Office Propre De La Bienheureuse Angèle Mérici.
Orléans, J.P. Jacob 1769.
8vo (195 x 121 mm.). [xvi], 78, [3]p. Woodcut Ursuline title device.
Contemporary speckled calf (rubbed, one corner stained), spine title label, red edges.
Only Recorded Copy. In August 1768, Pope Clement XIII beatified Angela Merici (1474-1540), founder of the Ursulines. This liturgical office was created for her feast day, 31 May, with prayers and meditations inspired by her biography and the history of the order. A French translation is known solely from the single leaf bound at the end of this copy. Two additional fragments are also bound in: a leaf from the widow Dauplet’s 1676 Breviary (I: 747-8) and four leaves from an unidentified 18th-century service book for the second Sunday after Epiphany. In good condition (small blank marginal stain); Ursuline ownership inscription dated 25 August 1788 on the front pastedown and title signature of Sister St. Charles.
¶See Butler’s Lives of the Saints II: 432-4 (Angela was raised to sainthood in 1807) and Rapley’s The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France 43-59.
Price: $1,450.00