Quadragesimale opus declamatum parisiorum urbe ecclesia sancti Johanni in gracia

Paris edition of Olivier Maillard’s Quadragesimale, printed by Jean Barbier for the bookseller Jean Petit and completed on 4 May 1508. Gothic type in double columns, 45 lines to a page. Large woodcut device of Jean Petit on the title-page; numerous white initials on criblé grounds. The text is described as having been collected in Paris from the preacher himself, then carefully revised before printing: “Parisius sub eodem recollectum ac novissime magno labore correctum”. Colophon on leaf 174: “et opera Johannis Barbier, impensis vero honesti viri Johannis Petit bibliopole Parisiensis impressorum. Anno M.CCCCC.VIII. Quarto nonas Maii”. 174 numbered leaves and 4 unnumbered leaves of table (a-x8, y10).

Late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century full burgundy morocco, raised bands, five gilt floral tools within compartments, gilt title and date at the foot of the spine, blind fillet borders to the covers, marbled endpapers and gilt edges. Dampstaining to the upper right corner of leaves 65-73 and 153-175. A handsome copy.

The text leads directly back to the Paris of 1498. That year, Olivier Maillard preached the Lenten season at Saint-Jean-en-Grève; ten years later, Jean Barbier and Jean Petit fixed his words in the form of this substantial Gothic volume. The title itself stresses that process of transmission: the sermons were “collected in Paris”, then revised and corrected before printing. Between pulpit and book, the spoken word changed form without entirely losing its movement.

The Latin in which it survives is never wholly divorced from spoken French. Vernacular words, turns of phrase and expressions run through the text, preserving something of a sermon intended first to be heard, in a crowded church, before it was read. Maillard attacks in turn the abuses of the clergy, luxury, avarice, trades and professions, the powerful, and the morals of his age, sparing the great no more than anyone else.

That freedom of speech had made his reputation long before 1498. A Franciscan Observant and doctor of theology, Maillard was elected vicar general of the Ultramontane Observants in 1487, and re-elected in 1493 and 1499. In 1488 Innocent VIII sent him to the king of France to seek the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction; an old tradition also credits him with some influence over Charles VIII at the time of the restitution of Roussillon and Cerdanya. Another celebrated anecdote relates that Louis XI, angered by his attacks, threatened to have him sewn into a sack and thrown into the river; Maillard is said to have replied that he would reach Heaven faster by water than the king would with his post-horses.

The last year of his life brought him back to Paris once more :in 1502, during the programme of monastic reform conducted under the authority of Georges d’Amboise, he attempted to bring the great Franciscan convent of Paris back to the Observance; the Conventual friars resisted violently. Maillard died a few months later at Toulouse.

His preaching nevertheless outlived both convent and pulpit. Henri Estienne still drew on his sermons for several examples in the Apologie pour Hérodote. Rabelais, above all, assumed that his name remained familiar enough to serve as a joke: in the Quart Livre, Panurge preaches to his sheep “comme si fût un petit frère Olivier Maillard”.

Ten years after the sermons of Saint-Jean-en-Grève, print gave them another kind of permanence. What Paris had heard from Maillard’s pulpit in 1498 passed into Gothic type in Jean Petit’s shop; a few decades later, Rabelais could still rely on his name to make his readers smile.