MS. D'Orville 141

Printed from this (the unique) manuscript by J. Porcher, Paris, 1962, and closely related to the surviving illustrations in Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. lat. 54. The text has been described as 'the fullest and most detailed written programme to survive' of instructions for an illuminator (J. J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work (1992), 57), but in the fullest recent analysis Anne van Buren has argued that the earlier text is descriptive - describing the illustrations that already existed in the Geneva MS. at the time of Lebègue's writing - with only the later entries (corresponding to fols. 39v onwards of the Geneva manuscript) being prescriptive (A. van Buren with R. Wieck, Illuminating fashion: dress in the art of medieval France and the Netherlands, 1325-1515 (2011), 35 nn. 120-1); a fuller analysis is in Anne D. Hedeman, Visual Translation: Illuminated Manuscripts and the First French Humanists (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2022).