Charlotte Guillard

French printer

• Born: Mid-1480’s?
• Birthplace: France
• Died: Between April 18 and July 20, 1557
• Place of death: Paris, France

One of the first great printers of the Renaissance in France, Charlotte Guillard directed the Soleil d’Or publishing house, which printed or contracted for publication scholarly works in areas such as theology, law, medicine, and natural history. The works of the press were valued especially for their accuracy and beauty.

Early Life

Charlotte Guillard (shahr-lawt gee-yahr) was the daughter of Jacques Guillard and Guillemyne Sancy. Archival documents reveal that she had several sisters and a brother and that the family had ties to Paris and the nearby province of Maine.

Historians situate Guillard’s marriage to her first husband, Berthold Rembolt, around 1502, or in one unlikely case 1491, but fail to cite evidence for either date. Rembolt had come to Paris from his native Alsace and, from 1494 to 1507, worked in collaboration with Ulrich Gering, a cofounder of the prestigious Soleil d’Or near the Sorbonne. The Soleil d’Or, or golden sun, was the first printing press in France and the most active print shop in Paris.

When Gering retired in 1508, Rembolt and Guillard set up shop for themselves in a spacious new residence in the nearby rue de Saint-Jacques. There, they worked side by side and specialized in the publication and sale of scholarly works. Rembolt’s printer’s mark contained his initials “B. R.” and two symbols commonly employed by merchants and artists the number four combined with an orb and cross. When Guillard later began to operate independently, she continued to use Rembolt’s mark, but eventually she substituted her own initials, “C. G.,” for those of her deceased husband.

Life’s Work

After Rembolt’s death in 1518, Guillard took over management of the printery and bookstore, publishing seven books before marrying Parisian book dealer Claude Chevallon around 1520. Although nieces, daughters, and wives would often work alongside husbands and male relatives in the printing industry, only widows were in a position to enter certain contractual agreements, such as hiring correctors (proofreaders). It is therefore not surprising that soon after Guillard’s second marriage, books that were sold or printed at the Soleil d’Or carried her husband’s or, on occasion, her former husband’s imprint only, as was customary for the time.

For the next seventeen years, her contributions to the history of printing were to a large extent lost in the shadow of her husband’s work. Chevallon published the writings of several church fathers, including Saint Jerome (1526), Saint Ambrose (1529), and Saint Augustine (1531). His 1526-1527 edition of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s complete works contains what is believed a rare family portrait of Guillard and Chevallon and his daughter Gillette genuflecting before the central figures of Saint Bernard, the prophet Malachias, and the Madonna with child. Guillard’s likeness is confined to a marginal position at the far right and is barely visible.

It was not until after Chevallon died in 1537 that Guillard again asserted her independence and took charge of the family enterprise. By current estimates, she printed or commissioned and sold under her own name or her widow’s name as many as 158 different titles between 1537 and 1557 an average of about eight titles per year. Dealing primarily in works of theology and religion, she also catered to students of law, natural history, and medicine. She sold Bibles and homilies, multiple editions of the works of the church fathers, Justinian I’s civil law codes, Corpus juris civilis (sixth century; The Institutes of Justinian, 1852), Galen’s popular Methodus medendi (second century; Galen’s Method of Healing, 1991), and other similar texts. Her boutique, moreover, supported the study of Greek in the French capital, carrying first editions of work by the theologian and saint Justin Martyr (c. 100-c. 165) and Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus of Constantinople (410?-485) and, in 1543, a reprint of Desiderius Erasmus’s edition of the New Testament in Greek and Latin. Guillard also offered Parisian readers the first French translation of Erasmus’s ever-popular Adagia (1539).

Continuous operation of the four or five presses under Guillard’s control at Soleil d’Or required the coordination of many workers and the investment of substantial sums of money for labor and for paper and other materials, money that often could not be recouped for several years. An inventory prepared in 1556 lists her stock of books at some 13,800 volumes, valued at more than œ30,000 figures that suggest the complexities and sums involved in managing one of Paris’s major printing houses.

Guillard often shared costs and material with other printers, many of them related through marriage. Her nephew, who began publishing in 1541, produced seventeen editions in association with her, using many of the ornate characters that had belonged to her press previously. Other volumes were published from associations with her in-laws, Guillaume des Boys, Sébastien Nivelle, and Conrad Néobar. Typical in this respect was the monumental ten-volume edition of Saint Augustine’s complete works, completed in 1541, a publication that came through collaboration between Guillard, who published the work, Parisian printer Yolande Bonhomme, and Hugues de La Porte, a printer from Lyon who helped finance and then sell it.

Over time, Guillard reprinted many of the first editions she published earlier. A Soleil d’Or edition of Saint Augustine’s De civitate Dei (413-427; The City of God, 1610) made use of an ornate capital “D” that had been discretely refashioned to encompass her initials “C. G.,” a sign that she was proud of her work and eager to publicize her accomplishments.

One of Guillard’s later ventures led to the first edition of Jacques Toussain’s two-volume Greek and Latin lexicon in 1552. Her Latin preface to this work, the only extant sample of her writing in print, tells how the project came to fruition. According to Guillard, publication of the lexicon was already under way when, first, Toussain, then her nephew Jacques Bogard (who had agreed to print the lexicon), unexpectedly died, leaving the work unfinished. At that point Guillard, with the financial support of Parisian book dealer Guillaume Merlin, hired Fédéric Morel as corrector, who then completed the task at hand. As a reference tool for students, Toussain’s humble lexicon represented an improvement over existing works on the market and so helped advance the study of ancient Greek literature. It is only fitting that, in the concluding remarks of her preface, Guillard noted with a certain pride her fifty years of dedicated experience in the publishing industry.

Guillard died sometime between April 18 and July 20, 1557. Her nephew-in-law, Guillaume des Boys, then assumed control of the Soleil d’Or, but he died within ten years, leaving his wife Michelle Guillard, Guillard’s niece, in charge of the family enterprise.

Significance

Charlotte Guillard was not the first woman to run a printing and publishing company in Paris, but she was certainly one of the leading printers in the city. Modern book collectors pay substantial sums for books that carry the imprint Excudebat Carola Guillard (printed by Charlotte Guillard), attesting to the critical reception of her company’s works.

According to Roméo Arbour, a near-contemporary historian of the sixteenth century, more than one hundred women, either widows or daughters of established printers, took over the management of their family-owned presses in sixteenth century France. Women such as Guillard, once considered an exception to the rule, were major contributors to the renaissance of learning and are only now receiving the attention that past generations of historians have denied them.

Bibliography

Becker, Beatrice Lamberton. “Charlotte Guillard, Printer of the Renaissance.” Inland Printer 72 (1923): 438-440. Provides a partial English translation of Guillard’s preface to Jacques Toussain’s Greek and Latin dictionary, the only text she is known to have written and published herself.

Beech, Beatrice. “Charlotte Guillard: A Sixteenth-Century Business Woman.” Renaissance Quarterly 36 (1983): 345-367. The standard reference to Guillard’s life and work.

Broomhall, Susan. Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002. The chapter titled “Women Working in the Book Trades” discusses the role of women, including Guillard, in the production of manuscripts and books in France from the late thirteenth to the late sixteenth century.

Coppens, Christian. “Une Collaboration inconnue entre Caroline Guillard et Hugues de la Porte en 1544: Le De civitate Dei d’Augustin édité par Juan Luis Vives.” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 63 (1988): 126-140. This article discusses Guillard’s collaboration with a printer from Lyon on publication of Saint Augustine’s De civitate Dei.

Davies, Hugh William. Devices of the Early Printers, 1457-1560: Their History and Development, With a Chapter on Portrait Figures of Printers. London: Grafton, 1935. Identifies a portrait of Guillard and her second husband in the 1526-1527 edition of Saint Bernard’s complete works; also explains the origin and significance of her printer’s mark.

Driver, Martha W. “Women Printers and the Page, 1477-1541.” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 73 (1998): 139-153. Examines women’s contributions, including those of Guillard, to the early history of printing.

Masiak, Cory. “On Our Marks: Symbols of Early Printers Adorn Fondren Reference Room.” The Flyleaf: Friends of Fondren Library, Rice University 40 (1989): 2-7. Discusses Guillard’s printer’s mark painted on a wall in the reference room of Rice University’s Fondren Library.