Research Projects

Idée de l'Estude d'un Honneste Homme

Judi Loach

This long term project has been leading towards the critical edition of a series of manuscripts recording a humanities course delivered to adult members of a Catholic devotional confraternity, set up in mid seventeenth-century Lyons for young "artisans", mainly skilled craftsmen and merchants in the retail sector. These included the city's architects and allied craftsmen, most obviously painters and sculptors or woodcarvers, masons, carpenters and cabinetmakers, but also engravers, printers and publisher-booksellers. Careful study of these texts in conjunction with contextual research in relevant libraries and archives across France and Italy reveals the level of education and literacy of these largely anonymous 'artisans of construction', who turn out to be more literate in Latin than in their native French. Although unexpected, this discovery is less surprising if one recalls that this was a period of unprecedented social mobility and therefore parents took advantage of free secondary education, which was delivered in Latin; moreover all members of confraternities, by definition, participated regularly in Catholic liturgy, wholly in Latin, and undertook private devotions, in Latin as well as French. Study of this course therefore puts forcibly into question previous assumptions as to the roles played by these less easily identifiable individuals not only in the creation of specific works of art but also in the more general development of art and architecture in mid and late seventeenth-century France, and thence a re-examining of the role of 'architect' in that social and cultural context.

The popularity of this course (demonstrated by a larger number of surviving manuscripts than for any other taught in confraternities) indicates the need felt by busy artisans to pursue further education, whilst its content (above all the first half, devoted to adult study techniques) suggests that they saw this partly as a means of improving their ability to interact with potential patrons, especially by preparing them to participate actively in social meetings. The course explicitly trains these artisans in educated conversation but also implicitly presupposes that the study prerequisite for this will be facilitated by wealthier members of confraternities loaning them books, thereby establishing relationships of trust and sharing between patrons and those working for them.

The second half of the course consists of a series of treatises on various genres of symbolic image (or of image-word amalgams) and their employment in festivals and decorative schemes. These were subjects in which any artisan needed to demonstrate competence in order to gain most of the academic, ecclesiastical or civic commissions of the day. Nevertheless, viewed from another perspective, these treatises are also important sources for enabling us to understand how theological concepts and devotional practices determined contemporary understanding of visual perception and the mental processing of images, and how this in turn impacted upon the commissioning and production of artworks. This is particularly important since the course's author, then a young Jesuit in training, was none other than Claude-François Menestrier, who would later become one of the leading European theorists on these genres. Moreover, his well-known published treatises all find their earliest versions in these unpublished manuscripts; half of these have only become available since I began the edition (indeed within the last few years), thus more than doubling the original extent of the project.

In order to obtain the interdisciplinary feedback necessary prior to publication, I have regularly presented sections of this research as papers, in international conferences or seminars organised by the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, the Association of Art Historians, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership and Publishing, in Warsaw, New York, Cambridge and Lyons, and by the universities of Cambridge, Glasgow, Bourgogne, Grenoble, Boston College and Harvard. Articles and chapters derived from this research have already appeared or are currently in press with academic journals and publishers in France, USA and Canada. Over the course of this project my research has benefited from study leave funded by the AHRB, and from fellowships awarded by the Stirling Maxwell Fund at Glasgow University, by the Jesuit Institute at Boston College and by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University. The international academic publisher Droz, of Geneva, is publishing the critical edition itself, the first volume of which is due out in 2006.