Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany (review)

This book offers a significant and comprehensive study of the production, marketing, and ownership of non-monastic manuscripts and printed books in Brittany in the fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries. In recent years there have been other notable contributions to the regional examination of medieval books — including their makers, patrons, and other facets of contemporaneous book trades — by Susie Nash (Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Illumination in Amiens, London, 1999) and Elizabeth Burin (Manuscript Illumination in Lyon, 1473–1530, Brepols, 2001). Despite Brittany’s intersection with trade routes and its importance in geo-political struggles, Breton manuscripts and printed editions have remained on the periphery of recent scholarship (with the exception of exhaustive analyses narrowly-tailored to certain deluxe manuscripts). Contemporary and later accounts of the print history of Brittany have been either exaggerated or nonexistent. Enter Booton’s timely volume, which provides an invaluable chronicle of the fragmentary, complex history of Breton manuscripts and printed editions from the time of the accession of the Montfort family in 1364 through the formal assimilation of the duchy by France in 1534, while also identifying 178 artisans and over 200 contemporary owners and their known manuscripts and books.

Comprising six cohesive and efficiently-organized chapters, the first half examines with rigour and clarity the creation of and commerce in manuscripts and printed editions of the period. Booton diligently identifies artisans by their names and trades, and also localizes, dates, and provides comparative data for Breton manuscripts and printed books. Her analysis, detailed yet engaging, reveals the influential role of prominent illuminators — especially the Master of the Hours of Marguerite d’Orléans and the Jouvenel Master and his associates — in Breton illuminated programmes, while also discerning a range of complex and diverse iconographic depictions. Through her critical and flexible integration of archival research with the stylistic and codicological features of manuscripts and printed editions, Booton innovatively nuances this ‘futile’ investigation of a singular regional style in Brittany (p. 39). Supported by privileged individuals, the fledgling and limited output of ten printers in Brittany between 1484 and 1532 further proves enigmatic through the ‘inexplicable’ vanishing of printers and their colleagues, which in part caused a ‘void’ in the book market later filled by libraires (pp. 103, 112). Booton masterfully navigates and assesses the movement of itinerant artisans and their practices, identifying geographic patterns and primary centres of manuscript and book production. While Booton nicely focuses on and exposes the reshaped terrain of and competition within the book market in the later Middle Ages, there is, however, perhaps too little said as to whether Breton manuscript illuminators may have utilized printed sources such as woodcuts or metal-cuts in the execution of pictorial cycles in their works.

In the second half of the book Booton undertakes an ambitious and preciselydocumented investigation into how manuscripts and printed editions were commissioned, as well as their patterns of circulation and ownership. Drawing on such colourful figures as Gilles de Rais — who unloaded, among other assets, his ‘movable property’ of manuscripts (with the exception of his copy of Ovid’s Métamorphoses) in pursuit of his experiments in alchemy (p. 169) — Booton effectively evokes the personality and intrigue of literary possessions, particularly those belonging to seigniorial collections, which often surpassed ducal libraries in quantity and diversity. The dynamic transition of books’ methods of acquisition and subsequent circulation are complemented by Booton’s intuitive readings of marks of ownership and their placement within texts. Superseding their husbands in book ownership in the fifteenth century, duchesses (chiefly Anne de Bretagne) began to acquire more manuscripts in Brittany. Booton introduces fresh perspective on the influential artistic patronage of Anne de Bretagne — whose literary preferences reflected a desire for richly illuminated manuscripts rather than printed editions — in the broader scope of Breton book history and trends. In the final chapter Booton further expands her comprehensive study to encompass the acquisition of Breton manuscripts and...