GLASS BEADMAKING AND ENAMEL LAMPWORK IN PARIS, 1547-1610: ARCHIVAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATA Élise Vanriest Translated by Brad Loewen This article presents beadmaking in Paris during the second half of the 16th century as seen through period documents and artifacts. Parisian archives document beadmaking by artisans called patenôtriers who made a wide range of glass buttons and jewelry, including beads. Records of the patenôtriers’ guild provide an idea of the number of artisans engaged in this activity, while notarial contracts and estate inventories reveal individual careers and the material dimension of beadmaking in Paris. Patenôtriers obtained their materials – soda glass and enamel supplied as tubes, rods, or ingots – from glassmakers in rural France, Altare in Italy, and a small glassworks that operated in the suburb of Saint-Germain- des-Prés in 1598-1608. They exported rosary beads to Iberia and trade beads to North America. In European terms, Paris was a major beadmaking center during the 16th century and we know its products from a small number of archaeological finds and museum holdings. INTRODUCTION Glass beadmaking in Paris developed considerably from the middle of the 16th century. This activity gained a professional stature in 1566 with the creation of the “enamel and glass beadmakers and buttonmakers guild” (patenôtriers et boutonniers d’émail et de verre), with statutes that defined the skills and the products made and sold by these artisans. Other related artisans, described by Laurier Turgeon (2001, 2019), specialized in working other materials such as coral, jet, horn, and bone. The production of glass beads and buttons was not a new activity in Paris, as archives show enamellers and button makers there before 1566 with apparently the same skills, but the trade greatly expanded thereafter. At the end of the 1580s, elections for the four guild officers, which elected two master artisans at a time, attracted from 28 to 37 voters, giving us an idea of the size of the community of enamel patenôtriers. 1 Patenôtriers were producers, but their statutes also allowed them to sell glass merchandise, notably bottles covered in wicker that had a good market. This activity put them in competition with merchant glassworkers specializing in wickering bottles (marchands verriers couvreurs de bouteille en osier), a separate but related guild that obtained its statutes in 1583. Conflicts erupted during the second half of the 16th century as these guilds opposed each other in court over the right to sell glass products. Despite these frictions, the artisans formed a common “glass community.” Patenôtriers and merchant glassworkers were frequently friends, neighbors, and even relatives. This article builds on Laurier Turgeon’s study of 16th- century beadmaking in Paris and the export of these objects to North America. It presents new information gathered for my doctoral dissertation, “Verre et verriers à Paris et en Île-de- France dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (1547-1610): production, commerce, usages” (Vanriest 2020). It uses postmortem inventories available in print or manuscript form, and notarial contracts, as well as archaeological finds from the Cour Napoléon and the Cour Carré at the Louvre Museum, which complement the beads found nearby at the Jardins du Carrousel that Turgeon studied. These three sites have yielded the vast majority of post-medieval glass beads presently known in France (Dussubieux and Gratuze 2012). THE PRODUCTS OF THE PATENÔTRIERS The guild statutes of 1566, promulgated by Charles IX, regulated the activity of the Paris enamel beadmakers and buttonmakers and listed the products they could make. Article 15 states that they could fabricate and sell in Paris “all kinds of beads, enamel buttons, gilded glass and enamel” and more generally, “all other kinds of works belonging to and depending on the said métier passing through fire and ovens, made in enamel, canon, crystal, and all other kinds.” 2 Article 16 further stipulates that “the masters of the said métier may string all kinds of belts, chokers, chains, necklaces, bracelets, beads, drawstrings, rosaries, and all other sorts of products resulting from the said métier of patenostrier.” 3 BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers 33:45-53 (2021)