ABSTRACT
Parisian printers and publishers recognized the market strength of Les lunettes des princes by the Breton poet Jean Meschinot and started to churn out editions, beginning in the 1490s, competing with one another for the buyer’s attention. The chapter examines the mise en livre to reveal market adaptation and product differentiation. What can the book’s materiality tell us about book production and commercial constraints as well as readers’ literary demands and consumption? By extending bibliographic, paratextual, and visual analysis, this study will probe for the first time market reception and subsequent publishing decisions of this popular work as the text was reedited, redesigned, and remarketed. When its novelty declined, publishers sought to cut production expenses by reducing the quantity of paper required and by eliminating illustrations. Meschinot fell from popular favor, together with other late medieval poets, as writers innovated from Italian and classical verse forms. The list of manuscripts and editions appended to the chapter is an index of commercial zeal and popular reception of Meschinot’s Les lunettes des princes.
