926J Madeleine de La Calprenède (1618-1668)

Les Œuvres diverses tant en Vers qu’en Proses; dediees a Madame de Mattignon par Octavie.

Image of the title page of 'Les Œuvres diverses tant en Vers qu’en Proses' by Madeleine de La Calprenède, published in Paris in 1658. The page features ornate lettering and a decorative floral design at the bottom.

A Paris, chez Jacques Le Gras, à l’entrée de la gallerie des Prisonniers. M. DC. LVIII. Avec privilege du Roy. 1658                                                   .                                                      Price $3,800

Duodecimo: 13x 7.5cm. signatures: ã4, A-E12, F10, G11 (lacking G12) (Bound without a leaf of privilege, apparently as usual (cf Berès). First and only edition. This copy is bound in 18th century calf with gilt spine and label ; some pale damp staining.

First and only edition — and the sole publication of the poet Madeleine de La Calprenède, née de Lyée, a member of the Gascon family that produced the novelist Gautier de La Calprenède. Written under the name Octavie, the volume gathers fifty-nine short poems — sonnets, odes, and a single rondeau — addressed to “Madame de Mattignon,” in whose salon La Calprenède likely moved. Alternating voices of Octavie and Lucidor create a gender-reversed dialogue of love, illness, and devotion. Several pieces dwell on the physical realities of the body: a pair of sonnets describe bloodletting(pp. 133-134), while a striking sequence (pp. 56-59) reflects on her own smallpox, rare among female poets of the Grand Siècle.

Édition reliée en cuir du livre 'Les Œuvres diverses tant en Vers qu’en Proses' de Madeleine de La Calprenède, datant de 1658, montrant le dos du livre avec le titre et des décorations dorées.

The work survives in very few examples.  OCLC records only one copy in the United States (Library of Congress) and a small handful in European holdings (BnF, Arsenal, Bodleian). Absent from Cioranescu’s listings of later seventeenth-century women poets and long overlooked in discussions of early modern “préciosité,” it represents one of the earliest independent poetic collections by a French woman outside court patronage.

Beyond its rarity, the volume offers a fascinating example of gendered literary performance in mid-seventeenth-century France. Through the alternating voices of Octavie and Lucidor, La Calprenède constructs a poetic dialogue that frequently unsettles conventional distinctions between male and female speakers. The result is a work that belongs simultaneously to the culture of the salon, the history of women’s authorship, and the broader tradition of early modern experiments with literary identity.

JAMESGRAY2@ME.COM https://wp.me/p3kzOR-8wB

Short Link: https://wp.me/p3kzOR-8wB