Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

In Montpellier, the university was, as in Paris, a centre for publishing undertakings, but in Angers, Rouen, Orleans, and Toulouse, in which there are various references to book-dealers as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, the trade must have been supported by a public largely outside of the university organisation. The statutes of Orleans and of Toulouse, dating from 1341, regulate the supervision of the trade in manuscripts.

In Montpellier, there appears to have been, during the beginning of the fourteenth century, a business in the loaning of the manuscripts and of manuscript hefts—pecias, similar to that already described in Bologna. The university authorities, usually the bedels, supervised the correctness of the pecias and prescribed the prices at which they should be rented. The stationarii who carried on this business and also the venditores librorum were members of the university body. The sale of books on commission was also supervised under regulations similar to those obtaining in Bologna.

No stationarius was at liberty to dispose of a work placed in his hands for sale (unless it belonged to a foreigner) until it had been exposed in his shop for at least six days, and had at least been three times offered for sale publicly in the auditorium. This offering for sale was cared for by the banquerii, who were the assistants or tenants of the rectors. These banquerii were also authorised to carry on the business of the loaning of pecias under the same conditions as those that controlled the stationarii. They were also at liberty, after the close of the term lectures, to sell their own supplies of manuscripts (usually of course the copies of the official texts) at public auction in the auditorium.

It is difficult to understand how, with a trade, of necessity, limited in extent, and the possible profits of which were so closely restricted by regulations, there could have been a living profit sufficient to tempt educated dealers to take up the work of the stationarii or librarii.

It is probably the case, as Kirchhoff, Savigny, and others point out, that the actual results of the trade cannot be ascertained with certainty from the texts of the regulations, and that there were various ways in which, in spite of these regulations, larger returns could be secured for the work of the scholarly and enterprising librarii.

An ordinance issued in 1411 makes reference to booksellers buying and selling books both in French or in Latin and gives privilege to licensed booksellers to do such buying and selling at their pleasure. This seems to have been an attempt to widen the range of the book-trade, while reference to books in the vernacular indicates an increasing demand for literature outside of the circles of instructors and students.

In the beginning of the fifteenth century, there was, among a number of the nobles of families in France, a certain increase in the interest of literature and in the taste for collecting elaborate, ornamented, and costly manuscripts.

The princely Houses of Burgundy and of Orleans are to be noted in this connection, and particularly in Burgundy, the influence of the ducal family was of wide importance in furthering the development of the trade in manuscripts and the production of literature.

A large number of the manuscripts placed in these ducal family libraries were evidently originally prepared by scribes having knowledge only of plain script, and the addition of the initial letters and of the illuminated head and tail pieces was made later by illuminators and designers attached to the ducal families. It was to these latter that fell the responsibility of placing upon the manuscripts the arms of the owners of the libraries. In case manuscripts which had been inscribed with family arms came to change hands, it became necessary to replace these arms with those of the later purchaser, and many of the illuminated manuscripts of the period give evidence of such changing of the decorations, decorations which took the place of the book-plate of to-day.

The taste for these elaborate illuminated manuscripts, each one of which, through the insertion of individual designs and of the family arms, became identified with the personality and taste of its owner, could not easily be set aside, after the middle of the fifteenth century, by the new art of printing. As a matter of fact, therefore, it not infrequently happened, towards the latter part of the fifteenth century, that these noble collectors caused elaborate transcripts to be made, by hand, of works which were already in print, rather than to place in their own collection books in the form in which ordinary buyers could secure them.