PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

Soon after its establishment, printing spread throughout France. Even before the turn
of the century, presses had been established in more than thirty locations in and out of
the country. 278 The region of Brittany (which became part of the French kingdom in
1532), Boaistuau’s birthplace, was among them. The new art had grown, so that by
the end of the fifteenth century there had been at least five different printing
establishments: in Rennes in 1484, in Loudéac in 1485, in Nantes in 1488, in Dol-de-
Bretagne in 1490, and in Treguier in 1499. 279 However, the French book industry
grew mainly because of the production of two great print centres, Paris and Lyon,
while cities located in the provinces such as Troyes and Rouen remained on the
periphery. Indeed, many of them did not survive the crisis which followed the initial
boom. 280
Paris had already established a name for itself as a well-organised production and
distribution centre long before the advent of print, which enabled a more placid
transition from the reproduction of manuscripts by hand to the new reality of
processing and publishing texts, using a printing press. Additional helpful factors
were the fact that the city was the capital of a large kingdom and permanent home of
Parliament and a renowned university. Although not as populous or commercially
278 Pettegree, A., ‘Centre and periphery in the European book world’, p. 109.
279 Werdet, E., Histoire du livre en France (Paris, new ed. 1971), Part 4, pp. 231-234. Also see La
Société des bibliophiles Bretons, L’imprimerie en Bretagne au XVe siècle (Genève, repr., 1973), which
noted Les Lunettes des princes as the first book ever printed in Nantes in 1493 by Etienne Larcher. For
a more complete and up-to-day survey see Walsby, M., Books and Book Culture in the First Age of
Print: Brittany, 1484-1600 (Leiden, 2009).
280 This situation would change after the rise of Protestantism in France. The ban on the publication of
vernacular Bibles in Paris resulted in the flourishing of important centres outside France, like Antwerp,
Neuchâtel and later Geneva, where many French editions were printed. After 1559 and the death of
Henry II, additional centres were also established in Normandy, Orleans, Lyon, and later La Rochelle.
This provincial print culture was often sponsored by local figures. For more see Pettegree, A., Nelles,
P. N., Conner, P. (eds), The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book (Aldershot, 2001); Racaut, L.,
Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion
(Aldershot, 2002).
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