Drolleries of the League, 1589‒1598

Following the defeat of the League, L’Estoile kept an increasingly detailed record of his collecting activities. This chapter demonstrates how L’Estoile’s responses to the books he collected were characterized by exchanges in the society surrounding the Palais de Justice, made up of its printers, bookbinders, scribes, office-holders, and the erudite humanists whose legal training drew them into its orbit. It sets out how L’Estoile managed his library, how he read books with erudite, Gallican friends, and then how he inherited and passed them on within his family. At the end of the civil wars, L’Estoile was no passive observer of Parisian erudition, but a key figure in its intellectual culture whose collection attracted visits from friends and family, as well as collectors from across Europe.