Abstract

According to regulations supported by royal edicts, books in late-fourteenth-century Paris were to be purchased from libraires, who acted as agents selling volumes placed on deposit with them. New manuscripts were commissioned from stationnaires, the equivalent of modern publishers, who hired calligraphers and other craftsmen. Both libraires and stationnaires supplied books to institutions, students, and bibliophiles and lent, against a set fee, controlled and approved exemplaria from which copies could be made. In theory these members of the trade were affiliated to, and governed by, the university. But there was also a third category, the écrivains, or professional copyists, who were in practice far more important in the actual making of books than the official documents would imply. Study of the activity of the écrivains suggests that their responsibility went well beyond the act of mechanical transcription and in the case of didactic, literary, and devotional texts designed for the layman often resembled that of the stationnaires. With the écrivains often rested the execution of the rubrication and, when it came to luxury copies, the hiring of illuminators, miniature painters, and even binders, in addition to setting the layout of the book. In many instances they would thus produce volumes ready for use