Le livre illustré du «long xve siècle». Pour l’analyse conjointe des manuscrits tardifs et des imprimés précoces

Abstract

This study advocates research bridging the gap between manuscripts and prints while studying a popular topic: the complex and diverse relationships between texts and images (including illuminations as well as woodcuts) in Late Medieval and Early Modern books. In order to shed light on the shift between Middle Ages and Renaissance, specialists pertaining to different research fields, especially historians, have promoted investigations taking in consideration a “long fifteenth century” (namely the period covering the years 1370-1520); at the same time, the overlaps between the topics and objects explored by codicologists and bibliographers have grown larger. Hence a more nuanced vision of the features linking Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, especially at cultural and artistic levels. By contrast, it remains too exceptional to investigate the text/image paradigm through corpuses of illustrated books comprehending both manuscripts and early prints. Nevertheless, such innovative case studies have been published recently. In this article, we underline the coherence of the following studies, all of which have been conceived with the collective aim of extending and enriching the corpus and methodology of such pioneering publications.The necessity remains to reach a better understanding of the purposes and methods thanks to which book makers designed hand-illuminations and printed images (some of them hand-coloured) associated with hand-copied or printed texts. In order to fulfil this goal, we promote the idea of bringing to the fore large textual traditions, and to elaborate new tools, for instance a “philology of images” allowing wide-ranging comparisons.