Wine, Women, and Song - THE COPY OF ISADORA DUNCAN

Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher. 1899. WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG. Medieval Latin Students Songs Now First Translated into English Verse with an Essay by John Addington Symonds. The copy of the pioneering modern dancer and choreographer, signed by her to the front free endpage "Isadora Duncan."  One of 725 copies of Van Gelder handmade paper. Small 8vo. 190 pp. Half leather with marbled boards and marbled endpapers, decorative title and design to spine. Endpages browned and slightly stained, otherwise clean internally throughout, boards and front marbled paper splitting from spine approx. 2 inches from head, otherwise fine. 

An intriguing association copy of John Addington Symonds' translations from the Carmina Burana, a Medieval Latin manuscript of 254 poems, songs and dramatic texts from the 11th-13th centuries, being the work of the Goliards, a group of clerical students from France, Germany Spain, Italy and England, who protested the growing contradictions within the Church and satirized it through song, poetry and dramatic performances. The original manuscript contains 55 songs of morals and mockery, 131 love songs and 40 drinking and gaming songs. Symonds' selection is dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson and is prefaced by an essay on Goliardic literature.

John Addington Symonds was an English poet and literary critic. Although he married a woman and had a family, he was an early open advocate of male love, which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships. He referred to it as l'amour de l'impossible (love of the impossible). A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies about writers and artists. He also wrote much poetry inspired by his homosexual affairs. (21381)

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