2020 Essays

Molded Roses in Sixteenth-Century France

Carlson, Raymond Edward; Katz, Jordan

Three entries in Ms. Fr. 640—on fols. 129r, 155r, 155v—are devoted exclusively to molding and casting roses. This essay clarifies some of the differences between the recipes, and suggests a potential change recorded by the author-practitioner that may have resulted from repeated experiments with the techniques over time. This set of entries are related to the molding and casting of other “thin things,” such as flies' wings, another thin, delicate substance that, like rose petals, necessitated separate castings. This essay proposes that the motives for singling out roses as an object to be molded are likely related to sixteenth-century literary culture in France, perhaps especially in Toulouse, where a literary society known in the sixteenth century as the College de l’Art et Science de Rhétorique awarded cast flowers as prizes for an annual poetry contest, the Jeux Floraux, which originated in the city in the fourteenth century.