ANNE DE LA ROCHE-GUILHEN AS HISTORIAN; NO COPY IN US OR UK LIBRARIES. 3 vols in 3, 8vos. (4), 7-382 pp; (2), 3-420 [i.e. 400] pp; (2), 3-285 pp, (3) including terminal blank. Bound without leaf Aii (Vol I) as in all copies; pagination skips from 48-69 (Vol II) as in all copies. Leaf Qv (Vol II) and a blank leaf erroneously bound in duplicate after Riiii. Bound in contemporary sheep with gilt spines, but Vol I entirely rebacked. Early 19th century lithographed armorial bookplates on pastedowns of each volume of “D. de Auria Montis Aldei Comitis” – i.e. a member of the celebrated Genoese Doria family, Counts of Montaldeo. A pleasant set, pages mainly clean and fresh. Very rare first complete edition of the exiled Huguenot Anne de la Roche-Guilhen’s three-volume historical study of Spain. Composed while resident in London, Roche-Guilhen’s nonfiction has undoubtedly attracted less critical attention than her novels, but the Huguenot sympathies which she makes no attempt to disguise in her Histoire chronologique make it deserving of further study. As Cherbuliez notes, “the circulation of La Roche-Guilhen's work -written in London, printed in Holland, smuggled into France and elsewhere - points to some of the most important connections in Huguenot Europe, as her economic and political insecurity led her to benefit from the diasporic publishing network, including clandestine booksellers.” (SIEFAR, 2005). Alongside Madame de Villedieu and Madame de Lafayette, Roche-Guilhen (1644-1707) was part of the first generation of writers to profit from (and draw income almost exclusively from) her native language’s new rise to prominence. Unfortunately, Roche-Guilhen was also descended from a Protestant Rouennais family and thus spent much of her life in exile. “On 10 April 1686, six months after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, La Roche-Guilhen and a sister sought permanent asylum in London… Today, as a result of feminist studies and renewed interest in the history of the book and Huguenot culture, La Roche-Guilhen is studied precisely because she exemplifies a generation of women writers: their lives -disrupted by economic hardship, local scandal, religious persecution, and thus characterized by itinerancy- transformed previous models of sociable writing strategies as they made their way in Europe. Appreciating her work necessitates a methodology of literary analysis that attends to the thematics of a text alongside the material and sociological conditions of its entire production.” (Juliette Cherbuliez, SIEFAR entry, 2005). Vol I contains a brief preface by Roche-Guilhen in which she comments that “the pleasure that I have taken in reading Spanish books led me to attempt to understand them better, and finally put into our language that which I found most remarkable in the famous historians…”. Calame points out that, contrary to her statement on the title-page, Roche-Guilhen did not draw on Mariana’s history as her primary source, but rather on an epitome published in French in 1628; and for the events from 1628 onwards she mainly relied on the Catalogo real of Rodrigo Mendes Silva of 1639/1656, and the chronology of Basilio Varen de Soto.Calame also notes that Roche-Guilhen makes no attempt to disguise her Protestantism in her work, declaring for example the corruption of Christianity itself in her discussion of Mohammed in Vol I, p. 157; and she is far from kind to Ignatius of Loyola, whom she calls an “homme sans raison… mais on le débita comme un saint… il eut parmi ses sectateurs Fabri son propre pédant…” Elsewhere she attacks the Council of Trent, the Holy Inquisition, and even defends Queen Elizabeth of England as the victim of a dangerous plot by the King of Spain and the Pope, “in which Divine Providence intervened” (p. 212). 19th century bibliographers variously recorded the first edition of Roche-Guilhen’s Histoire as 1694, 1695, and 1696. The 1695 edition is a ghost; and from OCLC records it becomes apparent that while Vols I & II appeared in 1694, Vol III appeared for the first time in 1696. In US libraries, Columbia has Vols 1 & 2 of the 1694; the copy at Indiana is a microfilm. We were unable to trace a complete set of all three volumes in any US or UK library. * cf Hardin, Modern Techniques in a Seventeenth-century Writer: Anne de la Roche-Guilhen (1997), p. 24; and Calame, Anne de La Roche-Guilhen: romancière huguenote, 1644-1707 (1972), pp. 47-49