Download The History and Historiography of Guild Hierarchies in the Middle

The History and Historiography
of Guild Hierarchies
in the Middle Ages*
Étienne Anheim
“The operations which must necessarily be performed in order to pass from the
inspection of documents to the knowledge of the facts and evolutions of the past
are very numerous. Hence the necessity of the division and organization of labor
in history. It is requisite, on the one hand, that those specialists who occupy themselves with the search for documents, their restoration and preliminary classification, should co-ordinate their efforts, in order that the preparatory work of critical
scholarship may be finished as soon as possible, under the best conditions as to
accuracy and economy of labor. On the other hand, authors of partial syntheses (monographs) designed to serve as materials for more comprehensive syntheses ought to
agree among themselves to work on a common method, in order that the results
of each may be used by the others without preliminary investigations. Lastly,
workers of experience should be found to renounce personal research and devote
their whole time to the study of these partial syntheses, in order to combine them
scientifically in comprehensive works of historical construction.”1
It might be an instance of occupational bias, but on reading this passage from
Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s Introduction to the Study of History,
This article was translated from the French by Adrian Morfee and edited by Lucy
Garnier, Chloe Morgan, and Nicolas Barreyre.
* On Philippe Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti au Moyen Âge. Essai sur une production
bien ordonnée (Toulouse: CNRS/Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2009). I wish to thank
Valérie Theis for her comments and observations.
1. Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History [1898],
trans. George Godfrey Berry (New York: Henry Holt, 1904), 317-18.
685
Annales HSS, 68, no. 4 (October-December 2013): 685–696.
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a historian of the Middle Ages cannot help thinking of how urban guilds were
organized from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, since, in the words of Louis
Halphen, quoted by Pierre Bonnassie, “guilds were organized into a hierarchy of
apprentices, journeymen, and masters.”2 The interpretation put forward by Philippe
Bernardi in Maître, valet et apprenti au Moyen Âge—an examination of this tripartite
structure viewed as characteristic of medieval trades and guilds—encourages us to
take the parallel seriously,3 for rather than considering it as an anachronistic shortcut
or tongue-in-cheek reference, he uses it to help map out an original approach to
social history based on historiographical analysis. Bernardi’s study of the hierarchy
structuring medieval trades weaves several different strands of argument together.
Firstly, like works by Mathieu Arnoux and Catherine Verna, this book contributes
to the general reinterpretation of medieval working practice being conducted in
the intellectual footsteps of Jacques Le Goff and of Philippe Braunstein, who has
written its preface.4 Work, in this perspective, is not simply resituated within the
larger history of techniques, trades, and production; it is central to a way of conducting
social history, where it is one of the key means by which social identities and
hierarchies are constituted. By studying “work statuses,” that is, statuses as defined
for work,5 Bernardi moves away from an overly narrow focus on the legal aspect of
social status, in which production tends to go largely unanalyzed—or else is considered only in curtailed form, as in the model of the three orders, where forms of
production apply solely to “those who work” and so play only a minor role in social
ordering.6 But Bernardi’s examination of the tripartite hierarchy of guilds does not
just contribute to new ways of thinking about the history of medieval societies,
for in fact the originality of this book lies in the way it constructs its object of study,
work hierarchies. These are systematically addressed both in historical terms, on
the basis of the medieval archives, and in historiographical terms, by examining
686
2. Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti, 26.
3. Ibid., 54-55.
4. Mathieu Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe,
XIe-XIVe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012); Catherine Verna, “Entreprises des campagnes
médiévales. Innovation, travail et marché (XIIe siècle-vers 1550),” (Professorial thesis,
Université Paris I, 2008). See also: Philippe Bernardi, Bâtir au Moyen Âge, XIIIe-milieu
XVIe siècle (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011); Mathieu Arnoux and Pierre Monnet, eds.,
Le technicien dans la cité en Europe occidentale, 1250-1650 (Rome: École française de Rome,
2004); Philippe Braunstein, Travail et entreprise au Moyen Âge (Brussels: De Boeck, 2003);
Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Philippe Bernardi, Laurent Feller, and
Patrice Beck, eds., Rémunérer le travail au Moyen Âge. Pour une histoire sociale du salariat
(Paris: Picard, 2014). For an overview of guilds in the early modern and modern eras,
see Steven Kaplan and Philippe Minard, La France malade du corporatisme? (XVIIIeXXe siècles) (Paris: Belin, 2004).
5. For further discussion of this notion, in particular as used by Jean Andreau, see the
article by Nicolas Tran in this issue.
6. For recent discussion of how the question of the three orders as developed by Georges
Duby and Jacques Le Goff relates to the issue of growth and social hierarchies, see
Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs, which also provides an overview of the vast bibliography
about the orders.
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STRATIFICATIONS
the models according to which these archives have been interpreted since the
nineteenth century. The study of medieval work is thus accompanied by a study
of medievalists’ knowledge about work over the long term, sketching out a method
that may be applied to both history and the social sciences in general.
Moving Back Through the Literature
The first half of the book, entitled “An Idea of Hierarchy,” is devoted to the historiographical survey, and is itself divided into two distinct phases.7 The first of these
relates to the period from 1950 to 2000, and is based on a corpus of seventy-four
books, mainly essays and university textbooks in French (any comparative observations being dealt with primarily in the footnotes), presenting the way guilds were
organized in the late Middle Ages.8 Analysis of this corpus brings to light the existence of a veritable doxa, handed down since 1950 from one generation of historians to the next and based on two points. The first is the tenet, explicitly stated
in 80 percent of the works in the corpus, that the tripartite hierarchy of masterjourneyman-apprentice forms the institutional basis on which trades were organized
in the Middle Ages. The second is a periodization based on a dichotomy between
a prosperous and harmonious thirteenth century, when upward social mobility meant
it was generally possible to advance from one order to the next, and a fourteenth
century viewed as a time of crisis. According to this model it is in this later period
that guilds became closed institutions, with an opposition between, on the one hand,
masters and certain apprentices destined to become masters (often from the same
family) and, on the other, workers destined to remain in a position of dependence—a
situation seen as foreshadowing the subsequent constitution of antagonistic social
classes.
The degree of unanimity is most surprising, and the doctrine has survived
over the decades irrespective of methodological, political, and institutional differences between historians. Having identified this doxa, Bernardi introduces a first
shift in perspective by examining the process of generalization at work within
the community of historians that has resulted in such a widely shared and stable
doctrine—a paradigm in the sociological sense of the word as used by Thomas Kuhn.
A corollary of this generalization is the reductive approach taken towards the diversity
of medieval work, and Bernardi points out certain important characteristics that the
general literature about the topic often ignores or glosses over. First, medieval trades
were not confined to the towns, for the countryside was also home to numerous
craftsmen who fell outside the guild system. It is hard to assess the exact proportion
from the available documentation, but for those cases where it is possible to provide
regional estimates the figure can be put at around 10 percent of the population.9
7. Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti, 22-83.
8. For the presentation of the corpus see ibid., 147-56.
9. Ibid., 28-29, where Bernardi provides the available estimates. According to Robert
Fossier the figure stood at 13 percent in Picardy, whereas Alain Belmont puts the figure
for the Dauphiné at 10-15 percent, occasionally rising as high as 40 percent.
687
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While these rural trades have recently attracted the attention of researchers,10 they
still play only a marginal role in synthetic accounts of the Middle Ages. And yet,
bearing in mind that in the late Middle Ages the urban population rarely exceeded
10 percent of the total population, rural trades probably exceeded urban trades in
demographic terms, and perhaps also in terms of their total production—even
though what they produced (when not integrated into urban supply chains) was
probably of lesser quality and only sold locally.
Bernardi then goes on to point out that numerous urban activities were not
organized into guilds, and that there was great variety depending upon the type
of activity and the geographical area. There was thus nothing systematic or natural
about the existence of trade charters, trades structured around binding oaths, or the
organization into guilds more generally. This provides Bernardi with the occasion
to raise what strikes him as the key issue for medieval craft work (to which he returns
at the end of his book), namely the problem of “free” work—in other words, work
carried out irrespective of personal status and falling outside any guild or trade
regulations. It would appear that even in towns the majority of work was in fact
free, yet it rarely shows up in the historiographical literature except in very specific
cases such as major construction projects, which even though they largely fell outside
of the regulatory framework are well known from their accounting documents.
But speaking of “free” work does not mean that it was not organized, just that
the forms of organization were not institutionalized in the same way as those of the
guilds, and that we know little of them due to a comparative lack of documentary
evidence—even though contracts or accounts can help us to reconstruct the stable
and ordered ways that this sort of “freedom” functioned by throwing light on actual
practice. These documents also act as a reminder that the whole family was
involved in craft production, in particular through the work of women, who virtually
never appear in the statutory regulations on which the historiography has based
its definitions of guilds. The final blow to the tripartite model is struck when
Bernardi points out the central role of a text which, though undeniably crucial, has
assumed a virtual monopoly over the illustration of guild and trade hierarchies: the
Livre des métiers drawn up for Étienne Boileau, the Provost of Paris, in the 1260s.
This work is explicitly referred to in 40 percent of the historiographical corpus,
and inspires much of the rest.11
This is the ultimate stage in the double process of reduction and generalization: in most of the synthetic literature on work in the Middle Ages, craft production is shorn of its rural, non-regulated, and familial dimensions, and is primarily
defined on the basis of one canonical example, namely regulations drawn up in
mid-thirteenth-century Paris. This was, however, a specific case whose equivalent
can only be found in certain towns, and it only related to certain categories of
workers who can, on the whole, be considered as the most privileged members
of medieval trades. It is of great interest, but it should not be taken as representative of the way that work was managed in the Middle Ages. Bernardi’s demonstration of how this particular case has subsequently been generalized can make one’s
688
10. See in particular Verna, “Entreprises des campagnes médiévales.”
11. Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti, 56-60.
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head spin: it is an instance of an example become a model, that is, once again, a
paradigm (this time in the linguistic sense, also invoked by Kuhn).
Bernardi thus sheds light on how history is actually written and knowledge
transmitted within the historical profession. He shows how the structure of the
documentation (where normative texts such as charters were better conserved than
other sources), the overdetermination of its study by the history of law, and the
progressive narrowing of the geographical and sociological focus all combined to
establish a doctrine passed on to students and copied from textbook to textbook,
and hence collectively considered to be “true” by the academic community. This
situation is all the more paradoxical as the limitations of this paradigm, clearly
brought out in Bernardi’s book, have in fact long been known. The principal
exaggerations about the organization of work had already been pointed out in 1960:
Few subjects have given rise to such an excess of flattering inexactitudes as medieval
guilds—with the touching vision of a modest employer sharing his bread with his family,
apprentices, and journeymen, a society of simple workshop supervisors living out the
Christian ideal of a humble life of labor, in which everybody had their share in the common
good. Not absolutely everything is wrong with this image. But a few characteristics that
were spatially and temporally localized have been erroneously generalized in the service
of a doctrine divorced from historical research.12
This leads on to the second phase of Bernardi’s regressive investigation, which
seeks to understand how and why this interpretation of medieval trades, with its
emblematic tripartite structure, has continued to dominate the historiography right
up to the present day, despite the fact that its bias is well known. Bernardi’s hypothesis is that the model draws its strength and stability from its long history, which
he traces from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. He successfully reconstitutes
the main structural lines of a large-scale social, economic, and political discourse
whose roots lie in the nineteenth-century reassessment of the Middle Ages. The
positive value that Romanticism placed on the Middle Ages nourished the perception of a harmonious era that was contrasted with the tumults of the new industrial
society, the tripartite model inspiring not only nostalgia but also hope. This was
extensively taken up by antimodern currents seeking a counter-model that could
be used against the liberal legacy of the French Revolution, as well as against
socialism and later marxism. It was also favored in milieus that were more sensitive
to the social question, where it was often tinged with a Christianity that also drew
on the medieval imaginary, as evidenced by the examples of Frédéric Le Play and
the encyclical Rerum Novarum of pope Leo XIII.13 And for that matter Karl Marx,
12. Louis-Henri Parias, ed., Histoire générale du travail, vol. 2, L’âge de l’artisanat
(Ve-XVIIIe siècles), ed. Philippe Wolff and Frédéric Mauro (Paris: Nouvelle librairie de
France, 1960), 132. Cited in Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti, 61.
13. Ibid., 64, quoting Le Play and his disciple René de la Tour-du-Pin, as well as Albert
de Mun, who considered the guild system to be the “organization of work that best
conforms to the principles of the Christian social order, and the most favorable to the
reign of peace and general prosperity,” and Leo XIII, who affirmed that in terms of
the social question, “the most important of all [were] working men’s unions.”
689
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from the Manifesto of the Communist Party onwards, used the same idealized model
of medieval guilds in his reflections on the emergence of wage labor and the class
struggle.14 In this way a tacit agreement built up around the reality and centrality
of medieval guilds and their hierarchy, whether this meant considering them as a
lost paradise or as a stage in the historical process leading towards capitalist modernity. The social sciences were also part of this movement—a clue to both the inherent
normativity of the nineteenth-century project for “sciences of society,” and to the
weight of “vernacular” knowledge and concepts in the models social scientists
devise. It was thus on the basis of this ideological model that Émile Durkheim
argued for a corporatist organization of work.15 All of these questions relating to
intermediary bodies and freedom of work (which had been raised at least since
Turgot’s reforms of 1776, and then again during the French Revolution, in particular by the Le Chapelier Law) played a determining role not only in the models
constructed by sociologists and economists but also in scholarly work by historians.
The publication of major sources relating to the history of work during the second
half of the nineteenth century needs to be placed within this specific context,
starting with the 1879 scholarly edition of the Livre des métiers by René de Lespinasse
and François Bonnardot, as indicated by the foreword written by Lazare Maurice
Tisserand:
A natural supplement to the Établissements de Saint Louis—a vast body of legal and
administrative provisions laid down for the entire kingdom—was the Statuts des Métiers
de Paris, local regulations that were so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the period
and corresponded so well to the society of the time that they may be considered as the faithful
expression of its ideas and customs. ... The Statuts des Métiers de Paris are thus virtually
those of all of France, except for a few local particularities. They provide an illustration
of the truths and errors of the thirteenth century, the most brilliant period of the Middle Ages
as it most completely encapsulated its past and its future, its evolutions and its traditions ...
The guild system was not without its abuses, that nobody wants to revive today, as well
as its advantages of time and place, which disappeared along with the social state of
which it was the expression. What have not perished, however, are the essential qualities
and intrinsic virtues of this regime, for these reside in the principle of association, the
corrective measure for individual weakness. And above all the guild system provided for
the organization and upkeep of the entire working family composed of the master, the
journeyman, and the apprentice, who worked together and lived the same life. ... Economic
science is sufficiently advanced nowadays to discern what is worth retaining from this vast
collapse, and the modern state is sufficiently well founded to have nothing to fear in borrowing from a now abolished regime. It is the duty of this century of research and study, well
used to and appreciative of comparative studies, to conduct the requisite comparisons
between the two regimes. ... It was time to think about republishing the Livre des Métiers.16
690
14. Ibid., 76.
15. Ibid., 73.
16. Étienne Boileau, Le livre des métiers, ed. René de Lespinasse and François Bonnardot
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1879), with a foreword by Lazare Maurice Tisserand,
pp. i-xviii.
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Early twentieth-century historians thus inherited a way of thinking about medieval
guilds that was very similar to the one we still find in the literature today, but
whose foundations, narrowly based on specific examples such as the case of Paris,
were rooted primarily in nineteenth-century political debates about the social question and its relationship to modernity. One might have thought that the dual filter
of the methodical history promoted by Langlois and Seignobos, followed by the
social and economic history practiced by the Annales school would have led to
the historiographical reevaluation of this very incomplete model, but this was not the
case. This is all the more surprising given that during this time discourse about
medieval guilds was once again taking on a political dimension. In Italy it played
a crucial role in the Fascist conception of work during the 1920s and 1930s, while
in France it was promoted by the Vichy regime,17 a fact which could easily have
brought about a rupture with the hierarchical and idealized interpretation of medieval guilds during the postwar years. Yet this did not take place.
One of the most striking aspects of Bernardi’s book is his description of
how this interpretation continued to be transmitted even though its ideological premises—already barely concealed in mid-nineteenth-century antimodern
circles—had been revealed in so harsh a light. Authors such as Édouard Dolléans,
Émile Coornaert, and Maurice Bouvier-Ajam played an important part in this process after 1945, contenting themselves with tempering their enthusiasm and watering down the social project it could still potentially support. In the chapter about
guilds in Dolléans’s Histoire du travail, written in 1944, the celebration of the
harmony of medieval guilds takes on its full meaning in the light of his reflections
on Vichy legislation of 1940-41: “The first characteristic trait of the Charter of
Labor is thus the desire to replace social antagonism with an atmosphere of social
peace and to replace class struggle with a policy of collaboration within the organization of professions.”18 This sentence, together with a few others, disappeared from
the revised edition of 1953, but Dolléans’s interpretation of the guild phenomenon
was left unmodified. Coornaert, similarly conscious of the pro-Vichy and corporatist
zeal that had characterized the conclusion of his 1941 work about guilds in France,
argued in a new preface to the 1968 edition that the “interest of this study was
and still is external to these contingences [i.e., the politics of the 1940s].”19 In the
absence of any new research or publications on the topic, the interpretation of
medieval work available in the 1950s and 1960s was for the most part marked by
the Vichy legacy and by neo-corporatist ideology, with only minor rewritings. And
so the book by Coornaert, the only available synthesis on the subject, came to be
regarded as a “classic,” and his definition of guilds was taken up by most subsequent
syntheses without being subjected to any real critical analysis.20
17. Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti, especially 66-69.
18. Ibid., 67.
19. Émile Coornaert, Les corporations en France avant 1789 (Paris: Gallimard, 1941; repr.
Paris: les Éditions ouvrières, 1968). Cited in Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti, 69.
20. Ibid., 68. The word “classic” is used on numerous occasions.
691
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The purpose of Bernardi’s work is not to disqualify the tripartite hierarchical
model on political grounds, nor to denounce it on the basis of its ideological use
by the Vichy regime. His aim is to show how the demarcation between the construction of historical knowledge and other ways of relating to the past can in fact be
porous—in particular when it is appropriated by political or ideological projects.
Indeed, it is this porosity that explains how interpretive models were built and
subsequently transmitted even though a critical examination of the available documentation sufficed to call them into question. For Bernardi, the purpose of such
an approach is not to discredit the possibility of constructing synthetic historical
knowledge. The point is rather to help build up our knowledge of the object under
study by throwing light on the biases of academic history, and on the effects caused
by the interaction between the production of knowledge, the sociopolitical realm,
and the ways that knowledge is transmitted within a discipline.
A Historical Reinterpretation
This is what is demonstrated in the second half of the book.21 Though Bernardi
is well aware that he would need to replace the paradigm with a different model
in order to meet the debatable ideal of totalization that tends to typify academic
knowledge as it is transmitted to students, he in fact refuses to formulate any alternative to the tripartite model of master-journeyman-apprentice. His strategy in this
part of the book is to conduct research on a regional scale and provide as precise
a description as possible of how hierarchical terms are actually used in his sources.
He chooses to study Provence between the end of the twelfth and the beginning
of the sixteenth century, for which he has assembled a corpus of about four thousand
deeds referring to urban workers.22 This enables him to shift the perspective away
from the Parisian model to a region that, despite the reaffirmation of the tripartite
structure in the existing bibliography, falls mainly outside the guild model.23 On
the basis of this corpus, which for once gives pride of place to contracts instead of
normative texts, Bernardi proceeds to conduct a series of focused readings centered
on the main terms used to designate workers, without neglecting their statistical
analysis when need be, studying in particular their distribution over time. By examining actual usage of the terms “maître,” “disciple,” “familier,” “apprenti,” “serviteur,” “valet,” and “compagnon,” he manages to draw up an alternative picture to
the tripartite model, based on a series of small snapshots. He thus shows how the
school-based model of master and pupil played an important part in the emergence
of craft designations in the twelfth century, how the metaphors of family shaped the
forms of dependency at work, and how the language of service, heavily influenced
by feudal law, also had an extensive impact. In his opinion, the process whereby
designations lost their original familial or feudal connotations and came to refer
692
21. Ibid., 85-137.
22. Ibid., 17 for the presentation of the documentary corpus.
23. Ibid., 85.
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exclusively to the conduct of a trade was a late phenomenon that was more characteristic of the fifteenth than the thirteenth century—the result of a complex process
and not some precocious and harmonious synthesis which, if it existed, did so
primarily as a theoretical point of view, or at least one found in the normative texts.
He also shows how the same terms, such as “valet” and “compagnon,” occur alongside
one another, at times overlapping but at others in opposition, and thus how designations themselves were not stable even within a given cultural, spatial, and chronological context. The emphasis on diversity might suggest that Bernardi’s point of
view is purely negative, following the critical historian’s dictum that it is always
“more complicated than that.” It is indeed always more complicated than that, if
by complexity we mean the countless forms taken by traces of the past in comparison to the simplification inherent in scientific discourse. But in this case the effort
taken to discern these many forms has a positive conclusion for our understanding
of work in the late Middle Ages. For what the case of Provence reveals is that, at
least in this context, the tripartite ideal does not really exist within the documentation, and is above all the product of a subsequent reconstruction by jurists and
then historians. What the documents do show is that practices were primarily
organized into a series of bipartitions, pairs of terms which, through their oppositions, defined the bonds of dependency at work. This observation has three major
consequences.
The first is to emphasize the large number of different people involved in
work, something the tripartite model has minimized. Bernardi cites the characteristic example of a 1433 contract establishing a dyeing workshop which includes a
very explicit list: far from describing the production unit as a structure consisting
of master-journeyman-apprentice, it refers to the entrepreneur putting up the capital, the master craftsman, his wife, his “valets” and “compagnons,” an accountant,
a courier, together with the various intermediaries in charge of supplies and the
relationship with the urban environment.24 This multiplicity is directly related to
Bernardi’s project, which is to repopulate the history of medieval work by reinstating its true context and reintroducing the problematic relationship between “free”
work and work that was regulated or governed by binding oaths.
The second consequence relates to chronology. Even concentrating on pairs
of terms involving the words “valet,” “compagnon,” or “apprenti,” Bernardi shows
that, for Provence, it is inaccurate to speak of a lexical chronology in which an
original harmonious model would have given rise to the use of these terms in the
thirteenth century. On the contrary, he observes that this vocabulary (which was
more extensively used in northern France) was only gradually adopted, with the
result that it was not until the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, a time when
the guild-based social model was in fact in crisis, that we can observe the growing
importance of these lexical items—and perhaps their partial use in working relationships. It is true that this is only a local and partial conclusion, but it draws our
attention to a very important element that underpins Bernardi’s book, namely
693
24. Ibid., 135.
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ÉTIENNE ANHEIM
the comparatively broad historiographical consensus in descriptions of how crafts
evolved from the thirteenth through to the eighteenth century, with a properly
medieval phase of harmony and fluidity characterized by a specific lexicon, followed by a crisis when guilds rigidified—contributing to the emergence of the
modern categories of wage-earner, proletariat, and the opposition between employers and workers—that lasted throughout the early modern period and ultimately
resulted in the refashioning of the model of work during the Industrial Revolution.
And if one accepts Bernardi’s conclusions, then the whole system needs to be
reconceived, for it is no longer possible to describe the period between the thirteenth and the eighteenth century as some sort of muted struggle between a feudal
and guild-based heritage and a capitalist, wage-based modernity, thereby turning
these five centuries (whether to one’s horror or delight) into some kind of vast
buffer period between feudalism and capitalism. This is nevertheless the tendency
that still informs numerous historical narratives. In fact, the question raised here
is the same one that has occupied many historians over the past twenty years: as
Jean-Yves Grenier’s book on the economy of the ancien régime illustrates,25 there
is much to be gained from discussing the social and economic history of the period
between the thirteenth and the eighteenth century in terms of a coherent world
with its own specific rationales—not simply a combination of inherited archaic
features and preliminary versions of modern characteristics, but a specific moment
in the history of European societies.
The third and final consequence is methodological and relates to the history
of social status more generally, for the meanings of the terms used to designate
work status need to be reconsidered. The shift from a stable tripartite model to a
series of dynamic pairs, brought about by a shift away from the history of norms
towards the history of practice, arising in turn from the selection of different documentation, brings with it a new way of thinking about status. The tripartite model
is not completely invalidated but instead assigned to its proper place, that of a
principle found in normative sources, whose ideological role had very tangible
effects on the life of guilds and the way they represented themselves—but which
did not actually govern the way production was organized. As Bernardi observes:
What with masters who were also servants, with apprentices who only really become such
at the end of the fifteenth century (and then only partially so), with journeymen (valets)
who were both laborers and skilled workers, the classical hierarchy of master-journeymanapprentice does not really apply to production in Provence in the late Middle Ages. As
we saw earlier, the regulatory texts accommodate a certain degree of vagueness, even though
they seem to impose, or attempt to impose, a more rigid vision of internal relationships. The
documentation from Provence reveals a complex and multifarious world where categories
694
25. Jean-Yves Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime. Un monde de l’échange et de l’incertitude
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1996). See also the critical analysis of this work by Alain Guerreau,
“Avant le marché, les marchés: en Europe, XIIIe-XVIIIe siècle,” Annales HSS 56, no. 6
(2001): 1129-75, as well as his Le féodalisme, un horizon théorique (Paris: Le Sycomore,
1980) which raises a similar question in relation to the same chronology.
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STRATIFICATIONS
overlap and intermesh, where the vocabulary used seeks to describe relationships rather
than define social groups, and where words may be interpreted on several different levels.
And, moreover, this is the picture which emerges from an examination of purely professional
nomenclatures, leaving aside the parts played by sons, daughters, wives, and slaves in the
production process.26
Apart from the emphasis on the necessary links between the history of categories,
of practices, and of documentation, what is most striking about these lines is the
simplicity of the conclusion—far from self-evident in the literature about the
Middle Ages—that despite the etymology of the word, statuses need to be thought
of not as states but as relationships. This makes it possible to analyze their multiplicity, the way they are bound up and entangled with one another, and the
strategies potentially used by those who employ them, without thereby reducing
them to performances, conventions, or linguistic fictions, and without overlooking
the collective constraints these designations exerted on the way the social realm
was constituted.27
This is no doubt the major conclusion of Bernardi’s book for any historian
wanting to analyze social statuses and their relationship to production by examining
forms of stratification and the practices of those involved. But the intellectual
endeavor required to reach this conclusion is in fact only possible thanks to the
central place accorded to the historiographical survey, which does not merely function as some sort of preamble or scholarly digression but instead lies at the very
heart of Bernardi’s method. It is only by adopting his regressive approach and choosing to consider medieval history along similar lines to those adopted in the history
of science over the past few decades that Bernardi is able to break free of the
enclosed vision represented by the tripartite model.28 Not only does he succeed in
putting forward a new reading of the documents, he also manages to explain why it
was so difficult to arrive at this reading, namely because history as a discipline—even
when approached as a social science—is still a historical production, forged from
intellectual experiences and critical procedures, but also from beliefs, values, and
forms of engagement.29 It is not in the slightest pessimistic to recognize this state
26. Bernardi, Maître, valet et apprenti, 134.
27. For a similar approach applied to the early modern era, see the work of Simona
Cerutti, in particular her recent work on the question of status during the ancien régime,
Étrangers. Étude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris:
Bayard, 2012).
28. For a valuable perspective on historiographical issues within recent work on the
history of science, viewed in an extensive timeframe running from the eighteenth century, see Éric Brian, “Le livre de la science est-il écrit dans la langue des historiens?,”
in Les formes de l’expérience. Pour une autre histoire sociale, ed. Bernard Lepetit (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1995), 85-98.
29. For discussion of this topic and the underlying genealogical issue that it implies,
see Antoine Lilti, “Rabelais est-il notre contemporain? Histoire intellectuelle et herméneutique critique,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 59, no. 4bis (2012): 65-84,
and Étienne Anheim, “L’historiographie est-elle une forme d’histoire intellectuelle?
La controverse de 1934 entre Lucien Febvre et Henri Jassemin,” ibid., 105-130.
695
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ÉTIENNE ANHEIM
of affairs, in fact quite the contrary. It is simply a matter of acknowledging the
links that exist between historians and the past, a past which is still present and
which shapes all of their representations, even their most intellectual and scholarly
ones. There is an uninterrupted thread running from the craftsman and notary of the
Middle Ages, via the jurist of the ancien régime, the social thinker addressing a nineteenth century public, and the scholar of 1900, through to the historian of today—as
also indicated by the observations by Langlois and Seignobos with which we started.
It is only by thinking about his own historicity, by conducting a genealogical survey
of his ideas and concepts, for instance, that a historian can fully live up to his
ambition vis-à-vis his objects of study, for, even if he is not always aware of it, they
too have played a part in fashioning him as a scholar.
Étienne Anheim
Université de Versailles/Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
696
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