The Inventory of Perrenot and Guillemote Vinsant

The inventory of the goods of Perrenot and Guillemote Vinsant, drawn up in Dijon on February 28, 1420, was not carried out in situ. Instead, the property was removed from the home occupied by the couple at the time of death and “safeguarded” in several locations. The inventory lists the objects that the deceased owned, but these objects are presented out of context. Normally, at least where inventories from Dijon are concerned, the objects described are placed in context. However, it is worth considering this context and what exactly it implies. In the inventory of the possessions of Hugote, wife of Jehan Perreaul, drawn up on January 21, 1427, for example, a room is visited by the scribe and the witnesses; the objects it contains are carefully described, without, on reading, any difference in treatment being noticed with the objects present in the other rooms or the other inventories of the same corpus. Yet, explains the scribe, it is a room “in which one can see nothing." If the room is dark, if you can't see anything in it, what exactly could the scribe and the witnesses have seen? What did they actually see? One suspects that, by candlelight, one does not see in quite the same way as in broad daylight.

Reflecting on this possibility of seeing, or of its impossibility, a question arises: are objects usually really all in context, in their chests and cupboards or, for example, have they been taken out of their storage space to be made more accessible and visible to the scribe? A few remarks, such as in the inventory of the property of Jehan Le Bonne, compiled on April 1409, in the estate of Jehannote, widow of Perrenot Matherot, compiled on August 1412 or even in that of Pierre Le Mareschal, compiled on March 1414, provide information and suggest that the team looked at what was in a chest and put the inventoried objects back in the chest in question. But it is difficult to conclude anything from this alone: had the objects been taken out before and then put away as they went along? Were they taken out at the time and put away immediately? In the corpus of post-mortem inventories of the city of Dijon, however voluminous, these mentions concerning the concrete reality of the procedure are few and far between.✱ We would like to invite DALME readers and users to send us anything that could provide additional information on the contextualization of objects at the time of their inventory.

Guilhem FERRAND (guilhem.ferrand0154@orange.fr)
Jean-Pierre GARCIA