This paper provides an overview of research on medieval bookbinding carried out over the last sixty years in France, particularly at the IRHT (CNRS). It offers an assessment of the national census of medieval bindings kept in France, which is currently being relaunched; it presents the elements of material description retained for the French corpus and transformed into an indexing tool in a dedicated database, arguing for the adoption of a standardised description scheme; finally, it shows how several reproduction techniques tested over time now offer researchers useful visual aids, and how new developments can now be envisaged using 3D tools.