Notes on Manuscript Production and Valuation in Late Medieval Brittany

In 1420 the Parish Church of St Martin in Vitré (diocese of Rennes) contracted with Raoul de Cerisay, a priest, to produce within eighteen months a missal and a psalter on good vellum, featuring a dozen large letters with flourishing and numerous smaller coloured initials in azure and vermilion. As a model, the parish church lent him 'le viel messel' to use as an 'exemplaire a escripre' for the new one. In payment, Raoul de Cerisay would receive 80 livres, half in advance and half on delivery, as well as 30 sous for bread and wine.¹ The missal and psalter that he promised to write and illuminate have yet to be identified, but the contract is important for a fuller understanding of the historical bibliography of illuminated manuscripts by testifying to a critical facet of production: the legal and economic expectations that existed between artisans as makers and patrons as buyers.

In recent years the history of the medieval book has benefited greatly from regional studies, which in their in-depth focus on patronage, book ownership, and the artisanal practices of particular geographic areas have revealed aspects of organized trades, supply and demand, and book marketing.² Such studies offer a new and distinct perspective on manuscript production, and constitute an important contribution that supplements more traditional arthistorical analyses and literary enquiry. Manuscript makers and the regional market in the late-medieval duchy of Brittany, however, remain largely unexplored.³ Who were the scribes and artists of Breton illuminated manuscripts, where did they work, and how well were they compensated? How do costs of material and wages in Brittany compare with those in northern France?

The costs of manuscript production in medieval Western Europe are difficult to calculate, and Brittany is no exception, in part because of incomplete and fragmentary documentation. In addition to the destruction caused by wars and natural disasters, Breton archives in the modern era were systematically purged. During the late eighteenth century, for example, the Commission de Triage sent parchment and paper records to the army and navy for use as artillery wadding. Mid-nineteenth-century town archivists earmarked many medieval documents on parchment to be cleansed and reused as registry binders for contemporary records. The story of the serendipitous rescue of medieval documents from a similar fate in Nantes in 1857 by the Baron de Wismes and the historian Arthur de La Borderie makes for fascinating reading and is an important commentary on society's changing regard for its own history.⁴

This paper presents data from ongoing archival research into manuscript commissions and production in late-medieval Brittany, collected from ducal tax registers, ecclesiastical payment ledgers, and municipal account books. Such medieval records occasionally document the price of paper and parchment, as well as the wages paid to scribes, illuminators, and bookbinders for commissioned manuscripts. Of course, methodological concerns abound for archival research that depends on a relatively small number of extant documents to represent the quantity and type of medieval records that were produced in Brittany but have not survived to this day. By comparing the modest data collected from archival sources about manuscript production in Brittany with scholarly studies of other regions of France, some of the potential interpretative distortions may be avoided.

The various currencies circulating simultaneously in late-medieval Brittany and their varying rates of exchange complicate the historical evidence. The dukes of Brittany minted both gold and silver coins at Nantes, Rennes, and Vannes.⁵ There were two Breton gold coins: the franc, in circulation during the reigns of Jean IV (1364–99) and Jean V (1399–1442), and the écu de Bretagne, averaging 22 sous (s) 9 deniers (d), which superseded the franc after 1422. Breton silver coins were le gros (10d), le demi-gros, blanc, and denier. Non-Breton currency included the French écu...