Poitiers, de Jean de Berry à Charles VII

These four volumes constitute a major edition of the first seven registers of the deliberations of the magistrates of Poitiers from 1412 to 1482, all those surviving from the fifteenth century, edited by a distinguished medievalist and historian of Poitou, Robert Favreau, who has published extensively on the region and the role of the bonnes villes in the later Middle Ages. Registers of deliberations are among the most important medieval and early modern sources for the social and political history of France and, although their survival is sometimes patchy, they are a vital resource. Many were made partly accessible in the nineteenth century through the famous series of Inventaires sommaires , and recently some (Lyon, Pau) have been made directly available by provincial archives online. A few, such as those of Paris and Limoges, were published in full for certain periods. Online publication is highly desirable, though, as Favreau points out, some of these archives are difficult to read, even for experts. This publication is therefore highly welcome to historians of France and of the region, especially since so many of the other urban archives of western France have suffered devastation (La Rochelle’s were taken to Paris after the siege of 1627–8 and destroyed in the fire of the Chambre des Comptes in 1737, those of Saintes were destroyed by fire in 1871 and those of Bordeaux seriously damaged by the fire of 1862). The archives of Poitiers were first classified by Louis Rédet in 1842, before the promulgation of the standard archival system of classification in 1857. He listed the 196 registers that survive for the period 1412 to 1790. In terms of regional history, therefore, they are exceptional in their degree of preservation

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