Du vray et parfaict amour. Escrit en Grec, par Athenagoras philosophe athenien. Contenant les amours honestes de Theogenes & de Charide, de Pherecydes & de Melangenie

12mo. ff. [8], 388 [2] (last blank). Signatures: A⁸ ²A¹² B-2I¹² 2K⁶. Bound in contemporary vellum with ties present. Printer’s mark on title. Head pieces, tail piece, engraved initials. Manuscript inscription on front pastedown, signature on first blank and title page. Erased manuscript inscription on spine.

Rare first edition of a novel that is not a translation of a work by Athenagoras, but an original work by Martin Fumée (c.1540-c.1600). Fumée is perhaps best known for his histories of early American travel and discovery, but ‘Du vray et parfaict amour’ is now studied as an early novel, ‘un géniale fabrication romanesque [...] dans le genre du roman sentimentale’, adapted (so he claimed, incredibly) from a manuscript of the second-century Greek church father Athenagoras, given him by Guillaume Philandrier (1505-1563), the friend of Rabelais. The text was plagiarized as ‘Le Péristandre’ in 1642 (see Bib# 5849529/Fr# 229.2 in this collection), and the deception was exposed in P. D. Huet, Lettre-traité sur les origines des romans (1669; Paris, 1971 ed., p. 81).

See J.-M. Quérard, Les supercheries littéraires dévoilées; seconde édition, considérablement augmentée, publiée par MM. Gustave Brunet et Pierre Jannet. Paris, 1869, vol I, Preface, c. 9 10 and 394-5, and the standard critical account by Walther Küchler, ‘Martin Fumée’s Roman “Du Vray et Parfait Amour”, ein Renaissanceroman’, in Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 37 (1911), pp. 139-225. See also A. Cioranescu, Bibliographie de la littérature française du dix-septième siècle. Paris, 1966, vol. II, no. 10293.

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