2023/12/21 by Emerson, Catherine
#Fifteenth-century Paris #Gilles #Historiography #Medieval Studies #Nicole (d. 1503) #Social Network Analysis
paper · doi:10.25517/jhnr.v9i1.128
Using the methodology of Network Analysis, we can visualize the network of owners associated with manuscripts of fifteenth-century French histories and the material connections between the manuscripts themselves. This provides clues as to where to look for additional manuscripts in this corpus, which we know is incomplete. A clear distinction emerges between a group of male historians associated with the French court whose manuscripts were privately owned, and other texts in institutional collections which were subject to public consumption. The work of Nicole Gilles is examined as a case-study of the first sort of manuscript. Both sorts of manuscripts – whether associated with individuals or institutions, particularly monasteries and the royal court – are revealed as key points of exchange and contact. The study, based on the Archives Nationales de France, could be expanded to other archives to give a more complete picture of the way in which texts circulated. Certain actors, most notably Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, are revealed to have a similar pattern of manuscript ownership as institutions like the great abbey libraries of Paris.