Religious

In the antiquarian book trade, religious material forms one of the most enduring categories of manuscript and printed books alike: books of hours and breviaries, editions of the Bible and the Church Fathers, sermons and theological controversies, correspondence of clergymen or the faithful, not to mention bindings bearing the arms of an abbey or a diocese that point to a precise provenance. Bibliophilic interest here lies as much in the antiquity of the text as in the quality of its editing, the richness of its illumination or illustration, and the trace left, on the copy itself, of the history of a devotional practice.

For the collector, it is also a way of approaching the great intellectual debates that have run through the centuries as seen through the prism of the sacred, and of following, from one copy to another, the manner in which each age read, glossed and transmitted the texts on which it was founded.