Boccaccio's Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes : Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript

College Art Association in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, first edition, 1996. Cloth, 4to, 29 cm,. x, 139 pp, 4 colour plates and 106 black-and-white ills. From the blurb - "The first surviving illuminated manuscript of the French translation of Boccaccio's De mulieribus Claris - known as the Cleres femmes (now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris), is the subject of this book. The manuscript was commissioned by a Parisian merchant, Jacques Raponde, as a New Year's gift for the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold. This innovative aspect of the commission, where a merchant rather than a prince acted as the patron of the manuscript, provides the subject for the first part of Buettner's study. In addition to sketching the Valois rulers practice of collecting illuminated manuscripts and to tracing the reasons for the successful reception of Boccaccio's work in this courtly milieu, the author delineates the role of merchants in Parisian artistic production around 1400. After considering the manuscript as a commercial and cultural object, the book then turns to an examination of the iconography of the 109 miniatures of the Cleres femmes. Rather than treating them as independent units, Buettner argues that the miniatures form a cycle - a coherent pictorial structure linked to the literary genre known as "estate literature," in which similar activities and professions are woven into subcycles. Religious practices, queenship, hunting, manual crafts, agricultural occupations. and military, legal, intellectual, and artistic activities compose the main socio-professional categories of the Cleres femmes. Their groundbreaking visualizations, which translate the biographies of famous women of the ancient past into late medieval cultural parameters, are especially remarkable because women are here consistently presented as the subjects rather than the objects of history. Buettner pays careful attention to the degrees of amalgamation between images and text as well as images and social practices and especially to the provocative representations that depict women engaged in occupations from which they were effectively barred in late medieval France. Near Fine in a dustwrapper with some scratches to the rear panel.