Author: LA ROCHE GUILHEM (ANNE DE, attributed to)]
Title: Zingis: A Tartarian History. Written in Spanish, and Translated into English, by J. M. Humbly Dedicated to the Earl of Dalkeith, Apparent Duke of Bucclugh.
Description: London, Printed for Francis Saunders in the New Exchange, and Richard Parker at the Royal Exchange 1692, FIRST EDITION OF THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION. Small 8vo, 168 x 103 mms., pp. [iv], 176, contemporary sheepskin; no endpapers, title-page soiled, worn, and creased with portion of imprint lost; text a bit grubby; binding worn, chipped, and rubbed. A poor copy. With the bookplates of Philip Gosse and Pamela and Raymond Lister on the front paste-down endpaper. The French writer and translator Anne de La Roche-Guilhem or La Roche-Guilhen was born in 1644 in Rouen, and died in either 1707 or 1710 in England. She was the "daughter of Charles de Guilhen and Marie-Anne d'Azemar", and was, "by her mother, a grand-niece of the poet Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant. Anne de La Roche-Guilhem became known by several works of fiction. A Protestant, she emigrated to England on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), perhaps via the Netherlands. Her father having died without a fortune, and she herself having never abjured from Protestantism, she sought in vain for protectors by dedicating some of her works to princesses, or to Charles II" (Wikipedia). Jack Weatherford in his study Genghis Khan and the Quest for God (Penguin, 2016) writes of this book, Zingis (1692), and its connection to the Washingtons in eighteenth-century America, being an inspiration for his research on Genghis Khan: "I was quickly encouraged by the discovery that Martha Washington had given her husband a novelized biography of Genghis Khan entitled Zingis: A Tartarian History by Anne de la Roche-Guilhem, originally published in French in 1691" (p. xix). Weatherford ranks high the importance of Anne de la Roche-Guilhem's novelization of the controversial man: "Zingis reintroduced Genghis Khan to a new generation, not as a wanton pillager of cities, but as a wise and virtuous lawmaker. Anne de La Roche-Guilhem reclaimed the image of Genghis Khan and made him more famous than he had ever been …" (p. 334). Arundell Esdaile, A List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed before 1740 (1912), p. 258. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 1660-1800, vol. 2 (1971), column 982. Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558-1700: A Critical History (Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 374. On George Washington's copy of this 1692 edition, see The Papers of George Washington: September 1758 - December 1760 (1988), p. 294. For Richard Heber's copy of this 1692 edition, see Bibliotheca Heberiana (1834), Part I, p. 378, item 7306. On the author, later in life a Londoner, see the biography by Alexandre Calame, Anne de La Roche-Guilhen: romancière huguenote, 1644-1707 (1972). This first edition of the English translation, ESTC R9927, is rare in the United Kingdom, and scarce in the United States: the UK has but three copies (British Library; All Souls at Oxford; and Winchester College); the US has nine (Folger, Harvard, Huntington, Indiana, Newberry, Princeton, U of Chicago, U of Pennsylvania, and Yale). No other countries are recorded by the ESTC as holding copies.

Keywords: fiction association copy literature


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