1. Pierre Champion, La Librairie de Charles d'Orle'ans (Paris: Champion, 1910), gives a
composite list of the Volumes that must have been in Charles's collection.
2. I must leave to the experts the the difficult issue of precisely
what form of furniture the pulpito implies in early sixteenth-century France. I use the
term "shelf" for simplicity, and by it I mean only to designate a discrete area in which texts were
stored
3. See Frédéric Lesueur, Le Château
de Blois: Tel qu'ilfut, tel qu'i est, tel g,u' il aurait pu être (Paris: Picard, 1970), for the
château's history. Lesueur's remarks about the library appear on p. 81.
4. MS .2548.
5. For this and other references to the inventories of 1518 and
1544, I cite from Henri Omont, Anciens Inventaires et catalogues de la Bibliothéque
Nationale, 5 vols . (Paris: Leroux, 1908-21 ); this is from 1: 1. I have also drawn data on
shelving instructions from Pierre Arnauldet's unfinished, annotated edition of the first 132 items of
the 1518 catalog; Arnauldet's edition appears in a serie of articles in Le Bibliographe moderne,
6-12 (1902-1908), 14 (1910), and 1916-17 (18).
6. The inventory does not list the promised Spanish works.
7. Five blank leaves (fols. 62-66) follow the list of the first 404
titles. Was there a plan to place the Spanish works here?
8. Petit is often content to group all titles beginning with, for
example, "A" without worrying too much about filing on the basis of the following letters. The
1222 items in the latter part of the inventory are generally alphabetized correctly.
9. The exception is the Italian category, which Petit gives the
heading of "Table and inventaire des livres en vulgaire italien, couvers de veloux." But the Vienna
manuscript does not have the anticipated companion list of books not so covered.
10. Omont, 1:217, note to item 1269.
11. Many of the extant Volumes now in the
Bibliothéque Nationale that can be traced to Louis of Bruges are cataloged in Joseph Van
Praet, Recherches sur Louis de Bruges, seigneur de la Gruthuys (Paris: Bure
Fréres, 1831).
12. Cited in Omont, 5:12, n. 1.
page 41
13. Omont, 5:9-12.
14. The numbers that one often finds on an opening leaf of a
manuscript at the Bibliothéque Nationale are later, and correspond to later inventories.
The Arabic-style numbers--usually two of them--correspond to the inventories of 1645 by Pierre
and Jacques Dupuy and of 1682 by Nicolas Clement. The other number--either a French number
spelled out (e.g., "quatre cents soixant quatre") or a Roman number (e.g., "MCCLIIII")--correspond to Nicolas Rigault's second 1622 inventory.
15. I have generally followed Arnauldet's annotated edition of the
Vienna manuscript in assigning items in the 1518 inventory to extant manuscripts.
16. Although I have usually retained the title as it appears in the
Catalogue général des manuscrits francais, ed. J. Taschereau et al., 18
vols. (Paris, 1868-1918), 1 have generally given the author's name in its Encyclopedia
Britannica form.
17. Omont, 5:16.
18. Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Fonds frangais MS.
5660.
19. Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Fonds frangais MS.
12999.
20. I will refer to the contents of MS. 5660 only.
21. Old habits die hard: the "livres estans aux casses" in 1544
continue to include such valuable manuscripts as the Grandes Heures and Petrarch's
Trionfi, now in different chests.
22. See Larry D. Benson's influential chapter on "Fifteenth-Century
Prose Romance" in Malory's Morte Darthur (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1976), 17-36. One of the linchpins in Benson's argument that Arthurian romance was
considered history by contemporary readers relies on a 1467 inventory of library of Philip the
Good of Burgundy. Benson cites Georges Doutrepont's analysis of Philip's collection to prove
that "in the catalog of 1467 all these [Arthurian] works are classified as 'histories"' (18). What
Doutrepont [La Littérature francais à la cour des duce de Bourgogne: le
Hardi, Jean sans Peur, Phil le Bon, Charles le Temeraire (Paris: Champion, 1909), 19] in fact
says is that all the Arthurian Volumes are "historiés" ["illustrated"]. As much as I might
like to believe with Benson that stories of the Round Table were thought of as histories (e.g., 20,
24), Philip's 1467 inventory does not bear on the issue, and the organization of the largest
Arthurian collection on the Continent indicates that sharper distinctions were already being made
at least as early as the first part of the sixteenth century.
page 42
2323. I point specifically to the Library of Congress's large collection
of mounted photographs of Bibliothèque Nationale manuscripts. These were
produced by the Modern Language Association's Committee on the Reproduction of Manuscripts
and Rare Private Books and then deposited at the Library of Congress in the I Unfortunately,
most of these reproductions begin with the opening folio of the text itself, thus omitting
preliminary material that could be useful for dating, provenance, etc.
