In November 2011, a late thirteenth century ivory statuette of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child made news in the art world when it sold at Christie's in Paris for over £6,000,000 or approximately $8,500,000. This was a record amount for a work of medieval art and far in excess of the pre-sale estimate of £1,000,000–2,000,000. The astronomical sum commanded by this object can be attributed, on the one hand, to the rarity of such things appearing on the art market, and, on the other, to its place in a collection of medieval art assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Victor Prosper Martin Le Roy and his son-in-law Jean-Joseph Marquet de Vasselot, who was a curator at the Louvre and director of the Musée de Cluny. For scholars of medieval art, this object's brief but spectacular appearance on the art market raises two interconnected sets of issues and questions. First, it points to a common problem with understanding Gothic ivories: while hundreds of these objects have survived, over time most of them have passed through the hands of multiple dealers and collectors and this has divorced them from any sense of their original contexts. Secondly, it raises questions concerning the value that such objects held for their original medieval owners and so the role of ivory as a material in later medieval culture.

In this essay, I address these issues by working with textual evidence. Specifically, I examine a series of inventories made of the possessions of members of the French royal family in the late fourteenth through early fifteenth centuries, looking for where and how ivory objects appear within them. Working with these documents allows me to reconstruct certain types of ivory objects that have been lost over time and so speaks to the topic of this volume of essays. This includes composite creations of ivory and precious stones and metals that have disappeared over time as the latter materials have been recycled into new objects, as well as functional ivory objects that have disappeared in the art-historical scholarship as they have received little to no attention there. Both of these types of objects need to be taken into account in order to understand the place of ivory as a material in the later middle ages.