Tableau historique des costumes, des moeurs et des usages des Ordres religieux et des Turcs, au moyen âge

Reissued under a new title and with the Metz imprint of the widow Devilly, this is the seventh and final volume of the Tableau historique des costumes, des mœurs et des usages des principaux peuples de l’antiquité et du moyen âge, published in Paris and Metz between 1804 and 1809 in the translation of the Comte de Jaubert. The text still carries the signature “Tome VII” from the original edition, while the plate captions retain their double reference to the Viennese edition and to “Moyen âge, tome IV” of the French version.

The 47 engraved and coloured plates give the volume much of its character: costumes of religious orders are followed, from plate XXX onwards, by a sequence devoted to the Turks. The title-page, ornamented with a shield bearing the initials DV within a laurel wreath, belongs instead to this later reissue. A pleasing copy preserved in its original state, in plain temporary blue wrappers, with a manuscript title-label pasted at the head of the spine.

In 1796, Spalart embarked in Vienna on an immense undertaking: to parade, through costume, the peoples of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times. He did not live to see it completed; after his death in 1808, Jakob Kaiserer was among those who continued the work. This final volume of the French translation retains something of that wide-ranging ambition, bringing together the habits of religious orders that had disappeared or become rare with, from plate XXX onwards, a sequence of Turkish costumes as early nineteenth-century Europe liked to imagine and depict them.

A few years pass, and the volume changes status without really changing its substance. The text remains that of the earlier edition, the plates keep their original references, but a new title-page now detaches it from the series and brings it back onto the market as an independent work in Metz, under the imprint of the widow Devilly. The object thus preserves at once the memory of the series from which it came and that of its second commercial life.

The new imprint even allows the date to be narrowed. Louis-Jean-Baptiste Devilly died on 30 March 1826; his widow, Félicité-Constance Gentil, did not receive her bookseller’s licence in succession until 10 October of that year. The reissue therefore cannot predate that date. Nothing in the volume, however, completely erases its earlier history: “Tome VII” remains in the text, the captions still refer to “Moyen âge, tome IV”, and the blue wrappers preserve the simplicity of a book put back into circulation rather than remade for the occasion.

Detached from Spalart’s great collection, the volume thus continued on its own course without losing the marks of its origin; beneath the widow Devilly’s blue paper still survives, almost intact, the memory of the Volume VII it had once been.