Colin de Lormoye’s Tailor’s workshop. the management skills of a medieval craftsman (Paris, 1420-1455)

Résumé 0

Historians of the medieval economy have long neglected the economy of craft workshops in favour of large-scale international trade and seigneurial and peasant agriculture. Crafts were most often approached through the prism of manufacturing standards, with corporate regulations forming the main source of research, a source that was published early on and has thus had a lasting influence on researchers’ questions. In the last three decades, both the history of techniques and archaeology have significantly revisited the scientific questions and the knowledge base relating to medieval craftsmanship. Researchers have come to realise that the textual corpus documenting medieval craftsmanship is more diverse and extensive than the academic tradition had suggested since the nineteenth century. Accounts and management books of craftsmen from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have been discovered or rediscovered in archival collections, giving rise to new studies of craft groups. It is now possible to study their clientele, their graphic and numerical skills, their managerial and legal knowledge, their professional and technical language at the level of the workshop, and their practices related to credit terms for customers, access to capital and procurement. This article examines the case of a tailor’s workshop in 15th-century Paris. Information from details kept in a book in the shop offer insight into how this ordinary workshop can be understood in the context of the organization of Parisian trade and the city’s clothing economy. Dozens of pages of invoices provide an ethnographic insight into this medieval workshop and the career of the owner who came to live in Paris at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The analysis covers his relationship with his customers as well as his management skills and some of his economic choices.