Textual Bodies and Manuscript Matters: The Case of Turin State Archives, MS J.b.IX.10

In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, a French aristocrat named Jérôme d’Arblay¹ sought a buyer for a modest late medieval codex now housed in the Turin State Archives as J.b.IX.10 (hereafter Turin 10). D’Arblay labeled the work a “recueil de galanteries” in a fanciful description now prefacing the bound codex:

Ce receuil de galanteries du bon vieux tems, est le langage de nos aïeux à culotes bouffantes. On dirait à chaque mot, que c’est l’expression la plus pure du pape Felix et de son fils Louis. Il mérite une place dans la bibliotèque d’un amateur de l’antiquité.

[This collection of gallantries from the good old days is in the language of our ancestors in their puffed breeches. Every word seems to represent the purest expression possible of the time of Pope Felix and his son Louis. (This collection) merits a place in the library of an amateur of antiquities.]²

One can only imagine that d’Arblay’s advertisement originally circulated separately from the actual codex, given that this hyperbolic description dramatically misrepresents Turin 10’s material state. Truth be told, Turin 10 represents, at best, a shabby hand-me-down version of aristocratic puffed breeches of yore.

As Turin 10’s modern editor Alessandro Vitale-Brovarone has observed, with its dimensions of 29.5 × 10.5 cm and its cheap, unruled ninety-one paper folios distributed unevenly between five gatherings, this codex is comparable to the modest ledger booklets used by merchants and households to keep financial records.³ This ragged book is a “poor cousin” to the luxury manuscripts that populated the Savoy library.⁴ Scattered among its pages, however, are traces of the rarefied world in which an Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy who was elected as Pope Felix V (1383–1451), or his son Louis (1402–1465), would have been at home.⁵ The 229 brief French lyrics, most of which are ballades that recycle the tropes of so-called courtly love, recall the cultivated circles of poetic activity of yore but, in place of nobility, the beneficiaries are of more modest stock. The presence of multiple hands sharing a common French chancery script, occasional identification of individuals without titles as participants in the collection’s confection, and the modest materiality of the codex suggest that it was produced by and for a bureaucratic community. The dating of the paper further implies that this codex was cobbled together as new owners and readers inherited the collection-in-progress. Its fascicles, which date from the 1380s through the first quarter of the fifteenth century, were likely purchased in two stages from stationers as low cost, presewn, blank units; the consistency of watermarks in the first four fascicles suggests that they were acquired together, while the watermarks of the fifth fascicle date it to a later period.⁶ If the codex’s contents justify d’Arblay’s labeling of Turin 10 as a “recueil de galanteries,” its material quality makes clear that the “puffed breeches” on display here are of a secondhand nature and, moreover, that it is the masterful retailoring of this lyric finery that merits admiration.

Of the individuals who deserve recognition for their participation in the creation of Turin 10, three stand out because they are internally named and identified as contributors to this collection and because their textual emergence aligns with key stages in the codex’s development. I proposed in an earlier article the term textual body to explore how a named textual-I—an author, owner, or reader who is identified by name in a text—in multiple works can come to constitute a literary corpus conceived as a surrogate for the absent author.⁷ Turin 10 provides a fascinating twist to my previous argument that Guillaume de Machaut’s readers, both imagined and real, either set out to construct the author by stitching together parts of a disparate corpus or to do harm to authorship by severing writings from an otherwise unified authorial body of...