Arthur in Manuscript in Renaissance France: The Case of Ysaïe le Triste, Gotha, MS A 688

Abstract

Abstract: Gotha, MS A 688 is currently preserved in the Universitäts- und Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, now kept at the Erfurt University Library in Germany. This is a luxurious manuscript of the neo-Arthurian Ysaïe le Triste: in quarto on paper, copied in a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century bâtarde, and including no fewer than 96 miniatures. The manuscript was probably prepared for Louis II de La Trémouille and his second wife Luisa Borgia, duchesse de Valentinois, both of whose arms are painted on the title page. Prepared perhaps to celebrate their wedding, which took place in 1517, the manuscript must have been produced between 1517 and 1525, Louis having been killed in that year at the battle of Pavia. We have little information on the La Trémouille library, but that said, Louis’s first wife, Gabrielle de Bourbon, was herself an author of several books, and the well-stocked library of Gabrielle’s mother, Gabrielle de La Tour, included copies of Lancelot and Guiron le Courtois. What is remarkable, however, is the fact that such a lavish manuscript of an Arthurian romance was produced at that time. Not of course that manuscript was obsolete as from the introduction of printing; on the contrary, until much later in the Renaissance, a manuscript, much more than print, represented a very personal gift, for instance, and constituted a prestigious library. That said, only a few Arthurian manuscripts seem to have been produced in sixteenth-century France, let alone manuscripts prepared with such elegance, and of the few that survive, only those produced for the bibliophile Pierre Sala, which he had produced for a modernised Yvain (Paris, BnF MS fr. 1638), and two Tristans (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Add. MS 443-D, and Geneva, Fondation Martin Bodmer, cod. Bodmer 148), all three dating from the 1520s, are of comparable quality. If indeed the Gotha Ysaïe was a gift to Louis and Luisa, it was a lavish gift; we know from a document giving details of expenditures billed by Antoine Vérard for a manuscript printed for Charles of Angoulême, how much such a princely gift might cost. However, the illustrations appear slightly dated: the costumes for example would seem more in the fashion of the mid-fifteenth century. Might our artist have copied an existing suite of miniatures from a manuscript dating from the fifteenth century? Was he simply a provincial artist unfamiliar with the fashions of a new century? These questions are unanswerable – but this manuscript shows, as do the beautiful illustrated manuscrits-imprimés produced for instance by an Antoine Vérard, the prestige enjoyed, even at the heart of the Renaissance, by a beautiful Arthurian manuscript.