The Waxing of the Middle Ages: Revisiting Late Medieval France

By Tracy Adams, Andrea Tarnowski, Stephen Nichols and 7 more

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period.

The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some “cultural form,” to borrow Huizinga’s expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Apr 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781644532928

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Working with Huizinga’s Legacy

TRACY ADAMS AND CHARLES-LOUIS MORAND-MÉTIVIER

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.

—John Keats, To Autumn

Johan Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, first published in 1919 and in print ever since, has shaped the image of late medieval French culture for generations. No work, prior or subsequent, treats the culture of the period with such loving attention. For this reason, the perennially popular study, translated into English successively as The Waning, The Autumn, and Autumntide, of the Middle Ages, offers an apt point of departure for a collection on the period, all the more so given that Huizinga has become a scholarly founding father figure in recent years.¹ Anne Midgley observes that with the rediscovery of the power of cultural history, a long list of luminaries claim him as an innovator, including Gerd Althoff, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Peter Burke.² Patrick Hutton cites Huizinga as a precursor to the history of mentalities.³ The introduction to the 2019 collection Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later, edited by Peter Arnade, Martha Howells, and Anton van der Lem, acknowledges Huizinga’s study as a methodological wonder and a completely original attempt to treat cultural forms and the materials that express them as reliable, if inherently imbalanced, historical evidence.⁴ The essays of L’Odeur du sang et des roses: Relire Johan Huizinga aujourd’hui (2019), edited by Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, demonstrate Huizinga’s continued relevance for a variety of disciplines.⁵

And yet, Huizinga’s study has always been controversial. In the first years after publication, Herfsttij met with a cool reception, at least among Dutch historians, and, although its popularity began to ascend with its translation into German and English in 1924 and French in 1932, it was long criticized, especially by positivist historians.⁶ Some of the essays of Rereading Huizinga detail the reasons for ambivalence: Huizinga’s disregard for scholarly protocols; neglect of archival sources; idiosyncratic and highly selective use of art historical sources; total lack of interest in urban life; and omission of commerce.⁷ But one of the most problematic aspects of Autumntide is its assumption that late medieval France and Burgundian Low Countries were societies in decline. Huizinga did not invent this narrative of degeneration. Still, as the most widely read treatment of the late medieval period on earth, his narrative of a formerly glorious culture on its deathbed reinforced a scholarly trend that can be traced from the mid-nineteenth century.⁸ Or at least this is true for his narrative of late medieval France. Interesting to note, the late medieval Burgundian Low Countries have never been regarded as waning, despite Huizinga’s inclusion of the region in Herfsttij. We will return to this point.

The essays of this volume are indebted to Huizinga’s approach to the late Middle Ages, specifically his attention to what he calls the period’s life and thought forms (levens- en gedachtenvormen). Each essay focuses on a particular form or set of forms characteristic of late medieval France. However, in the spirit of continued engagement with Huizinga’s study, a process undertaken not least by the historian himself as he oversaw translations and editions of his work, we propose certain correctives to his idea of form, which was, as we will see, inextricably linked to his notion of a declining Middle Ages.

Forms of Life and Thought and the Narrative of Decline

Huizinga never defined exactly what he meant when speaking of forms of life and thought. However, it is clear from a variety of his printed reflections that he was thinking of something like the collective attitudes of a society as revealed in its cultural productions—by which he meant not only material objects, but also physical movements like ritual, dance, and social interactions, as well as concepts expressed in written documents—and that he felt it is the cultural historian’s task is to analyze these forms in the aggregate for a particular period. As he famously puts it in The Task of Cultural History, only when the scholar turns to determining the patterns of life, art, and thought taken all together can there actually be a question of cultural history.⁹

As for the connection between his idea of form and his narrative of decline, in describing how historians approach form in his preface to the first Dutch edition of Herftsttij, Huizinga stresses the need to get close to the essential content that lay in those forms (den wezenlijken inhoud te benaderen, die in die vormen heeft gerust).¹⁰ It is clear that he conceives of form and meaning as separable, as exterior signifier and interior signified. It follows from this construction that as a society’s intellectual life develops in new directions over time, previously adequate cultural forms might become obsolete. Huizinga provides an example of such a mismatch in his discussion of late medieval funeral pomp. But, first, we note Huizinga’s assumption that late medieval emotions needed to be restrained in firm forms of expression: The passionate and violent spirit—hard as well as tear-filled, always vacillating between black despair at the world and sheer delight in its vibrant beauty—could not do without the strictest of life-forms (strengste vormen van het leven). It was necessary to contain the emotions in a fixed framework of accepted forms (een vast raam van geijkte vormen); in this way society achieved order, at least as a rule.¹¹ By the late fifteenth century, he explains, the forms of mourning that developed to control grief had lost their original meaning. Offshoots of primitive beliefs and ceremonial worship had been reduced to spectacle, real life had been transposed into the sphere of drama.¹² And yet, he explains later in the book, such drama cannot accurately be regarded as art, because, at that moment, art was still absorbed by life (de kunst gaat in dien tijd nog op in het leven); it did not exist as a separate category.¹³ Funeral pomp had become mere drama, but drama enacted in real life.

Individual forms—in this case, funeral pomp—could become obsolete. But this was not all. When outdated life and thought forms accumulated, they could hinder a society’s intellectual and emotional progress. In such a situation, forms on a large scale might suddenly undergo a transformation. Huizinga envisioned the late Middle Ages yielding to the Renaissance in just this way. In the essay My Path to History, he explains that, in reflecting on the paintings of the Van Eycks, he experienced the epiphany that the late Middle Ages represented an absolute terminus, a period whose forms were on the verge of a total overhaul. He writes that, on a Sunday walk along the Damsterdiep, the thought suddenly struck me that the late Middle Ages were not so much a prelude to the future as an epoch of fading and decay. This thought, if indeed it may be called a thought, hinged chiefly on the art of the brothers Van Eyck and their contemporaries, in all of whom I had been keenly interested for some time. It was just becoming fashionable, following Gourajod, Fierens-Gevaert and Karl Voll, to speak of the Old Dutch Masters as initiators of a Northern Renaissance.¹⁴ My ideas were radically different, he concludes.

The insight led him to write Autumntide, where the Van Eycks’ art represents the epitome of late medieval form. Elaborating his argument, he contends that by the late fifteenth century, form threatens to overrun content and prevents it from rejuvenating: In the art of the Van Eycks, the content is still wholly medieval. It does not express new thoughts. It is an extreme, an end point. The medieval system of concepts had been fully built up to heaven; all that could be added was some colour and embellishment.¹⁵ This vision of late medieval stultification has been influential, even among those who might not consciously accept the premise of cultural decline. Autumntide is the most powerful book ever written about the period, writes Howard Kaminsky, noting that its imagery of a late-medieval ‘autumn,’ as [Huizinga] originally put it, or of the ‘waning’ rendered in his remarkably fortunate English translation—‘the soul of the declining Middle Ages,’ ‘the extreme excitability of the medieval soul,’ ‘a somber melancholy weighs on people’s souls,’ ‘the extreme saturation of the religious atmosphere’—conjures up specters of senescence, decadence, and termination that have sometimes been debunked, but survive nevertheless to haunt the thinking even of those who reject them.¹⁶ On the one hand, the attention that Huizinga gave to life and thought forms has brought him recognition as the forefather of cultural history, and the essays in this collection recognize his role as pioneer in the field. But, on the other hand, his conception of form led him to a conclusion that few are willing to endorse today. The essays in this collection work with a slightly different conception of form, one that prioritizes networks of forms rather than the presumed relationship between form and content. This revision leads in turn to a vision of the relationship between the late Middle Ages and Renaissance different from Huizinga’s. To lay the groundwork for discussing this different idea of form and its advantages, we turn to an examination of the long-lasting effects of the narrative of decline, which in many ways remains tacitly in place despite widespread challenges.

Effects of the Narrative of Decline

Although Huizinga’s study focused on France and Burgundy, as we have noted, the characterization of a society on the wane has never much affected the historiography on the fifteenth-century Burgundian Low Countries.¹⁷ One reason for this may be that fifteenth-century France lacked historiographers of the caliber of their Burgundian counterparts.¹⁸ But perhaps more significant is the way in which Burgundy’s chronology is imagined. For fifteenth-century Burgundy, absorbed into the French kingdom and the Habsburg Empire after Charles the Bold’s death in 1477, there is no later glorious Burgundian Renaissance against which it can be positioned as the unfavorable half of a dialectic within a narrative of cultural progression. Huizinga notwithstanding, fifteenth-century Burgundy is typically regarded as a cultural apex. Late medieval France, however, has long been constructed in opposition to the Renaissance. The result has been a lingering view of late medieval France as a transitional period which connects the fifteenth with the sixteenth century,¹⁹ along with the assumption that except for a few big names and a few curiosities or important works, those years form a hole between the riches of the Middle Ages and the splendors of the Renaissance.²⁰

For this reason, although some of the essays here treat Burgundian writers, this volume focuses primarily on late medieval France. True, one would have to search long and hard to find a recent academic describing late medieval France as a declining society. As Cynthia Brown writes in her chapter in this volume, already in the 1960s, a group of scholars including Daniel Poirion and Franco Simone had laid the groundwork for a new period in French studies, "the late medieval period encompassing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the previously misunderstood and even maligned Moyen Age tardif." And yet, despite the excellent research that scholars of fifteenth-century France have produced on individual figures, events, authors, and works of the period,²¹ the practical reality is that in the English-speaking academic world, historians and literary historians have long behaved in concrete ways as if the late French Middle Ages was a period of little interest. Specialists in history note how relatively little English-language scholarship has been devoted to the Armagnac-Burgundian feud, the Praguerie, the War of the Public Weal, the Mad War, or to fifteenth-century clientèles. To date there are no major English-language biographies of Charles V, VI, VIII, or Louis XII. History reboots with the Renaissance. François I, subject of several biographies in English, is proclaimed the maker of modern France, arguably the most significant king that France ever had, and the king who presided over the transformation of France into a fully developed state, as if he appeared out of nowhere.²² Literary historians point out that the lack of easily accessible modern editions makes most works of the late fifteenth century impossible to study in university courses, which means that survey courses of French literature do not introduce students to literature of the period.

The High French Middle Ages and Renaissance have identities. In contrast, beyond the impression scholars have created of the French fifteenth century as one of decline or placeholding, the period has no real identity of its own; as any specialist in late medieval France knows, the jobs in the English-speaking world advertised for medieval and Renaissance go overwhelmingly to Renaissance specialists rather than to the late medievalists who are arguably in a better position to work across the two periods.

To be sure, in university curricula the entire French Middle Ages is flattened into a period of immobility, an era without contour and interest, an era of the eternal standstill,²³ propping up the notion of the Renaissance. Recent scholarship in a variety of areas from studies of novelty and of sexualities to critical race theory demonstrates again and again the persistence of what Geraldine Heng has recently referred to as "the grand récit of Western temporality" in which:

modernity is positioned simultaneously as a spectacular conclusion and a beginning: a teleological culmination that emerges from the ooze of a murkily long chronology by means of a temporal rupture—a big bang, if we like—that issues in a new historical instant. The material reality and expressive vocabulary of rupture is vouched for by symbolic phenomena of a highly dramatic kind—a Scientific Revolution, discoveries of race, the formation of nations, etc.—which signal the arrival of modern time. Medieval time, on the wrong side of rupture, is thus shunted aside as the detritus of a pre-Symbolic era falling outside the signifying systems issued by modernity, and reduced to the role of a historical trace undergirding the recitation of modernity’s arrival.²⁴

Still, certain pre-Renaissance periods attract more interest than others. Within the domain of French cultural history, the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the appearance of the Capetians (or, for literary historians, the troubadours) are little known. With the appearance of Hugh Capet and Guillaume IX, however, certain events begin to attract more interest: the second medieval Renaissance (the first being the Carolingian Renaissance); medieval French romances and courtly love; the Crusades and the reign of Louis IX; the Black Death.

But, as for late medieval France, when regarded as part of a long Middle Ages and even as part of a French Middle Ages running from the eleventh century to the Renaissance, the period becomes a flattening within a flattening, a space of historical changeover, not interesting on its own. And, to take the argument further, even within the already-flattened fifteenth century, the latter two-thirds of the French fifteenth century are generally regarded as particularly uninspiring. The time of Charles VII arouses little interest, and attitudes toward the king himself are generally tepid, despite his connection to the always popular Joan of Arc. Louis XI, Charles VIII, or Louis XII barely register among the better-known kings of France, and the literature of their period is little studied. It is not as if no one has noticed the riches of late medieval French culture. Still, relative to the world on the other side of the turn of the sixteenth century, this world remains obscure, undoubtedly a perception related to the common way of constructing the periods of French history.

Forms and Periodization

For Huizinga, forms are separable from content or the ideas that they manifest. In his eyes, the aggregate of forms defining late medieval France became incapable of supporting further development, leading to a discarding of such obsolete forms in favor of a whole new set. One of the many effects of the linguistic turn in historiography, however, has been the tendency today to conceive of forms and content or meaning as mutually and inextricably linked. An idea always already exists as a form, signifier and signified—together they form an entity that acquires meaning as part of an entire system. Recent studies of the emotions offer an example. In contrast with Huizinga’s vision of passions as entities clothed in outward expressions that may or may not fit, recent historians of the emotions assume a reciprocal effect: feelings are produced as much as they are modulated by emotives and social practices. And, like words in a language, emotions become meaningful as part of larger systems.²⁵

So conceived, forms do not become inadequate and fade out, certainly not all at once, replaced by a Renaissance of new ones, but come and go in staggered chronologies, enter into new combinations, mutate, shift in significance, and mix with other forms in various networks or systems. Transformations occur, but they are limited to particular areas. Applying this perspective frees late medieval France from its traditional position of inferiority and suggests two approaches to studying its cultural forms. They can be examined with no regard for the traditional chronological cutoff that limits so much research. Certain narratives will continue to be recounted with reference to the traditional Renaissance: the French language, for example, changed dramatically during the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century. However, other forms saw no particular rupture at that time. Early printed works straddle the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and literary debates passing through the sixteenth, and into the seventeenth, century required no reference to the Renaissance. Similarly, tracing the development of the author figure shows that interest in the author was well developed by the fourteenth century, and that, although shifts occurred along the way, the Renaissance did not see a major shift in this domain. Alternatively, the late medieval period can be cordoned off and spotlighted, not once and for all, but provisionally, as a set of dispositifs, or networks, of forms that coexisted at that moment. This is the approach that this volume takes.

A focus away from a cataclysmic Renaissance and toward dynamic networks of forms overlapping in time and space dovetails with challenges to traditional periodization over the past few decades. Jacques Le Goff, famously wondering whether we must divide history into periods, offered a schema of a long Middle Ages stretching into the mid-eighteenth century punctuated by numerous renaissances of greater or lesser importance.²⁶ Le Goff suggested that ninth-, eleventh-, and sixteenth-century Renaissances remain meaningful, but only partially, for certain features. A sixteenth-century Renaissance could be recognized for some phenomena, but not as a major shift, with points of interest scattered along either end of the period, its beginning and ending staggered.²⁷ Similarly, Kaminsky has suggested thinking in terms of syncopation: as soon as one stops imagining a ‘high’ medievality that the Late Middle Ages declined from or negated and begins to imagine an alternative construction of continuity rather than contradiction between the centuries in question, one readily imagines the ‘closing the frontier’ not as the end of expansion but as the moment within the rhythm of the whole.²⁸ Heng proposes thinking of history as a field of dynamic oscillations between ruptures and reinscriptions, or historical time as a matrix in which overlapping repetitions-with-change can occur, or an understanding that historical events may result from the action of multiple temporalities that are enfolded and coextant within a particular historical moment.²⁹

Thinking in terms of networks of forms harmonizes with conceptualizing the medieval not as the origin, or, conversely, as the dark Other, of the contemporary, but as a participant, or discussant, in the contemporary. Sylvain Piron has summoned the entire history of the Western world to explain our inability to confront the ecological disaster looming before us due to climate change, which history warns us against in no uncertain terms when we regard it in its long entirety. Soothed by myths of the economy that, containing the residue of religious certainty, reassure us that all will turn out in the end, we have failed to see the coming catastrophe, as we view history in familiar and easily digestible periods that disguise continuity.³⁰

In the introduction to their collection Making the Medieval Relevant, editors Chris Jones, Conor Kostick, and Klaus Oschema make the case for heightening our understanding of significant modern social and scientific questions by focusing on what actually happened during the Middle Ages (as opposed to studying medievalisms).³¹ In their chapter Pacific Perspectives: Why Study Europe’s Middle Ages in Aotearoa New Zealand? Chris Jones and Madi Williams suggest that medieval history courses should be taught with a focus on the ‘history of values,’ rather than adopting a traditional curriculum driven by historiographical debates. Confronting a society whose values are so different from those of the modern university—monetization, innovation, competition—prepares students to deepen the engagement with biculturalism.³² Although their chapter targets university programs in New Zealand that have recently committed to incorporating Maori values, such an approach could be fruitfully adopted in any university.

Still more recently, Zrinka Stahuljak has proposed an approach compatible with that of Jones and Williams but which functions on a global scale: littérature connectée (connected literature). Stahuljak’s method eschews diachronic emphasis on individual works and literary genres to focus on encounters across time and space between asynchronic dispositifs or networks of discourses, in this case, medieval and contemporary, with the aim of bringing to light perspectives that otherwise remain hidden on both sides. Specifically, the method renders visible dans le present ce qui n’est jamais advenu dans le passé, il met au monde par apposition dans le présent quelque chose du présent pour la première fois. Le contemporain, en tant que surgissement pour la première fois—et non resurgissement—des questions posées par les époques précédentes, qui restaient invisibles jusqu’au surgissement de l’écart dans l’horizon.³³ (in the present what never happened in the past; it establishes in the present something of the present for the first time. The contemporary, as the appearance for the first time—not the reappearance—of questions posed by previous eras that remained invisible until a gap appeared in the horizon.)

Stahuljak developed the approach of littérature connectée in the context of recent attempts to decenter the world of literature from Europe and North America, attempts that have been critiqued for perpetuating Orientalism in spite of themselves, because the very notion that a nation’s soul, its privileged means of expression, resides in a distinct literary tradition that can be sold on the open market to Western reading publics is itself an invention of the West.³⁴ Stahuljak suggests that bringing what she calls bibliothèque mondes, library worlds or clusters, of the Middle Ages—which were genuinely decentered because the West had not yet exported its values, literary and otherwise, to the rest of the world—into encounters with World Literature could help to realize the latter’s potential to include epistemologies not only from all parts but from all periods of the world.³⁵

Returning to late medieval France, certain networks of forms of that period reveal themselves to be productive for thinking about modern questions. If the Crusades can be put in dialogue with modern discourse about Christianity and Islam to activate silent voices both in the past and the present, and if the Religious Wars and the Dreyfus Affair enter easily into conversation with our own polarized societies, fifteenth-century French dispositifs make visible in contemporary cultures features characteristic of periods that see a sudden uptake in new technologies and information: particularly sharp cultural heteroglossia and evidence of bricolage and flux, resistance, and provisional or sometimes permanent shifts in meaning. Encounters with late medieval French dispositifs relativize some of the apprehension with which many confront cultural shifts that seem to be accelerating out of control, particularly those having to do with how we relate to one another (in person or electronically), how we receive and transmit information, how we form and articulate gender identities, and how we imagine our communities.

Fifteenth-Century Forms

The following essays do not in themselves create a littérature connectée. However, they hope to offer some ideas for such a project by drawing attention to the complexity of some of the period’s cultural forms. Rather than regarding the period’s forms as insufficient to carry new thoughts, the essays focus on how they work or metamorphose in different environments, what new purposes they serve, and what new combinations of thought, new hybrids, they facilitate.

The first three essays all examine a feature of late medieval life which, via the work of Huizinga and other proponents of the narrative of decline, has been treated as evidence of the period’s excess or degeneration. In chapter 1, Color Values, Or Life with Grey, Andrea Tarnowski takes Huizinga’s vivid descriptions of the magnificent, and sometimes lurid, colors of late medieval France as a point of departure. Huizinga brings the fifteenth century to life by detailing the variegated hues of daily existence. Colors also serve a metaphorical purpose in his work, emphasizing the period’s immoderate highs and lows, its oscillation between black despair and the bonte schoonheid (colorful beauty) of revelry and joy.³⁶ But he writes almost nothing about grey, which became very popular during this period. Tarnowski draws attention to this color, showing that in contrast with the modern tendency to see it as depressing, in late medieval France it came to signal wealth, care, elegance, and hope. The impression of manic energy that Huizinga’s color descriptions create is tempered by a focus on the soothing greys of the period.

Stephen G. Nichols, in chapter 2, Jean de Meun and Visual Eroticism in Fifteenth-Century Culture, explores forms of the erotic that Huizinga perceived as binaries to reveal more complexity than the Dutch historian admitted. As is the case with so many late medieval French cultural forms, erotic love literature of the period has often been regarded as inferior to works of the High Middle Ages, in this case as dully conventional, overwrought, and bursting with meaningless decoration, or just plain obscene. For Huizinga, the period’s aesthetic aspirations to a complex eroticism and its blatant licentiousness represented opposing urges or forces. Nichols, however, shows that Huizinga missed the emergence of a new erotic ecology born of the tension between overt and covert eroticism. The genuine particularity of this fifteenth-century eroticism is that it depends on the interchange between the two. The new ecology is particularly striking in the interaction between certain manuscript texts and the images that illustrate them, a domain that Huizinga ignores almost entirely.

In chapter 3, Jean Chartier and the End of the Historical Tradition at Saint-Denis, Derek Whaley reexamines the final installment of the Grandes chroniques de France. Huizinga made much use of chronicles as sources but paid them little heed as a literary form. The Grandes chroniques, the massive set of chronicles associated with the abbey of Saint-Denis, is recognized as a shining example of this form. However, the continuation of Jean Chartier (d. ca. 1464), with which the chronicle concludes, has been deplored by historians as derivative, lacking in style, and dull if accurate. One even posits that had Chartier been a more inspired writer, modern attitudes toward Charles VII’s reign would today be more enthusiastic. But, as Whaley explains, this final continuation represents Chartier’s strategic attempt to recoup the abbey’s prestige by adopting the old-fashioned style of the earlier chronicle tradition rather than following newer historiographical trends. Chartier did not work with a form whose meaning was no longer relevant; rather, he deployed the form precisely because of its meaning within a particular social context.

The next four chapters focus on aspects of literary forms of the period to highlight innovations, some of which stuck, others of which have vanished. A new fascination for the author figure is visible in some fifteenth-century manuscripts. In chapter 4, ‘Present en sa personne’: Identity and Celebrity in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Burgundian Literature, Helen Swift examines some texts and paratexts that engage in interesting ways with their authors: Jean de Meun, Alain Chartier’s fictitious Belle Dame sans mercy, and François Villon. Drawing on recent persona studies, an approach developed by scholars for studying modern celebrity culture, Swift shows to what extent and with what pleasure late medieval publics elaborated on certain author figures. Her point is not to argue for the invention of celebrity in the late fifteenth century; rather, she makes the medieval contemporary by demonstrating that the useful anachronism of persona studies illuminates both what does and does not match up on the medieval and modern ends, with the ultimate goal of valorizing the specificity of late medieval French promotional poetics and concepts of identity.

If readers’ interest in authors has remained steady over the centuries, the model of literary production as collaborative was eventually displaced by that of the one-author-of-a-standardized-script (although this monolithic model may be changing under the influence of new technologies of reading). But things could have been otherwise, as Anneliese Pollack Renck shows in chapter 5, Rethinking Patronage in Late Medieval France: Networks of Influence in Manuscript Production and Reception. To grasp the nature of fifteenth-century manuscript collaboration we need to understand patronage practices of the period. Scholars have often failed to appreciate the richness of such practices, Renck explains, by applying models of patronage particular to earlier periods. These earlier models do not capture the complex reality of the late medieval literary culture and manuscript production, where the author or translator, dedicatee, patron, and illustrator all contributed to create highly individualized versions of particular