Self-Portrait in a Library: Charles d’Orléans and his Books

Like most cultivated nobles of his time, Charles d’Orléans possessed a large library, partly inherited from his parents, Louis d’Orléans and Valentina Visconti. Charles’s library is fascinating due to its multiple origins: books were received as gifts, or purchased during Charles’s captivity in England, or copied by him or his brother during the same period, or written by him, as in the case of his ‘notebook’. As such, this library represents a lifetime and reflects its collector. Taking into consideration the medieval catalogues of the collection, details held within books made for Charles, and his own book of poetry, this article shows how the figure of the duke as owner or collector appears in a variety of forms. But it also argues that genealogy offers a powerful lens through which to understand the collection’s successive iterations; unity is seen to rest more on a series of social, especially familial, interactions than on the identity of any one individual. The late medieval library can thus be considered the result of a network of genealogical relationships, and a powerful expression of the intimate links connecting manuscripts, medieval libraries, and their owners.