Traité Des Tournois, Ioustes, Carrousels, Et Autres Spectacles Publics.

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4to. pp. 4 p.l., [4], 399, [1]. with the 2 cancels C2-3 included in the preliminaries. engraved printer's monogram on title. 22 large engraved headpieces (incl. repeats) & 22 large engraved historiated initials. several woodcut vignettes & initial. contemporary mottled calf, gilt back (some scarring to covers, joints partly cracked, spine ends worn, some intermittent foxing). engraved bookplate of Baron Walpole of Wolterton. First Edition of this early work on the staging of public festivals. Menestrier, a French Jesuit and antiquary, was responsible for arranging all aspects of some of the most dramatic of those during the reign of Louis XIV. Among his more notable productions were the festivities occasioned by the King's visit to Lyons in 1658, when he had the students of the Collège de la Trinité perform two ballets of his composition, and those celebrating the marriage of Françoise de Valois with the Duke of Savoy. Included here are chapters on carrousels, quadrilles, floats, recitals, devices and emblems, mascarades, horses and other animals used in festivities, tournaments, combat and staged attacks, military diversions and public spectacles of the Turks, &c. The large engraved headpieces depicting jousts, processions, and festivities are by Claude Derbage. "Ménestrier's [treatise] is still imbued with the thought processes of the renaissance. He opens his book by tracing the origins of tournaments back to antiquity in which such spectacles combined the rites of religion with military exercise and learned allusions. He goes on to discuss Roman circuses and combats and the symbolic nature of such tournaments, above all the choreographed carrousel in witch the movements of the horses and riders echoes the courses of the heavens. (Strong, Art and Power, p. 56) Brunet III 1624-25. Graesse IV 487. Seller Inventory # 1NEaiMÉN13

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