Joannes de Lugduno (Jean de Lyon) hailed from the diocese of Bourges, Latin Bituricae, the area of the Departements of Cher and Indre. He is listed in Students and Teachers at the University of Paris: The Generation of 1500 (2006) by James Farge, on page 347, as number 659. To be precise, he appears twice in the Rotuli nominatorum (Sorbonne, Archives, Reg 61), in the following locations:
- (1512) (de Lugduno) dioc. Bituricensis - Reg. 61 fol. 57r
- (1516) submagister grammaticorum regalis collegii Campanie alias Navarre, Bituricensis dioc. - Reg. 61 fol. 304vHe was the regent and subprincipal of the grammar school of the College de Navarre in Paris. And he was a man who liked to own his books properly. He had his name and a motto inscribed in the gilt edges of his copy of Pliny. This is not lightly done - such an investment is costly, and implies a claim to distinction that puts him on the highest social level of book ownership, on an equal footing with any royal library. And when it occurred to him to part with one of his books, he did that properly too, in the form of a legal document, almost a contract, in which he transferred ownership of this precious book to his friend, magistro Joanni poligrapho Anglico, the voluminous author Master Johannes Anglicus. This contract, formally yielding any claims of ownership over a book which has the name of the previous
owner "tattooed" into it, is inscribed onto the title page for all to see, and as a testament to a friendship still true.
500 years after he gave this book as a present to Johannes Anglicus, this gift still speaks to us, complete with his signature (chirographum) and a complex flourish which serves to seal this declaration as in a legal act.
Robert Findley Vidal, an otherwise unknown Englishman, wrote his name into this book in the 19th century. Did the book make its way to England because our magistro Joanni poligrapho Anglico took the book back home with him? Is this a document of Anglo-French relations in the 16th century?