Bibliophiles d’oncle à neveu : livres et bibliothèques de Jean et Hélion Jouffroy (vers 1460-1530)

Résumé 0

Thanks to their humanist culture, Jean Jouffroy, cardinal of Albi (1412-1473), and his nephew Hélion, cantor of Rodez and provost of Albi (d.1529), both shared a passion for books. The first one, who served the pope and the king of France, exchanged manuscripts with the foremost humanists of his time, took books from the abbey libraries he was in charge of, or bought items from Vespasiano da Bisticci, a Florence bookseller. He was thus able to build a library of which more than seventy manuscripts have been identified today. Most of them are kept in the Vatican Library. He also presented rulers, including King Louis XI, with gift copies. When he died in 1529, his nephew Hélion had managed to build a much larger library, known through a post obitum inventory discovered not long ago, and which reveals a collection of more than 650 items, making this private library one of the richest in its time. Those two churchmen’s passion for books leads one to think that they played a leading role in the quite early (as soon as 1474) introduction of printing in Albi.