Visualizing the Medieval Hunt

Gaston's Le livre de chasse presents one of the most comprehensive sources for medieval hunting methods other than falconry and participates in the tradition of hunting manuals in the Middle Ages, which began during the eleventh century with the production of Latin treatises. Medieval cynegetic works reached their height as a genre during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, beginning with the hawking treatises of the 1200s. Only one manual from the twelfth century addresses the method of vénerie, the Latin De arte bersandi, by the German knight Guicennas, but several accounts exist in literature and include the influential Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg and the anonymous poem Chace dou cerf. The production of original manuals rather than transcriptions from earlier Latin treatises into vernacular languages began in the fourteenth century, the highest point of popularity for hunting treatises as a genre. The most notable of the manuals included the poem Le Roman des Déduis (The Pleasures of Hunting) by Gace de la Buigne (c. 1359), and Henri de Ferrières’ approach to hunting through his vision of conversations between Queen Reason and King Method on the natures of man and animals as well as their debate on vénerie versus falconry in Le livre du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio (c. 1370). The third major hunting composition of the century was Le livre de chasse, which quickly became popular with the nobility across Europe. In the early fifteenth-century, Edward, Duke of York (1373-1415), translated the first thirty chapters as The Master of Game, evidence of the widespread dissemination of Le livre de chasse. Despite the challenges inherent in determining the survival rates for medieval manuscripts, Uwe Neddermeyer developed a system to establish numbers for all manuscripts produced based on extant codices, with an estimated five to seven percent surviving to the present. One might thus extrapolate that as many as five hundred iterations of Le livre de chasse may have been produced, especially if one includes the copies of The Master of Game.

       Today, forty-six copies of Gaston's manual survive in private and public collections around the world. Two early fifteenth-century manuscripts, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris MS. fr. 616 (BnF) and Morgan Library, New York M. 1044, are the most famous surviving copies. Together with BnF MS. fr. 619 and Hermitage, Petersburg OPp N.º 2, these codices form the primary manuscript family which all other copies likely imitated.  As expensive, gilded, and painted luxury objects, books such as BnF MS. fr. 616 and Morgan M. 1044 created boundaries of wealth and class within medieval society and produced what art historian Michael Camille eloquently described as an “…aura of power and authority, stimulating an awe and, for an owner, delectation and fervid attention.”

Provenance

Marcel Thomas and François Avril note the provenance of BnF MS. fr. 616 relies heavily on the commentary by Camille Couderc (1860-1933), a conservator in the department of manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and a professor of bibliography at the École nationale des Chartes at the Sorbonne, who identified the original patron of the manuscript as John the Fearless. The heraldry for an early sixteenth-century member of the Poitiers family, possibly Aymar de Poitiers, lord of Saint-Vallier, covers an earlier, original coat of arms. The next owner, Bernard Clesius, Bishop of Trent, gave the manuscript to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria before 1530, with an accompanying letter noting the codex had been found after the Battle of Pavia in 1525. The location of the book before it was given to Louis XIV (1638-1715) by the Marquis Vigneau in 1661.

It resided at several royal libraries in France until 1726, when the manuscript became part of the library of Louis Alexandre, count of Toulouse (1678-1737) at the Château de Rambouillet. In 1737, the count's son, Louis Jean Marie, Duc de Pentièvre (1725-1793), inherited the book. Over the next hundred years, the manuscript was held by the Orléans family. In 1834, King Louis-Philippe (1773-1850) gave the manuscript to the Louvre before it was deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The noteworthy parallels in composition, style, and content of the illuminations within these two manuscripts and with the images of the other two elaborate copies, BnF MS. fr. 619 and Hermitage OPp N.º 2, allow us to study these manuscripts, and in particular BnF MS. fr. 616, with its more complete provenance, in lieu of the illusive originals. The comparison of the visual program of BnF MS. fr. 12399, a copy of Henri de Ferrières' Livre du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio, with BnF Ms. fr. 616 shows significant similiarities in the foliage patterns surrounding the miniature as well as the alternating red and blue borders outlined with gold, abstract background, and content of the illuminations despite being produced nearly thirty years earlier, in 1379. As the manuscript is dated ten years before Gaston composed his hunting manual, the shared aspects of the illuminations and design with all four copies of Le livre de chasse indicate the original commissioned by the count and the gift to Philip were likely to have been modeled, at least in part, after BnF MS. fr. 12399.