Fourteenth-century French queens as collectors and readers of books

Although the earliest extant inventories of royal book collections are those prepared for Charles V (r. 1364-80), a study of wills and testamentary executions, together with the mentions of provenance in these later inventories, allows a sense of the kinds and numbers of books that French queens collected earlier in the century. Taking Jeanne d'Evreux and her extensive collection of manuscripts as its primary example, this article demonstrates not only how this material might be recovered from diverse sources, but argues that the documents, the identified extant books, and the friends and family members to whom she gave and bequeathed manuscripts reveal some of her feelings toward her books. In a final section, these women's collections are contrasted with the smaller libraries of the kings through mid-century. It comes as no surprise that the collecting patterns of the noted bibliophile, Charles V, mark a sea change; indeed one of his collecting goals seems to have been the uniting of books that had previously been in royal hands, including manuscripts that had belonged to these earlier women

Art · Epigraph · Extant taxon · Genealogy · Literature · Section (typography · Sociology · Surprise · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance Literature and Culture

• The ‘cursed’ queen

  Open Access•Gergely Kiss•Medievalista online•2023

  Incluir item

• Imagining Ovid and Chrétien in Fourteenth-Century French Libraries

  Miranda Griffin•French Studies•2016

  Incluir item

• Questioning the Capetians, 1180–1328

  Open Access•Field, M Cecilia Gaposchkin•History Compass•2014

  Incluir item

• Juana of Castile's Book of Hours

  Open Access•Lesley K Twomey•Religions•2020

  Incluir item