The History and Historiography of Guild Hierarchies in the Middle Ages

Philippe Bernardi’s book Maitre, valet et apprenti au Moyen Âge. Essai sur une production bien ordonnee examines the traditional triptych of master craftsman, servant, and apprentice, which is considered characteristic of medieval production. His analysis focuses on “labor statuses,” deliberately moving away from a conception of social statuses that is too strictly legal and too rarely linked to a reflection on production — beyond the schematic model of the three orders, in which production is confined to the group of “those who work” and therefore only plays a minor role in the constitution of the social order. The originality of Bernardi’s approach lies in systematically and symmetrically working on two planes : he explores his object, labor hierarchies, both historically — based on the archives from thirteenth– to fifteenth-century Provence — and historiographically, reflecting on the interpretative models that have been applied to the same archives since the nineteenth century. Applying the tools of the history of science to medieval history, he uncovers the mechanisms that have shaped our knowledge of medieval society since the nineteenth century and shows that the master-servant-apprentice triptych is first and foremost a representation that made its way from normative sources to historiography but does not account for medieval production as it appears in the sources on practices. Going beyond this normative view, Bernardi shows how labor statuses were mostly relational, working as a series of binary oppositions — a reality concealed behind a historiographical discourse traversed not only by intellectual experience and critical thinking, but also by beliefs, values, and forms of activism.