Histoire generale des Pais-Bas, contenant la description des XVII provinces [Pays-Bas]

New edition, published in Brussels in 1743 by the widow of François Foppens, in four volumes and illustrated, in the present copy, with 144 figures including 4 frontispieces, most on folding plates, engraved notably by Jacques Harrewijn. Title-pages printed in red and black.

Contemporary full polished mottled calf. Spines with raised bands decorated with repeated ermine tools, red morocco lettering-pieces and tan morocco numbering-pieces. Restorations to the headcaps and joints of volumes I and II; headcap of volume IV worn away; corners rubbed and some surface wear. Nevertheless a fresh set overall.

An early manuscript note on the title-page of volume I attributes the work “au chancelier J.-B. Chrystin”. A further distinctive feature is the heraldic decoration of the spines: ermine spots formed part of the armorial vocabulary used by several members of the House of Rohan and invite comparison with bindings from their libraries.

Under its revised title, this Histoire générale des Pais-Bas continues the project of the Délices des Pays-Bas, first published in 1697. The authorship remains disputed: traditionally attributed to Jean-Baptiste Christyn (1630-1690), Baron de Meerbeek and Chancellor of Brabant, the work has also been assigned by some bibliographers to his nephew and namesake, likewise a jurist attached to the Council of Brabant. The note in the present copy at least shows that the attribution to the Chancellor circulated at an early date.

The 1743 edition preserves the historical geography of the Seventeen Provinces in all its breadth, even though their political unity had long since disappeared. Brabant, Flanders, Hainaut, Artois, Luxembourg, Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, and Groningen are described as parts of a single historical whole. The work thus reaches beyond the political borders of its own period to preserve an inherited territorial and historical conception of the Low Countries.

Its illustrations give this geographical ambition a particularly striking form. Views of towns, fortified plans, abbeys, churches, castles, and civic buildings together form an extensive topographical repertory of the regions described. Several plates bear the signature of Jacques Harrewijn (1660-1727), a pupil of Romeyn de Hooghe and one of the most active engravers of towns and architecture in the Southern Netherlands.

The cumulative nature of the work also gives it genuine retrospective value. Certain passages preserve the memory of places and monuments that had already disappeared long before this edition was printed; Thérouanne, for example, entirely destroyed on the orders of Charles V in 1553, survives here through a textual tradition inherited from earlier states of the work.

From Brussels to the northern provinces, this edition therefore does more than describe the Low Countries of the 18th century; through text and image it reconstructs the memory of a territory once conceived as a political whole and subsequently fragmented by history. Its 144 illustrations give unusually rich visual form to the enduring editorial idea of the Seventeen Provinces.