La Galerie des Femmes fortes [...]

Bookseller Notes

Mid seventeenth-century biographical compendium of twenty heroic women (first published 1647), including Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots. This hagiographical text is the work of French Jesuit poet and moralist Pierre Le Moyne (1602-71), for whom heroic virtue was a favourite theme. Dedicated to the Regent Anna of Austria, his work discusses five heroines in each category of Jewish, Barbarian, Roman and Christian descent, including Judith, Salome, Artemisia, Zenobia and Portia. The engravings, by Bosse and Rousselet after Vignon, were widely replicated and circulated as prints. In attractive red morocco by neo-classical bookbinder Franois Bozrian (17651826), called 'Bozerian le Jeune' to distinguish from his older brother JeanClaude, with whom he shared an atelier. Active in Paris between 1801 and 1819 his patrons included Napoleon and Renouard.See: Alan Steele, 'Le Moyne, Pierre' in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French (OUP, 2005).