Museum curators, archivists, collectors, and individual researchers have long studied goldsmithery (Günther Schiedlausky, “Betrachtungen zur Geschichte des Schrifttums über Goldschmiedekunst,” in Studien zur europäischen Goldschmiedekunst des 14. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Renate Eikelmann et al. [2001]: 380). More recently, university scholars have joined their ranks; yet scholarly discussion remains widely dispersed and often limited to short exhibition-catalogue entries. In response, Élisabeth Antoine-König and Michele Tomasi organized a conference in 2014 that brought together experts—mostly historians and art historians—on Gothic goldsmithery from different fields: museums, academia, and restoration. The volume at hand is this conference’s printed outcome. It convinces through its well-researched contributions, provides a good overview of the state of research, and presents perspectives on future research.

Specifically, Antoine-König and Tomasi address the question of how Gothic goldsmithery was produced and received by contemporaries. The focus of the volume is on goldsmiths in the city (chapter 1), at court (chapter 2), and in the workshop (works, masters, production processes; chapter 3). Most contributions either focus on social-historical aspects of the craft and the figure of the goldsmith (goldsmith’s signatures, workshop structures, networks, collaborations, guild laws, trading systems) or on the production processes of a specific object or group of objects (seals, phylacteries, staurothekes, reliquaries of the true cross, collars, processional chests, and enameled reliquaries of the famous workshops of Limoges). The geographical scope ranges from Valencia, Toulouse, Siena, Tyrol, and Prague to Cyprus.

Élisabeth Antoine-König is an expert on the mass of enameled objects that originate in Limoges: more than 860 objects produced between 1190 and 1215. In her article, she asks how craftsmen used models, pattern books, and other ways of copying. In her precise analysis of a handful of iconographic subjects on enameled reliquary caskets she manages to demonstrate the manifold uses of universally applicable patterns. However, she emphasizes that many questions concerning the use of pattern books remain, which have profound consequences for attribution: Who owned the pattern books? Did they circulate between different workshops? If a motive appears on different objects, do they then all originate from a single workshop? Did the Gothic goldsmiths in Limoges reuse the widespread patterns of their Roman, monastic predecessors? What is more, with her contribution, Antoine-König raises the question of what a commodity in 1200 actually was and how it differs from our idea of it. She notes that the variety of patterns led to almost endless possibilities of combination: not a single object was produced twice. This observation challenges our notions of originality, singularity, copy, and what constitutes a commodity.

In the volume’s only contribution that deals with the reception of goldsmithery rather than its production, Michele Tomasi discusses our approach to the difficult question of how consumers perceived goldsmithery in the Gothic period. In the same critical spirit as Antoine-König, his case study examines how chronicles in the times of the French kings Charles V and Charles VI provide information on “aesthetic experiences” of goldsmith’s objects. Beyond the well-known involvement of goldsmith’s objects in the courtly “politics of prestige” (129), Tomasi provides a brilliant discussion of different accounts of Jean Froissart, Michel Pintoin, and Christine de Pizan on erudite, elite circles that discussed, commented on, and judged the materiality and manufacture of precious objects. In these Italianate convivia, the participants celebrated their social distinction as connaisseurs. Finally, Tomasi discusses aesthetic reactions as pleasure and estrangeté (strangeness); the latter has a rather positive connotation in this context.

Orfèvrerie gothique en Europe introduces the reader to the vivid expert discussions in the field. To follow these discussions requires fluency in Italian, French, English, and Spanish. One wishes that the abstracts at the end of the book had been presented in English instead of French, to reach a broader audience. Nonetheless, it is the merit of this enterprise to have opened up new problems and questions concerning the study of goldsmith’s art in the Gothic period.