♦ MUSINSKY RARE BOOKS ♦ E-Catalogue 16 Recent acquisitions No. 21 www.musinskyrarebooks.com + 1 212 579-2099
[email protected] Powerful women having fun 1) ABBEY OF REMIREMONT – Kyriolés ou Cantiques Qui sont chantez à l'Eglise de Mesdames de Remiremont, par les jeunes filles de différentes Parroisses des Villages voisins de cette Ville, qui sont obligez d'y venir en procession le lendemain de la Pentecôte. Remiremont: chez Cl[aude] Nic[olas] Emm[anuel] Laurent, 1773. 8vo (185 x 115 mm). [3], 4-14, [2] pp. Four large woodcuts, printed one to a page on the first and last leaves, within various woodcut and typographic ornamental borders. Woodcut headpiece, type ornaments. Dark green 19th-century quarter morocco, pale green paper flyleaves. $3400 ONLY EDITION, an unusual piece of popular printing, memorializing an ancient religious ritual held yearly on Pentecost Monday at the female Abbey of Remiremont in the Vosges. This ancient establishment had been founded in the 7th century as a double monastery of monks and nuns, under the austere rule of Saint Columbanus, by Saints Amé (or Aimé) and Romaric, who served successively as its first abbots. The mens’ monastery disappeared early on, and in the early 9th century the nuns embraced the more flexible Benedictine rule. The Abbey gradually became a secularized elite institution, reserved for women who could prove sixteen quarters of nobility on both paternal and maternal sides. These exigences were common to several other aristocratic chapters in Lorraine, but Remiremont was the richest of all the Lorraine abbeys, and its chanoinesses, known as les Dames de Remiremont, enjoyed all the privileges of a secular life, including marriage, and shared in the Abbey’s considerable income.