A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet 9780226242347

Citation preview

a feast for the eyes

a feast for the eyes

Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet

christina normore

university of chicago press chicago and london

christina normore is assistant professor of art history at Northwestern University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-24220-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-24234-7 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226242347.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Normore, Christina, author. A feast for the eyes : art, performance, and the late medieval banquet / Christina Normore. pages ; cm Includes bibliograpical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-24220-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-226-24220-x (cloth : alk paper) — isbn 978-0-226-24234-7 (e-book) 1. Fasts and feasts—Europe—History— 14th century. 2. Fasts and feasts—Europe—History—15th century. 3. Dinners and dining—Europe—History—14th century. 4. Dinners and dining—Europe— History—15th century. 5. Entremets—History—14th century. 6. Entremets— History—15th century. 7. Europe—Court and courtiers—Social life and customs— 14th century. 8. Europe—Court and courtiers—Social life and customs—15th century. 9. Fasts and feasts in art. 10. Dinners and dining in art. I. Title. gt4842.n67 2015 394.1'25—dc23 2014026574

o This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Setting the Table

1

1.

Between the Dishes

21

2.

Spectator-Spectacle

44

3.

Efficacy and Hypocrisy

74

4.

Dining Well

102

5.

Stranger at the Table

131

6.

Wedding Reception

164

Notes

195

Bibliography

233

Index

253

Gallery follows page 72

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ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

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his project has been over a decade in the making, and the debts I have incurred in the process are truly legion. Funds from the University of Chicago and the Fulbright Commission in Belgium allowed for research in Europe, and the staff of the Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Brussels, made my work there particularly pleasurable. The Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the A. W. Mellon Fellowship at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame provided vital time for writing. My thanks are also due to many friends, colleagues and mentors. Both as an adviser and as a friend, Rebecca Zorach has always been a constant and irreplaceable source of support and inspiration. Linda Seidel and Jas´ Elsner pushed me to reconsider both the parts and the whole—my apologies to Jas´ for having still written a book about feasts. Anne Harris, Anne D. Hedeman, Steve Perkinson, and Bret Rothstein generously read the whole of the current version and gave invaluable suggestions: this book is the better for it, and I am sorry only that constraints of space and time meant some advice went unheeded. Erik Inglis and Martha Wolff can be held responsible for this project’s having begun at all—Erik having first set me on Margaret of York many years ago when I was thinking about what to write for an undergraduate thesis at Oberlin, and Martha having juxtaposed readings on the Feast of the Pheasant and Hesdin that made me wonder what other implications banqueting might have for the broader visual culture. Dawna Schuld and Jeffrey Saletnik have been providing what probably feels like endless support and feedback since the project began; I am not sure which bits of this text are mine anymore, but I suspect the good parts belong to them. For their thoughtful comments and general good humor at various stages of this endeavor, my thanks also to Roberta Baranowski, Joy Beckman, Susan Bielstein, Katy Breen, Kenneth vii

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ack now ledgments

Brummel, Anthony Burton, Paroma Chatterjee, Holly Clayson, Huey Copeland, John Crocker, Kelsey Cowger, Stephen Eisenman, Jesús Escobar, Hannah Feldman, Shirin Fozi, Julie Fritz, Rachel Furnari, Ruth Goring, Agnès Guiderdoni, Ann Gunter, Scott Hiley, Seth Hindin, Jeehee Hong, Matthew Johnson, Tom Jones, Danielle Joyner, Christina Kaier, Mark Klassen, Jessica Keating, Richard Kieckhefer, Aden Kumler, Kristine Larison, Travis Lee, Rob Linrothe, Lia Markey, Susie Phillips, Scott Miller, Barbara Newman, Julia Orell, Jo Ortel, Rainbow Porthé, Zoe Saunders, Kara Schenk, the Sisters of the Bethlehem Convent of the Poor Clares, Rob Slifkin, Claudia Swan, Krista Thompson, David van Zanten, and the many students and faculty who have provided feedback on presentations I’ve given from this material. Finally, thanks are due to my family for their love, patience, and curiosity: Lorraine, Calvin, DB, George, and Joey. It is my greatest good fortune to have you in my life.

introduction

Setting the Table

T

he life of Christ and the late medieval court converge on the left wing of the Melbourne Miracles of Christ altarpiece from around 1500 (fig. 1). Standing before a table of guests at the wedding at Cana, Christ lifts his hand to perform his first miracle, turning the water being poured into jugs into wine. At the high table, the calm witnesses to this marvel are richly arrayed in the fashions of earlier fifteenth-century elites. It has even been suggested that the faces of some guests are borrowed from the official portraits of the dukes and duchesses of Valois Burgundy, who ruled the Lowlands and parts of France from 1385 to 1482.1 For a modern viewer, this image might seem to undermine the sacredness of the scene with its courtly intrusions. Jesus here appears to be a performer rather than a savior, enacting what was in fact a common banqueting trick of transforming one food into another. Alternately, a court feast has been elevated to the status of a sacred ritual, making a secular meal into something uncomfortably close to the Eucharistic feast of which the wedding at Cana was believed to be a sign.2 The Melbourne Wedding at Cana traverses many modern boundaries, linking secular and sacred and melding late antique with late medieval, just as the Jesus it portrays is caught in the act of transfiguring water into wine. In drawing on the wider phenomenon of court banqueting, it further hints at the porous nature of the boundary between the high art of painting and the low arts of the table with their messy mixture of the visual, the theatrical, and the culinary. Modern scholarship has only recently begun to appreciate the social and political ramifications of festival’s centrality within late medieval and early modern elite culture.3 Even less studied, but inextricably linked to these realms, is the importance of feasting for artistic production and reception. Patronized by trend-setting rulers such as the Valois dukes of Burgundy, 1

Figure 1. Master of the Legend of St. Catherine, Flemish, active 1470–1500, Triptych with the Miracles of Christ, ca. 1479–91, left wing obverse—The Marriage at Cana, oil on wood panel, 113.0 × 37.2 cm; 122.4 × 184.0 cm (overall). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1922.

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feasts were a major art form in the late Middle Ages. Banquets engaged the talents of leading artists in a wide range of media as well as the participation of aristocratic and mercantile elites. With their inventive blend of media and collaborative production, feasts blurred the boundaries between spectator and spectacle, creator and audience, and in so doing helped form a culture deeply invested in discernment, whether directed toward objects, other humans, or one’s own motivations. Preserved only in complexly mediated fragments, banquets nevertheless still have much to say about their own workings and those of their larger milieu. Indeed, it is precisely in their conventions that both verbal and visual depictions of feasts reveal the shared hopes and expectations that late medieval artists and patrons brought to the banquet hall. Identifying these priorities enables examination of late medieval feasting in something closer to its own terms and thus can provide a guide to feasting’s peculiar intertwining of artistry, performance, ethics, and ambiguity, the complex weave of which will be the subject of this book.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE FEAST Both banquets’ collaborative production and their aesthetic of magnificent wonder led many generations of scholars to dismiss if not outright condemn these innovative artistic productions as vacuous and vulgar displays.4 In concluding his case for the study of fourteenth-century miniature painting, Millard Meiss tellingly proclaimed that art historians should “devote more attention to the religious, intellectual and literary environment of the French courts than to their cutlery, dazzling though that undoubtedly was.”5 For Meiss, as for most of his generation, the flashy splendor of cutlery was by definition opposed to both painting and intellectual and spiritual concerns. Yet as the mingling of these discourses within the Wedding at Cana suggests, the separation of feasting from religion, serious intentions, and painting says far more about the concerns of modern scholars than it does about those of late medieval courtiers, who conceived of the role of art and the distinctions between sacred and profane rather differently. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have demonstrated the importance of broadening art-historical studies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries beyond the traditional focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture to include the so-called decorative arts.6 Their work and the array of appealing, innovative, and sometimes frankly odd objects they have brought into the spotlight suggest that it is time not only to acknowledge the value of these less-studied art forms but also to grapple with their greater implications. This book is therefore not simply an argument for the inclusion

4

introduction

of banqueting and its intriguing multimedia practices within art-historical study but also, more importantly, an investigation of what the practices and aesthetic values integral to banqueting can reveal about the larger cultural matrix of which they were such a prominent part. Uncovering this earlier history offers a challenge to many modern scholarly assumptions and models concerning art making in and beyond the late Middle Ages. To reintegrate feasts into the history of art is to think anew about the nature of art making itself. Most obviously, the mixed media of feasts breaks down the increasingly porous modern boundaries between high and decorative art, theater, and music. While these art forms could be produced separately and required particular technical skills, within the banquet hall they frequently mingled. Even today, to read the accounts of late medieval courtiers like Olivier de la Marche is to enter into a fantastic world in which sculpted stags sing, roast boars breath fire, and a duke can converse with the Holy Church personified. The results were not only cross-fertilization across media but also the formation of banquets themselves as an independent multimedia form that solicited collaboration and interaction. The immersion of medieval audiences in the interactive world of banqueting led both theorists and planners to grapple with the problem of how precisely such experiences might shape audiences’ characters, a concern that arises explicitly in the discourses of ethics and courtesy and implicitly in the actual staging of feasts. Taking late medieval thought on the issues of mimesis, agency, and intermediality seriously underscores the cultural contingency of current analytic tools and opens up new ways for thinking more generally about problems such as performance, creativity, and spectacle that are integral to the humanities today. Just as the determinedly mixed materials that make up the banquet upset current scholarly categories, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries at the heart of this book trouble the traditional distinction between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This is particularly true for the Valois Burgundian rulers and their subjects, who were among the most celebrated patrons of the art of banqueting. The polity referred to by modern scholars as Valois Burgundy was formed in the fourteenth century by the marriage of Philip the Bold (1342–1404), the fourth son of King John II of France, and the heiress Margaret of Flanders (1350–1405). This couple was succeeded by four generations of Valois rulers: John the Fearless (1371–1419), Philip the Good (1396–1467), Charles the Bold (1433–77), and Mary of Burgundy (1457–82). Over the following century they ruled a vast, rich, and varied territory based in both southern France and the present-day Lowlands, losing their control

setting the ta ble

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over their French possessions only upon the death of Charles the Bold in 1477. While their French territories were largely agricultural, the wealth of the highly urbanized centers of Flanders rested in cloth manufacturing and international trade. Valois Burgundy was thus an integral part of the growing international luxury market that extended from England to the Mediterranean. It was also continually embroiled in internal power struggles and major regional conflicts such as the Hundred Years’ War, with the dukes as often siding against as with their royal French relatives.7 Yet the fame of the region both in its own time and among historians today rests not only in its political and economic power but also in its phenomenal cultural capital: the short hundred years of Valois rule oversaw and at times directly supported radically innovative artistic practices in multiple media still evident in the surviving sculpture and painting of artists such Claus Sluter, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden and the musical compositions of Gilles de Binche and Guillaume Dufay. Modern studies of this period were deeply shaped by debates at the turn of the twentieth century that pitted a nationalist celebration of the so-called Flemish Primitives against Johan Huizinga’s pessimistic vision of late medieval decadence.8 While these qualitative distinctions are rarely employed today, the Burgundian court continues to be studied equally by medievalists and early modernists, a testament to the myriad ways in which its politics, religion, and art defy attempts to cleanly separate the medieval from the early modern. The particular connection of the Valois Burgundian court to banqueting and other forms of lavish spectacle is familiar to most scholars from Huizinga’s vibrantly decadent prose, yet he was far from the first to connect the Valois dukes to splendid display.9 The notion of Valois Burgundy at its height as a land whose plenty was epitomized in its feasts was already mythologized at the end of the fifteenth century. In the poisoned-honey words of Philippe de Commynes: At that time, the subjects of the house of Burgundy lived in great wealth, thanks to the long peace they had known and the goodness of their ruler, who taxed them very little; it seems to me that at that time these lands, more than any other principality on earth, could be called the promised lands. They were abundant in riches and in great repose as they have never been since. . . . The expenditure and clothing of both men and women was grand and superfluous; parties and banquets were larger and more prodigious than in any other place I know.10

6

introduction

For contemporary viewers, the achievements of this very earthly Promised Land thus manifested in the interactive arts of personal adornment and festival as much as if not more than in the paintings and sculptures that rivet the attention of scholars today. Different late medieval types of festival share some characteristics and often accompanied each other: tournaments, civic entry parades, and feasts in particular were often held on the same day, planned by the same committees, and thematically linked. For this reason, the findings presented here have important implications for the study of festival more generally. Nevertheless, the court banquets that are my focus constitute a distinct type. Banquets differ from other court festivities primarily through their combination of visual, performing, and culinary arts. This tripartite combination is epitomized in a category of art production called entremet in Middle French, which combines all these elements. Court banquets also have a more limited audience than other types of festival, and their details are often better documented than are those of other social groupings. While civic banquets and processions could be held in public and potentially involved a large proportion of the citizenry, court banquets tend to be held in separate dining halls with limited access. Thus, for example, when Philip the Good, third Duke of Burgundy, held the famous Feast of the Pheasant in 1454, pairs of squires and knights stationed at each doorway controlled entry into the feast hall. While the Feast of the Pheasant used a preexisting space, the largest banquets might require the construction of temporary buildings to properly separate guests from the rest of the community, as at the marriage of Duke Charles the Bold to the English princess Margaret of York. Because individual court feasts’ audiences were comparatively limited and often partially listed within records, it is possible to be more precise about who this audience was, what sets of ideas its members might share, and how the repetitive actions and mores of feasting related to other spheres of activity in their lives. For this reason, banquets provide a more controlled group for examining the interactions of festival with larger patterns of patronage and reception than do other forms such as tournament or royal entries. Despite the substantial archival traces banquets have left, as a time- and place-specific art form they pose certain difficulties as a subject of study. Playing out over a set period and utilizing many elements subject to decomposition (foodstuffs and human bodies alike), feasts are a time-based medium par excellence and can never be truly reconstituted in the present. As Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks among others have underscored, the survivals from even the most recent events are fragmentary at best: a mix

setting the ta ble

7

of visual and verbal descriptions, perhaps supplemented by artifacts used in the performance and scripts or scores written before or after the fact.11 The vast temporal gulf separating a modern audience from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries throws into sharp relief these general challenges facing the study of time-based art forms. Although a relatively large and varied body of evidence concerning late medieval feast culture survives, it is highly fragmented and rarely allows for direct correlation of descriptive, archival, and physical evidence for an individual event. While reconstruction has a long history as a tool for academic study, ultimately any attempt to assemble these fragments into a single unified picture in and of itself constitutes a creative act; each assemblage thus created is in many important ways an original work.12 Feasts pose two additional problems that are not shared by studies of more recent performance and installation art. The first of these is a radical disjunction between modern cultural norms and those of the original producers and audiences of these events. Assumptions about the transparency of accounts provided by modern observers may be ill founded, but the difficulties for positivism are multiplied exponentially when semantic shift, changes in governmental and social structure, and the loss of records to generations of war, fire, and disinterest must also be factored into the equation.13 The second problem is that, unlike many photographs or films taken of modern performances, the evidence one might employ to re-create late medieval court feasts was not primarily intended to enable such a reconstruction. Physical traces like tapestries and goldwork were kept because they could be reused rather than as pious souvenirs of any single evening, and many of them were modified repeatedly to meet new needs. The seemingly transparent descriptions and images of particular events are controlled by genre expectations and the didactic intent of their authors, which again are part of a distinctly late medieval worldview.14 Faced with these issues, previous studies of feasts usually either ignored the problems they raise entirely or attempted to look through the darkened glass and bring us face to face with past events cleansed of the source material’s interests. As well intentioned as these efforts are, and as convincing a simulacrum as a master of the genre can produce, in the end this approach not only attempts the impossible but also overlooks a golden opportunity to examine the system of thought within which feasts originally existed. If today scholars are more excited by the types of utensils depicted in a scene of the wedding at Cana than in the familiar text it accompanies, the potential religious significance of a meal was not lost on the men and women who both read the Bible and attended feasts. If twenty-first-century students are

8

introduction

taught to compare a chronicle’s description with other accounts of the same event, a fifteenth-century reader was equally interested in the chronicler’s assertion that this event demonstrated the sin of pride or the virtue of faith. If we are to truly understand feasts, this complex web of interests and expectations by which they were shaped must also be understood. When the conventions commonly deployed by late medieval writers and artists to depict feasting are examined carefully, it becomes apparent that they form a horizon of desires widely shared within the culture. This is true not only in the sense that they trace a set of preexisting needs but also in the more active sense that these fragments were integral to shaping late medieval elites’ understanding of what a feast should entail. While any particular event may or may not have really succeeded in meeting these expectations, their repeated deployment helped to build and perpetuate a shared basic understanding of what a feast was and could be. Visual and textual descriptions of feasts are in many respects mutually reinforcing, indicating interest in similar aspects of these events through different conventions. Yet the two are neither synonymous with each other nor straightforward attempts to record reality. In both their differences and the ideological work they perform, visual and textual accounts reveal themselves to be fractured and fractious constellations of hopes and expectations rather than simple data easily integrated into a perfect reconstruction of the past.

TExTUAL CONVENTIONS Verbal descriptions of late medieval banqueting are remarkably consistent in their overall structure, suggesting that they were understood to form a genre governed by a set of widely recognized conventions. Yet authors mobilized these conventions to record particular events that they lauded as unique. Given that the principal accounts of feasts were written by and for participants and official planners of such events, it seems reasonable to infer that the conventions of feast descriptions themselves helped form the basic outlines of banqueting within which each event was nevertheless expected to differ in its particulars, much as a each writer of a sonnet expresses creativity within a predetermined form.15 At their shortest, late medieval texts describing banquets can consist of little more than general references to people dining or celebrating. More commonly, a slightly longer description is used that specifies the date, location, major guests, and purpose of the feast, ending with a general reference to its planning and aesthetic success. A typical example of this short form can be seen in a description of a feast held by Duchess Isabella of Portugal

setting the ta ble

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during a war between her husband Philip the Good and the city of Ghent, written by Georges Chastellain, the official court chronicler of the Valois Burgundian court: The Lord of Ternant spoke to the Duchess of Burgundy and demonstrated to her the great dangers and mortal war of the Gantois . . . because of which some of them advised that, by her good advice, the Count of Charolais [Philip’s heir Charles the Bold] should be put far from these dangers. . . . The Duchess of Burgundy thanked the Lord of Ternant and the others concerned by this issue and responded that she was well advised and intended to hold a very beautiful banquet the next day in order to fête her son the Count of Charolais. And as she had said, the following day there was a very beautiful banquet, to which she invited a great number of knights, squires, ladies, and maidens. At this banquet the duchess made great cheer and so did those who attended. Afterward she pleaded with her son the Count of Charolais in the presence of the good company that was there, saying, “Oh my son, for love of you, I have assembled this good company . . . because your father is at war. . . . I beg you to return to him tomorrow morning . . .” When the Lord of Ternant and the others there heard the duchess speak in this way they were very amazed. . . . The greater part of them praised the noble Lady of Burgundy, and said that it was noble courage and great virtue in a woman to send her only son thus into the danger of war.16

This short account provides a skeleton of the feast elements considered worth recording in historical narratives: their purpose, attractiveness, guest list, and success, but also important performances or speeches made at them, as in the case of the duchess’s plea. The vignette begins by locating the banquet in terms of political events: the bloody war against Ghent is under way, and leading courtiers have asked the duchess to help protect the duke’s heir. Against this general setting, the duchess’s banquet takes place the next day. The feast is beautiful and attended by a number of nobles, who, if not named directly, are at least indicated by types. All of the participants enjoy themselves. The duchess then comes to her point: using the happy guests as an audience and proof of her love for her son, she goes against received advice and tells him not to stay safely home but rather to fight alongside his father. The duchess’s feast is at once motivated by political events and integral to shaping them, elevating her own standing at court and, as later events prove, moving her son to war. In this case, the banquet appears as an acceptable means for convincing members of the elite

10

introduction

to take part in or avoid such a serious endeavor such as battle. It also marks out a space in which pleasure is sought and achieved and where observers can quickly turn into participants either as actors (such as the duchess) or as spectacle (the happy guests). More substantial accounts build, often at great length, on this basic outline. Elaborations usually concentrate on the description of the guests and those elements that make the event enjoyable or memorable, particularly in terms of physical setting and entertainments or speeches performed. The date, place, and purpose are usually stated first, occasionally with reference to the planning of the event and almost universally with the identification of the host and at least some of the guests. In cases where the servers are noble, they too may be listed. After this basic setup, writers expand on the decoration of the hall and provide greater detail about the attending guests, sometimes with discussion of their costume. Descriptions of the feast hall and its decorations are often extended and pay particular attention to tapestries, heraldic signs, large statues or fountains, and the ceremonial display of extra plate on the dresser. If there is special costuming of the servers, as when the servers at the Feast of the Pheasant were dressed in Philip the Good’s colors of black and gray, this may be mentioned as part of the larger visual effect of the space. Lists of guests specify ranked male and female attendees by name and end with a reference to the numerous other noblemen, ladies, and foreign visitors as groups. The details of the seating arrangements are usually vague, although special attention is given to the placement of the most important participants. Sight is the most important sense in these descriptions, and a connection is repeatedly drawn between the visibility of the guests and the ornamentation of the space within which they move. In contrast to the generalities assigned to most guests, the decorative elements called entremets that occupy the tables are usually described in detail and occasionally interpreted in allegorical terms. These descriptions usually appear after the discussions of the guests and the room, although larger fountains may be enfolded into the description of the general setting. Once the hall, participants, and semipermanent entremets have been described, a brief statement is made regarding the quantity, quality, and splendor of the foods and wines provided, although dishes are rarely named or discussed at any length. Food, which might seem central to feasting, is largely incidental in its memorialization. The authors then turn to the actions that take place during the feast. Performances, also called entremets, are described in great detail. The scripts of particularly important acts are reproduced, as are speeches made by the host and guests when appropri-

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ate. The accounts then draw to a close, often by stating that the tables are cleared and dancing takes place and sometimes extolling the incomparable wonderfulness of the feast as a whole. One lacuna in the narrative written accounts calls for special attention. Both the basic and the elaborated versions of banquet descriptions are almost entirely silent as to the actual foods consumed. For example, in his account of a banquet held by Philip the Good in Paris, Chastellain notes that “from the abundance of leftover meat, forty plates were given to God’s poor in the city the next morning,”17 yet he remains silent as to the type of meat, how it was prepared, or indeed any gustatory characteristics it may have possessed. On the rare occasions when individual dishes are mentioned, attention is focused on their figural aspect rather than odor, taste, or ingredients. At a banquet held in Paris after Louis xI’s coronation and entry, Chastellain states: I will not speak of the dishes, nor the meats. . . . But in the middle of the meal various entremets were made and presented to the king and the princes at his table, which were very beautiful and sumptuous and made with beautiful imagination. The king was presented a flying deer, the Duke of Orléans a white swan, the Duke of Burgundy a lion, the Count of Charolais a pelican, the Duke of Bourbon a peacock, the Count of Eu a phoenix, the Count of Étampes a unicorn . . . and each entremet was emblazoned with the arms of the one who was served.18

While some of the animals listed seem at first to resemble at least plausible roast meats (swan, peacock, pelican), others, like the unicorn and phoenix, are highly improbable even on a king’s table. Like the coats of arms with which they are decorated, these heraldic animals most likely honored their recipients primarily by their external appearance rather than their interior contents; the aroma and tenderness of flying deer remain a mystery. The focus on ceremony and appearance over taste and nutrition places these accounts within an established literary tradition of French meal descriptions that crosses numerous genres. In fabliaux, romances, and poems alike, a detailed description of food is consistently used to designate nonnoble dining. In the satirical romance Le Petit Jehan le Saintre, the aristocratic hero is associated with dress and ceremony, the lascivious monk with specific foods. In fabliaux, food is primarily described in scenes of seduction, particularly adultery, or to designate the vilain, who consumes a diet of eggs and dairy without elaborate sauces.19 In romances, descriptions of court banquets concentrate on their visual and musical splendor.20 Indeed,

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in those unusual cases where court food is described, it can be used as a sign that a noble has fallen down on his or her luck: to remember noble foods is to have become prey to a nonnoble hunger.21 Against this backdrop, it is not surprising to find that the only firm designation of foods consumed by a noble in Chastellain’s multivolume official chronicle of the Burgundian court is a description of the simple torte, water, and fromage d’abbaye given to Philip the Good at a peasant’s home.22 Just as the detailing of gold plate and high company attempts to convey a banquet’s luster, so too the silence concerning tastes deploys an established literary trope to indicate the nobility of the feast event.

BANqUET IMAGE CONVENTIONS That there are disjunctions between these types of narrative description and the visual depictions of feasts is almost a commonplace of food studies literature. For some, these differences indicate an opportunity to supplement gaps in the textual accounts with visual information, particularly that drawn from manuscripts.23 Such studies are generally predicated on the erroneous assumption that medieval artists either sought simply to record the world around them or, in the case of historical subjects depicted anachronistically, relied on contemporary practice to imagine a past world. Given the highly constructed and politically nuanced nature of late medieval miniatures, this assumption is unwarranted and calls into grave question any resulting interpretations.24 Yet while medieval images of feasting are far from naive, this does not mean that they have little to say about actual banquets. As in the case of the textual descriptions, the conventions governing such images reveal much about the expectations planners and diners brought to the feast hall, since they single out the elements considered central to capturing the essence of a banquet experience. Like chroniclers, visual artists were often intimately acquainted with the staging of banquets and had a stake in mastering their idioms, even if only on the pragmatic level of wanting to please their patrons. Many of the visual artists who collaborated on the production of feasts also worked in more permanent media such as sculpture, tapestry design, and miniature and panel painting. Rogier van der Weyden’s probable work on the Ommegang festivities as city painter for Brussels is the best known of these productions, but court painters also planned and constructed banquets as part of their duties.25 Nonsalaried artists were called on to collaborate on particularly elaborate events. Simon Marmion, one of the most famous of fifteenth-century miniaturists, worked alongside his father and many other

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artists at the Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 and indeed seems to have caught the attention of court patrons at that time.26 Like the textual descriptions of feasts, images of feasting are remarkably consistent in their general outlines. A well-known example of the basic composition for depicting banquets appears in the copy of the Grandes chroniques de France owned by Charles V of France (fig. 2). The miniature is part of an unusually densely illuminated portion of the manuscript outlining the ceremonial details of the visit of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV to the French court, and has been eloquently examined by Anne D. Hedeman in relation to the political goals of Charles V.27 It is one of only two miniatures (both interestingly of banquets) that are expressly acknowledged in the accompanying text, which informs the reader that the royal and imperial party hurried to “the large dais with the marble table and the grouping of figures and their positions were as described below and as is figured in the miniature hereafter portrayed.”28 Textually framed as reportage, the miniature is nevertheless highly conventional. The basic presentational mode is frontal. Six men are seated shoulder to shoulder along one side of a long cloth-covered table. The host Charles V is seated in the center with his most important guest, Emperor Charles IV, to his immediate right and the emperor’s heir Wenceslas to his left. These three are given particular visual prominence not only by their central location but also by the placement of a cloth of honor behind and a nef in front of each. A few other signs of dining are scattered along the table in the form of cups and pieces of bread, but as in the literary accounts, relatively little attention is paid to the depiction of particular foodstuffs. The best clue to the nature of the repast served comes from a plate of white meat being carved by a young male server near the miniature’s center. This is most likely some form of poultry, given the prominence of birds in other feast miniatures, but the emphasis here is less on the type of flesh than on the service being provided by the young man. The server is joined in the foreground by the depiction of what the text calls an entremet, in which the Crusaders’ capture of Jerusalem is restaged. This staged spectacle interacts curiously with the feast scene: its actors are depicted in a smaller scale, and the prominent boat at the viewer’s left breaks through the miniature border from the margin, imparting a sense of movement to the depicted action. The viewer is therefore presented with a double spectacle, observing both the obvious staging of the eleventh-century siege and the more subtle staging of Charles V and his guests’ behavior as audience. The assembled guests, hierarchal seating, sparse table, and frontality of the Grandes chroniques miniature appear throughout late medieval art,

Figure 2. Banquet of Charles V, in Grandes chroniques de France de Charles V, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 2813, fol. 473v. (photo: BnF).

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deployed not only for historical events but also in romance and to illustrate abstract qualities such as magnificence (see chapter 4). Such highly visible diners are commonplace in images of court banquets, which usually depict guests seated side by side at one covered table. The room is arranged to allow for a serving and performance space on the opposite side of the table from that along which the diners sit. This space is often peopled with young male servers, although scenes of nonnoble or more domestic meals may have women in this role. Generally more than one guest is present, and the diners are shown conversing or otherwise interacting with each other. The feast is not, however, the site of complete social leveling. Distinctions in status are usually marked by the locations of cloths of honor and serving vessels. The placement of diners is also central to establishing power relations, with the usual rules of centrality and right dominance holding here as in sacred iconography. Common variants on this basic format add one or two tables, sometimes rearranging the room to put the main table either perpendicular to the picture plane or at a slight diagonal. Such images generally retain the base arrangement of having all or nearly all of the diners arranged along one side of the tables and often suggest the presence of a performance and service space on the unoccupied side. In the Wedding at Cana (fig. 1), for example, two tables lined on one side with seated guests are set at right angles to each other with an open floor before them. The most important figure, the bride, faces the viewer and is emphasized by the gold cloth behind her, much in the manner of the three rulers in the Grandes chroniques. While these tables are more heavily laden than the Grandes chroniques’ table, the food and drink before the guests is nevertheless limited and highly stylized, with rolls, beakers, knives, and plates alternating regularly along the white linen without regard for the actual placement of supposed diners. The open space between pictured and real viewers is taken up by a swirl of activity, from a server pouring wine in the foreground to the miraculous performance of the transfigured water at the center.

THE HORIZON OF A DINER’S DESIRE The conventions of textual and visual feast descriptions, taken together, help provide a road map to the general form of the feast, sketching out the basic structure into which individual planners and diners fitted their individual dreams and desires. There are a few obvious differences between the verbal and visual accounts. Texts emphasize the time-based quality of

16

introduction

feasts, both by stressing their placement within a sequence of historical events and by drawing attention to the order of actions in the banquet hall over the course of the evening. Images tend to encapsulate the acts of banqueting into a far smaller number of moments.29 Like the verbal accounts, the pictorial depictions of feasting draw attention to the assembled guests, but in place of the long lists of names and unclear seating arrangement in the texts, images tend to limit the number of figures and concentrate attention on their placement at table. Multiple events from a single banquet are seldom depicted in visual representations. When several moments are combined, this is usually accomplished through continuous narration within a single scene and only in extremely rare instances by including an extended feast miniature cycle. The visual concentration on a single moment as the summation of the temporally extended banquet is linked to a general tendency in the visual depictions toward abbreviation. Where textual accounts stress the large numbers of feast guests and variety of entremets on the tables, visual imagery tends to limit the number of table decorations and figures and provide a feeling of relative spaciousness by arranging them with little or no overlap. Despite their differences, visual and narrative descriptions of feasts share a number of common concerns. When possible, both tend to indicate the placement of the feast within a larger series of historical events. In both, food is underemphasized to a degree that is surprising to a modern audience. Instead, the two forms of depiction draw attention to the human participants in the feast. In the texts this is accomplished through the order and length of lists, in the visual accounts by the arrangement of seated figures in relation to both the viewer and each other. Both sets of conventions also suggest a link between the visibility of the guests and the visibility of other performers in the space. In the textual accounts, the list of guests is often linked by propinquity with the elaborate descriptions of the entertainments performed before the group. Visual depictions also often suggest the existence of a performance space and can at times show entremets being enacted, although this is more unusual. A similar but inverted shift of priorities can be seen in the case of table service. Narrative texts mention servers only when they are particularly high nobles or somehow otherwise differ from the norm, yet since these named servers are all male, it seems reasonable to suppose that masculine service was preferred when possible. Visual imagery, on the other hand, is quite insistent on this point: images of elite banquets always have young male waiters. The exceptions to this are images where the narrative insists on a female server: illustrations of the

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story of Griselda (who displayed her utter obedience to her husband after he cast her aside by serving his new bride during the wedding feast), for example, highlight her unusual presence as a waitress.30 Playing into established gender hierarchies that elevated men over women, texts and images alike repeatedly asserted table service’s ability to display the host’s authority and his servers’ humility. Such service also performed a vital role in socializing elite youths, as will be discussed in greater length in chapter 4. Both textual and visual accounts of feasting thus agree on a core group of elements that were particularly important for conveying the overall impact of a feast. While food plays a limited role, the elegance of the hall and high visibility of human actors within the space are endlessly repeated as signs of a banquet’s excellence. Both texts and images have a tendency to rely on shorthand formulas rather than meticulous description. An increased level of detail therefore indicates that the author or artist wants to draw special attention to the particular elements elaborated on. Set against an often generalized if not schematized backdrop, elements such as the multifigure scene in the foreground of the Grandes chroniques miniature become the focus of the viewer’s gaze. Similarly, in verbal accounts it is not that food is entirely ignored but rather that its presence is mentioned in passing, using stock phrases. In comparison to these laconic notes, the tendency to describe particular entremets for several pages at a stretch leaves the reader in little doubt as to what is the most important part of the banquet.

PLAN FOR THE PRESENT STUDY Taken together, the verbal and visual conventions of late medieval feast depictions offer a surprisingly consistent set of priorities, focusing attention on the decoration of the room and the actions of humans within it. These two seemingly disparate concerns combine in the capacious term entremet, and so it is with this important late medieval category that chapter 1 begins. Entremets’ combination of live performances, sculptures, automata, and certain foods immediately requires a rethinking of two modern assumptions often anachronistically applied to other periods. First, entremets undermine any attempt to maintain stable boundaries between static and time-based art forms as well as between the animate and the inanimate. Second, the range of technical expertise required by this variety of materials points to the centrality of collaboration in banquets. Not only did multiple individuals have creative input in individual entremets, but important feasts were

18

introduction

likewise collaborative at all levels and stages of planning. Examining the working methods developed by feast producers thus contributes to a small but growing body of scholarship on artistic collaboration, creativity, and authorship under way in both late medieval and contemporary art history. Chapter 2 uses the model of collaborative production traced in the previous chapter to reconsider the roles of what is typically referred to as the audience of art. Feasting was a highly interactive practice in which the lines between viewer and viewed, performance and performer, were constantly shifting: the loaded critical terms spectacle and spectator are inadequate in face of actual practice. Audience members regularly entered actively into the spectacle of feasts in a variety of ways that cannot be simply accounted for by modern theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin or Guy Debord. Participation helped seduce banquet guests into supporting the policies of late medieval rulers, who themselves often served as the stars of their own dinner entertainments. Medieval feasts thus offer a challenge to both the traditional division between spectacle and spectator and the frequent modern celebration of participation as an intrinsically liberating activity. The use of feigned emotions by both guests and actors at banquets imbricates feasting in late medieval concerns surrounding the role of emotions in public life and the dangers of dissimulation, which form the subject of chapter 3. While late medieval Flemish art has often been stereotyped as emotionally extreme and even naive, this chapter suggests both the variety of the emotional communities at play in this milieu and the subtle ways in which the arts were used to explore the carefully monitored boundaries between intentions and actions. Chapter 4 delves more deeply into the ethical dimension of feasting. Framed as a fraught training ground in magnificence, temperance, and gluttony alike by contemporary romances and mirrors of princes, the banquet hall emerges as a key site not for excess, as modern accounts would often have it, but rather for developing skills of discernment directed both outward toward others and inward toward one’s own motivations. The habits of judgment traced in the two previous chapters are shown to have an aesthetic counterpart in chapter 5. Chroniclers commonly praise entremets and other art works with the adjectives marvelous and strange. These terms often connote an object or performance’s ability to draw attention to its ingenious facture and the processes of perception. In the process, wonder-inducing art requires viewers to examine themselves as subjects as much as the object of attention. Ambiguity and paradox are valued for their ability to simultaneously test and suspend interpretation. Rather than confounding its viewers, marvelous and strange art is prized for call-

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ing attention to their abilities as judges and connoisseurs. Despite modern attempts to frame such discernment as a secularizing force, similar strategies emerge in contemporary devotional art as well, making the boundary between the spiritual and the earthly yet another of the borders breached by the entremet. Drawing on this larger framework of social, spiritual, and artistic mores, the final chapter turns to a case study of a single night of feasting and its reverberations across the many years of the life of one participant. The first night of the wedding celebrations for Margaret of York and Charles the Bold in 1468 in many ways conforms to larger feasting traditions both for marriage alliances and for traditional displays of political loyalty. Yet it also presented the new Duchess of Burgundy with a very particular vision of female rule that stressed loyalty to other female family members and engaged virtue. Margaret’s own actions and commissions, and images of her created at the behest of her stepgrandson after her death, suggest the potential lasting influence of both the motifs and the problems posed within seemingly ephemeral feasts. Like the Wedding at Cana, late medieval court banquets refigure the boundaries drawn by scholars today between chivalric and religious, miracle and sleight-of-hand, spectator and spectacle, thing and performance. At once aesthetically pleasing and of vital political importance, feasts could express and create both unity and division. Despite their reputation for hedonistic excess, feasts figured in the minds of many as a training ground for ethical and social discernment, encouraging participants to take pleasure in judging not only others but also themselves. While modern audiences have largely viewed the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries through the lens of their paintings and sculptures, and by extension the very few writings that concern those media, it was feasts that were enshrined again and again in the official histories, memoirs, and letters of the late Middle Ages. To acknowledge the importance of this now largely overlooked artistic form is to reevaluate the society in which it was refined and celebrated. On examination, what emerges is a highly reflective and aware culture in which critical attention to the processes of perception and decipherment was key to both artistic and political practice. Such an investigation also has implications beyond the confines of even this pivotal period in art history. Reintegrating banquets back into late medieval art provides new insight into the longer history of time-based and environmental arts, which are too often treated as purely modern phenomena. The concerns outlined here extend beyond the

20

introduction

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as banquets confront us with some of the key questions facing art history as a discipline today: What relationships between media are possible? And in what ways does art, however constituted, work within the social sphere not only as a reflection of a society but also as a vital force within it?

chapter one

Between the Dishes

F

easting is a subject that inspired numerous accounts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Only a small portion of these, usually addressed to potential planners or cooks, express any sustained interest in the edible aspects of these elaborate events. Chronicles, memoirs, and letters pay little attention to taste, instead focusing on the visible and audible decoration of space and the people and objects that moved within it. A large part of such accounts is taken up with describing and evaluating table decorations, statuary, automata, and live acts. These diverse objects and performances were grouped together according to their position under a single term, also found in surviving cookbooks: interspersed between the main dishes, they were called entremets. The presence of entremets is an important element in transforming a meal into a feast, a daily event into something special. If the entremet is an extra, it is the same sort of constitutive supplement as the trifles discussed by Patricia Fumerton or Jacques Derrida’s reimagination of the Kantian parergon.1 Like the painting frames that intrigue Derrida, the entremet has meaning only when placed alongside the mets: as the parergon is in fact inextricable from the painting, the entremet is in effect the extra that turns a meal into a feast. Like Fumerton’s trifles, the entremet appears at first glance to be remarkably inessential and ephemeral. But just as Fumerton’s frivolities lay open the heart of Stuart aristocratic selfhood, the entremet reveals key aspects of late medieval elite culture. The late medieval entremet is a complicated category, combining the performing, visual, and culinary arts. The combination of media occurred not only in the use of the term but also in individual entremet that fused moving and still, object and performance, people and things. Such combinations required the collaboration of a shifting variety of technical specialists: 21

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musicians, writers, engineers, painters, cooks, heralds, and actors, to name only a few of the more common. Both as a category and in their particular instances, entremets make evident the anachronism and limitations of media specificity and artistic individualism as interpretive presuppositions when investigating the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

WHAT IS AN ENTREMET? In modern French cuisine, entremets largely consist of sweets and constitute a course between the cheese and dessert within a formal meal.2 However, this specificity of both ingredients and position is a late development. In the centuries-long evolution of the conventions for formal dining, the entremet was one of the last elements to find a fixed form and place, if it can be said to have done so even today (current usage suggests it is increasingly conflated with dessert). The slipperiness of the modern French entremet is not surprising given its medieval origins. Literally, the term entremet means between (entre) the dishes or courses (mets). This etymological dependence on the presence of dishes locates the entremet firmly within the sphere of dining. But it also suggests a degree of ambiguity, since entremets derive their identity not from inherent qualities but from their liminal placement. This ambiguity is borne out in practice: fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Francophone authors are consistent in using entremet only when describing a feast, yet a single account may designate a great variety of referents as entremets. This variety and the challenges it poses to modern analytical categories are apparent even within individual entremets, which frequently cross the boundaries between secular and sacred, two and three dimensions, the visual, culinary, and performing arts. The entremet’s fluidity is evident in the detailed accounts of the Feast of the Pheasant. Held in Lille on February 17, 1454, at the direction of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy to generate enthusiasm for his projected crusade, the Feast of the Pheasant is recounted in considerable detail in two French chronicles. One of the authors, Olivier de la Marche, was a planner and performer in the Feast of the Pheasant; the other, Mathieu d’Escouchy, was at most a guest.3 The two authors express preferences for different entremets but agree on the general semantic range of the term. According to these two accounts, the three main tables at the Feast of the Pheasant were decorated with at least fifteen objects in the form of fountains, automata, salt-cellars, and statues, all of which are called entremets. In addition, the Feast of the Pheasant featured a number of musical and theatrical performances by both the noble guests and paid professionals, which

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23

are also called entremets. While some of these performances play with the notion of facture and many employ made objects in their costuming or props, they would today be characterized as performing rather than visual arts. Finally, while the surviving accounts are generally reticent about the nature of the dishes served, at least one manuscript of d’Escouchy’s text mentions a combination of entremets with roasts, both of which are decorated with the coat of arms of the hosts.4 It would not be impossible for en­ tremets here to refer to foodstuffs separate from the roast meat, although its precise composition is difficult to guess. Numerous other contemporary chronicles use the term to designate edible items.5 The evidence of cookbooks, like the evidence of chronicles, suggests a remarkable ability to switch easily between materials and media. Among the earliest and most influential of these late medieval cookbooks was the Viandier attributed to Guillaume Tirel, called Taillevent. Taillevent served the French royal court from the 1320s until his death in 1395. Beginning as a chef under Jeanne d’Evreux, he was the head of the royal kitchens for both Charles V and Charles VI. The Viandier is among the earliest and most influential recipe collections of the late Middle Ages. While there is now some doubt as to Taillevent’s involvement in its production, the fact that the Viandier is attributed to him suggests the esteem in which both he and the French royal kitchens were held, and the type of elaborate cuisine connected with them. Entremets are included as a distinct category within Viandier manuscripts from at least the fourteenth century, with additional examples appended to later copies. The core recipes grouped under the heading entre­ mets are edible, although they often appeal to the eye and imagination as well as the palate. A simple recipe for millet directs that it to be cooked in milk, colored with saffron, and placed in a bowl. An entremet recipe for lamprey directs that the meat be roasted, then covered in a thick sauce made from combining its blood with spices and vinegar. This sauce is referred to as “mud,” suggesting both its probable appearance and the possibility that the dish visually simulates the living lamprey’s tendency to burrow into river bottoms.6 Similarly, the entremet known as cigne revestu, in which a cooked swan is redressed in its skin and feathers, breaches the boundary between living and dead animal.7 Additional recipes for entremets were included in a copy of the Viandier from the first half of the fifteenth century.8 Doreures is an “entremets for a feast day or for a princely banquet on the three meat-days of the week, namely, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.”9 Its consumable elements are similar to those in other recipes: poultry is stuffed with a mixture of pork,

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bacon, eggs, spices, pine-nut paste, and currants, then roasted; the leftover stuffing is made into balls and also roasted. The name doreures may refer to this stage (dorer refers today to browning meat). Or it may indicate the visual effect created in the final stage, when the cooked meat is covered in gold and silver leaf (dorer also refers to gilding, while doré can mean golden or gilded). As in contemporary painting manuals, the recommended adhesive is egg-based, the gold of the celebratory doreures thus being linked on several levels to the illumination given to the names of feast days in the calendars of the most luxurious books of hours.10 If the earlier entremets delighted the diner by eliding the difference between the living and the cooked, doreures instead are named for the techniques that transforms ingredients into a luxurious dish that is if anything hyperprocessed, the sheen given to cooked meat through glazing pushed into the realm of nearly supernatural reflectivity in the coating of metallic gold or silver. Many of the fifteenth-century additions to the Viandier are even more visually startling. In the recipe for coqz heaumez, a stuffed roasted hen or cock is seated atop a piglet and given a “helmet of glued paper and a lance couched at the breast of the bird, and these should be covered with gold- or silver-leaf for lords, or with white, red, or green tin-leaf.”11 Coqz heaumez is edible, but it also communicates through sight. The strange vignette of the knighted chicken with its porcine steed draws on traditional themes such as the animal jousts common to manuscript marginalia and the animate foodstuffs of Cockaigne, although it does not precisely imitate any single model.12 As in those topsy-turvy worlds, this entremet exploits its liminal position in order to humorously interrogate societal norms. While late medieval medical advice considered poultry more appropriate for aristocrats than for workmen due to its connection to air, chicken was consumed by people at all social levels and lacked the elite status of the swan in cigne revestu.13 Similarly, coqz heaumeuz’s postroast manipulation, although imitating knights, does not impart the glittering elegance of do­ reures. Rather, it recalls other appearances of “noble” poultry such as the chivalric cock Chanticleer who appears in both Le Roman de Renart and Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Chanticleer’s noble pretensions endanger him when a fox flatters him like a courtier, and he eventually escapes not by bravely facing his foe but by running away.14 Similarly, coqz heaumez gently mocks aristocratic male pride when the roasted chicken assumes the trappings of tournament. In addition to casting doubt on the martial prowess of noblemen, it significantly registers and so paradoxically mocks the use of dress to create social differentiation by aligning the various colored helms and lances to the status of their audience. In eating the chicken

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knight, the diner was placed in a curious position of both obliterating the potentially troubling satire through division and mastication and incorporating its ambiguous humor into his or her body. Other recipes in the Viandier elevate sight and performance even further above taste. Four entremets grouped under the heading Entremetz de paintrerie, or painted entremets, may not to be meant to be eaten at all; their definition of painting, moreover, is much broader than the limited modern “two-dimensional coloring of a support.” Two of the four entremets de paintrerie depict chivalric subjects. To portray the popular story of the Swan Knight, the cook is directed to construct a wooden box with wheels in which is placed a water-filled lead coffer holding a minever-covered parchment boat and a swan tied together with a golden chain (it is not specified whether this is a cigne revestu or a sculpture).15 A cloth painted to represent water is then attached to hide men underneath, presumably to move the box around the room. This multimedia construction combining metalwork, carpentry, sculpture, possibly cooking, and stagehands employs painting in the modern sense only to depict the false water. The term painting in relation to entremets appears to cover the entire semantic range of constructing nonedible spectacle rather than simply the medium of painting as it is understood today. The interchangeability of materials and construction methods within entremets de paintrerie is even more evident in the description of one of the two examples depicting religious subjects. The recipe for the entremet labeled Saincte Marthe is both to the point and bewilderingly vague: To make the ymage of Saint Martha. One ought to make the ymage of Saint Martha with the dragon at full length next to her and, around the neck of the dragon, a gold chain by which the saint will hold it as though she had conquered it. This personnage can be done by two people or by painted work of whatever height and size as one wishes.16

The basic iconography of this entremet is clear: in keeping with an apocryphal story included in the widely circulated Golden Legend, St. Martha is shown having tamed a dragon.17 In almost every other respect, however, the facture of this entremet is left to the cook’s own devices. The visual spectacle produced by the entremet is twice called an ymage, a term that can be translated equally well as “image” or “sculpture.”18 In the third sentence, however, it is called a personnage, which might be a character, an actor, or a depicted figure.19 The shifting descriptor signals the most startling substitution of the pas-

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sage for a modern reader, as the recipe offhandedly suggests that St. Martha and the dragon could be played by two actors or by “painted work” (ouvrage de paintrerie) as the cook desires. As the Swan Knight entremet has already shown, the term paintrerie had a very wide semantic range. The possibility of using “painted work” therefore allows for substantial variation not only in scale but also in medium. The entremet of St. Martha thus steps blithely over numerous modern boundaries. In a manner typical of feasting, it incorporates sacred iconography without comment into what might now be considered a secular event. And at the level of production, it proposes a complete interchangeability between theater, painting, and sculpture. The seemingly transgressive nature of entremets’ mixture of performances, objects, and cuisine into a single category has long troubled scholars of medieval dining. Faced with such a capacious term, historians divide entremets into subcategories more closely aligned with modern preconceptions. Agathe Lafortune-Martel, for example, argues in a study of fifteenthcentury menus that aristocratic politics drove a steady movement “away from the table” of edible entremets and toward the “figuration” of statuary and performances.20 Yet as the evidence from both the Viandier and the accounts of the Feast of the Pheasant suggest, food and figuration are not necessarily separate from each other, nor is either solely available at or away from the table. Furthermore, the variety of possibilities within figuration requires a serious reconsideration of modern preconceptions concerning the division of the arts. Whenever scholars have attempted to mold the idea of the entremet to current expectations, it has repeatedly refused to realign neatly to fit their arguments. This recalcitrance suggests just how robust the category of the entremet truly was and how understanding its workings can reveal crucially different aspects of the late medieval approach to producing pleasure. Faced with entremets’ complexity, the food historian Bruno Laurioux in the end looks to social function to explain the category. Declaring that the entremet’s “sole function is quite simply to be a ‘plus,’ a gift, a supplementary dish destined to honor whomever it is served to,” he suggests that food and spectacle could both show respect for the recipient and thus are properly considered entremets.21 This open definition more accurately captures the rich complexity of late medieval practice. The idea of the entremet as a supplement points to its parergonal character as an addition that in fact constitutes the meaning of its supposed base. While the entremet may seem incidental if banqueting is seen as only a series of foods, it is in fact fundamental to the purpose of feasting. As Master Chiquart, chef to Duke Amadeus of Savoy, noted, for any feast all of a cook’s labor and all of his ingredients are

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mobilized to “do the banquet honourably and to honour the lord who gives it.”22 Particularly well suited to casting such glory, the entremet is indeed the most effective element of the feast as a vehicle for conferring honor. Regardless of how the wide combination of elements in and expectations for the entremet originally came together or the trouble they cause modern sensibilities, by the end of the fourteenth century this rich category was firmly established. While entremets surface frequently in both cookbooks and descriptions of feasting, there is no medieval debate over their nature comparable to that found in contemporary scholarship. Nor do late medieval sources allow the various forms called entremet to be dismissed as a case of distinct conceptual categories that simply happen to be verbal synonyms. The mingling of food, performance, and object within the term entremet is reflected in many entremets themselves: a food might be presented in an elaborate vessel with the ruler’s coat of arms; musicians could play while standing in a giant pie; automata were statues in motion; a performer could be frozen in a tableau vivant.

ERODING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN ANIMATE AND INANIMATE In light of the multiplicity of entremets, it is tempting to imagine that they could at least be arranged along a spectrum even if they cannot be neatly divided into discrete units. One could, for instance, envision a scheme that places made objects at one end and living beings at another, a series of gradations between animate and inanimate. Yet such distinctions are made among entremets only in order to be quickly transgressed. With an astonishing persistence, both surviving material evidence of entremets and their textual descriptions interrogate the boundaries between static and animate, living and nonliving. In some entremets this takes the general form of evoking spiritual and practical motifs of liveliness through movement and vivid aromas. In many others it takes a more complex and titillating form as humans turn into objects and objects into animate beings, a process inflected with erotic desire and the thrill of physical violence. The modern dream of enforcing an ordering system on entremets might at first glance appear to have late medieval support. As noted above, an early fifteenth-century copy of the Viandier includes a small number of entremets de paintrerie. But although they differ from the Viandier’s other entremets in not necessarily being edible, these recipes if anything work to undermine the distinction between living beings and things, animate and inanimate. While both Olivier de la Marche and Mathieu d’Escouchy usually refer to

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entremets with no qualifier, their accounts of the Feast of the Pheasant do signal the move from describing the room to recounting what they term “entremets living, moving, and going across/on the earth.”23 Yet even this modest attempt at classification is complicated by the actual descriptions of these “living and moving entremets” found in d’Escouchy’s and de la Marche’s texts, all of which upset the connection of life with movement and animation with the natural. The two authors are also surprisingly loose in how they employ their own term: the first entremet that both d’Escouchy and de la Marche describe under this grouping is in fact a clock tower with singers that they had already listed as a “table entremet.” 24 This entremet played an integral role in several of the performances that follow by providing introductory fanfares and musical accompaniment to the action. A similar liveliness is a typical feature of the rare surviving physical evidence of entremets. The fourteenth-century table fountain commonly known as the Cleveland fountain is one of the very few extant examples of the once ubiquitous moving metalwork that enlivened elite dining (fig. 3).25 Long separated from its original catch basin, the Cleveland fountain now consists of an octagonal Gothic tower in three tiers of gilt-silver, the bottom two of which have affixed enamel plaques.26 Liquid would rise through the circular central tube and issue from the mouths of the four animals at the top, thereafter cascading down each level through additional spouts in the forms of distorted human and animal faces. Along the way, the water jets turned a series of wheels attached to bells, creating a flurry of whirling movement and ringing. To the sensual pleasure of this attention-grabbing mixture of sight and sound was likely added the intellectual pleasures of recognizing the technological skills of the maker and pondering how the visible mechanisms of the spouts and wheels might relate to the plumbing masked by the ornate stem. In describing a slightly more elaborate fountain at the Feast of the Pheasant, for example, Olivier de la Marche notes among its marvelous effects the fact that water spurted from the edge of a cross held by St. Andrew, to disappear in the simulated meadow below “in such a subtle manner that no one knew what became of the water.”27 The delicacy of the Cleveland fountain’s mechanisms makes it unlikely that it ever held wine, although such uses are attested in literary descriptions for other fountains. Instead, it was most likely filled with scented water, which could both perfume the room and be used to wash guests’ hands. Smell is today the most difficult to reconstruct of the senses evoked by entremets, yet it was integral in the separation of the festive from the everyday. The spices whose aromas spread from both edible and inedible

Figure 3. Table Fountain, ca. 1320–40. Paris, France, 14th century. Gilt-silver and translucent enamels; 33.8 × 25.4 × 26.0 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of J. H. Wade 1924.859.

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entremets were strongly associated with the exotic and the supernatural, but also with life. Some late medieval accounts even claimed that the most prized spices drifted down from the lost gardens of Eden, that unreachable earthly heaven where life began.28 While professional merchants were better informed, the closure of the overland trade routes with the disintegration of the Mongol Empire in the late thirteenth century meant that access to many spices was limited and knowledge about their origins was cloaked in mystery. Despite, or perhaps because of, their rarity and unclear origins, spices were widely used not only for taste but also to maintain health, whether in carefully balanced foods or in medical preparations for specific ailments. While spices were also used in the treatment of bodies for burial, their pleasant odors connoted not death but instead the imperishable bodies of holy men and women, who lived on in heaven. The water in the Cleveland fountain might have been scented with the more commonplace rose, whose origins were well known. Yet this scent too would link the fountain with not only the sweet smell of saintly bodies but also courtly love and its associated qualities of pleasure and youth. Roses were integral to the poetry of romance, as the objectification of the ideal lady as a rose in the Roman de la rose indicates. Appealing to the senses and the intellect, the animated metal of the Cleveland fountain enlivened relatively simple functions that might just as easily be performed by a bowl of potpourri or water, and in the process transformed its setting from a meal to a banquet. Movement and sound were likewise central to the effect of numerous lost entremets. Although their use is primarily attested in verbal descriptions rather than surviving material records, there is little reason to doubt that astonishingly complex fountains and highly prized automata decorated the tables of the elite. Of the fifteen “stationary” entremets at the Feast of the Pheasant, five were fountains. One, a sort of proto-Mannequin pis, consisted of a small naked boy on a rock who constantly pissed rosewater in a less decorous version of the Cleveland fountain. An additional three entremets are specifically described as having moving elements. These include a lake on which a boat floated past several towns29 and an Indian forest in which strange animals moved.30 It is unclear whether these movements were achieved through mechanics or by the use of hidden human actors. The entremet of the Swan Knight in the Viandier discussed above, for instance, involved a moving boat that was manipulated by puppeteers hidden below it. The placement of these entremets directly on the tables, however, makes some form of automation more likely: having a number of men move various entremets while huddled under the tablecloth next to the feet of the dining guests is charming in theory but seems uncomfortable

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in practice. Regardless, the desired effect was of self-propelling scenes in which miniature figures constructed from metal and wood moved of their own volition. D’Escouchy stresses that these entremets were self-animated: the boat sailed “by itself” while the animals “moved themselves.”31 In addition to the marvelous self-propulsion of miniature figures, living beings moved visibly within entremets. Two entremets listed at the main tables of the Feast of the Pheasant included human musicians. As in the nursery rhyme in which four and twenty blackbirds begin to sing, the second table featured “a pie, in which twenty-eight living people played instruments.”32 Living beings could also be combined with mechanical movers. In perhaps the most potentially hazardous of entremet, at a special table there was a high pillar, on which was seated an ymage of a young woman, nude except for her long blonde hair which covered her back to her waist; on her head was a rich hat; [she was] wrapped, so as to preserve propriety, in a cloth like a fluttering veil with Greek letters on it in many places, beautifully written in violet; and this ymage jetted hippocras from her breasts the entire duration of the supper. And near her, braced against the dresser, was another pillar, not as tall, but a little thicker, like a platform, on which was attached, by an iron chain, a very beautiful and entirely alive lion, as a sign to guard and defend the ymage; against his pillar was written on a charge in gold: Do not touch my lady.33

In general, textual records of entremets tend to describe a statue as if it were the thing it represents.34 Thus, for example, the entremet of an Indian forest has “in it many strange sorts of beasts, which moved on their own.” Even though the movement of these beasts is surprising enough to rate mention, the reader must draw the conclusion that these are not real animals by inference alone. In a break with this convention, d’Escouchy repeatedly calls the hippocras-spouting statue of a woman an ymage. The entremet of St. Martha included in the Viandier discussed above employed this flexible term in a way that blurred the boundaries between actors and sculpture. In d’Escouchy’s description of the fountain of the woman and the lion at the Feast of the Pheasant, however, ymage is used for precisely the opposite ends. In specifying that this woman is an ymage, he draws attention to the artifice of the fountain. Essentially naked on her plinth, the woman-image plays on the stereotypical image of the pagan, often Eastern, idol as a nude raised statue.35 Yet rather than soliciting the destruction traditionally meted out to idols, this beautiful artificial form offers the traditional courtly hospi-

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tality gift of hippocras, encouraging the diner to see her essentially passive foreignness as an open invitation to desire and consumption. In contrast to the woman-image, the reality of the lion is stressed by the text, which specifies that he is “tout vif” or entirely alive.36 As with the use of the term ymage, the specification that the lion lives differs from d’Escouchy’s usual descriptive language. The insistence that the woman is not a woman but an image and that the lion conversely is alive underscores the importance of the combination of living and nonliving elements for d’Escouchy. The risk taken in bringing a lion into the room paid off handsomely, at least for some of the audience, imprinting this entremet more deeply not only into participants’ memories but also into the imaginations of those who read about it in later accounts. The combination of lion and ymage breaks apart the connection of life with animation, since the woman-image is the source of movement (her breasts provide hippocras all night long) while the lion is hopefully stationary, secured by his iron chain. In part, this can be accounted for in specific political terms. The lion, as the heraldic symbol of Flanders and thus the Duke of Burgundy, is animated but foreboding: the woman-image, as a figuration of the Eastern lands to be conquered by a new crusade, is passive and welcoming. This allegorical play becomes compelling through the ways in which the entremet of the female fountain complicates the supposed boundary between people and things. While the imagery of a woman lactating drink may have called to mind maternal fecundity, the lion’s threat to those at the Feast of the Pheasant who would “touch my lady” underscores the desirability of the naked image when it is read as a (noble) woman. Based on its description, moreover, the ymage at the Feast of the Pheasant was designed to closely resemble one of the live performers at a banquet held eight days earlier. At the Feast of the Pheasant, the fountain depicted a young blonde woman, nude except for a “rich hat” and a cloth with Greek words written in violet. At the earlier banquet, an entremet enacted the passing of the torch (or in this case, flower crown) to the next host. Accompanied by over twenty men, a young woman called the Princess of Joy presented Duke Philip with this chaplet, after first climbing onto the table and kneeling before him. According to Olivier de la Marche, she was “a very beautiful young lady, twelve years of age, dressed in a violet silk dress richly embroidered and worked with gold; over her dress she wore a sleeve of extremely fine silk, on which were written Greek letters; a veil covered her beautiful blonde hair and under it was a violet cap much enriched with stones.”37 The two feasts separated by a mere eight days thus provide two ladies, each young, blonde, with a veil over the rich cap on her head and with violet and

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Greek lettering in her garments. Listing their differences, in fact, reveals a far smaller degree of variation: one has a dress while the other is largely nude; one presents flowers to a single man while the other offers hippocras to all; one is alive while the other is not; one is guarded by men, the other by a lion. The ymage of the woman at the Feast of the Pheasant thus in many ways seems to provide an inhuman alter ego for the earlier living princess, as though the gold threads of the living girl’s dress had unraveled and crept into her skin, leaving her naked glittering form. The girl who once climbed up on the table can no longer be anywhere else, as what was once a female agent becomes the comparatively passive object of human consumption and bestial regard. Just as human actors might be transformed into metallic things, so too might inanimate objects be enlivened. The erotic dimension of metal bodies appears in a surving Netherlandish aquamanile of around 1400 (fig. 4).38 The subject of this aquamanile is traditionally known as Phyllis and Aristotle or the ridden Aristotle in reference to a high and late medieval exemplum concerning the overwhelming power of sexual attraction. According to this apocryphal tale, Aristotle, in his role as tutor, warned Alexander the Great against spending too much time with his beautiful mistress Phyllis. Alexander heeded this advice, and the saddened Phyllis vowed revenge. She beguiled Aristotle with her beauty, but when he asked to sleep with her she demanded that he first allow her to ride him like a horse. Aristotle agreed, effectively turning himself from a human into a beast. Phyllis arranged for Alexander to see Aristotle in this position and in the end refused to hold up her half of the bargain. Thus humiliated, Aristotle learned the terrible power that a beautiful woman can exercise over even the wisest of men. The key power relations of this story are contained within the Netherlandish aquamanile (fig. 4). Phyllis is portrayed as a conventionally beautiful woman. Her sensuality is alluded to primarily through the depiction of her lower body: she sits with her ankles crossed and knees splayed, her open legs both revealed and concealed by the clinging drapery of her long skirt. In several textual versions of the ridden Aristotle it is with similar flashes of her legs that Phyllis first seduces the philosopher. Yet the rest of the composition negates whatever invitation might be read into this pose. Phyllis does not look out at the viewer but rather disdainfully down toward Aristotle. She aggressively asserts her dominance over him, tugging back sharply on a handful of his hair with one fist while her other hand proprietarily caresses his buttocks, which peek out from under his fashionable short tunic. In an inversion of the entremet of the ymage and the lion at the Feast of the Pheasant, it is the tamed man rather than woman who is used

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Figure 4. Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis, late 14th or early 15th century. South Netherlands. Bronze; quaternary copper alloy (approx. 72% copper, approx. 17% zinc, approx. 6% lead, approx. 3% tin), H 32.5 cm, W 17.9 cm, L 39.3 cm, WT 6062 g. Robert Lehman Collection 1975 (1975.1.1416). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY USA. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: IAP.

to distribute liquid: in this aquamanile the spigot extends from an unusually sexualized Aristotle’s chest, while Phyllis retains an impenetrable and unpenetrated body. The possible resonances of this object go beyond a single narrative reference, and the theme plays interestingly with the performative use of the aquamanile on several levels. The popular visual motif of the ridden Aristotle recalled not only a particular story but also a series of inversions in the social order, as Susan Smith argues in her study of the theme.39Aquamanile, in contrast, could reference many narratives in their imagery but functionally helped to reinforce social order. As the name suggests, the aquamanile

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was used to provide water for hand washing, a cleansing act required by both religious ritual and courtly manners. Various images of men controlling animals (rider with horse, Samson and the lion) were common in both church and court aquamaniles, making their inversion in the ridden Aristotle aquamanile readily apparent to a contemporary audience.40 Such inversion could be read negatively, as in many sermons and guides to ruling a household, or positively, as proof of the power of love. Not coincidentally, preparing for seduction and observing household propriety were two major motivations for aquamanile use at court.41 The ridden Aristotle imagery for an aquamanile could at first appear to undermine social norms, since it demonstrates the reversal of the rider-and-horse imagery in other types of aquamanile such as Samson and the lion that served “as an ideal portrait of its users.”42 Yet such reversals are common in the decorative arts and marginal imagery of the period, where they served a variety of purposes: warning users of the dangers of behaving improperly, for example, or amusing them by asserting their superiority over even so respected a figure as Aristotle. In the aquamanile this superiority took a physical form, since the diners and servers literally manipulated the ridden Aristotle in order to make the aquamanile function. Nevertheless, the aquamanile tempts the user as well. In handling this small bronze, the thirsty men and women, like those who braved the lion to approach the hippocras-spouting female ymage at the Feast of the Pheasant, would be invited to experience sensual pleasures of their own both in the feel of the polished bronze and in the unavoidable contact between human hands and eroticized sculpted bodies. The interplay between animate and inanimate, living and made, is directly thematized in a series of entremets concerning the Greek hero Jason at the Feast of the Pheasant.43 All three take place on a special stage with a curtain that rises and falls. Olivier de la Marche stresses that when Jason first appears, viewers see a personnage.44 Given Jason’s later movements, this is most likely an actor, but the loose use of the term has already been noted above; it is possible that some of the other characters were in fact portrayed by something akin to puppets, since raised stages were (and are) often used to hide puppeteers, as in the Viandier’s Swan Knight scene. In the second entremet, Jason confronts a serpent, with which he battles so furiously that “it did not seem to be a play, but more closely resembled a bitter and mortal battle.”45 Having failed to conquer his foe with his sword, Jason remembers an amulet that Medea has given him; when he shows this object to the serpent, it promptly dies. Its inert body becomes a talisman in turn when Jason carries off its head as the curtain falls. In the final entremet, Jason sows the serpent’s teeth, which hatch warriors that immediately turn

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and kill each other. Finally, Jason stands alone above their defeated and dead bodies, and the curtain closes for the last time. The terms used to describe the marvelous transformation of dead teeth into bellicose men stress animation in multiple senses. While Jason planted, “armed and armored men were rising up and being born.”46 The imperfect tense of the verbs helps convey the active nature of the transition as the men both move up from the earth and are enlivened, literally birthed, before the spectators. Born from the serpent’s teeth, they invert its death: the serpent was conquered by an inanimate amulet, but its immobile teeth easily spring to life. The resulting beings not only move but also are fleshy, fighting until they spill blood.47 In the end, however, this disruption of the natural order is limited in two ways. In the story on which this entremet is based, Jason tricks the men into fighting each other and then kills them when they are weakened. In the entremet, however, no intervention is needed. Enraged simply by the sight of their fellows, the warriors automatically turn and kill, ending their own unnatural existence. Jason, like the audience, simply looks on. Circumscribed as an enclosed event by its script, the transformation is also defined by the conventions of the staging, since the curtain falls immediately after the last soldier dies.48 This use of the curtain, which is confined at the Feast of the Pheasant to the Jason entremets, at once draws explicit attention to the limited duration of these scenes and sets them apart as objects of contemplation in a way that none of the other entremets either achieve or desire.49 In the Jason entremets, life and death, thing and human, moving and still are unstable propositions, and their transgression unusually appears as violently threatening. The use of the curtain helps to change potential unease into a more pleasurable frisson, making the bitter battles into a source of entertainment. As even this small sampling of the myriad entremets devised in France and the Lowlands during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suggests, the mixing of performance and visual arts was a persistent feature of this type of artistic production. Whether imitating animal movements like the self-propelled creatures in their Indian forest or enlivened through sound, scent, and movement like the Cleveland fountain, entremets composed of inorganic materials often evoked liveliness. In the entremet of the lion and the ymage of the lady, it is ironically the metallic statue that offers nourishment and movement, while the living lion is securely tied down. Entremets could also blur their own sensual temptations with those of human bodies, bringing new meaning to erotic objectification. As inventively as they explore the hazy border between animate and inanimate through their execution, entremets could also take on these issues through their iconography,

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as the Jason entremets illustrate. Rather than simply being unaware of the difference between people and things, entremets play with the distinction between the two with endless inventiveness.

MULTIMEDIA AND THE LATE MEDIEVAL COLLABORATIVE PROCESS The creation of even one of these complex entremets, let alone a full feast, required the sustained cooperation of many talented individuals. Precisely how many individuals and what elements they contributed are difficult to gauge fully from surviving narrative and payment documents, although these can help piece together a partial picture. The working process that emerges from these sources involves collaboration at all levels of production, from the initial planning by the patrons to the final details of a single entremet. This collaborative working method stands in stark contrast to the still widespread, although increasingly questioned, construction of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the time of the “rise of the artist” as individual author.50 A closer examination of the creative processes typical in banquet production places them firmly within a persistent pattern of collaborative patronage and facture that art historians have begun to map across a wide range of late medieval media, providing additional evidence that such group creation was not intrinsically opposed to either societal recognition or artistic invention.51 By his own account, de la Marche was one of the planners of the Feast of the Pheasant.52 According to his memoirs, the initial impetus for the event came from Duke Philip the Good in response to prompting by the Holy Roman emperor to fulfill his stated desire to go on crusade. Philip appointed Jean de Lannoy (the governor of Holland, Zeeland, and Frisia) and a squire named Jean Boudault to oversee preparations, but he also called together a larger committee to deliberate on the design of the various activities and performances. This council included de la Marche and the major art patrons Nicolas Rolin (then chancellor) and Anthony de Croy (the first chamberlain), as well as “the greatest and most privileged.” Work at this stage appears to have been done primarily by the group as a whole, and authorship is attributed to the collective: according to de la Marche, “after deliberations on opinions, it was concluded what the ceremonies and plays should be.”53 The only individual singled out for a particular contribution is Philip the Good, whom de la Marche credits with inventing the conceit of having the personified Holy Church appear and casting de la Marche to play her. While unusually high-powered, this complicated patronage situation is far from

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unprecedented. Committees were often formed by civic and religious organizations in order to commission and oversee important projects. Private patrons, particularly members of the upper elites, also regularly relied on their servants and subjects to mediate between their desires and craftspeople, as Sherry Lindquist has demonstrated for the Burgundian ducal burial foundation at the Chartreuse de Champmol.54 Collaborative working practices continued in the actual construction of the various feast elements. The personnel again drew from the upper nobility, who served as actors in some entremets, but was predominantly professional. It included regular household members and additional workers on partial contract, as well as individuals and workshops who contributed elements such as tapestries without actually working on site. Special payments for over thirty artists are recorded in connection with the Feast of the Pheasant. Some of these men were members of the ducal staff who received additional funds for this work. Pierre Coustain and Colard le Voleur were official varlets de chambre with skills not only as painters but also as mechanics. They were paid an additional twenty livres on top of their normal salary for having “exercised their profession for the advancement of these entremets.”55 Artists were also recruited from Lille, where the feast would be held, and nearby major centers such as Amiens, Arras, Bruges, and Tournai. These temporary workers were usually paid for roughly a week and included the painters Jacques Daret, Simon Marmion, and Jean le Tavernier. Some artists were paid only for their own labor, but others brought apprentices and assistants whose payments were directed through their masters; ducal accountants therefore rarely recorded their names. Additional professionals with needed expertise were also imported, from musicians and actors to joiners and mechanics. While there are no surviving documents that detail the day-to-day interactions of the teams assembled for individual entremets for the Feast of the Pheasant, it is possible to gain a sense of the variety of human talent and flexible working relationships required by looking at the instructions provided in Master Chiquart’s Du fait de cuisine, compiled around 1420.56 Chiquart composed his text for his longtime employer Duke Amadeus of Savoy, the son-in-law of the first Valois Duke of Burgundy. Unusually, it is organized as a menu for a multiday feast rather than by type of dish. Although his text contains fewer recipes than the Viandier and indeed repeats some of the same dishes, Chiquart is far more thorough in his descriptions not only of cooking techniques but also of the proper divisions of labor for each dish. He thus makes apparent the working arrangements that are simply assumed by Taillevent, allowing a closer look at the process of facture in elite dining.

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Both the Viandier and Du fait de cuisine describe a popular entremet in which an animal breathes fire. The Viandier includes a recipe for what it calls an “easier entremets” in which a fake lion or other animal is constructed (how is not specified) and equipped to spout flame: “make it with a brass-lined mouth and a thin brass tongue, and with paper teeth glued in the mouth; and put camphor and a little cotton in the mouth and, when it is about to be served before the lords, set fire to this.”57 As in the recipe for the ymage of St. Martha discussed above, Taillevent here ignores the technique for creating the body of the animal and relies heavily on verb forms that could be interpreted as either singular or plural. In contrast, a similar recipe for a fire-breathing boar’s head by Chiquart takes nearly four pages in the modern edition. Importantly for the issue of collaboration, Chiquart places the reader in the role of director and signals when different talents will be needed. First a “person or persons” with cooking training are set to singeing off the fur, cleaning and washing the head and forelegs, then boiling them in water and wine. When ready, these are first drained and then spitted into position (one leg under each ear) and roasted. Meanwhile, a cook makes green- and gold-colored glazes, which are applied to the roasts. When the colored roast is dry, the director must leave the kitchen to “seek out painters in order to gild those heads with gold leaf.”58 A “master chef” then inserts wax candles wrapped in camphordipped cotton into the open boar’s mouth. Finally, “because things should be done so honourably as to be to the honour of the lord and the chief workers,” the master cook must find heralds who will ask the lord for the names of the guests and then provide the coat of arms so that a banner with the appropriate arms can be set on the boar’s head in front of each diner.59 A minimum of seven people are thus involved in the preparation of this single, relatively simple entremet. Each is selected for special skills. Cooks know how to prepare the head. A master chef can be trusted with the delicate insertion of the dangerous fire-apparatus. Painters know how to gild. Heralds can properly identify coats of arms. And the reader/director can organize this crowd of workers, while also ensuring that other teams successfully execute the eighteen additional recipes required for this meal.60 Praise for the resulting entremet does not go to any one of these figures, not even the impresario. Instead, honor is due to the plural “chief workers” and the lord (who himself is a minor contributor, since he provides the heralds with the guest list). What separates a “chief” worker from others is admittedly unclear, but the adjective clearly applies to more than one individual. Given the amount of labor and skill required to execute even this one entremet, it is daunting to remember that in a single evening the Feast

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of the Pheasant undertook to put forward several courses with forty-eight dishes at each, as well as twenty-seven entremets. While few other events in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ever quite reached this density, many wedding and holiday celebrations took place over days and even weeks and must have met, if not exceeded, this benchmark over the course of their entire duration. In light of this, the need for organizational committees and small armies of skilled workers able to collaborate efficiently becomes glaringly obvious. As Chiquart might say, when such a complex task was successfully completed, there was plenty of honor to spread among the many talents involved. Attributing and praising joint agency seems not only honest but indeed only fair. This shared authorship runs counter to traditional models of arthistorical writing and complicates the Vasarian narrative of the emergence of the heroic artist-as-individual in the late medieval period. While they increasingly recognize the role played by patrons, audiences, and even materials in determining the final form and meaning of an artwork, many arthistorical discussions of intentionality and creativity continue to assert single-authored works as normative.61 The construct is paradoxically reinforced in many cases where the named artist is open about not having physically crafted the art attributed to his or her authorship.62 Scholars of modern art periodically equate this creative model, in which “the directed labour of others (artist-assistants and technicians) is subordinated to the signature style of the artist,” with the medieval workshop.63 This, however, oversimplifies the complexity of actual artists’ working methods in the late medieval period.64 Nearly twenty years before the Feast of the Pheasant, Leon Battista Alberti had already assigned the praise due for the group achievement of the dome over the Florentine Duomo to Filippo Brunelleschi alone and lauded Brunelleschi and Donatello’s “genius for accomplishing every praiseworthy thing.”65 This eulogizing has been interpreted as allowing Alberti to “raise the painter from the level of a craftsman and make him an independent artist.”66 Yet the influence of this rhetoric should not be overestimated. Significant doubt has been cast on the influence of Alberti’s ideas outside his own circle, and even within it there is little evidence that collaboration was stigmatized. Donatello not only worked for an extended period in Ghiberti’s workshop but also had a successful long-term partnership on more equal terms with Michelozzo di Bartolomeo.67 Two years after Alberti offered the Italian edition of On Paint­ ing to him, Brunelleschi’s engineering skills were combined with the acting and musical talents of other Florentines to create a spectacular sacre rap­

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presentazioni of Jesus’s ascent into heaven performed before the delegates of the Council of Florence, among others.68 A similar range of working arrangements took place in the major artistic centers of Northern Europe. While works executed by a single individual exist, the complexity of large works and the regulation of guilds in many cases necessitated collaboration. Recent research on Parisian manuscript production reveals that the multiple hands present in a single manuscript do not indicate the existence of formal workshops.69 Instead, independent contractors were hired on a piecemeal basis and might indeed never have seen either their coworkers’ sections or the finished product. The massive painted and carved altarpieces produced in the Lowlands both on commission and for the market often required not only multiple artists but also cross-guild, and sometimes intercity, contracting.70 In many towns different tasks such as figural carving, polychroming, constructing shrine frames, and carving architectural ornaments were legally required to be executed by members of different professions. Even when this was not the case, the variety of skills required to cut, polish, paint, and decorate both stone and wood sculpture made collaboration a preferred mode of production.71 While some successful partnerships could last over multiple works and years, many were short term. The division of labor typical of such production may have bred habits and shaped training in ways that influenced working methods even when artists were employed by courts and thus released from strict compliance with city ordinances. The sculptor Claus Sluter worked extensively in Brussels, where sculptors were forbidden to paint, and he continued to subcontract this stage of production when he worked at the ducal foundation of Champmol. His contemporary André Beauneveu was trained in Valenciennes, where sculptors and painters were members of the same guild; he is known to have not only worked as a sculptor but also to have polychromed statuary and even illuminated a book of hours.72 Perhaps the numerous artists brought together to work on entremets embraced the opportunity to meet and test new partners or to work against the still nascent concept of the solitary artistic genius; perhaps they resented the requirement to work with rivals at a patron’s whim or hoped to work alone: there is no surviving evidence that speaks directly to either mindset. Rare, however, would be the artist who would have found this type of collaboration remotely remarkable. Importantly, shared creation and its attendant honor did not negate recognition of individual achievement. Simon Marmion’s career seems to have received a significant boost from his work at the Feast of the Pheasant, with a major altarpiece commission

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coming only a few weeks after the event and later contracts to execute manuscripts for members of the ducal court.73 Both Olivier de la Marche and the official court chronicler Georges Chastellain attracted the attention of their patrons through their work on smaller entertainments: de la Marche as an actor, Chastellain as a writer. Court festivities therefore neither completely sublimate nor celebrate individual imagination and skill. Instead, the surviving evidence suggests a far more dynamic interplay between the two poles. Despite the complicated intermedial effects of entremets, the methods used to produce them were in fact much closer to standard contemporary working procedures than is the modern art-historical construct of the radically individual creative agent. Rather than relying on a single mind whose vision is actualized through unacknowledged artisans, major feasts required substantial input from multiple creators at all stages of their development. At the Feast of the Pheasant this involved the formation of short-term working committees from the initial planning undertaken by high nobles to the interaction of artists, cooks, performers, and others in the various entremets. This multiauthored approach was in part driven by the sheer complexity of the many tasks involved. Yet it was also typical of much artistic production outside of the feast proper, adapting patterns of collaboration employed from small manuscripts to massive altarpieces. As in these other working relationships, while the goal was to create a unified final product, societal norms seem to have also allowed for recognition of the separate talents involved, which were regularly acknowledged and respected. Both as a category and as individual works, entremets complicate the separation between media and makers alike. Just as the term can refer equally to objects, performances, and foods, so too might any single entremet blur boundaries that have since come to seem impassible. Visually complex objects such as coqz heaumez or fire-breathing boar were at once additive sculptures and delicious roasts. Similarly, the various uses of ymage and personnage indicate the interchangeability of human and sculpted actors. While true cannibalism was never considered, the frequent use of human forms as vessels created a tension between human servers and serving vessels, as well as between the object of desire and the eroticized object. Indeed, many entremets relied on the possibilities for transformation and play opened up by the mixed media of the genre as a whole. Movement, sound, smell, and taste enlivened crafted objects, calling forth awe and curiosity from their viewers. Even the potential anxiety aroused by these animated

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things could be used to provide excitement, whether in the form of guardian lions or brutal soldiers born from a serpent’s teeth. The creation of these multimedia works was undertaken by a series of collaborating groups, from organizational committees to shifting teams of specialists. While it is often assumed that such collaboration must involve the subordination of the many to a single guiding intellect, the evidence suggests that individuals could benefit from their work on such a large project without detracting from the respect given to the assembly as a whole. The assemblage of elements in the entremet thus parallels the collaborative processes that produced it. Both product and process are difficult to reconcile with the traditional categories of art-historical investigation, yet they are revealing of the society that created and embraced them. Indeed, the concepts of collaboration and ambiguity that are celebrated in the entremet extended even further once these object-event-dishes were mobilized within the feast itself, as the following chapters will show.

c h a p t e r t wo

Spectator-Spectacle

I

n the previous chapter it became apparent that both entremets and the feasts featuring them combined media in innovative ways, transforming food into sculptures, sculptures into people, human forms into serving vessels. The range of materials and techniques needed to create these effects required extensive cooperation between multiple makers from the earliest planning stages to the event itself. In one important respect, however, feasts press collaborative practice even further than the discussion up to this point has revealed. While sculptors and painters may have laid aside their tools once the banquet began, their works were not complete. Still to come were the guest-participants’ scripted and spontaneous interactions with the physical setting that were integral to forming the feast’s final meaning. The contributions of this additional set of collaborators took a number of forms both familiar and unfamiliar to a modern reader, demonstrating the inability of current formulations such as “spectator and spectacle” to adequately account for the rich variety of late medieval viewing and participation. Something of the range of relationships between spectator and spectacle typical of feasting can be seen in the entremet of the Holy Church, which formed the climax of the Feast of the Pheasant. All the acted entremets before the entremet of the Holy Church that evening were introduced by music. The entremet of the Holy Church, in contrast, started in marked silence. Bereft of sound, the entremet began with a remarkable vision. An armed giant in a long green silk robe with the turban of a Saracen on his head entered the room leading an elephant covered in silk. On the elephant’s back rode a lady wearing a white satin robe with a black coat and headdress. This ensemble resembled the characteristic garb of both nuns and the pious laywomen known as Beguines, a combination that conveyed the feminine holiness of the lady but at the same time removed her from any 44

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single real-world social group. This lady ordered her giant to halt so that she could address the assembled noble company. Pausing before the ducal table, she revealed that she was the Holy Church and delivered a long complaint poem to the duke and the other assembled nobles detailing her fallen state after the Turkish capture of Constantinople, a lament that culminated in a tearful plea for their aid. Following the Holy Church’s petition, a group of richly dressed officers of the Order of the Golden Fleece, led by the herald Toison d’Or, entered with two ladies, Philip’s bastard daughter Yoland and Isabeau of Neufchâtel. After this group made reverence to Philip, Toison d’Or asked all the noble men assembled in the hall to swear on a pheasant held by the two ladies, according to “ancient” custom, to aid the beleaguered Lady Church. At this point, Philip the Good entered actively into the entremet. Pretending to be moved by what he heard, he drew out a letter promising to aid his fellow Christians, which Toison d’Or read aloud to the assembled guests.1 Having heard this letter, the Holy Church blessed the duke and was led out on her elephant. Moved by the duke’s feigned pity, the nobles immediately began to offer their vows to go on crusade, a process that, given the many pages of vows that survive, probably took several hours to complete. The entremet of the Holy Church encapsulates nearly every type of interrelationship between guest-participant and spectacle imaginable. Guests were meant to see some figures, such as the “Saracen” giant and the Holy Church, as characters rather than as the actors who played the parts. Other actors, such as Duke Philip the Good and the noblewomen, followed a script but retained their real-world identities. And most complexly of all, many members of the audience shifted in the course of the performance from admiring viewers forming a suitable backdrop to active players within the chivalric scene. How should this constant movement in and out of various viewing positions and roles be understood? As with the other collaborative practices discussed in the previous chapter, the fluctuating status of feast participants does not fit neatly into modern critical categories. Scholars often refer to feasts as spectacles, but as used today this term has a number of problematic associations.2 It is often assumed that spectacle requires two distinct quantities—the spectator and the spectacle.3 This distinction appears for instance in the Oxford English Dictionary, where spectacle is “a prepared or arranged display . . . forming an impressive or interesting show for those viewing it.” Spectator, similarly, is “one who sees, or looks on at, some scene or occurrence.” The OED does allow for the possibility that a person may be a spectacle, “a person or thing exhibited to, or set before, the public

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gaze as an object either [a] of curiosity or contempt or [b] of marvel or admiration.” However, in becoming visible a spectator loses her or his status as viewing subject and becomes the passive object of others’ judgments. Many critical discussions of spectacle go further and assume that spectacles have a single political effect based in their formal structure. The most famous condemnation of the spectacle-spectator binary came from Guy Debord, but similar views appear frequently in media studies.4 In this vein, studies of medieval and Renaissance performance that invoke the spectatorspectacle distinction have tended to describe court spectacles as intent on creating a passive audience, which thus became subservient to the will of increasingly powerful central authorities.5 To complicate matters, other modern definitions of spectacle instead assert that spectacles undermine or eliminate the difference between the individual and the community.6 These celebratory accounts stand in a longer tradition that valorizes festival in general and feasting in particular as means for destroying the division between audience and event, which they likewise view in negative terms.7 This model likewise has parallels within medieval studies, notably in readings of medieval carnival as the site for the questioning and/or reinvigoration of culture.8 Whether they define spectacle as the antithesis or pinnacle of participation, modern models tend to radicalize the distinction between participant and audience member. As the entremet of the Holy Church suggests, however, such approaches fail to account for the instability of these categories in actual late medieval practice. The permeability of the boundary between spectacle and spectator is highly visible in banqueting practice but extends beyond it as well, offering possibilities for both reflection and indoctrination in nearly every sphere of elite life. The court banquet and arts related to it create neither a firm division between spectator and spectacle nor a complete integration of the two.9 Using the entremet of the Holy Church as a touchstone, this chapter will examine some of the ways in which the arts in and beyond the feast hall called on guests and planners alike to move among a variety of positions between audience and exhibition. One of the primary purposes of court banquets was the education of the nobility and upper bourgeoisie in social and religious mores; the most elaborate and well-recorded events also conveyed specific messages derived from particular political needs of the planners. In order to meet these goals, banquet planners and artists created a variety of scenarios in which actors played a range of fictional and historical characters. Yet while this type of mimetic acting is familiar today, it was but one of the many ways in which humans entered into the world of the

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feast. Members of the audience were also an intrinsic part of the spectacle, their reactions frequently observed and judged by other guests. Guests could further be invited to verbally and physically interact with both stationary and performed entremets, particularly at moments when the planners most hoped to solicit their acceptance of a particular message.10 Agreement with the planners’ goals was thus linked with full membership in the idealized chivalric setting of the banquet.11 Belonging to such a chivalric world was deeply intertwined with social acceptance—while one might have the option to refuse the offered social integration and the values it entailed, such refusal meant putting oneself deliberately beyond the pale.12 Active participation in the rarefied world created by feasting was seen as desirable and so was often a privilege given to the highest-ranking alone; at the same time, the fact that the politically powerful aligned themselves with the banquet’s diegesis helped maintain the cachet of the ideals it fostered. By performing cameos as themselves in entremets, rulers in particular presented themselves as bridges between the chivalric fiction of the banquet and the more everyday world in a manner similar to film stars today. In its seemingly infinite nuance and variation, the behavior of feast participants ultimately undermines both the neat division between spectacle and spectator and the equation of involvement with empowerment that dominate modern critical discourse, requiring a more subtly gradated and flexible model for interpreting the interlocking relationships between subjects and objects.

CHARACTER ACTING AND THE MEANING OF MIMESIS For a modern audience, the most familiar form of participation in the entremet of the Holy Church is likely the mimetic acting used to portray the Holy Church. As the Holy Church and her entourage entered the Feast of the Pheasant, a divide seems to have been formed between the mobile actors and the seated viewers. Accompanied by such strange figures as an elephant and a giant, the Holy Church must have appeared almost to come from another world. The iconographic and narrative rhetoric of separation required in turn that the Holy Church be read purely as herself; outside knowledge concerning the lived identity of the actor whose body portrayed her must for the moment be suppressed. Such willing suspension of disbelief was commonplace in late medieval theatrical productions. In the case of the entremet of the Holy Church, all the audience’s practice at this type of viewing was likely required, since the Holy Church, symbol of all feminine purity and devotion, was in fact played by the middle-aged courtier and military captain Olivier de la Marche.

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From de la Marche’s own account of the entremet, it is clear that he hoped to create a perfect representation of the Holy Church, erasing his own identity from the audience’s consciousness for the duration of the performance. De la Marche is one of the primary chroniclers of the Feast of the Pheasant, describing it from its earliest stages to its final political effects. In recounting the deliberations of the planning council, de la Marche tells his readers that Duke Philip cast him in the role of Holy Church.13 Yet in the extensive description of the performance that follows, de la Marche works to remove any sense that this apparition was in fact brought forward through the medium of his own body. Rather than describing the techniques or thoughts that went into his impressive performance, the narrator de la Marche assumes the position of a viewer observing the entremet as it unfolds. This positioning stands in marked contrast to de la Marche’s insistence in other, non–feast-related passages of his memoirs on his own active involvement in the events he recalls.14 Throughout his description of the entremet of the Holy Church, de la Marche refers to the personification Holy Church as though she truly was present, consistently using feminine pronouns and describing her in the third person. De la Marche’s acting was meant to evoke only the character he portrayed, and his text presents his performance as a rousing success precisely by removing any mention of the means by which it was achieved. The concentration on the role rather than the actor that characterizes de la Marche’s appearance as the Holy Church is typical of theatrical performance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Particularly when it comes to the performances of actors or lower court functionaries, the interpretive emphasis rests on the relationship between the character, other characters in the entremet, and perhaps the patron or guest of honor. Several entremets at the Feast of the Pheasant depicted events from the life of Jason, whom the audience could be expected to connect with Philip the Good and the Order of the Golden Fleece of which he was the leader, rather than with the unnamed actor who portrayed the famous hero. Similarly, Olivier de la Marche’s real gender and sanctity were hardly likely to be in question, no matter how skillful his performance: what mattered instead was that the Holy Church lowered herself to beg Philip’s support. Even the highest courtiers could at times attempt this type of elevation of role over actor. At the festivities following a court wedding in 1392, six members of the highest French nobility, including King Charles VI, set out to perform an entertainment reminiscent of the traditional charivari that mocked many remarriages.15 Dressed in tight-fitting suits of flax and tar, dancing and howling, the nobles mimicked the mythical wild men re-

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nowned for their uncivilized sexuality. The intended referent of their display was the newly married couple, particularly the thrice-married bride. The two most extensive descriptions of the event stress that the actors were unrecognizable, with one indicating that they were masked.16 Indeed, the only reason that the identity of these manic actors survives is that the success of their portrayal tragically proved to be their downfall. According to the Monk of St-Denis, the audience members were so caught up in the performance that they did not at first notice when an observer accidentally dropped his torch near one of the wild men. Alternately, the chronicler Jean Froissart claims that Duke Louis of Anjou, arriving late, wanted to discover the real identity of the actors who were so completely disguised, and caught them on fire while attempting to get a closer view. In either case, the miming of threat by the wild men was pierced at this moment by the intrusion of real danger as the highly flammable costumes flared up. Four men died; one survived by throwing himself into nearby dishwater. The very masking that condemned his friends ironically saved the sixth. King Charles VI had moved closer to his aunt the Duchess of Berry, who apparently also could not penetrate his disguise and held him back at the crucial moment to demand his name. Seeing the disaster unfold, she quickly protected him with her heavy dress. As the queen swooned in fear that Charles was among those burning to death before her, the Duchess of Berry ordered him to remove his costume and dress himself in his normal clothing in order to reassure his wife, as though even at this critical moment when every second mattered, his attire remained an impenetrable barrier to the recognition of his true identity by a woman who knew him intimately. Modern scholars have tended to see the wild men portrayed in this interlude as a commentary on the personal identity of Charles VI, whose periodic bouts of madness both before and after this event seem to echo the disordered state of these mythic creatures.17 Yet the near contemporary accounts never draw this comparison. Both Froissart and the Monk of St-Denis state that a noble other than Charles first thought up the entertainment, although Charles was the host for the entire feast and happily embraced the part once it was presented. The Monk of St-Denis suggests that the uneasy mixture of man and animal in the costumed figures reflected on the character of one of the other nobles, Hugh of Guisay, who frequently punished his servants by making them get on all fours and act like dogs or horses as he beat them.18 In contrast, a guardian angel came from God to protect the good king.19 Froissart may be implying that Charles shared the mythical wild man’s love of women when he ascribes Charles’s

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separation from the other men to his youthful desire to show off for the ladies, but the courtly flirtation with the Duchess of Berry is very tame stuff when compared to the usual aggressive attacks of wild suitors.20 While Charles reportedly regretted the performance, it was his courtiers’ deaths rather than his own supposed impropriety that weighed on his conscience. The six Froissart manuscripts containing illuminations of this event similarly obscure the faces of the actors behind exaggerated movement and beards or full masks.21 In a copy belonging to the fifteenth-century courtier and memoirist Philippe de Commynes, the burning men must express their pain through wild gestures and the small crack provided for their mouths by their heavy disguises (fig. 5). Through recourse to the accompanying narrative some of the performers can be identified: Charles VI, for instance, peeps out ignominiously from the Duchess of Berry’s lap. Yet the artist, like the author, relies on the men’s actions rather than their appearances to differentiate them. The disastrous consequences of the event both unmasked the performers and put their varied responses under duress into history and before judgment, but had things gone as planned it seems likely that this impersonation would have had no lasting ill effect on Charles’s and the other nobles’ reputations. Unmasking, in which the masked behaviors are transferred back to the performer, became a part of the Bal des ardents much as its cognomen did, through misadventure.22 As planned, this horrific event would have been no more than a lightly amusing commentary on the newly married couple: the wild men’s resonance with youth, sexuality, and transgression were intended to reflect on the thrice-married bride rather than the actors. Whether used to portray the ladylike Holy Church or the lascivious wild man, the appeal of mimetic acting lay in its capacity to make fantastic beings present and concentrate the audience’s attention on the content it attempted to convey. According to at least one line of thought current in the period, perfectly performed mimesis is the way in which actors can convince a viewer of the truth of the material they present. By mimesis here I refer simply to appearances or behaviors that were believed by contemporaries to be accurate imitations of objects or beings.23 Medieval standards for such accuracy differed markedly from photography-influenced modern modes; the late Middle Ages in particular witnessed great experimentation with representational strategies.24 Despite, or perhaps because of, this lack of uniformity, the ideal of perfect imitation had a strong allure. Such, for instance, is the case of the dream that comes to the wife of King Ceys recounted by the eminent court poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut in “La fonteinne amoureuse.” In the classical source material, King Ceys dies

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Figure 5. Bal des Ardents, in Jean Froissart, Chroniques. London, British Library, MS Harley 4380, fol. 1. © The British Library Board.

and his wife has a dream informing her of this sad fact. Machaut’s account of the event suggests a connection with the entremet by making the dream into a play performed by Morpheus’s children, who . . . changed shapes As they wished, for they took the forms Of people So that, in sleep, through dreams, they appeared In different guises; and so people dreamed, And while dreaming saw many things, Sweet or bitter. Some are hurtful, some difficult; One clear, others obscure25

For Machaut, the ability of these dreams to convey truth is dependent not simply on whether the information they portray is accurate but also on the ability of the actors to perform mimetically. Elsewhere in the same poem, Machaut’s narrator claims to recognize a lovesick man he had never met

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before because he resembles a man the narrator earlier saw in a dream. This man claims his lady’s heart can be wrung only if she has a dream that accurately represents his lovesickness: “And she will see / That the ill she causes me is a fact / If Morpheus imitates me correctly.”26 According to such a model of acting, imitation is a way to accurately communicate information and thus to move hearts. Within the dreamlike world of the banquet, Olivier de la Marche’s demand that he be seen solely as the Holy Church at this pivotal moment can be taken as a method to establish the truth and emotional value of what he conveyed in his role. It was only by suppressing his own identity that he could hope to convincingly express the political goals espoused by the character who declared in her very first speech: “Giant, I wish to halt here / for I see a noble company / to whom I must speak. / Giant, I wish to halt here / to tell them their will and to teach / them things which should be truly heard.”27

VIEWING THE AUDIENCE The “noble company” to which the Holy Church wishes to speak is identical with the guests at the Feast of the Pheasant. This verbal recognition of the men and women present in the room by an allegorical personification at once signals a more explicit role for them to play in what follows and acknowledges a previously unstated truth: the feast audience is less passive spectator than constituent of and participant in the multisensory, interactive work. For many court feasts the guests were no less carefully selected and arranged than the wine or the entremets. At the Feast of the Pheasant, archers at the five doorways controlled entrance to the hall while knights and squires oversaw activity within it; all of these directors dressed in Duke Philip the Good’s personal colors of gray and black. Those admitted were, according to de la Marche, almost entirely nobles; “there were few other sorts of people.”28 The most eminent of these guests were assigned places at the three tables, with an additional five platforms or bleachers erected to hold the remainder. Verbal descriptions of feasts stress the visibility of diners by regularly naming at least the most eminent participants and cataloging their movement within the room. Immediately following an extensive listing of the main entremets within the feast hall, Olivier de la Marche provides just such a list of guests. A portion of this section may suggest the whole: “The duke was seated in the centre of the middle-sized table, and on his right my lady, daughter of the Duke of Bourbon, was seated, after her, my lord

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of Cleves, my lady of Ravenstein, niece of my lady the duchess and wife of my lord Adolf; and the duchess was seated to the left of the duke, with my lady of Charny, my lady of Étampes, my lord of Saint-Pol . . .”29 The rhythmic litany of noble names mirrors the earlier description of the entremets at the same table: “On the middle-sized table there was a cruciform church with glass windows, made in a fine way. . . . There was another entremet of a nude little boy. . . . There was another entremet of an anchored carrack. . . . Another entremet was a very beautiful fountain . . .”30 Listing in both cases at once creates a reality effect through the accumulation of particulars and suggests the unlimited possibilities of more items and individuals that might be added.31 De la Marche’s litany of guests’ names signals plenty by devolving into the evocation of whole categories, a room perfectly filled with people. The descriptions of the second and third tables both end simply in the image of repletion: “mixed with a great number of ladies and maidens, as well as so many other knights that the tables were full from one end to the other, and at the third table squires and damsels likewise sat together, in such a way that the tables were full.”32 Despite its pretense to precision, de la Marche’s account does not make clear where the eight seating areas were placed within the hall. Contemporary manuscripts often show seated and standing audience members set around the outer edges of the room. In a feast scene from the Histoire de Charles Martel created for Philip the Good and Charles the Bold in the late 1460s, a small number of guests sit at tables forming an L-shape (fig. 6).33 Their placement along the outer edge of the room allows them to see each other, the speakers, and the servants who move through the central space, as well as the massive dresser filled with serving vessels on the facing wall. Just as the dresser displays the ruler’s gold and silver, so too do the raised tables frame the seated nobles; this parallel is reinforced by echoing the shape of the baldachin behind the king in the overhanging wooden structures behind the royal plate. The “audience,” like the dresser and the servants, is on view both for figures within the miniature and for the reader of the Histoire de Charles Martel. This common pictorial strategy also opens up the possibility for the manuscript reader to enter into the scene, making the open fourth wall into another table from which to look out, and at which the depicted men and women may look. Particularly when the viewer’s own inward-facing body is taken into consideration, this spatial arrangement creates a repetition of the line of the wall with the lines of elite bodies and things reminiscent of Elias Canetti’s arena. Canetti described the arena as a “crowd which is doubly enclosed” by bodies that block out the everyday world of streets and silent

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Figure 6. The queen instructs three brothers, in Histoire de Charles Martel. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 8, fol. 33v.

walls.34 For Canetti, the inescapable experience of others seeing and feeling what one sees and feels within the arena feeds the sense of excitement. The distance at which many figures are viewed heightens the intensity of the emotional feedback: robbed of their individual features, other humans come to serve as simple validation of the viewer’s own emotions. The seating arrangements of feasts share some of these features. Lined along the walls with guests, the feast encourages the feeling of a world literally enclosed by bodies, separate from quotidian concerns. While much more intimate than the modern arena, the nocturnal feast lit by flickering torches, candles, and fires nevertheless plays with the visibility of the viewers seen from across a room. The sense of a world apart, and even an amorphous viewing crowd, was further heightened by the tapestries that frequently lined the hall. Although tapestries did not have to include human

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figures, many of the most famous and prized sets were heavily peopled. As in the famous miniature of Jean de Berry feasting from the Très riches heures (plate 1), the life-size figures within tapestry might blur the boundary between the feast hall and the fictive space, extending the crowd of guests into the woven crowds behind them. But where Canetti’s sporting arena is perfectly enclosed by the bodies that line it, the feast space is intensely liable to breaks and interruptions. The most obvious of these are the intrusion of entremets into the feast hall space. The accounts of the Feast of the Pheasant are typical in their insistence that the performed entremets appear through doors—that is, that they come from some unspecified outer world into the feast. At the same time, these intrusive elements are constitutive of the feeling that the banquet hall holds a special world. This sense of the entremet as simultaneously invasive and constructive is elegantly captured in a miniature depicting a feast held by Charles V of France for Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in Charles V’s own copy of the Grandes chroniques de France (fig. 2). The accompanying text records that the grande salle was hung with figural tapestries that precisely filled the areas between, but never obscured, the permanent sculptures of French kings that lined the hall, creating an enclosed wall of images.35 The miniature, however, highlights the ambiguous position of the mobile entremets that staged the taking of Jerusalem in the First Crusade. At left, the Crusaders’ ship forcefully enters the miniature from the manuscript margin, breaking through the decorative gold frame. And yet this rupture is also partially sutured: the mast of the ship has already lost its entirely independent existence as it blends into the very border that the ship as a whole interrupts. Banquets do not depend solely on such entrances for disruptions of the arena’s circle. Any hope of obtaining a coherent picture from the constantly shifting bricolage of the festive space required the active engagement of participants whose views were often partially blocked or fragmented. The Swiss author-artist Diebold Schilling the Elder’s depiction of a banquet held by Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy for Emperor Frederick II at Trier in 1473 depicts the feast hall as a series of tables at which the guests are seated on both sides (fig. 7). Each table is a self-sufficient unit and visibility always partial, as half the guests’ faces are obscured from both the manuscript reader and any figure within the scene. At the same time, there is constant movement between these islands, as both servants and dogs travel between them. As important as these moving bodies are moving gazes; figures glance out, across, and sideways. The most prominent of these

Figure 7. Meeting at Trier, in Diebold Schilling the Elder, Great Burgundian Chronicle, Zürich, Zentralbibliothek Ms A5 p. 121.

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binding looks are the locked eyes of Charles the Bold at the upper left table and Frederick II at the upper right, as Frederick raises a glass to toast his host. Schilling’s arrangement of the tables interestingly both bears out and contradicts textual descriptions of the actual event. The Libellus de mag­ nificentia ducis Burgundiae seats the two rulers side by side and mentions only three tables.36 Whether or not he was aware of his divergence from earlier accounts, Schilling’s miniature conveys the disjunctive nature of the ultimately unsuccessful political negotiations pictured in it (Charles held this feast as part of a failed bid to be declared king of the Romans). More broadly, Schilling’s reimagining reveals the complex play of sight and obscuration, and the potential for their manipulation, in these elaborately shaped environments. The profoundly visible diners of the late medieval feast could become the main object of other guests’ scrutiny. The poet Alain Chartier exploits the unstable division between spectator and spectacle to offer social commentary in his “La Belle Dame sans merci.” The poem is a complicated investigation of the validity of courtly love, centering on an intelligent lady’s witty retorts to the romantic clichés with which a young man attempts to woo her. The story begins at a banquet attended by the narrator as well as the titular Belle Dame and her suitor. It is over the course of the meal that the narrator’s attention is first drawn to the suitor, who gazes longingly at his love despite her blatant lack of reciprocal feelings or patience with his antics. The young man’s pale looks and sighs transform him into, the narrator tells us, “un piteux entremés”—a piteous entremet.37 As a performance, it wins the narrator’s sympathies, although it fails to convince the lady herself, who later dissects the young man’s chivalric commonplaces with ruthless logic. To be a member of the feast audience was to be simultaneously viewer and viewed, an active observer forced to piece together a disjunctive array of activities and a decorative element as carefully selected as any other the room might hold. Just as tapestries and other furnishings helped make the generic late medieval hall into a place of fantasy, so too the walls lined with audience members helped create a world set apart. Within this space, viewing was nevertheless highly active, attention solicited and broken by the wide range of people and things to see. As the piteous entremet of Chartier’s young man suggests, even as one audience member gazed at another longingly, he might become in turn the unconscious object of another’s contemplation.

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AUDIENCE AS ACTORS Scripted performances took place in close proximity to, and could even move to encompass, this highly visible and observed audience. At the Bal des ardents discussed above, this physical intimacy both brought about tragedy by exposing the dancers to unregulated flames and allowed the Duchess of Berry to wrap the closely adjacent king in her dress and so save his life. An extreme of this potential for mixing is imagined in a composition known variously as the Garden of Love or the Outdoor Party of the Burgun­ dian Court, now in Dijon (fig. 8). Over thirty figures are spread throughout the scene, listening to music, hunting, conversing, and flirting. Yet even as these revelers relish the beautiful sights and sounds that surround them, they too are an integral part of the spectacle. Richly dressed in gleaming white, the guests are linked both to each other and to most of the paid performers who mingle among them. One of the rare surviving compositions of a strongly secular character linked to the Valois Burgundian court, the Outdoor Party has been associated with conventional treatments of the Garden of Love and the months of April and May.38 At the same time, the presence of the ducal arms in several locations and some topographical elements have led to the belief that this may be a record of a real event and a real place: a postmarriage celebration held at the castle of Hesdin in 1430.39 While many details in the depicted landscape do not align with the castle’s actual geography, Hesdin and its gardens are known to have been the site for many banquets and other festivities. The court chronicler Georges Chastellain recounts an event at which Duke Philip the Good seduced the English ambassadors with Hesdin’s al fresco wonders, only to trick them in the end into meeting with the French king and performing obeisance, which they had hoped to avoid.40 “One of the most sumptuous works on the earth,”41 Hesdin contained not only hunting grounds and pavilions suited to outdoor events but also a famous collection of automata and other marvelous engins. As in the Outdoor Party, many of these marvels required a degree of visitor participation in order to function properly. William Caxton describes one such room in the preface to the Recueil des histoires de Troie: I know that the noble Duke Philip, founder of the said Order [of the Golden Fleece] had a chamber made in the castle of Hesdin in which Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece was skillfully and curiously painted. I have been in this room and seen the said history so depicted. And in memory of Medea and her intelligence and art he had this chamber made by subtle engyn so that when he wished it would seem that there was

Figure 8. Court society in front of a Burgundian castle. Oil on wood. Musée des BeauxArts, Dijon, France. Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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lightning, then thunder, snow, and rain, all in that chamber as often and whenever it pleased him, all of which was made for his singular pleasure.42

While some record of the painted compositions may survive in a roll of drawings now in Berlin, this ingenious room, like all of Hesdin, has been lost at least since the destruction of the castle by Charles V in the sixteenth century.43 Nevertheless, as Caxton’s account makes clear, what set it above the myriad other depictions of the story of Jason connected to the Burgundian court was its ability to evoke not only the image of the mythical hero but also the sounds and tactical sensations (pleasant or unpleasant) that accompanied his journey. These are made possible by “subtil engyn,” a phrase that refers at once to the ingenuity and the engineering excellence of the artists, and by the will of the duke, whose pleasure dictates the room’s use. The Jason Room gave its visitors a privileged vantage point: they were at once omniscient observers who viewed the passage of long-gone great events and intimate participants who could experience past magic in their own flesh. Other entertainments likewise relied on the physical engagement of their “audience” for everything from farce to moral education. Numerous mechanical traps awaited the visitor to Hesdin, who could emerge from the pleasure gardens sprayed in soot, soaked, and generally bedraggled. Similar slapstick amusement at the expense of guests took place in feasts. The seemingly innocent Swan Mazer, for instance, at first glance is nothing more than a handsome maple drinking cup enhanced with a central tower topped by a gilt swan (fig. 9).44 Its elegance, however, masks a nasty trick. The swan’s tower is equipped with a suction apparatus and ringed by twenty-four holes: when the liquid level rises too high, the suction takes over and the whole contents of the bowl are drained onto the drinker’s lap, doubtless to the amusement of the other guests. Activated by the attempted consumption of too much drink, the greedy cup serves as a playful warning of the consequences of overindulgence. A far more pleasurable immersion of guests into the unfolding spectacle took place in the entremet of the Holy Church at the Feast of the Pheasant. Unlike the Bal des ardents, where the entry of viewers into the fictive world almost immediately signaled its collapse, the entremet of the Holy Church required the participation of the “noble company” present in the feast hall in order to complete its narrative. The guests were at first constructed by the entremet as viewers and students whose wills and minds must be directed by the Holy Church. By the end, however, this passive position had transformed into an active one, as the entremet stirred passions through

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Figure 9. Swan Mazer, before 1384, silver-gilt and maplewood,. Reproduced by kind permission of The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University.

sight and sound. The mimetic acting of Olivier de la Marche gave the assembled nobles an image of a religious woman, whose high status was signaled through the fine material of her robes and her exotic entourage. This woman’s speech consisted of an extended appeal to their emotions, particularly shame and sorrow. “I have,” the Church tells them, “a heart pressed by bitterness and hardness / My eyes flow, my color pales / As you can well see. / Hear my pleas, all of you I see / Save me . . . Cry my ills; / for I am the Holy Church, / Your mother.”45 The phrase “cry my ills” recurs several times in the complaint: sadness rather than anger figures as the key motivator of political action, as though the outflow of tears led directly to the outflow of words in the Crusader vows. And this strategy worked. Their feelings of “pity and compassion” having been touched, so many noblemen rushed forward that some were asked to come back the next day. The surviving vows show that a surprising number of these new performers saw their role in precisely the elevated chivalric terms encouraged by the entremet, as they made such unlikely promises as to use only one arm to fight their foes and not to return until they had engaged the Grand Turk in

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personal combat. The spectators had now entered into the spectacle, accepting not only the spotlight but also the unworldly logic of the enacted scene. The slow seduction of the Feast of the Pheasant guests, who moved inexorably from visitors to avowed participants, has interesting parallels in another artistic program similarly intended to transform its viewer for Christian purposes. Two generations before the Feast of the Pheasant, Philip the Good’s grandfather Philip the Bold acquired a manuscript that remained in his grandson’s collection at the time of the Feast of the Pheasant. Bibliothèque royale MS. 10197–8 contains three texts written by Guillaume de Digulleville: Le Pélerinage de la vie humaine, Le Pélerinage de l’âme, and Le Pélerinage de la vie Jhesucrist.46 A united image cycle apparently by a single hand runs throughout all three books. Philip the Bold’s Pélerinages positions its reader at the outset as a spectator to the account, who may invest in what follows but for the moment is at best one among many viewers. The manuscript opens with a doublecolumn miniature of the author preaching to a packed house (fig. 10). His audience includes men and women, clerics and laypeople of varied ages and a range of social classes all the way up to a king. The author’s gaze and elongated hand point toward two possible members of this crowd: the king (who is also being addressed by another man) and a young cleric sitting in front of the king. The whole miniature is encased in a border with architectural details at top. Attending such public preaching was a common pastime at the French royal court to which Philip the Bold belonged, and he is known to have been in the audience for several such addresses.47 The original owner of this manuscript might therefore imagine himself as a part of just such a crowd, but nothing in the scene requires such identification, nor is special attention drawn to any Philip-like figure. The strongly marked border around the miniature and the additional floral border surrounding both image and text also hinder immediate submersion into the space. One hundred folios later, the next miniature moves the scene from a public site to the privacy of a bedroom, making the reader the sole witness to the narrator’s actions at the beginning of the second book, the Péleri­ nage de l’âme (fig. 11).48 The author/narrator appears alone, asleep on his bed with a vine growing behind him in a manner familiar from the opening miniatures of the more popular Roman de la rose. He is dressed as a pilgrim, his dream identity in the previous poem, and a small naked figure (the Soul) emerges from his mouth. This naked figure represents the narrator’s dreamself in the other miniature for this chapter. The miniature, despite its simplicity, thus performs a great deal of work. First, it links the vision to follow

Figure 10. Preaching, in Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 10197–8 fol. 1.

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Figure 11. The Narrator dreams, in Pèlerinage de l’âme. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 10197–8 fol. 110.

with the larger tradition of dream poetry. Second, it creates a transition between two texts that were often transmitted in isolation from each other by stressing the emergence of the second narrator from the first. Finally, it marks a shift toward a far greater familiarity between reader and narrator, as she or he enters the intimacy of the narrator’s bedchamber. The reader cannot yet simply substitute for the narrator, however, as the next miniature indicates (fig. 12).49 The text describes one of the sights the narrator encounters and has explained to him by his angelic guide: two statues that celebrate chivalry and good governance. The conversing narrator and guide and the subject of their conversation appear, but the differentiation between instructor and pupil is not entirely clear. While the Soul turns his head back to the angel, thus indicating the importance of its explanation, the angel and the Soul make nearly identical gestures, pointing at the statues with their right hands and slightly cupping their left. The second

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Figure 12. The statue and how kings should rule, in Pèlerinage de l’âme. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 10197–8 fol. 162.

illumination for the second book thus brings the reader closer to the unfolding events, but at the same time it stresses the importance of the narrator both as the factor uniting the two poems and as the observer (and explicator) of the unfolding scenes. The illuminations for the final book of Diguilleville’s trilogy, Le Péle­ rinage de la vie Jhesucrist, dispense with such visualized intermediaries, making the reader’s and narrator’s gazes identical. The Pélerinage de la vie Jhesucrist contains roughly twice as many miniatures as the rest of the manuscript combined. The majority of the scenes are drawn from the life of Christ (e.g., the Annunciation, the Circumcision, the Adoration of the

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Figure 13. The gyrfalcon and the eagle, in Pèlerinage de Jésus-Christ. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 10197–8 fol. 246v.

Magi) and use standard iconographic formulas. In all cases the scene alone is shown. While this might partially result from the artist’s using standard formulas for standard subjects, it also suggests that for the first time the reader is indeed seeing through the narrator’s eyes. This impression is confirmed by the final miniature of the Jhesuchrist cycle, which alone of the seven is not based on established iconography (fig. 13).50 In the midst of his discourse on the betrayal of Christ by the Jews, the narrator relates a separate dream he once had: “By this conspiracy / I was reminded of a vision / That I had seen in a time past.”51 It is this dream—in which a gyrfalcon allows an eagle to kill it and is rewarded by inheriting the eagle’s nest—that is depicted in the miniature. It is an idiosyncratic subject marked out in the text as the private vision of the narrator, but the miniature provides the reader unaided and unimpeded access to it. By the last miniature of the third book, there-

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fore, the reader has come to the end of a consistent trajectory of steadily increasing involvement in the fictional world. Having started from a distant position as at best one of a crowd of spectators, he or she is now not only within the dream but also within the memories that the dream recalls to the narrator. The reader’s identification with the narrator is now complete, since she or he not only sees through his eyes but also into his mind. The reasons behind the use of increasing identification in the illuminations of the Pélerinages and the actions of nobles at the Feast of the Pheasant are slightly different but interrelated. The Pélerinages is a didactic text intent on teaching its readers the proper way to live their lives by charting the movements of the Pilgrim (an Everyman) and the most perfect of all humans, Jesus; its illuminations work in tandem with the text to create a connection between the actions of these ideals and the reader. The Feast of the Pheasant is essentially a piece of religiopolitical propaganda meant to convince the guests to publicly dedicate themselves to Philip’s crusade, a goal realized in the entremet of the Holy Church and the following vows. In both cases, identification helps instill what the planners consider proper behavior in others and to convince their audience of the validity of that behavior.

THE LATE MEDIEVAL STAR SYSTEM In the entremet of the Holy Church, Philip the Good served as the role model to which all other diners had to assimilate themselves in order to truly be worthy of the alternate chivalric reality created within the performance. While his performance is in some respects parallel to that of Digulleville’s Pilgrim, they differ in one important respect. Where the Pilgrim is an alter ego and quasi-Everyman, Philip the Good emphatically is himself. Philip is directly addressed by his title five times in the course of the entremet. The Holy Church stresses his singularity, calling out, “Oh you, oh you, noble Duke of Burgundy / Son of the Church, and brother to her children, / Heed me, and consider my need / Paint on your heart the shame and humiliation, / the grievous remorse that I carry and feel.”52 Not only does this plea come first in a series of direct addresses to various portions of the audience, but the singular “toi” used to speak to Philip contrasts with the plural “vous” directed at all other listeners. Echoing the Church’s assumption that Philip is the first and most important addressee, Toison d’Or speaks directly to the duke when explaining how the vows should be made. In response to these various appeals, Philip the Good not only offers his pledge to go on Crusade but does so in the manner demanded by the Holy

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Church: “My lord the duke, who knew with what intention he had held the banquet, looked at the Church and then, as though having pity on her, took from his breast a letter that said he vowed he would save Christianity.”53 The Holy Church then praises Philip and finally directs the other guests to look to his example: “Oh you, princes, knights, noble men, / See the pa­ tron for undertaking high deeds.”54 The noun patron used to designate the duke usefully combines two meanings, indicating that he is the leader of the enterprise but also exploiting the alternate translation of patron as a pattern or template.55 Philip’s actions are thus at once those of a lord and those of a model, and the assembled men are bidden to follow him in both respects. As a planner of the event, Philip was not actually surprised by what took place, nor does Olivier de la Marche suggest that his emotions were triggered unexpectedly. Philip’s performance of pity for the Holy Church is therefore entirely premeditated and in some respects feigned, even if it does align with his long-held image of himself as a pious man devoted to the crusading cause. Although they are play-acted, these emotions are an important component of what Philip conveys to the other guests. The noblemen, when they take their vows, do so moved by “compassion and pity” and in a manner that “follows my lord the Duke.” Emotions pantomimed in the service of real convictions thus become real emotions that ignite convictions in the diners; Philip’s appearance under his true title of Duke of Burgundy bridges the gap between the highly allegorical Holy Church and the lived reality of the assembled guests. In this respect, Philip’s performance is analogous to that theorized for movie stars, and can create similar ideological effects. Writing of stars, Richard Dyer notes: “Stars are, like characters in stories, representations of people. Thus they relate to ideas about what people are (or are supposed to be) like. However, unlike characters in stories, stars are also real people. . . . Thus, the value embodied by a star is as it were harder to reject as ‘impossible’ or ‘false’ because the star’s existence guarantees the existence of the value s/he embodies.”56 In the case of film stars, the confusion of scripted performance and real personality often occurs but would usually be agreed to be fundamentally illogical. Medieval viewers similarly expressed concerns that most actors and characters needed to be recognized as distinct entities; a failure to do so was considered a sign of deviance.57 This distinction is far harder to draw in the case of Philip the Good’s interactions with the Holy Church. Not only does Philip share a name and bodily form with the figure he portrays, but the actions undertaken by the character, such as swearing vows, remain binding on the real Philip after the performance’s

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end. Some other high-ranking courtiers—notably the two ladies who accompany the pheasant—similarly retain their regular social identities while acting in entremets, yet their roles are emphatically secondary to that of the duke. Philip the Good’s value as a protagonist draws in part on the real economic and military superiority he held over most of his guests. However, it is an important part of the work of the entremet and the Feast of the Pheasant as a whole to turn this might into a right that can capture other men’s imaginations. Well before the Holy Church entered the space, the artistic campaign to elevate Philip as the ideal model for aristocratic behavior had already begun shaping viewer expectations. Philip’s personal presence was emphasized by a long list of noniconic elements surrounding the nobles at the Feast of the Pheasant. The guards and servers were all dressed in his colors of black and gray. Many of the entremets in the room featured his coat of arms, patron saints, or other personal signs, such as the lion of Flanders. The walls were hung with tapestries depicting his favored narrative of Hercules. At the Feast of the Pheasant, Philip the Good was an omnipresent force, at once enveloping and guiding his guests. Such radical assertion of presence is widespread in the artistic patronage of late medieval ruling elites.58 This pattern has been well studied in the context of devotional and memorial portraiture, but its influence in fact extends more broadly.59 The frequency with which aristocrats and wealthy burghers appear through emblems, heraldry, and portraiture in the imagery they commissioned or owned suggests that they wished to see themselves (and be seen by others) as omnipresent, as well as particularly intimate with sacred or otherwise culturally elevated figures.60 Public representations might positively influence impressions of the ruler in rebellious areas, as did the votive statue of Duke Charles the Bold and St. George given to the Cathedral of Liège. Despite Charles’s probable intentions, this sculpture came to be read by citizens as an attempt at reconciliation with the city.61 Such images were also given to rulers as signs of loyalty.62 The Goldenes Rössl, for example, places a praying Charles VI of France directly at the feet of the Virgin and Child. While this sculpture promotes the king as both pious and blessed, it was commissioned not by Charles VI but by his wife Isabelle of Bavaria, who gave it to him as a New Year’s gift in 1404. In light of Charles VI’s bouts of mental illness and rumors surrounding Isabelle’s marital infidelity, its elevation of the king speaks more to his wife’s claims of allegiance than to his own interest in propaganda. Similarly close relationships with holy figures were pictured for less exalted members of the

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leading hierarchy, such as Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Canon van der Paele in prayer with the Virgin and saints, or the Virgin and Child with Chancel­ lor Rolin. Assertions of presence also appeared in nondevotional contexts. Located in the Burgundian countryside eight miles northwest of Chalon-sur-Saône, the estate of Germolles was given by Duke Philip the Bold to his wife Margaret of Flanders.63 Beginning in 1385, Margaret spent 23,500 francs and over a decade remodeling the existing château. While this undertaking entailed some changes to the physical superstructure, Margaret of Flanders seems to have been at least equally concerned with interior design. The result is a decoration scheme that celebrates both the pastoral and the ducal couple. Financial records and the surviving examples indicate that several painters, predominantly from Dijon, were instructed by Margaret of Flanders to cover her walls in hundreds of Ps (Philippe), Ms (Marguerite), thistles (a Burgundian symbol), daisies (marguerites in French), and sheep, as well as heraldic arms and personal mottos. While few other wall paintings survive from this period to provide a comparison set, such combinations of flora, fauna, and heraldry are typical of the class of tapestries now known as mille-fleur, including the famous set once belonging to the later Dukes of Burgundy.64 Sheep, thistles, and daisies also decorate the recovered paving tiles created for the château at Germolles during this period, along with lions, geometrical designs, the wheel of Fortune, St. George and the dragon, fleur-de-lis, and stylized suns. Of these repeated signs, it is the sheep that seems most odd at first glance, yet it is the sheep motif that in fact proves key to the image of Margaret of Flanders crafted at Germolles. It was as a shepherdess and shepherd surrounded by a flock that Claus Sluter depicted Margaret and her husband in a statuary group once displayed at the château. This Pastorale and any visual record of it are now lost, so discussion of its appearance must remain speculative. The most likely surviving parallel is the pairing of Philip the Bold and Margaret of Flanders that flanked the portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol. Installed just one year before the Germolles group and likewise executed by Sluter, the Champmol portal shows Philip and Margaret in the guise of devout rulers accompanied by their name saints. The ducal couple’s physical features are naturalistically depicted: neither is ideally beautiful, and both statues appear to be late middle-aged. If the Germolles group displayed a similar taste for naturalism, it seems likely that it showed the ducal couple as recognizably themselves, yet in a role and dress not their own. Like their successors, the first Valois Burgundian duke and particularly the first duchess might see in this role-playing portrait some type of ideal to

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tie to their own identity, although the precise intentions behind the multifaceted image remain a matter for conjecture. The sheep was a personal emblem of Margaret’s father Louis de Mâle, which she adopted for her own use; other records show her purchasing saddles with sheep patterns and several tapestries featuring sheep and shepherds. In addition to this familial tie, sheep imagery might have appealed to the duchess for its ability to call to mind a variety of possible and even antithetical readings in her contemporaries. The ducal shepherd statue and the other uses of bucolic imagery at Germolles could be taken as an attempt (unusual for the time) to reference and elevate the practical workings of the site, since late medieval Germolles was a functioning farm with a small flock of sheep.65 The choice of shepherding in particular could also reference the wool trade that was the keystone of economic prosperity in the urban centers of Margaret of Flanders’s Flemish dower lands. Margaret might also be expressing a fashionable taste for the idyllic “simple life”; such interest surfaces periodically in aristocratic Francophone culture during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and finds verbal expression in the form of pastorals and pastourelles.66 In the purified world of elegant pastoral pleasure at Germolles, the duke and duchess could appear as a permutation of the popular shepherd-lovers Marion and Robin.67 This rustic imagery could also be read allegorically, identifying the ducal couple with the biblical ideal of the good shepherd. Visitors to Germolles such as Margaret of Flanders’s nephew-by-marriage Charles VI thus encountered their hostess not only as a living body but also as a diffused subject for contemplation and reflection. Over the course of a stay her polysemous image would play out across multiple motifs: the repetition of sheep on the floors, hangings, and other surfaces, the paired initials of the ducal couple lining the walls, and equally personal signs such as the thistle and lion. Interpretation would fluctuate with the actions of the duchess herself as she moved through this space. Whether intentional or not, the resulting experience cast Margaret of Flanders not only as the center of attention but also, more importantly, as a riddle, whose human behavior required the same care in reading as did the courtly emblems depicting her, enigmatic signs that at once revealed and concealed their subject. The performance and depictions of Philip the Good, Margaret of Flanders, and many of their late medieval contemporaries served as reminders of the societal expectation that leaders would not only govern but also ideally function as models. In this respect, these highly constructed images and spaces could function in a manner analogous to the praying figures in contemporary devotional manuscripts that might both idealize readers as perfect worshipers and provoke anxiety in individuals who recognized

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the gap between themselves and these perfected models.68 In contrast to Richard Brilliant’s model of portraiture as an expression or consolidation of a preexisting self, these ducal practices suggest that portraits, scripted performances, and other personalized representational practices helped to create as well as to represent their elite subjects.69 Both the actual bodies and their various representations thus become highly ambiguous and malleable points of exchange between ideals and the everyday world. Collaboration in late medieval feasts was a never-ending process involving not only what are usually considered planners and creators but also members of the audience. Just as it disrupts modern assumptions about divisions between media and labor, banqueting challenges current critical models of spectatorship and spectacle. Many actors of course distinguished themselves from their roles, as Olivier de la Marche did when he played the Holy Church: such acting helped to create a sense of the truth of the material being conveyed. Yet the unmasking of Charles VI in the tragedy of the Bal des Ardents makes clear that the possibility for a breakdown of the facade of character was always present. Audience members likewise were important as viewers and recipients of the messages communicated by the planners of banquets, but they were also an integral part of the spectacle. Whether arranged along the walls like precious plate or filling the room, viewers were always also viewed. The multiplication of possible things to look at in the richly decorated space of the feast hall required active viewer involvement in order to make sense of the shifting meanings of objects and performances over time. The case of the entremet of the Holy Church at the Feast of the Pheasant makes evident that individuals who might loosely be termed spectators could become physically involved in the unfolding spectacle even while maintaining their personal identity. The possibility for breaching the divide between the real and fictive worlds in that case was prompted by the model of Philip the Good, who functioned as a bridge between the two. Such highly visible strategies for articulating power exposed these late medieval stars to the potentially critical gaze of their audiences. At the same time, the imaginative play possible within the fictive worlds offered at least the potential for imagining new ways of being within the everyday. It is important, however, to distinguish this involvement from the utopian erasure of hierarchy assumed by modern theories of carnival. The acceptance of already socially prominent figures such as Duke Philip the Good in such roles was fundamentally conservative and supported preexisting power hierarchies precisely by naturalizing the claims that equated might with right.

Plate 1. Limbourg Brothers (Herman, Pol, Jean; fl. 1399–1416 CE), January: The Feast of the Duke of Berry. Illuminated manuscript page from Les Très Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, 1416. Ms. 65 fol. 1v. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. Musée Condé. Chantilly, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Plate 2. Sobriety and Gluttony, in Somme le roi. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 11041 fol. 135v.

Plate 3. Gawain and the Green Knight. London, British Library Ms. Cotton Nero A.X art.3, fol. 94v. © The British Library Board.

Plate 4. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441), the Ghent Altarpiece, closed state: Annunciation, Prophets Zecariah and Micah, Eritrean and Cumean Sibyls, Donors, Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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Similar patterns of both depiction and performance extended well beyond the feast hall, appearing in painting, sculpture, and interior design alike. Whether these strategies began in feasting or entered it from architecture and other arts is as circular an argument as the originality of the chicken and the egg, but feasting perhaps makes more evident just how vital such interplay was to promoting both ideology and specific goals. In order to understand how all such arts functioned, the relationship between spectator and spectacle must be reconceived as a constantly shifting position along a subtly graded spectrum. It is vital, moreover, to acknowledge that participation in and of itself does not guarantee freedom from indoctrination. The potential for both refusal and manipulation of the script for personal ends was always present, but the practices of feasting were relatively good at reincorporating dissent. In the face of this insistence on conformity and staging, one might reasonably ask, how much are any of these performances to be believed? Can the truth claims of mimesis really be reconciled with the recognized pretense of play-acting a chivalric dream? Once made as much object as subject of viewing, did members of the audience not begin to question the honesty of their fellow actors? It is to these questions that the next chapter turns.

chapter three

Efficacy and Hypocrisy

I

n the lull following the taking of vows at the Feast of the Pheasant, the author Olivier de la Marche stages an odd moment of doubt for readers of his memoir. Pretending once again to be a naive viewer, he looks at the hall, from which all the wondrous entremets have been removed except for a single glass fountain. Deprived of anything new to distract him, he reflects back on what seems to him now to have been but a dream: “I thought of the outrageous excess and great expense laid out for these banquets which had lasted only a short time . . . without finding any virtue in it. . . . It seemed to me to have begun too precipitously for such an important enterprise.”1 Immersed in his dark thoughts, he turns to a nearby chamberlain to confess his misgivings. “My friend,” this ducal confidant replies: You should know, and I promise you on my oath as a knight, that these chaplets, banquets, and festivities were arranged and undertaken beginning long ago in accordance with the firm direction and secret desire of my lord the duke in order to accomplish his banquet in the way you have seen, because he desires greatly and with all his heart to bring to fruition an old holy promise which he had taken to serve God. . . . Know that for a long time he has persevered and striven so as to have time to be able to make the vow and demonstrate the goodwill and desire he has for the common good and the general profit of Christianity.2

De la Marche’s concerns about the seriousness of the event are thus countered by the chamberlain’s claims that it is part of a much larger and longstanding political plan. The seriousness and effectiveness of the Feast of the Pheasant as an intervention in the political sphere has similarly troubled modern scholars, 74

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who often restage the two sides of Olivier de la Marche’s argument between himself and the chamberlain, although they rarely admit his rhetoric’s influence. The great biographer of the Burgundian dukes Richard Vaughan, for example, describes the Feast of the Pheasant as “most bizarre and extravagant” in terms of its aesthetics but acknowledges its role in promoting Philip’s lifelong crusade agenda.3 While agreeing that the Feast of the Pheasant appealed to the senses rather than the intellect, Agathe Lafortune-Martel defends its serious purpose by looking to the ways in which it helped form a Burgundian Christian community.4 The persistent questions about the possible discrepancies between the means and goals in feasting reveal very real contradictions that riddled banquets’ mixture of fantasy and binding vows. How were viewers then, or readers now, to know what intentions, if any, lay beneath the beautiful appearances and emotional appeals of an event like the Feast of the Pheasant? Where does the boundary between pleading one’s case persuasively and deception lie? De la Marche may liken the actions and vows taken within the feast hall to those experienced in a dream, but this neither wholly secures nor denies the power that banqueting held to influence reality beyond its walls. The late medieval courtier, as the inheritor of a rich tradition of dream interpretation, would be well aware that some dreams are false and demonic, while others are not only true and predictive but possibly divinely inspired.5 Unfortunately, the means to tell one from the other were not always entirely clear. Feasting and related arts at late medieval courts thus raise the question: how could intentions be read in actions performed during a feast, in art, or in daily life? The concerns broached here about the legibility of signs and the intersection of imagination and action remain alive today, but the familiarity of some of the questions does not entail equally familiar answers. Examining behaviors at feasts and their parallels in other media provides new insight into the particular nature of courtly concerns and both the benefits and pitfalls attached to some of the major approaches proposed to these long-standing problems in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The discourses surrounding emotion in governance suggest that controlled passions and their properly mediated display were integral to earthly leadership, yet more exaggerated emotional norms were embraced in devotional practice. While calculation could signal justice and convey truth, it was also highly suspect amid growing concerns about the dangers of hypocrisy in all spheres of social life. Additional dangers were perceived in acting without any forethought at all, which brought people perilously close to the bestial state of nonhuman animals such as monkeys. Resisting any final solution,

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the late medieval debates surrounding form and intention intersected with many spheres of experience, alerting their participants to the need for continued critical viewing in a world of potentially false appearances.

SIGNALING AND STAGING INTENTIONS Olivier de la Marche questions the Feast of the Pheasant on account of its great expense and its seemingly precipitous plunging of the French and Flemish elites into a new Crusade. I want to delay the important issue of monetary extravagance until the next chapter and concentrate for the moment on the more curious charge of excessive spontaneity. Although spontaneity is today associated with honesty, the varied emotional communities of the late Middle Ages exhibit a more complicated range of opinions concerning the proper place and forms of emotional display. The Feast of the Pheasant mobilizes two of these sets of emotional norms—those associated with justice and leadership for Philip the Good and those developed in devotional culture for the Holy Church—in its attempt to solicit a properly motivated response from its audience. Since the romantic period, spontaneity is often popularly conceptualized as a positive quality inextricably linked to both honesty and innocence. In particular, emotions such as the assembled noblemen’s pity and compassion at the entremet of the Holy Church are preferably unrehearsed: there is something unsettling for a twenty-first-century reader in calculated displays of sadness, love, or other passion. Indeed, the current legal code of the United States of America equates premeditation in the killing of another human being with such additional factors as sexual abuse, robbery, or torture of a child, one of which must be present to qualify the crime as first-degree murder. Killing “upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion,” in contrast, immediately diminishes the crime to voluntary manslaughter.6 Heat-of-passion defenses depend on the idea that emotions can spring upon people as unexpectedly as a quarrelsome assailant and are capable of causing actions that the actor does not actually intend to commit. This understanding of emotion as a mitigating factor has parallels in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century legal practice. It was, however, relatively new at that time and ran against a long legal tradition that instead concentrated on questions of transparency and treachery: thus in the earlier Song of Roland Ganelon defends himself against the charge of unjustified homicide by claiming he had first deliberately and publicly threatened Roland’s life in front of a group of witnesses, a defense that would do him little good in a modern court of law.7

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For many years it was standard practice to interpret public tears and especially violent acts performed by members of late medieval society as similarly implying a transparent reflection of the spirit in the body. Standing before Elias’s “civilizing process” had truly taken hold and within Huizinga’s childhood of mankind, late medieval men and women were held to be both blessed and cursed by their inability to do aught but immediately jump from one emotional high to the next.8 Art historians have likewise tended to describe the emotional palette of late medieval artworks as provocatively extreme, focused on producing strong responses such as tears in its susceptible viewers.9 Recent work in psychology and anthropology has stressed the importance of nurture rather than pure nature in structuring even the most seemingly spontaneous emotions for all societies, opening up the possibility to consider emotions as culturally specific habits that are part of, rather than antithetical to, thought and communication.10 Inspired by this work, historians too have begun to reexamine the role and changing nature of emotions in past cultures.11 A pivotal rethinking of this problem has taken place in Barbara Rosenwein’s work on emotional regimes in the medieval period. In place of positing universal medieval passions, Rosenwein points to the diversity of what she terms “emotional communities” that may exist within a given time and region, and the possibility for mobility between them: The researcher looking at [emotional communities] seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore. I further propose that people move (and moved) continually from one such community to another—from taverns to law courts, say—adjusting their emotional displays and their judgments of weal and woe (with greater and lesser degrees of success) to these different environments. . . . Even within the same society contradictory values and models, not to mention deviant individuals, find their place.12

The successful movement from the Holy Church’s passionate pleas to Philip the Good’s actions “as though having pity” and finally to the noble company’s “pity and compassion” discussed in the previous chapter appears in this light to indicate a successful affective exchange, suggesting that the performance made use of emotional norms shared by the court members,

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landed aristocrats, and urban patricians to whom it was addressed. Drawing on a language of suffering and compassion familiar from devotional texts and images, the Holy Church repeatedly references her emotional distress, which manifests in the form of flowing tears and fluttering facial color, even as she demands that the assembled nobles imitate her, commanding them to “cry my tears and weep my sorrow.”13 But where the Holy Church cries, Philip the Good and his nobles after him respond not with tears but with a measured offer of practical aid. Philip’s performance, in which a compassionate expression is married to the offer of an already written letter detailing his crusading vow, is markedly premeditated. This sense of staging is carried over in de la Marche’s literary account through the insistence on the duke’s feigning and previous knowledge. Olivier de la Marche is hardly a neutral source when speaking of the Burgundian dukes (for loyalty to whom he had sacrificed his ancestral holdings in France by the time his memoirs were under construction) and is rarely inclined to present them in a poor light. Thus while a modern audience may be taken aback by Philip’s clearly premeditated pity, de la Marche seems to assume that his late medieval readers could be expected to view this behavior positively. Indeed, it is possible that Duke Philip the Good’s premeditation was as important in convincing his audience as was his emotional appeal. The necessity of striking a balance between feeling and control appears regularly in accounts of court life. Philip’s son Charles the Bold, for example, was regularly condemned for his inability to exercise proper control over the volatile passion of anger. For this reason, pro-Burgundian chroniclers were particularly pleased by opportunities to show his rare premeditated performance of emotions. One such occasion occurred when the ambassadors of Louis xI of France accused Charles of plotting against his father and unjustly imprisoning a French citizen. Chastellain attributes these accusations to Louis xI, who he claims fears and doubts Charles’s father, Philip the Good, and “willingly hates” Charles himself.14 These emotions lead Louis to stir up unrest in Burgundian territories, which Chastellain feels both injures the king’s honor and weakens his political position by destabilizing a key area of the kingdom. Chastellain presents the notoriously bellicose Charles as the effective antidote to this improper and ill-conceived royal behavior. According to Chastellain, the imprisoned man, the Bastard of Rubempré, had been captured in a foiled attempt to kidnap Charles. Charles was therefore understandably unhappy at being accused of holding his would-be assailant illegally. Yet rather than act quickly on the injury that he “bitterly carried

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in his heart,” he decided to schedule a public defense a fortnight later.15 In the interval, he shut himself in a room filled with paper and ink in order to “compose and articulate his response, just as he ought.” Chastellain adds that this practiced eloquence achieved its ends; “every man lauded him afterwards on the form and ease [of his address].”16 Like many historians of his day, Chastellain is not above writing the speeches his characters should have given rather than what they actually said, but for this reason his reconstruction of Charles’s oration indicates what rhetorical strategies might have been counted upon to impress his courtly audience. Charles’s long speech tediously bears out the claim that it is composed and ordered, proceeding point by point through his injuries. Charles, like his chronicler, attributes Louis xI’s actions to ire and displeasure. While he speaks of his own grievous injury and bitterness, he more frequently expresses his wish to please his father and God. In keeping with the traditional purpose of history writing as a method for providing behavioral models for readers, Chastellain’s chronicle thus sets Louis xI and Charles the Bold in this scene as avatars of two different ways of drawing on emotions in politics. Louis xI’s anger inspires actions improper for a king, while Charles the Bold’s response is praised because he rationally controls his feelings and draws on the acceptable feelings of duty and righteous grief. Similar norms appear in civic government as well. Both manuals and fictional accounts aimed at producing urban leaders such as aldermen express concern about the potential abuses that wrath and love might produce because of their tendency to provoke unreflective action. Rather than removing all emotion, however, these prescriptive accounts reserve approval for a more limited palette, the most prominent elements in which are pity, compassion, and fear of God. Bailiffs, who had the right to commute sentences, often tersely attribute their leniency to compassion.17 While official judgments tend to avoid describing the judge’s emotional reactions, one mirror of aldermen, the late fourteenth-century Scaecspel, goes so far as to advise its reader that he must feel compassion when delivering a sentence on a fellow Christian, not only bearing sadness in his heart but also displaying “tokens of grief” externally.18 Judicial pity and compassion here shade toward measure and mercy, allowing their adherents to act in accordance with humane justice. A similar range of what might be called devotional and judicial emotional communities appears in contemporary imagery. The type of passionate display enacted by the Holy Church formed part of a well-studied devotional culture in which both male and female tears were approved. An artist like Dieric Bouts, working in the Lowlands during the third quarter

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of the fifteenth century, found an established market for devotional paintings of subjects such as the Virgin as Mater dolorosa and Christ as the Man of Sorrows. With their lids swollen and eyes bloodshot from the glittering tears that cling to their cheeks, Bouts’s Madonnas are strikingly powerful embodiments of deep sorrow (fig. 14).19 Bouts’s frequent decision to also make his Man of Sorrows weep only serves to drive home the cosuffering of Mother and Child, holy figure and viewer. Such images invite, perhaps even coerce, the viewer into an affective exchange, mapping emotional reactions on overly familiar and at times abstract theological commonplaces such as the humanity of Jesus or Mary’s role as intercessor. In contrast, depictions of leadership and judgment in town halls tend toward emotional restraint, particularly when imaging the righteous.20 Despite his consummate skill at depicting grief, Bouts’s paintings titled Judg­ ment of Otto III, created for the town hall in Leuven around 1475, are startlingly dry-eyed portrayals of dramatic events.21 The apocryphal tale begins when a count rejects the advances of Otto III’s lascivious empress; angered, she falsely accuses him of rape, and he is beheaded (fig. 15). His widowed countess, determined to prove her husband’s innocence, submits to an ordeal by fire. When she emerges unscathed, Otto III orders that his own faithless wife be executed (fig. 16). The noble countess appears in both panels. In the foreground of the first, she kneels a mere pace away from her husband’s headless corpse, from which blood still spurts. She gently receives his grimacing head from the executioner, who dangles it somewhat nonchalantly by the forelock. In the foreground of the second painting, the countess, still accompanied by the grotesque head, kneels once again to prove the justice of her cause to the enthroned Otto. Throughout, the turbulent mixture of horror, sorrow, rage, and later triumph that one might imagine would motivate the righteous widow are seemingly absent. While she slightly tightens her lips when wrapping her husband’s severed head, this possible trace of distress is entirely absent by the time she stoically faces Otto, holding out the burning iron bar as though handing it to him. Indeed, her metaphorical sangfroid is visible in the metal itself, which literally cools from red to black as it passes through her hand. Otto likewise seems little moved by the charge that his wife is unfaithful and he himself has killed an innocent man. Raising one hand to his chest to indicate acceptance, he acknowledges these shocking revelations with clear eyes. Given the complex history of these panels, it is possible that some subtle signs of grief such as an errant tear might have been intended but either left unexecuted or removed in a later repainting.22 Certainly, contemporary accounts of real supplicating women often dwell on their public

Figure 14. Workshop of Dieric Bouts, Mater dolorosa (Sorrowing Virgin), 1480/1500, oil on panel, 38.7 × 30.3 cm (15¼ × 117⁄8 in); painted surface 37.2 × 29 cm (147⁄8 × 113⁄8 in.), 1986.998, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Figure 15. Dieric Bouts the Elder (ca. 1415–75), The Justice of Emperor Otto—Martyrdom of the Innocent. Musée d’Art Ancien, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium. Photo credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 16. Dieric Bouts the Elder (ca. 1415–75), The Judgment of Emperor Otto III—the count’s widow offering to undergo ordeal by red-hot iron. Musée d’Art Ancien, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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weeping in bids for sympathy. Yet perhaps such signs were never meant to be present: historical women more often than not failed in emotional appeals, as did Mary of Burgundy in her supposed tearful plea for the lives of her councilors before the rebellious burghers of Ghent in 1477. The countess’s proffered brand, like the written vows Philip the Good produced at the Feast of the Pheasant, indicates her control over her situation, rendering the justice of her cause visible. The distinction between the emotional registers of Bouts’s devotional and civic paintings, as well as that between the Holy Church and Duke Philip the Good, cannot be reduced to an anachronistic separation of the sacred and the secular. While not involved in devotional praxis, the values of just governance embedded in the town hall paintings were a divine as well as a human concern, as the countess’s miraculous survival of the burning brand suggests. Similarly, the whole of the entremet of the Holy Church was oriented toward the cause of crusade, which was both political and sacred. The term used by the Holy Church to describe Philip’s performance in the entremet, patron, links him explicitly with saints, who likewise were called patrons to indicate both their support of their followers and their role as models.23 If Philip feigns pity rather than abject sorrow, and if his emotions must be read as premeditated rather than spontaneous, this suggests the existence of an alternate set of emotional norms tied to leadership, which persists in productive tension with more well-known affective devotional modes. The carefully calibrated display of emotions was a powerful political tool, yet such displays could easily go awry if they were read by viewers as too extreme, too unreflective, or veering into any of the nearby but improper passions. Affective exchange played an important role in both political and devotional discourses, which regularly sought the fellow feeling of community members as a means for strengthening allegiance and motivating action. Props such as Philip the Good’s written vows or the righteous countess’s slowly cooling brand signal the resolve and forethought that grounded their users’ pity or pursuit of justice. Similarly, the grief shown by an alderman as he condemned defendants in his court allowed him to indicate his Christian feeling; displays of nearly any other emotion, however, would have invalidated his status as an impartial judge. The premeditated emotional appeals of the entremet of the Holy Church appear false if seen as outliers in the world of utterly unrestrained emotionality evoked by Johann Huizinga. However, a more realistic recognition of the societal constraints that surrounded such displays indicates the complexity of employing emotional appeals, particularly for leaders and

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those involved in the pursuit of justice. When placed within these larger discourses, the feigned pity of the duke can be interpreted as a communicative strategy that is no more or less manipulative than any attempt to explain and defend one’s beliefs. The chancellor’s defense that the Feast of the Pheasant was intended by Philip the Good to “demonstrate the goodwill and desire he has for the common good and the general profit of Christianity” thus appears perfectly coherent: the ends not only justify but also dictate the emotional means.

FALSE APPEARANCES Despite the logical coherence of this positive reading of Philip the Good’s performance, the fact that Olivier de la Marche nevertheless felt obliged to defend the entremets at the Feast of the Pheasant suggests that underlying doubts might have lingered. This uncertainty is part of a larger range of deep-seated concerns about misleading appearances at work within late medieval court culture in general and the Valois French courts in particular. While de la Marche and Philip the Good may have hoped to speak to a set of emotional norms that prized control, their valorization of pretense was not universally accepted. Philip the Good might be expected to be particularly sensitive to charges of insincerity given the checkered history of his father, John the Fearless. John was the sponsor and subject of one of the most notoriously disingenuous documents of his age, Jean Petit’s Defense of the Role of the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, in the Death of the Duke Louis of Orleans. The text offered an explanation for John’s cold-blooded assassination of his cousin Louis of Orleans in 1407. It infamously not only accepts John’s responsibility for the killing but also demands that he be praised for it, since it was done for the meritorious goal of protecting the king from Louis’s supposed tyranny. While Petit stresses the long list of abuses that logically justify execution of Louis as a traitor, a Parisian illumination accompanying one of the manuscript copies more complexly presents the event as a seemingly spontaneous act of righteous anger (fig. 17). Against a rather generic rocky ground with a distant city view, the artist places a large blue tent patterned with fleur-de-lis and topped by a standard of white, green, red, and black with broom plants. The royal French arms are thus combined with the personal colors and emblem of Charles VI, who is seemingly objectified in the tent and the crown that hovers between the open flaps. Below, a gray wolf howls with its tail between its legs as a large golden lion rakes its bleeding

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neck with his claws. The lion is clearly infuriated, brows furrowed and lips pulled back to reveal his fierce, growling maw. The accompanying poem clarifies this odd scene without in the end adding much detail: “By force the wolf breaks and tears/ With his teeth and tugs the crown / And the lion by very great wrath / With his paw gives him a great blow.”24 Loup (wolf) is a near-homonym for the name Louis, and the lion was the heraldic sign of Flanders, making this an easily decipherable miniature à clef. Louis has attacked the crown; John in his anger has struck him down. The potential thoughtlessness of the direct transfer of anger into action visualized in the miniature is to some extent mitigated by the freedom allowed allegorical figures: just as the Holy Church may weep and wail while Philip the Good only shows pity, so too the lion can snarl where John supposedly mulled carefully over the list of Louis’s crimes. The result is a careful balance between two modes of defense against the charge of murder, one drawing on reason and the other passion. Despite, or perhaps because of, this careful calibration, the Defense singularly failed to impress the vast majority of John’s contemporaries, who saw it as mere window dressing for an obvious political power play. Such blatantly false and obviously self-serving pretense condemned rather than justified its subject, and John was assassinated in retaliation not long after. Similar concerns arise elsewhere in the courtly context. While Christine de Pisan was willing to grant the possibility that some dissimulation was allowable if it served the greater cause of peace, she came down forcibly against the use of disingenuous public appeals by false lovers.25 Christine was a poet employed by numerous members of the French court, including Philip the Good’s grandfather Philip the Bold; while her views may not have been universally shared, her disquiet was far from unique. In The Letter of Cupid, God of Love, she has Cupid complain of misleading men: The loyal lovers’ pose they strike is false, Hiding behind their myriad deceits, They go declaring that a woman’s love Inflames them sorely, keeps their hearts locked up; The first laments, the second’s heart is wrenched, The next pretends to fill with tears and sighs . . . Sparing themselves no pain to come and go, They promenade in church and peer about, Bending their knees upon the altar steps In fake devotion: many are like that!

Figure 17. Jean Petit, La Justification du duc de Bourgogne, Paris, ca. 1410. ÖNB / Wien Cod. 2657 fol. 1v.

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. . . Then ever so Attentively they tender their requests, Inquiring for the weddings and the feasts At which those polished, ardent, gallant swains Display how much they feel our arrow’s cut, So much that they can barely stand the pain!26

Feasts serve in Christine’s account as a stage on which false lovers simulate suffering in order to mislead women, a task that they are able to perform because of their polished manners. Playing to an audience of which they are always conscious, these tearful makers of highly public vows recall the selfaware performances of banquet attendees whose complex position between viewer and viewed was discussed in the previous chapter. Despite scholars’ use of the Middle Ages as the backdrop against which the supposedly modern invention of a separation between interior self and exterior behavior appears, Christine’s criticism of false seeming is far from original or unique.27 Lying was hardly an invention of the modern world, nor has it ever been limited to lovers and politicians.28 Even the men Christine denounces are not only false to their ladies or at court. Their fake devotion is similarly “offered” to God, as they strut through churches looking around to make sure that their genuflections before the altar are being noted. This partnering of sham lovers with sham Christians appears most famously in the personification Faus Semblant (False Seeming), a hypocritical friar whose aid is critical to the success of the Lover in the tremendously popular Roman de la Rose.29 Like Christine’s Cupid, the God of Love in Jean le Meun’s portion of Roman de la Rose initially rejects the inclusion of falsity into his army. Unlike Christine, however, Jean allows his God of Love to be persuaded to include this manifestly deceptive force, who proves both his usefulness and his dishonesty when he clears the way for the Lover by treacherously killing Male Bouche (Gossip) under cover of his mendicant’s robes. While Faus Semblant is part of a long-standing critique of hypocritical friars, his falsity is not simply a problem at the level of characterization or limited social censure. In a poem deeply invested in questions of language’s ability to speak truly, Faus Semblant is a figure of unstable signification, the embodiment of a “systematically duplicitous discourse which is ungrounded in, unguaranteed by, any extralingistic or transcendent ‘truth.’”30 While the portion of the Roman de la Rose in which he appears is less frequently illuminated than earlier sections, the strategies selected for visualizing his deceptive figure reflect the multiple types of behavior that his figure represents.31 Faus Semblant is often depicted as a friar, in keeping

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with his role as antimendicant critique. However, some manuscripts focus instead on not only his mutability but also the interchangeability of secular and religious hypocrites by showing him shifting from a religious habit to a young nobleman’s fine dress as his needs require. In these manuscripts, Faus Semblant speaks to a larger cultural anxiety surrounding the disjunction between behavior and intention, not least because he demonstrates how efficacious the hypocrite can be. Nor is the concern with hypocrisy limited to French courtly verse. Christine’s bent-kneed mock devotees closely recall an established iconographic convention for depicting hypocrisy in the widely circulated mirror of princes known as the Somme le roi. The Somme le roi was originally composed for Philip III of France by the Dominican friar Laurent de Bois, who completed the text in 1279, but it continued to be widely read throughout the late Middle Ages.32 The Valois Burgundian ducal library alone had several copies executed from the mid-fourteenth through the fifteenth century, five of which are extant today. The Somme le roi defines hypocrisy as a subset of pride in which the sinner “makes show of the good without that is not within.”33 This definition allows hypocrisy to reach into many portions of life, although the accompanying illuminations focus on religion. An example of this traditional hypocrisy iconography appears at the bottom right of a four-image panel in one of the Burgundian ducal copies (fig. 18). To the left kneels a pious man, covered in a cloak and gazing up adoringly at an altar on which are placed a chalice and some type of figural altarpiece. The iconography of the altarpiece is unreadable because of the curtains drawn around it, much as the pious man’s voluminous cloak hides his identity from casual passersby. In contrast, the hypocrite to the right ignores the empty altar before him, which has no such concealing curtains. Rather than pray in secret, he twists his kneeling body so that his torso and face are clearly exposed to the reader’s gaze, peering around like Christine’s counterfeit lovers. He points emphatically toward the pious man, as though to suggest that this is how he himself should be viewed, breaking through the picture frame in his attempt at self-aggrandizement. The hypocrite is further distinguished from the true penitent beside him by crude ethnic stereotyping: his long beard, pointed hat, and imageless place of worship all point to his identification as a Jew. Such imagery refers most obviously to Jesus’s condemnation of the Pharisees as hypocrites who are concerned only with outward actions rather than worshiping God in their hearts (Mark 7:1–8). This and similar miniatures cast hypocritical Christians as non-Christians, and in turn further the dangerous definition of non-Christians as hypocrites.

Figure 18. Humility, Pride, Piety, and Hypocrisy in Somme le roi. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 11041 fol. 70v.

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Clearly, hypocrisy was a live issue at the very courts where feasting was so prized and cultivated as an art. Calculated displays that masked the true feelings and intentions of the actor in pursuit of personal gain were recognized not only as possible but also as matters for debate in courtly and religious discourses. Feigning and dissimilation were sometimes lauded if they helped achieve positive ends. Yet falsity was also believed to undermine governance, love, and devotion alike. In using their outward appearance to mislead, bad-faith actors raised the specter of a breakdown in the trust required to unite people toward common goals. At its most extreme, criticism of hypocrisy defined the hypocrite as an outsider to both the courtly and the Christian communities who must be expelled in order to secure the safety of the group. In an activity traditionally associated with community such as dining, the masking of intentions posed both a particular temptation and a threat. At the table, the celebration of controlled display discussed in the previous section was thus in constant unresolved tension with an equal concern for the possible social consequences of dissembling.

MONKEYING AROUND As troubled by intentionally manipulated appearances as late medieval elites might be, they were equally uneasy with behavior reflecting no intention at all. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the dread of a gap opening up between appearance and intent encompassed not only purposefully deceptive actions but also the possibility of motions devoid of any real meaning. Just as hypocrisy was characterized as socially transgressive, so too unintentional action threatened the actor’s inclusion in a larger civilized human realm. Thoughtless actions and rote imitation were sites of considerable anxiety because they were felt to signal a possible breakdown in the rational and communicative faculties that separated humans from all other creatures. The special status of humanity in relation to other animals was vital to numerous spheres of activity and theological claims, and the possibility that human and animal might merge was a matter of real and persistent concern. It is not surprising therefore that frequently anthropomorphized animals such as monkeys were increasingly figured during the late Middle Ages everywhere from the cups and performances of the feast hall to the margins of saints’ lives, acting as signs of meaningless action to be avoided by human actors just as carefully as the overly mediated gestures of the hypocrite. Close observation of animals such as apes and monkeys, which had been known and kept by Europeans since antiquity, revealed the ability of animals to mimic human behavior to an uncanny degree. In

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many medieval accounts, simians figured the division of appearance and intention, with the varied negative readings of their nature circling around their status as icons of foolish imitation and deceptive action. Tracing the forms and contexts of their appearance thus reveals the shape and locations of anxieties surrounding the potential failure of actions to reveal intentions. Despite, or perhaps because of, their potential to disrupt notions of human uniqueness and the legibility of the spirit in actions, apes were frequently represented in the high and late Middle Ages, appearing in all media and particularly in the fertile ground of the margins.34 This marginal placement hints at the uneasy position of the ape as a liminal figure: occupying the edge between humans and other animals, simians presented a threat to the notion of human uniqueness yet also offered a gateway to natural pleasures. The fearful aspect of such border transgression was heightened in the feast hall, since much medieval socialization in a dining context centered on regulating bodily functions to ward off natural activities such as gorging and excretion of fluids that would betray bestial instincts. These worries and the accompanying protective behaviors are reminiscent of modern models such as Julia Kristeva’s abject, which undermines the body’s boundaries, or Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that the strongest negative reactions toward others’ tastes tend to be directed at those groups that border on without belonging to one’s own.35 Yet unlike the instinctual revulsion associated with such encounters, simians provided medieval audiences with pleasure as much as pain. As Michael Camille proposes, the margins of late medieval structures and manuscripts could simultaneously construct their inhabitants as social outsiders and rejuvenate the center by offering an area for creativity and experimentation.36 Like the marginal spaces described by Camille, the ape occupied an uneasy ground between humor and threat. In his magisterial study of the subject, H. W. Janson not only points to the pleasure afforded by watching real apes perform on the streets but also posits a progression in the metaphorical ape’s changing fortunes from a rare early Christian figure of the devil through a high medieval identification with sinners and finally as a late medieval representation of human folly.37 The classical and medieval literary tradition conceptualizes apes’ ability to imitate as a drive that is both compulsive and self-destructive. A number of common scientific accounts rely on this reading to formulate methods to catch wild apes. In several accounts, a hunter pretends to put quicklime on his eyes. Unable to resist imitating this action, and equally incapable of understanding the difference between reality and the hunter’s simulation, the ape actually puts lime in its eyes and blinds itself. In the bestiary tradition, this and similar stories

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were interpreted explicitly as metaphors for the treachery of earthly pleasures. Lacking judgment, the ape blindly desires whatever it sees and so is caught by the hunter: so too is the sinner weighted down by worldly desires and captured by evil and death. Implicitly, apes are also warnings against trusting in appearances and mindlessly mimicking, behaviors that are marked as not only bestial but also self-destructive. Visual depictions directed apes’ imitative skills toward social critique. While the inventive possibilities for inversion and playacting when apes performed human actions were seemingly endless, some motifs did become particularly prevalent. Apes appeared as mock clerics, courtiers, or knights, with armed apes frequently pitted against humans or enormous birds. Apes might also appear in a feminine guise, nursing not only baby apes but also puppies and other young. Often they indulged in frivolous physical pleasures, whether playing instruments or dancing. Apes also engaged in potential vices. In their vanity, they stared entranced at their own reflections. Gluttonously, they consumed fruits, especially apples with their potential evocation of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. These stock vignettes define the ape as a gifted but perverse mimic of human class and gender norms (as warrior, cleric, and mother), as well as a profoundly physical creature obsessed with eating, reproducing, and gazing at its own body. The potent mix of playfulness, improper desire, and destructiveness in the figure of the ape is portrayed on an enameled goblet colloquially known as the Monkey Cup (fig. 19).38 Linked by Aby Warburg to a similar item in the Medici collection, this delicately painted vessel was created in the Netherlands sometime during the last half of the fifteenth century.39 Its decoration closely resembles that of contemporary manuscript margins, the flat plane of the page replaced by a slightly tapering cylinder divided by two gold bands, terminating in a removable quatrefoil foot. Across this surface sprouts a continuous interlocking mass of delicately curving gray acanthus. Myriad small silver apes climb, sit, swing, and swoop down from the stylized fronds. In their hands and hanging from the branches are an array of human accessories and instruments. The source of these items becomes apparent in one of the three scenes in the lower register. A round-faced man with curly red hair sleeps heavily at the base of the tree, a small white dog curled up at his side. Both are remarkably oblivious to the four apes that have descended upon them. One ape samples a louse from the man’s head with the air of a connoisseur; another brushes his head. A third ape delicately peels back the man’s hose (his shoes have already been carried up into the trees); the fourth calls out to his companions to see the man’s genitals, which he is in the act of exposing.

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Figure 19. Beaker (“Monkey Cup”), ca. 1425–50. Silver, silver-gild, painted enamel, H 77⁄8 in (20 cm), D 45⁄8 in (11.7 cm). The Cloisters Collection, 1952 (52.20). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

Less a story than a situation, the images multiply rather than explain the troubling, amusing details of the monkeys’ crimes. These include not only the stripping of the peddler but also two other small vignettes near the base. If the cup is turned 90 degrees clockwise, the sleeping peddler is replaced by a large basket, presumably containing his saleable items. Like the peddler, this basket is surrounded by four monkeys, all of them seemingly entranced by the human possessions they pull from it. One crawls bestially on all fours toward a series of metal objects, including a prominently placed mirror. The presence of the mirror recalls other images of monkeys with

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mirrors and a variety of bestiary tales about animals entrapped with their reflections. It also reminds the viewer of apes’ traditional association with the helpless compulsion to mimic. A large dagger just to the right of this mirror hints at the dangers of this seemingly humorous scene. Not only attracted to human objects, the apes also succumb to suspect human activities: stealing, sexually harassing the sleeping peddler, and leisurely playing lutes, bagpipes, and other instruments in the branches above. Entrancingly beautiful and replete with witty details, the Monkey Cup invites the viewer to interact with it, admire it, and laugh with it. This laughter is at the expense of the peddler rather than the apes that appear to triumph over him. To identify with the apes, however, is a somewhat suspect proposition. The apes’ clear fascination with fripperies and disrespect for the law on the Monkey Cup itself are hardly morally uplifting. These capering creatures in fact seem to be seducing the cup’s admirers into approving of some very suspect behaviors. But if the behavior of the apes on the Monkey Cup questions the pleasure of bestial imitations and base human activities, it is arguably more of a conversation piece than a criticism of its users. One could conceivably encounter the cup without feeling directly implicated in the improper actions it stages. Elsewhere, however, the motif of monkeys robbing a peddler could involve its viewers more directly and so potentially cast greater doubt on humans’ ability to imitate without falling to the level of inhuman animals. On the third night of the wedding celebrations for Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in 1465, these issues were both raised and enacted.40 Guests on that Wednesday evening were greeted by dishes and pastries covered by tents and pavilions made of silk and decorated not only with the arms of Burgundy but also with the mottos of the newlyweds and the name of a ducal town. The tents thus represented the newly married couple’s rule over their subjects. On each of the pastries were two small gold marmousets, which were either monkeys or some other type of grotesque. Armed with hammers, spades, and other tools, these small villains attempted to destroy the covering tent. The viewer of these marmousets thus literally caught them in the act of attacking the trappings of legitimate ducal rule, a task they undertook with human tools. From the moment they were seated, therefore, guests were alerted to the potential malice of such semihuman figures. The tension between humans and animals was likewise at play in the entremets performed that evening. At the center of the banquet hall was a giant model of a watchtower that was currently under construction in the town of Gorinchem. A watchman appeared on it. He initially pretended fright at the sight of the gathered “tents” on the tables, which he at first

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mistook as enemies. Reassured by realizing that they belonged to Duke Charles, the watchman welcomed his “allies” through a series of musical numbers. The watchman’s struggle to correctly interpret the tents reactivated them and their marmousets for the guests, drawing the sides of the room into the performance at its center. It also highlighted the importance of properly reading external signs that might be at first ambiguous, a problem as common on the battlefield as at court.41 Trumpet-playing boars, flutist wolves, singing donkeys, and musical monkeys performed the entertainments ordered by the watchman. The donkeys, which were the penultimate act of the evening, expressed the potential linkage between these animal antics and the observers, singing a song with the refrain “Faictes vous l’aisne?” Figuratively this might be translated as “Do you play the fool?” but more literally the question the asses ask is “Do you act as an ass?” This joking query sets up a cascade of problems concerning imitation. Does the viewer ever act foolishly? Does she (the song is addressed to a woman) play a part like the actors here portraying animals? Is her foolishness simulated just as the singing donkeys are in fact played by costumed men? Directly following this amusing but troubling commentary on the problems of playacting, the watchman called for a morisque to entertain the company. Out of a door came seven apes. They set upon an innocently sleeping merchant and stole his possessions, notably a tambourine, flûte­ à­bec, and mirror. With these typical signs of human frivolity and vanity in hand, the apes began to play and perform a morisque dance around and around the tower. The tables were cleared immediately following this performance, and the assembled nobles danced the rest of the evening away. The dancing usually held at the end of a feast here becomes redeployed to invert the usual tale told about simian imitation: here it is the human diners who imitate the apes, both by miming their actions and by unreflectively dancing simply because it is established practice. As is so frequently true when dealing with humor, the performance here resists any closing singular signification. It might be seen as a case of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, in which the (frequently literally) marginalized figure of the ape took center stage, disrupted the socioeconomic order, and modeled through its music and dance an activity that, when imitated by the audience, created a sense of community and engagement among the formerly passive viewers.42 Or it might be seen precisely as supportive of the established hierarchy, since the monkeys’ morisque was called for by the watchman in the duke’s tower, and dancing at the end of a banquet was a traditional close to an evening’s entertainment. The pleasure would then come

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from things behaving in the way they are intended to: apes badly, humans well. Or a thoughtful participant might feel that the entremet undermined the validity of performing regular social activities without paying particular attention to their meaning, turning attention toward self-reflection rather than outward to communal renewal. The instantiations of the scene of the monkeys robbing the peddler on the Monkey Cup and at the marriage of Margaret of York and Charles the Bold are ambiguous. Yet many other late medieval representations more bluntly employ simians as pure antimodels. The ape appears as the antithesis of the saintly ideal in a manuscript commissioned by Margaret of York several years after her marriage morisque, the Vie de sainte Colette.43 The manuscript contains the biography of and a short prayer to the fourteenthcentury Franciscan reformer St. Colette of Corbie, illuminated with the first extensive image cycle connected to the saint. As a hagiography, the manuscript almost inevitably runs up against the larger problem of imitation in terms of both how the saint is related to previous holy figures and how the reader should relate to the life of the saint whose tale is told within its covers. These general concerns had a very specific importance in the context of the Colettine convent in Ghent, to which Margaret donated the manuscript. Colette of Corbie’s reform movement within the Order of the Poor Clares was predicated on the recovery of a purer form of monasticism practiced by the first female Franciscans; its innovations were consistently couched in terms of properly repeating the models of the Virgin and St. Clare.44 Visions were an important source of authority for Colette and her followers, not only because they were divine in origin but also because they provided access to figures from the past, ranging from St. Anne to St. Francis. Such visions figure prominently in the two accounts of Colette’s life compiled as part of the effort to secure her canonization, including the text by Colette’s confessor, Pierre de Vaux, that forms the bulk of the manuscript commissioned by Margaret of York for the Ghent Poor Clares. Visions are also highlighted in the new image cycle created for this text. A vision that was also a miracle, for instance, was chosen as the subject for the opening miniature to chapter 14.45 According to the following text, Colette had a sore throat, which was miraculously cured when an extraordinarily beautiful young girl appeared and kissed her on the mouth. When she told her confessor about this, he informed her that she must have met the Virgin Mary. In the text, therefore, Colette meets the Virgin but fails to recognize her physical form; it is only when the immediacy of the visual experience has faded and been replaced by a verbal description and exegesis that it can be made intelligible.

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The miniature of this event, however, reinterprets it (fig. 20). Like many miniatures in this manuscript, it includes two temporal moments, read from left to right. Inside the building, Colette embraces a young girl dressed in white, their intermingling halos manifesting their joint sanctity. To the right, Colette stands in the doorway with her back unusually turned to the picture plane. The viewer thus mimics Colette’s orientation, looking with her deeper into the pictured space toward a miraculous woman in white floating high above. In the miniature, Colette and the viewer do not need a confessor to understand what has occurred. Instead, the similarity of costume and face link the woman in the vision on the right to the young girl embracing Colette on the left. Visual similarity here creates identity, but the repeated image is not a perfect copy. Unlike the two Colettes, the two Marys are not entirely identical, which suggests some distinction between the fully revealed glory of the Marian vision and the slightly more obscure form she initially assumed. A related use of resemblance also takes place at the level of composition. In creating this image cycle for a new saint, the artist employed stock compositions that add layers and legitimacy to the imagery. In this miniature, the embrace of the Virgin and Colette is based on the common composition of the Visitation, in which Mary and her cousin St. Elizabeth meet and recognize the wonder of their unborn children, Jesus and St. John the Baptist. The meeting of two pregnant firstcentury women thus becomes refigured as the healing meeting of a vision and a virgin saint, creating visual echoes that avoid pure repetition. The delicate play of mirroring at many levels of this image is complexly registered by the figure of a small Barbary ape in the lower margin, directly below the building wall that marks the transition between miracle and revelation. Unlike the mobile Colette, who stoops and stands with upraised hands above, the ape is unusually static. It sits squarely with its legs stretched out before it, one paw resting on its knee. Its attention is utterly consumed by a small hand mirror, into which it stares at its own reflection. The small reflection is only partially visible to the viewer but sketchily reproduces the gray and gold face of its holder. The common motif of an ape with a mirror here provides an important contrast to the action of the larger narrative image. The ape’s passivity highlights Colette’s agency: even when receiving healing, she properly responds by honoring her savior. The slight differences between the healing and visionary Marys make the recognition of her identity an active process, distinct from the passive acceptance of surface appearance suggested by pure mirroring. While the ape is obsessed with its own image, Colette’s interest is directed outward toward

Figure 20. Chapter 14, Vie de sainte Colette. Ghent, Bethlehem Convent of the Poor Clares Ms 8 fol. 85v.

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her holy companion. The page as a whole thus contrasts ape and saint, not as a means to reject all imitation, but rather to issue a warning about the importance of interpretation and engagement both in acting and in reading another’s actions. While less commonly discussed in modern accounts than hypocrisy, mindless actions were a real concern in the late Middle Ages, from manuscripts to the performance of entremets. Whether contrasted with saints or slyly assimilated to courtiers, simians and other animals were exploited to address this anxiety, particularly through its humorous staging. While based in some real apes’ behavior, the discourse of the simian antimodel was predominantly metaphorical and directed toward anthropology rather than natural history. Metaphorical monkeys allowed artists and audiences alike to think creatively about a range of issues such as the conventionality of late-night dancing, the stability of ducal rule, and the practice of imita­ tio sanctorum. Their appearance in entremets and other banquet elements at once links feasts to a larger set of religious and political discourses and points out the heightened attention to appearance and intention at work within the banquet hall. In carefully calibrating his display of pity at the Feast of the Pheasant, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy was far from unique. The potential effectiveness of affective display made it a nearly irresistible strategy for rulers and other leaders intent on engaging the hearts and bodies of their subjects. Calculated performance was nevertheless a double-edged sword. Some arenas of contemporary activity, such as the aldermanic hall of judgment or the courtly inquiry, encouraged control and dramatically limited the palette of acceptable emotions in pursuit of rational rule. Other emotional communities, such as those surrounding religious and amorous devotion, instead favored emotional display, which made an individual’s character legible in his or her actions and ideally provoked similar feelings in others. At the same time, concerns continued to be expressed about the possibility that actions could lie outside the field of legibility altogether, as in the acts of nonhuman animals which were believed to lack true rational intent. Emptied of human will, the imagined antics of animals such as apes walked a fine line between entertainment and threat. They provided pleasure in the seeming access they offered to antisocial behaviors such as theft and greed but also brought such all-too-human behaviors uncomfortably close to subjects whose special status as rational beings seemed to depend on distinguishing themselves from other animals. The situation was further complicated by the fact that anxieties surrounding the relationship between appearance

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and intentions coexisted alongside the valorization of mimesis as a route to truth found in contemporary accounts such as Machaut’s “Fonteinne amoureuse,” discussed in the previous chapter. Like the never-ending scholarly rehashing of Olivier de la Marche’s staged debate over the seriousness of the Feast of the Pheasant, proponents and opponents of mimetic simulation continued to argue for their views throughout the late Middle Ages. Rather than cohering into one shared worldview, late medieval discourses on public performance, particularly the performance of emotion, were singularly varied. This variety testifies to the energy devoted to this topic, as does the frequency with which intention and appearance alike were probed in religious, political, and artistic life. Navigating through all these arenas and a seemingly endless range of possible ways in which they might be misled, individuals needed to finely hone and constantly practice their skills as critical viewers. Such watchfulness was not limited, however, simply to the actions of others. As the following chapter will show more fully, this discerning gaze was also turned reflexively back on the viewer in strategies of self-regulation and critique nurtured by ethical and confessional modes that permeated all aspects of elite life.

chapter four

Dining Well

I

n expressing reservations about the Feast of the Pheasant, Olivier de la Marche worries not only about the spontaneity and degree of forethought present at the event but also, more concretely, about its “outrageous excess,” which he directly links to the “vast expense” required to stage it.1 Condemnation of visual splendor as a misallocation of resources was commonplace throughout the Middle Ages, expressed nowhere with more force than as the capstone to Bernard of Clairvaux’s damning of art in the monastic cloister: “If one is not ashamed of the absurdity, why is one not at least troubled by the expense?”2 Yet the potential excess that provoked de la Marche’s concern is not simply a matter of coin, nor could it be avoided by the radical simplicity advocated by the Cistercian Bernard, who was as distrustful of variety in cooking as in sculpture.3 Unlike monks, members of the high nobility were as likely to be faulted for being misers as for being spendthrifts, since frugality contradicted their position’s twin requirements to live grandly (magnificence) and give generously (largesse). As with many other character traits, a medieval individual’s tendency to spend or save was usually described with terminology drawn from ethical discourses. Most late medieval ethical systems prized balance; excess and paucity alike were traditionally condemned.4 Temperance, the virtue that allowed one to achieve such balance, was particularly closely linked to dining by visual artists. So too was magnificence, a virtue that modern scholars frequently misrepresent as celebrating excess, but that on closer examination proves, like temperance, to have required careful control on the part of its practitioners.5 These ethical models were of particularly evident concern in the context of feasting. Images of dining were regularly deployed to depict ethical concepts; at the same time, real feasts served as sites to both train and display virtue and vice. A feast might be judged 102

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in terms of the patron’s magnificence and guests’ generosity while simultaneously being used to train young courtiers in humility and other courtly virtues. Inextricably linked with the development and monitoring of virtue, feasting required careful viewing and self-reflection among its many late medieval participants. In the late Middle Ages both classical theorists such as Aristotle and more recent Christian paradigms such as the seven deadly sins were communicated to men and women of all social levels in religious contexts like catechism and sermons, but also in everything from history writing to the mirrors of princes that formed the equivalent of modern self-help manuals. Systematic ethics was likewise surprisingly common as a subject in the visual arts, appearing in grand church facades and small parish murals, manuscript miniatures and bedroom decor. If in the twenty-first century it is not unusual to hear even the strongest critics of psychoanalysis refer casually to their subconscious or ego, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was equally routine to praise a man for his continence or see a nation’s downfall as the result of its people’s pride: the ethical framework was in such cases so ingrained as to seem entirely natural. While late medieval men and women were manifestly not universally moral in the sense of actually living up to their ideals, they were ethical beings in that systematic ethics provided many of the interpretive categories that they brought to bear in trying to make sense of their world and themselves. In several important interventions into fifteenth-century studies, Marina Belozerskaya has forcibly argued for the centrality of magnificence as a motivation for elite display. While I agree with her conclusion that magnificence was central to the construction and reception of feasting and many other arts commissioned by rulers, in what follows I want to draw attention to the medieval rather than modern understanding of what magnificence entailed.6 Modern scholarship has tended to treat magnificence as a synonym for overabundance. Writing on the densely textured interweaving of all the senses in the banquet hall, for example, Belozerskaya concludes: “The sensory overload engendered by the overlapping layers of exquisite creations was part of the magic that distinguished the realm of the great from the drudgery of the rest.”7 But as compelling as notions of sensory surplus may be for many modern writers, the ethically saturated culture of the late Middle Ages was profoundly divided on the subject of abundance and sensual pleasure, and often directly antagonistic to actual excess. Olivier de la Marche’s worried pairing of “excess” with “outrageous” was far from unusual. The multiplicity of sensations involved in feasting opened it to such charges on a regular basis. Yet perhaps precisely because of its potential

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dangers, feasting was also framed as a location where virtue could be practiced and learned. It played a formative role in the socialization of young men at court, as they were trained in patterns of obedience and watchfulness by their service at table. Dining moreover provided one of the most potent and enduring iconographies for visualizing key concepts of systematic ethics. While its links to the vicious behaviors of greed and gluttony are perhaps most obvious to a modern audience, in the late Middle Ages dining was associated equally if not more frequently with temperance, a central virtue in almost every ethical system. It was from such temperance imagery that the less common iconography of magnificence was sometimes developed, suggesting that balance was of vital concern even in this most luxurious of virtues.

MORE LOVELY AND MORE TEMPERATE If the didactic intent of the entremet of the Holy Church is readily apparent, the chronicler Mathieu d’Escouchy found moral lessons in other entremets as well. One of the entremets to which he draws particular attention was a barrel set in a vineyard, in which were two types of drink, one sweet and good and the other bitter and bad. These seemed to me to be the substance of good and evil; and on the barrel was seated a figure of a bear, richly dressed, who held in his hand a letter, on which was written: Whoever wants some should take some.8

Fountains were among the most common types of entremets; indeed, four others were present at the Feast of the Pheasant alone. What set this entremet apart therefore was not its ability to quench thirst but the moralizing use it made of its ability to engage its audience. The fountain contained two different forms of drink, one sweet, one bitter. It is unclear what these two drinks were, although it is probable that both were based in wine. If so, it is possible that d’Escouchy’s additional adjectives describing one as good and the other as bad refer directly either to the quality of the wine or to a difference between red and white wine (red wine often being said to be better than white at the time). But at the very least, quality is not the entire story. For d’Escouchy, these two tastes symbolized two entirely different moral states: they are the very essence of good and evil, which the guest must choose between. What appears at first glance to be a simple fountain is thus instead a lesson. Instead of conveying its message through an alter ego whose performance is watched, the entremet invites the viewer to ex-

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perience it directly through touch and taste as well as sight. Only when this direct interaction has taken place does the simple instruction to take what one wants become revealed as a loaded statement about the proper orientation of desire and the ethical dimension of choice. The ability to regulate such decisions was the proper provenance of the virtue of temperance. The Middle Ages inherited at least three systems of virtues from antiquity and evolved numerous others; temperance appears in all the major traditions.9 One line of thought derived from Aristotle. In the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines temperance as a virtue of balance with regards to sensual pleasures, characterized as “those pleasures which man shares with the lower animals, and which consequently appear slavish and bestial. These are the pleasures of touch and taste.”10 As he does throughout the Ethics, Aristotle insists here that virtue consists of a mean between excess and lack, although in the case of sensual pleasures he thinks it is highly unlikely that any human being would be naturally inclined toward paucity.11 For Aristotle, submission to gluttony is particularly disturbing because it violates the important distinction between humans and other animals. Indulgence in excess on this account is a betrayal of one’s humanity. Such policing of the border between the human and animal recalls the concerns surrounding thoughtless imitation discussed in the previous chapter. It is unsurprising therefore to find that the same apes that served as antimodels with regard to senseless behavior are also characterized as particularly inclined toward gluttony and other sensual indulgences. A second major medieval ethical tradition is more complex in its antecedents, containing elements from Cicero and Macrobius, among others. It proposes four cardinal virtues—force/fortitude, justice, judgment, and temperance—and is often linked with a further three theological virtues; this group of seven could then be set in opposition to the seven deadly sins.12 In this system, temperance contains the Aristotelian notion of balanced consumption, but extends to other realms as well. Thus, for example, the fifteenth-century writer Jean Mansel defines temperance by opposing it to the vices of gluttony, lust, covetousness, and avarice. Mansel also defines temperance positively as the direct cause of humility, continence, and clemency.13 The popular mirror of princes known as the Somme le roi opines that temperance guards the virtuous against three dangers: sins of the flesh, pride in the heart, and desire for the temporal world.14 Temperance in the Somme le roi results in a complete evenness of spirit and countenance, protecting one from practicing favoritism or being overcome by small inconveniences.15 It is in many ways the ideal virtue for rulers or aldermen, who

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were expected to control their emotions in order to lead. In his eulogy on the death of Philip the Good, the court chronicler Georges Chastellain notably praised his former employer not only for his piety and magnificence but also for his temperance.16 As one of the four cardinal virtues, temperance thus instills resistance to excess in many guises. Temperance might result in measure in all things, yet when it came time to visualize this all-purpose virtue, artists repeatedly returned to imagery derived from dining practice. The motif of properly measuring and mixing wine with water was a typical attribute of medieval personifications of temperance, who were often shown either engaged in the act of mixing wine or simply holding the implements of this task. The association also worked in reverse, with the small pot used to mix wine and water coming to be known as a temproir or tempoir.17 Tempriors continue to appear among the alarming array of esoteric attributes denoting temperance in what Emile Mâle termed the early appearances of the “new iconography” of the late Middle Ages.18 Temperance remains relatively straightforward even in this new guise. In Mansel’s Fleur des histoires, she holds a locked casket and a set of keys but retains her traditional temproir; in Christine de Pisan’s moral instructional manual L’Épître d’Othéa, she holds both a casket and a temproir while balancing a clock on her head. In addition to these schematic references, temperance is closely connected to dining in more dynamic vignettes. In the text of the popular Somme le roi, Laurent de Bois presents temperance as a particularly important virtue for leaders that can positively influence all aspects of their life. However, the most common miniature cycle for the Somme le roi pictures this wide-ranging virtue through the visual language of dining. A full-page miniature in a copy of the Somme le roi belonging to the Valois dukes of Burgundy depicts the four cardinal virtues, with Temperance at the upper right (fig. 21). The scene consists of three figures: a kneeling server and two seated women, one crowned, one bareheaded. On analogy with the other three virtues depicted on the page, the crowned woman is most likely a personification of the virtue temperance. All four personifications are visually linked. Temperance shares not only her crown with Prudence, Force, and Justice but also her facial features and tightly curled blond hair.19 Indeed, other than their actions and details of dress, the four cardinal virtues are identical, which underlines the text’s assertion that the four are intertwined and mutually supportive.20 The personification Temperance simultaneously listens as the woman by her side speaks and measures the wine. The notion of balance as integral

Figure 21. Four Cardinal Virtues, in Somme le roi. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 11041 fol. 65v.

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to temperance is rendered visible in the symmetry between the two flagons open for use on the table and the two reserved on the floor. The inclusion of a second female figure is a common feature of Somme illuminations for this virtue, and the written instructions that accompany other manuscripts of the text make mention of it.21 Given the proximity of the personified Prudence instructing a group of small boys to the left, it is possible that Temperance too should be read as instructing her companion, although she does not make clear speaking gestures.22 While all four virtues have similar features, the pronounced compositional similarities between the scenes of Temperance and of Prudence invite a particularly close comparison. Both personifications sit looking toward the right with an identical soft curve to their slightly inclined shoulders and heads; they raise their differing attributes with the same crook to their elbow. These compositional similarities highlight the subtle differences in the way each virtue instructs. In contrast to Prudence’s rapt young pupils, Temperance’s interlocutor makes an active speaking gesture with one hand while indicating the flagon offered to her with the other. If prudence can be taught through formal education, temperance is instead particularly present in daily life. Rather than simply providing abstract principles, Temperance models proper behavior at the moment when her companion is faced with the necessity of putting virtue into practice, in much the same way that the entremet of the good and bad wine instructed d’Escouchy. The dangers of failing to adhere to the model of temperance are made vivid later in the same manuscript. The issue of moderation arises once again in the context of a discussion of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Here the precise term under scrutiny is sobriety, defined as measure in all things and explicitly equated with temperance by Laurent de Bois.23 Singled out for a full-page miniature on folio 135v, sobriety and its antithesis gluttony are contrasted in two scenes in the upper register, while a feast scene spreads over the whole bottom register (plate 2). The distinction between sobriety and gluttony is asserted in almost every detail of their portrayal. The personification of sobriety is strongly vertical and basically static, while the glutton sits and is caught in the midst of action. The personified Sobriety is young and female, Gluttony old and male. Sobriety tramples sin below her feet and motions to her emblematic shield in keeping with a long-standing tradition for depicting virtues.24 Gluttony too motions to indicate his outstanding characteristic, but this turns out to be an action as much as an attribute: a stream of blue vomit that flows from his mouth even as his other hand reaches toward the already-emptied plate. The odd color of the vomit suggests both its origin (the same color appears on the serving vessels in

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both registers of the miniature) and its sinfulness, since a similar blue predominates in the dragon under Sobriety. The precise subject of the bottom register is unclear from this manuscript alone. The single young man having a simple meal to the left may be enacting temperance, since his placement and the bright yellow of his hair suggest a link with Sobriety above him. The larger scene running from center to right is sometimes identified as Dives and Lazarus.25 In any event its general message is clear: the laden table and figural arrangement are utterly conventional for the depiction of feasts in general, and the age and headdress of the seated man recall those of the glutton above. The leprous beggar (identifiable by his bell) to the left is the subject of discussion by the three inside figures but can only look on at their festivities from the other side of the doorway. Taken together, the two registers in this miniature show the potential dark side of the feast, which can devolve into a realm of meaningless overconsumption where the privileged deny the needy. The images for the Nicomachean Ethics and the texts derived from it likewise rely upon the dinner table for their illustrations, despite the fact that Aristotle declared that “taste appears to play but a small part, if any, in Temperance.”26 While mostly of interest to professional philosophers today, the Ethics was well known among Francophone elites through mirrors of princes, a popular genre of self-improvement literature.27 For instance, Aristotle is quoted almost verbatim in the discussion of temperance in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum (ca. 1275), which was available throughout Western Europe in vernacular translations from at least the fourteenth century.28 At the Valois courts, the full text of Aristotle’s Ethics was also available in a scholarly French edition completed in 1372 by Nicolas Oresme at the request of King Charles V. The two copies prepared for Charles V exerted sufficient appeal that his brother Philip the Bold purloined both while serving as a regent of France.29 The miniature in the second copy makes vivid Aristotle’s basic claim that temperance is a matter of moderation; rather than attempt to visualize all the many realms in which Aristotle sees temperance at work, the miniature focuses on dining (fig. 22).30 The register is divided into three distinct scenes in keeping with the basic Aristotelian claim that all virtues consist of a mean between two extremes of excess and lack, and that both these are vicious. In the center of the register, a nun caught in the midst of drinking with a relatively well-supplied table before her represents the proper balance called for by temperance. To the left is a depiction of excessive selfindulgence, shown as a young man and woman who drink and touch, giving in to more than one sin of the flesh. Their table does not contain more

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Figure 22. Fortitude and Temperance. The Hague, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, MMW 10 D I, f. 37r. Source: Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum.

vessels than the temperate table in the middle vignette, but the prominent placement of a dish of fowl in the center refers back to the iconography of feasting. Poultry was classed as an aristocratic food and is frequently depicted in images of court feasts, while other meats are pictured for scenes of simpler meals. Temperance’s main dish, an unidentified loaf placed in front of her, belongs instead to the nonfestive class of general eating imagery. To the right sits a single woman at a full table that again includes the festive fowl. As a representation of insensibility (the failure to achieve tem-

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perance due to overrestraint), she consumes none of what is before her.31 While she and the central temperate woman are both imaged alone, the fact that the insensible woman raises her hand in a speaking gesture with no interlocutor underscores her isolation: her solitary state is an equally improper inversion of the exceedingly convivial intemperate couple to the left. While the two vices are both provided with the means for a feast, they err toward them in diametrically opposed ways. The intemperate couple overindulges in food and company; the insensible woman completely rejects conversation and nourishment. In contrast to both, the truly temperate woman at center partakes of her simple but sufficient meal while gazing out toward the viewer. The use of dining as a synecdoche for all the many spheres governed by temperance in part reflects the views of Oresme, who glosses temperance as concerned with “those things that preserve the life of the individual, such as drinking and eating, or as a species, as does carnal sin.”32 Yet Oresme’s decision to lead with the actions of eating and drinking in his verbal and visual commentary cannot be dismissed as a personal idiosyncrasy. Instead, both image and gloss speak to the overdetermination of temperance as particularly tied to food consumption, a connection forged in large part by the visual rather than the textual traditions. Pure excess thus appears as both personally and socially destructive. In the verbal realm this point was repeated with a large variety of examples drawn from many walks of life. Visually, however, one activity was especially targeted for concern. The centrality of dining imagery to the iconography of gluttony and temperance linked virtue and vice alike indelibly with the fraught arena of diet, which was at once necessary for survival and susceptible to perversion. The late medieval elites who so frequently encountered such depictions might be expected to be particularly alert to potential danger in actual feast halls. While slightly melodramatic, Mathieu d’Escouchy’s reading of the fountain of good and bad wines, whose instructions so clearly highlighted the issue of choice and will, as a lesson in the difference between good and evil speaks to very real concerns at work within his culture.

ARE THEY NOT MAGNIFICENT? The very name of the virtue temperance suggests that it is based in regulated restraint and balance. Less obvious perhaps is that a similar concern with balance animated the discussion of most (and in some systems, such as Aristotle’s, all) virtues, including those like courage or magnificence that

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might initially seem to require a certain degree of excess. While magnificence was regularly described as a subset of fortitude or largesse rather than of temperance, the two virtues were surprisingly closely linked in both the verbal and the visual traditions circulating in the late Middle Ages. Like temperance, magnificence appears in several competing ethical systems. In the case of temperance, these traditions are relatively uniform: while some allow it a wider sphere of activity than others, they nevertheless agree on its basic properties. The same cannot be said for magnificence. There is general accord on the meanin of this virtue’s prefix—it consists of some sort of greatness. Disagreement arises when defining in what realm this greatness will operate. In those texts influenced by Cicero and Macrobius, magnificence is a subset of the cardinal virtue fortitude. In the midfifteenth-century Fleur des histoires, Mansel provides a typical definition according to this line of thought: Magnificence is action and the execution of great and excellent things with an ample amount of courage, as Cicero says. It is magnificence of the heart that disdains to be subjugated or deprived of liberty. It is magnificence of the mouth that speaks truthfully. It is magnificence of labor and deeds that accomplishes all works magnificently. The ancient princes were well adorned with the first element of magnificence, and all princes should have it.33

This notion of magnificence as great endeavor could be extended even further. In the Somme le roi, magnificence is refigured as the highest Christian virtue, the perseverance required to endure all the trials that beset one on the road to spiritual perfection.34 Yet whether it operated only in this world or also held out hopes for the next, this type of magnificence focused on the alignment of action with principles. Aristotle explicitly rules out such a definition of magnificence.35 For Aristotle, magnificence belongs not to the battlefield but to the bankbook. This point is highlighted by Oresme, who opens the chapter on magnificence with a direct quotation from Aristotle: “This virtue concerns pecunes but it does not extend as liberality does to all operations concerned with pecunes.”36 Pecunes is a technical term in Oresme roughly comparable to the modern economic concept of the commodity. Oresme glosses pecunes in the earlier discussion of liberality as “all things whose worth and value is measured and estimated by money.”37 The importance Oresme attached to this monetary aspect in defining magnificence is underscored by an additional marginal note attached to pecunes as it appears in the introduction to

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the discussion of magnificence: “pecunes. This is the reason that he [Aristotle] discusses magnificence after what he said about liberality. Because they start from and concern the same matter.”38 Aristotle further narrows the range of magnificence in two important respects. While the Ciceronian tradition mentioned that magnificence of heart is a desirable quality in a ruler, broadly speaking it allowed any free person to aspire to magnificence in one respect or another. Aristotle, on the other hand, firmly limits the practice of magnificence to the upper elite.39 Both princes and corporate bodies can exercise magnificence, but the poor and even moderately wealthy cannot. The importance of a proper actor is integral to the basic Aristotelian definition of virtue: only the right thing done in the right way in the right circumstances by the right person is virtuous. The sole individuals suitable for exercising magnificence are those who can spend large amounts without putting themselves in need, that is, those for whom large expenditures are not excessive. Those who overspend cannot be virtuous, since they eventually will find themselves needing to rely on others for their survival, which is detrimental to the freedom that is a precondition for all virtue. Given this definition, it would seem that any (vastly) wealthy person might aspire to magnificence, but Aristotle further stresses that magnificence is appropriate only in certain situations and that these tend to arise only for nobles and those holding high office. Drawing on Aristotle, Giles of Rome extended this point to make magnificence not only possible but also required of a prince, providing six reasons for his opinion.40 The second important Aristotelian limitation relates to the works proper to magnificence. The concept of magnificence in the Ciceronian tradition can be practiced in most areas of human endeavor; as a subset of fortitude, it is equally essential in conversation and battle. Aristotelian magnificence, however, concerns only great and honorable expenditures done in a great way. Aristotle interprets greatness in terms of the quantity spent but also, more importantly, in terms of the goals achieved. He provides several examples of what these might be: the building of temples, the cultivation of religion, the reception of visitors, and the construction of the homes of the elite.41 The emphasis on both religion and building as works of magnificence remained relatively stable in the Aristotelian mirror of princes tradition. Aristotle’s formulation is repeated in the fourteenth-century Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté, where the chapter on the works of magnificence is illustrated by a miniature of a king ordering construction of an elaborate building.42 Giles of Rome provides a systematic list of four possible venues for magnificence: building and providing for churches, supporting the general community, honoring notable men, and building castles

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and great houses.43 Aristotelian French mirrors of princes thus presented architectural patronage as the typical work of magnificence from at least the thirteenth century, despite Fraser Jenkins and Green’s claims that the classical concept of magnificence as a spur to artistic patronage first reappeared in Renaissance Italy.44 In their texts, these manuscripts include the idea of feasts as a work of magnificence but do not give them the clear approval and emphasis granted to building. Wedding feasts, entertaining foreign ambassadors, and feeding an entire city all appear as proper occasions to exercise magnificence. Yet in the description of vices opposing magnificence, the first example provided of excess is a man who fêtes his club as though they were at a wedding,45 a statement which Oresme broadens to include all dining occasions: “he gives grand dinners as though they were wedding feasts.”46 Feasts may have suffered in comparison with building because of their lack of durability. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics mentions in passing that “it is more fitting to spend large sums on works that will survive for a long time, because such works are very good.”47 Oresme’s gloss presses the point more fully: “very good. It is much more magnificent and a better thing to make a temple or a palace that will endure, which is also a perpetual memorial of its patron and which benefits the public, than to make such a thing that is beautiful and pretty that lasts for only a short time. But that which is beautiful and durable would be very good.”48 For the textual tradition, then, the ephemerality of feasting posed a serious challenge to its status as a true work of magnificence. While there are multiple widely attested textual traditions describing magnificence in elite late medieval libraries, visual depictions of it are comparatively rare. In texts where magnificence is a part of fortitude, the chapter is usually illustrated with a single personification, often a knight or other courageous figure, rather than including individual images of the subvirtues. This is the case in both the Fleur des histoires and the Somme le roi. Magnificence is technically a distinct virtue in Aristotle—with its own opposing vices, proper actors, etc.—but alone among the virtues, it does not appear in the first two illumination cycles for Oresme’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. In the first version of the Oresme Ethics cycle the illustration for book 4 shows the other two virtues found in that book, liberality and magnanimity, but not magnificence, which is discussed between them.49 The second version gives liberality a full separate miniature but once again does not show magnificence.50 Magnificence receives fuller pictorial treatment in another manuscript tradition that relies heavily on Aristotle for describing this noble virtue. Li

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ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté is an encyclopedic and often densely illustrated treatment of its three topics—love, virtue, and the good life.51 Both the text and its manuscripts are dated to the early fourteenth century, but the manuscripts continued to exert influence in later periods as they entered the hands of new generations of readers. Significant portions of the section on the virtues in this text are close translations of Aristotle into French, including the portion on magnificence.52 The visual cycle for magnificence, however, appears to be adapted from temperance imagery rather than the images of largesse with which the Aristotelian text associates it. It also abnormally favors magnificence. In the manuscript owned by members of the de Croy family, a clan that included several of Philip the Good’s closest confidants, magnificence is illustrated with three miniatures on folios 122v, 123v, and 124v.53 The manuscript in general is heavily illuminated, but this alone does not account for the weight given to the representation of magnificence. Of the virtues depicted, only fortitude receives more images than magnificence: fortitude has six miniatures; liberality, magnanimity, and magnificence all have three; temperance has only two. Visually, then, magnificence is treated as an independent virtue that is equal to or greater than its fellows. The three illuminations in the de Croy manuscript each head one of Aristotle’s three chapters on magnificence. The first of these (fig. 23) introduces the virtue in general and depicts a feast. In keeping with other dining images in the manuscript, a raised table with a white cloth crosses the entire miniature. The table is laden with schematically rendered food and serving vessels. The lack of coloration for most of the tableware and the white tablecloth accentuates the few items that are colored: a hanap to the left balanced by a bread roll to the right, a knife near the center, and the three dishes that sit before the guests, all of which are filled with orange fowl. Three well-dressed young diners are seated at the table. The man at the center raises a gold hanap as he turns to the woman on his left; she and the man to our left both speak to the man at the center. Through these extremely economical means—the substantial and appropriate repast and the wealthy dress of the mixed-gendered diners—the miniature indicates the festive nature of the scene. While the text contains little reference to feasting, the image cycle makes banquets into the paradigm of magnificence. This point is perhaps even clearer if the miniature of magnificence is juxtaposed to the miniature for the vices contrary to magnificence two pages later in the same manuscript (fig. 24). This miniature also shows a dining scene with three figures, but of a very different type. In the second scene three young men sit on the ground rather than at a table. They are

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Figure 23. Magnificence, in Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 9548 fol. 122v.

more simply dressed than their counterparts in the previous miniature, with single-colored long robes in place of the tight chemise paired with a contrastingly colored over-robe worn by the noble diners. In place of food and a variety of vessels, the nonmagnificent men possess a single ewer and two cups. Rather than a formal feast, this appears to be a drinking party. The relationship between this image and the following text is not immediately apparent. On the one hand, the very simplicity of the scene indicates that it is not magnificent. On the other hand, the type of gathering shown is not the type of “great thing” that would call for magnificence in the first place. A possible explanation for the figure to the right lies in the author’s translation of those who exceed magnificence as gasterres or wastrels. This slumped figure drinks heavily from a large bowl, and his raised leg is bare while most men in this manuscript wear colored leggings. His lack of hose suggests that this drinker either is too slovenly or has run out

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Figure 24. Vices opposed to magnificence, in Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 9548 fol. 124v.

of the money necessary to dress properly. Despite this he consumes copious amounts, exhibiting the wasteful behavior that has led to his current disheveled state. The term gasterre is more difficult to apply to the other two men. Both sit relatively straight, and the man in center’s orange hose show up strongly against his blue robe. The man on the left is offering a hanap that the man in the center refuses; as in the later use of a similar refusal in the depiction of insensibility in Oresme’s translation of the Ethics (fig. 22), the concept portrayed here may be the lack of magnificence, or parvenisence. The accompanying text includes among parveniscence’s five properties the example of a man who holds a great feast but skimps on the wine, thus undoing the magnificence of the whole event. Another important reference for this figure lies within the image cycle itself. In the first magnificence miniature (fig. 23), the man at the center of the feasting group prominently raises a

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Figure 25. Magnificence, in Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 9543 fol. 148.

hanap. In the depiction of vices two folios later, another centrally placed figure rejects a similar hanap. The rejection or acceptance of the cup thus turns into a synecdoche for the failure or ability to achieve magnificence. In both the miniature of magnificence and the miniature of its contraries, dining and its accoutrements proved a pliable metaphor for expressing the nature of this puzzling virtue. The connection between temperance and magnificence is even clearer in another manuscript of Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté that may have been owned by the Dukes of Burgundy.54 As in the Croy manuscript, the first miniature for the chapter on magnificence in this manuscript shows a feast scene: however, it lacks any of the signs of drinking that were exploited to such telling effect in the Croy imagery. Instead of looking ahead to the miniature on vice, this image recalls the earlier miniature of temperance in the same manuscript.55 The central figure and his nearest com-

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Figure 26. Temperance, in Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 9543 fol. 127

panion to the right in the miniature for magnificence (fig. 25) use nearly identical gestures to those used by the two figures in the temperance cycle (fig. 26). The figure to the left speaks with one hand and holds a knife to his shoulder with the other; the figure to the right places one hand on the table and the other to his or her throat. This repetition of gesture is all the more striking since it is not found in the other image of feasting in this manuscript.56 While there are numerous diners shown in the magnificence miniature, the two who repeat the gestures from the temperance miniature are singled out in the composition both by their centrality and by the fact that all their fellow guests point toward them. Separated by a mere twenty-one folios, the repetitions in the compositions of temperance and magnificence ignore the divisions imposed by the accompanying text to suggest an underlying similarity between these two virtues, which emerge as variations on a shared theme of regulated dining.

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Magnificence as a technical term has a very complicated range of meanings. On the one hand it was equated with courage and spiritual strength, on the other with grand expenditure. These two lines of thought not only coexisted in personal libraries but sometimes even appeared in the same manuscript. The persistence of both these seemingly disparate definitions means that magnificence regularly united the world of great deeds and the world of great things. But whether any individual use of the term magnificence indicates either or both of these definitions, the one meaning it cannot legitimately be said to have had is the one given to it in modern scholarship: on neither account can magnificence be equated with pure excess. At the same time, the problem of excess and the problem of magnificence both seem to lead inexorably back to the dining hall. Although most ethical manuscripts’ verbal accounts pay relatively little attention to feasting, the repetition of dining images in their visual cycles both reflects and contributes to dining’s special status as a particularly fraught cultural arena. Within late medieval ethics in general, feasts appear to have been a highly ambiguous phenomenon, perilously perched on the surprisingly thin border between virtue and vice.

LIVING THE GOOD LIFE The clear visual links between temperance, magnificence, and dining established by illustrations in ethical manuscripts also had real-world counterparts. Both in the instructional discourse of political theory and in the actual socialization of young members of the elite, the feast hall was deemed a particularly useful arena in which to expand on the issues of control, judgment, and discernment that were critical to living a moral life. The illuminations for political treatises exploited the nuances of feasting behavior to convey complex ideas concerning good and bad governance. Actual feasts likewise were closely watched to determine their patrons’ political and moral state. Both in depictions and reality, then, feasts were a site of careful contemplation for late medieval courtiers. Systematic ethics was a common habit of mind among late medieval elites, familiar from its appearance in everything from the personifications that populated courtly romance to the writing of history. So popular and pervasive were ethical modes that the great scholar of medieval French literature Georges Doutrepont characterized the massive library and literary patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy as ultimately reducible to a single purpose: “Ce but, c’est d’instruire, c’est de moralizer.”57 A moral life was moreover generally considered to have political benefits. The belief that a

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leader’s personal virtue was fundamental to his or her ability to rule was widespread: indeed, this was one reason for the popularity of moral manuals in rulers’ libraries. For such men and women in particular, culturally acceptable strategies for displaying power could not derive their value from unadulterated excess.58 In a society so deeply ingrained with the systems of virtues and vices, proper balance in consumption had not only to be learned but also to be regularly exercised. This need was as pressing for rulers seeking to display magnificence as it was for others attempting to temper their natures. That the feast can be both a sign of virtue and a sign of vice makes other depictions of feasts within medieval instructional manuscripts particularly loaded. Several examples of this appear in the illuminations of the two Oresme-Aristotle cycles. In addition to the images of temperance that I have examined above, two subjects are portrayed with dining images: friendship in the Ethics (in the second cycle alone) and sedition in the Politics. While the friendship miniature exploits feasting’s ephemerality in order to characterize shallow interpersonal relationships based only on shared pleasures, the sedition image in the Politics ties feasting directly into a discussion of how poor judgment can lead to the fall of a kingdom. A companion volume containing a translation of the Politics and Eco­ nomics accompanied each of the two Ethics manuscripts prepared by Oresme for Charles V of France. The headings for both manuscripts’ miniatures for book 5, which discusses how governments can be destabilized and destroyed, have the same basic composition and subject matter (fig. 27). Each shows four scenes in two registers. In the left upper register, a king, queen, and male companion take part in a feast (marked by the presence of typical foods, servers, and musicians) inside an architectural setting. Outside this building, two groups of men conspire. In the lower register, the king is imprisoned directly below the feast image and a demagogue addresses soldiers to the right. Claire Richter Sherman has discussed both these images and their historical references at length.59 As Sherman notes, the idea that a king could be brought down by overindulgence in pleasures is mentioned not only in Aristotle’s text but also in Oresme’s gloss on this chapter. She tentatively suggests that the choice of a feast could be a shorthand for such pleasures because of a connection of such events with excessive spending—“the elaborate feast, gold curtain, and musicians indicate such dangers”60—before she moves on to the identification of the royal couple’s male companion. While other aspects of Sherman’s argument are extremely persuasive, her direct equation of the basic attributes of banquets with excess cannot

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Figure 27. Sedition, in Politics. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 11201–2, fol. 181.

be maintained in light of the larger ethical discussions surrounding feasting both within the Oresme manuscripts and in the broader milieu. The miniature for the first Oresme Politics manuscript differs very little from standard feast iconography. Both male and female diners sit frontally at a raised table with the most important figure in the center and a cloth of honor behind. The central crowned figure raises a cup, which might suggest overindulgence were it not for the fact that similar gestures appear in miniatures depicting virtuous action, as when the temperate nun drinks in

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the companion volume of Aristotle’s Ethics. A variety of dishes and foods appear schematically at the table, and servers present a dish of fowl from the viewer’s side of the table. Only two details seem slightly exaggerated. The presence of musicians is not startling, but neither is it a required element for indicating a feast. It is likewise not uncommon to have multiple servers, but the fact that both kneel, and that one appears to have no function beyond indicating the tray carried by his fellow, is less usual. The need to differentiate the Politics feast more fully from generic banqueting imagery was addressed in the revised illumination cycle for the second copy of this text overseen by Oresme (fig. 27). The basic components for the two feasts are the same. Musicians play to the left, servers kneel in the foreground, a king, queen, and noble sit at a raised table, the king raises a hanap but does not drink, the queen and nobleman lean in toward him. There are, however, important changes to the composition that cannot be explained solely through the change in artist between the two cycles. These are primarily concerned with the diners and servers. First, both of the male diners are dipping their fingers into the serving bowl held by the left server. This draws attention not only to the consumption of this dish but also to its dangerous pleasures, since Aristotle specifies that it is touch rather than taste that truly poses a danger to temperance.61 The second server deepens this impression of intemperance. Unlike the analogous server in the earlier miniature, who made a speaking gesture, this man is drinking from a large shallow gold bowl. A similar gesture is used in both cycles of the Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté to depict excess opposed to magnificence (fig. 24), and a parallel condemnation may be intended here; at the very least, the fact that an inappropriately base person (a server) is indulging himself in an inappropriate place (directly before the royal couple) would make such an action vicious overconsumption by Aristotle’s standards.62 The changes to this scene are small in comparison with some of the other modifications made to clarify concepts in the second image cycle of Oresme’s translation of Aristotle, but they are telling. The fact that such changes were made at all suggests that a generic feast scene could not be clearly read as either good or bad. Additional elements had to be introduced in order to separate out proper and improper feasting. These elements might have particular resonance given their parallels in the iconographies developed for depicting virtues and vices. The connection between ethical thought and the feast could thus run both ways—virtue or vice could be indicated through dining practices, but dining practices could also be used to uncover the virtues and vices of diners. Just as feasting provided a potent metaphor for didactic moral instruc-

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tion, so too it could serve as a gauge of actual rulers. The power of feasting as an index of magnificence is readily apparent in the contrasting Christmas feasts held in 1420 by King Charles VI of France and his English son-in-law Henry V described by Chastellain and Jean Lefèvre de St-Remy.63 The preceding years had been momentous ones for France. In 1415 the French had suffered a notable defeat at Agincourt, and in 1419 Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy was murdered in Paris. John’s son Philip the Good blamed the dauphin Charles for his father’s death and committed the Burgundian party decisively to the English side. In 1420 Henry V of England married Catherine of Valois and under the terms of the Treaty of Troyes became the heir and chief administrator of France, although Charles VI retained the crown and the honors due it for life.64 While the war itself was thus put on hiatus, a tricky political situation had come into being in which Henry V was given the real governing power while Charles VI served primarily as a figurehead. Both Chastellain and Lefèvre see the Christmas feasts held in Paris as telling indicators of the decline in Charles VI’s power and the rise of English control. For Chastellain, this change is especially marked because of the traditional nature of Christmas as a time of high festivity at court. Instead of the main royal residence, Charles has to content himself with the smaller palace of Saint-Pol. In addition to this humbler setting, the feast itself was not of a state equal to what had in other times been seen of him, nor was it appropriate to his rank, and so it seemed like a disfigured thing, which before had been very pretty and beautiful, but now was nothing. For there, where the princes and highest members of the kingdom usually served and celebrated at the table of their king, with all the other riches which made it resplendent, now were only poor, old servants who were out of practice and little respected, who had presented themselves and were given the place of high officers because the others did not show themselves.65

Henry V, on the other hand, holds his feast in the Louvre, is surrounded by the highest French nobles, and dines “in royal estate, with a crown on his head . . . in pomp and luxury, as great as can be described.”66 Lefèvre similarly points to the difference in location and quality of service but omits mention of Henry’s crown, stating instead that Henry, the princes of the blood, and Catherine were all richly dressed and that subjects from all over the kingdom came to honor the new heir.67 Chastellain and Lefèvre both agree that Charles VI’s feast deeply displeases the French. Charles fails to keep a table worthy of his rank; in Ar-

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istotelian terms, his feast represents a paucity of magnificence. Chastellain highlights this lowered estate by comparing it with an act of iconoclasm against a precious object, once beautiful, now nothing. Yet while he elsewhere states that the debasement of France and its king is punishment for their sins, Chastellain here focuses on the reaction of the French audience. Where Lefèvre simply states that the king’s low estate “greatly displeased any Frenchman who saw it,”68 Chastellain paints a more elaborate picture of audience response, as the gathered notables, “when they saw the king so poorly attended, in such a pitiful state, and of such little account, among those who had seen and known him before, certainly their hearts were strongly softened, and there was not one of them whose eyes were not moistened by tears.”69 Their tears for the humbled king very quickly become tears for themselves as they see in Charles their own fate: “once glory and happiness, now great shame for them and confusion for their children.”70 Charles’s feast’s lack of magnificence comes to embody the fallen state of the nation. In contrast, Henry’s feast demonstrates the ability of even a ruler to fail at projecting magnificence by falling into excess. In setting himself up in far higher estate than his father-in-law, Henry has gotten above himself and become overly proud. The term Chastellain uses to describe this, “eslevé en orgueil,” carries a number of connotations. Orgueil, unlike the more ambiguous fierté, is a clearly vicious character trait, the deadly sin of pride. Elever has a similar set of meanings to the English verb to raise. Thus the fact that he is eslevé in pride suggests at once that Henry is extremely proud and that he has been badly brought up. The feast here is a testing ground where Henry fails. Notably, Henry’s failure takes the form of excessive pomp. Although he is king of England and now the French heir, it is still possible for him to exceed the boundaries of magnificence. Magnificence lies not in all forms of sumptuousness but only in ones that are deemed appropriate. By usurping the traditional place of the still-reigning French king, Henry oversteps his bounds and thus fails to demonstrate the virtue required of a ruler. While these two accounts are highly abbreviated, the reader is made deeply aware of the real importance of such symbolic occasions. Chastellain and Lefèvre draw here not on the narrative level of these events but on generally shared assumptions concerning how banquets should be conducted, as well as some of the key discourses with which feasts were associated. Because excess is a constant danger for those who try to stage an impressive feast, Chastellain’s censure of Henry’s lapse is believable. That such excess of expenditure could be read as pride rather than gluttony depends on the fact that magnificence was connected not only to largesse (which if exceeded is gluttony) but also to courage (which if exceeded is pride).

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Chastellain equates Charles’s lack of magnificence with the failure of his nobles to support him: the upper nobility’s failure to serve the king at table is given far more attention than the other errors of presentation. As I will show below, this suggests that not only has Charles failed his duty to be magnificent, but the French nobility has also failed to exhibit proper humility and loyalty. In contrast to these flawed nobles, Chastellain describes the visiting notables as ideal guests who strongly identify with their host and recognize the ties between his failure to achieve magnificence and their nation’s inability to maintain its independence. While unstated, this emphasis on virtue as a sign of economic independence and governance (or the lack thereof) fits well within the Aristotelian paradigm in which any moral actor must have personal financial resources and the freedom they entail. Charles VI’s failure to achieve magnificence is both literally and figuratively a symbol of his and his country’s loss of independence. Late medieval courts were without doubt lavish entertainers, and the sheer scale of the amounts spent in some instances attracted condemnation. Yet as the cases above suggest, the ability to host such events was also a crucial index of the independence and resources of a ruler and even by extension his or her realm. Canny hosts and guests alike were thus on their mettle in the banquet hall, alert to the subtle nuances of both their own and others’ displays of character.

LEARNING TO BE GOOD The careful balancing of actors, intentions, and resources required by late medieval ethical systems was a learned skill cultivated not only through reading but also through training in courtly settings such as banquets. At times, instruction in virtue might take explicit didactic form. The final entremet at the Feast of the Pheasant, which appears in Olivier de la Marche’s account almost as if to finally lay to rest his fears concerning the banquet’s potential vice, consisted of a visit by personifications of twelve virtues led by God’s Grace.71 Each of the virtues was played by a court lady and accompanied by a nobleman; the actors included the duke’s heir Charles the Bold and his wife Isabelle of Bourbon, the duke’s nephew, and two of his favored bastard children. Claiming to have been drawn to the event by Philip’s pious vows, God’s Grace introduced her virtuous charges to the duke as aids for his endeavors. A short poem was recited detailing each virtue’s basic qualities and potential benefits. God’s Grace then left the virtues to serve the company, at which point they shed parts of their costumes and began to dance with the audience.

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In addition to its explicit description and commendation of the virtues, this entremet hints at the more practical use of feasts to instill court values. By directly involving courtiers, who played parts in order to further Philip’s aims, this performance took part in a larger pattern in which feasts helped instill a shared courtly code in their participants by encouraging the development of a service ethic centered on humility and generosity. Many late medieval northwestern European courts cultivated models of nobility that focused on nurture as well as nature.72 Courtiers came not only from the hereditary aristocracy but also from the increasingly wealthy merchant classes. The variety of backgrounds from which it drew personnel put particular pressure on the court as a training ground that formed children and young adults into courtiers. Given the centrality of feasting to ethical images of virtues such as temperance and courtly magnificence, as well as the value placed on applying abstract ethical concepts to actual practice, it is not surprising that participation in banquets was a common feature of the education of young courtiers. Many northern European courts were organized on the model of a household, and while the members of the nobility often held titles such as butler more as an honor than as a description of real duties, service at table in festive contexts was actually performed by noblemen and upper bourgeois. For example, both Olivier de la Marche (an aristocrat from Burgundy) and Georges Chastellain (child of the lower gentry and mercantile elites of Ghent) in their youth held the position of écuyers panetier at the Burgundian court, a position whose duties included serving the ducal family at table. Discussions and depictions of feasts often appear in narratives outlining the education of a young nobleman. Serving a lord at table had the advantage of putting one in personal contact with such a powerful figure and thus might pave the way to promotion or other favors. Yet this could not be accomplished through simple presence; the server had to exhibit the proper character traits and social graces to win approval. In Antoine de la Sale’s Jehan de Saintré, the eponymous hero first attracts the attention of his patroness the Dame des Belles Cousines while serving as a royal page in the banquet hall. At a later stage, Jehan’s courtesy and the Dame des Belles Cousines’s influence obtain the post of carver for him, a promotion that inspires the author to remind his readers, “For it is a beautiful and profitable thing for all young squires to serve without disservice, to be sweet, humble, and patient, in order to acquire the grace of God and of all people.”73 Although the ironic ending of Jehan de Saintré calls into some doubt the seriousness with which it should be taken as a manual of courtly behavior, more respectable figures than the Dame des Belles Cousines also used feasts in the

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socialization and social advancement of young men. Folio 33v of the His­ toire de Charles Martel (fig. 6) shows one such scene. To the left the queen speaks animatedly with several eager young aristocrats. The text informs the reader that she is advising these three brothers that they should take part in court festivities in order to show off their good breeding and practice largesse or generosity. In the image, the queen directs the brothers’ attention to the right, where the artist has chosen to depict a court banquet complete with musicians and hungry dogs as the quintessential courtly space for displaying manners and morals. Although the Histoire de Charles Mar­ tel narrative takes place in the distant past, the herald Lefèvre frequently reports in his memoirs that diners at the Valois Burgundian court did indeed display their generosity routinely at feasts, where any gift bestowed by an appreciative viewer to a performer would prompt the performer to approvingly cry, “Largesse!”74 While male waiters were preferred for high entertainments, table service was also considered a sign of good manners and morals in young women. In the popular story of Griselda, the long-suffering heroine proves her superhuman humility and obedience by waiting on her husband and his supposed new bride at their wedding feast. In the ninth tale told on the second day of Boccaccio’s Decameron, a more enterprising lady likewise uses her skills as a waitress to prove and protect her moral rectitude. The heroine is described by her husband as possessing “all the virtues which a woman or even, to a great extent, a knight or a young man should possess,” prominent among which is the fact that “no squire or gentleman’s servant could better serve a gentleman’s table than she, since she was well bred, educated and discreet.”75 This praise of the lady’s abilities is offered as part of a defense of her moral character as well as her elite manners, directly correlating birth, good upbringing, and discretion. These skills and character traits prove of practical advantage to the lady, since they allow her to win employment and favor at a distant court when she is later forced to disguise herself as a man after her husband orders her execution under the false impression that she has been unfaithful. The feast hall was thus a location where aristocrats honed both etiquette and moral character. The fact that the queen in the Histoire de Charles Mar­ tel uses the name of a virtue, largesse, to describe a set of behaviors also intended to demonstrate good manners is indicative of the entanglement of social skill and moral behavior in the minds of many late medieval courtiers. Similarly, humility was at once a sign of deference that aided in the maintenance of social hierarchy and a virtue that Mansel attributed to the practice of temperance. Although modern definitions of ethics tend to ignore social

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niceties, late medieval conduct literature is perfectly comfortable including a discussion of why one should close one’s mouth while eating under the heading of gluttony. Manners and morals were united by the fact that both required a high degree of personal training and control and were meant to create regulated subjects.76 Proper etiquette likewise slipped easily into the realm of beliefs and emotions. The behaviors meant to be exhibited by young courtiers as they worked within the feast hall not only included mastery of the mechanics of carrying dishes or carving but also cultivated deference toward their leader. According to Antoine de la Sale, himself the onetime tutor to a young Charles the Bold of Burgundy, the young knight Jehan de Saintré is to serve not only politely but also humbly and sweetly. The necessity to not only act but also feel, particularly to cultivate pleasure in deference, resonates oddly well with the emotional conditioning examined by modern sociologists in the twentieth-century service industry.77 Just as spectator involvement in feasting was often a moment less of liberation than of indoctrination, the use of the feast hall as a training vehicle not only offered opportunities but also required adaptation to societal norms. Densely complex and highly sensitive to situational needs, systematic ethics was integral to the worldview of members of the elite in late medieval Europe. Moral treatises in the vernacular abounded in the libraries of rulers and their confidants. Histories relied on the behavioral and conceptual frameworks that ethical systems provided to explain the course of events and describe the qualities of individuals. While the textual traditions claim that most virtues and vices operate in multiple spheres, the iconographies developed for such key virtues as temperance and magnificence posited a special connection between these moral qualities and dining. Feasting thus became linked in moralizing literature with dangerous arenas of consumption but also self-regulation, making the feast hall into a fraught test of the diner’s ability to walk a middle path between excess and lack. This focus on balance is most obvious in the virtue of temperance, which is devoted precisely to the practical regulation of consumption and other actions in order to achieve balance. But it was also a concern in the exercise of magnificence, which likewise could not veer into excess without losing its virtue. The close visual parallels that were made between magnificence and temperance even in cases where the accompanying text explicitly separated their realms of activity indicate that there was some interest in establishing that magnificence too required balance. The connection between morals and manners proposed in conduct literature was reinforced by the actual use of feasting in training young court-

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iers, whose ability not only to serve but to serve willingly and humbly was felt to ensure their proper socialization as courtiers. Members of the elite were thus not only primed to view the world in terms such as magnificence and temperance but also deeply aware of just how ambiguous and difficult the actual achievement of such virtues would be. The subjects formed in this crucible of ethical discourse were oriented toward an ideal in which the perfect courtier was also the perfect critic. He or she was hyperaware not only of the potential for falsity at work in hypocrites and other liars but equally of his or her own potential for failure, of the very real dangers, both spiritual and social, that lay on either side of the good life.

chapter five

Stranger at the Table

A

s the previous chapter showed, feasting was integral to displaying and inculcating virtue in late medieval court circles. Precisely because banquets perilously mixed public scrutiny with so many ways to stray, the feast hall became a potent site for testing and forming critical judgment. Both the widespread discourse of systematic ethics and the practical problem of reading intentions in behavior led members of the elites to approach life in general, and feasting in particular, with a critical eye. Yet this discerning gaze was not only a source of distrust and anxiety: like most successful ideologies, late medieval ethics rewarded its adherents with its own special pleasures. Chief among these was the cultivated enjoyment of effects that solicited and challenged the viewer’s judgment, qualities that were often grouped under the related terms wonderful, marvelous, and strange. The aesthetic preferences at work within fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Northern European culture are notoriously difficult to reconstruct. In contrast to the steadily increasing flow of Italian writings devoted to the defense and explication of the artist’s craft, Northern accounts tend to reveal tastes only in passing. The visual evidence is likewise tantalizingly ambiguous: not only do multiple stylistic idioms coexist, but the goals of even such well-studied trends as Flemish realism are difficult to classify. Svetlana Alpers has mounted a spirited defense of mimesis as a long-standing goal in art from the Lowlands, a tendency she traces back to the detailed techniques of late medieval artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.1 However, transcribing observations alone cannot account for the playfulness and at times straightforward oddity of some of the most prized artworks produced during the late Middle Ages. The calculated ambiguities of Flemish painting in particular have been long recognized; they were, notably, integral to Erwin Panofsky’s much131

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debated theory of disguised symbolism. While Panofsky was not the first to recognize the combination of symbolism and realism in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Northern European art, his writings continue to set the stage for scholarly dispute on this issue. The paintings of the Burgundian court painter Jan van Eyck occupy a privileged position in this historiography, from Panofsky’s early essay on the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait to the much-debated theory of disguised symbolism in Early Netherlandish Paint­ ing.2 In the latter, Panofsky put forward the Madonna in a Church (fig. 28) as the quintessential example of symbolism in the guise of realism.3 Although numerous paintings of the Virgin by Jan van Eyck survive, the small, exquisite Madonna in a Church now in Berlin was arguably the most popular of his Marian images in the following centuries.4 The original frame was lost when the painting was stolen in 1877, but surviving descriptions indicate that, like many of van Eyck’s frames, it was inscribed with various suggestive phrases.5 At the base, the Virgin was addressed with a conventional metaphor: “You are called the flower among flowers.”6 More unusually, the sides contained lines from a paradoxical hymn: “This mother is the daughter / This father is a newborn / Who has heard of such a thing / God born a man.”7 The painting is small, but its highly detailed world is rendered with a meticulous linear clarity. Within a rectangle roughly the size of a single adult hand is contained the soaring interior of a carefully rendered Gothic church, at the center of which light bathes a giant Virgin holding the Christ child. Her soft velvet robes curve in patterns that echo the hard column moldings to the left, while her slight shoulders brush against the galleries of the church crossing. Behind her stands an elaborately carved choir screen, which houses a statue of the Virgin and Child in a similar but not identical pose and various Marian scenes. On the far side of this screen, two angels painted to scale with the architectural surrounding read from large books near the altar, perhaps indicating that they are participating in the Mass. Like many scholars both before and after him, Panofsky was intrigued by the difference in scale between the Virgin and Child and the rest of the painting. In this play Panofsky perceived a deliberate strategy: “The ‘disproportion’ between the figure and the architecture, then, is . . . a symbol: a deviation from nature which, deliberately retained within the framework of a naturalistic style, makes us aware of the fact that this wealth of physical detail, so carefully observed and reconstructed, is dominated by a metaphysical idea.”8 The metaphysical idea expressed, he adds, is the commonplace that the Virgin is the Church. More recently, the disproportion

Figure 28. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441), The Madonna in the Church, ca. 1425. Oil on oak panel, 31 × 14 cm. Inv. 525C. Photo: Joerg P. Anders, Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin / Gemaeldegalerie / Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY.

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between the main figures and the larger church background has been explained as a sign that the image is meant to represent a vision prompted by the sculptures of the Virgin on the choir screen rather than a representation of a physically present woman and child.9 But should the strangeness of the Madonna in the Church truly be explained away as either a straightforward symbol of Maria-Ecclesia or a simulated visionary experience? Even within van Eyck’s own oeuvre there are other paintings of patrons envisioning saints, none of which manipulate scale in a comparable manner or suggest that the spiritual and the real are such distinct entities. The well-known Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, for example, makes evident the mystical nature of the Virgin’s presence through the ostentatious removal of the spectacles that dangle from the canon’s hand. Yet in it the Virgin and the other holy figures are all represented at the same scale as their worshiper, and the reflections in the glimmering polished metal of St. George’s armor naturalistically reflect the room that holds both the saints and the canon. Similarly, while the combination of metaphors and paradoxes drawn from hymnography on the original frame of the Berlin Madonna in a Church encourages allegorical reading and connects the image to liturgical devotion, the chosen text refers neither to Panofsky’s chosen symbolism of Mary as the Church nor to any expressly private meditative practice. If it is assumed that van Eyck employed this disjunctive visual strategy and the accompanying verses intentionally, a number of questions immediately present themselves. How could such a strange image not only come into being but also prove so popular? How do oddity, artistic craft, and sanctity relate to each other, and what does this indicate about the nature of making and reception more generally for van Eyck and his wealthy patrons? Feasts are a particularly useful source for answering these questions. In contrast to the paucity of writing about painting and sculpture, feasting is a subject that inspired numerous accounts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As I discussed in previous chapters, historians describing banquets devote considerable attention to describing and evaluating the entremet, a complicated category that includes culinary, performing, and visual arts. This mixed category disrupts the seemingly obvious distinctions between moving and still, object and performance, people and things, while nevertheless relying on viewers’ ability to recognize these transgressions. Such attention to detail and parsing of meaning is tied to habits of discernment encouraged by ethical discourse. The presence of this aesthetic of discernment is registered in the textual accounts by the frequent use of terms denoting wonder, marveling, and estrangement in praising entremets.

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Cultivating an appreciation of the marvelous and the strange, late medieval patrons and artists actively sought out ambiguity and paradox, delighting in multiple meanings and seeming impossibilities. Their love of wit and play brought with it an appreciation for crafted experience that, just as much as contemporary Italian texts, set the stage for modern attitudes about art and aesthetics. However, the ease with which these habits of aesthetic appreciation moved between devotional and nondevotional realms belies modern theories in which aesthetic appreciation of objects is assumed to contradict an interest in their spiritual efficacy. While art historians such as Hans Belting, looking back on this phenomenon, have tended to view a growing appreciation for skill and ingenuity as tentative steps along a teleological path toward the secularization of art, late medieval artists and their patrons instead appear to have openly embraced delightful oddity for its ability to address both spiritual and secular needs.10 Marvelous and strange, artworks from the feast hall’s entremets to Jan van Eyck’s devotional panels worked together to form a culture in which doubt and questioning could be a source of pleasure, faith, and self-renewal.

CHIVALRIC WONDER Banquets and the individual entremets that helped set them apart from simple nutrition provide many moments of transgression that can strike a modern viewer as uncanny: men emerge from pies, teeth turn into violent soldiers, roast chickens carry the eater’s own coat of arms. This sense of uneasy metamorphosis lies perilously close to Freud’s definition of the Unheimliche, in which the transformation of seemingly familiar and stable things into something unexpected provokes anxiety and terror.11 Yet there is little sign that confusing human and thing was primarily viewed as frightening in the late Middle Ages, at least when it took place during banquets.12 In part this may be because such transformations were expected in feast settings. As Freud notes, the horrors of fairy tales are not truly uncanny, because such activities are expected in those settings.13 This is not to say, however, that contemporary audiences were unaware of or insensitive to the play between living and still, animate and inanimate. Rather, they appear to have derived a positive pleasure from the slight frisson of danger within what they expected to experience as a safe environment. This uneasy balance between entertainment and true transgression is made apparent in the fictional deployment of the wondrous entremet. In the Middle English alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ancient Britain is cast as a nation created in the wake of Odysseus’s trickery at Troy,

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its history fittingly marked by both war and wonder. The author promises in the introduction that the events he describes will be a true wonder, an adventure in keeping with such a land. The first wonderful event he recounts takes place not on a battlefield but in a feast hall. On New Year’s Day, the nobles in Camelot demonstrate their largesse and indulge in the laden tables. King Arthur alone sits somewhat apart; he has taken a noble vow to never eat unless first told of a new adventure or a great marvel in which he might believe. The words wonder and marvel are evoked repeatedly both at the level of the poetic frame and in the festive setting, but they merely set the stage for the wonderful appearance of the Green Knight. Announced by a trumpet as in many entremets, he enters, a near giant whose strange green skin and long hair are tempered by his knightly dress and initial courtesy. It is first the glowing green of the man’s skin that causes “wonder” in his viewers, a wonder that stuns them into silence yet also engages their intellects. Just as the poet piles up descriptive phrases, so too Arthur’s guests continue to stare because There was looking at length at that lord so bold, For each man did marvel at what it might mean, That a human and horse could have such a hue, To grow green as the grass, and greener it seemed Than green enamel on gold, glowing more brightly. All standing there studied him and stepped ever closer, With all the wonder in the world at what he would do.14

The mixing of metaphors from the worlds of nature and facture, as well as the alliterative poetic play with the sounds of grass, green, and gold, suggests that it is the color green’s ability to link and cross many boundaries that makes the man a marvel. This visual marvel immediately prompts practical questions, the first of which (what the color of the knight means) continues to prompt speculation among literary scholars today: is this the green of Christian faith, a pagan fertility god, or a demonic foe? The Green Knight’s actions quickly begin to answer the second question for those who wonder “what he would do.” He dares the assembled knights to prove their bravery by striking him with an ax and then taking the same blow in turn. Gawain accepts the challenge and beheads the Green Knight, only to have the headless body lift its fallen head and speak, telling Gawain to come find the Knight to face his own execution in one year. The poem teeters on the edge of terror—not simply because death has been cheated, since such reversals might be expected in the course of an

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entremet, but rather because the violence meant to be contained within the performance now threatens to exceed the banquet’s boundaries. Shaken, Arthur must pretend when he claims to have enjoyed this “entertainment.” To calm the anxious Guinevere, he makes explicit the connection to more normal feast performances: “Dear lady, do not be dismayed today; / Such craft well becomes Christmas / Staging of interludes, to laugh and sing . . .”15 Yet by the poem’s end, the extension of the feast’s wonder into the world proves to have been efficacious. By agreeing to participate in this entertainment within the feast hall, Gawain is set on a long path that ends in selfimprovement outside of it. When he later manages to save his life by lying to the man who lavishly hosts him next Christmas (a lord who turns out to be none other than the Green Knight), Gawain realizes the lingering cowardice—or the sensible sense of self-preservation—that remains within his knightly persona. In keeping with a theory of knowledge traceable at least to Augustine, wonder in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight serves the vital cognitive role of capturing the average man or woman’s wandering attention and encouraging their quest to know the unknown: without it, the question of Gawain’s true chivalry might never have been raised.16 Like the invocations of feasting in conduct literature, the message of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also notably tied to questions of personal character. The poem slowly reveals not only to Gawain but also to the reader the reality behind his courtly persona, bringing forward a flaw he pledges to correct now that he knows of it. While drawing on the popular matter of Britain, Arthur’s feast hall, as well as the chivalric ideals it models and tests, is recognizably part of the same set of moral and spiritual concerns that motivate the more overtly didactic poems found in the sole manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “Pearl,” “Cleanness,” and “Patience.” 17 The accompanying image of the feast scene in this manuscript makes evident the close connection between the appearance of the Green Knight and the appearance of so many wondrous figures in contemporary entremets (plate 3).18 In keeping with the usual conventions for depicting feasts, Arthur, Guinevere, Gawain, and a courtier sit on one side of a sparsely laden high table in the background facing the viewer; the weapons held by the three men (indicating that this portion of the miniature shows the moment when Gawain accepts the challenge) are the only unusual element. In the foreground between the pictured audience and manuscript’s viewer, the potentially deadly performance is carried out as the stylish young Gawain appears again, brandishing a battle-ax larger than his own body. The Green Knight on his equally green horse holds up a smiling head to both pictured

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and real viewers. Rather than playing on the unusual size of the quasi-giant, the artist picks up on the importance of color within the text: the dark green pigmentation of horse and rider not only contrasts sharply with the red of his blood and Gawain’s coat but also hints at its possible human facture since a similar color is used for Guinevere’s dress almost directly above. While appearing within a fictional past, the Green Knight’s sudden startling appearance within a banquet hall intentionally recalls the real-world entremet or rather its Middle English equivalent, the interlude or soteltie. If interlude evokes both liminality and play, soteltie refers to the quality of subtlety or ingenuity that went into making and appreciating these performances, much as does Arthur’s alliterative linking of craft as appropriate to celebrate Christmas. Within the idealized but also often imitated world of Arthurian romance, wonder thus serves multiple interrelated purposes. Based at once in the startlingly exotic, the skillfully made, and the thoughtprovoking, wonder creates the pleasure required for elite enjoyment while also challenging even the most seemingly refined guests to soul-searching and moral improvement. For late medieval elites who looked into such an Arthurian mirror, the complexity and possible efficacy of the aesthetic of wonder would be difficult to ignore.

MARVELS TO THINK WITH It is hardly surprising to find, therefore, that actual feast practices similarly valued the intelligence and ambiguity of late medieval wonder. The language of marvels and wonders used by the Gawain poet was not limited to the actual lands of Arthur. Francophone sources similarly register the sustained interest in the marvelous on the Continent. Both as a noun and as an adjective, merveilleux, like wonder, registers not only surprise but also the longer pleasure of unraveling mysteries and uncovering skilled making at the edge between nature and facture. Marvelous is one of the terms most frequently used by chroniclers to describe the impact of entremets. It is omnipresent in descriptions of the Feast of the Pheasant, where one of the fountains is an iron tree sprouting glass flowers “made in such a novel way that it was extremely marvelous to see.”19 An automaton at another table “was a desert, an uninhabited land, in which a tiger that was marvelously and vividly well made battled a serpent.”20 At the marriage of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal twenty years earlier, the decoration of all the rooms for feasting guests, “common and not, were so richly covered with tapestry that it was a great marvel to think of it.”21 Ten years after the Feast of the Pheasant, the massive chande-

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liers at the wedding feast for Charles the Bold and Margaret of York are “of marvelous work.”22 As even this small sampling suggests, a repeated set of qualities are therefore linked to the marvelous: unusually skilled craftsmanship, richness, exoticism, novelty, and artifice. Entremets are rarely referred to as marvels in and of themselves. Instead, marvelous is more likely to appear in conjunction with verbs of perception, cognition, or facture: the glass tree is marvelous to see, the tapestries a marvel to think about, the chandeliers result from marvelous work. While the marvelous takes many outward forms, its unifying principle therefore resides in its relationship to human work, both creative and appreciative. There is a strong political dimension to the aesthetic category of the marvelous. The Aristotelian definition of virtue, discussed at length in the previous chapter, required not only the right timing and agent but also the right manner of performing an action. In the case of magnificence, this necessitated not only proper expenditure but also expenditure in the proper manner. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, this takes the form of creating works that are both useful and impressive. Nicolas Oresme translates this passage in keeping with his own culture’s understanding of what impresses: “for the work of the magnificent must be marvelous.”23 Since magnificence is a virtue proper only to rulers and other wealthy political leaders, the marvelous too seems to be linked at least in part to such individuals. The connection between marvels and power has recently drawn scholarly attention. The Valois Burgundian court serves as the case study for the collection and evocation of the marvelous as a political stratagem in Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park’s widely influential Wonders and the Order of Nature.24 Having identified Philip the Good and Charles the Bold as the “ultimate impresarios of the marvelous,”25 Daston and Park read both the wedding celebration of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal and the Feast of the Pheasant as systematic statements in which the marvelous is used to advance ducal imperialist desires in the East. While Daston and Park’s account concentrates on the particular political ends of these events rather than their aesthetic means, their analysis usefully summarizes many of the elements found in late medieval written records: wealth, foreignness, and the mixing of natural and man-made. The entremet of the naked female fountain with her attendant lion discussed above in chapter 2 is a vivid case of this combination at work. Ymage and live animal alike are tied to the exotic by the Greek letters on the ymage’s veil and the foreign origin of lions; at the same time, the hippocras flowing constantly from the ymage’s breast suggests plentitude. Daston and Park also suggest that late medieval crafted marvels differed

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from earlier medieval natural marvels in their explicit “civilizing intent” and that the interpretation of marvels by their owners constituted symbolic capital in the form of connoisseurship.26 Both of these observations warrant further investigation, since they indicate that the marvelous is deeply implicated in aesthetic norms and education. Daston and Park remain vague on how the marvelous might be expected to civilize. One reason for this lacuna may be that they pay little attention to how skepticism informed late medieval experiences of the marvelous. The savvy with which the Burgundian elites discussed by Daston and Park, both nobles and merchants, might be expected to approach marvels is wittily embodied in the Nineteenth Tale of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles.27 The framing conceit of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles is that members of the Burgundian court, including the ducal family, are taking turns recounting tales to amuse the group. Although the collection’s title promises novelties, many of the tales are relatively familiar at least in type; their charm derives instead from the tellers’ displays of wit in both tweaking familiar tropes and exploiting verbal play. The Nineteenth Tale concerns an English merchant who, moved by a desire to have adventures and see things he cannot experience at home, leaves his wife and family and goes to the East. He is away for several years, during which his wife has an affair and gives birth to a son. On the merchant’s return, his wife tries to brazen out the fact that there is now one child too many by telling her husband that “their” son was the result of a miracle: one day she ate frost off a leaf and immediately became pregnant. The merchant does not believe her but pretends to, noting that such marvels have been known to happen. After a few years at home, the merchant again longs to travel. This time he takes along his supposed son and promptly sells him as a slave in Egypt. On his return to London, his wife asks him where their son has gone, to which he gives a reply worthy of the marvels-chronicler John Mandeville: The truth is this. The sea swept us to a country where it was so hot that we all thought we would die from the burning heat of the sun, whose rays beat down upon us. One day, we all left the ship so that we could each dig a ditch in which to take shelter from the sun. Our good offspring, who, as you know, was composed of snow, suddenly dissolved into water onto the sandy soil, as we all watched, all because of the sun’s heat. Before you could have said one of the seven psalms, we could no longer find any trace of him. He left this world as quickly as he came into it. And you can imagine that I was, and am, very grieved. Despite all the marvels I have seen, I have never witnessed one which left me more flabbergasted.28

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Not to be outdone, the merchant’s wife replies with the commonplace that marvels lead in the end to the contemplation of God: “Indeed! Since it pleased God to take our son from us in as miraculous a way as He gave him to us, let us praise Him.”29 The Nineteenth Tale of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles assumes familiarity with the literary tradition of the marvelous, not only among the bourgeois characters but also among the courtly audience of the narrative frame. It likewise depends on its audience agreeing that it is reasonable to believe in some marvels—since the merchant makes more than one trip in search of adventure, presumably he was not entirely disappointed the first time— but not others. From this, it appears that the marvelous needs to be connected not only to wealth and exoticism but also with interpretative prowess. While Daston and Park note the political capital that owners might gain from connoisseurship, the Nineteenth Tale instead suggests that such skill might be shared by all intelligent viewers; the evocation of wonder might have “soften[ed] up” its audience to ducal propaganda, but it was equally likely to make them question what they were seeing.30 The fact that marvels could be questioned was a part of their charm. Descriptions of entremets provide perhaps the fullest late medieval accounts of how a questioning and paradoxical aesthetic worked in practice. In an extended account of one of his favorite entremets, Olivier de la Marche verbally reconstructs the revelatory process through which this interpretive mode operated. The entremet of the stag at the Feast of the Pheasant integrated visual and musical elements in order to create a wonderful vision. Following directly on an entremet in which Jason fought magical bulls, the entremet of the stag opened, like all the others, with song: After this mystery the organs were played for a long time in a motet, and afterward a long song called “Safeguard of My Life” was sung from within the pastry by three sweet voices. Then through the door from which the other acts [lit. mets or dishes] had come, after the church and the pastry had each played four times, a marvelously large and beautiful stag entered into the room, which was entirely white and had golden horns, and was covered with a rich vermilion silk cloth. It seemed to me that on this stag was mounted a young boy of twelve years of age, dressed in a short robe of crimson velvet, wearing a small black cut hood on his head, and shod with fair shoes. This child held, in his two hands, the horns of the stag. And as he thus entered into the room, he began the top line of a song very high and clear, and the stag sang the tenor without there being another person except the child and the artifice of the stag, and the name of the

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song which they sang was “I Never Saw the Equal, etc.” And singing, as I have recounted to you, they made a tour past the tables, and then they returned; and this entremet seemed good to me and pleasurable to see.31

The entremet of the stag, like most of the entremets at this feast, begins with music. This repeated pattern has two contradictory effects. On the one hand, it alerts diners to pay attention. On the other, it provides a relatively neutral opening, since other entremets arrive in a similar manner through the same door. Into the room then come the white stag and rider, both of whom de la Marche describes in detail. The stag in particular is “marvelously large and beautiful.” Just as the reader begins to visualize the marvelous appearance of child and stag, the boy begins to sing. Up to this point, nothing in de la Marche’s account suggests that the stag is in fact anything but an unusually handsome and well-trained animal. At this moment, however, de la Marche records a transformation: the stag too begins to sing “without there being another person except the child and the artifice of the stag [my emphasis].” The stag’s voice thus changes everything for the viewer, suddenly making the natural into the artificial. This moment is tellingly marked with the song “Je ne vis oncques la pareille.” The piece in question is generally believed to be identical with a surviving composition attributed to either Binchois or Dufay. If this is so, then the lyrics are particularly apt for the moment of transformation. “I have never seen the equal,” the singer claims, Of you, my gracious lady, For your beauty, upon my soul, Is unequalled by any other. When I see you, I marvel, And ask, “Is this Our Lady?” . . . Your very great sweetness awakens My spirit, and my eye rips open My heart, which I may say boldly, For I am prepared to serve you.32

Seeing an unprecedented beauty and sweetness, the singer’s soul is stirred, his heart is opened; in short, he marvels at the uniqueness of his lady. His marveling in turn leads to further questions and consideration; he asks, to whom might this lady be compared? Finally, he concludes that her marvelous nature has only one possible parallel, the Virgin, whose cult

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had for centuries exploited the language of romantic love for devotional purposes. In the end the singer pledges to serve his earthly lady with similar reverence and pride. Wonder here is a response to earthly and heavenly beauty equally, as well as an important step along a longer path. Sight leads to marveling, a state that in turn prompts judgment as the singer considers and compares the lady. The marvelous also leads to action, with the singer not only prepared to serve but also to create, since the words of allegiance he claims to be speaking boldly are presumably the highly polished poetry and music of the song he sings. With the introduction of the song, the viewers of the entremet of the stag likewise came to a new understanding of the sight in front of them. What makes this entremet “good and pleasurable” is neither that it is made with “real” wonders such as a talking animal nor that it presents a perfect illusion. It is instead the way in which the entremet builds on itself. It first makes an illusion and then reveals that it is an illusion, in the process creating something arguably even more beautiful as music melds with visual spectacle. The pleasure comes not from mimesis that is indistinguishable from reality but from the audience’s realization that they were fooled; the recognition is neither more nor less necessary than the initial acceptance of the vision presented. This is not a simple disintegration of the opposition between natural and man-made, but rather a balancing act that suspends the viewer between the two. A similar tension is evoked in one of the most famous images of feasting, the January calendar page of Jean of Berry’s Très Riches Heures executed by the Limbourg brothers (plate 1). The blurring of the boundary between the courtiers within the space and the soldiers depicted in the surrounding tapestries has already been discussed in chapter 2; Michael Camille has discussed other overlaps of humans and objects in Jean of Berry’s collecting activities.33 Nonhumans are likewise the subjects of mimetic play, particularly on the right edge of the miniature. The cropping of the scene cuts Jean of Berry’s table just to the side of a massive gold nef, whose two prows are topped by a small golden bear and swan. The sculptures refer to Jean’s personal emblems, but unlike the flattened, schematized black bear and white swan in the cloth of honor above, these golden animals are realistically modeled. The bear in particular hunches forward naturalistically, a fish dangling from his jaws. Slightly to the left of these obvious sculptures are two small golden dogs, one standing at attention while the other bends as though to sample the dishes unobserved by his noble master. With their curly coats, plausible

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dimensions, and doglike postures, these two figures are regularly taken for real animals, proof of Jean of Berry’s love of dogs.34 Yet their glistening coats are in fact executed in the same gold leaf used for the surrounding plates and nef. The gold dogs’ unnaturalness is highlighted by comparison with the larger white hunting dog directly below them, who anxiously but elegantly awaits the meat being carved for it by a kneeling server. What, then, should be made of this metallic coating? Coloring animals for entremets was an established practice throughout the late medieval period; for example, a goat was dyed blue and gilded for an entremet at the marriage of Jean’s great-nephew Philip the Good to Isabella of Portugal.35 The January miniature’s golden dogs may be similarly altered live animals. They may equally, however, be highly mimetic statues designed to trick but ultimately reveal themselves to the careful viewer. Gold made into animals or animals turned to gold? The viewer’s pleasure is sustained by the Limbourg brothers’ insolvable puzzle, a pleasure that only deepens when it is recalled that all the figures from sculpted nef to lively white hound are equally artificial, painted products of the artists’ skill. There is additional evidence to suggest that the Limbourgs had experience with this type of playful mimesis. A few years earlier, on January 1, 1410, the brothers had offered an unusual gift to Jean of Berry. New Year’s was an established time for gift exchange at French courts, and artists and authors often offered manuscripts to their patrons. Moreover, Jean of Berry was a major collector, and the Limbourg brothers were renowned illuminators. Yet on this occasion the Limbourg brothers took a block of wood and made a trick book so convincing in its illusion that the duke could be fooled by it. Vastly cheaper than an actual illuminated manuscript, it nevertheless seems to have pleased Jean and was retained in his collection. Presumably what delighted Jean of Berry was in large part the artistic skill and cleverness required to create such an item. This pleasure in skilled making is ironically registered by just how thoroughly Berry’s inventory stresses what aspects of the trick book were not made, describing it as “made of painted wood in the semblance of a book, in which there were no pages nor anything written, covered in white velvet with two gilded silver clasps enameled with the arms of my lord.”36 It is on the clasps that in fact secure nothing that Berry’s own emblems are emblazoned, stressing the connection between the wit of the joke and the distinction of its intended audience.37 The aesthetic here is not unlike the “thinness” prized by special-effects artists of the late twentieth century, who, Norman Klein reports, “kept reminding me that they wanted the spectator to notice how paper-thin the effects were. Thin was elegant. Thin showed control, like a ballet.”38 As

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in the case of modern movies, thin effects in entremets revealed precisely enough artifice to make their viewers appreciate the craftsmanship that went into their production without destroying the pleasurable illusion. Such maintenance of two contradictory propositions is in keeping with the tradition of the paradox, what Rosalie Colie calls “the perfect equivocation”: “It lies and it doesn’t. It tells the truth and it doesn’t. . . . Its negative and positive meanings are so balanced that one meaning can never outweigh the other.”39 Like the paradox, the type of experience modeled in the entremet of the stag is at once playful and profoundly self-critical, forcing viewers to be aware their perceptual and interpretive processes.40 In the case of late medieval banquets, this balancing act opened up into a larger cultural interest in ambiguity and play. Similar sorts of formal play occur in a wide variety of media during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Music includes some of the best-known instances of this approach. One example of this is the chasse, a musical form in which one voice “chases” (chasser) the other.41 At the French court it was commonly used for hunting songs, so that the structural form of the song wittily mimicked the activity it described. Further mimicry surfaced in the imitation of animal sounds and hunting cries in such songs. D’Escouchy describes one such chasse at the Feast of the Pheasant: “a chasse was performed [by the musicians] in the pie which cried like little dogs and in the end like hares; and the dog-handlers and hunters yelled and trumpets sounded in that pie as though they were in a forest.”42 More formal play surfaced in other canons, that is, pieces that require the application of a rule in order to create all the parts needed for performance from a given portion of notation.43 Since the relevant rule might be unstated or hidden within the accompanying lyrics, canons could be quite sophisticated verbal as well as musical riddles. The texts for such songs often include hints for decoding that not only aid the performers but also allow unskilled listeners to know what is afoot. To take a well-studied example, the first known song entirely composed in retrograde (where the performer must read the notation backwards) is Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century “Ma fin est mon commencement,” whose lyrics describe in detail what procedures must be applied in order for the individual parts to be realized: “My end is my beginning / and my beginning is my end / and the tenor is sung truly. / My end is my beginning. / My tiers sings three times only / turns back on itself and thus ends. /My end is my beginning / and my beginning is my end.”44 Lest this text seem to make things too clear for it to be a true puzzle, it is worth noting that Machaut’s poem has been read not only as instructions but also as

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a memento mori, a representation of God, a play on the circularity of the rondeau form, and a symbol of the immortality of the soul.45 Machaut’s rondeau thus presents layers of puzzles both allegorical and formal.46 Moreover, while listeners might learn the trick of reading the music from solving the riddle, they would still require musical training in order to follow the procedure themselves, and substantial experience to do so with the fluidity required for real performance of the song. In the period following Machaut, additional play appeared in the visual inscription of music as well, with the appearance of so-called mannered notation and pieces written to form hearts and other forms on the page.47 While this type of notation became less common by the mid-fifteenth century, composers continued to create ever more elaborate musical riddles, demonstrating enjoyment of this playful aesthetic well past the end of the Middle Ages. The visual and musical realms so frequently combined in entremets thus reveal a shared appreciation for both the skill of creator and the involved wit of the discerning audience.

THE SHIFTING MEANINGS OF STRANGENESS In her 2001 study of New Year’s gift exchange at the Valois courts, Brigitte Buettner suggested using the term estrangeté (strangeness) to describe this playful aesthetic. She defines estrangeté as “an object’s visual and conceptual dexterity, its ability to flatter the recipient’s wit.”48 Buettner derives the term from Christine de Pisan’s Le Livre des trois vertus, where it appears in a discussion of the largesse proper for a princess.49 Largesse or generosity in the distribution of money and commodities was a key virtue for Aristotle, particularly closely linked to magnificence. As I discussed in the previous chapter, it was incumbent on members of the elite to demonstrate such generosity at feasts, most obviously in the tips given in response to the heralds’ cries of “Largesse!” Christine’s discussion of feminine largesse is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian tradition. She argues for largesse as a mean and insists that it is proper to rulers, who must practice it with decorum, giving the right gifts to the right people. The princess must take into account the gifts and social class of the recipient as well as the value of the services he or she has rendered, and then select a gift by considering its “value, goodness, beauty or strangeness [estrangeté] according to the case.”50 Strangeness therefore must be some quality that increases the receiver’s appreciation for a gift, akin but not identical to beauty and monetary and moral value. Unlike these other qualities, Christine’s strangeness is also singled out as a quality that anyone can use to create a gift of great worth; she notes

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that a poor person deserves recognition from the princess if she or he gives “something strange for goodwill.”51 In Christine’s account, an eye for strangeness thus supposedly transcends class barriers: it is expected of rulers but also allows even the humble to draw the attention and approval of the elite. In this respect it differs markedly from Aristotle’s concept of the marvelous as a quality of the magnificent, who are by definition wealthy. In contrast to the fixed hierarchy of Aristotle’s social model, strangeness would appear to be ideally suited to communities such as those formed at the Valois and contemporary English courts that included not only hereditary nobles but also the upwardly mobile noblesse de robe.52 A caveat should be entered to this rosy egalitarian picture, however. Given that taste was acknowledged in the period to be formed in large part through proper nurture, an appreciation for strangeness, like any other aesthetic preference, would necessarily be more accessible to those raised within court circles or other similar social groupings. The seeming accessibility of strangeness is, to some extent, also a way to naturalize and justify the status quo.53 Christine unfortunately provides no examples of these worthy strange gifts. As Buettner notes, one possible contemporary meaning for the term estrange (strange) is the witty play also signaled by the term marvelous discussed above. Like the modern French étrange or the English strange, estrange refers to both the unexpected and the foreign in relatively equal measure. Strangeness is never an absolute quality: something is strange only if something else is intimate. Thus Philip the Good is reported to have made peace with his son after a long dispute by reminding him: “Whatever others serve me and are around me, they are not to me as you are: they are my servants, they are strange to me; you are my flesh and my substance.”54 Yet on another occasion Philip is reported to have distinguished his subjects in general from the “strange” group of Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans.55 The relativity of strangeness was particularly evident for members of the increasingly internationalized ruling and merchant classes and at courts that ruled over widely disparate territories such as that of the Dukes of Burgundy. The Valois Burgundian dukes controlled an extremely heterogeneous territory, some sections of which were part of France, others part of the Holy Roman Empire, and still others controlled by the dukes alone. Although there was a steady push toward centralization of certain functions (notably in terms of finance) over the period of Valois control, individual cities and territories continued to differ widely in their customs, governmental patterns, and relationship to the dukes. While the Burgundian dukes were unusually successful in managing such a diverse inheritance, they were far

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from alone in claiming dominion over highly varied territories. Their cousin and onetime prisoner René of Anjou, for example, maintained his rights not only to Provence and Anjou but also to Sicily (which he actually ruled briefly), Jerusalem, and Hungary. Beyond the narrow confines of great rulers were scores of additional men and women who similarly needed to travel between regions, whether in pursuit of profit, battle, or administration. Given the rising use of vernaculars in all cultural spheres, this circulation of people and other resources required travelers to navigate between multiple dialects and language groups. In the Burgundian ducal territories, for example, French continued to be the primary court language throughout the period of Valois control, but both Dutch and French were used as administrative languages.56 The necessities of communication increasingly led toward translation and multilingualism: in the fourteenth century both Eustache Deschamps and Guillaume de Machaut remarked on the difficulties of traveling without knowing other languages.57 At the same time, vernaculars increasingly came into use for worship and scholarship, as Geert Grote’s translation of the hours of the Virgin, which replaced Latin hours almost universally in the Netherlands, and the translations of classical authors sponsored by so many Francophone nobles suggest.58 Rather than simply bemoaning the necessity of secondary language acquisition, the late Middle Ages witnessed a new interest in other languages and the problems posed by translation. As Jacqueline Cerquiglini- Toulet has argued, translation became associated with trickery through paronomasia, resulting in a powerful metaphor for the problem of understanding in general.59 The diversity and tensions between languages could also be a source of aesthetic pleasure. Like the transformation of the stag at the Feast of the Pheasant, the process of translation not only approximated meanings but also revealed the special qualities of individual languages, their “beauty, ugliness or sensuality,” which could not so easily be transferred.60 Despite this diversity close to home, the archetype of both the pleasures and the uncertainties of strangeness for Western Europe in this period remained the Near East and Byzantium. These strange lands had both a positive valence as the Holy Land and a negative one as the center of the percieved Muslim threat.61 Interest in the Crusades, the Near East, and the exotic more generally was bolstered through both the literary and the visual arts.62 Romances, travel accounts, and guidebooks about the Holy Land were popular and were often produced in lavish illustrated copies for both courtiers and the upper bourgeoisie.63 As a part of this orientation, both relics and icons from the East were particularly prized as foci of religious devotion, their strangeness being thought to lend them authenticity. Icons

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Figure 29. Cambrai Madonna, Italo-Byzantine, possibly Sienese, ca. 1340. Photo: Pol Mayer / Paul M. R. Maeyaert.

also made their way into Western European churches, in the forms of both imported objects and, more frequently, copies.64 Among the most famous examples of holy strangeness is Notre-Dame de Grâce, also known as the Cambrai Madonna (fig. 29). The Cambrai Madonna is a Tuscan adaptation of the Byzantine type known as the Eleousa, or merciful mother, in which Mother and Child lovingly embrace, their cheeks pressed closely together. It was brought to Cambrai from Rome and installed in the cathedral in 1451.65 It quickly caught local attention, and a formal confraternity was established in 1453 to care for it. Fifteenth-century viewers believed St. Luke himself had painted it, and pilgrims journeyed to venerate it, including Dukes Philip the Good and Charles the Bold of Burgundy and King Louis xI of France.66 Despite its supposed pedigree, and perhaps adding to its appeal, the Cambrai Madonna was from the outset the result of cultural mixing, combining Byzantine and Italian painting styles,

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Orthodox iconography, Latin inscriptions, and pseudo-Arabic ornamental lettering. The importance of the cult surrounding the Cambrai Madonna can be felt in its frequent citation and duplication in Netherlandish art. While the copies commissioned from Petrus Christus do not seem to have survived, several other renditions suggest the adaptive process that this strange image underwent when reimagined by Western European artists. The basic strategies of Flemish interpretation can be seen in a surviving fifteenth-century panel attributed to Rogier van der Weyden (fig. 30), in which markers of foreignness such as the distinctive pose are married to local techniques for more naturalistic rendering of physical features.67 This reimagining recalls the roughly contemporary entremet of the nude statue and the lion at the Feast of the Pheasant discussed in chapter 2. Placed on a pillar, the blondehaired ymage was covered by a veil with Greek letters: marked as foreign by her use of Greek, the ymage is also a quintessential pale Franco-Flemish beauty. Likewise, the spiced hippocras that flowed from her breasts combined the local wine of which the Burgundian dukes were so proud with Eastern spices. Whether in a fountain or in a devotional image, the adaptations of imported imagery to fit local tastes raise the question of the extent to which the foreign or strange was conceived of as truly distinct from the native. After all, the aristocracy and rulers of the Crusader kingdoms were often blood relations of Western European rulers; following the Fourth Crusade, Baldwin of Flanders had even become the Byzantine emperor. As an archetype of the exotic, the East proves surprisingly riddled with references to the local. The seemingly clear comparison between the intimate and the foreign breaks down in the face of actual practice. Indeed, the fact that the foreign and the familiar exist in a constant push-pull relationship during this period may be one of the appeals of the concept of strangeness. A telling example of the tension between the strange and the familiar can be found in the surviving tableware known as the All Souls Salt (fig. 31).68 Two other nicknames for this salt—the Huntsman and Giant Salt— derive from its central figure: a bearded man in an open-necked short tunic who strides forward while balancing the salt bowl on his head with one hand and clasping a scimitarlike falchion at his side with the other. His facial hair, simple attire, and curved sword mark him as lower class and potentially exotic, a metallic counterpart to the giant Saracen who served the Holy Church at the Feast of the Pheasant.69 His exposed hands and face were once enameled pink to mimic Northern European skin, suggesting a possible point of contact between him and his medieval users. Yet his size

Figure 30. Rogier van der Weyden, Flemish, ca. 1399–1464, Virgin and Child, after 1454, oil on wood, 129⁄16 × 9 in (31.9 × 22.9 cm). The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection.

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Figure 31. All Souls Salt, LI179.1. Reproduced by kind permission of the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

compromises his humanity. In comparison to the viewer, this clearly adult bearded man is impossibly small. In comparison to his own sculpted world, however, he is impossibly large. Miniature stags, boars, hares, and dogs seem to move through the green grass at his feet, along with two smaller huntsmen blowing horns and a bagpipe player positioned directly between the giant huntsman’s legs. The contrast in scale between the hunt at the base and the main figure makes what at first seemed a miniature human (smaller than the viewer) into a towering giant who dwarfs his imaginary world.70 The All Souls Salt embodies a number of contradictions: between the civilized and the wild, the miniature and the gigantic, the familiar and the

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startling. In part, these are tensions implicit in the subject of the giant itself. On the one hand, giants were among the monstrous races believed to inhabit the far reaches of the world, inherently evil monsters that were signs of both pride and gluttony.71 Not only foreign themselves, giants were in a sense the cause of one of the key signs of foreignness. The biblical giant Nimrod, whose pride had led him to have the Tower of Babel constructed, caused foreign languages to exist in the first place.72 While often cited as the builders of architectural feats such as Stonehenge, giants were equally seen as wild forces of nature antithetical to human culture.73 On the other hand, just as they hovered between created and natural wonders, giants also lay between being hominid and human. Average-size people could, then as now, give birth to giant offspring:74 Saracens were often held to have giants among them, but Christian giants were also acknowledged to exist.75 Although such births were sometimes believed to result from intercourse with demons, giants could become members of civil society and even saints, as the popular St. Christopher demonstrates.76 Among the elites, there were court giants as well as court dwarves; Philip the Good, for example, employed a giant named Hans.77 Giants were thus intimate strangers,78 either threats or loyal retainers depending upon circumstance. The All Souls Salt toys with these myriad presuppositions surrounding giants. The main figure is a giant, and so connected to both violence and the natural world. But he is also a civilized being whose body is tightly controlled—arms at taut angles leading in toward the center, torso stiffly upright and balanced despite his forward movement. He is, moreover, subservient despite the sword at his side: his true purpose is to balance a dish for the user’s spices on his head, the immense size of which makes his body seem almost fragile in comparison. The overall effect is therefore not one of terror or threat but rather of order and constraint. The foreign appears here only to be controlled, its remnants maintained in order to stress the ultimate triumph of the powers of normative civilization. In addition to its strange subject, the All Souls Salt evokes the aesthetic mode of strangeness. While Susan Stewart does not address the All Souls Salt or the fifteenth century directly, she has proposed two interrelated and opposed categories that can help illuminate the contrasting forces carefully balanced within the salt: the gigantic, connected to landscape, which can be seen only in fragments and which makes the human body insignificant; and the miniature, connected to civilization and facture, which creates a protected and malleable version of experience.79 The All Souls Salt oscillates between these two options. From the point of view of the huntsmen and bagpipe player on the base, the central man—five times their height—is

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a giant indeed. Yet an adult viewer stands in roughly the same proportion to the foot-tall giant as the giant does to the men at his feet. The All Souls Salt thus presents a series of ever-changing perceptions in relation to height and scale, culminating in the supremacy of the viewer. Enjoyable on a formal level, such play also provided a political pleasure, reasserting the control exercised by those wealthy enough to own and use such a salt not only over employees like huntsmen but also over unusual beings such as giants and the powers they represent. At the same time, by making such users into giants themselves the All Souls Salt creates an underlying unease about diners and their relationship to the qualities of the giant. In particular, such parallelism draws attention to the possible presence of pride and gluttony in the viewer, natural instincts that must be tamed and that constantly threaten participants at the elaborate banquets where such a complex salt might be used. Strangeness thus raises many of the same issues as does the marvelous with which it is so often linked. Both qualities appear relatively straightforward at first glance, but further investigation reveals them to be polyvalent and at times self-contradictory. If strangeness is typical of those far away, it can also be found close to home. The marvelous may be associated with wealth and great lords, but it is equally a matter of wit and rising new elites. This dual political message was particularly useful for late medieval rulers, who employed these modes both to assert their own sovereignty and to create an aristocracy based on shared values as well as birth. Both terms denote not only certain types of subject matter—such as exotica—but also certain types of aesthetic attitudes: the evocation of surprise in particular, often tied to the recognition of craft and the questioning of normal perceptual modes.

VAN EYCK REVISITED Alerted to the multiple resonances of marvelous and strange, I would like to return to the work of Jan van Eyck. While there is no known documentary evidence linking van Eyck explicitly to festival production, he would inevitably have had contact with at least the broader aesthetic preferences cultivated in such settings through his position as a varlet de chambre of Philip the Good. His skill at manipulating the conceptual and formal strategies of the marvelous and the strange can be seen in works such as the Berlin Ma­ donna in a Church and the Ghent Altarpiece, in which he exploited these effects (often misinterpreted by art historians today as intrinsically secular) for devotional ends.

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As discussed above, scholarship on van Eyck’s Madonna in a Church has focused on the fact that the Virgin and Child are significantly larger in scale than the building surrounding them. To the oft-repeated ideas that this disproportion creates a connection between the Virgin and the Church or provides a template for meditative visualization, the further point that the manipulation of scale is also a method for creating (or, alternately, revealing) the marvelous nature of the holy figures portrayed must now be added. The original frame signals the likelihood of strangeness in this painting. The sides contained lines from a Latin hymn Dies est laetitae: “This mother is the daughter / This father is a newborn / Who has heard of such a thing / God born a man.” The paradoxes included here—a human God, a mother-daughter, an infant-father—were all established doctrinal commonplaces in Christianity. Yet the line “Who has heard of such a thing?” reminds viewers of the oddity of these claims, opening the viewers’ eyes to reconsider, and ideally their heart to a new awe, in much the same way as had the song of the entremet of the stag at the Feast of the Pheasant. Drawing on the conditional nature of judgments of strangeness, the frame thus shifts the reader-viewer’s perception to make familiar doctrine unfamiliar, underscoring the miraculous circumvention of natural laws in the two figures the painting depicts. In the painting itself (fig. 28), this promise of surprise is borne out through manipulation of the formal means used to convey an utterly familiar iconography. One painterly technique employed by van Eyck is a tricky play with scale and perception similar to that used later in the All Souls Salt. The colossal size of the Virgin and Child is emphasized by everything within the painting, from the small figures of the angels whom they dwarf to the delicate column fluting that is identical with the Virgin’s dress. Yet at the same time, this is an extremely small painting, a bare 14 × 31 cm. The viewer’s sense of scale thus becomes woefully unbalanced as it must shift and shift again to keep pace with the task of looking at and around the painted surface. The manipulation of perception does not end with scale. While much has been made of the fact that the arches of both the transept and the nave rest on the shoulders of the Virgin, little attention has been paid to the perceptual doubling required to make this connection. After all, the two arches and Virgin occupy the same plane only if this is a two- rather than three-dimensional space; she rather obviously stands well in front of both of them in three-dimensional terms. The familiar metaphor of the Virgin as the Church is thus legible only when the realistically rendered space of the church interior is also recognized as a flat surface. Once again the viewer

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must both look at and through the surface, here faced with the great paradox posed by fifteenth-century painters’ experiments in spatial depth, which requires paintings to be read as simultaneously two- and three-dimensional. Just as metaphor can draw attention to poetic invention, so too the painted relationship between Virgin and building reminds the viewer of the compositional craft that went into forming the painted surface. This redirecting of attention allows viewers partial access to the creative process of the painter without, as it were, giving away too much. To understand van Eyck’s craft to this extent does not allow one to replicate his hand; if anything, this glimpse into the creative process points to the gap in skill between the artist who can achieve such effects and the viewer who can only partially retrace them. Yet it does allow at least a partial alignment between making and viewing, both of which could be modified here, as they are in the feast accounts discussed above, with the adverb marvelous. This attention to artistic skill is furthermore aligned with the miraculous character of the paradoxical figures portrayed. The fact that the Virgin and Child function both compositionally and perceptually as the meeting point of painted surface and illusionistic space is a testament to their importance and marvelous nature. That this painterly play is intended to draw equal and simultaneous attention to van Eyck’s artistic skill and the religious significance of the central figures is further suggested by the juxtaposition of the statue of the Virgin and Child in the background and the lifelike giant pair. Craig Harbison has suggested that this statue might be meant to represent an object of cultic veneration, which has inspired the outscaled vision.80 Yet if this image is in some sense a vindication of such cult practices, it also suggests that painting is better able to meet devotional needs than sculpture. Not only does the painting manage to portray both sculpture and the meditations it can provoke, but it also demonstrates that the painted image forms a more responsive type of devotional image. While the giant and sculpted Virgin and Child pairs are similar in almost every respect of pose and dress, the sculpted Virgin looks down at the Christ child while the giant Virgin smiles peacefully toward the viewer’s right, gazing out of the picture frame toward the location where a pendant donor portrait may have originally been placed.81 In a perceptual play similar to those elsewhere in the painting, the viewer might equally remember that this is not a devotional sculpture and a vision but rather a skillful combination in paint of a sculpture and a mental image which together form an iconic rendering of the Virgin and Child for use in devotional practice. The manipulation of scale in the Madonna in a Church thus serves as more than a symbol of Mary’s tradi-

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Figure 32. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441), the Ghent Altarpiece (open state). Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

tional association with the Church or of possible interest in miraculous visions, although it may also be these things. It is rather part of an artistic practice and reception that favored polyvalence when possible and associated paradox with skillful making and marvelous being alike. Similar uses of the aesthetic of strangeness occur elsewhere in the Eyckian oeuvre. The Adoration of the Lamb or Ghent Altarpiece, executed at least in part by Jan van Eyck for Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut’s family chapel in St. Bavos, Ghent, is arguably the best-known Eyckian altarpiece today.82 The interior (fig. 32) portrays a multivalent religious scene. According to most modern reconstructions, in the bottom register myriad saints— grouped into classes such as virgins, hermits, and confessors—move in from both sides to contemplate and worship the Lamb of God, who stands on an altar spurting blood that turns into a river of hosts. Above this scene in the top register sits God, wearing a papal crown and flanked by the Virgin, John the Baptist, and groups of angelic musicians. A shamed Adam and Eve stand at either end of the upper register, their postlapsarian state indicated by the leaves covering their genitals. While the precise details of the iconography here may always be subject to debate, the general connection between the

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Fall and the Eucharistic sacrifice that rectifies it, and between heaven and the community of the saints, is relatively straightforward. Any more extended discussion of the altarpiece’s multiple resonances, however, reveals far greater complexity. Among the many other layers of meaning embedded in the altarpiece’s program is a subtle discourse on the relationship between local Flanders and Eastern Christendom. In keeping with patterns of Franco-Flemish interest and investment in the Holy Land and Byzantium discussed above, the altarpiece in general suggests a rapprochement between West and East. For example, while the enthroned God of the upper register justifies the Roman Catholic claim of papal supremacy by wearing a three-tiered tiara, his grouping with Mary and John the Baptist rather than John the Evangelist forms a standard Byzantine iconography known as the Deesis, uncommon in Western European art. Similarly, the heavenly setting in the bottom register combines Flemish-style churches with a round building; this shape would have recalled the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a building that itself was by this time a mixture of Byzantine and Western Crusader elements. Heaven, it would seem, brings together both forms of Christianity. This ecumenical spirit is particularly interesting in light of contemporary discussions surrounding the Eucharistic rite that is the focus of the bottom register. The river of small disklike hosts that flows from the blood of the Lamb may seem innocuous to a modern viewer, yet the form of the Eucharist was a matter of serious concern in the late Middle Ages, and the difference between the leavened Orthodox loaves and the unleavened Roman wafers was at times a serious bar to shared communion. There is some evidence to suggest that van Eyck’s frequent patron Philip the Good was interested in bridging this divide. One manuscript in Philip’s collection notes that the Orthodox use loaves instead of smaller forms of bread for the host, and that this difference was once the cause of some consternation.83 In order to determine which practice was correct, the Roman Church tested both types of blessed host by throwing them in a fire, in which neither burned. The author concludes that it is acceptable for each to worship according to his manner. Within this short narrative, it is the marvelous ability of both materials to remain unburned that justifies differences in practice. The interior of the Ghent Altarpiece thus utilizes multiple layers of iconographic reference in order to both register and domesticate foreignness in a manner very similar to other French and Flemish strategies for managing the conceptual Near East. By placing this discourse of foreignness within scenes meant to show a perfected heavenly realm, van Eyck further

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suggests the miraculous nature not only of the foreign in and of itself but also of its oddly successful combination with the local. Yet the Ghent Altarpiece does not draw on the tensions of strangeness only in its interior or solely through iconography. The exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece (plate 4) is less familiar to a general audience than its oftreproduced interior, but not less intriguing. The exterior is divided into three registers, all of which manipulate lighting effects and foreshortening to tie the pictured space with the space of the viewer. Presiding over the whole are figures of the ancient Sibyls, who were believed to have foretold the birth of Jesus. Already co-opted by tradition from pagan Roman religion into Christianity, these prophetesses are represented in dress associated with the Portuguese ladies in the service of Philip the Good’s wife Isabella of Portugal, once again proposing a notion of strangeness that would be oddly familiar. The holy figures below are likewise partially brought into the viewer’s world (or the viewer into theirs), although this is accomplished as much through formal means as through details of clothing and setting.84 The lower register shows two saints and two secular patrons, all in shallow niches. Or rather, it shows two patrons and two statues of saints, complete with statuary bases.85 A parallel between statue and human is created here through the niches, but many indicators separate out the depictions of living beings and objects. The two statues are shown standing upright, while the patrons kneel. The statues are at a smaller scale than the patrons, since the standing statues and kneeling patrons fill relatively equal portions of their niches. Most immediately noticeable, color here is one of the key means for creating a distinction between (pictured) living and inanimate, patron and saint: the grisaille of the statues ties them to the architectural elements and distinguishes them from the rich red clothing and simulated skin of the patrons.86 In the scene above, however, this distinction between the quotidian and the holy is held in tension rather than simply asserted or denied. The Annunciation is a strange amalgam of the characteristics used to distinguish human and statue in the lower register. The scale of Mary and the archangel in relation to background is similar to that of the patrons, as is their kneeling pose. A connection with the saint statues is created through the use of a semi-grisaille, with color increasing as the eye journeys up the figures’ bodies. Although a concentration of color in the hands and face is common in semi-grisailles found elsewhere, here this convention casts a curious indeterminacy over the figures. The distinguishing use of color so elegantly exploited in the lower register is upset in the middle register. The Virgin and Gabriel are at once tied to the world of the colorful, fleshy patrons and

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joined with the holy solidity of the saints.87 The narrative scene thus serves as a sort of negotiation between sacred and living, here staged in terms of simulated materiality—painted stone and painted flesh. The combination of foreign subjects and formal play typical of the marvelous and strange more broadly was deployed primarily for its possible religious significance in the surviving works of Jan van Eyck. Whether referencing Eastern Christendom or the far west of Portugal, the Ghent Altarpiece partially reworked the foreign to show its possible alignments with the familiar. At the same time, the visual playfulness of both the Madonna in a Church and the Ghent Altarpiece signals the rapprochement of recognizable artistic skill and celebration of religious truths. In both paintings, compositional effects are manipulated in an attempt to reveal the special nature of the Virgin in particular—in the Madonna in a Church this is accomplished primarily through scale and spatial arrangement, in the Ghent Altarpiece through color and simulated textures. Yet these same effects simultaneously draw attention to the skill of the artist, who not only can manipulate the perception of space, materiality, and animation but in doing so surpasses the skill of workers in other media, such as sculptors. These two goals appear to have been not only coexistent but also mutually supportive, despite the attempts by modern scholars to see the assertion of artistic identity or appreciation of skill as an intrinsically antidevotional act.

PAINTING AND PERFORMANCE There is no record of Jan van Eyck’s ever producing an entremet per se, yet the sympathy between the strangeness of the Ghent Altarpiece and the heterotopic space of festival was apparently evident to fifteenth-century viewers. If the division between human and statue is complicated on the outer panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, the reception of the altarpiece complicated the division between painting and performance. In 1458 the rhetoricians of Ghent staged the interior panels in an elaborate tableau vivant during the joyeuse entrée of van Eyck’s patron Philip the Good of Burgundy. The stakes for this display of loyalty were unusually high. Five years earlier, the military forces of the city of Ghent (dominated politically by the craft guilds at the time) and the forces of Philip the Good had fought in nearby Gavere on July 23, 1453. An estimated seventeen to eighteen thousand of Ghent’s thirty thousand soldiers were killed.88 Ghent was forced to ask for peace, and Philip imposed harsh legal and financial penalties. The city attempted to gain full reconciliation through an official ducal visit, but Philip refused for five years. The duke and his court finally settled on Sun-

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day April 23, 1458, for Philip’s official entry into Ghent. Given the political importance of the occasion, it seems reasonable to suppose that some effort was made by the Gantois not only to provide a fantastic entry but also to suit it to court tastes. The parade route extended from outside the city to the duke’s official residence. The progress along the route took roughly four hours, in large part because of the nineteen tableaux vivant that the duke and his entourage paused to view on the way. Roughly at the halfway mark of this route was an elaborate staging of the interior of the Ghent Altarpiece involving around ninety performers.89 The stage was divided into three levels, each of which was roughly 100 by 28 pieds. The upper register had three enthroned figures (God with crown and scepter, Mary, and John the Baptist) in the foreground with an angelic orchestra behind them. A curtain closed over this register once the duke’s party had time to take in its splendor. Attention was then directed to the lower two registers. In the second register were combined all the saintly groups from the original altarpiece (Confessors, Patriarchs, Prophets, Christian knights, Judges on the left; Virgins, Apostles, Martyrs, Pilgrims on the right), each represented by six actors. In the center of the bottom register was an altar inscribed with the biblical text “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” On the altar was a lamb surrounded by rays of light. From his chest, blood flowed into a chalice. Around the lamb were angels holding the instruments of the Passion and censers. In addition, there was a forestage with a marble fountain of life that poured out aqua vitae, which was given to Duke Philip to drink. How should this performance be understood? One short contemporary description of the event comes from Jean Chartier. Chartier was the official historian of Charles VII of France from 1437, and although his account is incomplete, it provides one of the best sources for French history of the mid-fifteenth century. As an experienced observer of such events but not a planning member of this particular entry, Chartier gives an informed but comparatively impartial description. A visitor to the city, Chartier does not seem to have recognized the reference to van Eyck in the performance. Instead, the fountain is the focus for Chartier, who sees it as the center around which all the other elements revolve: “in the middle was a fountain and around it was the Church triumphant.”90 The prominence of the fountain is in part explained by the fact that it was the symbol of the chamber of rhetoric that staged the performance, but it had effects beyond this. The fountain, a site of consumption, transforms this street performance into something very close to an entremet such as the hippocras-spouting ymage at the Feast of the Pheasant. Like other en-

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tremets, the fountain not only distributes drink but also transgresses the boundary between spectacle and spectator as the observing duke is invited to become a part of the performance. The aqua vitae provided in the rhetors’ fountain not only creates the movement seen in other entremets but also fits well within the appreciation of playful doublespeak discussed in this chapter. On the one hand, aqua vitae (water of life) designates baptismal water, a meaning that clearly aligns with a large basin of blessed water such as that shown in the Ghent Altarpiece. On the other hand, aqua vitae was a long-standing term for various types of hard alcohol, which is the more probable substance that actually filled the fountain used for the tableaux vivant. Without undermining the religious message of the original altarpiece, the rhetors’ guild was evidently willing to indulge Philip the Good with a pun that would become evident only once he agreed to participate by drinking. As a close examination of the concepts marvelous and strange have shown, the boundaries here between the secular and the sacred, the playful and the devout, were evidently drawn far differently in the fifteenth century than they have come to be today. Even when occurring outside the feast hall, artistic production in multiple media exhibited a similar set of aesthetic strategies and concerns. In a telling moment of condemnation, Johan Huizinga once remarked of late medieval entremets: “We cannot imagine a greater distance than that which exists between the consecrated atmosphere of the Ghent and Louvain altars and these expressions of barbaric princely ostentation.”91 As always an exquisite stylist, in a seemingly offhand comment Huizinga drew two sides and placed them in total opposition. On one side are the paintings of van Eyck, which are holy because of both their devotional purpose and their beauty. On the other side is festival, which is princely and secular, lacks any deeper significance, and is utterly uncultured, indeed barbaric. Piety thus opposes secular nonsense; the high art of painting stands against and above the tasteless world of the time-based and decorative arts. Yet the separation posited by Huizinga would be largely unintelligible to the late medieval elites he described. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, playful intelligence was a feature of both performance and painting, arts that could equally provoke pleasure and reflection. The staging of the Ghent Altarpiece, like the entremets, serves as a welcome reminder that the divisions modern audiences assume between religion and politics, object and action, were far less firm in the late Middle Ages than they are today. Devotional and secular art alike could draw power from artistic skill and tensions between simulated materials.

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Notions of play and ambiguity seem to have pleased audiences whether they were looking at a fountain or a painting, and were sufficiently malleable that they could be employed in the service of a variety of messages. An altarpiece could provide the script for a live performance to celebrate the triumphal entry of a secular ruler rather than a religious rite. The strategies used to create visual interest in a saltcellar could also be employed to impress viewers with the miraculous nature of the Virgin and Child. Although here I have concentrated on Eyckian painting, similar strategies can be found not only in the school of Rogier van der Weyden but also outside regions directly controlled by the Burgundian dukes. Iconography often played an important part in creating a sense of strangeness, whether evoking mythical giants or Byzantine Madonnas. Yet the marvelous and strange nature of much artistic practice in all media might more properly be understood as a shared rhetorical strategy, involving composition as much as subject. The regular use of wonder and merveille to describe human perception and creation underscores a close linkage between these two realms of endeavor and signals the active involvement of the viewer in determining what is or is not strange in any given moment. Strangeness thus reveals a pattern of artistic production and appreciation that runs throughout elite culture in fifteenth-century Northern Europe, drawing attention both to the mechanisms by which art moved its audience and to the fluidity of ideas between realms that are all too often anachronistically divided in modern scholarship.

chapter six

Wedding Reception

T

he preceding chapters have traced some of the many ways in which banqueting encountered and shaped late medieval elite society. As part of an extended and carefully orchestrated process of socialization, feasts promoted many of the values and strategies for self-examination found in ethical manuscripts and courtesy manuals. At the same time, feasts fed and fed on a set of aesthetic values in which wit, skill, and discernment were prized, facture and reception inextricably entangled. Just as they met general cultural needs, the procedures and sensory stimulation of feasting could also be employed to create specific outcomes. This functional emphasis is most obvious in banquets that declare their planners’ intentions, as when the Feast of the Pheasant culminates in a solicitation of crusading vows. However, banquets arranged for annual celebrations such as New Year’s or for lifechange events such as marriage likewise employed the sophisticated aesthetic vocabulary of feasting in an attempt to mold the minds and hearts of their guest-participants. As this chapter will explore in the case of the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York, an individual feast might be enacted for a limited time in a single location, but it nevertheless continued to reverberate in the political, personal, and artistic production that followed after it. Recent attempts to trace the possible social and political influence of medieval feasts reflect a persistent methodological tension between political and intellectual historians and more anthropologically influenced historians and archaeologists. Political and intellectual historians have attempted to combat the belief that the act of feasting in and of itself is primarily frivolous by looking at the particularities of individual event’s programmatic content, which they read as a type of visualized policy speech. At the same time, a growing number of archaeologists and social historians 164

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have turned to anthropological models to defend feasting. These studies often treat feasting as a general social practice to be read in terms of crosscultural categories such as gift giving, community building, and status competition rather than examining the specific details of individual events.1 Each of these approaches provides useful insight into elements of the medieval banquet. Yet the bifurcation of feast studies into microhistory and grand narratives has tended to obscure the rich ground between these two extremes. The resulting severing of the ties among feast aesthetics, symbolic programs, and social effects distorts both single events and feasting as a whole. On the one hand, the generalizing tendency of most anthropological literature fails to account for the creativity of individual feasts and their influence on other historical events. On the other hand, the study of single banquets in isolation often operates without knowledge of the varied set of practices in the larger feasting tradition that individual events manipulate, ignoring the fact that any feast’s success or failure in reaching particular goals can be understood only if this broader set of customs and values is taken into account. In what follows, I would like to chart a middle course between these approaches by examining the first night of banqueting celebrating the 1468 marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. The complex play of symbols and sensory effects employed for these celebrated festivities in some respects aligns with larger social patterns in late medieval marriage and gift exchange and can be truly legible only in relation to them. Yet the specific iconographic and sensual program of this banquet also actively engaged with social norms to express very specific desires for the particular new union being forged. In keeping with the general tradition of marriage banquets, this message centered on the figure of the bride, who in this instance was encouraged to join not only with her husband but also with her new host of female relatives and her new people. The concepts of gifting and reciprocity highlighted in cross-cultural anthropological studies of feasting practices are concretized in this instance to meet a specific set of political concerns acting within a specific cultural formation. While the marriage ultimately failed to produce a male heir, it arguably succeeded in producing the type of socially engaged duchess that the entremets of the first night’s banquet requested. The well-documented later career and artistic patronage of Margaret of York provide an unusually full record with which to examine how the goals and modes of an individual event might reverberate across time and be wrestled with by a participant such as Margaret, who for many years continued to consider and nuance the image of herself as duchess that she encountered in the feast hall.2

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THE TRADITION OF MARRIAGE FEASTS In order to comprehend the particular innovations of the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York, it is essential first to understand the larger tradition of wedding feasting to which these festivities belonged. Because current Western culture inherited many marital practices from the medieval period, it can at times be all too easy to imagine that the institution has remained largely unchanged in the interim. However, the existence of similarities should not be allowed to obscure the very real differences between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the twenty-first. The shorthand for marriage in the modern West is relatively constant, reinforced not only through movies and television but also through an entire industry of bridal shops and magazines. At its most basic level, this imagery depicts two people (usually of different genders) exchanging vows, rings, and a kiss under the guidance of a minister or justice of the peace with several witnesses. Common additions include specifications of dress (the bride is often in white, the groom in a suit), location (a church or, less frequently, city hall), and specifications about the nature of the witnesses (family members and gender-appropriate companions for each member of the couple). Fourteenth- or fifteenth-century viewers confronted by such images would probably be able to understand their basic import, but certain details that are vital today would seem rather irrelevant to them, and vice versa. The practices and the images of late medieval marriage were more varied than those enshrined in popular culture today, in both the range of activities included and the variety of ways in which these acts could be acceptably executed. By the later Middle Ages, marriage was established as a sacrament of the Roman Church, in which the union of the two individuals was taken as a sign of the love between God and humans. It therefore appears regularly in sacramental iconographic cycles in all media.3 These images usually depict a couple clasping each other’s right hand in a ritual known as handfasting that often accompanied the exchange of vows. This simple iconography can be broadly divided into two groups. In one iconography of marriage, the handfasting couple is Adam and Eve, whose union is overseen only by God. An even more common iconographic type is similar to that usually found today, with the couple grasping each other’s right hand while a priest blesses them and witnesses look on. Sacramental imagery thus concentrates, like modern wedding images, on the exchange of vows. Outside of expressly sacramental imagery, however, late medieval depictions of marriage become more unfamiliar to modern eyes. A typical example of the imagery focused on the public, festive, and extended nature of

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marital alliance appears in the six miniatures depicting marriage executed by Loyset Liédet for the Burgundian ducal copy of a collection of Carolingian romances referred to as the Histoire de Charles Martel.4 None of these six miniatures are set in a church or chapel, and only two show the taking of vows (one before a priest, the other before a man in court clothing). All four of the remaining miniatures concentrate on the festivities surrounding the vows. Two of these miniatures show wedding banquets (fig. 33); two show the entry of the bride into a city. Although some of these scenes might seem to depict something other than marriage itself, the accompanying rubrics stress that these are scenes of marriage. Thus, for example, a relatively typical banquet scene is labeled “How Duke Guerin of Metz married Beatrice, the daughter of King Ansseys” (fig. 33).5 While the rubrics typically begin by evoking the male partner, who is usually the more important figure in the larger narrative, the bride is singled out for attention in all four miniatures. In the banquet depicting the marriage of Guerin de Metz, for example, his new bride Beatrice is immediately noticeable not only as the sole woman in the scene but also as the seeming endpoint of a sequence of narrative action extending from the turning man seated across from her through the supplicant who approaches from the right. In short, marriage in the Histoire de Charles Martel consists not only or even most importantly of the exchange of vows, but rather of a series of events among which the vows, processions, and feasts are arguably of equal consequence, in all of which the bride is repeatedly highlighted. This multiplication of possible marriage iconographies raises several interconnected questions. How does the exchange of vows that is the focus of the seven sacraments imagery relate to the range of activities that can symbolize marriage in the Histoire de Charles Martel? What lies behind the emphasis on the public nature of the marriage ceremony in so many images? Why is the presence of the bride (both by herself and as part of a couple) emphasized so strongly? How does this range of imagery relate to the complex realities of late medieval marriage ceremonies? Some answers to these questions lie in the disjunctions between late medieval marriage theology and practice. The sacrament of marriage resides in a free exchange of vows between the two spouses and thus can be performed by any eligible man and woman anywhere and at any time.6 Although church marriage (in facie Ecclesiae) was relatively common in France, Flanders, and Brabant,7 it was not obligatory until the sixteenth century.8 Priests might bless the event, and family and friends witness it, but these elements were not required from a theological point of view. From a practical standpoint, however, the validity of any marriage as a

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Figure 33. Wedding banquet of Beatrice of Cologne and Guerin de Metz, in Histoire de Charles Martel. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 8, fol. 326.

legal and social entity required public recognition. Given the usual troubles that accompany both money and sex, it comes as little surprise that a large quantity of marriage litigation took place in the late medieval period.9 The courts were particularly troubled by clandestine marriages, a blanket term that covers all “marriages celebrated in secret or which fell short of the complete form.”10 Litigated clandestine marriages included marriages actually carried out with the blessings of a priest but not publicized in the larger community to which the spouses belonged: precisely the type of marriage shown in the Adam and Eve wedding iconography.11 While a clandestine marriage was in principle as binding as any other, in reality it was extremely difficult to prove and thus to maintain. Religious ritual and theological support were not sufficient; a couple also needed public acceptance and several reliable witnesses to defend the sanctity of their union. Conflict between the doctrinal and social definitions of marriage in large part accounts for the differences in the strategies for visualizing it. The theological position that a couple administered the sacrament to each other and needed only God as witness manifests in the iconography of Adam and

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Eve’s handfasting before God. The iconography of the couple before a priest and other witnesses, on the other hand, depicts the ideal marriage in a fallen world, where proof may be required. This need for publicity is further emphasized by the elaboration of scenes in the Histoire de Charles Martel, which reflect the elaboration of actual marriage practices intended to make unions as public as possible. The tension between the theological and the social aspects of marriage that is apparent in both visual imagery and legal disputes deeply shaped the form of marriage in the late medieval period. The need not only to have a free exchange of consent between eligible parties but also to prove that such an exchange had taken place combined to create highly extended and public marriage rituals.12 Even with love matches, socially acceptable marriages began with negotiations by go-betweens.13 These negotiations culminated in a betrothal in which vows were exchanged in the future tense, usually before witnesses. A period of engagement followed the betrothal. During this period banns were read in the couple’s home parishes to determine whether an impediment existed—a lack of objection indicating that the community agreed that both parties were single and not related in a prohibited degree. This period of engagement could extend for several years, particularly when one or both members of the couple were underage. While the Church made a firm distinction between these future-tense vows—which were breakable—and the present-tense vows that were not, there was some practical confusion surrounding the degree to which the initial vows were binding. In 1414, for example, Catherine of Burgundy, daughter of Duke John the Fearless, was returned to her father by Louis of Anjou, king of Sicily, to whose son she had been contracted and at whose court she had lived for three years of engagement. Both the Bourgeois of Paris and Enguerrand de Monstrelet state explicitly that Catherine had married Louis’s son before being sent to Louis’s court, and thus her dismissal with no explanation led her father to develop a deep hatred for Louis.14 Yet while these two contemporary witnesses use the verb espouser to describe Catherine’s failed alliance, the fact John was unable to insist on the union’s being maintained, as well as the fact that both Catherine’s partner and she were soon married to other people without any comment as to the necessity of securing an annulment, suggests that vows in the present tense were never exchanged.15 That engagement might be conflated with marriage by multiple observers suggests that the distinction between the two was not as clear in practice as it was in canon law. In the espousal itself, vows in the present tense were exchanged along with small love tokens, again before witnesses. A wedding feast was usually

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held following this religious ceremony, perhaps with other festivities such as jousting. Among the upper aristocracy these celebrations could take days, and at least once extended for a full month. The couple usually consummated their marriage at some point during this festive period, which might again be attended by communal activities such as charivari. In addition to these events common to the wealthier classes generally, the marriage of rulers tended to involve at least one joyeuse entrée of the spouse(s) into major cities of the country she, he, or they now ruled, both when the marriage entailed a change in sovereignty and when it did not. The staging of entries was particularly frequent for brides. Isabella of Portugal married Philip the Good of Burgundy in Bruges and then quickly proceeded to Ghent to make a joyeuse entrée.16 Catherine of France and Henry V of England both made entries into Paris following their marriage—she accompanied by her mother, he accompanied by her father—although Catherine had long been a French princess and her father Charles V remained king.17 The events that ideally took place in the marriages of rulers are thus relatively consistent with the range of scenes in the Histoire de Charles Martel, with its bridal entries, exchanges of vows, and wedding feasts. Feasts recurred throughout the long sequence of events leading up to and surrounding the finalization of late medieval weddings. Chroniclers’ accounts frequently describe the banquets that mark the marriage process at almost every step, culminating in the feast following the exchange of vows. For ruling elites, banqueting began with the marriage negotiations. The Count of Foix, for example, hosted the Hungarian delegates who came to arrange the union of their prince Lancelot to Madeleine of France; the splendor of the entremets he had staged thrilled the ambassadors and made them more eager to come to an agreement on the marriage.18 While the premature death of Lancelot called a halt to that betrothal, the general practice of elaborately fêting the ambassadors who served as go-betweens at the highest levels of society seems to have been widespread. At times these events could even overlap with the celebration of marriages by other couples. Thus the mission sent to Portugal to negotiate the marriage of Isabella of Portugal with Philip the Good was invited to take part in celebrations then being held at the Portuguese court for the marriage of Edward of Portugal and the sister of Alphonse of Aragon.19 Such festivities served two basic purposes. On the one hand, a well-executed banquet might help convince the ambassadors and their principals of the value of the proposed match. On the other, the splendor of a banquet helped advertise the possibility of the match, beginning the process of securing public recognition of the eventual couple.

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The most common and elaborate marriage feasts followed the exchange of vows, the direct ancestor of the modern wedding banquet. This banquet was a traditional site to announce one’s marriage in a highly public and memorable way, making witnesses of the gathered family, friends, and colleagues whose attendance proved their acceptance of the new couple’s validity. Since the vows were made prior to the meal and often in a different location, participation in the feast in and of itself was no real legal proof that the marriage had actually taken place: a witness to the banquet was not necessarily a witness to the vows. Yet a connection between the two forms of witnessing continued to be made, and attendance at the wedding banquet could be cited in testimony proving that a marriage had been concluded, although this type of evidence seems to have become less common in aristocratic marriage litigation over the course of the fifteenth century.20 Participation and the display of consent in wedding banquets were not limited to, or even primarily focused on, the invited guests. In Geneviève Ribordy’s study of marital litigation among the French nobility, she notes that when wedding feasts are mentioned in the proceedings, they are generally used both to prove that the wedding took place and especially “to attest to the consent of the new bride participating joyfully in the celebration.”21 The bride’s performance at the wedding feast was the most scrutinized of all. This attention to the bride is likewise a marked feature of the illumination cycle in the Histoire de Charles Martel, suggesting that both images and feasts relate to a larger societal concern with the figure of the bride. The degree to which women, particularly nonwidowed aristocrats, actually had control over their marriage choices remains highly debatable, but this may in fact have only fueled the importance of feasting and other marriage rituals as ways of socially producing the image of a bride’s free and enthusiastic embrace of her new role and family. Late medieval marriages in general, and elite marriages in particular, were thus in practice extended affairs. The series of activities that made up the establishment of a new couple is captured both in written accounts and in the varied imagery that attempted to convey the concept of marriage. On the one hand, marriage was a sacrament of Roman Christianity, dogmatically declared to be the result of a free exchange of vows between two individuals without the need for other participants or elaboration. This view of marriage was understandably conveyed in the visual programs designed for religious institutions. Yet marriage was by definition enacted by the laity (indeed, the term laity refers to the ability of these individuals to wed), for whom marriage was as much a social as a theological concern. Both chroniclers’ descriptions and imagery such as that in the Histoire de

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Charles Martel thus forward a rather different vision from that found in church programs. For the elite laity, an elaborate sequence of public events bookended and all but replaced the actual exchange of vows. Beginning with negotiations and betrothal and ending after the wedding proper, these highly public displays both made known and helped craft consent to the new union. While present-tense vows were often exchanged in relative privacy, the festivities surrounding them created a public image of the married couple. This new vision was directed both outward to the larger community and inward toward the couple themselves, particularly the bride, who emerges as both the star of and a primary audience addressed by the marriage celebrations. Feasting is a persistent feature of this process, repeatedly emerging as an effective mode for negotiating the competing concerns that arose at each stage.

THE MARRIAGE OF MARGARET OF YORK AND CHARLES THE BOLD The late medieval wedding feasts described by chroniclers and memoirists combine many varied attributes, acting as metonymic representations and instantiations of aristocratic marriage as a whole. To do this, elite marriage feasts negotiated a variety of possible and at times conflicting visions of the nature of marriage by simultaneously displaying the consent of participants and witnesses, transitioning the bride into a new set of social roles, and making the new union memorable for attendees.22 Wedding banquets address these goals through manipulation of the norms of banqueting and through specific programmatic elements. With their ability to cross boundaries and turn spectators into participants, entremets played a key role in these complex negotiations between multiple needs. A particularly successful case of this larger social practice took place in 1468 in what was arguably the marriage of the century, when the Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, married the English princess Margaret of York. An examination of some of the key early moments in this ten-day celebration can illustrate the flexibility possible within the general tradition of marriage banqueting, as the planners and participants began to forge a delicately nuanced image of the new union and of Margaret of York’s place within the line of Burgundian duchesses. Like most marriages in which significant political and economic capital was at stake, the alliance of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York was both negotiated over a protracted period and driven by practical concerns far more than personal compatibility.23 Discussion of the possible pairing began

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in 1465, shortly after the death of Charles’s second wife and in the midst of a costly trade war between Burgundy and England that had brought English wool and cloth exports to their lowest point for the entire century. The pressure felt by the mercantile communities and their interest in promoting a marital union that would ease political tensions under such conditions is self-evident, but the importance of the wool and cloth trades for both polities ensured that these princely exchanges of boycotts and restrictions reverberated throughout all levels of society. Complicated by the French king’s attempt to broker alternate marriages for Margaret and by factionalism at the English court, the negotiations continued in fits and starts for the next two years, prompting a series of banquets and other entertainments on both sides of the English Channel as each court attempted to impress its counterparts into agreement. Margaret publicly gave her formal consent to marry Charles at a meeting of the English Great Council in Kingstonupon-Thames in October 1467. The betrothal was extended a further eight months while the marriage treaty was concluded; it not only included the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement concerning the payment of Margaret’s dowry and the towns Charles granted her in return, but also regulated fishing rights and instituted a mutual defense agreement between England and Burgundy. In 1468 Margaret finally embarked by boat to meet her fiancé and exchange present-tense vows in the Flemish city of Bruges. As the concern with fishing fleets in the betrothal contract makes evident, it is hard to make the case for the marriage of Margaret of York and Charles the Bold as a touching romantic tale. This did not, however, prevent both the English and Burgundian courts from trying. At multiple points in the extended process both sides attempted to evoke the refined world of chivalric romance. During the initial negotiations, the pro-Burgundian English faction invited Charles’s envoy and illegitimate brother Anthony the Grand Bâtarde of Burgundy to a tournament and feasting in Smithfield. Charles likewise tried to dress his political alliance in more attractive clothes. Several days before the wedding, Charles unexpectedly visited Margaret with a small retinue after dinner. After the betrothed couple had chatted for a bit, their courtiers pressed them to publicly declare their desire to marry each other. Having already publicly consented to the union, Margaret replied pragmatically, and perhaps exasperatedly, that marrying Charles was the reason she had come all the way from England to Bruges.24 However, the most extended evocation of the more refined world of romance came in the festivities following the wedding vows. These included over a week of tournament and feasting. Each day the participants gathered for another installment in the tale of the tournament of the Golden Tree

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organized by the Grand Bâtarde, and almost every evening an equally complex series of entremets unfolded in temporary halls erected for the large crowds. John Paston III, who was among Margaret’s English attendants, succinctly summarizes the effect of these festivities on the gathered witnesses. Writing to his mother, Paston claims that Charles the Bold’s court so impressed him that he had “never heard of anything like it save King Arthur’s court.”25 While he mentions the exchange of vows, what most moved him was the tournament and the postvow “dinner” where Margaret “was received as respectfully as the world could devise, with the most attractive ladies and lords of any people that I ever saw or heard of, and many pageants were enacted before her in welcome, the best that I ever saw.”26 With its repetition of verbs of sensing, Paston’s English account echoes the rhetoric of the Francophone descriptions of the marvelous discussed in the previous chapter, suggesting that the effects cultivated in these festivities spoke an international language of sensual pleasure. While the voluminous nature of the Paston archive suggests that there was little that members of this family would not wish to write about, the fact that the honor bestowed on Margaret and the pleasure experienced at the Burgundian court led John Paston III and other attendees to write accounts of their experience further suggests the usefulness of a splendid banquet in publicizing the new union well beyond the confines of the actual gathered guests. At the same time that it gratified her English companions, the banqueting also informed both them and Margaret of York herself about the Burgundian court’s expectations for the new ruling couple. The entremets of the first night after the exchange of vows is particularly revealing of these hopes. The marriage’s importance for the Burgundian lands was suggested from the first by thirty nefs distributed among the three tables in the central dining room. Each nef was rigged out as a boat with both sailors and soldiers on board and decorated with the name and arms of a specific Burgundian duchy, county, or other possession along with Charles the Bold’s arms, banners, and personal devices.27 The tables also held thirty pastry castles, again with the Burgundian arms, each marked with the arms and name of a major ducal city. In the words of Olivier de la Marche, one of the planners of the event: “And so were shown the thirty principalities and lordships of the Duke’s heritage, and thirty cities subject to him, which are unparalleled in the world.”28 In addition to obviously referencing Charles’s heritage in the form of heraldry and the names of his inherited lands, for the older guests this display could call to mind the wedding feast of Charles’s own parents, where the same combination of the arms of the duke and his lands alongside his banners and personal devices was used.29

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Charles’s pastry castles and nefs are at one level signs of his omnipresence and immense personal landholdings. The possibility of such a reading might at first suggest that the ducal wedding feast was generic Burgundian political propaganda with little relation to the act of marriage or the choice of bride. But while the display of political and economic power undeniably does play some part here, as in almost all arts sponsored by rulers, this is not the whole story. When seen in relation to the other entremets of the evening, the representations of ducal possessions at Charles and Margaret’s wedding feast take on other meanings as well, becoming symbolic representations of the larger Burgundian community’s presence, witness, and assent. The rhetoric of Margaret’s transfer and welcome into a new community is especially stressed in two of the three performed entremets of the evening. In the first of these, a unicorn caparisoned in a cloth painted with the English royal arms came into the room ridden by a leopard. The leopard held an English banner in one paw and a daisy in the other. After progressing around the room, the unicorn stopped in front of Charles the Bold, whose maître d’hôtel took the flower and presented it to Charles, saying: “Most excellent, high and victorious prince, my awesome and sovereign lord, the proud and awesome leopard of England comes to visit the noble company; and for your consolation and the consolation of your allies, countries and subjects, makes you the present of a noble marguerite.”30 Charles accepted the flower, and the leopard and unicorn left the room. Since marguerite is at once the French equivalent of the English name Margaret and the French word for daisy, this performance is less allegory than transparent personification drama. The leopard and unicorn of English royal heraldry offers Margaret not only to Charles himself but also to his countries and subjects personified, or perhaps more accurately objectified, in the various table entremets that surround the enacted scene.31 Like Charles’s subjects, Margaret appears as passive, miniaturized, and objectified in the form of her namesake flower. In many respects this entremet supports modern stereotypes of elite medieval marriage practice as essentially the homosocial bonding of male actors through the exchange of women. Added to this is Charles’s apparent fantasy of controlling his unruly territories by casting them in the form of nefs that serve him doubly, both displaying his arms and holding his spices. Yet this aura of power is at the very least dimmed by the fact that Charles cannot even in this moment of allegorical exchange enjoy the consolation of his bride without her also needing to please his allies and lands. Nor can the banquet as a whole be simply read as advocating the subjugation of either the bride or her new subjects. The second entremet shifts at-

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tention from Charles to Margaret, granting her a far greater importance and agency than might be imagined possible given the previous performance. After the unicorn and leopard left, a lion the size of a warhorse entered wearing a covering painted with the arms of Burgundy. On this lion rode Madame de Beaugrand, the dwarf of Margaret’s new stepdaughter Mary of Burgundy, accompanied by two noblemen. Madame de Beaugrand was dressed in a cloth-of-gold and violet version of a shepherdess’s garb and held a basket painted with the names of various virtues, a Burgundian banner, and a small dog on a leash. As the lion circled the room, it moved its mouth and sang a song welcoming the “beautiful shepherdess” who is “the source, the mine,” of hope, solace, strength, pride, peace, and safety for “all the ruled lands.”32 The lion ended its tour in front of Margaret of York, and the same maitre d’hôtel as in the leopard entremet knelt before Margaret and said: My awesome lady, the lands of which you are, by the grace of God, today the lady are joyous at your coming; and in memory of the noble shepherdesses who up to now have been the pastors and guards of the sheep here, and who have conducted themselves so virtuously that the lands have not known how to praise enough those who have instructed them by their noble manners and condition, they make you a present of this beautiful shepherdess, dressed and emblazoned with virtuous garments and staffs to use and for good fortune, asking you to remember them and recommending them to you.33

Margaret received Madame de Beaugrand kindly, and the lion left the room, repeating its song on the way out. It is Margaret’s active involvement in her new countries that the second performance of the evening attempts to construct. Where the first entremet suggested that she was essentially property to be given by her brother Edward IV to Charles the Bold, the lion and shepherdess entremet focuses on Margaret’s new role as duchess. The lion’s song of welcome is directed both to the shepherdess who has just entered the room and to the new duchess, who is to be a source of virtue and reassurance to her people. The maître d’hôtel’s speech specifically links Margaret’s new function with the behavior of earlier duchesses, all those virtuous pastors who inspired the lands with their moral example. The gift of Madame de Beaugrand is notably not a representation of Charles as the daisy was a sign of Margaret: the shepherdess is instead a sign of Margaret’s own new role, which she publicly accepts in receiving Madame de Beaugrand “most humanely.”34 Especially given that Madame de Beaugrand was the dwarf of Margaret’s new stepdaughter, Mary of Burgundy, Margaret’s bridehood is here figured as her entrance into

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a lineage of Burgundian duchesses.35 The motif of the shepherdess recalls Margaret of Flanders’s frequent use of sheep and shepherding motifs, which were discussed in relation to the château of Germolles in chapter 2 and likely were still visible there in 1468. Many of same meanings can be seen in the motif here, from the common association of the ruler with the good shepherd to the wool trade that so closely bound Flanders and England on an economic level. Margaret of Flanders likely adopted the sheep emblem in part as a sign of continuity with her birth family, particularly the father from whom she inherited her vast Flemish territories; Margaret of York instead is invited to identify with the shepherdess as a sign of her marital family, and particularly the women within it. While a vision of a united line of duchesses is legible in the performance, the explicit focus is on the relationship between Margaret and her new peoples, represented in the surrounding entremets on the tables and given voice by the maître d’hôtel. In contrast to the unity with these lands that Charles was assumed to already possess in the previous entremet, the peoples represented in this instance may be ventriloquized, but they are also presented as worthy and deserving supplicants. Their ability to present a gift and Margaret’s willingness to accept it mark the initial steps in creating bonds of reciprocity between the duchess and her subjects. The motif of the gift is employed with equal richness, if less iconographic specificity, in the final entremet of the evening, where it mingles with the aesthetic of marvelous strangeness beloved by the Valois courts. Once again an animal (this time a highly realistic simulated camel) saddled “in the Saracen manner” entered the room, with a man “dressed in a strange fashion” and two giant baskets on its back.36 The man opened the baskets and took from them “birds strangely painted, as though they came from India,” which he released to fly around the room and land on the various tables to the sounds of trumpets.37 This was the last performance of the evening, and the guests dispersed after it had finished. Structurally, this entremet is similar to the two that have come before, with their exotic animals and riders. Yet it differs from them both by including a larger portion of the audience and by eliminating any accompanying explanatory speech. Where each of the two previous entremets gave a gift to one member of the bridal couple, the bird-gifts of the final entremet are distributed at random to the entire audience. Moreover, where the first two entremets included a spoken explication of their symbolism, the mixed exoticism of the Saracen camel, strange man, and Indian birds evokes an amorphous mood of surprise and interest rather than any specific allegory. The unicorn, leopard, and lion were also manmade, but only the camel (already strange in its foreignness) is described as artificial by de la Marche.

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The birds, while real, are European species painted in a strange way, just as the man is strange because of his dress.38 As when he described the Feast of the Pheasant fifteen years earlier, de la Marche here stresses the centrality of human agency in the creation of strangeness. Iconography was clearly not the only way in which wedding feasts communicated with their audience. If the first two entremets figured Margaret’s acceptance into and of a new Burgundian family and polity through specific allegorical details, the final entremet of the same evening used the rich vocabulary of strangeness to impress the memory of the evening onto the assembled guests. Addressed to the wedding party and guests as a group, this entremet lacks a strict didactic message yet nevertheless meets one of the key goals of wedding festivities by drawing the guests into the scene and transforming observers into witnesses. A vivid memory of the event is created through the evocation of two typical features of feast aesthetics— strangeness and the involvement of viewers into the fantastic world of the enacted scene—as well as the logic of the gift, as will be discussed below. These three entremets combine to form a lasting image of the marriage of Charles and Margaret in the minds of their viewers. Creating such an image was especially important at this early moment in the feast cycle for the wedding. While the vows had taken place earlier in the day in a church outside Bruges, the majority of the enormous crowd gathered for the banqueting would not have been present to actually witness the exchange. In addition, Olivier de la Marche’s account points out that the ducal couple consummated their marriage after this feast, but he strongly stresses the private nature of their bedroom encounter: “The married couple went to bed; and as for the rest of the night’s secrets, I leave it to the understanding of the noble parties and return to recounting the next day’s adventures.”39 The night secrets of the bedchamber and the limited audience for the vows drastically limit the ability of the majority of the pan-European audience to honestly testify to the theologically specified portions of the wedding. The public fact of consummated marriage was thus formed not by the vows or the sex act but by the following festive celebrations. These festivities, moreover, structured the witnesses’ image of this particular union through both their iconography and their manipulation of aesthetic values. The idea of marriage evoked in the first night’s banquet is a complicated one, focused on the bride’s change of state and the community’s recognition of the marriage. In the first entremet, the movement of the Margaretflower from the hand of the English leopard into Charles’s possession is a somewhat heavy-handed enactment of her new legal status as his wife and gives no sense that Margaret herself has any agency in the transfer that

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takes place between her sovereign brother and new husband. Aristocratic marriage here appears to be a matter of male bonding, both political and personal; such a view of marriage was a persistent attitude among the French aristocracy, as Georges Duby has noted.40 Interestingly, however, the second entremet instead stresses female homosocial and political ties, focusing on Margaret’s relationship with other Burgundian duchesses and her new subjects. Notably, there is less interest here in Margaret’s relationship with her husband than in her relationship with her new subjects and female relations. In contrast to some modern readings of late medieval marriage which stress the subservience of the wife to her husband, the entremets attempt to refigure Margaret as a model for her community and the continuer of a Burgundian female line.41 Rather than accepting the authority of a single man, she is asked to publicly display her decision to become a leader of both state and family.42 While the didactic content of the second entremet makes no direct reference to Margaret’s relationship with Charles, the formal similarity between Margaret’s and Charles’s performances in the two entremets allows the second entremet to suggest a correspondence between bride and groom utterly lacking in the first. Seen together, the evening’s entremets further indicate that the perceived significance of marriage differs depending upon gender. While Charles begins and ends the evening as overlord to his varied holdings, Margaret enters into new familial and political bonds and takes on a new role as a moral guide and comfort to her community. Indeed, while the role assigned to Margaret in the first entremet is not an active one, she is present in both entremets while Charles appears only in one. Despite the numerous signs of Charles’s lordship that fill the room, attention is drawn repeatedly to Margaret, in keeping with the focus on the bride typical of late medieval marriage practice. Casting a political and dynastic union in the garb of allegory and romance, the first night of banqueting for the marriage of Margaret of York and Charles the Bold at once reflects such general qualities of late medieval weddings as the display of consent and the elevation of the bride and intervenes to particularize these qualities by stressing the bond between ducal couple and subjects, women and moral rule, memory and future action. The accounts written by participants and planners spread word of the festivities well beyond their original audience. A carefully calibrated iconographic program played an important role in these festivities, particularly in the first two performed entremets. These must, however, be considered in tandem with behaviors and experiences that relied on guests’ shared expectations concerning both feasts and marriage. For the details of the feast to be under-

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stood, it must be placed in a larger tradition; at the same time, individual events such as this one cannot simply be collapsed into that context. As this first marriage feast of Charles and Margaret demonstrates, a banquet could not only help construct a union and a change of social role but also subtly shape the nature of these life changes, presenting a particular and slightly idiosyncratic image of what this marriage and this bride would be. The flexibility of feasting as an art form allowed the planners of the marriage of Margaret of York and Charles the Bold to offer their hopes for the future marriage, and particularly for the role to be played by their new duchess.

THE TIES THAT BIND The metaphor of the gift deployed in all three of the evening’s entremets provided a particularly rich language for expressing not only the various social relationships formed through this political union but also the planners’ hopes that these proposed ties would continue to bind the participants after the banquet’s end. The stakes of the repeated exchanges that characterized the first night’s marriage feast for Charles the Bold and Margaret of York become clear when seen against the backdrop of the rich complexity of contemporary gift-giving practices more generally. For the assembled guests, the gift giving in the three entremets could recall the gifts frequently exchanged along with marriage vows in late medieval marriage practice. While the sacrament of marriage proper consisted of the words uttered by the two participants, this exchange of words was often accompanied by an exchange of physical tokens in the form of rings, clothing, or symbolic pouches of money.43 These items could later be entered as evidence in marriage trials as proof that the vows had indeed taken place. However, they were not usually formally distinct from other personal accessories, and so their significance in such cases had to be established by accompanying eyewitness testimony that asserted the items’ status as wedding gifts. This verbal/memorial component was particularly important since the types of objects exchanged during vows were highly ambiguous on their own. In cases where a woman sued for the acknowledgment of her marital rights, it was particularly common for the groom to claim that he had not exchanged vows but rather paid for sexual services, transforming the gift into a payment and the bride into a prostitute.44 Marriage gifts were thus signs that drew their specific meaning from carefully crafted memories of the freely exchanged vows they evoked. For the guests assembled at the wedding banquet of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York, the various gifts

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of daisies, the shepherdess, and birds likewise deployed physical signs in an attempt to forge a memory of the newly instantiated union. Yet if the three entremets from this night recall the connection between gifts and vows, they also complicate the idea of reciprocity that underlies both the medieval doctrine of marriage and most modern theories of gift exchange. Unlike wedding vows, in which the two parties both gave and received, the three entremets leave the return portion of the gift exchange unfulfilled. Each entremet clearly identifies its givers and receivers. In the first, Charles receives the marguerite from England for both his own sake and that of his people. In the second, Margaret receives a new role in life but also a new community. In the third, the community receives strange birds and their attendant wonder. Yet in all three cases the recipients appear to give nothing back. This is a striking lacuna given the emphasis in marital theology on the act of free exchange of vows, which indeed forms the only sacrament administered by the laity under normal circumstances.45 What then is the logic underlying the seeming lack of real exchange at work in the first evening’s entremets? Feasting writ large has been closely tied to theorization of the gift since Marcel Mauss used the Western Canadian gift-giving feast known as potlatch as a central case study in his Essai sur le don. In potlatch, elites gave gifts in order to gain loyalty and display dominance, and families competed to give away the most resources possible.46 To explain this competitive giving, Mauss proposed that accepting a gift imposes heavy social obligations on the receiver, who is in the giver’s debt until he or she can offer an equal gift in turn. More recent work has sought to nuance Mauss’s somewhat idealistic vision of gifting as intrinsically oriented toward equality, pointing both to the importance of observing what types of items are reserved from exchange and to cases in which receivers assert their dominance through their refusal to recognize the need to return a gift, effectively turning it into tribute.47 Given the centrality of gift giving to elite late medieval culture, it is not surprising to find that its giving practices were complex.48 Gifts in all their range of possible concerns were omnipresent features of late medieval sociality in general and of feasting in particular. Feasts and gifts not only shared the ability to mediate and form social relations as separate entities but also were often paired together. The winter holiday season was associated then as now with giving of gifts and sharing meals. On New Year’s, many Northern European rulers not only hosted banquets for their courtiers but also exchanged gifts both within and between households, as discussed in the

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case of Henry V and Charles VI in chapter 4.49 These gifts served to reify the bonds between individuals and often referred explicitly to either the giver or the recipient. Thus Duke John the Fearless’s son-in-law Louis de Guyenne gave him a “gold ring, with cameo, a sapphire, and an emerald, which is the portrait of my lord of Burgundy.” This ring may have closely resembled one now in Paris, which contains not only a cameo portrait of the duke but also his emblem of a wood plane and a seasonal quotation, “Vere [filius Dei erat] iste” (Matthew 27:54).50 Rulers might also pair the distribution of personal emblems with banqueting on other occasions. The induction of members into chivalric orders, for example, not only involved the giving of collars or other accessories that would mark the bodies of the inductees as members of the group but also culminated in one or more communal banquets. It is no coincidence that the founding of the French Order of the Star was visualized in King Charles V’s copy of the Grandes chroniques in a miniature depicting the members at a banquet prominently displaying their order’s bejeweled star badges.51 On one level, the act of giving both winter gifts and royal badges may have been used to create a sense of obligation in the recipient, as most anthropological models of gift giving would suggest.52 Late medieval gifts are often difficult to disentangle from both payments for services and bribes for political support.53 But the bonds formed by court gifts are rarely as simple as a straightforward quid pro quo. It is unclear that even valuable gifts truly gave the giver any real power over the receiver. Whether given by a follower or a family member, the form of gifts such as John the Fearless’s ring reinforced the centrality and power of the higher-ranking receivers, whose desires their subjects sought to meet. It is important to be suitably skeptical concerning how equal exchange was actually expected to be in elite gifting during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In winter feasts, gift giving took place not only among equals but also between clients and their patrons, usually with the lower member of the hierarchy initiating the exchange and offering more elaborate and costly items. Such unequal exchanges recall Charles’s reception of the marguerite in the first entremet. In this “exchange,” England and its king are notably not figured as recipients and community members but only as donors and guests. This, in part, aligned with the political reality of the moment. It was a sign of Charles’s power that he had not in fact had to offer an equal exchange in order to obtain Margaret’s hand in marriage. Edward IV had initially negotiated for a marriage between George, Duke of Clarence, and Mary of Burgundy as well as between Charles and Margaret, but had been forced to give up his hopes of acquiring the heiress for his brother. In these

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negotiations, Charles’s ability to avoid reciprocity was profoundly significant, indicating his superior position in this newly solidified political alliance.54 While enacted in the more subtle language of allegory, the first entremet of his marriage banquet similarly asserts Charles’s importance by casting him as a recipient who is not required to give anything in exchange: after bestowing his gift, the leopard must leave empty-handed. The first entremet thus serves as a valuable reminder of the degree to which powerful individuals could express their privilege by successfully subverting societal norms without punishment. While not denying the possibility of free will in their own recipients, the second and third entremets more closely adhere to common anthropological models of gift exchange, which suggest the recipient of a gift is placed at a temporary disadvantage and can reassert his or her supremacy only by offering a superior countergift. For Mauss, “to give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).”55 In the third entremet, the gift of birds to the assembled guests encourages them to fulfill the feast planners’ desires by carrying news of the new union to others. While modern scholars often stress the ephemerality of feasts as a time-based art form, its fleeting performances could have surprisingly long-lasting effects. The most obvious success of the banquet following the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York came in its effect on the assembled guests, who not only remembered it themselves but also spread news of it through word of mouth and letter alike. Whether consciously or not, in publicizing the marriage the guests were working on behalf of their ducal host, fulfilling their duty as witnesses. The expectation of such a return explains in part the gift of multicolored birds distributed in the final entremet, an act of seemingly pure pleasure and whimsy that taps into a greater tradition of gifting to create both a tangible and a mental record of the marriage. In the second entremet, the gift of the shepherdess is expressly linked with the hope that Margaret will look sympathetically on her new subjects not only at the banquet itself but also in the future. Margaret’s return gift was thus to be the work of a lifetime.Figured first as a gift in and of herself, and then as a recipient, Margaret was also prescriptively cast as a future donor. The presentation of the “noble marguerite” by the leopard in the first entremet is accompanied by the assertion that she will be a “consolation.”56 The lion’s song in the second entremet heralds the shepherdess-duchess as the source of virtues, and the gift of the shepherdess is specifically cast as a request for Margaret to remember and care for both her predecessors and

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the giving lands. In receiving, Margaret is thus held to have incurred a debt that she must repay through her future behavior as ruler.

BECOMING THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE The seriousness with which Margaret took this charge, and the intelligence with which she sought to balance the many expectations placed on her, is evident from her later activities as both a duchess and a patron of the arts. Margaret’s substantial charitable and political exploits are known largely through the mediation of terse textual traces. Yet both the artistic commissions that commemorated her after her death and her own substantial book patronage indicate the care with which she approached her role as the “source and mine” of her new people’s virtue and happiness. Following her elaborate wedding festivities, Margaret of York spent several years traveling through her new territories, infrequently with her husband, more regularly with her stepdaughter.57 As Charles became increasingly immersed in his disastrous military campaigns against the Swiss,58 Margaret played an important role in negotiating with their fractious subject towns.59 Following her husband’s death in 1477 at the Battle of Nancy, the childless Margaret continued to work closely with her stepdaughter Mary of Burgundy.60 When Mary in turn died unexpectedly at the age of twenty-five, Margaret continued to aid Mary’s widower, Maximilian I, ruling the Burgundian estates in his absence and raising her stepgrandchildren. Throughout her life she balanced her overt political maneuvering with charitable giving, particularly directed toward religious reforms.61 She was a particularly active promoter of reformed religious orders such as the Augustinians and the Observant and Colettine Franciscans. In accordance with her will, she was buried in the Observant Franciscan monastery in Mechelen, dressed in the plain habit of a Franciscan Tertiary. Although time and political change have been unkind to her nowdestroyed tomb, the visual representations surrounding this plainly clothed body provide a useful summary of Margaret’s carefully crafted image as a just ruler.62 Her body was contained within a tomb above which she was pictured in two statuary groups. In the first she knelt beside her hushand and her namesake St. Margaret. In the second, three members of the Recollects order, in whose church she was buried, watched over her shrouded, crowned body. The combination of the ascetic habit surrounding Margaret’s entombed corpse and the crown on her effigy points to the tension between worldly dignity and Christian humility that haunted the performance of piety by rulers, particularly ruling women, in the late medieval period.

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This tension also appears in the commemorative medal ordered by Margaret’s stepgrandson Philip the Fair for the occasion.63 On the obverse, Margaret’s heraldic arms are surrounded by the instruction “diligente justicia[m] qui judicat[is] terr[am]”: Prize justice, you who judge the world. Appropriately surrounding a representation of Margaret’s bloodlines and territory in the coat of arms, this phrase is a common late medieval admonition to rulers; it appears, for instance, in the earlier and now betterknown Simone Martini Maestà at the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, as well as in the mirror of princes given by Pierre Salmon to the mad Charles VI of France.64 The reverse of Margaret’s medal shows Death trampling daisies accompanied by “memorare novissima tua ano dni 1503” (Remember your end in the year 1503). This phrase links viewers to Margaret, asking them both to remember Margaret’s death, as enacted in the destruction of her namesake flowers, and to connect Margaret’s death with their own future end. The moral implications of this injunction are evident given the origin of the inscription in the Vulgate rendition of Ecclesiastes 7:40: “In omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua et in aeternum non peccabis” (In all your works remember your last end, and you shall never sin). Coming in Ecclesiastes directly on the heels of injunctions to perform good deeds from honoring one’s parents to caring for the hungry, sick, and sorrowful, this phrase connects such charity with the recognition of mortality in a manner readily familiar to any late fifteenth-century viewer from a large array of macabre motifs.65 Even in death, Margaret of York was thus presented as an ideal for her viewers, at once embodying just rule and serving as a spur to virtue in others. Seen with the benefit of hindsight, Philip the Fair’s commemoration of his stepgrandmother in this medal appears to be a neatly apt summation of the story begun nearly forty years before at her marriage ceremony. Yet the apparent ease of this unfolding tale on the modern page is replaced on Margaret’s own manuscripts’ folios by a far more compelling image of the struggle between multiple ideals and the realities of rule. Margaret of York is among the most celebrated fifteenth-century patrons of illuminated manuscripts. Her interest in this art form can itself be seen as part of her larger attempts to assimilate to the Burgundian ducal family. While her deceased father-in-law Philip the Good was the single most important patron of Flemish book arts during his long reign, a taste for illuminated manuscripts and sustained support for authors, translators, and artists had been typical of Valois courts for several generations.66 Margaret’s patronage appears to have gone far beyond that of former duchesses, however, and a perusal of her library suggests a strong personal interest in exploring

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the interrelationship between religion and rule that might be expected from one seeking to become the source of virtue for her people. At some point during her nine years as duchess, Margaret of York commissioned a manuscript directly addressing this problem titled Benois se­ ront les misericordieux, or “Blessed are the merciful” (Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier MS 9269). The text was a compilation of biblical passages and church authorities on the subject of charity, originally compiled for a Carthusian monastic community in Hainault, which was translated from Latin to French at Margaret’s request by her almoner Nicolas Finet.67 While the words of the text might also be read in Hainault, the appearance of those words on the page inexorably linked them back to their new reader. Of the two hundred decorated letters in Benois seront les misericordieux, seventythree contain the initials “C M” (Charles and Margaret) joined by a love knot, while another eighty-six display white roses (the family badge of York, famously opposed to the Lancastrian red rose). White roses also appear 130 times in the marginal decorations accompanying these initials alongside dozens of daisies (marguerites). Margaret’s arms appear eight times on the two pages marking major textual divisions (e.g., fig. 34). As these numbers suggest, it is impossible to read more than ten pages in this 213-folio manuscript without reaching an image that links the text back to Margaret of York through the language of personal signs. Margaret of York is also the star of the large miniatures that mark the divisions between the two books of the text. In the first miniature (fig. 34), she is shown literally enacting the teachings that will follow as she carries out the traditional Seven Corporal Acts of Mercy. The concept of charity extends even into the marginal decoration. In the upper right corner, a pelican (associated with giving because it was believed to feed its young with its blood) overcomes evil in the form of a serpent. Directly below and opposed to this is a monkey, who eats fruit itself while watching the miniature in which Margaret of York gives food and aid to others. As discussed in chapter 3, monkeys had an ambiguous role as uncanny doppelgängers to humans, figures of greed and lust whose supposedly soulless actions revealed the untrustworthiness of mere appearances. The seductive, sinful power of simians had indeed been employed already in the third day’s banquet for the marriage of Margaret of York and Charles the Bold. On that occasion, thieving monkeys led the assembled guests, perhaps even Margaret herself, into dance. On the margin of her manuscript page, however, Margaret might learn instead to refuse the selfish pleasure that the monkey enjoyed and instead become a source of nourishment like the pelican above it. What appear at first glance to be decorative drolleries thus emerge as a set of

Figure 34. Margaret of York performing seven acts of charity, in Benois seront les misericordieux. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale / Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms 9269, fol. 1.

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choices set before the woman who appears repeatedly in the large miniature to their left. The tall, elegant lady in red and gold who stars in all but one of the eight vignettes that make up the main miniature is clearly meant to represent Margaret of York: not only does she appear with St. Margaret while praying at a prie-dieu bearing the English arms in the final scene, but her features also align closely with Margaret of York’s official portrait type.68 This ideal Margaret is shown in constantly shifting positions as she performs each charitable act. Read clockwise, the scenes show her feeding the hungry; giving them drink; clothing them; holding the hand of a pilgrim; visiting prisoners; visiting a sick man; a burial; and Margaret praying with her patron saint behind her.69 In the first five of these scenes, Margaret engages closely with those she helps, even allowing one thirsty traveler to clasp her arm intimately as she holds a cup to his lips in the second scene. While the final two images show less physical engagement, they can be read together as Margaret of York praying for the souls of the unidentified dead, an act often associated with familial or communal ties. The final image can also refer back to all of the previous scenes. Margaret’s unfocused gaze opens the possibility that she is looking with mental rather than worldly eyes at her activities in the previous scenes, which may therefore exist only in a vision. The mystical nature of the seemingly practical images of charity is further suggested by the nearly constant presence of Jesus himself, who appears in every scene but the final two. Dressed in a pale purple robe, Christ looks on approvingly at each of Margaret of York’s actions, but he is not himself ever the giver of charity. In keeping with his statement in Matthew 25, he appears among the prisoners Margaret of York visits in the bottom left scene, making him the direct recipient of her goodwill on at least one occasion. Despite the presence of the Savior and some other recurrent figures, Margaret consistently remains the focus: her gold gown with its white fur and her pale face and black wimple stand out sharply against the more muted colors around her.70 Margaret of York thus becomes a meeting point between the everyday world of the needy and the holy world of Jesus and the saints. This reconciliation does not require her to renounce her elite position. To the contrary, her status is stressed not only through her rich clothing but also in the very structure of the miniature. Margaret’s noble birth and role as duchess and wife are an integral part of the miniature’s framework, since it is her arms and her and her husband Charles’s intertwined initials that form the joins between the interior borders. Literally, it is Margaret-asduchess that holds the scenes together.

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Considerable stress is placed on Margaret of York as an agent in these scenes. Appropriately enough for a text devoted to the active spiritual life, the Benois seront les misericordieux miniature insists on Margaret’s effective embodiment of the active virtues described and makes evident the approval of God for a life thus led. The rhetorical power of such an image is highly seductive even to modern viewers, some of whom have offered this miniature as evidence that fifteenth-century personalized images were intended to spark imitation in their original viewers.71 Yet as Andrea Pearson has noted, it is important to remember that this image and the text it accompanies represent not only Margaret of York’s views of her proper role as duchess but also, importantly, those of Nicolas Finet, the spiritual counselor who translated the assembled Latin texts into French.72 Like the shepherdess presented to Margaret at her marriage, these portraits of the new duchess are part of a larger conversation concerning her proper behavior between her and her Burgundian advisers. These seemingly mimetic images were meant as, and taken to be, mental models rather than literal actions for imitation. Although illuminated miniatures played a part in forming ideals and behavior, simply describing this rich process rather vaguely as imitation runs the risk of ignoring the complexity of the task. As I have already suggested in chapters 3 and 4, late medieval theorists and their audiences were well aware of both the complications surrounding applying general standards to individual situations and the potential for hypocrisy in visual signs. On the first page of Benois seront les misericordieux, the potential pitfalls for a reader who blindly copies the pictured actions is obliquely posed by the figure of the insouciant monkey. The choice posed between the greedy monkey and the valiant pelican in the margins required the real-world Margaret of York to incorporate the lessons of both image and text in her manuscript and to manifest these principles in her actions. This may be one reason for the quasi-visionary status of the charitable scenes. As Craig Harbison has argued in the case of roughly contemporaraneous paintings, explicitly visionary imagery could provide an ideal experience for a viewer who is prompted to see an alternate layer of reality in worldly visible signs.73 The series of mental readjustments required to move from image to action in the case of the Benois miniature must at least be recognized as a creative conversation between image, text, and viewer rather than a simple one-way command from one to the other. It is not therefore surprising to find that Margaret of York’s numerous real lauded acts of charity concentrated on institutional support and rarely if ever took the form of direct interaction with the poor and infirm as individuals shown in the miniature.

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An interesting pendant to the negotiations between expectations and enactment in the Benois seront les misericordieux appears in another manuscript translated by Finet for Margaret, Le dyalogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ (British Library, Add. 7970). As one might guess from the title, the Dyalogue is a text specifically crafted for the duchesses of Burgundy. While Finet claims to have written it for Margaret in the introduction, the dialogue is in fact only slightly altered from an earlier Latin text composed for Margaret’s mother-in-law Isabelle of Portugal.74 On the level of content, therefore, the Dyalogue aptly embodies the sense of female Burgundian ducal lineage suggested several years earlier in the entremet of the shepherdess, offering Margaret advice drawn from that given to her predecessor. In the time-honored tradition of mirrors of princes, the Dyalogue combines advice on spiritual matters with commentary on social manners. One of the most important themes is the reconcilability of wealth and position with piety. Unusually, this advice is given directly by Jesus. In the Dya­ logue’s sole miniature, the Risen Christ appears in the middle of Margaret of York’s bedchamber, identifiable by the C & Ms embroidered on the canopy and complete with a sleeping dog (fig. 35). Looking back over his shoulder, Christ extends one hand toward the kneeling figure of Margaret of York, who wears a similar ensemble of cloth of gold to that in the Benois miniature. At first glance, this miniature might seem to resemble typical visionary imagery: a woman kneeling at prayer alone in her room is rewarded for her piety by a vision of a holy figure. That this miraculous appearance literally allows the sleeping dog to lie casts doubt on the reality of Christ’s physical manifestation in the room. This ambiguity allows the image to walk the fine line between expressing Margaret’s intimacy with Christ and claiming for her the type of true visionary status granted to saints.75 The choice of compositional model further complicates the seemingly simple scene. Once it is noticed that Margaret of York is not in fact praying but rather reaching out with both hands, it becomes likely that the Dyalogue miniature draws directly on a traditional iconography, the Noli me tangere.76 This frequently reproduced scene derives from John 20:17, in which Christ appears to St. Mary Magdalene after his death.77 The Magdalene attempts to touch Jesus but is rebuffed; for theological reasons, however, a Christian must assume that this is a true appearance rather than simply an insubstantial image. Jesus orders Mary to inform the male apostles that he has risen from the grave, making her the apostle to the apostles. The palimpsest of the Noli me tangere in the scene of Margaret’s instruction performs several functions. In a society in which traditionalism

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Figure 35. Nicolas Finet, Le dyalogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ. London, British Library Additional ms. 7979, fols. 1v–2. © The British Library Board.

was highly valued, this reuse of iconography validated a radically new subject by connecting it with an accepted older one. At the same time, the particular choice of model creates a certain level of confusion. The choice to cast Margaret of York in the problematic guise of Mary Magdalene requires highly selective interpretation. The apostolic role granted to Mary Magdalene is arguably a good fit for Margaret of York, and she might be said to have imaginatively fulfilled it in part by later giving this very text to one of her ladies in waiting, as well as through her propagation of devotional reading at court.78 Yet while the Magdalene’s mission to witness the Risen Christ was supported by her experience of his fleshly return, the visionary overlay of the Margaret of York scene seems to contradict the original meaning of the story in John and in doing so to create potential confusion as to what precisely Margaret of York’s message should be. Mary Magdalene is a problematic model to place before Margaret of York. Even if the tradition connecting the Magdalene with prostitution is ignored, she was also importantly believed to have been a rich woman who renounced her worldly goods to live an extremely ascetic existence in the wilderness.79 Jesus’s advice to Margaret of York in the Dyalogue text, however, stresses the compatibility of religious practice with political and economic power. By casting Margaret of York in the role of the Magdalene, the miniature potentially undermines the ease with which Finet’s lessons, even if placed in the mouth of Jesus Christ, can be accepted at face value. While

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the text attempts to erase tensions within Margaret of York’s intended role as a ruler and a Christian, the miniature reveals these difficulties. At the same time, it seems to suggest that Margaret of York, who can be shown in expensive clothing while becoming a type of new Mary Magdalene, may be able to unite these paradoxical roles through the sheer fact of embodying both. For the real Margaret of York such a portrait might be at once flattering comfort and a daunting challenge. The idea that her rule should display and spur virtue may have first been publicly proposed at Margaret of York’s marriage banquet, but surviving evidence indicates that the new duchess engaged thoughtfully with what might seem at first glance to be a rather dry allegorical performance. Both as duchess and as dowager, she combined political activism on behalf of her marital family with a sustained program of charitable activity. Her attempts to align her spiritual and social roles are equally evident in the library she built following the lead of previous Burgundian dukes. The two manuscripts she commissioned from Finet celebrate Margaret’s potential to bridge the gap between the realm of spiritual ideals and the everyday world, yet their miniatures also suggest the creativity and active engagement that such suturing required of her. Often, they employ motifs and strategies reminiscent of Margaret’s marriage festivities, from the recurrence of the monkey as antimodel to Margaret’s central role as an actor in her own drama. The constant struggle between the active and the contemplative life remained a leitmotif for Margaret’s career not only in life but also in death. Her attempt to walk the fine line between exercising power and enacting piety was celebrated nearly forty years after her marriage feast in the tomb and medals commissioned to honor her. While her political enemies once referred to her angrily as diabolical, her descendants by marriage and the beneficiaries of her largesse crafted her funerary arts to present this penultimate Valois duchess as an ideal mixture of ruler and ascetic, a model of female rule who even in death served as source of virtue in the living. Despite their modern reputation as escapist and anti-intellectual, late medieval feasts not only could be highly effective means of communication but also helped their participants think through very real problems in their personal and professional lives. Margaret of York’s career suggests the influence that individual feasts might exert on receptive individuals, as well as the substantial overlap between the strategies of feasting and those of other visual arts. Both her actions as duchess and the artistic patronage that surrounds her repeatedly return to the combination of female ducal lineage and virtuous guidance first proposed to her during her wedding night banquet.

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Motifs such as the marguerite-Margaret conflation and strategies such as the use of Margaret’s own image as an object of contemplation recur, but these later uses are never simple repetitions; both the texts and the images she consumed in her early years as duchess make evident the thoughtful and active engagement with which she approached these general instructions. The postvows celebration of the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York thus might be said to have had a surprising degree of social efficacy, not only securing the social recognition of this much-desired union but also influencing the bride who was its focus for years to come. In pursuing these ends, the creators of the feast, from the planners to the final participants, worked not only with a particular iconographic program but also within a shared understanding of the proper behavior, values, and aesthetic modes of wedding banquets in particular and feasting in general. The nuances of this single event are indeed visible only when it is set against the larger expectations surrounding both feasting and marriage. The recent rise of scholarly respect for both individual feast events and the general practices of feasting as a whole offer a welcome corrective to previous generations’ disdain and dismissal. Yet it is only once the gap between the individual and the general begins to be bridged that we can truly begin to appreciate how and why banqueting captured the imaginations and influenced the actions of late medieval men and women.

notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Burgundian Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 65. 2. Hans Aurenhammer, “Abendmahl,” in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie (Vienna: Brüder Hollinek, 1959), 1:11; Maurice Vloberg, L’Eucharistie dans l’art (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1946), 32–34. 3. To name but a few publications since 1990: Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Konrad Eisenbichler and Wim Hüsken, eds., Carni­ val and the Carnivalesque (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1999); Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Ryerson, eds., City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Steven Gunn and Antheun Janse, eds., The Court as a Stage: England and the Low Countries in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge,UK: Boydell, 2006); J. R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring, eds., Court Festivals of the Euro­ pean Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002); Detlef Altenburg, J. Jarnat, and H.-H. Steinhoff, eds., Feste und Feiern im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, Germany: Thorbecke, 1991); J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds., Italian Renaissance Festivals and Their European Influence (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992); Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); John Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500–1750 (London: Seven Dials, 2000); James Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as “Theatrum mundi” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Pierre Béhar and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, eds., Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1570–1750) (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999). 4. Johan Huizinga is perhaps most closely associated with this view: see The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5. Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries (New York: G. Braziller, 1974), 6. 6. See, for example, Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts across Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Dagmar Eichberger,

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“The Tableau Vivant—an Ephemeral Art Form in Burgundian Civic Festivities,” Parergon 6 (1988); Birgit Franke, “Gesellschaftsspiele mit Automaten—‘Merveilles’ in Hesdin,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 24 (1997); Birgit Franke and Barbara Welzel, eds., Die Kunst der burgundischen Niederlande: Eine Einführung (Berlin: Reimer, 1997); Eva Helfenstein, “The Goblet of Philip the Good: Precious Vessels at the Court of Burgundy,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012; Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold, trans. Beverly Jackson (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000); Laura Weigert, Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 7. The classic political histories remain Richard Vaughan, Philip the Bold (London: Longmans, 1962); John the Fearless (London: Longmans, 1966); Philip the Good (Harlow, UK: Longmans, 1970); and Charles the Bold (London: Longmans, 1973). 8. For a discussion of these debates, see Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 431–95. 9. Huizinga, Autumn, 294–328. 10. “Por lors estoient les subgectz de ceste maison de Bourgongne en grande richesse, à cause de la longue paix qu’ilz avoient eu et pour la bonté du prince soubz qui ilz vivoyent, lequel tailloit peu ses subgectz. Et me semble que pours lors ses terres se pouvoient myeulx dire terres de promission que nulles autres seigneuries qui fussent sur la terre. Ilz estoient combles de richesses et en grand repoz, ce qu’ilz ne furent oncques puis. . . . Les despences et habillemens et d’hommes et de femmes, grans et superfluz, les convyz et les banquetz plus grans et prodigues que nul autre lieu dont j’aye eu cognoissance” (Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. J. Calmette and G. Durville [Paris: Honoré Champion, 1924], 1:104). 11. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001). 12. On reconstruction as a form of academic discourse in studies of medieval theater, see Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 13. Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56 (1997). 14. Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 28–41; Haskell, History and Its Images. 15. Three of the main chroniclers of Valois Burgundian court feasting—Georges Chastellain, Jean Lefèvre de Saint-Remy, and Olivier de la Marche—were regularly employed in staging court festivities, Chastellain as an author, Lefèvre as an actor, and de la Marche as both. 16. “Le seigneur de Ternant parla à la duchesse de Bourgogne et luy remonstra les grans dangiers et la mortelle guerre des Gantois . . . pour laquelle cause avoient aucun d’eux advise que, pour le bon moyen et advis d’elle, on pourroit bien mettre mondit seigneur de Charolois hors de tels dangiers . . . la duchesse de Bourgogne . . . respondit que elle auroit advis et quele lendemain elle avoit intention de faire un très-beau bancquet,

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pour bien festoyer le comte de Charolois son fils. Et comme la duchesse de Bourgogne avoit dit, fist le lendemain faire un très-beau bancquet, où elle fist pryer et assambler chevaliers, escuyers, dames et damoiselles en grant nombre, et à icelluy bancquet fit la duchesse très-bonne chière, et fist faire à tous ceux qui là estoient, et après elle prya au comte de Charolois son fils, en la présence de la belle compagnie qui là estoit, et dist: ‘O mon fils, pour l’amour de vous, j’ai assemblé ceste belle compagnie. . . . Or donques, mon fils, puisque monsiegneur vostre père est en la guerre . . . je vous prye que demain au matin vous retournez devers lui . . .’ quant le seigneur de Ternant et les autres qui là estoient, oïrent ainsy parler la duchesse de Bourgongne, ils furent bien esbahis. . . . Dont les plusiers louèrent la noble dame de Bourgongne, en disant que c’estoit noble courage et grant vertu de femme d’envoyer ainsi son seul fils au dangier de la guerre” (Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. M. le baron Kervyn de Lettenhove [Brussels: R. Heussner, 1863–66], 2:277–79). 17. “Par l’abondance de viande qui restoit superflue, le lendemain au matin furent donnés quarante plats de viande aux povres de Dieu parmy la ville” (ibid., 4:160). 18. “Je ne parle des mets, ne des viands . . . Mais au milieu du souper furent faits et présentés divers entremets au roy et aux princes de sa table, qui moult estoient beaux et somptueux, et de belle invention composés. Au roy fut présenté un cerfvolant, au duc d’Orléans un blanc cigne, au duc de Bourgogne un lyon, au comte de Charolois un pélican, au duc de Bourbon un paon, au comte d’Eu en fénix, au comte d’Estampes une licorne . . . et chacun entremet armoyé des armes à qui il servoit” (ibid., 4:87). 19. Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, “Manger et boire dans les fabliaux: Rites sociaux et hiérarchie des plaisirs,” in Manger et boire au Moyen Age, ed. Denis Menjot (Nice: Belles lettres, 1984), 1:227–35. 20. A. Planche, “La table comme signe de la classe: Le temoignage du Roman du Comte d’Anjou (1316),” in Manger et boire au Moyen Age, ed. Menjot, 1:239–60. 21. Ibid., 1:258. 22. Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:258–9. 23. E.g., Monique Closson, “Us et coutumes de la table du xIIe siècle au xVe siècle a travers les miniatures,” in Manger et boire au Moyen Age, 2:21–32; Patricia D. Labahn, “Feasting in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” PhD diss., St. Louis University, 1975. 24. Jonathan J. G. Alexander, “Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor,” Art Bulletin 72 (1990); Michael Camille, “Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter,” Art History 10 (1987). 25. Mark Trowbridge, “Art and Ommegangen: Paintings, Processions, and Dramas in the Late-Medieval Low Countries,” PhD diss., New York University, 2000. 26. Fabienne Joubert, “Les peintres du Voeu du Faison,” in Banquet du Faison, ed. Marie-Thérèse Caron and Denis Clauzel (Artois, France: Presses Université, 1997). 27. Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the “Grandes chroniques de France,” 1274–1422 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 128–33. 28. Ibid., 131–33.

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29. The most famous attempt to distinguish literary/theatrical and static visual art on this basis remains Gotthold Lessing, Laocöon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 30. E.g., Jean Mansel, Fleur des histiores Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er, MS 9232 fol. 7.

CHAPTER 1 1. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15–147; Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aes­ thetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 2. On the history of entremets in modern French dining, see Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, trans. Edward Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 187; Jean-Louis Flandrin, “Structure des menus français et anglais aux xIVe et xVe siècles,” in Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montreal, 1992), 180. 3. Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont (Paris: Libraires Renouard, 1884), 2:340–80; Mathieu d’Escouchy, Chronique, ed. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt (Paris: Mme Ve Jules Renouard, Libraire de la Société de l’histoire de France, 1863), 2:130–237. On the accounts, see Catherine Emerson, “Who Witnessed and Narrated the ‘Banquet of the Pheasant’ (1454)? A Codicological Examination of the Account’s Five Versions,” Fifteenth­Century Studies 28 (2003). 4. “Les plas charios à limons, etc., et avoit en checun chasriot IIIIxx et II pieces de rost entiers et joygnoient ensemble les plas et les entremez; chascun desquelx plas et entemès estoit garnis de IIII banieres du mains des armes de mondit seigneur d’un costé et de son filz de l’autre costé.” M Baluze, quoted in d’Escouchy, Chronique, 2:137n1. 5. Bruno Laurioux,“Table et hiérarchie sociale à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montreal, 1992), 96. 6. Taillevent, The Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts, ed. Terence Scully (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988), 286–87. 7. Ibid., 288. 8. Bibliotheca Vaticana, Regina 776. 9. Taillevent, Viandier, 300. 10. Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian “Il Libro dell’Arte,” trans. Daniel Thompson Jr. (New York: Dover, 1954), 79–80, 100. 11. Taillevent, Viandier, 300. 12. On Cockaigne, see Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life, trans. Diane Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). For marginalia, see Lillian Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 83–84, 220. 13. Philip Slavin, “Chicken Husbandry in Late-Medieval Eastern England, c. 1250– 1400,”Anthropozoologica 44 (2009). Pichon claims instead that sweets and fowl form

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the bulk of entremets, at least within Le Ménagier de Paris (ed. Jérôme Pichon [Geneva: Slatkine, 1977], xlii). 14. Both are included in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue, ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 269–85; 457–61. 15. Taillevent, Viandier, 269. 16. Pour faire l’ymage saincte Marthe. Convient faie l’ymage saincte Marthe, le dragon de son long en costé elle et une chainne d’or lyee au col du dragon don celle saincte le tendra, comme elle le conquist. Et se peult faire ledit personnage par deux personnes, qui veult, ou d’ouvrage de paintrerie de tele haulteur et grander que on veult (ibid., 271). 17. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:23–24. 18. Reflecting its etymological derivation from the better-studied Latin imago: JeanClaude Schmitt, “Imago: De l’image à l’imaginaire,” in L’image: Fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Jérôme Baschet and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris: Leopard d’Or, 1996). 19. Le Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé, s.v. “personnage,” ATILF-CNRS and Université de Lorraine,http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/personnage. 20. Agathe Lafortune-Martel, “De l’entremets culinaire aux pièces montées d’un menu de propagande,” in Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montreal, 1992), 129. 21. “L’unique fonction est tout simplement d’être un ‘plus,’ un cadeau, un plat supplémentaire destiné à honorer celui auquel il est servi” (Laurioux, “Table et hierarchie sociale,” 96, 98). 22. Chiquart, Du fait de cuisine / On Cookery of Master Chiquart (1420): ‘Aucune science de l’art de cuysinerie et de cuysine’, ed. and trans. Terence Scully (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 99. 23. “Des entremès vifz, mouvans et allans par terre” (d’Escouchy, Chronique, 2:141; de la Marche, Mémoires, 2 :356). The distinction is not applied systematically in either d’Escouchy or de la Marche, who generally refer to such performances as entremet without a qualifier. 24. De la Marche, Mémoires, 2:360. 25. Art from the Court of Burgundy, 1364–1419 (Dijon: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2004), no. 26, p. 87; Stephen Fliegel, “The Cleveland Table Fountain and Gothic Automata,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 7 (2002); William Wixom, “A Glimpse at the Fountains of the Middle Ages,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 8 (2003). 26. The original plaques were restored with modern colorants at some point before 1924 (Rainer Richter, “Between Original and Imitation: Four Technical Studies in Bassetaille Enameling and Re-enameling of the Historicism Period,” Cleveland Museum of Art Bulletin 81 [1994]). 27. “Par l’ung des boutz de la croix sourdoit la fontainne . . . et recheoit dedans le prel par si subtille maniere, que l’on ne sçavoit que l’eaue devenoit” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 2:350). 28. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

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29. “Ung lac advironné de plusiers villes et chasteaux, ouquel avoit une navire à voile levé, tousjours nagant parmi l’eaue à part soy” (d’Escouchy, Chronique, 2:135). 30. “Avoit manière de la forest d’Inde, et en laquelle estoient pluseurs bestes de estrange fachon, qui d’eux meismes se mouvoient” (ibid., 2:136). 31. “Á part de soy” and “qui d’eux mesme se mouvoient” (ibid., 2:135–36). 32. “Ung pasté, dedens lequel avoit xxVIII personnages vifz, juans de divers instrumens, chascun quant leur tour venoit” (ibid., 2:133–34). 33. “Ung hault piller sur lequel avoit ung ymage de femme nue, exepté que ses blons cheveux lui pairroient et couvroient par derrière jusques au rains; et sur son chief avoit ung très riche chappeau; et estoit envoleppée ainsi, comme pour muchier ce qu’il appartenoit, d’une serviette à manière de volet bien delyé, et escripte en pluseurs lieux de lettres grigoises violeutes par moult belle fachon; et gettoit celle ymage, par les mamelles droit ypocras tousjours autant que le soupper dura. Et auprez d’elle, tirant contre le dreschoir, avoit ung autre piller, non pas sy hault, mais estoit ung peu petit plus large, en manière d’un hourd, sur lequel avoit attachié, à une chainne de fer, ung moult beau lyon tout vif, en signe d’estre garde et deffendeur d’icelle ymage; et contre son piller avoit escript, en un etarge, de lettres d’or: Ne touchiés à ma dame” (ibid., 2:137–38). 34. This is in keeping with long-standing conventions of ekphrasis inherited from antiquity. See, for example, Jas´ Elsner, “Introduction: The Genres of Ekphrasis,”Ramus 31 (2002); Liz James and Ruth Webb, “To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium,” Art History 14 (1991); Haiko Wandhoff, Ekphrasis: Kunstbeschreibungen und virtuelle Räume in der Literatur des Mittelalter (Berlin: Walter de Gruyer, 2004). 35. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image­Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 36. The modifier vif could denote markedly nonnaturalistic images, such as Villard de Honnecourt’s famous drawing of a lion “al vif,” but late medieval uses generally indicate that vif suggested at the very least a highly lifelike and enlivened representation (see Noa Turel, “Living Pictures: Rereading au vif, 1350–1550,” Gesta 50 [2011]: 163–82). In the case of the lion at the Feast of the Pheasant, the survival of records for payment for an iron chain to secure the lion, and the fact that Philip the Good is known to have kept a lion in his menagerie, suggests that a dangerous predator may indeed have been in the room (Léon de Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne: Études sur les lettres, les arts et l’industrie pendant le XVe siècle, vol. 2, pt. 1 [Paris: Plon Frères, 1849], 427). 37. “Une très belle dame, jeune, de l’eage de douze ans, vestue d’une robe de soye violette, richement bordée et estoffée d’or, et luy partoient unes manches, oultre la robe, d’une moult desliée soye, escriptes de lettres gregoises, et estoit son chief paré de ses cheveulx beaulx et blondz, et par dessus une tocque, affulée d’ung volet moult enrichy de pierrere” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 2:343–44). 38. See Peter Barnet and Pete Dandridge, eds., Lions, Dragons, and Other Beasts, ex. cat. (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2006), 136–41, which includes earlier bibliography. 39. Susan Smith, The Power of Women: A “Topos” in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 121. 40. Peter Barnet, “Beasts of Every Land and Clime,” in Lions, Dragons, and Other

notes to pages 35–38

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Beasts, ex. cat., edited by Peter Barnet and Pete Dandridge (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2006: 3–17; Otto von Falke and Erich Meyer, Bronzegeräte des Mittelalters, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1935); Michael Hütt, Aquamanilien: Gebrauch und Form (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zaubern, 1993), 40–54. 41. Hütt, Aquamanilien, 17–34. 42. Ibid., 54. 43. On the Burgundian concept of Jason, see Danielle quéruel, “Le personnage de Jason: De la mythologie au roman,” in Le Banquet du faisan, ed. Marie-Thérèse Caron and Denis Clauzel (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 1997), 145–62. 44. De la Marche, Mémoires, 2:357. 45. “Ce ne sembloit pas mistere, ains sembloit trop mieulx une très aigre et mortelle bataille” (ibid., 2:360). 46. “Sourdoient et naissoient gens armez et embastonnez” (ibid., 2:361). 47. “qu’ilz se firent le sang couler” (ibid., 2:361). 48. “Prestement qu’ilz se furent tous abatuz et occiz devant luy, la courtine fut retiree” (ibid., 2:361). 49. On stage curtains, see William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 57–58. 50. Posited from at least Vasari’s Lives, this construct has been studied, and increasingly questioned, by a number of art historians. E.g., Andrew Martindale, The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972); Catherine Sousslof, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Martin Warnke, The Court Artist, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self­Portraiture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 51. Some of the complexities of agency in relation to art are outlined in Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), although he concentrates on how art is perceived rather than how it is made. For just a few examples of scholarship investigating complexly authored works across late medieval media, see Antoine de Pise: L’art du vitrail vers 1400, ed. Claudine Lautier and Dany Sanderson (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2008); Lynn Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380–1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sherry Lindquist, Agency, Visuality and Society at the Char­ treuse de Champmol (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Stephen Perkinson, “Portraits and Their Patrons: Reconsidering Agency in Late Medieval Art,” in Patronage, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, 2013); Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200– 1500 (Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller, 2000). 52. De la Marche, Mémoires, 2:339–40. 53. “Après deliberacion d’opinions, furent les cerimonies et les misteres concluz telz qu’ilz se devoient faire” (ibid., 2:340). 54. Lindquist, Agency, 85–120. 55. Chrétien Dehaisnes, Documents et extraits divers concernant l’histoire de l’art dans la Flandre, l’Artois e le Hainault avant le xve siècle (Lille: L. Daniel, 1886), 197. 56. Archives of the Valais MS S103; discussed in Chiquart, Du fait de cuisine, 29–64.

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57. Taillevent, Viandier, 271 and 304. 58. Chiquart, Du fait de cuisine, 126. 59. Ibid., 127. 60. For the full menu, see ibid., 44. 61. Artistic practices that intentionally employ and acknowledge group authorship are generally treated as transgressive or avant-garde: see, for example, Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site­Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); the essays collected in Third Text 18 (2004). 62. For example, scholars often cite Richard Serra’s interest in industrial materials and processes, but the workers who actually craft his massive sculptures remain nameless—no art-historical article explores the various individual steelworkers’ experiences or intentions as makers (e.g., Benjamin Buchloh, “Richard Serra’s Early Work: Sculpture between Labor and Spectacle,” in Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, ed. Kynaston McShine et al. [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007]; John Rajchman, “Serra’s Abstract Thinking,” in Richard Serra Sculpture, 63). In contrast, economic reporting at the same time as the MOMA retrospective treats Serra as a collaborator with the owner of his then foundry, although in keeping with the priorities of business journalism the individual workers remain unnamed; see Jack Ewing, “German Steelworks Soars with Serra,” Bloomberg Businessweek July 9, 2007. 63. John Roberts, “Collaboration as a Problem of Art’s Cultural Form,” Third Text 18 (2004): 557–58. On the workshop as antecedent, see also Green, Third Hand, xiii. 64. Sherry Lindquist and Stephen Perkinson, “Artistic Identity in the Late Middle Ages: Foreward,” Gesta 41 (2002). 65. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, ed. John Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 39–40. 66. John Spencer, introduction to Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 29. 67. Yael Evan, “Artistic Collaboration in Florentine Workshops,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1984. 68. Allie Terry, “Meraviglia on Stage: Dionysian Visual Rhetoric and Cross-Cultural Communication at the Council of Florence,” Journal of Religion and Theater 6 (2007). 69. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts, and Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse, “The Commercial Production of Manuscript Books in Late-Thirteenth-Century and EarlyFourteenth-Century Paris,” in Medieval Book Productions: Assessing the Evidence, ed. Linda Browning (Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990), 103–4. 70. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish, 99–102, 209–19. 71. Susie Nash, “‘Adrien Biaunevopt . . . faseur des thomes’: André Beauneveu and Sculptural Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century France and Flanders,” in No Equal in Any Land: André Beauneveu, Artist to the Courts of France and Flanders, ed. Susie Nash (London: Groeningemuseum, 2007), 51, 57–61. 72. Ibid., 48. Tellingly, much art-historical ink has been shed attempting to characterize Beauneveu as either a sculptor or a painter in order to avoid reference to intermedial-

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ity in his production: Jim Harris, “(Re-)Making Beauneveu: The Scholarly Construction of a ‘Great Artist,’” in No Equal in Any Land, ed. Nash. 73. Joubert, “Peintres du Voeu du Faison,” 194–95.

CHAPTER 2 1. This is pretense is made explicit in Olivier de la Marche’s account: “Ces parolles dictes, mondit seigneur le duc, qui savoit à quelle intencion il avoit fait ce bancquet, regarda l’Eglise, et ainsy, comme ayant pitié d’elle, tira de son seing ung brief contenant qu’il vouoit qu’il secourroit la chrestienté” (Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont [Paris: Libraires Renouard, 1884], 2:367)]. 2. Foundational is Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Ryerson, eds., City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Pierre Béhar and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, eds., Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1570–1750) (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999). 3. The idea that spectacle indeed is defined by this distinction appears in a number of critical studies: e.g., Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 21; John MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 243; Patricia Mellencamp, “Spectacle and Spectator,” in Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from “Ciné­Tracts,” ed. Ron Burnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 4. E.g., Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995) and Commentaires sur la societé du spectacle (Paris: Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1988); Jason Gross, “Big and Loud,” in Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Jose Arroyo (London: BFI, 2000), 3–9; Myra Mendible, “High Theory / Low Culture: Postmodernism and the Politics of Carnival,” Journal of American Culture 22 (1999): 71–76, esp. 73. 5. E.g., Jessica Gordon, “Entertainments for the Marriages of the Princesses of Savoy in 1608,” in Italian Renaissance Festivals and Their European Influence, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, (Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992), 119–39. 6. David Rockwell, Spectacle (New York: Phaidon, 2006), 20–21. 7. E.g., Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002); Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics ond Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Victor Turner, “The Center out There,” History of Religions 12 (1973). Complicated related approaches appear in Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Es­ say on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York:Columbia University Press, 1982). 8. Touchstones of this discussion are Bakhtin, Rabelais; and Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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9. A similar breakdown of these two categories, although demonstrated with different types of evidence, can be found in Louise Fradenburg’s characterization of late medieval Scottish kingship, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Fradenburg’s dynamic power has parallels with the interaction of object and viewer proposed by Jas´ Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–22. 10. While symptomatically similar, these performances differ from both modern experimental theater (in that they form a norm rather than rejecting it) and other types of environmental theater such as dinner theater which, while popular, are often ignored or stigmatized as low by critics (Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “Casting the Audience,” Drama Review 37 [1993]). 11. On chivalry and its importance for elite self-definition and formation, see Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Jean Rychner, La littérature et les moeurs chevaleresques à la cour de Bourgogne (Neuchatel: Secrétariat de l’Université, 1950); Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North­West Europe 1270–1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12. For an interesting contemporary ethnographic description of a parallel situation that discusses the issue of belonging, see Sharon Mazer, “The Power Team: Muscular Christianity and the Spectacle,” in Performance Studies, ed. Erin Schiff (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 14–28. 13. De la Marche, Mémoires, 2:340. 14. As, for example, in the Bastard of Rubempré affair, when de la Marche specifies that he was sent as an envoy and that Duke Philip defended him as a loyal subject (ibid., 3:4). 15. The comparison to charivari is in Chronique du religieux de Saint­Denys: Con­ tenant le règne de Charles VI, ed. L. Bellaguet (Paris: De Crapelet, 1852), 2:64–67. 16. Ibid., 64–71; Jean Froissart, The Chronicles of Froissart, trans. John Bourchier (London: Macmillan, 1904), 419–21. 17. E.g., Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 18. Chronique du religieux de Saint­Denys, 68–69. 19. Ibid., 66–67. 20. Froissart, Chronicles, 420. 21. Lorraine Stock, “Froissart’s Chroniques and Its Illustrators: Historicity and Ficticity in the Verbal and Visual Imagining of Charles VI’s Le Bal des Ardents,” Studies in Iconography 21 (2000). 22. Crane, Performance, 154. Crane reads the Bal des Ardents as integrally connected to Charles VI and contrasts it with the forms of straight masking typical of charivari. 23. Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942); Visual Resources 20 (2004). Krautheimer notably views the fifteenth century as a time when the standards for accurate imitation were in flux (Krautheimer, “Introduction,” 20). 24. Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 25. Guillaume de Machaut, “The Fountain of Love” (La fonteinne amoureuse) and

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Two Other Love Vision Poems, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York: Garland, 1993), ll. 636–44. 26. Ibid., ll. 784–86. 27. “Geant je veulz cy arrester / Car je voy noble compaignie / A laquelle me fault parler. / Geant, je veulz cy arrester / Dire leur veulz et remonstrer / Chose qui doit bien estre ouye” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 2:362). 28. Ibid., 2:354. 29. “Au milieu de la moyenne table s’assit mondit seigneur le duc, à sa dextre s’assit madamoiselle, fille de monseigneur le duc de Bourbon, après elle monseigneur de Cleves, madame de Ravestain, niepce de madame la duchesse et femme de monseigneur Adolf; et madame la duchesse fut assise à sa senextre avec madame de Charny, madamoiselle d’Estampes, monseigner de St Pol . . .” (ibid., 2:355). 30. “Sur la moyenne avoit une eglise croisée, voirrée et faicte de gente façon . . . il y avoit ung aultre entremetz d’ung petit enfant tout nu . . . Ung aultre entremectz y avoit, d’une caraque ancrée . . . Ung aultre entremectz y avoit d’une moult belle fontainne” (ibid., 2:349–50). 31. Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce (London: MacLehose, 2009). 32. “Meslez avec grant nombre de dames et de damoiselles, et aussi tant d’aultres chevaliers, que les tables estoient plaines d’ung costé et d’aultre; et pareillement à la troisiesme table furent assis escuyers et damoiselles ensemble, en telle façon que les tables furent fournies” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 2:355). 33. On these manuscripts, see J. van den Gheyn, Histoire de Charles Martel: Repro­ duction des 102 miniatures de Loyset Liédet (1470) (Brussels: Vromant, 1910). 34. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking, 1963), 27. 35. BnF MS fr. 2813 fol. 474r. 36. quoted in Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy (London: Longmans, 1973), 146. 37. Alain Chartier, “La Belle Dame sans merci,” in The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. J. C. Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), l. 128. 38. A summary of interpretations of the Dijon composition and a closely related earlier copy in Versailles can be found in Sophie Jugie, “Une fête champêtre à la cour de Bourgogne,” Bulletin des musées de Dijon 5 (1999). On the composition and love/ spring iconography, see Roberta Smith Favis, “The Garden of Love in Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish and German Engravings: Some Studies in Secular Iconography in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1974, 62– 164; Jean-Bernard de Vaivre, “Chasse à l’oiseau et cour d’amour: Note sur deux tableaux de Versailles et de Dijon,” Journal des savants (1985); Otto Pächt, Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, ed. Maria Schmidt-Dengler, trans. David Britt (London: Harvey Miller, 1994), 114–15. 39. Anne Hagopian van Buren, “Un jardin d’amour au parc d’Hesdin, et le rôle de Jan van Eyck dans une commande ducale,” Revue de Louvre et des musées de France 35 (1985). The evidence for this is slim. The details of the arms are presumed to be those of the duke at the time of the original painting’s creation—they include Luxembourg and so

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must date to after October 1430—but the Order of the Golden the Fleece (founded 1431) is absent, which indicates that the composition predates the foundation of the order. The marriage in question is one of the few elaborate festivities recorded during the precise period thus delineated. Other possible historical connections are proposed by Albert Châtelet, “Jardin d’amour où commémoration?” Bulletin des musées de Dijon 5 (1999), and Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, “Le repas de marriage au Moyen Âge (xIIIe–xve siècles) à travers l’iconographie,” in Le Mariage au Moyen Âge: Actes du colloque de Montfer­ rand 3 mai 1997, ed. J. Teyssot (Montferrand: Il était une fois Montferrand, 1997), 101. On Hesdin more generally, see van Buren’s “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), 115–34; Sharon Farmer, “Aristocratic Power and the ‘Natural’ Landscape,” Speculum 88 (2013); Birgit Franke, “Gesellschaftsspiele mit Automaten—‘Merveilles’ in Hesdin,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 24 (1997). A review of physical and nonarchival evidence on the layout of the site, as well as some tentative suggestions for how its past splendors might be evoked in present-day restorations, can be found in Pierre-Louis Cusenier, “Le parc des comtes d’Artois à Vieil Hesdin: Essai de reconstruction du site,” in Le Jardin dans les anciens Pays­Bas, ed. Laurence Baudoux-Rousseau and Charles Giry-Deloison (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2002), 71–86. 40. Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. M. le baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: R. Heussner, 1863–66), 4:380–83. 41. Ibid., 3:328. 42. “But well wote I that the noble Duc Philippe firste foundeur of this sayd ordre dyd do maken a chambre in the Castell of Hesdyn, Where in was craftly and curieusly depeynted the conquests of the golden flese by the sayd Iason in whiche chambre I haue ben and seen the sayde historie so depeynted. & in remembraunce of medea & of her connyng & science. he had do make in the sayde chambre by subtil engyn that whan he wolde it shuld seme that it lightened & then thondre, snowe & rayne. And all within the saide chambre as ofte tymes & whan it shuld please him. which was al made for his singulier pleasir” (William Caxton, prologue to Raoul Lefèvre, For as moche as late by the comau[n]dement of the right hye [and] noble princesse my right redoubted lady my lady Margarete by the grace of god Duchesse of Bourgoyne Brabant [et]c. [. . .] as to the historie of Iason [. . .] [Westminster: William Caxton, 1477], fol. 2). 43. The Golden Fleece roll is Kupferstichkabinett Inv. 14,721 a–e. It is discussed at length in Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “The Artistic Patronage of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (1419–1467)” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979), 114–49, 265–70; Anne Hagopian van Buren, “The Model Roll of the Golden Fleece,” Art Bulletin 61 (1979). 44. Oliver Rackham, Treasures of Silver at Corpus Christi College Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–59. 45. “J’ay cueur pressé d’amertume et rigueur, / Mes yeulx fonduz, flatrie ma couleur, / qui bien y vise. / Oyez mes plaintz, vous tous où je ravise./Secourez moy, sans le mectre en feintise; / Plourez mes maulx; car je suis Saincte Eglise, / La vostre mere” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 2:363). 46. On the illustrations see Michael Camille, “The Illustrated Manuscripts of Guillaume Deguileville’s Pélerinages, 1330–1426,” PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1985. On the text, see Robert Clark and Pamela Sheingorn, “Encountering a Dream-Vision:

notes to pages 62– 69

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Visual and Verbal Glosses to Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pelerinage Jhesuchrist,” in Push Me, Pull You, vol. 1, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura Gelfand (Leiden: Brill, 2011) (with earlier bibliography); Guillaume de Digulleville, ed. Frédéric Duval and Fabienne Pomel (Rennes: Presses de Rennes, 2008); Susan Hagen, Allegorical Remembrance: A Study of “The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man” as a Medieval Treatise on Seeing and Remembering (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). 47. Discussion of this practice and mention of specific instances in which Philip the Bold would have been in the audience can be found in D. Catherine Brown, Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 48. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 10197–8, fol. 110. 49. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 10197–8, fol. 162. 50. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 10197–8, fol. 246v. 51. “Par ceste conspiration / Me souvint d’une vision / que je vi u tempz qui passa” (Guillaume de Deguileville, Le pelerinage Jhesucrist de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. J. Stürzinger [London: Nichols and Sons, 1897], ll. 7453–55). 52. “O toy, o toy, noble duc de Bourgoingne, / Filz de l’Eglise, et frere à ses enffans, / Entemps à moy, et pense à ma besoingne. / Paintz en ton cueur la honte et la vergoingne, / Les griefz remordz qu’en moi je pourte et sens” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 2:365). 53. “Mondit seigneur le duc, qui savoit à quelle intencion il avoit fait ce bancquet, regarda l’Eglise, et ainsy, comme ayant pitié d’elle, tira de son seing ung brief contenant qu’il vouoit qu’il secourroit la chrestienté” (ibid., 2:367). 54. “O vous, princes, chevaliers, nobles hommes, / Voyez patron pour haulx faictz entreprendre” (ibid.). 55. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, s.v. “patron,” http://www .cnrtl.fr/definition/patron. The entremet’s careful construction of Philip as a patron has interesting parallels with the patron-function discussed by Aden Kumler, “The PatronFunction,” in Patronage, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ: Christian Index of Art, 2013), 297–319. 56. Richard Dyer, Stars, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 20. 57. Sarah Beckwith, “Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identi­ ties and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 77; Jody Enders, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 58. James Bloom, “Performance as Paradigm: The Visual Culture of the Burgundian Court,” in Staging the Court, ed. Wim Blockmans et al. (London: Harvey Miller, 2013). 59. E.g., Truus van Bueren, Leven na de dood: Gedenken in de late middeleeuwen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999); Laura Gelfland, “Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Devotional Portrait Diptychs: Origins and Function,” PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1994; Barbara Lane, “The Development of the Medieval Devotional Figure,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvannia, 1970. 60. Foundational to recent thought on the social role of medieval heraldry and emblems is Michel Pastoureau, L’hermine et le sinople (Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1982). 61. On the evolution of popular readings of the votive image of Charles and St. George, see Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive

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notes to pages 69 –74

Portraits of Charles the Bold, trans. Beverly Jackson (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 81–108. 62. Stephen Perkinson, “Likeness, Loyalty, and the Life of the Court Artist,” Quaer­ endo 38 (2008): 161–72. 63. Michel Maerten, “The Germolles Château,” in Art from the Court of Burgundy, 1364–1419, ex. cat. (Dijon: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2004), 146–50; Patrice Beck, ed., Vie de cour de Bourgogne à la fin du Moyen Age: Le château de Germolles (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, France: Alan Sutton, 2002). 64. For decorative schemes in the Burgundian Valois territories, see Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, “Contribution à l’étude de la peinture médiévale, les peintres en Bourgogne sous les ducs de Valois, 1363–1477,” PhD diss, Université de Bourgogne, 1996; Carina Fryklund, “Studies in Wall Painting in the Southern Low Countries c. 1300– 1500,” PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2000. 65. Burgundy remained predominantly agricultural during this period and was a more reliable and less fractious source of income for the dukes than their other holdings well into the mid-fifteenth century (Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised Lands: The Low Countries under Burgundian Rule, 1369–1530, trans. Elizabeth Fackelman, ed. Edward Peters [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 144–45). 66. This includes an extremely complicated and relatively understudied set of texts: Joël Blanchard, La pastorelle en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles: Recherches sur les struc­ tures de l’imaginaire medieval (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1983). 67. The conceit of the ruler and his wife as pastoral lovers was more clearly exploited in the depiction of René of Anjou and his second wife in the poem Regnault et Jeanneton fifty years later. 68. Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 105–35. 69. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Susan Crane has recently argued for the importance of insignia on clothing and other objects in aristocratic self-construction during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France and England. The proliferation of personal signs found in the Burgundian examples discussed here in part support her general conclusions; see Crane, Performance of Self.

CHAPTER 3 1. “Je pensay en moy mesme les oultraigeux excès et la grant despense qui, pour la cause de ces banquetz, ont esté faictz puis peu de temps . . . sans y trouver entendement de vertu . . . me sembloit si haulte entreprinse trop soubdainement commencée” (Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont [Paris: Libraires Renouard, 1884], 2:369). 2. “Mon amy, saches, et je le te afferme en foy de chevalier, que ces chappeltz, bancquetz et festiemens qui se sont menez et maintenuz de longue main, n’ont esté sinon par la ferme entreprinse et secrete desirance de monseigneur le duc, pour parvenir à faire son bancquet par la maniere qu’on cy veue, desirant grandement et de tout son cueur conduyre à effect ung ancien sainct propoz qu’il a eu de servir Dieu. . . . Saiches qu’il mesme

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a ceste besoigne conduicte et desmenée de longue main pour avoir temps de pouvoir vouer et monstrer le bon vouloir et le desir qu’il a au bien publicque et general prouffict de la chrestienté” (ibid., 2:370–71). 3. Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1970), 143, 358–72. 4. Agathe Lafortune-Martel, Fête noble en bourgogne aux XVe siècle (Montréal: Bellarmin, 1984). 5. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “The Liminality and Centrality of Dreams in the Medieval West,” in Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreams, ed. David Shulman and Guy Stroumsa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6. US legal code Title 18, part 1, chapter 51 1111–12. While courts regularly equate passion with rage and jealousy, the term technically denotes any emotion, and feminist law scholars in particular have argued for a broader reading that would include states such as fear (e.g., Laurie Taylor, “Provoked Reason in Men and Women: Heat-of-Passion Self-Defense,” UCLA Law Review 33 [1985]: 1,682). 7. La Chanson de Roland ll. 3774–78, discussed in Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 37–40. 8. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); Huizinga, Autumn, 1–29. 9. For examples and discussions of this approach, see Émile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Erwin Panofsky, “‘Imago Pietatis’: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des ‘Schmerzensmanns’ und der ‘Maria Mediatrix,’” in Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1927); Sixten Ringbom, From Icon to Narrative (Åbo, Finland: Åbo akademi, 1965); Robert Suckale, “Arma Christi: Überlegungen zur Zeichenhaftigkeit mittelalterlicher Andachtsbilder,” in Stil und Funktion, ed. Peter Schmidt and Gregor Wedekind (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003); James Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, Belgium: Van Ghemmert, 1979); Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1990); David Freedburg, The Power of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 161–91; Joanna Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1992); Jeffrey Hamburger, “‘To Make Women Weep’: Ugly Art as ‘Feminine’ and the Origins of Modern Aesthetics,” RES:Anthropology and Aesthetics 31 (1997); Elina Gertsman, ed., Crying in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2011). 10. Usefully surveyed in William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3–62. 11. The foundations of this work are summarized in Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002). 12. Rosenwein, “Worrying,” 842–43. 13. De la Marche, Mémoires, 2:363–65. For the development of this emotional rhetoric in a specifically crusading context, see David Morris, “The Servile Mother: Jerusalem as Woman in the Era of the Crusades,” in Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, ed. Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

210

notes to pages 78–88

14. “Alla prendre volontaire haine contre le comte” (Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. M. le baron Kervyn de Lettenhove [Brussels: R. Heussner, 1863–66], 5:125). 15. “qui aigrement porta en coeur son injure” (ibid., 5:127). 16. “Et là composa et articula sa response, telle que devoit faire, et de quoi tout homme luy donna los après, de la forme et de l’assiette” (ibid.). 17. Mariann Naessens, “Sexuality in Court: Emotional Perpetrators and Victims versus a Rational Judicial System?,” in Emotions in the Heart of the City (14th–16th century), ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure van Bruaene (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 153. 18. Jacqueline van Leeuwen, “Emotions on Trial: Attitudes towards the Sensitivity of Victims and Judges in Medieval Flanders,” in Emotions in the Heart of the City, ed. Lecuppre-Desjardin and van Bruaene, 171. 19. As beautifully evoked in James Elkins, Pictures and Tears (New York: Routledge, 2001), 155–58. 20. For a basic overview of this tradition, see Julian de Ridder, Gerechtigheidstafe­ relen voor schepenhuizen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden in de 14de, 15de en 16de eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1989). 21. Bret Rothstein, “Looking the Part: Ruminative Viewing and the Imagination of Community in the Early Modern Low Countries,” Art History 31 (2008); Hugo van der Velden, “Cambyses for Example: The Origins and Function of an exemplum iustitiae in Netherlandish Art of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Simiolus 23 (1995). For earlier bibliography, see de Ridder, Gerechtigheidstafeleren, 47–54. 22. The first panel was completed by Bouts but heavily restored; the second is largely intact but was left unfinished on Bouts’s death (Un chef­d’oeuvre à la loupe: La justice d’Othon de Dieric Bouts [Brussels: Service educatif, Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, 1988]). 23. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, s.v. “patron,” http://www .cnrtl.fr/definition/patron. 24. “Par force le leu rompt et tire /A ses dens et gris la couronne / Et le lyon par tresgrant ire / De sa pate grant coup luy donne” (Jean Petit, La justification du duc de Bour­ gogne [Paris, ca. 1410], Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 2657 fol. 1v). 25. On Christine’s acceptance of lies that promote concord, see Dallas Denery, “Christine de Pizan against the Theologians,” Viator 39 (2008). 26. Christine de Pizan, “Epistre au dieu d’Amours,” in Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. and trans. Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 33– 89, ll. 36–59. 27. David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists, or Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177–202; Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 242–45 and 258–59. 28. E.g., Francois Amory, “Whited Sepulchres: The Semantic History of Hypocrisy to the High Middle Ages, ” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 53 (1986); Edwin Craun, Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge:

notes to pages 88– 96

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Cambridge University Press, 1997); Dallas Denery, The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 29. Faus Semblant is introduced in l. 10,456 and much debated thereafter (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean le Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Daniel Poiron [Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1974]). 30. Kevin Brownlee, “Machaut’s Motet 15 and the ‘Roman de la rose’: The Literary Context of ‘Amours qui a le pouoir / Faus Semblant m’a deceu / Vidi Dominum,’” Early Music History 10 (1991): 7. 31. Traced in Timothy Stinson, “Illumination and Interpretation: The Depiction and Reception of Faus Semblant in Roman de la Rose Manuscripts,” Speculum 87 (2012): 469–98. 32. Laurent de Bois, La somme le roi, eds. Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise LeurquinLabie (Paris: Société des textes français modernes, 2008); Édith Brayer, “Contenu, structure et combinaisons du ‘Miroir du Monde’ et de la ‘Somme le Roi,’” Romania 79 (1958). On the miniature cycle see Eric Millar, An Illustrated MS of “La Somme le Roy” (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1953); Rosamund Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices, Part II: ‘Hely’; Two Missing Notes in the Somme le Roi Illuminator; the Unicorn; ‘Sevens’ in the Belleville Breviary and some Psalters and Horae,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 42–72. 33. Laurent de Bois, The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the “Somme le roi” of Laurens d’Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 21. 34. Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 105–6, 122–24; Jean Wirth, Les marges à droleries des manuscrits gothiques, 1250–1350 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2008), 197, 244–46, 313–18. 35. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York:Columbia University Press, 1982); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Cri­ tique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 36. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 11–53. 37. Horst Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952). 38. For a more extended discussion of the Monkey Cup and following entremet with earlier bibliography, see Christina Normore, “Monkey in the Middle,” in The Anthropo­ morphc Lens, ed. Walter Melion et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014). 39. Aby Warburg, “Artistic Exchanges between North and South in the Fifteenth Century (1905),” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 275–80. 40. De la Marche, Mémoires, 3:151–54. 41. Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 125–46. 42. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

212

notes to pages 97–105

43. Ghent, Bethlehem Convent of the Poor Clares MS 8. Auspicius van Corstanje, Yves Cazaux, J. Decavele, and Albert Derolez, Vita Sanctae Coletae (1381–1447) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982). 44. Elisabeth Lopez, Colette of Corbie (1381–1447): Learning and Holiness, trans. Joanna Waller and Daria Mitchell (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2011). 45. The text is available in a modern edition as Pierre de Vaux, Vie de soeur Colette, ed. Elisabeth Lopez (Saint-Etienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1994).

CHAPTER 4 1. Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont (Paris: Libraires Renouard, 1884), 2:370. 2. Bernard of Clairvaux, “A Justification to Abbot William,” in Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Atti­ tude toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 283. 3. Ibid., 266–67. 4. For an introduction to the complex terrain of medieval ethical systems and their iconographies, see Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medi­ eval Art from Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Richard Newhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1993); Jennifer O’Reilly, Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1988); Rosamund Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices, Part I: Two Fifteenth-Century Lines of Dependence on the Thirteenth and Twelfth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963). 5. On the importance of magnificence in fifteenth-century court culture, see Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Luxury Arts of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005); A. D. Fraser Jenkins, “Cosimo de’ Medici’s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 166–69; Louis Green, “Galvano Fiamma, Azzone Visconti and the Revival of the Classical Theory of Magnificence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990). 6. On the distinction between current interest in magnificence as excess and premodern usage, see Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Ink, Milk, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1–31. 7. Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance, 49. 8. “ung tonneau posé en ung vignoble, ouquel avoit deux manièrez de buvrages doulx et bons, quant à l’un, et l’autre estoit amers et mauvaix. Ainsi me sembla substance bonne et mauvaise; et sus ledit tonneau avoit assis le personnage d’un hours, moult richement vestu, qui tenoit en sa main ung beisvet, ouquel avoit en escript: Qui en voeut sy en prengnge” (Mathieu d’Escouchy, Chronique, ed. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt [Paris: Mme Ve Jules Renouard, Libraire de la Société de l’histoire de France, 1863], 2:134–35). 9. Traced in Newhauser, Treatise on Vices and Virtues.

notes to pages 105–109

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10. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. R. W. Brown (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), 177. 11. This opinion was repeated but not necessarily shared throughout the Middle Ages. Excessive self-denial with regard to basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter was one of the marks of avarice. 12. O’Reilly, Studies in the Iconography, 163. 13. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9323, fol. 456v. 14. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 11041, fol. 66v. The Somme le roi also contains an extended discussion of an alternate list of virtues known as the Seven Gift Virtues, which do not include temperance under its own name and so will be omitted from extended discussion here. On this system and its iconography, see O’Reilly, Studies in the Iconography, 163–206. 15. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 11041 fol. 142v. 16. Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. M. le baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: R. Heussner, 1863–66), 5:244. 17. R. W. Lightbown, Secular Goldsmiths’ Work in Medieval France: A History (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1978), 26–27. 18. Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices, Part I,” 289. Interestingly, in the slightly later Rouen images discussed by Mâle, the temproir has disappeared to be replaced by, among other things, a windmill meant to symbolize the steady production (rather than consumption) of food, only to then have all food references vanish from the French iconography. Mâle holds, however, that the mixing of wine is a steady feature in Italian iconography (Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986], 288, 294–95). 19. In the interest of clarity, personifications of virtues will be capitalized here, the abstract concept they illustrate will not. 20. This idea recurs frequently; see for example Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 11041 fol. 66. 21. The instructions are reproduced in the appendix to Eric Millar, An Illustrated MS of “La Somme le roi” (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1953). Temperance appears on page 50: “Et atrempance doit estre painte de coste en la part senestre et doivent estre li dames seans a une table mise de viandes lune parle a lautre par contenance de mains Et dessouz la table a un poure a genouz qui prent un hanap a pie et boit.” 22. In his discussion of related illuminations in Mazarine 870, Millar notes that the woman is declining the offered wine at the behest of the personification of temperance (ibid., 31). This is less clear in BR ms 11041, although the notion of interaction between the two figures persists. 23. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 11041 fols. 137–39. 24. The figure on this shield is illegible. On the early development of virtue and vice iconography, see Katzenellenbogen, Allegories. 25. Millar, Illustrated MS, 42, and Rosamund Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices, Part II: ‘Hely’; Two Missing Notes in the Somme le Roi Illuminator; the Unicorn; ‘Sevens’ in the Belleville Breviary and some Psalters and Horae,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 51.

214

notes to pages 109 –112

26. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 177. 27. Lester Kruger Born, “The Perfect Prince: A Study in Thirteenth- and FourteenthCentury Ideals,” Speculum 3 (1928). 28. On the dissemination of this text, see Charles Briggs, Giles of Rome’s “De Regi­ mine Principum”: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c. 1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The Burgundian ducal library included several copies of this work in two different translations: one by Henri de Gauchy (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9474 and MS 10368) and a new translation by Jean Wauquelin ordered by Philip the Good (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9043). Leading courtiers also possessed copies despite the fact that the text is explicitly directed toward rulers (e.g., Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 11099–100, ex-libris Charles de Croy). 29. The copies created for Charles V have been eloquently discussed in Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 30. Both image cycles are reproduced in full in ibid. 31. Sherman discusses the curious headdress of this figure in detail: she notes that a similar headdress is worn by Avarice in the same manuscript and suggests that the woman may be intended as a Jewess (ibid., 81–82). 32. “Et actrempance resgarde celles qui la conservent ou en singulier comme boire ou mengier, ou en son espece comme fait ou culpe charnel” (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9505–6, fol. 60). 33. “Magnificence cest agitation et adminstration de grans choses et excellentes avec ample et reliusant proposition de corage comme dit tulle. Ceste magnificence ou elle est de cuer en desdaignant estre subget a vilter ou estre priue de liberter. Ou elle est de bouche en proferant ader verite en paroles. Ou elle est deuure et de fait en faisant magnifiquement toutes ses euvres. De la premiere partie de ceste magnificence furent les anciens princes bien orner et si la doivent tous princes avoir” (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9232, fol. 460v). 34. “Li sisiemes degres de puesce il appellent magnificence. Ceste vertue il deseront ensi: Magnificence est font il de haultestre besongn bonneuvres et chevance. Ceste vertu moustre mes grans philosophes Jhscris et appelle perseidance par la quelle la bons chlvs dieu endure les maulx et pardure dusques en la fin de celle haulte voye de pfecton que il a emprins. De ceste vertu dit sains pol que toutes les vertus couvent mais ceste gagne lespee. Toutes se combatent mais ceste a victoire et la courronne. Toutes eunvent mais ceste emporte le loyex au vespre car si com dit meß qui parseuevra jusques en la fin il ßa saus et nulz autv. Plus avant ne seuvent li philosophe la vertus de puseche donner mais li desciple nn maistre Jhscrist vont plus avant asser” (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 11041, fol. 92). 35. This point is most directly stated in the earlier chapter on the related virtue of liberality, when Aristotle says that the liberal person is “moienne ou moienneresse en pecunes et vers pecunes” (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9505–6 fol. 66). 36. “Ceste vertu est vers pecunes mais elle ne extent pas aussi comme fait liberalite en toutes operacions qui sont en pecunes” (ibid., fol. 71v).

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37. “Toutes choses quelsconques des quelles le digne pris et la valeur est mesuree et estimee par monnoie” (ibid., fol. 66v). 38. “Pecunes Cest la cause pour quoy il determine de magnificence apres ce que il a dit de liberalite. Car il ont coumence et sont vers une meisme matiere” (ibid., fol. 71v). 39. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 95. 40. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 10368, fol. 24v. Giles of Rome does not otherwise limit the social class of those who can practice magnificence, referring simply to gens. However, he insists that the magnificent must be free and have sufficient resources so that great expenditures do not put them in financial need. 41. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 94. 42. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9548, fol. 123v. 43. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 10368, fol. 24. 44. Fraser Jenkins, “Cosimo de’ Medici’s Patronage”; Green, “Galvano Fiamma.” Fraser Jenkins places the origin of architectural magnificence in the late fifteenth-century humanism of Florence. Green sees it as an innovation of the Milanese Visconti court in the thirteenth century, perhaps under Tuscan influence (“Galvano Fiamma,” 112). Green specifically rejects any Northern European connection in the formulation of a theory of magnificence, although he acknowledges what he considers a surface similarity between thirteenth-century French royal patronage and the decoration of Visconti buildings (“Galvano Fiamma,” 106, 111). 45. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 96. 46. “Il donne grans disners comme noces” (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9505–6, fol. 74). 47. “Et lui appartient miex et plus faire despense en oeuvres qui sont longuement durables car teles oeuvres sont tres bonnes” (ibid., fol. 74). 48. “Tres bonnes. Cest trop plus grant magnificence et meilleur chose de faire un temple ou un palais longuement durable de quoy il est aussi quie ppetuel memoire de celuy quy la fait et proffit au bien publique que de faire une tele chose bele et jolie ce de petite duree Mais secelle escoit belle et durable ce seroit tres bien” (ibid.). 49. Brussels Bibliothèque royale Albert I, MS 9505–6 fol. 66. 50. Meermanno-Westreenianum MS 10 D 1 fol. 63. 51. There are three known surviving manuscripts of this text: Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9543; Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9548; and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS français 611; two were owned by members of the Valois Burgundian court. Both of the manuscripts now in Brussels were in the collection of Margaret of Austria (Marguerite Debae, La Librarie de Marguerite d’Autriche, Europalia 87, Österreich [Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, 1987], 103). Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9548 was purchased from the Croys. On these manuscripts, with previous bibliography, see Elizabeth Hunt, Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts, 1270–1319 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 137–40. The text is published as Jehan le Bel, Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté, ed. J. Petit (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1867–69). 52. For the sections on largesse and magnificence, see le Bel, Li ars d’amour, 1:371– 423.

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53. While it differs in some details, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9543 also has three miniatures for magnificence (fols. 148, 149v, and 150), the first two of which have identical subject matter with Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9548. 54. It is not known how Margaret of Austria acquired Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9543; she inherited many manuscripts from the Burgundian library, but this manuscript is not mentioned in the inventories of that collection. 55. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9543, fol. 127. The temperance miniature for Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9548, fol. 105v, is heavily damaged. From what can still be seen, it had the same general composition as that in Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9543, with a man and a woman seated at a full table. The two face each other and gesture, but losses in the hands and faces make the exact nature of their communication unclear. They do not, however, seem to be closely related to figures in any of the other feast images within the manuscript. 56. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9543, fol. 251v. 57. Georges Doutrepont, La littérature française de la cour des ducs de Bourgogne: Philippe le Hardi, Jeans sans Peur, Philippe le Bon, Charles le Téméraire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909), 187. 58. The idea that a ruler had to be virtuous is a commonplace. A clear statement of the position appears in the prologue to Giles of Rome, Le livre du governement des rois et des princes, where the ordering of the material is said to be natural because one must first know how to govern oneself before one can govern others (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 10368 fols. 2v–3). 59. Sherman, Imaging Aristotlte, 231–39, and “Some Visual Definitions in the Illustration of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics in the French Translations of Nicole Oresme,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 320–30. 60. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 237. 61. The fact that the nobleman reaches for the dish that is being presented to the king helps to support Sherman’s argument that he represents a kinsman plotting to take the throne. Table etiquette demanded that the highest-ranking people be served first and that special dishes be reserved only for rulers. These could be given to others as a sign of special regard, but since the king in this miniature has eyes only for the queen and seems oblivious to what is happening to his right, it is unlikely that he is making such a gift intentionally. Usurping the king’s dish is similar in kind to usurping his throne, although obviously different in degree. 62. The other possibility, that this figure is meant to be testing for poison, likewise underscores the precarious nature of feasting, albeit in a more practical fashion. 63. Chastellain specifically cites comparison as a technique used to discern the relative merits of princes, especially contemporaries (Oeuvres, 2:151). 64. For a summary of the terms of the Treaty of Troyes, see Pierre Champion and Paul de Thoisy, Bourgogne, France­Angleterre au traité de Troyes (Paris: Éditions Balzac, 1943), 213–16. 65. “N’estoit pas estat tel que autrefois on avoit vu en luy, ny qui suffist à sa hautesse, ains estoit semblant d’une chose desfigurée, qui jadis sembloit avoir esté spécieuse beaucoup et belle, mais maintenant rien. Car là où les princes et haux membres par avant du

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royaume souloient servir et faire les cérémonies à la table de leur roy, avec toutes autres richesses qui y resplendissoient, maintenant, c’estoient povres vieux serviteurs deshabitués, peu réputés ydoines, qui se présentoient et avoient l’exercice de haux et royaux officiers, parce que les autres ne s’y monstroient” (Chastellain, Oeuvres 1:200–201). 66. “En estat royal, couronne sur la teste . . . en pompes et beubans, le plus qu’il se pouvoit dire” (ibid., 1:202). The term beubans often carries a negative connotation of pride and prodigality rather than more acceptable forms of luxury such as magnificence. Interestingly, it is linked etymologically to the modern expression faire bombance, which means to feast. 67. “Et, quant à parler de l’estat du roy d’Angleterre et de la royne, sa femme, et des grans estatz et des habillemens dont luy, la royne sa femme et les princes de son sang estoient adornez ce jour, seroit trop forte à racompter. Et, de toutes pars, venoient les subgetz du royaulme en humilité grant, pour luy faire révérence et honneur; et, dès lors, commença le roy d’Angleterre du tout à gouverner . . .” (Jean Lefèvre de St Rémy, Chronique, ed. François Morand [Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1876–81], 2:26–27). 68. “Le roy estoit petitement et povrement servy; dont il desplaisoit moult à aucuns François qui ce véoient” (ibid., 2:26). 69. “Vinrent à court aucunes notables citoyens à qui nature trayoit de aller voir et de visiter en tel jour leur souverain et naturel seigneur, comme autres fois ils avoient fait. Les quels, quand ils aperçurent le roy estre si povrement accompagné, en son estat si parsobre, et de si peu de fait, envers ce que auutres fois avoient vu et congnu, certes le coeur leur atendrissoit durement, et n’y avoit celuy à qui les larmes ne mouillassent les yeux” (Chastellain, Oeuvres 1:201). 70. “Jadis glorieux et félice pour eux, à celuy de lors plein d’oppobre et de confusion pour leurs enfans” (ibid.). 71. De la Marche, Mémoires, 2:371–78. 72. Charity Cannon Willard, “The Concept of True Nobility at the Burgundian Court,” Studies in the Renaissance 14 (1967): 33–48. 73. “Et pour ce est tresbelle et proffitable chose a tous josnes escuiers de servir sans desservir, de estre doulz, humbles et paciens, pour acquerir la grace de Dieu et puis de toutes gens” (Antoine de la Sale, Jehan de Saintré, ed. Jean Misrahi and Charles Knudson [Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1965], 67). 74. Lefèvre, Chronique, 2:155–56, 292–96. 75. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Richard Aldington (Garden City, NY: Garden City Books, 1949), 115–16. 76. The conscious use of somatic training to instill social values and its effects are discussed in a somewhat different form in Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 135–69. A more unconscious but equally pervasive connection between manners and ideology is famously posited in Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 77. Arlie Hochshild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

218

notes to pages 131–137

CHAPTER 5 1. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xxi, 25. 2. Erwin Panofsky, “Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait,” Burlington Maga­ zine 64 (1934), and Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). See also Panofsky, “The Friedsam Annunciation and the Problem of the Ghent Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 17 (1935). 3. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 144–48; Elisabeth Dhanens, Hubert et Jan van Eyck (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1980), 328. 4. Carol Purtle, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 144. 5. On the theft and restoration of the painting, see Dhanens, Hubert et Jan, 316–23. 6. “Flos floriolorum Appellaris.” 7. “mater hec est filia / pater hi(c) est natus / quis audivit talia / deus homo natus etcet,” transcribed in Maurits Smeyers, “Jan van Eyck Archaeologist? Reflections on Eyckian Epigraphy,” in Archaeological and Historical Aspects of West­ European Societies, ed. Marc Lodewijckx (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1996), 413; Millard Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth Century Paintings,” Art Bulletin, 27 (1945): 179, prefers the translation of “est natus” as a verb. 8. Panofksy, Early Netherlandish Painting, 147. 9. Craig Harbison, “Miracles Happen: Image and Experience in Jan van Eyck’s Ma­ donna in a Church,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, 1993), 157–70; Purtle, Marian Paintings, 151–52. 10. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Age of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 419–24. Although their account is less definitively developmental, a similar divide between aesthetic and devotional appreciation informs Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), e.g., 17. 11. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy­ chological Works of Sigmund Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–74), 17:218–56. 12. The well-known iconographies of the Dance of Death (performed on one occasion before the Burgundian court) and Three Living and Three Dead are exceptions to this general claim, with their animation of corpses and prediction that living beings will eventually become mere bone. The threat of death, however, cannot be assumed to be identical with the threat of objectification, although this is one of its aspects. 13. Freud, “Uncanny,” 249–50. 14. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Dual­Language Version, trans. William Vantuono (New York: Garland, 1991), 17. 15. “Dere dame, today demay yow neuer; / Wel bycommes such craft vpon Cristmasse / Laykyng of interludes/to lase and to syng” (ibid., 28). 16. Augustine, Civitas dei 10.12. Introductions to medieval wonder include Caroline Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 37–76; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 2001).

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17. British Library Cotton Nero A.x. 18. On the miniatures, see Maidie Hilmo, Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Literary Texts (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004); Jennifer Lee, “The Illuminating Critic: The Illustrator of Cotton Nero A.x,” Studies in Iconography 3 (1977); Kathleen Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), no. 12. 19. “Sy nouvellement faictes que c’estoit grant merveilles à le veoir” (Mathieu d’Escouchy, Chronique, ed. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt [Paris: Mme Ve Jules Renouard, Libraire de la Société de l’histoire de France, 1863], 2:133). 20. “Fut ung dersert, ainsi que terre inhabitée, ouquel avoit ung tigre qui estoit merveilleusement et vivement bien fait, lequel se combatoit contre ung serpent” (ibid., 2:135). 21. “Communes et non communes, furent tant richement tendus de tappiserie que c’estoit ung grant merveille à pensser” (Jean Lefèvre de St Rémy, Chronique, ed. François Morand [Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1876–81], 2:161). 22. “De merveilleuse euvre” (Jean de Haynin, Mémoires de Jean, sire de Haynin et de Louvignies 1456–77, ed. D. D. Brouwers [Liège: Denis Cormaux, 1905–6], 2:24). 23. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9505–6, fol. 73. On Oresme’s translation and interpretation of Aristotle, see chap. 4 above. 24. Daston and Park, Wonders, 86–108, esp. 102–8. 25. Ibid., 100. 26. Ibid., 91. 27. Cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Franklin Sweetser (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1966). 28. Ibid., 82. 29. Ibid. On the connection between marvels and worship, see Daston and Park, Wonders, 76. 30. Daston and Park, Wonders, 88, 107. 31. “Après ce mistere [the Jason scene] fut joué des orgues par le long espace d’ung motet, et tantost après fut chanté ou pasté, par trois doulces voix, une chanson tout du long, laquelle se nomme la ‘Sauvegarde de ma vie.’ Puis par la porte dont les aultres mectz estoient venus, après ce que l’eglise et le pasté eurent chascun joué quatre fois, entra dedans la salle ung cerf merveilleusement grant et beau, lequel estoit tout blanc et portoit grandes corners d’or, et estoit couvert d’une riche couverte de soye vermeille. Selon mon advis, dessus ce serf estoit monté ung jeune filz de l’age de douze ans, habillé d’une robe courte de velours cramoisy, portant sur sa teste ung petit chaperon noir decoppé, et estoit chaussé de gentz solliez. Ce dit enfant tenoit, à deux mains, les deux cornes dudit cerf. Et quant doncques il entra dedans la salle, lors il commença le dessus d’une chanson moult hault et cler, et ledit cerf chanta la teneur, sans y avoir autre personne, sinon l’enffant et l’artifice dudit cerf, et nommoit on ladicte chanson qu’ilz chantoient: ‘Je ne veiz oncques la pareille, etc.’ En chantant, comme je vous racompte, ilz feirent le tour par devant les tables, et puis s’en retournerent; et me sembla bon cest entremectz et voulentiers veu” (Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont [Paris: Libraires Renouard, 1884], 2:358–59). 32. “Je ne vis oncques la pareille / de vous, ma gracieuse dame / car vo beaulté est, sur mon ame / sur toutes aultres nonparaille / En vous regardant m’esmerveille / et dis, “qu’est cecy Nostre Dame? . . . / Vostre tresgrant doulceur reveille / mon esperit, et mon

220

notes to pages 142–146

oeil entame/ mon coeur, dont puis dire sans blasme / puis qu’a vous servir m’apareille.” Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Codex Guelf. 287 Extravag. ff. 38v–39. 33. Michael Camille, “‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry,” Art History 24 (2001): 169–94. 34. Sophia Menache, “Dogs and Human Beings: A Story of Friendship,” Society and Animals 6 (1998): 67–86. Camille identifies the animals as lapdogs but reads them as living collectibles (“Sexual Objects,” 180). 35. Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1970), 57. 36. “Item, un livre contrefait d’une piece de bois paincte en semblance d’un livre, ou il n’a nulls fueillets ne riends escript; couvert du veluiau blanc, a deux fermours d’argent dorez, esmaillez aux armes de Monseigneur” (Jules Guiffrey, Inventaires de Jean Duc de Berry (1401–1416) [Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1894], 1:265). 37. On this book and wit, see Brigitte Buettner, “Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts ca. 1400,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 605. 38. Norman Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York: New Press, 2004), 9–10. The history of this aesthetic after 1500 lies outside the scope of this study, but some interesting comparisons may be found in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Arcimboldo’s Serious Jokes: ‘Mysterious but Long Meaning,’” in The Verbal and the Visual: Essays in Honor of William Sebastian Hecksher, ed. Karl-Ludwig Selig and Elizabeth Sears (New York: Italica, 1990), 59–86. 39. Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 6. 40. On this aspect of paradox, see ibid., 7–22. 41. In fourteenth-century scores, chasse often simply denotes the need for a canon to be applied, but literary sources of the period imply that is was a specific type of song. 42. “Ou pasté, fut fait une chasse qui glatissoient en manière de petis chiens, et en la fin en manière de levriers; et huoient vallès de chiens et braconniers, et sonnoient de trompes en icelluy pasté, comme s’ilz feussent en une forest” (d’Escouchy, Chronique, 2:151). 43. Alfred Mann, J. Kenneth Wilson, and Peter Urquhart, “Canon (i),” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, www.grovemusic.com. A chasse is a simple form of canon in which the governing rule is that one voice enters after the other. 44. For the resolution of this canon and a modern score, see Guillaume de Machaut, Musikalische Werke, ed. Friedrich Ludwig (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1954), 63–64. On the piece and its legacy, see Virginia Newes, “Writing, Reading and Memorizing: The Transmission and Resolution of Retrograde Canons from the 14th and Early 15th Centuries,” Early Music 18 (1990). 45. Jacqueline Cerquiglini, “Le Rondeau,” in La Litterature francaise aux XIVe et XVe siecles, ed. Daniel Poirion (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1988), 1:45–58, 50–51; Newes, “Writing, Reading,” 234; Daniel Poiron, Le poète et le prince: L’évolution de lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), 322. 46. On Machaut’s integration of poetry and music more generally, see Marie-Louise Göllner, “Interrelationships between Text and Music in the Refrain Forms of Guil-

notes to pages 146–148

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laume de Machaut,” in Songs of the Dove and the Nightingale, ed. Greta Mary Hair and Robyn E. Smith (Basel, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach, 1995), 105–23. 47. Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 11. 48. Buettner, “Past Presents,” 605. 49. Christine de Pisan, Le Livre des trois vertus, ed Charity Cannon Willard with Eric Hicks (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1989), 77–78. 50. “Elle regarda la faculté de la personne et son estat et la grandeur du service et la value ou bonté ou beauté ou estrangeté du don selon le cas” (ibid., 79). 51. “Se povre ou simple personne lui . . . presente quelque chose estrange pour bon vouloir” (ibid.). 52. The Valois concept of nobility as nurture as well as nature is discussed in chap. 4. For the contemporary Richardian court, see Lee Patterson, “Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). 53. The most extensive studies of the connection between taste and class are those of Pierre Bourdieu and his followers. See, for example, Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), and “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randall Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 215–37. 54. “quiconques autres me servent et sont à l’entour de moy, ils ne me sont pas comme vous; ils me sont serviteurs; ils me sont estranges; et vois, [vous estes] ma chair et ma substance” (Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. M. le baron Kervyn de Lettenhove [Brussels: R. Heussner, 1863–66], 5:198). 55. Ibid., 3:91. 56. French and Dutch themselves were divided into multiple dialects. The fate of the two vernacular groups varied considerably over time, but while French had the dominant position because it was the dukes’ mother tongue, Dutch was used both in certain ducal institutions and in civic administration. For example, under Philip the Bold judicial hearings at the audience in Flanders were conducted in Dutch, but French increasingly became the language of financial administration (Richard Vaughan, Philip the Bold [London: Longmans, 1962], 133, 135). Under Charles the Bold, Dutch and French were used in financial institutions, although his Parlement was only conducted in French (Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy [London: Longmans, 1973], 186). 57. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, The Color of Melancholy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 12–13. 58. Roger Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller, 1997), 10. On French language translations, see Georges Doutrepont, La littérature française de la cour des ducs de Bourgogne (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909); Anne Hedeman, Translating the Past (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2008); Jacques Monfrin, “Humanisme et traduction au moyen âge,” Journal des savantes (1963); Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

222

notes to pages 148–150

59. Cerquiglini-Toulet, Color of Melancholy, 14. 60. Ibid., 15 61. That these were two sides of the same coin is suggested by the frequent visual conflation of the two groups in paintings of the period (Anthony Cutler, “The Pathos of Distance: Byzantium in the Gaze of Renaissance Europe and Modern Scholarship,” in Byz­ antium, Italy and the North: Papers on Cultural Relations [London: Pindar, 2000], 131). For a general history of crusading in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Norman Housley,The Later Crusades, 1274–1580: From Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Crusading appears to have had wide appeal among at least the elites of the Burgundian territories, since these areas were the only territories outside of the actually embattled regions of the Peninsula and Eastern Europe that continued to produce large-scale lay contributions toward a crusade in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Housley, Later Crusades, 443). On the Burgundians see Jacques Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, la croisade et l’orient: Fin XIVe siècle–XVe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003); Charity Cannon Willard, “Isabella of Portugal and the FifteenthCentury Burgundian Crusade,” in Journeys toward God: Pilgrimage and Crusade, ed. Barbara Sargent-Baur (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 206–14. 62. E.g., Elizabeth Moodey, Illuminated Crusader Histories for Philip the Good (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012); Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “The Artistic Patronage of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (1419–1467)” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979), 114–49. 63. Vicki Porter, “The West Looks at the East in the Late Middle Ages: The Livre des Merveilles du Monde” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977). 64. E.g., Maryan Ainsworth, “‘À la façon grèce’: The Encounter of Northern Renaissance Artists with Byzantine Icons,” in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), ed. Helen C. Evans (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004); Belting, Likeness, 330– 48; Maria Constantoudaki-Kitromilides, “Taste and the Market in Cretan Icons in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes from Greece, ed. Myrtali Acheimastou-Potamianou (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1988), 51–53; Larry Silver, “Fountain and Source: A Rediscovered Eyckian Icon,” Pantheon 41 (1983); Thomas Stanton, “Forging the Missing Links: Robert Campin and Byzantine Icons” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1998). 65. On the history of the cult, see Kim Woods, “Byzantine Icons in the Netherlands, Bohemia and Spain during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe, ed. Angeliki Lymberopoulou and Rembrandt Duits (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 145–48. 66. Helen C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) (New York: Metropolitan Museum of New York, 2004), 582–84. 67. The copying of the Cambrai Madonna as a method for accessing the exotic East is discussed by Jean C. Wilson, “Reflections on St. Luke’s Hand: Icons and the Nature of Aura in the Burgundian Low Countries during the Fifteenth Century,” in The Sacred Image East and West, ed. Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 141–42. 68. Claude Blair and Marian Campbell, “The Founder’s Salt at All Souls College,” Apollo 519 (2005); Harold Charles Moffat, Old Oxford Plate (London: Archibald Constable, 1906), 86–87.

notes to pages 150 –158

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69. Although they could be used by nobles, falchions are generally associated with lower-class users in late medieval Europe. The sword’s curved shape might vaguely recall foreign giants, since scimitars were traditionally linked with Muslims in medieval romances. The All Soul Salt giant’s other features and dress, however, suggest a Northern European origin. 70. While the present base is a sixteenth-century replacement, it may reflect earlier iconography; other unaltered fifteenth-century examples indicate a pattern of supporting large figures with smaller, thematically linked ones. A cup owned by the Hohenlohe family, for example, has a base with three young men riding, while its cover is crowned by a much larger young gallant holding a gigantic flower. For a reproduction, see Susan Marti, Till-Holger Borchert, and Gabrielle Keck, eds., Charles the Bold (1433–77): Splen­ dour of Burgundy (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009), 271, fig. 109. 71. Jeffrey Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 51, 67; John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 65–66, 71. The association of giants with earthly passions had a long history: see, for example, Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–1177 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 392, 406–7, 466. 72. Cohen, Of Giants, 22–24, 67–72. 73. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 70–103; Cohen, Of Giants, 1–12. 74. Augustine indeed maintained that this was the origin of all giants, although his opinion seems to have had limited influence (Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 91). 75. Cohen, Of Giants, 132, 165. 76. Christopher, however, was usually held to be a member of a giant race or other monstrous race. See, for example, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:10–15. 77. On unusual bodies at court, see Touba Fleming, “Identity and Physical Deformity in Italian Court Portraits 1550–1650: Dwarves, Hirsutes, and Castrati” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2007), esp. 81–88. 78. Cohen, Of Giants, xii. 79. Stewart, On Longing. 80. Harbison, “Miracles Happen,” 151–57. 81. The original presence of a donor portrait is suggested by the fact that copies by the Master of Bruges of 1499 and Jan Gossaert both have a pendant donor painting. For reproductions see color plate II and figure 2 of Nina Zenker, Jan van Eyck: Die Madonna in der Kirche (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2001). 82. Most recently examined in the Closer to Van Eyck project (http://closertovaneyck .kikirpa.be/#home/sub=project). On the altarpiece’s authorship and construction, with a summary of previous bibliography, see Hugo van der Velden, “The quatrain of The Ghent Altarpiece,” Simiolus 35 (2011). 83. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er MS 9017.

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84. In the lower and middle registers the frames cast shadows consistent with the lighting source of the original setting for the altarpiece; in the upper register the male prophets’ books project over the edge of the frame. On the use of perspective in the middle register, see David Carleton, “A Mathematical Analysis of the Perspective of the Arnolfini Portrait and Other Similar Interior Scenes by Jan van Eyck,” Art Bulletin 64 (1982): 120. On the use of such elements to link the viewer with the painting in the work of van Eyck, see Linda Seidel, “The Value of Verisimilitude in the Art of Jan Van Eyck,” Yale French Studies 80 (1991). 85. Similar motifs and the use of gray tones are frequently found on altarpieces from this period and area; the significance of this fashion remains much debated. Marion Grams-Thieme has suggested a connection with the metaphor of the “living stone” (Marion Grams-Thieme, Lebendige Steine: Studien zur niederländischen Grisaillemalerei des 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts [Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1988]). The details of this argument are questioned in Winfried Wilhelmy, review of Lebendige Steine by Marion Grams-Thieme, Simiolus 20 (1990). 86. The term grisaille and its proper referents have inspired some debate; I here intend something both of its suggestion of an imitation of stone and of gray differentiated tonally rather than chromatically. On the history of the terminology, see René Verbraeken, Clair­Obscur, histoire d’un mot (Nogent-le-Roi, France: Libraire des Arts et Métiers—Éditions, 1979), 65–68. 87. I am disagreeing here with the view that this light tonality is unrelated to the depiction of stone (e.g., Otto Pächt, Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, ed. Maria Schmidt-Dengler, trans. David Britt [London: Harvey Miller, 1994], 168). 88. For a history of the conflict, see Vaughan, Philip the Good, 303–33. 89. A great deal of research has already been done on this performance. I will here basically follow Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s reconstruction as put forward in his discussion of the entry into Ghent (Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Venit nobis pacificus Dominus: Philip the Good’s Triumphal Entry into Ghent in 1458,” in “All the World’s a Stage—”: Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Barbara Wisch and Susan Scot Munshower [University Park: Department of Art History, Pennsylvania State University, 1990], 258–90). 90. “Et ou melieu avoit une fontaine et à l’environ l’estat de l’Église triumphant” (Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, roi de France, ed. Vallet de Viriville [Paris: P. Jannet, 1858], 3:84). 91. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 305–6.

CHAPTER 6 1. E.g., Laura Crombie, “Honour, Community and Hierarchy in the Feasts of the Archery and Crossbow Guilds of Bruges, 1445–81,” Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011): 102–13. For a useful introduction to anthropological and archaeological feast studies, see Brian Hayden and Suzanne Villeneuve, “A Century of Feasting Studies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011).

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2. The standard biographies for Margaret of York are Luc Hommel, Marguerite d’York, ou La Duchesse Junon (Paris: Hachette, 1959), and Christine Weightman, Mar­ garet of York, Duchess of Burgundy, 1466–1503 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989). For an introduction to Margaret’s artistic patronage, see Thomas Kren, ed., Margaret of York, Simon Marmion and The Visions of Tondal (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992); Dagmar Eichberger, ed., Women of Distinction: Margaret of York and Margaret of Austria (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005). 3. On marital iconography, see Ann Nichols, Seeable Signs: The Iconography of the Seven Sacraments, 1350–1544 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1994), 274–86, 279–83. 4. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er, MS 6–9. 5. “Comment le duc guerin de mes espousa beatrix fille du roy Ansseys de coulongne” (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er, MS 7 fol. 204v). 6. Eligibility is determined by age, marital status, and degree of spiritual or physical consanguinity, the details of all of these differing over time. The basic definition of the sacrament of marriage was most famously formulated by Peter Lombard and made dogma by Pope Alexander III. The history of this development has been traced in numerous studies. See, for example: Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jean Gaudemet, Le mariage en occident: Les moeurs et le droit (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987); Geneviève Ribordy, “Faire les nopces”: Le mariage de la noblesse française (1375–1475) (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2004), xii–xv. 7. Didier Lett, Famille et parenté dans l’Occident medieval Ve–Xve siècle (Paris: Hachette, 2000), 123. 8. The decree Tametsi, which required the presence of a priest and two or three witnesses to create a valid marriage, was adopted at the Council of Trent in 1563. For a summary of the Tridentine debates that led to this formulation, see Reinhard Lettman, Die Diskussion über die klandestinen Ehe und die Einführung einer zur Gültigkeit ver­ pflichtenden Eheschliessungsform auf dem Konzil von Trient (Munster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966). 9. Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 20; Gaudemet, Mariage, 235. 10. “Mariages célébrés en secret ou même dépourvus de toute forme” (Gaudemet, Le Mariage, 232). 11. Ibid. 12. E.g., Henri Bresc, “Europe: Town and Country (Thirteenth-Fifteenth Century),” in A History of the Family, ed. André Burguière et al., trans. Sarah Hanbury Tenison, Rosemary Morris, and Andrew Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 437; Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 44. For an excellent reconstruction of this process among the late medieval French aristocracy, see Ribordy, “Faire les nopces,” 1–138. 13. Ribordy provides the example of the courtship between the comte de Saint-Pol and Mathilde de Courtenai reported by Froissart: the two fall in love after meeting at various court festivities, but their espousal and marriage is then approved of and properly conducted (Ribordy, “Faire les nopces,” 15, 18). 14. Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (1405–1449), ed. Alexandre Tuetey (Paris:

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notes to pages 169 –175

H. Champion, 1881), 48; Enguerrand de Monstelet, La Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstre­ let, ed. L. Douêt-d’Arcq (Paris: Mme Ve Jules Renouard, 1858), 2:414. 15. This is, for example, how Ribordy reads the incident (Ribordy, “Faire les nopces,” 53). 16. Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. M. le baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: R. Heussner, 1863–66), 2:16. 17. Ibid., 1:195. 18. Ibid., 3:373–78. 19. Jean Lefèvre de St Rémy, Chronique, ed. François Morand (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1876–81), 2:151–57. 20. Ribordy, “Faire les nopces,” 112–13. 21. “Elles servent pourtant à attester du consentement de la nouvelle mariée participant joyeusement à la fête” (ibid., 112). 22. On wedding festivities as a means for asserting the social status of the bride and groom within the larger community, see Michael Schröter, “Wo zwei zusammen kommen in rechter Ehe . . .”: Sozio­ und psychogenetische Studien über Eheschließungs­ vorgänge vom 12. bis 15. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkampf, 1985), 124. 23. A detailed account of the marriage negotiations can be found in Weightman, Margaret of York, 30–60. 24. Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont (Paris: Libraires Renouard, 1884), 3:104–5). 25. “Herd never of non lyek to it saue Kyng Artourys cort” (Paston Letters of the Fifteenth Century, pt. 1, ed. Norman Davis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 539). 26. “Was receyuyd as worchepfully as all the world cowd deuyse, as wyth pressessyon wyth ladys and lordys best beseyn of eny pepyll that euer I sye or herd of, and many pagentys wer pleyid in hyr wey in Bryggys to hyr welcomyng, the best pat euer I sye” (ibid.). 27. De la Marche, Mémoires, 3:133. 28. “Et ainsi fut monster trante principaultez et seigneuries de l’heritaige de mondit seigneur le duc, et trante villes à luy subgectes, les non pareilles du monde” (ibid., 3:134). 29. Lefèvre, Chronique, 2:161. 30. “Très excellant, très hault et très victorieux prince, mon très redoubté et souverain seigneur, le fier et redoubté liepart d’Angleterre vient visiter la noble compaignie; et pour la consolacion de vous et de vos alyez, payz et subjectz, vous faict present d’une noble marguerite” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 3:135). 31. The English royal arms (gueles, three lions passant guardant or) featured three animals that were variously described as lions or leopards in this period, since lions guardant (i.e., with their faces turned toward the viewer as though they were examining their surroundings watchfully) were sometimes referred to as leopards or leopardlike. Edward III seems to have taken the leopard as a personal emblem, and Mathew Paris reports a gift to Henry III in 1235 of three leopards specifically meant to refer to Henry’s arms. See Adrian Ailes, The Origins of the Royal Arms of England: Their Development to 1199 (Oxford: Graduate Center for Medieval Studies, University of Reading, 1982), 16–17; Caroline Shenton, “Edward III and the Symbol of the Leopard,” in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002), 73–74.

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32. “Bien viegne la belle bergiere / De qui la beaulté et maniere / Nous rend soulas et esperance! / Bien viegne l’espoir et fiance / De ceste seigneurie entiere! / . . . C’est la sourse, c’est la miniere / De nostre force grande et fiere; / C’est nostre paix et asseurance” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 3:136). 33. “Ma très rebdoutée dame, les pays dont aujourd’huy par la grace de Dieu vous estes dame sont moult joyeulx de vostre venue; et en souvenance des nobles bargieres qui par cy devant ont esté pastoures et gardes des brebis de pardeçà, et qui si vertueuesement s’y sont conduictes que lesdits pays ne s’en sçavent assez louer, à ce que soyez mieulx instruicte de leurs nobles meurs et condictions, ilz vous font present de ceste belle bergiere . . . vous suppliant que les ayez en souvenance et pour recommandez” (ibid., 3:136–37). 34. “Et madicte dame la receut très humainnement” (ibid., 3:137). 35. Margaret was in fact related to Isabella of Portugal (the mother of Charles the Bold and grandmother of Mary of Burgundy) through their mutual ancestor John of Gaunt. Dwarves and fools seem to have served as signs of their employers relatively frequently at these events: Madame d’Or, Isabella of Portugal’s fool, performed in an entremet with a blue and gold goat at the feast following Isabella’s marriage to Philip the Good (Lefèvre, Chronique, 2:168). Although further discussion lies outside the scope of the current study, the idea of a line of female duchesses seen here and elsewhere at the Burgundian court complicates any simple model of the relationship between lineage and heredity. 36. “Ung grant dromadaire qui entra parmy la salle, faict auprès le vif par tel artifice, qu’il sembloit mieulx vif que aultrement; et estoit harnaché en la maniere sarrasinoise, à grandes campannes dorées, moult riches, et sur son doz avoit deux grans paniers, et entre iceulx paniers assis ung homme, habillé d’estrange façon” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 3:137). 37. “Oiseaulx estrangement paintz, comme s’ilz veinssent d’Ynde, et les gectoit parmy la salle et par dessus les tables” (ibid., 3:137). 38. Payment records reveal that the birds were purchased and perhaps painted by the artist Pierre Coustain (Léon de Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne: Études sur les lettres, les arts et l’industrie pendant le XVe siècle, vol. 2, pt. 2 [Paris: Plon Frères, 1849], 375). 39. “L’espousée menée coucher; et du surplus du secret de la nuyt, je laisse à l’entendement des nobles parties; et reviens au deviser de l’adventure du lendemain” (de la Marche, Mémoires, 3:138). 40. E.g., Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, 104–5, 281. 41. On late medieval Flemish marriage feasts as a site for staging the bride’s subservience, see Myriam Greilsammer, “Le mariage en pays flamand: Un ‘fait social total,’” in Marriage and Social Mobility in the Late Middle Ages / Mariage et mobilite sociale au bas moyen age, ed. Walter Prevenier, 2nd ed. (Ghent: Uitgegeven met steun van het FKFO, 1992). 42. While there might at first appear to be surface similarities, this staged choice contrasts with models proposed for the sixteenth century in which courtship is characterized by men giving gifts and women choosing whether or not to accept them (e.g., Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London [Oxford: Clarendon, 1996], 139–79). Margaret is asked to accept, but not by her spouse, and while

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her choice does reflect a change of state, the focus is less on her role as a wife than on her conduct as a ruler. 43. These items could also be exchanged as love tokens at other points in courtship (Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Subjects and Objects of Desire [New York: Abrams, 1998], 50–71). 44. Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 65. 45. Baptism can be administered by a lay Roman Catholic in case of an emergency (e.g., when an infant is about to die unbaptized) but is ideally done by a priest. 46. The interpretive scholarly literature on potlatch begins with Franz Boas’s 1897 report to the Smithsonian (The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians [New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970], esp. 341–58). In addition to Boas’s many following publications, major later statements include Homer Barnett, “The Nature of the Potlatch,” American Anthropologist 40 (1938); Helen Codere, Fighting with Property (New York: J. J. Austin, 1950); Philip Drucker and Robert F. Heizer, To Make My Name Good: A Reexamination of the Southern Kwaikutl Potlach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Stewart Piddocke, “The Potlatch System of the Kwakiutl: A New Perspective,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21 (1965); Wayne Suttles, “Affinal Ties, Subsistence, and Prestige among the Coast Salish,” American Anthropologist 62 (1960). 47. E.g., Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping­While­ Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Yuanxiang Yang, The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 48. For a useful case study of this complexity, see Valentin Groebner, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 49. Brigitte Buettner, “Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts ca. 1400,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001); Jan Hirschbiegel, Étrennes: Untersuchungen zum höfischen Ge­ schenkverkehr im spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich der Zeit König Karls VI. (1380–1422) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2003). 50. Transcribed in Art from the Court of Burgundy, 1364–1419, ex. cat. (Dijon: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2004), 134. 51. Paris BnF Ms. fr. 2813 fol. 354. 52. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Most theories still hold that gift and reciprocity are linked concepts even as they propose alternates to Mauss’s use of hau as the central driving force behind exchange. See, for example, Raymond Firth, Economics of the New Zealand Maori (Wellington, NZ: R. W. Owen, 1959), 393–432; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 45–50; Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (New York: Humanities, 1951), 22–49; J. Prytz-Johansen, The Maori and His Religion in Its Non­ritualistic Aspects (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1954), 107– 19; Marshall Sahlins, “Philosophie politique de l’ ‘Essai sur le don,’” trans. Tina Jolas, L’Homme 8 (1968); Weiner, Inalienable Possessions. Pierre Bourdieu likewise holds that

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reciprocity is the “objective reality” of gift giving, although he believes this point is intentionally obscured by actual social actors (Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge: Polity, 1990], 98–111). 53. Alain Derville, “Pots-de-vin, cadeaux, racket, patronage: Essai sur les mécanismes de décision dans l’État bourguignon,” Revue du Nord 56 (1974). 54. Yang’s study of a modern Northern Chinese village provides an interesting parallel case in which it is the gift receiver rather than the donor who is consistently considered to have superior social standing (Yang, Flow, 147–75). Similarly, while Bourdieu generally holds that a failure to return a gift may put one at a disadvantage vis à vis the original donor (Bourdieu, Logic, 106), he notes that such an omission may also be a sign that the receiver does not consider the donor to be his or her social equal (ibid., 100). It seems unlikely that Charles would have wished the entremet to be read this strongly; its subtlety, in fact, was probably part of its appeal. 55. Mauss, Gift, 74. 56. De la Marche, Mémoires, 3:135. 57. Herman vander Linden, Itinéraires de Charles, duc de Bourgogne, Marguerite d’York et Marie de Bougogne (1467–1477) (Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1936). 58. Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy (London: Longmans, 1973), 261–432. 59. Weightman, Margaret of York, 97, 100. 60. Ibid., 104–18. 61. On Margaret’s combination of political and religious action, see Nancy Bradley Warren, Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380–1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 36–53. 62. Hommel, Marguerite d’York, 338–42. 63. Illustrated and described in Louis J. G. Galesloot, “Marguerite d’York, duchesse douairière de Bourgogne,” Annales de la société d’emulation pour l’étude de l’histoire et des antiquités de la Flandre, ser. 4, 3 (1879): 323. 64. Diana Norman, Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 91; Anne D. Hedeman, “Making Memories for a Mad King: Illustrating the ‘Dialogues’ of Pierre Salmon,” Gesta 48, no. 2 (2009): 173. 65. The meditative use of the sight of death in Christianity extends back to the desert fathers, but the late Middle Ages saw a flowering of new forms of macabre imagery often explicitly presented as a prompt to moral behavior. For an introduction to these uses, see Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Elina Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Perfor­ mance (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010); Susanna Greer Fein, “Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts,” Mosaic 35 (2002); Ashby Kinch, “Image, Ideology, and Form: The Middle English Three Dead Kings and Its Iconographic Context,” Chaucer Review 43 (2008); Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: P. Elek, 1976). 66. E.g., Brigitte Buettner, “Profane Illuminations, Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society,” Art Bulletin 74 (1992); Claire Richter Sherman, The

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Portraits of Charles V of France (1338–1380) (New York: New York University, 1969); Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “The Artistic Patronage of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (1419–1467)” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979); Patrick de Winter, La bibliothèque de Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne (1364–1404) (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherché scientifique, 1985). 67. Ezekiel Lotz, “Secret Rooms: Private Spaces for Private Prayer in Late Medieval Burgundy and the Netherlands,” in Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the late Middle Ages, ed. Julian Luxford (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 175. 68. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Margaret of York and the Burgundian Portrait Tradition,” in Margaret of York, Simon Marmion and the “Visions of Tondal,” ed. Thomas Kren (Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Musuem, 1992). 69. These are the seven works of mercy outlined in Matthew 25:34–40. 70. A noblewoman in blue accompanies Margaret in five of the scenes; an old woman in red with a white headscarf is a part of the group of poor in three, and a small child in two. Jesus appears in all but the last two images, usually looking on, but helping Margaret in the third and fourth image, imprisoned in the fifth, and speaking with Margaret over the bed of the sick man in the sixth. 71. Alixe Bovey, “Renaissance Bibliomania,” in Viewing Renaissance Art, ed. Kim Woods, Carol Richardson, and Angeliki Lymberopoulou (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 116. 72. Andrea Pearson, “Productions of Meaning in Portraits of Margaret of York,” in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrea Pearson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 73. Craig Harbison, “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting,” Simiolus 15 (1985): 87–118. 74. Lotz, “Secret Rooms.” 176. The earlier text is Denis the Carthusian, “De vita et regimine principissae Dialogus,” in Doctoris ecstatici D. Dionysii Cartusiani Opera Omnia (Monstreux, Belgium: Typis Cartusiae S. M. de Pratis, 1896–1935), 37:502–18. 75. On this distinction, see Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 271–76. 76. Andrea Pearson, “Gendered Subject, Gendered Spectator: Mary Magdalen in the Gaze of Margaret of York,” Gesta 44 (2005). This composition also recalls some images of the woman with an issue of blood who was healed after touching Christ’s clothing. This subject, while very common in early Christian imagery, was unusual in the fifteenthcentury Lowlands, making this connection more unlikely to have been made by a contemporary viewer. 77. On the Noli me tangere iconography, see Barbara Baert, “The Gaze in the Garden: Body and Embodiement in Noli me tangere with an Emphasis on the 15th-Century Low Countries,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (2008); Barbara Baert et al., “Noli me tangere”: Mary Magdalene—One Person, Many Images (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2006). 78. Andrea Pearson, Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 45–58. 79. For a summary of the Magdalene legend’s elaboration, see Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 93–97. There are other, as yet underexplored, connections between Margaret of York and the cult of Mary

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Magdalene. Most notably, in 1485 Margaret founded, endowed, and commissioned a rule for a religious community called the Filles de Madeleine to rescue young women from prostitution in Mons. Van Mielot has suggested that the use of the heraldic white rose on the Magdalene in a Deposition now at the Getty may indicate that that painting was intended for this convent, perhaps even a gift of Margaret herself (Hans J. van Mielot, “The Sign of the Rose: A Fifteenth-Century Flemish Passion Scene,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 27 [1992]: 77–84).

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index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Plates are located following page 72. Adam and Eve, 166, 168–69 aesthetics, and banquets, 4, 74–75, 131, 135 agency, 4, 37, 175–76, 178–79, 189, 192 Alberti, Leon Battista, 40 All Souls Salt (Huntsman, or Giant Salt), 150, 152, 152–54, 223nn69–70, 223n74, 223n76 Alpers, Svetlana, 131 ambiguity, 3, 22, 43, 135, 138, 146, 163, 190 animate and inanimate boundaries, in entremets, 27–28, 29, 30–37, 34, 199n26, 200n34, 200n36. See also civilized human realm, and wonder-inducing art; human and object relationship anthropological studies, 77, 100, 164–65, 182–83 apes/monkeys, as marginal figures, 92–98, 94, 99, 100, 105, 186, 187, 188, 192. See also civilized human realm, and wonderinducing art aquamanile, 33–35, 34 archaeological studies, 164 Aristotle: aquamanile of Phyllis, 33–34, 34; ethics/virtues, 103, 105, 109; largesse, 146; magnificence, 112–13, 147, 214n35; marvelous effects, 147; Nicomachean Ethics, 105, 109–11, 110, 114, 117, 121–23, 139, 214n31; Politics, 120–23, 122; sedition, 120–23, 122, 216nn61–62; temperance, 105, 109, 122–23 Arthur (king), 135–38, plate 3 art making, and banquets, 1, 3–4, 12–13

audiences: banqueting creator’s boundary with, 3; entremets and, 6, 52–53, 54, 60–62, 67; human interactions and, 13, 14, 15, 53–55, 56, 57, plate 1; spectatorspectacle and, 13, 14, 15, 52–55, 54, 56, 57–58, 59, 60–62, 63, 64, 64–67, 65, 66, plate 1 Augustine, 137, 223n74 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18, 96 banquets, 164, 193; accounts of, 4, 196n15; scholarship on, 1, 3–8, 16, 19, 164–65; textual descriptions of, 6–12, 15–17, 22, 196n15; time-based art forms and, 6–7, 15–16, 183; visual descriptions of, 6–8, 12–13 Beatrice of Cologne, 166–72, 168 Beaugrand, Madame de, 176, 227n35 Beauneveu, André, 41, 202n72 behavior of feast participants. See socialization and banquets Belozerskaya, Marina, 103 Bernard of Clairvaux, 102 betrothal period, 168, 172 Binche (Binchois), Gilles de, 5, 142 bird-gifts, 177–78, 180–81, 183, 227n38 Bois, Laurent de, 89, 106, 108 Bortolomeo, Michelozzo di, 40 Bourdieu, Pierre, 92, 228n52, 228n54 Bouts the Elder, Dieric: Christ as the Man of Sorrows, 80; Judgment of Emperor Otto III, 80, 83, 84, 210n22; Justice of Emperor

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Bouts the Elder, Dieric (continued) Otto, 80, 82, 210n22; Mater dolorosa (Sorrowing Virgin) [workshop of Dieric Bouts], 79–80, 81 Brilliant, Richard, 72 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 40–41 Buettner, Brigitte, 146 Cambrai Madonna, 149–50, 149 camel symbolism, 177 Camille, Michael, 92, 220n34, 228n43 Canetti, Elias, 53–55 Catherine of Burgundy, 169 Catherine of Valois/France, 124, 170 Caxton, William, 58, 60 Cent nouvelles nouvelles, 140–41 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jaqueline, 148 Chanson de Roland, La (Song of Roland), 76 character acting, 4, 37, 47–50, 51, 52, 61, 104n14, 204n14 charivari, 48–49, 170, 204n22 Charles V, 13, 14, 15, 23, 55, 109, 121 Charles VI: character acting, 48–49; magnificence in context of politics of rulers, 124–26, 216n63; masking/unmasking, 49–50, 72, 204n22; role models, 69; Viandier cookbook, 23; wild men portrayal in character acting, 48–50, 51, 204n22 Charles the Bold: audiences at banquets, 6, 55, 56, 57; betrothal, 173; death, 184; diversity, 221n56; emotions, 78–79; marriage, 6, 172–73; negotiations in marriage, 172– 73, 182–83; objectification/subjugation of duchess, 175–76, 178–79; politics of rulers, 173; reciprocity, 182–83; religious beliefs, 149, 149; role models, 69, 126; romance, 173, 179; Valois Burgundian era, 4–5; vows exchange, 173. See also wedding banqueting for Margaret of York and Charles the Bold Chartier, Alain, 57 Chartier, Jean, 161 Chastellian, Georges, 8–9, 11–12, 42, 78–79, 106, 124–26, 196n15, 216n63 Chiquart, Master, 26, 38–40 chivalry, 19, 24–25, 45, 47, 61, 64, 65, 67, 137–38 Christopher (saint), 153, 223n76 Cicero, 105, 112–13 civilized human realm, and wonder-inducing

art, 91, 140, 152, 152–53. See also animate and inanimate boundaries, in entremets; apes/monkeys, as marginal figures; human and object relationship clandestine marriages, 168 Cleveland fountain (Table Fountain), 28, 29 Colie, Rosalie, 145 collaborative process in multimedia works, 3–4, 25–26, 37–43, 162, 202nn61–62, 202n72 color and simulated textures, in visual arts, 159–60, 224nn85–87 Commynes, Philippe de, 5, 50 consummation of marriage, 170, 178 coqz heaumez, 24–25, 42 courtesy manuals. See socialization and banquets Coustain, Pierre, 38, 227n38 Crane, Susan, 204n22, 208n69 Croy, Anthony de, 37 Croy manuscript, 115, 118 Crusades, 148, 222n61 culinary arts, 6, 21, 23–26, 30–31, 35, 38–39. See also entremets Daston, Lorraine, 139–41 Debord, Guy, 46 Derrida, Jacques, 21 Deschamps, Eustache, 148 D’ Escouchy, Mathieu, 22–23, 27–28, 31, 104, 108, 111, 145 Digulleville, Guillaume de: Pèlerinage de la vie Jhesucrist/Jésus­Christ, 62, 65–67, 66; Pèlerinage de l’âme, 62, 64–65, 65; Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, 62, 63, 64 disguised symbolism theory, 131–32 diversity, during Valois Burgundian era, 147– 48, 221n56 Donatello, 40 doreures, 23–24 Doutrepont, Georges, 120 Duby, Georges, 179 Duchess of Berry, 49–50, 58 Du fait de cuisine, 38–39 Dufay, Guillaume, 5, 142 Dyer, Richard, 68 ecumenical spirit, 158 Edward IV, 176, 182 Elias, Norbert, 77 eligibility, for marriage, 167, 225n6

index emotions and emotional communities, 18, 100; character acting and, 52, 61; entremets and, 52, 61, 76–78, 79–80, 84; human interactions and, 54; judicial practices and, 79–80, 82, 83, 84–85, 210n22; politics and, 78–79, 84; religious beliefs and, 76–77, 79–80, 81, 84–85; spontaneity and, 76, 209n6; staging and, 78–79, 85 engagement period, 168 entremets, 6, 17–18, 42–43; aesthetics and, 74–75; agency and, 37; ambiguity and, 22, 43; animate and inanimate boundaries and, 27–28, 29, 30–37, 34, 199n26, 200n34, 200n36; apes or monkeys as marginal figures in, 95–97; aquamanile and, 33–35, 34; art making during, 12–13; audiences and, 6, 52–53, 54, 55, 60–62, 67; character acting and, 4, 37, 47–48, 52, 104n14; chivalry and, 45, 67; collaborative process in multimedia works and, 37–43, 202nn61–62, 202n72; coqz heau­ mez and, 24–25, 42; doreures and, 23–24; Du fait de cuisine and, 38–39; emotions and, 52, 61, 68, 76–78, 79–80, 84–85; entremetz de paintrerie and, 25–26; etymology of, 22; excess and, 74, 102–3; fountains and, 104–5; giant/“Saracen” giant in, 44–45, 67, 150; hippocrasspouting female ymage and, 31–35, 139, 150, 161; historical context for, 22–27; Jason story and, 35–37, 48, 141; lion and lady ymage and, 31–33, 35–36, 139, 150; marvelous effects and, 138–39, 141–43; mimesis and, 50, 52, 61; negotiations in marriages and, 170; politics and, 32, 48, 52, 61–62, 67, 74, 84, 100; religious beliefs in context of emotions and, 79–80, 84; religious/profane boundaries and, 22, 25–26, 100; role models and, 4, 37, 45, 67–72, 84; scholarship on, 26–27, 40; socialization of participants in, 26–27, 67, 126–27; spectator-spectacle boundaries and, 46; spontaneity and, 76, 102; stag symbolism and, 141–43, 145, 148; St. Martha and, 26–27, 31, 39; Swan Knight scene and, 25–26, 30, 35; temperance and, 104–5; textual descriptions and, 9–10; thin effects in, 144–45; Viandier cookbook and, 23–26, 30–31, 35, 38–39; visual conventions and, 12–13; wedding banqueting and, 172–75, 177–81, 183–84;

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wonder-inducing art and, 134–38, 141–43. See also specific entremets entremetz de paintrerie, 25–26 ethics/virtues, 103, 129–30; banquets and, 3, 4, 121, 123; excess and, 105–6, 109, 110, 111–12, 121–22, 122; fortitude and, 105, 112–15; gluttony and, 105, 108–9, 128– 29, plate 2; largesse and, 112–13, 128, 214n35; magnificence and, 102–4, 112– 13; paucity and, 105, 115–17, 117, 123, 124–25, 213n11; politics of rulers and, 120–26, 122, 126, 216n58, 216nn61–63; pride and, 8, 24, 105, 125, 153–54, 217n66; prudence and, 106, 107, 108; role models and, 126, 176, 179, 183–86, 187, 188–92, 229n65, 230nn69–70, 230n76; ruler as just and, 176, 179, 183–85, 192, 227n42; sobriety and, 104–5, 108–9, 111, 213n24, plate 2; socialization of banquet participants and, 53, 54, 126–29; temperance and, 104–11, 107, 122–23, 128–29, 213n18, 213n22, plate 2; texts on, 109, 121, 214n28; visual arts and, 103. See also specific authors and texts excess, 19, 74, 102–3, 105–6, 109–12, 110, 114, 120–22, 122 false or misleading appearances, 85–86, 87, 88–89, 90, 91 Faus Semblant (False Seeming), 88–89 Feast of the Pheasant: aesthetics and, 74–75; animate and inanimate boundaries in entremets and, 27–28, 30–33, 200n36; art making during, 12–13; audiences and, 6, 52–53, 55, 60–62, 67; collaborative process in multimedia works and, 37–43; emotions and, 68, 76, 84–85; entremets and, 22–23, 26; excess and, 74, 102–3; fountains and, 104; hippocras-spouting female ymage and, 31–35, 139, 150, 161; Jason story and, 35–37, 48, 141; lion and lady ymage in, 31–33, 35–36, 139, 150; marvelous effects and, 138, 141–43; politics and, 48, 61–62, 67, 74; role models and, 69; socialization of participants in, 67, 126; stag symbolism in, 141–43, 145, 148; textual descriptions, 9; visual conventions and, 12–13; wonder-inducing art and, 138, 141–43. See also Holy Church personification in entremet festival celebrations, 1, 6, 46, 154, 160, 162

256

index

Finet, Nicolas: Benois seront les misericor­ dieux translation by, 186, 189, 192; Le dyalogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ, 190–92, 191 fortitude, 105, 112–15 Fortitude and Temperance, 109–11, 110 fountains, 28, 29, 104–5, 111, 161–62 Fradenburg, Louise, 204n9 Freud, Sigmund, 135 Froissart, Jean: Bal des Ardents (Chroniques), 49–50, 51, 58, 60, 72, 204n22; comte de Saint-Pol and Mathilde de Courtenai courtship and, 225n13 Fumerton, Patricia, 21 Garden of Love (Outdoor Party of the Burgundian Court), 58, 59, 203n39 Gawain and the Green Knight, 137–38, plate 3 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 40 giants: All Souls Salt and, 150, 152, 152–54, 223nn69–70, 223n74, 223n76; pride and, 153–54; “Saracen,” 44–45, 67, 150, 153 Giant Salt (All Souls Salt, or Huntsman), 150, 152, 152–54, 223nn69–70, 223n74, 223n76 gift giving, 69, 128, 144, 146, 175–78, 180–84, 220n52, 227n38, 228n43 Giles of Rome, 109, 113, 214n28, 215n40, 216n58 gluttony, 105, 108–9, 128–29, 153–54, plate 2 Grams-Thieme, Marion, 224n85 Grandes chroniques de France de Charles V, 13, 14, 55 Green, Louis, 114, 215n44 Green Knight, 135–38, plate 3 Guerin de Metz, 166–72, 168 handfasting couple, 166, 168–69 Harbison, Craig, 156, 189 Hedeman, Anne D., 13 Henry V, 124–25, 170, 181–82, 216n63 hippocras-spouting female ymage, 31–35, 139, 150, 161 Histoire de Charles Martel: queen instructs three brothers scene, 53, 54, 127–28; wedding banquet of Beatrice of Cologne and Guerin de Metz, 166–72, 168 Holy Church personification in entremet, 44–45, 72–73; audiences and, 52–53, 60–62, 67; character acting and, 4, 37, 47–48, 52, 104n14; chivalry and, 45, 67;

emotions and, 52, 61, 76–78, 79–80, 84; giant/“Saracen” giant, 44–45, 67, 150; mimesis and, 50, 52, 61; politics and, 52, 61–62; religious beliefs in context of emotions and, 79–80, 84; role models and, 4, 37, 45, 67–72, 84; spectatorspectacle boundaries and, 46; spontaneity and, 76, 102 Hugh of Guisay, 49 Huizinga, Johan, 5, 77, 84, 162 human and object relationship, 135, 159–60, 218n12, 224nn85–86. See also animate and inanimate boundaries, in entremets; civilized human realm, and wonderinducing art human interactions, 3, 4, 13, 14, 15, 53–55, 54, 55, 56, 57, plate 1 Huntsman (All Souls Salt, or Giant Salt), 150, 152, 152–54, 223nn69–70, 223n74, 223n76 hypocrisy, 88–89, 90, 189. See also pride intentions, 18, 74–76, 100–101; apes/monkeys as marginal figures and, 92–98, 94, 99, 100; false/misleading appearances and, 85–86, 87, 88–89, 90, 91; hypocrisy and, 88–89, 90, 189; judicial practices and, 85– 86, 87, 91; meaningless actions and, 91– 100, 94, 99; religious beliefs and, 88–89, 90, 91 Isabella of Portugal, 8–9, 138–39, 144, 159, 170, 190, 227n35 Isabelle of Bavaria, 69 Isabelle of Bourbon, 126 Janson, H. W., 92 Jason story, 35–37, 48, 60, 141 Jean of Berry, 143–44, plate 1 Jenkins, A. D. Fraser, 114, 215n44 John the Fearless, 4, 85–86, 87, 124, 169, 182 joyeuse entrée, 170 judicial practices: emotional communities and, 79–80, 82, 83, 84–85, 210n22; false/ misleading appearances and, 85–86, 87, 91; intentions and, 85–86, 87, 91; ruler as just and, 176, 179, 183–85, 192, 227n42 knowledge theory, 137 Krautheimer, Richard, 204n23 Kristeva, Julia, 92

index Lafortune-Martel, Agathe, 26, 75 laity’s performance of sacraments, 171, 181 Lancelot, prince, 170 largesse, 112–13, 128, 146–47, 214n35 Laurioux, Bruno, 26 Lefèvre de St Rémy, Jean, 45, 67, 124–25, 128, 196n15 legal status, of brides, 175–76, 178–79 leopard symbolism, 175–78, 183, 226n31 Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté: fortitude, 115; magnificence, 114–15, 116, 117–19, 118, 216n55; temperance, 118–19, 119, 216n55; vices opposed to magnificence, 115–17, 117, 123 Limbourg Brothers, 143–44, plate 1 Lindquist, Sherry, 38 lions: lady ymage with, 31–33, 35–36, 139, 150; symbols and, 176–77, 183, 226n31 Lorris, Guillaume de, 30, 62, 88–89 Louis de Guyenne, 182 Louis of Anjou, 49, 169 Louis of Orleans, 85–86, 87 Louis xI, 78–79, 149, 149 love (romance), 88–89, 173–74, 228n43 Machaut, Guillaume de, 50–52, 101, 145–46, 148 Macrobius, 105, 112 Madeleine of France, 170 magnificence, 3, 18, 102–4, 115, 116, 120, 129–30; ethics/virtues and, 102–4, 112– 13; excess in context of paucity of, 102, 105, 115–17, 117, 123, 125; fortitude and, 114–15; largesse and, 112–13, 146–47, 214n35; paucity of, 115–17, 117, 123, 124–26; pride and, 125, 217n66; religious beliefs and, 113–14; scholarship on, 102–3; social class and, 113, 215n40; temperance and, 102, 104, 106–11, 110, 118, 118–19, 119, 214n31, 216n55, plate 2; visual conventions and, 13–15, 14, 113– 14, 215n44 Mâle, Emile, 106, 213n18 male bonding, and marriages, 175, 179 manners. See socialization and banquets Mansel, Jean: Fleur des histoires, 105–6, 112, 114, 128 Marche, Olivier de la: animate and inanimate boundaries in entremets, 27–28, 32; audiences, 52–53; banquet accounts, 4, 174, 177; collaborative process in multimedia

257

works, 37–38, 42; false/misleading appearances, 85; Feast of the Pheasant, 37, 48, 52, 74–75, 102, 142; Holy Church personification, 4, 37, 47–48, 52, 61, 104n14; magnificence of banquets, 74–75, 102–3; marvelous effects, 141–42; socialization of participants, 126–27; staging, 74–76, 78; textual descriptions, 22, 196n15 Margaret of Flanders, 4, 70–71, 176–77 Margaret of York: agency, 175–76, 178–79, 189, 192; apes/monkeys as marginal figures, 95–97, 192; Benois seront les misericordieux, 186, 187, 189–90, 192; betrothal, 173; charitable giving, 184; ethics/virtues role model, 176, 179, 183– 86, 187, 188–92, 229n65, 230nn69–70, 230n76; hypocrisy in visual signs, 189; lineage of duchesses, 176, 179, 183–84, 190, 227n35; manuscript patronage, 185– 86; marguerite­Margaret motif, 175–76, 180–83, 185–86, 192–93; marriage, 6, 172–73; marvelous wedding banquet, 138–39; Mary Magdalene, 190–92, 191, 230n79; negotiations in marriage, 172– 73, 182–83; objectification/subjugation duchess by, 175–76, 178–79; politics of rulers, 184, 192; reciprocity, 177, 183– 84; religious reforms, 184; romance, 173, 179; ruler as just, 176, 179, 183–85, 192, 227n42; ruler Christian humility paradox, 184, 191, 191–92; subjects’ links with ethics/virtues, 184–85, 229n65; subjects’ relationship with, 177, 179, 183; tomb, 184–85, 229n65; Vie de sainte Colette, 97–98, 99, 100; vows exchange, 173. See also wedding banqueting for Margaret of York and Charles the Bold Marmion, Simon, 12–13, 38, 41–42 marriages: betrothal period and, 168, 172; clandestine, 168; consummation of, 170, 178; eligibility and, 167, 225n6; engagement period and, 168; handfasting couple and, 166, 168–69; joyeuse entrée and, 170; laity’s performance of, 171, 181; legal status of brides and, 175–76, 178–79; male bonding and, 175, 179; negotiations and, 169–70, 225n13; publicity or witnesses of, 167–70, 172; reciprocity and, 181–83; religious beliefs and, 166– 69, 171–72, 181, 225n6, 225n8; social

258

index

marriages (continued) practices and, 166–69, 171–72, 225n6; vows exchange and, 169–70. See also wedding banqueting; wedding banqueting for Margaret of York and Charles the Bold marvelous effects, 131, 138–47, 154, 174 Mary Magdalene symbolism, 190–92, 191, 230n79 Mary/Marian vision, 98, 99, 100 Mary of Burgundy, 4, 84, 176, 182, 184 masking/unmasking, 49–50, 72, 204n22 Master of the Legend of St. Catherine, Mar­ riage/Wedding at Cana, Triptych with the Miracles of Christ, 1, 2, 3, 7, 15, 19 Mauss, Marcel, 181, 220n52 Maximilian I, 184 meaningless actions, and intentions, 91–100, 94, 99 Meiss, Millard, 3 Meun, Jean le, 30, 62, 88–89 mimesis, 4, 48–52, 61, 131, 204n23 misleading or false appearances, 85–86, 87, 88–89, 90, 91 Monkey Cup (beaker), 93–95, 94 monkeys or apes as marginal figures, 92–98, 94, 99, 100, 105, 186, 187, 188, 192. See also civilized human realm, and wonder-inducing art Monk of St-Denis, 49 mores. See socialization and banquets motivations, and banquets, 3 multimedia works, and collaborative process, 3–4, 25–26, 37–43, 162, 202nn61–62, 202n72 musical forms, 145–46, 220n41, 220n43 negotiations, and marriages, 169–70, 225n13 New Year celebrations, 69, 136, 144, 146, 164, 181–82 Noli me tangere iconography, 190–91, 191 objects, 3–4; human relationship with, 135, 159–60, 218n12, 224nn85–86; objectification/subjugation of bride and, 175–76, 178–79. See also entremets; and specific objects Oresme, Nicolas, 109, 110, 111–12, 114, 117, 121–23, 139, 214n31 Outdoor Party of the Burgundian Court (Gar­ den of Love), 58, 59, 203n39

Panofsky, Erwin, 131–32, 134 Park, Katherine, 139–41 Paston, John, III, 174 pastoral scenes, and ducal couples, 70–71, 208n65, 208n67 paucity, 105, 115–17, 117, 123, 124–26, 213n11 Pearson, Andrea, 189 Pearson, Mike, 6–7 performances/performing arts: bridal performances and, 167, 168, 170–72, 175–77; of visual art, 160–63. See also entremets performing arts, and banquets, 3 Petit, Jean: Defense of the Role of the Duke of Burgundy, 85–86, 87 Philip the Bold, 4, 62, 70–71, 160, 170, 176–77 Philip the Fair, 185 Philip the Good: diversity, 221n56; ecumenical spirit, 158; emotions, 76, 78–79, 84–86; ethics texts, 109, 214n28; false/ misleading appearances, 85–86; Feast of the Pheasant, 37; giant as retainer, 153; manuscript patronage, 185; marvelous wedding banquet, 138–39, 144; negotiations in marriages, 170; politics of rulers, 160–61; religious beliefs, 149, 149; role models, 67–72, 84, 208n65, 208n67; staging, 78–79, 84; strangeness, 147; temperance, 106 Phyllis and Aristotle aquamanile, 33–34, 34 Pichon, Jérôme, 198n13 Pisan, Christine de, 86, 88, 89, 106 politics: banquets and, 1, 9, 46, 100; emotional communities and, 78–79, 84; entremets and, 32, 48, 52, 61–62, 74, 84, 100; marvelous effects and, 139–41; of rulers, 120–26, 122, 126, 216n58, 216nn61–63; spectator-spectacle and, 46–48, 61–62, 67; strange effects and, 154; wonder-inducing art and, 139–41, 154 politics of rulers: ethics/virtues and, 120–26, 122, 192, 216n58, 216nn61–63; wedding banqueting and, 173–75, 178, 182–84, 229n54 pride, 8, 24, 105, 125, 153–54, 217n66. See also hypocrisy profane-secular and religious-sacred boundaries. See religious-sacred and profane-secular boundaries prudence, 106, 107, 108

index publicity or witnesses, and marriages, 167–70, 172, 174, 178, 183 realism: symbolism in guise of, 132, 133, 134, 154, 156–57; visual arts and, 131–32 reception, and banquets, 1, 3 reciprocity, 181–84, 220n52 religious beliefs and practice (theology): apes/monkeys as marginal figures and, 97–98, 99, 100; ecumenical spirit and, 158; emotional communities and, 76–77, 79–80, 81, 84–85; emotions in context of, 79–80, 84; entremets and, 79–80, 84; false/misleading appearances and, 88–89, 90, 91; fountains and, 161–62; hypocrisy and, 88–89, 90; intentions and, 88–89, 90, 91; laity’s performance of sacraments and, 181, 228n45; magnificence and, 113–14; marriages and, 166–69, 171–72, 181, 225n6, 225n8; ruler and Christian humility paradox and, 184, 191, 191–92; visual arts and, 157–60, 224n87; wedding banqueting and, 181; wonder-inducing art and, 133, 148–50, 149, 155–57, 157–60, 224n87 religious-sacred and profane-secular boundaries: entremets and, 22, 25–26, 100, 162; fountains and, 161–62; Mar­ riage/Wedding at Cana, 1, 2, 3, 19; wonder-inducing art and, 162 Renaissance tradition, 4, 46 René of Anjou, 148, 208n67 Ribordy, Geneviève, 171, 225n13 role models (star system): entremets and, 4, 37, 45, 67–72, 84; ethics/virtues and, 126, 176, 179, 183–86, 187, 188–92, 229n65, 230nn69–70, 230n76; spectator-spectacle and, 4, 37, 45, 67–72, 84; visual arts and, 69–70 romance (love), 88–89, 173–74, 228n43 Roman de la rose, Le (Lorris and Meun), 30, 62, 88–89 Rosenwein, Barbara, 77 ruler as just, 176, 179, 183–85, 192, 227n42 sacred-religious and profane-secular boundaries. See religious-sacred and profane-secular boundaries Saincte Marthe (Saint Martha) ymage, 25–26, 31, 39

259

Sale, Antoine de la: Jehan de Saintré, 11, 127–29 “Saracen” giant, 44–45, 67, 150, 153 Scaecspel, 79 scale, within visual arts, 132, 133, 155–56, 160 Schilling, Diebold, the Elder: Great Burgun­ dian Chronicle, 55, 56, 57 secular-profane and religious-sacred boundaries. See religious-sacred and profane-secular boundaries Serra, Richard, 202n62 Shanks, Michael, 6–7 shepherdess and shepherd motif, 70–71, 176– 77, 180–81, 183, 189–90 Sherman, Claire Richter, 121–22 simulated textures and color, in visual arts, 159–60, 224nn85–87 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 135–38 Sluter, Claus, 5, 41, 70 Smith, Susan, 34 sobriety, 104–5, 108–9, 111, 213n24, plate 2 social class, 113, 146–47, 215n40 social efficacy, 165, 193 socialization and banquets, 4, 6, 46, 104, 120–21; entremets and, 26–27, 67, 126– 27; ethics/virtues and, 53, 54, 126–29; spectator-spectacle and, 47, 62, 63, 64–67, 64, 65, 66, 69, 204n10 social practices, and marriages, 166–69, 171– 72, 225n6 Somme le roi: four cardinal virtues, 106, 107, 108, 213n22; Humility, Pride, Piety, and Hypocrisy, 89, 90; magnificence and, 112, 114; pride and, 105; Sobriety and Gluttony, 108–9, 213n24, plate 2; temperance, 105–6 spectator-spectacle, 18, 44–46, 72–73, 204n9; audience participation and, 58, 59, 60–62, 63, 64–67, 64, 65, 66; audiences and, 13, 14, 15, 52–55, 54, 56, 57–58, 59, 60–62, 63, 64–67, 64, 65, 66, plate 1; banquets and, 3; character acting and, 47–48, 204n14; chivalry and, 47, 61, 64, 65; entremets and, 46; human interactions in context of audiences and, 13, 14, 15, 53–55, 56, 57, plate 1; interior design and, 53–55, 54, 56, 57, 70; mimesis and, 48– 52, 61, 204n23; politics and, 46–48, 61– 62, 67; role models and, 4, 37, 45, 67–72,

260

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spectator-spectacle (continued) 84; sculpture and, 55, 69; socialization of banquet participants and, 47, 62, 63, 64– 67, 64, 65, 66, 69, 204n10; tapestries and, 54–55, 69–71, plate 1 spontaneity, 76, 102, 209n6 staging, 74–76, 78–79, 84, 85 stag symbolism, 141–43, 145, 148 star system (role models). See role models (star system) Stewart, Susan, 153 strange effects: visual arts and, 158–59; wedding banqueting and, 177–78; wonderinducing art and, 131, 146–50, 149, 151, 152, 152–54, 223nn69–70, 223n74, 223n76 subjects, and duchess’ relationship, 177, 179, 183–85, 229n65 subjugation/objectification, of bride, 175–76, 178–79 Swan Knight scene, 25–26, 30, 35 Swan Mazer, 60, 61 symbolism, in guise of realism, 132, 133, 134, 154, 156–57 Table Fountain (Cleveland fountain), 28, 29 Taillevent (Guillaume Tirel), 23–26, 38–39 temperance, 102, 104–11, 107, 110, 118, 118– 19, 119, 122–23, 128–29, 213n18, 213n22, 214n31, 216n55, plate 2 temproir or tempoir, 106, 213n18 textual conventions, 8–12, 17 textual descriptions of banquets, 6–12, 15–17, 22, 196n15 theology (religious beliefs and practice). See religious beliefs and practice (theology) thin effects, 144–45 time-based art forms, 6–7, 15–17, 19–20, 162, 183 Tirel, Guillaume (Taillevent), 23–26, 38–39 transformation, of familiar to unexpected, 135 Très Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, Les (Limbourg Brothers), 143–44, plate 1 uncanny, the, 135 unicorn symbolism, 175–77 Valois Burgundian era, 4–6, 69, 128, 147–48, 157, 221n56, 222n61 Van Eyck, Jan: chivalry and, 24–25, 45, 67; color and simulated textures in visual

arts and, 159–60, 224nn85–87; ecumenical spirit and, 158; festival and, 154, 160, 162; fountain symbolism and, 161–62; Ghent Altarpiece (Adoration of the Lamb), 154, 157, 157–60, 224nn84–87, plate 4; human and object relationship and, 159–60, 224nn85–86; Madonna in the Church, 132, 133, 134, 155–56, 160, 223n81; mimesis and, 131; performance of Ghent Altarpiece and, 160–63; religious beliefs and, 157–60, 224n87; role models and, 69–70; scale within visual arts and, 132, 133, 155–56, 160; sobriety/wine and, 104–5, 108, 111; strange effects and, 158–59; symbolism in guise of realism and, 132, 133, 134, 154, 156–57; Valois Burgundian support for, 5, 157; viewers and artworks relationship and, 159, 224n84; Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin, 69–70 Viandier cookbook, 23–26, 30–31, 35, 38–39 Vie de sainte Colette, 97–98, 99, 100 viewers, and artworks, 159, 224n84 virtues/ethics. See ethics/virtues visual arts: banquets’ boundary with, 1, 3, 4; chivalry and, 24–25, 45, 67; color and simulated textures in, 159–60, 224nn85–87; disguised symbolism theory and, 131–32; ecumenical spirit and, 158; ethics/virtues and, 103; festival and, 154, 160, 162; fountain symbolism and, 161–62; human and object relationship and, 159–60, 224nn85–86; mimesis and, 131; performance of, 160–63; realism and, 131–32; religious beliefs and, 157–60, 224n87; role models and, 69–70; scale within, 132, 133, 155–56, 160; sobriety/ wine and, 104–5, 108, 111; strange effects and, 158–59; symbolism in guise of realism and, 132, 133, 134, 154, 156–57; Valois Burgundian support for, 5, 157; viewers and artworks relationship in, 159, 224n84. See also entremets visual conventions: entremets and, 12–13; magnificence and, 13–15, 14, 113–14, 215n44; marvelous effects and, 138–39; spectator-spectacle and, 53–55, 54, 56, 57, 70; wedding banqueting and, 1, 2, 3, 7, 12–15, 14, 17 visual descriptions of banquets, 6–8, 12–13 vows exchange, 169–70

index wedding banqueting: bridal performances and, 167, 168, 170–72; charivari and, 48–49, 170, 204n22; consummation of marriage and, 170; mimesis and, 48–49; tradition of, 166–72; visual conventions and, 1, 2, 3, 7, 12–13, 14, 15, 17; vows exchange and, 169–70. See also wedding banqueting for Margaret of York and Charles the Bold wedding banqueting for Margaret of York and Charles the Bold, 165, 172, 179–80, 192–93; agency of duchess and, 175–76, 178–79; apes/monkeys as marginal figures and, 95–97, 186, 192; bird-gifts and, 177–78, 180–81, 183, 227n38; bridal performances and, 175–77; camel symbolism and, 177; consummation of marriage and, 178; entremets and, 172–75, 177–81, 183–84; ethics/virtues of duchess as role model and, 179, 192; gift giving and, 175– 78, 180–84, 228n43; leopard symbolism and, 175–78, 183, 226n31; lion symbolism and, 176–77, 183, 226n31; marvelous effects of, 138–39, 174; politics of rulers and, 173–75, 178, 182–84, 192, 229n54; publicity or witnesses of marriage and, 174, 178, 183; reciprocity and, 181, 184; religious beliefs and, 181; romance and, 173–74, 228n43; shepherdess and shepherd motif and, 176–77, 180–81, 183, 189–90; social efficacy of, 165, 193; strange effects and, 177–78; subjects and duchess’ relationship in context of, 177, 179, 183; unicorn symbolism and, 175– 77. See also Charles the Bold; Margaret of York

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Weyden, Rogier van der: mimesis and, 131; Valois Burgundian era, 5; Virgin and Child, 150, 151; visual conventions and, 12 wild men portrayal, 48–50, 51 witnesses or publicity, and marriages, 167–70, 172, 174, 178, 183 wonder-inducing art, 18–19, 131, 134–35, 163; banquets and, 137–38, 143–44, plate 1, plate 3; chivalry and, 137–38; civilized human realm and, 91, 140, 152–53, 152; Crusades and, 148, 222n61; diversity during Valois Burgundian era and, 147–48, 221n56; entremets and, 134–38, 141–43; Green Knight and, 135–38, plate 3; human and object relationship and, 135, 159–60, 218n12, 224nn85–86; largesse and, 146–47; lion and lady ymage and, 31–32, 139, 150; marvelous effects and, 131, 138–46, 147, 154; musical forms and, 145–46, 220n41, 220n43; politics and, 139–41, 154; religious beliefs and, 133, 148–50, 149, 155–57, 157–60, 224n87; religious/profane boundaries and, 162; scale within visual arts and, 132, 133, 155–56; social class and, 146– 47; strange effects and, 131, 146–50, 149, 151, 152, 152–54, 223nn69–70, 223n74, 223n76; symbolism in guise of realism and, 132, 133, 134, 154, 156–57; thin effects and, 144–45; transformation of familiar to unexpected and, 135; uncanny and, 135 Yang, 229n54