Quentin Poulet (
fl.
''Floruit'' ( ; usually abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for 'flourished') denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indic ...
1477–1506) was a
Burgundian Catholic priest, known as a scribe, illuminator, and librarian, from
Lille
Lille (, ; ; ; ; ) is a city in the northern part of France, within French Flanders. Positioned along the Deûle river, near France's border with Belgium, it is the capital of the Hauts-de-France Regions of France, region, the Prefectures in F ...
.
[Michael Van Cleave Alexander, ''The First of the Tudors: a study of Henry VII and his reign'' (1981), p. 160]
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Between 1492 and at least 1506, when he disappears from the historical record, he was the first recorded librarian of the
Old Royal Library of England, and probably "an arbiter of continental taste for the English royal court".
Life
He enrolled as an apprentice in the Confraternity of St John the Evangelist in 1477, in
Bruges
Bruges ( , ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders, in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is in the northwest of the country, and is the sixth most populous city in the country.
The area of the whole city amoun ...
. It was in Bruges that he learned his craft as book artist.
[Arn, p. 162]
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The confraternity was mainly for artists, leading several scholars to think Poulet trained as an illuminator, but other book trades were also represented, and no miniatures have ever been attributed to him.
[Kren & McKendrick, p. 520]
He was appointed librarian by
Henry VII of England
Henry VII (28 January 1457 – 21 April 1509), also known as Henry Tudor, was King of England and Lord of Ireland from his seizure of the crown on 22 August 1485 until his death in 1509. He was the first monarch of the House of Tudor.
Henr ...
in 1492, with other duties including French Secretary.
[ As keeper of the king's library at ]Sheen Palace
Richmond Palace was a Tudor royal residence on the River Thames in England which stood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Situated in what was then rural Surrey, it lay upstream and on the opposite bank from the Palace of Westminste ...
(soon after renamed Richmond Palace), he selected French manuscripts as well as printed books by Antoine Vérard.[Deanne Williams, ''The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare'' (2004), p. 125]
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Poulet worked in parallel with Peter Actoris, Stationer to the King, who managed the importations.
Poulet is recorded in 1506, sent to Calais
Calais ( , , traditionally , ) is a French port city in the Pas-de-Calais department, of which it is a subprefecture. Calais is the largest city in Pas-de-Calais. The population of the city proper is 67,544; that of the urban area is 144,6 ...
for the king on book business.[ He was succeeded by William (Guillaume) Faques,][ or " Giles Duwes".]
Works
Poulet introduced into the court of Henry VII the Burgundian mirror for princes ''L'enseignement de vraie noblesse''; the work was already old, and the Yorkist Warwick the Kingmaker had had a copy made in Bruges some thirty years earlier. The manuscript, for which Henry paid Poulet the large amount of £23 plus 10 marks
Marks may refer to:
Business
* Mark's, a Canadian retail chain
* Marks & Spencer, a British retail chain
* Collective trade marks
A collective trademark, collective trade mark, or collective mark is a trademark owned by an organization (such ...
on 26 July 1497, was put together in a transcription of high quality by Poulet, and had some adjustments to the text hinting at its application to Henry's problems with low-born pretenders to the throne.[Kren & McKendrick, pp. 403–404] Entitled ''Imaginacion de vraye noblesse'', it employed the '' lettre bastarde'' script commonly used in Flanders, and only later coming into use in England. The work itself was given an English version within a couple of years, by John Skelton. The original author has traditionally been given as Guillebert de Lannoy, but it is now argued that the work was by his brother Hugues de Lannoy. In either case, the work has strong associations with Poulet's home city of Lille. The manuscript, now British Library Royal MS 19 C viii, was once seen, together with the Charles d'Orléans MS Royal 16 F ii below, as entirely the product of a workshop of immigrant specialists headed by Poulet at Sheen, and so "key early evidence of the Tudors' revival of English court culture". However it is now thought that Poulet scribed the pages at Sheen – the colophon is dated 30 June 1496 – but then sent them to one of the best Bruges workshops to be decorated, using his contacts there. A similar conclusion is less firm in the cases of some of the miniatures in the Orléans manuscript, one of which appears to depict London accurately.Charles, Duke of Orléans
Charles of Orléans (24 November 1394 – 5 January 1465) was Duke of Orléans from 1407, following the murder of his father, Louis I, Duke of Orléans. He was also Duke of Valois, Count of Beaumont-sur-Oise and of Blois, Lord of Coucy, ...
, long held prisoner in England, at least according to the usual account, in which it was prepared for presentation to Arthur, Prince of Wales
Arthur, Prince of Wales (19/20 September 1486 – 2 April 1502), was the eldest son of King Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York, and an older brother to the future King Henry VIII. He was Duke of Cornwall from birth, and he was crea ...
; it has been suggested that the editor selected from the poems those that would recommend marriage to the prince. It was given to Prince Arthur in 1501, and passed into the Royal Library, being held at Richmond. However Janet Backhouse has suggested that the manuscript was originally a product of the reign of Edward IV
Edward IV (28 April 1442 – 9 April 1483) was King of England from 4 March 1461 to 3 October 1470, then again from 11 April 1471 until his death in 1483. He was a central figure in the Wars of the Roses, a series of civil wars in England ...
, with the decoration left incomplete on his death, and then with illuminations added around 1500, presumably under Poulet's supervision.[Kren & McKendrick, pp. 398–400]
References
*Arn, Mary-Jo (2000), ''Charles d'Orléans in England, 1415–1440'' (2000)
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*Kren, T. & McKendrick, S. (eds), ''Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe'', Getty Museum/Royal Academy of Arts, 2003,
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Poulet, Quentin
15th-century Roman Catholic priests
16th-century English Roman Catholic priests
Writers from Burgundy
Medieval European scribes