The History and Historiography of Guild Hierarchies in the Middle Ages

Abstract

Philippe Bernardi’s Maître, valet et apprenti au Moyen Âge. Essai sur une production bien ordonnée, examines the traditional triptych of master craftsman, journeyman, and apprentice, considered to be characteristic of medieval production. By focusing on “work statuses,” Bernardi moves away from an overly narrow legal approach to 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, applying solely to “those who work,” forms of production play only a minor role in social ordering. The originality of his approach lies in the way he constructs his object of study: work hierarchies. These are systematically addressed both in historical terms, on the basis of medieval archives (using the example of Provence in from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century), and in historiographical terms, by examining the models according to which these archives have been interpreted since the nineteenth century. Applying tools drawn from the history of science to medieval history, Bernardi thus uncovers the mechanisms that have shaped our knowledge of medieval society since the nineteenth century, showing that the master-journeyman-apprentice triptych is a representation originating in normative sources that has become a historiographical model, but which does not account for medieval production as it appears in sources relating to practice. Moving beyond this normative view, Bernardi shows that work statuses were mostly relational and functioned as a series of binary oppositions—a reality concealed behind a historiographical discourse woven not only through intellectual experience and critical thinking, but also by beliefs, values, and forms of activism.