Visualizing the Medieval Hunt

Brigitte Buettner identifies the art patronage of the French elite as the implementation of a “cultural policy” which led to extensive private libraries filled with a variety of manuscripts given as gifts, commissioned, and purchased on the book market.   Though prevalent in universities much earlier, book culture gained immense popularity in the French aristocratic courts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the establishment of libraries by members of the royal family. More manuscripts were produced in the fifteenth century than in the preceding five hundred years. Wijsman’s extensive examination of royal libraries reveals late medieval collections contained (in most instances) a variety of texts, including religious works (bibles, psalters, lectionaries or evangelaries, collections of sermons, books of hours) and secular texts (courtly poetry and literature, law books, botanics, medicinals, equestrian works) and, significant to this study, frequently included a book on hunting. In addition to these works, nobility collected chivalric texts which reflected the idealized views of kingship and proper behavior as well as courtly literature and poetry.     

    The library of the count of Foix embodied the ideal aristocratic collection and was known to rival even royal libraries.   Later inventories of Gaston's books survive, revealing a well-educated elite versed in Latin and an avid reader.   The count's extensive library included a wide variety of texts such as l'Arbre des batailles, a fourteenth-century political treatise, chansonniers, the Elucidari de las proprietatz de totas res naturals, a Béarnais interpretation of Bartholomeus Anglicus' medieval encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, historical works such as the Faits des Romains from the thirteenth century, and many others, including translations of Middle Eastern works by Abul Kasim and Ibn Sina.   The medieval chronicler Jean Froissart (c. 1337-c. 1404) visited the count's main residence at Orthez in 1388 and wrote of Gaston's appreciation for chivalric literature and patronage of poets and musicians.    

  Gaston's library shows how book collecting came to be an identity-forming activity for the nobility. Aristocratic patrons determined which books they wished to possess in consideration with their own tastes and desires but also relative to the cultural capital they sought to amass and convey to their peers.   Romances, religious texts, heraldic accounts, and hunting and martial manuals, both reflected and informed the chivalric practices of cultivating honor through piety, warrior prowess, bravery, loyalty, and the accumulation of wealth and valor, as well as the exhibition of the courtly virtues of intelligence and wisdom through education.   The ownership of particular books displayed individual participation in the larger social networks within and of the aristocracy.   The materiality of books provided evidence of interactions in "real places, among real persons" as a visual manifestation of relationships between particular individuals in "literary communities" within which texts circulated as personal copies, gifts, and loans.   The practice of aristocratic commissioning of manuscripts depended on knowledge of who owned the desired book and then the ability to arrange to have it copied or obtain it to be duplicated.   Owners solidified their material and associated connections to the upper class by incorporating their own coats of arms in their books, visibly demonstrating their participation in the medieval manuscript culture of the nobility in material form, transcending the written signature or spoken word.   As interest in vernacular texts, in particular romances, grew over the course of the thirteenth century, heraldry gained currency as ornamentation and as representations of particular fictional characters through assigned coats of arms in literature. By the end of the century, heraldry had become essential to and synonymous with individuals and families in life as "real, legally recognized emblems of identity," which resulted in the inclusion of the patron's coats of arms in approximately half of all French manuscripts produced during the late Middle Ages. 

The analysis of heraldry to identify patrons and owners of manuscripts provides clues as to which of the four main illuminated manuscripts of Le livre de chasse may be the original commissioned by the count for his own collection and which may be the copy given to Philip the Bold. Thomas and François Avril argue that the original was lost at some undisclosed date; in her biographical book Gaston Fébus: le prince et le diable from 2007, Claudine Pailhès notes that the original disappeared from Madrid in 1809.   Through analysis of the heraldry at the beginning of each manuscript, Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Baudouin van den Abeele argue that BnF MS. fr. 619 may be the original with Hermitage OPp N.º 2 gifted to Philip.   Both of the codices include the Foix-Béarn coat of arms on their frontispieces. The Petersburg copy includes a painted version with bright red charges dividing the shield into four compartments against a gold field. Vertical red stripes decorate the top left and bottom right, with two passant cows (walking in profile). Despite the persuasiveness of this evidence, both BnF MS. fr. 616 and Morgan M. 1044 include overpainted arms on the frontispieces of Hermitage OPp N.º 2 and BnF MS. fr. 619. The frontispiece of the fully pigmented manuscript of Morgan M. 1044 displays the arms of Brittany (black ermine under a five-point gold crown with crimson bezels), partially eroded and painted over the original arms, among the leaves in the margins below an illumination of Gaston enthroned under a canopy amidst huntsmen and hounds.   These symbols of identity initiated the reader's journey through the book and often marked the start of visual programs comprised of illuminated miniatures, historiated initials, marginalia, and other decorative additions to the pages.