This article considers a little‐known manuscript – the Chaldean Histories – that was offered to Anne de Graville, author, bibliophile, and lady‐in‐waiting to Claude of France, by her husband Pierre de Balsac around 1507–10. The manuscript contains a partial translation into French of Annius of Viterbo's Antiquities, first published in Rome in 1498 and purporting to be ancient texts relating the history of the world around the time of the Flood. Although previous scholars have noted the close reliance on the Antiquities by Jean Lemaire des Belges in his Illustrations de Gaule et singularités de Troyes (1511–13), the translation offered to Anne is unknown. Here I argue that Anne's personalized manuscript and translation predates Lemaire des Belges’ work, indicating that she and Pierre were early players in an emerging courtly interest in translated works relating to antiquity. In addition, I suggest that the choice of text and the manuscript's frontispiece by a leading court artist showing Anne receiving the book meant that it was designed to appeal to, and likely shaped, Anne's interests in literature and translation which are later evident in her own library and writings for the French queen, Claude.
This book is, in many ways, much more than the sum of its parts. It is divided into three sections tacking Packaging and Presentation, Consumers, Producers, Owners and Readers, and Writing Consumption. Some of the essays in the first section sometimes feel like rather a dry read when tackled alone but read as part of the volume they show how attention to aspects of book culture often overlooked, such as bindings, rulings, or text order, can add to our understanding of the way in which manuscripts not only functioned, but came to exist in particular formats. In fact, the idea of the book as 'material artefact', as the editors note (p. xiii), is at the heart of new research into the lives and afterlives of medieval and early modern books. Thus Anne Marie Lane's article 'How can we Recognise 'Contemporary' Bookbindings of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries?' takes as its starting point Mirjam Foot's observation that 'the history of bookbinding actually intersects with many different areas of study: religion, art, patronage, collecting, market forces, readership, book production and the booktrade' (p. 3). Using this framework she brings a curator's approach to the problems of analysing and identifying bookbindings. The article draws on a project at the Toppan Library at the University of Wyoming to identify original fifteenth-and sixteenthcentury bindings in pre-1550 books. Using these examples, the author tackles a series Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe 1350-1550: Packaging, Presentation an... Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes , Comptes-rendus
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.