Oeuvres de maitre François Rabelais avec remarques historiques et critiques de Mr. le Duchat. Nouvelle edition

Beautifully printed with an impressive array of engraved plates, this is widely considered the most desirable eighteenth-century edition of Rabelais. It is notable for its learned commentary by the scholar Jacob Duchat, and for the inclusion of letters and other material related to the life of the master satirist.

This lavish enlightenment production contains sixteen plates including three folding studies of Rabelais' family estate of La Déviniere at Indre-et-Loire (namely, a birds-eye view of the estate with its walled vineyard, Rabelais' chamber, and the domestic courtyard). As the title-page boasts, many of the engravings are from the Amsterdam workshop of Bernard Picart (1673-1738), a gifted Huguenot engraver who emigrated to Amsterdam in 1710. Like many printers of the early decades of the eighteenth century, Picart sought refuge in Holland from religious persecution. Today he is best remembered for his role in the monumental enlightenment study of comparative religion Cérémonies et coutumes Religieuses de tous les peuples du Monde. To this edition of Rabelais he contributed a striking portrait frontispiece (as a religious exile Picart may well have found sympathy with the irreverent treatment of the clergy in Rabelais' writings).

This is an excellent set in a striking contemporary, probably English, binding.