Adrien Gambart's Emblem Book (1664): The Life of St. Francis de Sales in Symbols (review)

We must be grateful to Saint Joseph's University Press for making more easily accessible Adrien Gambart's delightful, but relatively understudied, collection of fifty-two meditational emblems (one for each week of the year) which ingeniously weave together conventional emblematic images with allegorical interpretations relating specifically to the life and virtues of St. François de Sales. This work was originally printed in 1664 (at the expense of the author) for the use of the nuns of the Order of the Visitation, founded forty years earlier by St. François de Sales. Gambart, who was initially educated by the Jesuits, joined St. Vincent de Paul's recently formed Congregation of the Mission after being ordained in 1633, and became confessor to the nuns of the Order of the Visitation in the Paris convent of which Vincent de Paul was superior.

It must be said, however, that the presentation of the work here is somewhat odd. Gambart's original version is carefully structured so that the first page of each "emblem" comprises an engraved image incorporating a Latin motto, preceded by a heading and a French title identifying the particular virtue of St. François de Sales to be later discussed in the text, and followed by a French couplet relating to the engraved image. The facing page and two subsequent pages contain a prose "Eclaircissement" interpreting the association between the image and the virtuous life of the saint, followed by a set of general injunctions to good behavior entitled "Fruits et pratiques." Unlike other meditational emblem books which habitually include a meditational section with each emblem, Gambart instead groups his meditations together in a two-hundred page "Seconde partie" following the collection of emblems.

What we are given here, however, is a heavily adapted and truncated version of Gambart's work, in which, extraordinarily, the whole of the important meditational "Seconde partie" is suppressed, and a much shortened version of the fifty-two emblems is given, each reduced from four to two pages only. The first page reproduces in facsimile the engraved image and French title of the original, though for no obvious reason the French couplet is deleted. The facing page gives an English translation of the title, a brief description of the engraving (hardly necessary, since the engraving is reproduced), and the French couplet, plus an English translation. Thereafter Gambart's "Eclaircissement" and "Fruits et pratiques," which originally occupied three pages, are replaced by ruthlessly slimmed-down English summaries entitled "Text" and "Points" occupying a mere half-page. This heavily adapted version is then followed by a proper full facsimile of the original, but again the "Seconde partie" is omitted (although its existence is noted in the facsimile title page, and its index included in the preliminaries). The result is a curious compilation in which some material is duplicated and other material excised. The fifty-two engraved figures are all unnecessarily reproduced twice, while the important two-hundred pages of meditation are excised from both edited and facsimile version.

The volume includes a brief section of critical apparatus. The short foreword by Terence O'Reilly (who is also responsible for the English translations of Gambart's French couplets) explains how this edition is based on an unpublished study of Gambart by the late Elisabeth Stopp. Thereafter follows a short essay by Elisabeth Stopp explaining how Gambart's work was closely connected with the process of beatification of François de Sales which was happening in Annecy and Paris between 1656 and 1658, culminating in the actual canonization in 1665, the year after Gambart's volume was published. The last part of the preliminaries comprises a study by Agnès Guiderdoni-Bruslé situating the work in its broader emblematic and christological contexts.

In short, while the editors are to be praised for...