octavo (16 × 11 cm). Contemporary vellum binding with contemporary neatly written title on the spine and green (later?) textile ties; 746 [recte 744, pagination jumps from 458 to 460], [5] pp., 1 errata leaf, with copperplate title (with Noli me tangere, blood-nourishing pelican and resurrected phoenix, as well as two palm trees and cherubs), engraved frontispiece (reclining Magdalene as a penitent with floating, music-playing angels), and two copperplates (kneeling Mary Magdalene as penitent, elevation of Mary Magdalene with angels). Front endpaper with contemporary ownership annotation of a "Soeur" from a convent in Tournay. Gathering "xx" incorrectly bound between gatherings "rr" and "ss" (with contemporary ink annotation); complete and very good. First and only edition of the Baroque long poem, which historically marks the beginning of a succession of Magdalene-themed poetic texts and reflects the changing iconography of Mary Magdalene in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The Capuchin monk's work was not originally intended for publication, but was written privately for a devout lady named Marie de Longueval. Other sources give her full name as Marie Madeleine, which explains her fondness for the holy penitent. According to Hildebrand d'Hooglede, she was not, as assumed elsewhere, the daughter of Maximilien de Longueval, the governor of Mons and Arras, but a daughter-in-law, Marie Madeleine de Biglia, who in 1600 married the famous general Charles Bonaventure de Longueval, who fought for the Habsburgs in the Thirty Years' War. Marie Madeleine was connected to the Capuchins and knew Remi before her marriage. He had given her several poems and songs that he had written himself. At her request, he wrote her a long poem about her patron saint, which he completed in about four years. The work comprised 20 "livrets". (See: Hildebrand d'Hooglede: Deux poètes peu connus: les capucins Remi de Beauvais 1568-1622 . , in: Collectanea Franciscana 24, 1954, pp. 159-165.) The apostle of the apostles, according to legend a "penitent courtesan" who was the first to see the risen Lord (noli me tangere) and proclaimed him, not only received great popularity among the Capuchins (ibid.), but also increasingly took on a life of her own outside church structures from the sixteenth century onwards. While efforts had been made since the Council of Trent to curb sacred art, the image type of the naked or semi-naked beautiful penitent, whose physical charms were emphasized rather than concealed by cloths and hair, became established in courtly and bourgeois private devotion (Lex. Christl. Ikonografie VII, column 520). In his long poem, the author embellishes the biblical passages in which Mary Magdalene appears and those later attributed to her, as well as the narrations from the "Legenda Aurea" and other medieval poems and prose works in Baroque detail. Later readers, especially Protestants, reproached him for this. The German philologist Paul Dittmer, for example, criticizes the monk's numerous scholarly digressions, whose archaeological remarks and ancient allusions supposedly distract from the subject. Rejecting the Baroque abundance of symbols, allegories, and emblems, Dittmar wrote: "We can literally see the poet before us, rummaging through a veritable mountain of scholarly books in search of some quotation or other, which he then inserts in a place that may or may not be appropriate." (p. 9) What Dittmer finds worthy of criticism actually refers to Mannerism and the early Baroque as a whole: "Christ is, in Romy's view, king, pulpit speaker, and miracle worker in one person, who quite clearly combines all the characteristics of the sixteenth century." (La Magdeleine: eine Magdalenenlegende aus dem Anfange des 17. Jahrhunderts, in: Siebzehnter Jahresbericht über die Städtische Realschule zu Magdeburg, Magdeburg 1907, p. 1-10.) Remarkable is also the bibliophile arrangement of the book. Hildebrand.

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• Titre: [THE SACRED COURTESAN - WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN SPIRITUALITY - ELABORATELY ILLUSTRATED WORK OF FLEMISH BAROQUE AND COUNTER-REFORMATION] La Magdeleine de F. Remi de Beauvais capucin de la province des Pais-Bas [La Magdeleine by F. Remi de Beauvais, Capuchin monk from the province of the Netherlands]
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