The DOCTRINAL OF MARRIED WOMEN. Booklet in-4, red morocco, triple fillet, spine with 5 nerfs nicely decorated with small irons, interior lace, gilded edges (Trautz-Bauzonnet). Not in Baudrier // Bechtel, 241/D-338 // Brunet, II-783 // Claudin, III, 441 // Fairfax Murray, 128 // GW, 8593 // USTC, 79166. (6f.) / a6 / 20 lines, gothic car / 121 x 180 mm. Very rare first edition or incunabula second edition of this advice in verse to married women. This versified piece consists of 45 stanzas of four lines each. It is a series of injunctions to virtue, beginning with obedience to the husband: Femme qui es en mariage / A ton seul mary tabandonne / car q[ui] son corps a plusieurs dõne / Jamais il n'est tenu pour saige. Claudin, in his Histoire de l'imprimerie, describes these popular and naïve productions as follows: The word "crude" was not spared, but no one paid any attention to it. They made equivocations full of coarse Gallic salt that charmed the vulgar and gave us a fairly accurate picture of the various degrees of the social scale at the time (III-442). Thus, in the course of these stanzas, among other incitements to pray to God, we find wise warnings such as : Woman forgets the course of Venus Which is only sin and lust And think that by this rubbish Hands are apute end come Woman looks at madness Que Dido commist pour Enee By her lust was burnt And in hell arse ﾌ bruye This booklet was printed by Pierre Pincerne, a printer in Lyon between 1485 and 1494 under the name Pierre Bouttellier, whose output is still relatively unknown but who published several of these popular little booklets. This one was printed around 1488, the date on which this workshop used the initial large L on the title. Another edition in four leaves was published around the same year in Besançon, but it is impossible to determine which one preceded the other. Our edition is illustrated on the title with a large grotesque L (71 x 36 mm) showing two faces (initial "a" of this workshop according to the classification of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, used in 1487 and 1488) and a woodcut on the verso of the title depicting a woman in front of two men, one old and the other young. The verso of the last leaf is blank. This edition is extremely rare. Brunet mentions a Bruyères-Chalabre copy (sale in 1833, no. 520), which Fairfax Murray assumes to be the same as the present one. There is nothing to confirm this assertion, as the Chalabre copy was described at the time as bound in blue half-maroquin, or to deny it, as the copy may have been rebound by Trautz-Bauzonnet between the Bruyères-Chalabre and Yemeniz sales. A very fine copy, finely bound by Trautz-Bauzonnet. The copy has been perfectly established, naturally washed and the ink is a little pale in two or three stanzas. The first 3 leaves show a small restoration in the outer margin. Provenance: Nicolas Yemeniz (bookplate, 9 May 1867, no. 1663), Count Raoul de Lignerolles (II, 5-17 March 1894, no. 1117, dated "circa 1525") and Fairfax Murray (label, no. 128).