Charles d'Orléans and his Brother Jean d'Angoulême in England: What their Manuscripts Have to Tell

Summary

EVEN after being in daily contact with medieval manuscripts for more than half a century, one will never get tired of them. Actually, the more one studies them, the more exciting the study becomes. People who are not familiar with them may imagine that – with the exception, perhaps, of some lavishly illuminated books – they are just dead and dusty old things. Quite the contrary: there is life in them, like in the dried grains found in the Egyptian tombs which, they say, can still sprout. But codices will not be brought back to life unless one knows how to deal with them.

First of all, a manuscript must always be treated as a whole: one should never separate the text, considered as the only valuable element, from the book itself, regarded as a mere wrapping of the text, packing paper of the Christmas present; for, in many cases, one can reach a full understanding of the text only through a careful scrutiny of the archaeological object.

Then, one must remember that, like any other archaeological object, a manuscript is primarily a part of a set, more exactly of several sets in succession: it belongs to a family of books that were copied by a given scribe or in a certain scriptorium, commissioned or bought by a particular person, annotated by a known scholar, and so on. Therefore, if one wants to know what a manuscript has to tell, one must first attempt at least a partial reconstruction of the ‘set’ of which it was originally a part.