Jean Miélot

Secretary to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, from 1449 until the duke's death in 1467, and then to Charles the Bold. Around 1456 he completed a compilation of the Miracles de Nostre Dame, in which Jean Le Tavernier included the portrait of him writing in his scriptorium.

There is a neatness in the identification worth recording. The forks essay uses that picture to stand for the scribes Gutenberg made obsolete, anonymous gatekeepers displaced by a machine. The man in it was not anonymous: he was a named court secretary, working within about a decade of Gutenberg's Bible, and the portrait exists precisely because he was worth portraying.