Alain de Lille (c. 1128-1202).

Chartier, Alain (1390-c. 1440). Les cronicques du feu roy Charles septiesme. Paris: (Nicolas Couteau) for Jehan Longis, 3 December 1528, first edition, ff. 80, ruled throughout in red, title-page printed in red and black, illustration: woodcut printer's device on title-page, woodcut illustrations (the first coloured), woodcut initials, manuscript marginalia, long closed tear to one leaf, margins cropped affecting a few headlines and manuscript marginalia



2 works in one volume (Les cronicques bound first), Chancery folio (240 x 167mm.), binding: eighteenth-century red morocco, gilt triple fillet border, gilt arms of Foucault stamped on both covers, spine gilt in compartments, gilt edges

Nicolas Moreau, lord of Auteuil and treasurer of France, signature on title-pages; Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, bookplate and arms on binding

1st work: HC 385; BMC viii 78; Goff A179; Bodleian XVc. A-080; Macfarlane 23; Tony Hunt (editor), Les paraboles maistre Alain en francoys (London, 2005); 2nd work: IA 135.786; Moreau III, 1413

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Alain de Lille's Liber parabolarum (also known in Latin as Parvum doctrinale or Doctrinale minus) is a collection of moralising sententiae that was a hugely popular medieval pedagogical text and became incorporated into the enlarged Liber Catonianus. The work is arranged in sections of two, four, six, ten and a dozen distichs through six chapters. Drawing on classical and biblical sources, the parallels are both clever and direct: for instance the self-consuming heat of Etna is compared with a jealous man's inner turmoil.

There were two French versions of Parabolae (surviving in manuscripts of the late thirteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively) before the present translation which is dedicated to Charles VIII (a cut on a2 depicts the anonymous translator presenting his work to the monarch). A commentary is followed by the Latin original alongside the translation into the vernacular, resulting in an easy understanding of the text's didactic element (important if, as has been suggested, the translation was specifically intended as a moral guide for the relatively unschooled young king) and an immediate assurance of the translation's fidelity to Alain's original.

Les paraboles is a very rare Vérard production. Nine other copies are recorded (in the British Library, the Bodleian (two), the Condé Museum at Chantilly, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (3 copies, 2 on vellum), Oldenburg and Boston Public Library), four of which are imperfect. Many of the 252 woodcuts in the Macclesfield copy are boldly handcoloured: a distinct contrast to the work of the Master of Jacques de Besançon for the royal copy in Chantilly. The cuts are enhanced versions of those used in such earlier Vérard publications as Cent nouvelles nouvelles (1486) and Le chevalier delibere (1488). Some of the cuts that had already been used are refined in Les Paraboles by the addition of background detail missing from earlier uses.

The work attributed to Chartier was shown in the mid-seventeenth century to be by Gilles Le Bouvier, the noted herald.