Book Number: 21 359

Gervaise, Nicolas

THE NATURAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE KINGDOM OF SIAM

Translated and edited with introduction and notes by John Villiers and illustrated with period maps and prints, including a rare view of the Queen of Pattani.

With the possible exception of Simon de La Loubère's Du Royaume de Siam, the Histoire Narurelle et Politique du Royaume de Siam is the most authoritative of the numerous French accounts of Siam published during the last twenty years of the seventeenth century. These accounts came as a result of the establishment of formal diplomatic and commercial relations between Siam and France that led to the exchange of a series of embassies during the 1680s between the courts of Versailles and Ayutthaya, and to a spate of missionary activity, prompted chiefly by hypes that King Narai of Siam might be converted to Catholicism. Gervaise's work has, indeed, been described by a recent biographer of La Loubère as “the only book on Siam which up to that time could stand comparison with La Loubère's work from the point of view of its documentation on the kingdom,” and Loubère made extensive use of it in preparing his own account, which was published in Paris three years later.

(Bangkok 1997) ISBN 974-8495-61-9

220 pp., 32 pp. illus., 145 x 210 mm, pbk.

forthcoming approx.

27.50 US-Dollar

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