Folger-specific note
From dealer's description: "[CHÂTILLON, Jérôme de.] Bref et vtile discovrs svr l'immodestie & superfluïté d’habits. […] Par M[onsieur] H[ierome] D[e] C[hâtillon] P[rocureur] A L[yon]. Lyon: Antoine Gryphius, 1577. ONLY EDITION of a work arguing for the renewal and enforcement of sumptuary laws in France. Laws regulating public displays of wealth had been in force since at least 1229, and were regularly trotted out whenever the lines between the noble, merchant, and subaltern classes began to blur. The printer, Antoine Gryphius, in his address to the reader, notes that the author—a lawyer with cases pending—uses only the first letters of his name to maintain an anonymity that would be in service of equal justice for all. But we know that the author was in fact the Lyon procureur Jérôme de Châtillon, humanist and Hebraist, who argues that a clearly defined social hierarchy is essential to an operative society. What would become of France, de Châtillon asserts, if "the vile and lumbering craftsman dresses like the merchant, the merchant like the bourgeois, the bourgeois like the gentleman, the gentleman like the baron, the baron like the count, the count like the marquis, the marquis like the duke, the duke like the prince?" De Châtillon supports his argument for luxury regulation by citing and translating (in part) the Lex Oppia, a BCE 215 Roman sumptuary law that specifically limited what women could display as wealth ("…what if women could hang their inheritance heavy from both earlobes?"), though he hedges a bit, allowing that women must be allowed to adorn themselves just enough to please their husbands. Sumptuary law was of especial importance in Lyon, where silk was produced for export. If locals bought all the silk, then it would cannibalize the economy, and no foreign monies would flow inland. Anti-luxury laws, De Châtillon argues, would put a stop to this. A typographic feature of this work stands out, and presents a mystery: the epistle dedicatory, to Madame Leonor Robertet, the wife of Henri III's chevalier François de Mandelot, is printed in civilité type. Not just any type—it is a fount (Carter and Vervliet's A6) that had been used exclusively by the Plantin Press in Antwerp since 1562, and nowhere else. How did it come to be used—-once—by a printer in Lyon who may have been in debtors' prison at the time of publication? Christophe Plantin had established a branch of his firm in Paris shortly after the Spaniards burned Antwerp in 1576; this at least brings him a bit closer to Lyon. Carter and Vervliet overlooked this book in their census of works printed in civilité types, but note several other works printed at the Plantin Press with this same fount. Withal a fine copy of an important work in the history of the political, social, and economic consequences of sumptuary laws, and an enigmatic connection between the Plantin and Gryphius printing dynasties during the chaotic Wars of Religion." Ordered from W.S. Cotter, D9783, 2024-11-25, Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, November 2024
