The Lancelot en prose of the Dunois Master
Research, Census and Virtual Reconstruction of a Dismembered Manuscript
The Organisation pour la Protection des Manuscrits Médiévaux (OProM), Paris, has launched a research project devoted to the reconstruction of a major illuminated manuscript of the Lancelot en prose, produced in Paris around 1440 and illustrated by the Dunois Master and his workshop. Conducted by Professor Carla Rossi and developed in editorial collaboration with Éditions Pigouchet, the project brings together provenance research, textual scholarship, codicology and the comparative study of medieval narrative cycles.
The original manuscript contained the Lancelot propre, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort le roi Artu. Its surviving cuttings preserve almost square miniatures, generally measuring approximately ten centimetres on each side, together with portions of the original French text on their versos. An early numbering system indicates that the manuscript once contained at least 152 miniatures and therefore possessed an exceptionally extensive programme of illustration.
Thirty-four miniatures from the codex were assembled in a red morocco album during the nineteenth century. The album later belonged to the Murat family and was acquired in 1960 by the London dealer and collector Wynne R. H. Jeudwine, who removed the cuttings from the binding and presented them individually in a selling exhibition held at the Alpine Club Gallery in London in 1962. Their subsequent circulation through auction houses, dealers and private collections produced a second dispersion. A further cutting, now at Boston College and apparently never included in the Murat album, demonstrates that the surviving corpus extends beyond Jeudwine’s group of thirty-four.
The point of departure for the reconstruction is provided by the three miniatures now preserved in the Museo Civico Amedeo Lia in La Spezia. Other cuttings are held by the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the Liberna Collection at the Draiflessen Collection in Mettingen. Many others remain in private collections or are known only through auction catalogues and booksellers’ records.
The project aims to establish a documented census of all known cuttings and to reconstruct their original narrative order. Each miniature is examined through the evidence provided by its old number, its number in Jeudwine’s 1962 catalogue, the surviving text on its verso, its position within the different sections of the Lancelot en prose and its relationship to the illustrations found in other witnesses of the cycle, particularly BnF, MSS français 110 and 111. Textual comparison with the editions of H. Oskar Sommer and Alexandre Micha will help identify the precise passages once surrounding each image and estimate the extent of the lost intervals.
The resulting virtual reconstruction is not intended to conceal the destruction of the manuscript by creating the illusion of an intact object. Its purpose is to make that destruction historically intelligible: to recover, as far as the surviving evidence permits, the original relationship between text and image, document the successive movements of the cuttings and restore the dispersed miniatures to their place within one of the most ambitious Arthurian manuscripts produced in fifteenth-century Paris.
The research will form the basis of a scholarly volume published by Éditions Pigouchet, initially in Italian and subsequently in an English edition for an international readership.