An extraordinary survival, and a monumental record of more than one individual’s eclectic cultural and intellectual interests; a hand-bound, -stitched and -stuck French manuscript miscellany of commonplaced poetry and prose, spanning a period of more than 150 years, from the closing decades of the sixteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth.
It is rare to find compendia of such scope and volume surviving in as complete and untouched condition as the present, and it offers innumerable avenues for further research.
In some ways this volume aligns with the definition of a commonplace book; a collection of snippets arranged by one or multiple pairs of hands, sometimes over decades, though physically it is a departure. There is little of the cohesion, organisation or uniformity that we might associate with a commonplace book or comparable, individually-compiled manuscript genres; it is miscellaneous in both its content and physical form. Rather than a blank book into which extracts are copied, this is more scrapbook, a vessel for foreign and flyaway slips, scraps, leaves, even whole gatherings of paper to be physically attached and inserted into. The volume comprises over 400 leaves of varying sizes, ranging from the largest, folio sheets repurposed from an account book and pre-structured in printed columns, through quarto bifolia, flattened letters – which pleasingly retain their folds, and the grubbiness of once exposed outer areas (e.g. f.329) - to small slips and stubs, all sewn - together, and to each other (e.g. ff.330-34 among others) - pasted (e.g. ff. 48-50, 66, 317) and in one case pinned (see f.8) into the volume.
The binding is pasteboard, covered in a thin outer layer of repurposed parchment; the clear evidence of crude, makeshift stitching at the spine indicates that this was a working volume, continuously added to and expanded. Its contents have been sewn in with a variety of different materials, from thin thread to thicker, almost twine-like string. The structure of the volume reveals that there were stages to its creation, and strongly suggests that it was compiled by more than one owner, over an extended period of time. There is no thematic or chronological arrangement here; the order in which the material has been bound, stuck or inserted appears to have been dictated purely by expediency.
The contents of this miscellany are of exceptionally broad thematic scope, and form. It is a compelling combination of high and low culture, comprising prose, verse, anagrams, epigrams, satire, lists, short accounts, even receipts and promissory notes. They range in subject matter from moral instruction (front pastedown) and reflections on religion and atheism; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political satire and commentary (ff.12, 27, 38, 55, 323, and others); science (f.356); philosophy; a significant volume of French literature and poetry from contemporary and near-contemporary writers and poets; gossipy accounts of scandal; popular verse on colloquial subjects, and much more.
Precisely when this miscellany first began to be assembled is unclear, though the presence of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century material might indicate the middle-late 1600s. An early poem (f.5), sent as a letter and retaining its address, to a Père Julien of the Couvent des Grands Minimes du Plessis-lès-Tours, possibly points to early Touraine provenance. The ‘Gauthier’ who names themselves on the title page is Gauthier de Balagny, named more fully elsewhere; there is little historical evidence of him, and yet he has left traces of himself throughout this miscellany in a distinctive, sloping and slightly rushed hand.
While this volume certainly fits into the broad category of ‘commonplace culture’, and alongside other manuscript genres defined by information compilation and management, we have found few comparable volumes in institutional holdings. It presents numerous avenues for further research: for example, into popular and more high-brow culture at various moments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (even, to a slightly lesser extent, the sixteenth); what the inclusion and then retention of early works suggests of shared and changing tastes; and the role played by volumes like this in the self-fashioning of those who compiled them.
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