Fourteenth-century French queens as collectors and readers of books: Jeanne d'Evreux and her contemporaries

Abstract

Although the earliest extant inventories of royal book collections are those prepared for Charles V (r. 1364-80), a study of wills and testamentary executions, together with the mentions of provenance in these later inventories, allows a sense of the kinds and numbers of books that French queens collected earlier in the century. Taking Jeanne d'Evreux and her extensive collection of manuscripts as its primary example, this article demonstrates not only how this material might be recovered from diverse sources, but argues that the documents, the identified extant books, and the friends and family members to whom she gave and bequeathed manuscripts reveal some of her feelings toward her books. In a final section, these women's collections are contrasted with the smaller libraries of the kings through mid-century. It comes as no surprise that the collecting patterns of the noted bibliophile, Charles V, mark a sea change; indeed one of his collecting goals seems to have been the uniting of books that had previously been in royal hands, including manuscripts that had belonged to these earlier women.