À propos de la librairie de la chambre du roi : manuscrits de la bibliothèque personnelle de François Ier hérités des comtes d’Angoulême (1445-1496)

Résumé 0

From Valentine Visconti’s dowry in 1388 to the manuscripts left by Margaret of Rohan at her death in 1497, inventories permit to identify one hundred manuscripts from the counts of Angoulême’s library in Cognac. Handed down to the future Francis I like the printed works found by Ursula Baurmeister, they were in the king’s chamber library in 1544, and forty of them still have call marks from this collection with a slightly mysterious history. They were already kept in the official royal library in the late sixteenth century. Since the fourteenth century, those volumes have had various and sometimes eventful histories: that is the case for Louis of Orléans’s purchases in Paris, books brought back from England by John or by the Duke Charles of Orléans, exchanges between the brothers, very close to each other, and finally works commissioned by John when he returned to France and by his son, Charles of Angoulême, after 1467. The identified manuscripts are part of a larger collection of 300 works described in the inventories, whose unusual contents reflect the literary tastes of Jean—a member of the royal family but also a Latinist, a scholar and a copyist—, tastes shared with his brother and differing from those of the French higher aristocracy of the time. The choices of his son, drawn to less original but lavish texts, agreed more with those of his contemporaries.