The Waxing of the Middle Ages: Revisiting Late Medieval France (The Early Modern Exchange) 1644532905, 9781644532904

Citation preview

THE WAXING OF THE ­MIDDLE AGES

The Early Modern Exchange s e r i e s e d i tor s Gary Ferguson, University of ­Virginia, author of Same-­Sex Marriage in Re­nais­sance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Eu­rope Meredith K. Ray, University of Delaware, author of ­Daughters of Alchemy: ­Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy s e r i e s e d i tor i a l boa r d Frederick A. de Armas, University of Chicago Valeria Finucci, Duke University Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles Nicholas Hammond, University of Cambridge Kathleen P. Long, Cornell University Elissa B. Weaver, University of Chicago s e l e cte d t i tles Gendering the Re­nais­sance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy, edited by Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater Storytelling in Sixteenth-­Century France: Negotiating Shifting Forms, edited by Emily E. Thompson ­England’s Asian Re­nais­sance, edited by Su Fang Ng and Carmen Nocentelli Performative Polemic: Anti-­Absolutist Pamphlets and Their Readers in Late Seventeenth-­Century France, Kathrina Ann LaPorta Innovation in the Italian Counter-­Reformation, edited by Shannon McHugh and Anna Wainwright Milton among Spaniards, Angelica Duran The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales, edited by John D. Lyons ­Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain: A Tribute to Bárbara Mujica, edited by Susan L. Fischer and Frederick A. de Armas

The Waxing of the ­Middle Ages Revisiting Late Medieval France

Edited by Tracy Adams and Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier

Newark

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Adams, Tracy, 1959–­editor, author. | Morand-­Métivier, Charles-­Louis, editor, author. Title: The waxing of the ­Middle Ages : revisiting late medieval France / Edited by Tracy Adams and Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier. Description: Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2023] | Series: The early modern exchange | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022039421 | ISBN 9781644532904 (paperback) | ISBN 9781644532911 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644532928 (epub) | ISBN 9781644532935 (mobi) | ISBN 9781644532942 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: France—­History—15th ­century. | France—­Social life and customs— 15th ­century. | France—­Civilization—1328–1600. | France—­History—15th ­century— ­Historiography. | Huizinga, Johan, 1872–1945—­Influence. Classification: LCC DC33.3 .W39 2023 | DDC 944/.026—­dc23/eng/20220824 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2022039421 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2023 by the University of Delaware Individual chapters copyright © 2023 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact University of Delaware Press, 200A Morris Library, 181 S. College Ave., Newark, DE 19717. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) ­were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor University of Delaware Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. udpress​.­udel​.­edu Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

Contents



Introduction: Working with Huizinga’s Legacy Tracy Adams and Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier

1 Color Values, or Life with Grey Andrea Tarnowski

1 21

2 Jean de Meun and Visual Eroticism in Fifteenth-­Century Culture Stephen G. Nichols

44

3 Jean Chartier and the End of the Historical Tradition at Saint-­Denis Derek R. Whaley

72

4 “Pre­sent en sa personne”: Identity and Celebrity in Fifteenth-­Century Franco-­Burgundian Lit­er­a­ture Helen Swift

94

5 Rethinking Patronage in Late Medieval France: Networks of Influence in Manuscript Production and Reception Anneliese Pollock Renck

110

6 The Rhétoriqueurs and the Transition from Manuscript to Print Cynthia J. Brown

124

7 François Villon and France: Emotional (De)constructions Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier 8 La Belle Dame of Chartier Manuscripts: Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier Joan E. McRae

141

158

vi Contents

9 Agnès Sorel, Celebrity, and Late Medieval French Visual Culture Tracy Adams

189

10 No Job for a Man: Fifteenth-­Century France and the Invention of the Institution of Female Regency Zita Eva Rohr

213



Conclusion: French Historians in Search of the Historiographical Identity of the French Fifteenth ­Century Franck Collard (translated by Tracy Adams)

235

Bibliography 251 Contributors 277 Index 281

in trodu cti on

Working with Huizinga’s Legacy Tracy Adams and Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-­friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-­eves run. —­John Keats, “To Autumn”

Johan Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, first published in 1919 and in print ever since, has s­ haped the image of late medieval French culture for generations. No work, prior or subsequent, treats the culture of the period with such loving attention. For this reason, the perennially popu­lar study, translated into En­ glish successively as The Waning, The Autumn, and Autumntide, of the ­Middle Ages, offers an apt point of departure for a collection on the period, all the more so given that Huizinga has become a scholarly founding ­father figure in recent years.1 Anne Midgley observes that with the “rediscovery of the power of cultural history,” a “long list of luminaries” claim him as an innovator, including Gerd Althoff, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Peter Burke.2 Patrick Hutton cites Huizinga as a precursor to the history of mentalities.3 The introduction to the 2019 collection Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the ­Middle Ages, a ­Century ­Later, edited by Peter Arnade, Martha Howells, and Anton van der Lem, acknowledges Huizinga’s study as a “methodological won­der” and a “completely original attempt to treat cultural forms and the materials that express them as reliable, if inherently imbalanced, historical evidence.”4 The essays of L’Odeur du sang et des roses: Relire Johan Huizinga aujourd’hui (2019), edited by Élodie Lecuppre-­Desjardin, demonstrate Huizinga’s continued relevance for a variety of disciplines.5 1

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And yet, Huizinga’s study has always been controversial. In the first years ­after publication, Herfsttij met with a cool reception, at least among Dutch historians, and, although its popularity began to ascend with its translation into German and En­glish in 1924 and French in 1932, it was long criticized, especially by positivist historians.6 Some of the essays of Rereading Huizinga detail the reasons for ambivalence: Huizinga’s “disregard for scholarly protocols”; neglect of archival sources; “idiosyncratic and highly selective” use of art historical sources; total lack of ­interest in urban life; and omission of commerce.7 But one of the most problematic aspects of Autumntide is its assumption that late medieval France and Burgundian Low Countries w ­ ere socie­ties in decline. Huizinga did not invent this narrative of degeneration. Still, as the most widely read treatment of the late medieval period on earth, his narrative of a formerly glorious culture on its deathbed reinforced a scholarly trend that can be traced from the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury.8 Or at least this is true for his narrative of late medieval France. In­ter­est­ing to note, the late medieval Burgundian Low Countries have never been regarded as waning, despite Huizinga’s inclusion of the region in Herfsttij. We ­will return to this point. The essays of this volume are indebted to Huizinga’s approach to the late ­Middle Ages, specifically his attention to what he calls the period’s “life and thought forms” (“levens-­en gedachtenvormen”). Each essay focuses on a par­ tic­u­lar form or set of forms characteristic of late medieval France. However, in the spirit of continued engagement with Huizinga’s study, a pro­cess undertaken not least by the historian himself as he oversaw translations and editions of his work, we propose certain correctives to his idea of form, which was, as we w ­ ill see, inextricably linked to his notion of a declining M ­ iddle Ages. Forms of Life and Thought and the Narrative of Decline Huizinga never defined exactly what he meant when speaking of forms of life and thought. However, it is clear from a variety of his printed reflections that he was thinking of something like the collective attitudes of a society as revealed in its cultural productions—by which he meant not only material objects, but also physical movements like ritual, dance, and social interactions, as well as concepts expressed in written documents—­and that he felt it is the cultural historian’s task is to analyze ­these forms in the aggregate for a par­tic­u­lar period. As he famously puts it in “The Task of Cultural History,” “only when the scholar turns to determining the patterns of life, art, and thought taken all together can ­there actually be a question of cultural history.”9

Introduction

3

As for the connection between his idea of form and his narrative of decline, in describing how historians approach form in his preface to the first Dutch edition of Herftsttij, Huizinga stresses the need to “get close to the essential content that lay in ­those forms” (“den wezenlijken inhoud te benaderen, die in die vormen heeft gerust”).10 It is clear that he conceives of form and meaning as separable, as exterior signifier and interior signified. It follows from this construction that as a society’s intellectual life develops in new directions over time, previously adequate cultural forms might become obsolete. Huizinga provides an example of such a mismatch in his discussion of late medieval funeral pomp. But, first, we note Huizinga’s assumption that late medieval emotions needed to be restrained in firm forms of expression: “The passionate and violent spirit—­hard as well as tear-­filled, always vacillating between black despair at the world and sheer delight in its vibrant beauty—­could not do without the strictest of life-­forms (“strengste vormen van het leven”). It was necessary to contain the emotions in a fixed framework of accepted forms (“een vast raam van geijkte vormen”); in this way society achieved order, at least as a rule.”11 By the late fifteenth c­ entury, he explains, the forms of mourning that developed to control grief had lost their original meaning. “Offshoots of primitive beliefs and ceremonial worship” had been reduced to spectacle, “real life” had been transposed “into the sphere of drama.”12 And yet, he explains ­later in the book, such drama cannot accurately be regarded as art, b­ ecause, at that moment, “art was still absorbed by life” (“de kunst gaat in dien tijd nog op in het leven”); it did not exist as a separate category.13 Funeral pomp had become mere drama, but drama enacted in real life. Individual forms—in this case, funeral pomp—­could become obsolete. But this was not all. When outdated life and thought forms accumulated, they could hinder a society’s intellectual and emotional pro­gress. In such a situation, forms on a large scale might suddenly undergo a transformation. Huizinga envisioned the late M ­ iddle Ages yielding to the Re­nais­sance in just this way. In the essay “My Path to History,” he explains that, in reflecting on the paintings of the Van Eycks, he experienced the epiphany that the late ­Middle Ages represented an absolute terminus, a period whose forms ­were on the verge of a total overhaul. He writes that, on a Sunday walk along the Damsterdiep, “the thought suddenly struck me that the late M ­ iddle Ages w ­ ere not so much a prelude to the ­future as an epoch of fading and decay. This thought, if indeed it may be called a thought, hinged chiefly on the art of the ­brothers Van Eyck and their contemporaries, in all of whom I had been keenly interested for some time. It was

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just becoming fash­ion­able, following Gourajod, Fierens-­Gevaert and Karl Voll, to speak of the Old Dutch Masters as initiators of a Northern Re­nais­sance.”14 “My ideas ­were radically dif­fer­ent,” he concludes. The insight led him to write Autumntide, where the Van Eycks’ art represents the epitome of late medieval form. Elaborating his argument, he contends that by the late fifteenth c­ entury, form threatens to overrun content “and prevents it from rejuvenating”: “In the art of the Van Eycks, the content is still wholly medieval. It does not express new thoughts. It is an extreme, an end point. The medieval system of concepts had been fully built up to heaven; all that could be added was some colour and embellishment.” 15 This vision of late medieval stultification has been influential, even among ­those who might not consciously accept the premise of cultural decline. Autumntide is the “most power­ful book ever written about the period,” writes Howard Kaminsky, noting that its “imagery of a late-­medieval ‘autumn,’ as [Huizinga] originally put it, or of the ‘waning’ rendered in his remarkably fortunate En­glish translation—­‘the soul of the declining M ­ iddle Ages,’ ‘the extreme excitability of the medieval soul,’ ‘a somber melancholy weighs on p­ eople’s souls,’ ‘the extreme saturation of the religious atmosphere’—­conjures up specters of senescence, de­cadence, and termination that have sometimes been debunked, but survive nevertheless to haunt the thinking even of ­those who reject them.”16 On the one hand, the attention that Huizinga gave to life and thought forms has brought him recognition as the forefather of cultural history, and the essays in this collection recognize his role as pioneer in the field. But, on the other hand, his conception of form led him to a conclusion that few are willing to endorse ­today. The essays in this collection work with a slightly dif­fer­ent conception of form, one that prioritizes networks of forms rather than the presumed relationship between form and content. This revision leads in turn to a vision of the relationship between the late ­Middle Ages and Re­nais­sance dif­fer­ent from Huizinga’s. To lay the groundwork for discussing this dif­fer­ent idea of form and its advantages, we turn to an examination of the long-­lasting effects of the narrative of decline, which in many ways remains tacitly in place despite widespread challenges. Effects of the Narrative of Decline Although Huizinga’s study focused on France and Burgundy, as we have noted, the characterization of a society on the wane has never much affected the historiography on the fifteenth-­century Burgundian Low Countries.17 One reason

Introduction

5

for this may be that fifteenth-­century France lacked historiographers of the caliber of their Burgundian counter­parts.18 But perhaps more significant is the way in which Burgundy’s chronology is ­imagined. For fifteenth-­century Burgundy, absorbed into the French kingdom and the Habsburg Empire ­a fter Charles the Bold’s death in 1477, ­there is no ­later glorious Burgundian Re­nais­ sance against which it can be positioned as the unfavorable half of a dialectic within a narrative of cultural progression. Huizinga notwithstanding, fifteenth-­ century Burgundy is typically regarded as a cultural apex. Late medieval France, however, has long been constructed in opposition to the Re­nais­sance. The result has been a lingering view of late medieval France as a “transitional period which connects the fifteenth with the sixteenth ­century,”19 along with the assumption that except for “a few big names and a few curiosities or impor­ tant works,” t­ hose years “form a hole between the riches of the ­Middle Ages and the splendors of the Re­nais­sance.”20 For this reason, although some of the essays h ­ ere treat Burgundian writers, this volume focuses primarily on late medieval France. True, one would have to search long and hard to find a recent academic describing late medieval France as a declining society. As Cynthia Brown writes in her chapter in this volume, already in the 1960s, a group of scholars including Daniel Poirion and Franco Simone had laid the groundwork for a new period in French studies, “the late medieval period encompassing the f­ ourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the previously misunderstood and even maligned Moyen Age tardif.” And yet, despite the excellent research that scholars of fifteenth-­century France have produced on individual figures, events, authors, and works of the period,21 the practical real­ity is that in the English-­speaking academic world, historians and literary historians have long behaved in concrete ways as if the late French M ­ iddle Ages was a period of ­little interest. Specialists in history note how relatively ­little English-­language scholarship has been devoted to the Armagnac-­Burgundian feud, the Praguerie, the War of the Public Weal, the Mad War, or to fifteenth-­ century clientèles. To date ­there are no major English-­language biographies of Charles V, VI, VIII, or Louis XII. History reboots with the Re­nais­sance. François I, subject of several biographies in En­glish, is proclaimed the maker of modern France, “arguably the most significant king that France ever had,” and the king who presided over the transformation of France into a fully developed state, as if he appeared out of nowhere.22 Literary historians point out that the lack of easily accessible modern editions makes most works of the late fifteenth ­century impossible to study in university courses, which means that

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survey courses of French lit­er­a­ture do not introduce students to lit­er­a­ture of the period. The High French M ­ iddle Ages and Re­nais­sance have identities. In contrast, beyond the impression scholars have created of the French fifteenth c­ entury as one of decline or placeholding, the period has no real identity of its own; as any specialist in late medieval France knows, the jobs in the English-­speaking world advertised for medieval and Re­nais­sance go overwhelmingly to Re­nais­sance specialists rather than to the late medievalists who are arguably in a better position to work across the two periods. To be sure, in university curricula the entire French M ­ iddle Ages is flattened “into a period of immobility, an era without contour and interest, an era of the eternal standstill,”23 propping up the notion of the “Re­nais­sance.” Recent scholarship in a variety of areas from studies of novelty and of sexualities to critical race theory demonstrates again and again the per­sis­tence of what Geraldine Heng has recently referred to as “the ­grand récit of Western temporality” in which: modernity is positioned si­mul­ta­neously as a spectacular conclusion and a beginning: a teleological culmination that emerges from the ooze of a murkily long chronology by means of a temporal rupture—­a big bang, if we like—­that issues in a new historical instant. The material real­ity and expressive vocabulary of rupture is vouched for by symbolic phenomena of a highly dramatic kind—­a Scientific Revolution, discoveries of race, the formation of nations, etc.—­which signal the arrival of modern time. Medieval time, on the wrong side of rupture, is thus shunted aside as the detritus of a pre-­Symbolic era falling outside the signifying systems issued by modernity, and reduced to the role of a historical trace undergirding the recitation of modernity’s arrival.24 Still, certain pre-­Renaissance periods attract more interest than o­thers. Within the domain of French cultural history, the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the appearance of the Capetians (or, for literary historians, the troubadours) are ­little known. With the appearance of Hugh Capet and Guillaume IX, however, certain events begin to attract more interest: the second medieval Re­nais­sance (the first being the Carolingian Re­nais­sance); medieval French romances and courtly love; the Crusades and the reign of Louis IX; the Black Death. But, as for late medieval France, when regarded as part of a long M ­ iddle Ages and even as part of a French M ­ iddle Ages r­ unning from the eleventh c­ entury

Introduction

7

to the Re­nais­sance, the period becomes a flattening within a flattening, a space of historical changeover, not in­ter­est­ing on its own. And, to take the argument further, even within the already-­flattened fifteenth c­ entury, the latter two-­thirds of the French fifteenth ­century are generally regarded as particularly uninspiring. The time of Charles VII arouses ­little interest, and attitudes ­toward the king himself are generally tepid, despite his connection to the always popu­lar Joan of Arc. Louis XI, Charles VIII, or Louis XII barely register among the better-­known kings of France, and the lit­er­a­ture of their period is ­little studied. It is not as if no one has noticed the riches of late medieval French culture. Still, relative to the world on the other side of the turn of the sixteenth c­ entury, this world remains obscure, undoubtedly a perception related to the common way of constructing the periods of French history. Forms and Periodization For Huizinga, forms are separable from content or the ideas that they manifest. In his eyes, the aggregate of forms defining late medieval France became incapable of supporting further development, leading to a discarding of such obsolete forms in ­favor of a ­whole new set. One of the many effects of the “linguistic turn” in historiography, however, has been the tendency t­ oday to conceive of forms and content or meaning as mutually and inextricably linked. An idea always already exists as a form, signifier and signified—­together they form an entity that acquires meaning as part of an entire system. Recent studies of the emotions offer an example. In contrast with Huizinga’s vision of passions as entities clothed in outward expressions that may or may not fit, recent historians of the emotions assume a reciprocal effect: feelings are produced as much as they are modulated by “emotives” and social practices. And, like words in a language, emotions become meaningful as part of larger systems.25 So conceived, forms do not become inadequate and fade out, certainly not all at once, replaced by a Re­nais­sance of new ones, but come and go in staggered chronologies, enter into new combinations, mutate, shift in significance, and mix with other forms in vari­ous networks or systems. Transformations occur, but they are ­limited to par­tic­u­lar areas. Applying this perspective ­frees late medieval France from its traditional position of inferiority and suggests two approaches to studying its cultural forms. They can be examined with no regard for the traditional chronological cutoff that limits so much research. Certain narratives ­will continue to be recounted with reference to the traditional Re­nais­sance: the

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French language, for example, changed dramatically during the second and third quarters of the sixteenth c­ entury. However, other forms saw no par­tic­u­lar rupture at that time. Early printed works straddle the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and literary debates passing through the sixteenth, and into the seventeenth, ­century required no reference to the Re­nais­sance. Similarly, tracing the development of the author figure shows that interest in the author was well developed by the ­fourteenth ­century, and that, although shifts occurred along the way, the Re­nais­sance did not see a major shift in this domain. Alternatively, the late medieval period can be cordoned off and spotlighted, not once and for all, but provisionally, as a set of dispositifs, or networks, of forms that coexisted at that moment. This is the approach that this volume takes. A focus away from a cataclysmic Re­nais­sance and ­toward dynamic networks of forms overlapping in time and space dovetails with challenges to traditional periodization over the past few de­cades. Jacques Le Goff, famously wondering ­whether we must “divide history into periods,” offered a schema of a long M ­ iddle Ages stretching into the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury punctuated by numerous “re­ nais­sances” of greater or lesser importance.26 Le Goff suggested that ninth-­, eleventh-­, and sixteenth-­century Re­nais­sances remain meaningful, but only partially, for certain features. A sixteenth-­century Re­nais­sance could be recognized for some phenomena, but not as a major shift, with points of interest scattered along ­either end of the period, its beginning and ending staggered.27 Similarly, Kaminsky has suggested thinking in terms of syncopation: “as soon as one stops imagining a ‘high’ medievality that the Late ­Middle Ages declined from or negated and begins to imagine an alternative construction of continuity rather than contradiction between the centuries in question, one readily imagines the ‘closing the frontier’ not as the end of expansion but as the moment within the rhythm of the ­whole.”28 Heng proposes thinking of history as a field of “dynamic oscillations between ruptures and reinscriptions, or historical time as a matrix in which overlapping repetitions-­with-­change can occur, or an understanding that historical events may result from the action of multiple temporalities that are enfolded and coextant within a par­tic­u­lar historical moment.”29 Thinking in terms of networks of forms harmonizes with conceptualizing “the medieval” not as the origin, or, conversely, as the dark Other, of the con­ temporary, but as a participant, or discussant, in the con­temporary. Sylvain Piron has summoned the entire history of the Western world to explain our inability to confront the ecological disaster looming before us due to climate

Introduction

9

change, which history warns us against in no uncertain terms when we regard it in its long entirety. Soothed by myths of the economy that, containing the residue of religious certainty, reassure us that all ­will turn out in the end, we have failed to see the coming catastrophe, as we view history in familiar and easily digestible periods that disguise continuity.30 In the introduction to their collection Making the Medieval Relevant, editors Chris Jones, Conor Kostick, and Klaus Oschema make the case for heightening our understanding of significant modern “social and scientific questions” by focusing on “what actually happened” during the M ­ iddle Ages (as opposed to studying “medievalisms”).31 In their chapter “Pacific Perspectives: Why Study Eu­rope’s M ­ iddle Ages in Aotearoa New Zealand?” Chris Jones and Madi Williams suggest that medieval history courses should be taught with “a focus on the ‘history of values,’ rather than adopting a traditional curriculum driven by historiographical debates.” Confronting a society whose values are so dif­fer­ent from ­those of the modern university—­monetization, innovation, competition—­ prepares students to “deepen the engagement with biculturalism.”32 Although their chapter targets university programs in New Zealand that have recently committed to incorporating Maori values, such an approach could be fruitfully ­adopted in any university. Still more recently, Zrinka Stahuljak has proposed an approach compatible with that of Jones and Williams but which functions on a global scale: “littérature connectée” (“connected literature”). Stahuljak’s method eschews diachronic emphasis on individual works and literary genres to focus on encounters across time and space between asynchronic dispositifs or networks of discourses, in this case, medieval and con­temporary, with the aim of bringing to light perspectives that other­wise remain hidden on both sides. Specifically, the method renders vis­i­ble “dans le pre­sent ce qui n’est jamais advenu dans le passé, il met au monde par apposition dans le présent quelque chose du présent pour la première fois. Le contemporain, en tant que surgissement pour la première fois—et non resurgissement—­des questions posées par les époques précédentes, qui restaient invisibles jusqu’au surgissement de l’écart dans l’horizon.”33 (“in the pre­sent what never happened in the past; it establishes in the pre­sent something of the pre­sent for the first time. The con­temporary, as the appearance for the first time—­not the reappearance—of questions posed by previous eras that remained invisible u ­ ntil a gap appeared in the horizon.”) Stahuljak developed the approach of “littérature connectée” in the context of recent attempts to decenter the world of lit­er­a­ture from Eu­rope and North

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Amer­i­ca, attempts that have been critiqued for perpetuating Orientalism in spite of themselves, b­ ecause the very notion that a nation’s soul, its privileged means of expression, resides in a distinct literary tradition that can be sold on the open market to Western reading publics is itself an invention of the West.34 Stahuljak suggests that bringing what she calls “bibliothèque mondes,” library worlds or clusters, of the ­Middle Ages—­which w ­ ere genuinely decentered ­because the West had not yet exported its values, literary and other­wise, to the rest of the world—­into encounters with World Lit­er­a­ture could help to realize the latter’s potential to include epistemologies not only from all parts but from all periods of the world.35 Returning to late medieval France, certain networks of forms of that period reveal themselves to be productive for thinking about modern questions. If the Crusades can be put in dialogue with modern discourse about Chris­tian­ity and Islam to activate s­ ilent voices both in the past and the pre­sent, and if the Religious Wars and the Dreyfus Affair enter easily into conversation with our own polarized socie­ties, fifteenth-­century French dispositifs make vis­i­ble in con­temporary cultures features characteristic of periods that see a sudden uptake in new technologies and information: particularly sharp cultural heteroglossia and evidence of bricolage and flux, re­sis­tance, and provisional or sometimes permanent shifts in meaning. Encounters with late medieval French dispositifs relativize some of the apprehension with which many confront cultural shifts that seem to be accelerating out of control, particularly ­those having to do with how we relate to one another (in person or electronically), how we receive and transmit information, how we form and articulate gender identities, and how we imagine our communities. Fifteenth-­Century Forms The following essays do not in themselves create a “littérature connectée.” However, they hope to offer some ideas for such a proj­ect by drawing attention to the complexity of some of the period’s cultural forms. Rather than regarding the period’s forms as insufficient to carry new thoughts, the essays focus on how they work or metamorphose in dif­fer­ent environments, what new purposes they serve, and what new combinations of thought, new hybrids, they facilitate. The first three essays all examine a feature of late medieval life which, via the work of Huizinga and other proponents of the narrative of decline, has been treated as evidence of the period’s excess or degeneration. In chapter 1,

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11

“Color Values, Or Life with Grey,” Andrea Tarnowski takes Huizinga’s vivid descriptions of the magnificent, and sometimes lurid, colors of late medieval France as a point of departure. Huizinga brings the fifteenth ­century to life by detailing the variegated hues of daily existence. Colors also serve a meta­ phorical purpose in his work, emphasizing the period’s immoderate highs and lows, its oscillation between black despair and the “bonte schoonheid” (“colorful beauty”) of revelry and joy.36 But he writes almost nothing about grey, which became very popu­lar during this period. Tarnowski draws attention to this color, showing that in contrast with the modern tendency to see it as depressing, in late medieval France it came to signal wealth, care, elegance, and hope. The impression of manic energy that Huizinga’s color descriptions create is tempered by a focus on the soothing greys of the period. Stephen G. Nichols, in chapter 2, “Jean de Meun and Visual Eroticism in Fifteenth-­Century Culture,” explores forms of the erotic that Huizinga perceived as binaries to reveal more complexity than the Dutch historian admitted. As is the case with so many late medieval French cultural forms, erotic love lit­er­a­ture of the period has often been regarded as inferior to works of the High ­Middle Ages, in this case as dully conventional, overwrought, and bursting with meaningless decoration, or just plain obscene. For Huizinga, the period’s aesthetic aspirations to a complex eroticism and its blatant licentiousness represented opposing urges or forces. Nichols, however, shows that Huizinga missed the emergence of a new erotic ecol­ogy born of the tension between overt and covert eroticism. The genuine particularity of this fifteenth-­century eroticism is that it depends on the interchange between the two. The new ecol­ogy is particularly striking in the interaction between certain manuscript texts and the images that illustrate them, a domain that Huizinga ignores almost entirely. In chapter 3, “Jean Chartier and the End of the Historical Tradition at Saint-­ Denis,” Derek Whaley reexamines the final installment of the Grandes chroniques de France. Huizinga made much use of chronicles as sources but paid them l­ittle heed as a literary form. The Grandes chroniques, the massive set of chronicles associated with the abbey of Saint-­Denis, is recognized as a shining example of this form. However, the continuation of Jean Chartier (d. ca. 1464), with which the chronicle concludes, has been deplored by historians as derivative, lacking in style, and dull if accurate. One even posits that had Chartier been a more inspired writer, modern attitudes t­ oward Charles VII’s reign would t­ oday be more enthusiastic. But, as Whaley explains, this final continuation represents Chartier’s strategic attempt to recoup the abbey’s prestige by adopting the

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“old-­fashioned” style of the ­earlier chronicle tradition rather than following newer historiographical trends. Chartier did not work with a form whose meaning was no longer relevant; rather, he deployed the form precisely ­because of its meaning within a par­tic­u­lar social context. The next four chapters focus on aspects of literary forms of the period to highlight innovations, some of which stuck, o­ thers of which have vanished. A new fascination for the author figure is vis­i­ble in some fifteenth-­century manuscripts. In chapter 4, “ ‘Pre­sent en sa personne’: Identity and Celebrity in Fifteenth-­Century Franco-­Burgundian Lit­er­a­ture,” Helen Swift examines some texts and paratexts that engage in in­ter­est­ing ways with their authors: Jean de Meun, Alain Chartier’s fictitious Belle Dame sans mercy, and François Villon. Drawing on recent “persona studies,” an approach developed by scholars for studying modern celebrity culture, Swift shows to what extent and with what plea­sure late medieval publics elaborated on certain author figures. Her point is not to argue for the invention of celebrity in the late fifteenth c­ entury; rather, she makes the medieval con­temporary by demonstrating that the “useful anachronism” of persona studies illuminates both what does and does not match up on the medieval and modern ends, with the ultimate goal of valorizing the specificity of late medieval French “promotional poetics and concepts of identity.” If readers’ interest in authors has remained steady over the centuries, the model of literary production as collaborative was eventually displaced by that of the one-­author-­of-­a-­standardized-­script (although this monolithic model may be changing ­under the influence of new technologies of reading). But ­things could have been other­wise, as Anneliese Pollack Renck shows in chapter 5, “Rethinking Patronage in Late Medieval France: Networks of Influence in Manuscript Production and Reception.” To grasp the nature of fifteenth-­century manuscript collaboration we need to understand patronage practices of the period. Scholars have often failed to appreciate the richness of such practices, Renck explains, by applying models of patronage par­tic­u­lar to ­earlier periods. ­These ­earlier models do not capture the complex real­ity of the late medieval literary culture and manuscript production, where the author or translator, dedicatee, patron, and illustrator all contributed to create highly individualized versions of par­tic­u­lar texts. The appearance of the printing press heralded shifts in written communication of a magnitude comparable to t­ hose instigated by the internet. Arriving in Paris in 1470, printing affected production of all genres. A growing sense of authorial self-­consciousness led writers to defend their interests when printers

Introduction

13

tried to usurp them. In chapter 6, “The Rhétoriqueurs and the Transition from Manuscript to Print,” Cynthia  J. Brown details early printed works of Jean ­Molinet (1435–1507), André de la Vigne (ca. 1470–ca. 1515), and Pierre Gringore to follow a shift in the dynamics of literary creation. Like modern writers and journalists moving to electronic supports and seeking new ways to monetize their work, writers ­after printing ­were required to negotiate a system in which publishers, printers, and authors all took part. Shifts in the material forms of lit­er­a­ture, then, ­were nonlinear and resulted along the way in wonderfully complex productions that combined dif­fer­ent va­ ri­e­ties of patronage and ideas of authorship vis­i­ble in the works themselves. In chapter  7, “François Villon and France: Emotional (De)constructions,” Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier revisits the popu­lar fifteenth-­century literary celebrity François Villon, observing, like Helen Swift, that the author’s vivid persona is constructed over a veritable black hole. But Morand-­Métivier’s interest extends beyond the figure of Villon himself to the author’s renowned Testament and what it represents. The strange heteroglossic work—­a ­will interspersed with ballades—­adds up to a vision of France as an emotional community, centered around Villon’s vivid persona and the solidarity he offers the oppressed. The Testament, like the Grandes chroniques, creates a virtual emotional community, but, dif­fer­ent from the official royal chronicle, it includes members of French society who w ­ ere typically ignored. Together, t­ hese four essays reveal some of the diversity within a writing culture that had not settled into standardized forms familiar to modern readers. The next three chapters consider how certain forms of thought about ­women ­were repurposed in the fifteenth ­century to represent and even create new female roles. The first two center on Agnès Sorel, who as mistress of King Charles VII occupied a role that eluded articulation within the con­temporary royal court system and yet formed the basis of a long genealogy of French royal mistresses. In chapter 8, “La Belle Dame of Chartier Manuscripts: Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier,” Joan McRae focuses on this sumptuous exemplar of a popu­lar literary debate, Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans mercy, along with responses to Chartier. Copied ca. 1450–1460, the manuscript is one of the first collections related to the Querelle des femmes (“the ­Woman Question debate”), which animated readers from the fifteenth through the eigh­teenth centuries. The highly personalized manuscript with its twenty-­two illuminated initials and nineteen illuminations is a stunning example of the type of collaborative efforts that Renck describes: author of the text Chartier had nothing to do with the

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production of this exemplar; the manuscript was illustrated by the Dunois master apparently with real-­life events in mind; the person who commissioned the manuscript is not known (although McRae forwards some hypotheses), nor is it clear who the destinataire may have been; and the dedicatee may have been still someone e­ lse. McRae focuses on the identity of the female figure whom several of the illuminations seem intended to memorialize and h ­ azards a fascinating guess: was it Agnès Sorel? If so, this installment of the Querelle with its attacks and defenses in such a luxurious material context offers a fitting environment for repre­sen­ta­tions of a ­woman who was regarded with genuine ambivalence. Like Helen Swift, Tracy Adams brings the fifteenth ­century and a con­ temporary form of celebrity into contact, and, like Joan McRae, she focuses on memorials to Agnès Sorel. In chapter 9, “Agnès Sorel, Celebrity, and Late ­Medieval French Visual Culture,” Adams examines the posthumous celebrity that Agnès Sorel enjoyed as a result of her identification with Jean Fouquet’s lactating Virgin, who, gracing the right panel of the Melyn diptych, is reputed to bear Agnès’s features. In contrast with Huizinga, for whom the image served as an example of a “blasphemous frankness with re­spect to the sacred,”37 Adams argues that the Melun diptych makes perfect sense as a manifestation of the fifteenth-­century conception of the relationship between images and their models that supported religious theater. During her life, Agnès could not be assimilated into the system of Charles VII’s royal court, but, a­ fter her death, she gained celebrity status through the bricolage of forms that Fouquet assembled in his diptych, coming to represent the ideal of the French royal mistress. In chapter 10, “No Job for a Man: Fifteenth-­Century France and the Invention of the Institution of Female Regency,” Zita Eva Rohr foregrounds the forms that ­ others had alcombined to articulate and legitimate female regency. Although m ready served as regents for their minor sons—­Blanche of Navarre is one significant example—­the position came to be semi-­institutionalized during the fifteenth ­century, ­imagined as a female rather than male role that would ­later be held by Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria. How did this happen? The Lex Salica, repurposed and elaborated during the f­ourteenth and fifteenth centuries to protect the French throne from foreign investiture, prohibited ­women from ascending the throne or even passing a claim to the throne to their sons. But the prohibition in no way implied that ­women ­were po­liti­cally incapable. On the contrary, their exclusion from the royal succession guaranteed that w ­ omen w ­ ere the safest and therefore most desirable regents.

Introduction

15

Forming a book end with this introductory chapter, the final essay by Franck Collard reflects on how French historians have conceived of the French fifteenth ­century over the years. In contrast with the absence of attention by English-­ speaking academics t­ oward late medieval France, French colleagues have found the period worthy of extensive theoretical reflection. The fifteenth ­century has long played a special role in the classification of history, dividing the ­Middle Ages from the Re­nais­sance. And yet Collard argues that the period has no essence for French historians (although a case may be made that it does for literary and art historians): t­ here is no French Quattrocento, nor is ­there a “first” or “second” section for the fifteenth ­century as ­there is for the sixteenth ­century. The French fifteenth ­century may be a lure or a s­ imple fabrication, Collard suggests, leading us back to the broader prob­lem of the French fifteenth ­century construed as a placeholder between two more in­ter­est­ing times. The construction, coupled with the long tradition of seeing the period as waning, explains the neglect, at least in part; it may also be true, as Collard argues, that the French fifteenth c­ entury seems too disjointed to be ­imagined as an entity. But maybe that is not a prob­ lem, as the essays of this volume hope to show. Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages English-­speaking readers, first encountering Huizinga’s study via Frederick Hopman’s much-­abbreviated 1924 translation, The Waning of the ­Middle Ages, had always been aware that their knowledge of the Dutch historian’s ideas was incomplete, and, moreover, that Hopman’s guiding meta­phor, “waning,” created a significantly more negative impression than Huizinga’s herfsttij, literally, “autumntide.”38 Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch’s choice of Autumn of the ­Middle Ages for the title of their 1996 unabridged retranslation promised a more positive take on the period. The still more recent Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages, translated by Diane Webb and edited by Anton van der Lem and Graeme Small, has now superseded Payton and Mammitzsch’s translation. Their guiding meta­ phor “autumntide” is a literal translation of the one that Huizinga selected.39 And yet, what­ever the meta­phor, Huizinga’s belief that the period’s major life and thought forms had become obsolete is as strongly expressed in Dutch as in translation. Of the many examples we might choose, the following represents one of Huizinga’s key themes. Th ­ ere is nothing ambiguous about this observation: “Met uitzondering van enkele dichters, werkt de litteratuur vermoeiend en vervelend. Eindeloos uitgesponnen allegorieën, waarin geen

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figuur iets nieuws of eigens vertoont, en waarvan de inhoud niet anders is dan de lang gebottelde en vaak verschaalde zedelijke wijsheid van eeuwen her. Altijd weer dezelfde formeele thema’s” (“With the exception of a few poets, the lit­er­a­ture seems exhausted and tedious. Endlessly spun-­out allegories, where not a single figure shows anything new or unique and where the content is nothing more than the bottled and often stale moral wisdom from an ­earlier age. Always the same official themes”).40 Michelet’s influence on Huizinga’s conception of the late M ­ iddle Ages as 41 declining has been well documented. In addition, numerous scholars have conjectured that Huizinga’s own biography led him to imagine late medieval France and Burgundy in this way. Élodie Lecuppre-­Desjardin evokes his status as young widower of forty-­seven with five c­ hildren (his first wife died in 1914), exhausted by the war and distressed by the idea of continued conflict.42 ­Others have drawn attention to his historical context. Born in 1872, he lived through the disorienting social changes and technological developments of the de­cades on e­ ither side of 1900, and he wrote Autumn during World War I. He may have incorporated the anx­i­eties caused by life in a rapidly shifting society into his narrative of the fifteenth c­ entury, working through the melancholy of “the fin-­ de-­siècle cult of de­cadence, not to mention the twentieth-­century Wasteland” to produce a work shot through with nostalgia, with the French Re­nais­sance offering him a way to magically recuperate the terrible losses inflicted by the First World War.43 If the Re­nais­sance is the big payoff for Huizinga, however, for readers his wistful narrative of decay is in itself seductive. Like Keats’s ode to the last golden hours of Indian summer, Huizinga’s narrative triggers yearning for the “songs of spring” when experience was vivid. The nostalgia that this narrative evokes is so compelling, we suggest, that it inspires a sort of second-­level allegory, one that explains, in part, the study’s continued popularity. Historians typically develop their passion early on, devouring tales of, say, the Vikings, Arthurian legend, historical romance. The first unforgettable lines of Autumntide conjure up this early engagement with the past, the sensation of immersion in another world, where “all the affairs of life had much sharper outward forms than they do now,” and “every­thing one experienced had that high degree of immediacy and absoluteness that joy and sorrow still have in the minds of c­ hildren.” The “big ­things—­birth, marriage, death—­were endowed by the sacraments with the splendour of the divine mystery.”44 In addition, many historians ­were introduced to medieval scholarship through this study, and rereading Autumn recalls

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the pro­cess of entering the profession: of learning that most of what we thought we knew was not exactly true, of looking again from a dif­fer­ent perspective. Autumntide, then, is a double-­edged sword, alluring but also dangerous, ­because it so irresistibly makes the case for the period as the end of an era, a sort of Terre Gaste within the longer narrative of French cultural history.45 The problematic status of Autumntide, however, makes it an apt point of departure. The work may have instigated, or, at least reinforced, a long stagnation of fifteenth-­century French studies, but it also inspires appreciation of its method and calls on us to rethink how we periodize. On a visceral level it plugs into many of our own anx­i­eties as we face a f­ uture that e­ ither brings the end of the world as we know it or a new beginning and motivates us to imagine pos­si­ble f­ utures. Notes 1. For En­glish translations, this collection relies on the most recent translation of Herfsttij, Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages, edited by Graeme Small and Anton van der Lem, translated by Diane Webb, and published by Leiden University Press in 2020. We refer to that edition as Autumntide; we use Herfsttij when referring specifically to Johan Huizinga’s original work, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens-­en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Haarlem, Netherlands: H.D. Tjeenk Willink and Son, 1952). 2. Anne Midgley, “Cultural History and the World of Johan Huizinga,” Saber and Scroll 1, no. 1 (2012): 109–22 (116). 3. “In effect, ‘mentalities’ is a code name for what used to be called culture. It takes up again themes pursued by idealist historians such as Burckhardt in the nineteenth ­century and Huizinga early in the twentieth. For ­these historians, prob­lems of culture ­were essentially prob­lems of world-­views and their interpretation.” Patrick H. Hutton, “The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History,” History and Theory 20, no. 3 (1981): 237. 4. Peter Arnade, Martha Howell, and Anton van der Lem, Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the ­Middle Ages, A ­Century L ­ ater (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 21. 5. Élodie Lecuppre-­Desjardin, ed., L’odeur du sang et des roses: Relire Johan Huizinga aujourd’hui (Lille, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2019). In the conclusion of her introductory essay, Lecuppre-­Desjardin gives a particularly moving summary of Huizinga’s tremendous influence (23). 6. On the work’s reception history, see especially Edward Peters and Walter P. S ­ imons, “The New Huizinga and the Old ­Middle Ages,” Speculum 74 (1999): 587–620; and F.W.N. Hugenholtz, “The Fame of a Masterwork,” Johan Huizinga 1872–1972, ed. W. R. H. Koops, E. H. Kossmann, and Gees Van der Plaat (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 91–103, which surveys reviews of the first edition of Herfsttij. Hugenholtz writes that “[c]omment upon Huizinga’s use of source material remained superficial. The reviewers failed to recognize that Huizinga was exploring what was to become a totally new field of historical research.” (245). 7. Arnade, Howell, and Van der Lem, Rereading Huizinga, 13.

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8. See Franck Collard’s essay in this volume. 9. On Huizinga’s understanding of form, see Ilse N. Bulhof, “Johan Huizinga, Ethnographer of the Past: An Analy­sis of Johan Huizinga’s Approach to History,” Clio 4, no. 2 (1975): 201–224 (205–209). See also R.  L. Colie, “Johan Huizinga and Cultural History,” American Historical Review 69 (1964): 607–630, who writes that Huizinga believed that “cultural history emphasized ­those forms of life that are expressed in art and in thought (perhaps also in feeling)” (609). For Huizinga’s famous quotation on the nature of cultural history, see “The Task of Cultural History,” Men and Ideas: History, the ­Middle Ages, the Re­nais­sance, ed. Johan Huizinga (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1959), 17–76, (28). 10. Huizinga, Autumntide, 4; Huizinga, Herfsttij, 2. 11. Huizinga, Autumntide, 67; Huizinga, Herfsttij, 57. 12. Huizinga, Autumntide, 69–71. 13. Huizinga, Autumntide, 364; Huizinga, Herfsttij, 307. 14. Huizinga, “My Path to History,” 273. 15. Huizinga, Autumntide, 398. 16. Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: The Burden of the ­Later ­Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 86. 17. On a Re­nais­sance of the visual arts centered on the Burgundian court, see Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Re­nais­sance: Burgundian Arts across Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On fifteenth-­century Burgundy, see Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier, eds., Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trou­ble: ­Pardon Letters in the Burgundian Low Countries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Élodie Lecuppre-­Desjardin, Le royaume inachevé des ducs de Bourgogne (XIVe–­XVe siècle) (Paris: Belin, 2016); and Élodie Lecuppre-­Desjardin and Anne-­Laure Van Bruaene, eds., Emotions in the Heart of City (14th–16th ­century) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005). Art historians have always been interested in the art of the Burgundian Low Countries, less so in French art. 18. Burgundian historiography has been much studied in recent de­cades. See Rolf Strøm-­Olsen, “French History as Burgundian Historiography in the Histories of Thomas Basin,” Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Eu­rope: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir, ed. Mark Jurdjevic and Rolf Strøm-­Olsen (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Re­ nais­sance Studies, 2016), 361–389; Graeme Small, George Chastelain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy: Po­liti­cal and Historical Culture at Court in the Fifteenth ­Century (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997); Jean Devaux, “L’identité bourguignonne et l’écriture de l’histoire,” Le Moyen Age 112.3–4 (2006): 467–476; and, also by Jean Devaux, Jean Molinet, Indiciaire bourguignon (Paris: Champion, 1998). 19. Karl Voretzsch, Introduction to the Study of Old French Lit­er­a­ture (Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine Reprints, [1931] 1976), 464–465. 20. Gustave Lanson and Paul Tuffrau, Manuel illustré d’histoire de la littérature ­française des origines à l’époque contemporaine, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, [1923] 1953), 1:71. 21. Joël Blanchard’s recent La fin du Moyen-­Age: France à l’aube de la Re­nais­sance (Paris: Perrin, 2020) surveys the period as a w ­ hole to foreground the new ideas resulting from its many t­ rials and tribulations. Also, worthy of note is the exhibition “France 1500, entre

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19

Moyen Age et Re­nais­sance,” which foregrounded the vari­ous combinations of new and old art forms during the period, held October 6, 2010–­January 10, 2011, at the ­Grand Palais in Paris and or­ga­nized by Ré­union des musées nationaux and the Art Institute of Chicago. The cata­logue is cited in the bibliography ­under the name of the exhibition, “France 1500, entre Moyen Age et Re­nais­sance.” Biographies of Charles VII and Louis XI have been published recently, including Philippe Contamine, Charles VII. Une vie, une politique (Paris: Editions Perrin, 2017); Joël Blanchard, Louis XI (Paris: Perrin, 2015); and Jean-­ François Lassalmonie, La boîte à l’enchanteur: Politique financière de Louis XI (Paris: ­Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2002). Some excellent ­collections on the po­liti­cal situation in this period exist, including Christopher Allmand, War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). Margaret Lucille Kekewich’s The Good King René of Anjou and Fifteenth-­ Century Eu­rope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) inserts René into a larger context and therefore does some of the work of a cultural history of the period. In literary historical studies, recent works include Rosalind Brown-­Grant and Rebecca Dixon, eds., Text/ Image Relations in Medieval French and Burgundian Culture (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015); Rosalind Brown-­Grant, French Romance of the ­Later ­Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Michael Randall, Building Resemblance: Analogical Imagery in the Early French Re­nais­sance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); François Cornilliat, “Or ne mens”: Couleurs de l’Eloge et du Blame chez les ­Grands Rhétoriqueurs (Paris: Honor and Champion, 1994); and François Rigolot, “Rhétoriqueurs,” A New History of French Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 27–133. Also impor­tant for drawing attention to the pleasures of late fifteenth-­century French lit­er­a­ture are David La Guardia, Intertextual Masculinities in French Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture: Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles Nouvelles (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008); and Gary Ferguson and David LaGuardia, eds., Narrative Worlds: Essays on the French Nouvelle in 15th and 16th ­Century France (Tempe: Medieval & Re­nais­sance Texts & Studies, Arizona State University, 2005). 22. As we read on the back cover of Leonie Frieda’s popu­lar history of the king, Francis I: Maker of Modern France (London: Hachette, 2018). 23. Daniel Lord Smail, “Genealogy, Ontogeny, and the Narrative Arc of Origins,” French Historical Studies 34 (2011): 22–23. 24. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the Eu­ro­pean ­Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 20. 25. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–130; Barbara  H. Rosenwein, “Controlling Paradigms,” Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 233–247 (238). 26. Le Goff details his revisionist periodization in The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and, more fully, in Must We Divide History into Periods, trans. M. B. De Bevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 27. See the case that Le Goff lays out throughout the entirety of his Must We Divide History into Periods.

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28. Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis,” 122. 29. Heng, The Invention of Race, 21. 30. Sylvain Piron, L’occupation du monde (Paris: Zones sensibles, 2018). 31. Chris Jones, Conor Kostick, and Klaus Oschema, eds., Making the Medieval Relevant: How Medieval Studies Contribute to Improving our Understanding of the Pre­sent (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 29. 32. Chris Jones and Madi Williams, “Pacific Perspectives: Why Study Eu­rope’s ­Middle Ages in Aotearoa New Zealand?” in Making the Medieval Relevant, 151–69 (168). 33. Zrinka Stahuljak, Le médiéval contemporain. Pour une littérature connectée (Paris: Editions Macula, 2020), 71–82. 34. See, for example, Aamir R. Mufti, Forget En­glish! Orientalisms and World Lit­er­a­ tures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 35. Stahuljak, Le médiéval contemporain, 86–87. 36. Huizinga, Autumntide, 67; Huizinga, Herfsttij, 57. 37. Huizinga, Autumntide, 240. 38. Le Goff had ­earlier pronounced the title of the first French translation, Le Déclin du moyen-­âge, a “betrayal” of Huizinga’s title, and the 1975 reprint of the French translation was retitled L’Automne du moyen-­âge. See Jacques Le Goff’s interview with Claude Mettra in the introduction to the 1975 French edition, L’Automne du Moyen Age, trans. Julia Bastin (Paris: Payot, 1975); see also Marc Boone’s discussion of the issue in “L’Automne du moyen-­âge: Johan Huizinga et Henri Pirenne ou ‘Plusieurs vérités pour la même chose,’ ” in Autour du XVe siècle: journées d’étude en l’honneur d’Alberto Varvaro: communications présentées au Symposium de clôture de la Chaire Francqui au titre étranger (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2008): 27–52 (33). Thanks to Jeroen Duindam for providing the following reference in the Digital Library for Dutch Lit­er­a­ture, which makes the point that the expression herfsttij carries connotations similar to autumn but feels more literary to Dutch speakers: https:​/­w ww​.­dbnl​.­org​/­tekst​/­​_ ­g id001187901​_­01​/­​_ ­g id001187901​_­01​_­0007​.­php. 39. Whereas Payton and Mammitzch relied heavi­ly on the German translation in The Autumn of the ­Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), this newest version translates entirely from Huizinga’s original. 40. Our translation of Herfsttij, 345. 41. See, for example, Jo Tollebeek, “ ‘Re­nais­sance’ and ‘Fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga,” Re­nais­sance Studies 15 (2001): 354–66. 42. Lecuppre-­Desjardin, L’odeur du sang et des roses, 11–12. 43. Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis,” 87. See also Wessel Krul, “In the Mirror of van Eyck: Johan Huizinga’s Autumn of the ­Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 358–363. 44. Huizinga, Autumntide, 9. 45. This is the case not only among historians, but also musicologists. See chapter five of Page, Discarding Images. See also Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis,” 86.

cha p te r one

Color Values, or Life with Grey Andrea Tarnowski

The per­sis­tent image of the ­Middle Ages in our imagination is surely one of color. Stained glass cathedral win­dows glow with intense blue and red, online as much as on site, and sumptuous golds and greens mark borders of holiday card reproductions from centuries-­old Books of Hours. As recalled from depictions of pageants and pro­cessions, rich textiles, embroidered or bejeweled, constitute our idea of the cloth that made medieval merchants wealthy. Already in the early twentieth ­century, Johan Huizinga had emphasized brilliance and extravagance as key features of fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­century cultures, which he described as “altijd wankelend tusschen de zwarte vertwijfeling aan de wereld en het zwelgen in haar bonte schoonheid” (“ever teetering between black despair at the world and delight in its colorful beauty”).1 The word “bonte” ­here may be taken in its figurative sense of striking or even garish, but it pertains equally to the standard meaning of colorful. Elsewhere, Huizinga asserted (with his famous parti pris concerning forms of de­cadence in the late medieval period) that the “Franco-­Burgundian culture of the last period of the ­Middle Ages is one in which splendour seeks to drive beauty.”2 The habit of magnificence is to proffer color abundantly. Yet if color suffuses our cultural impressions of the ­Middle Ages, then we must also make room for grey. Grey was always naturally part of the lived landscape—­stone, metal, shades of earth and sky, the undyed stuff that clothed the poor and some religious—­but late medieval society and aesthetics gave it a 21

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certain new status. Win­dows in which glass was left clear or painted in grey, black, and white w ­ ere prized in places of worship. Book illuminators developed a set of painting practices that eschewed the multichrome. Clothmakers addressed a taste for grey fashion. Across dif­fer­ent media and in dif­fer­ent contexts, grey throve. In a world of awe-­inspiring color display, the “neutral shade” drew its share of attention. Grisaille Glass Any discussion of the evolving uses of grey must start with the notion of ­grisaille, at once a style, a substance, and a technique. Famously manifested in ­Cistercian architecture in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,3 it consisted t­ here of unpainted glass arranged in patterns whose lines w ­ ere traced with lead. Grisaille made for sober decoration that reflected Cistercian disapproval of the use of bright colors and figural repre­sen­ta­tion.4 Unpigmented glass was eco­nom­ical and practical; with no color to incorporate, it was easier to produce, and its transparency allowed more light to reach interior spaces. It thus also served a power­ful symbolic function: the light that passed through the glass bespoke God, and its whiteness demonstrated its purity. Colorless glass that was distinguished only by the patterns composing the win­dows also shared the austerity of the stone, monastic, and church structures in which such win­dows ­were placed. Walls and apertures formed a unified and uniform aesthetic environment5 where nothing encouraged the eye to dwell on the terrestrial. Only the divine would mesmerize ­human attention, and light was its vehicle. Subdued, harmonized, tranquil surroundings favored transcendence. This early, religious-­ house grisaille was less grey than grey-­white and emphasized luminosity. While French Cistercian glazing made use of clear glass, the term grisaille covers a broader spectrum of treatments. It refers to painting glass with layers of monochrome paint; for example, first a light grey wash, then a second layer of grey for areas that required shading, and fi­nally the addition of dark grey to black lines to lend contour to represented forms such as folds of drapery or the arcs and shadows of architectural ele­ments. Painted grey thus lent dimension and allowed flat surface to become sculptural. Its interest was not the glory of color—­the juxtaposed reds, greens, and blues of the Sainte Chapelle win­dows, for instance—­but rather an invitation to look more closely. Modeled grey, that is, planes of paint transformed by “drawn” line detail, offered more content, if a less subjugating effect, to the eye.



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At the beginning of the ­fourteenth c­ entury, the introduction of silver stain6 for the purpose of glass decoration revolutionized the style of win­dows.7 A stain of silver compounds was painted onto the back of glass whose front surface had been outlined with images. When the glass was heated, the silver compound fused with the glass to result in a range of yellow shades. The possibility of manipulating in a detailed way, by means of brush and paint, the coolest and warmest of tones meant that, on glass, golden curls, regal crowns, or fine haloes could frame precisely rendered facial features, or contrasting metals could be depicted on armor or other military equipment, or that the gilded edges of books could stand out against their pale pages. Greys and yellows (or silvers and golds), along with black and white, made for more “legible,” tableaux-­like win­ dows than ­those formed with smaller, individual pieces of glass whose colors, deep and intense, w ­ ere bordered by the dark leaded edges that separated each ­shaped piece from the next. The silver stain technique, which arose in Paris,8 transformed the look of win­dow glass to something much more akin to painting. Greyed Volumes and Altarpieces Painting in books, that is, grisaille and miniatures, also developed rapidly beginning in the f­ ourteenth c­ entury. We can cite the historically famous but physically tiny Book of Hours of Jeanne of Evreux, illuminated by Jean Pucelle between 1325–1328, as a foundational marker for the privileging of grey in codices. Just two inches wide by three inches high, it contains twenty-­five full-­page grisaille miniatures.9 Its minute size, compared to the span of monumental church win­dows, highlights the range of audiences that grisaille technique could speak to: from the throngs who beheld public architecture to the single royal lady carry­ing a Book of Hours on her person to accompany her intimate devotions. Other religious texts w ­ ere worked in grisaille, notably a Bible moralisée of King Jean le Bon (1350), two Bibles historiales belonging to King Charles V, a Book of Hours of Duke Jean of Berry, and the same duke’s Psalter and Bible moralisée, the last illuminated by the Limbourg ­brothers (1403–1404).10 Sacred and religious texts w ­ ere not the only works treated in grisaille, however. Two of the eight extant copies of the collected works of poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut contain grisaille images,11 as well as two copies of Christine de Pizan’s Débat de deux amans and the king’s copy of the Grandes chroniques de France de Charles V.12

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A “first round” of taste for grey in fourteenth-­and very early fifteenth-­ century book illumination was a mostly Pa­ri­sian, and in any case largely French, phenomenon. ­There are few instances of grisaille work from ­either ­England or Italy. Flemish artists working in Paris themselves or producing miniatures in such northern locales as Tournai and Bruges exhibited more inclination for this technique.13 ­After a c­ entury of French interest, the predilection for grisaille moved north. A spate of miniatures from the Burgundian-­held Netherlands dates from the 1440s, when grisaille had departed France. In the late 1450s and 1460s, though, a “second round” proliferation of grisaille took place at the court of Burgundy, with paint­ers Jean le Tavernier and Dreux ­Jehan illuminating, respectively, the Croniques et conquestes de Charlemaine and a work of paired extracts from the New and Old Testaments known as Cy nous dit.14 Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, whose nearly fifty-­year rule (r. 1419– 1467) greatly expanded his territories and thus Burgundian influence on art, favored shades of grey. We can imagine him slaking his thirst for this hue—to the extent that it is a hue—­from a sumptuous object such as the “Monkey Cup,” an eight-­inch-­high drinking cup in silver and gilt whose black enameled background is decorated with a design of grey monkeys and vine-­like curlicues.15 The striking presence of grey in manuscript miniatures of the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suggests its strong appeal, though admittedly to a very ­limited public. The names of kings, queens, and princes among the patrons of the works cited above suffice to conclude that while grey decoration was appreciated, it was not popu­lar in the sense of being widely accessible. Book grisaille reached a highly restricted audience, both ­because codices themselves ­were precious, and b­ ecause decoration of any kind further increased manuscripts’ value. ­There was a ­great difference between the numbers of ­people who would have seen grisaille win­dows in a church and t­ hose whose eyes would have feasted on monochrome-­wrought volumes. But in this time when “la peinture était dans les livres” (“painting meant books”)16 another painted object whose form evoked that of a book was on public display: the folding altarpiece, frequently executed in grey. That is, the exterior wings of triptychs and polyptychs, shuttered over a central image, consistently offered grisaille figures to the viewers’ gaze. Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432) and Dresden Triptych (1437); Rogier van der Weyden’s Beaune Altarpiece (1445–1450); the Saint Bertin Altarpiece by Simon Marmion (1455–1459); and the St. Ursula Altarpiece by the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula (ca. 1482–1483) all exploit grey in the same way. The painted figures, which



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always include a pair of panels depicting the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation, are made to imitate stone sculpture: they stand on pedestals placed in niches, clothed in draped, gathered, and folded robes that create an intense impression of dimension and shadow. If the grisaille figures on glass starting in the ­fourteenth ­century had gained in depth by virtue of the lines and shading that the technique allowed, the altarpiece panels of the fifteenth ­century exploit to a maximum the possibilities of evoking volume on a flat surface. Even while they depict moments of transcendent importance, they are weighted to stand in the world. They proclaim their status as art—­producing texture and relief where ­there are none, borrowing conventions from sculpture to translate “stone” into another medium—­but they encourage a connection with the viewer, a sense of corporeality and real­ity. They do this by way of grey. Picasso said “[l]a couleur affaiblit” (“color weakens”),17 a phrase that resonates with the achievements of line and form in t­ hese altarpiece paintings; the color of grey recedes, or holds off from a bid for attention, in order to privilege other characteristics of the works. True, when the grisaille shutters of the structures open to reveal a rich palette of hues in a triumphant central image—­a red-­gowned, bejeweled Virgin in the Dresden Altarpiece, or a gold-­illumined Christ sitting atop a rainbow in the Last Judgment of van der Weyden’s altarpiece in Beaune—­the color dazzles the viewer, seizing the gaze. The contrast between the restrained shades of grisaille on the covers of the altar “book” and the glory of the chromatic spectrum inside is purposefully sharp. But the advantage does not go solely to the colored center, which impresses and imposes more than it invites. The greys encourage attention and examination. In gauging the effect ­these works could have had on their audience, it is impor­tant to recall that the usual pre­sen­ta­tion of the altarpieces ­ ere what congregants in a church was in their closed state. The grisaille figures w or other sacred space saw most of the time. The altarpieces ­were only opened to reveal their brilliant interiors on special feast days and holidays. Thus, the qualities called on in viewers ­were perception and discernment; the images cultivated contemplation of a steadier, mea­sured sort, rather than astonishing the senses. As with grisaille glass, the paintings on exterior altarpiece panels privileged a kind of legibility. “Grisaille” is a term that applies in multiple arenas of artistic production and covers a broad range of treatments. Planes of near-­white that delineate a few stately figures against a colored background generate a dif­fer­ent impression from paintings in which numerous, highly detailed black ink characters gesture or

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move against a dark grey backdrop—­yet both of ­these are encompassed by the grisaille category. The label grisaille was in­ven­ted more recently than the range of its medieval manifestations; its first use dates from the seventeenth c­ entury and has thus been applied retroactively. Medieval artists themselves would have referred to their production of grisaille as rendered in noir et blanc. Naming the work where value and shape rather than color was the vehicle of meaning, they anticipated the term that would be used by photog­raphers in the invention of their own medium, calling “black and white” what should more accurately be termed an infinitely nuanced grey scale.18 Conversely, when the phrase “black and white” would indeed have reflected the colors of a work, as in the dark ink drawing on cream silk of the famed Parement de Narbonne altar cloth,19 the piece is nevertheless cited as an example of grisaille—in the case of the Parement, a rare instance of grisaille on textile. It seems si­mul­ta­neously fitting and curious that grey, just gris, without the addition of the suffix aille that makes for grey-­ ishness and imprecise scope, does not elicit much commentary, despite the fact that it often appears. That is, grisaille as an art form and as a series of techniques wears a sufficiently broad aegis that it can denote work that is not fully colored, rather than art that uses grey systematically. The color grey itself recurs, of course, and what we might call the “princi­ple of grey” animates artists’ attention; but the result of the ­simple mix of black and white is not thematized. Grey, an “in-­between” color, prominent and discreet, skirts definition. Placing Grey on the Spectrum of Meaning Within the systems, hierarchies, and o­ rders so beloved by medieval thought, grey’s in-­between-­ness suggests a need for exploration; how do we place what begs classification? Heraldry, the color system that marries hue and symbolic meaning, does not include grey.20 Yellow, white, red, blue, black, green, and purple21 are the colors that make up the arms and emblems whose use expanded greatly in the f­ ourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Th ­ ese seven building blocks of armorial expression ­were further divided into two categories: metals and enamels. The association of yellow and white with metals is clear from their heraldic names, or (gold) and argent (silver). ­These colors ­were represented on coats of arms as true yellow and white, rather than metallic gold and silver; the distance between the heraldic name and its color repre­sen­ta­tion suggests some thoughts about grey.



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The color of argent, or silver, is actually grey; when argent is called white its connection to light, its shininess or sheen, is emphasized. It is the light that silver reflects, and not the color of the metal itself, that can accurately be depicted as white. The same association of white, light, and grey was made in grisaille glass, originally called verre blanc (“white glass”); we recall that the term grisaille denotes both clear, unpainted glass, which allows light to pass unobstructed, and glass that is painted in monochrome palettes, such as grey-­to-­black and the coats of silver nitrate that create shades of yellow. Paradoxical as it might seem, then, if we view grey specifically in relation to white, the trait of luminosity comes to the fore. White is pure light; grey confirms white’s perfection, its own degree of luminosity linking it to white while its color distinguishes it. The comparison and contrast of white and grey defines the latter in reference to the former: the sign that they are ele­ments of a system and that systems create meaning by virtue of positing distinctions. Grey, w ­ hether glinting like silver or with the matte aspect of lead, means through its proximity to white. A medieval saying shows that the two colors are at once associated and distinct: to say of someone “[i]l ne connaît ni blanc ni gris” (“he knows neither white nor grey”) means the person cannot distinguish the true from the untrue.22 Grey also means through proximity to black. In its absence of luminosity, black brackets grey on one side as white does on the other. Its degree of saturation, its density, define it. Grey occupies a vast m ­ iddle ground of perception, but the heraldic sable and argent deal in sharp differentiation, black and white. The symbolism of white and black is of prime importance in making them tools of signification. The seven colors of the heraldic system are each assigned moral attributes; for the ­Middle Ages, what is seen always refers to the unseen, and what­ever pre­sents itself to the eye must be decoded. A renowned treatise of the 1430s entitled Le blason des couleurs says of white: “argent signifie pureté et ­innocence . . . ​[et] la clarté de vérité de la sainte foy catholique” (“silver signifies purity and innocence . . . ​[and] the clarity of the truth of the Holy Catholic faith”).23 Michel Pastoureau, distilling information from multiple color treatises—­a popu­lar fifteenth-­century genre—­reprises ­these terms and elaborates: “le blanc [est la] couleur liturgique du Christ et de la Vierge, symbole de pureté, d’innocence, de franchise, d’éclat et de gloire. Hiérarchiquement, le blanc devance souvent [les autres couleurs], non seulement sur le plan de l’honneur mais aussi sur celui de la beauté” (“white [is the] liturgical color of Christ and

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the Virgin, symbol of purity, innocence, frankness, splendor and glory. Hierarchically, white often surpasses [the other colors], not only in terms of honor but also of beauty”).24 White is thus not only the lightest color, but the “best”—or the best ­because it is the lightest.25 It represents the divine, the angelic, the ideal— or, if it is attached to the h ­ uman, it is the h ­ uman in its most unsullied form—­ childhood or virginity, a state as yet untouched by corruption. The symbolism of black responds to that of white; the herald Sicile says “le noir . . . ​représente la terre, qui signifie tristesse, car elle est plus loing de clarté que nulz des aultres eslémens . . . ​noirceur, en l’Escripture, signifie souvent dueil ou tribulation” (“black represents the earth, which signifies sorrow, ­because it is further from clarity than any of the other ele­ments . . . ​blackness, in the Scriptures, often means mourning or tribulation”).26 Binaries of symbolic meaning for white and black—­light/darkness, joy/sadness, heaven/earth, divine/human, purity/mortal corruption lead us to won­der ­whether grey is cast only as a m ­ iddle term, participating in variable proportions in the semantics of the endpoints of the color scale, or w ­ hether it has its own realm of signification. The second part of Le blason des couleurs, in fact an in­de­ pen­dent treatise composed by an anonymous continuator a half ­century ­after the first but edited and published in the same volume, provides material for considering the question. This Second traicté du blazon shifts its focus from the seven colors of heraldry to a wider color range and treats grey extensively. The context for this shift is a move from the symbolism of arms to that of clothing; the second part of the text treats liveries.27 Multiple new shades are cited in an extension of the heraldic palette: pers (dark blue) and azur (lighter blue) appear alongside bleu (blue),28 palle is a beige-­brown, and the description of a color between yellow and red is an early mention of orange.29 The Second traicté du blazon combines and recombines colors to judge of their symbolism, creating a kind of handbook on encoding vestimentary messages. For example, blue worn with violet signifies that one is “saige en amours” (“wise in love”); green with tan conveys “rire et plorer” (“laugh and cry”).30 In the round robin of color pairs that each section gives—­a single color is cited with a series of pos­si­ble partners, and then one of the partner colors becomes the stable term in the next series of pairs—­grey is always evoked. Thus, grey with white is “esperance de venir a perfection” (“hope of reaching perfection”); grey with red, “espérer en haultes choses” (“hope in lofty ­things”); grey with yellow suits “gens plains de soulcy, pour ce qu’ilz ne peuvent jouyr” (“­those filled with worry b­ ecause they cannot be happy”); grey with green means “ jeunesse transie d’amours” (“youth overcome



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with love”). Black with grey points to “espérance de mieux avoir” (“hope of having better ­things”), while grey with blue suggests changing status: “venir de povreté en richesse ou de richesse en povreté” (“moving from poverty to riches or riches to poverty”). Grey with pink (incarnat) relays “espérance d’avoir richesses” (“hope of getting riches”), whereas violet with grey affirms “trop forte loyauté” (“a too strong loyalty”).31 With the advent of color treatises that focused on clothes—­the uniting of color-­meaning with codes of self-­presentation—­grey took its full place among signifying hues. Grey Cloth, Grey Clothing Cloth production as a generator of cultural currency as well as economic wealth has no equal in late medieval Eu­rope; Pastoureau writes that the textile industry is “la grande industrie motrice de l’Occident médiéval” (“the g­ reat driving force in the medieval West”).32 Rather than rooting meaning in a unique object or a single place, rather than encouraging a personalized or confined system of “messaging,” cloth was made in quantity, and it traveled. Color was integral to the craving for textiles, and its use was highly regulated: for example, cloth dyers who worked with blue did not also have the right to dye in red.33 The books that declared or settled how dif­fer­ent colors meant w ­ ere themselves of broad popularity and scope, as their reproduction in print and translation into Italian, German, Dutch, and Castilian attest.34 While princely courts certainly remained prime loci for communicating through dress, cloth could move in and out of numerous communities, and its language could draw “speakers” of a wider range of statuses. The ­Middle Ages favored systemization of objects and ideas, assigning qualities, import, and influence to each instance within a determined category: days of the week, animals of the horoscope, flowers and plants, gemstones. Colors w ­ ere no dif­fer­ent. The cut of cloth and form of garments ­were laden with meaning as well, but, through color, ­people could disclose, inform, or announce without words, w ­ hether to a single intimate or a large public group. Writing of color and cloth as hand-­in-­glove, Christian de Mérindol asserts their fused power: “Répondant aux nécessités de la vie sociale, les couleurs, comme les autres signes, par l’intermédiaire des étoffes, participent aux jeux des affirmations, des alliances ou des oppositions . . . ​[dans] une société où triomphe l’art du paraître” (“Responding to the necessities of social life, colors, like other signs, participate through cloth in games of affirmation, alliances, or oppositions . . . ​[in] a society where the art of appearance triumphs”).35

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Only the last few words of this phrase give pause, as the art of appearing or a­ ppearance suggests nothing but exterior, a surface phenomenon. Colors and clothes instead sought to convey thoughts, feelings, and the inner state of the wearer; they could exhort, assert, or warn. The purpose of dress was not simply to impress, but to relate; when the Second traicté du blazon states that the combination of red and grey means “espérer en haultes choses” (“hope of higher ­things”), it defines a cast of mind and, through color, posits aspiration. The viewers of color-­coded livrées ­were meant to absorb and understand vesture’s visual communiqués. Rather than “l’art du paraître” (“the art of appearance”) we might say that colored cloth promoted “l’art de signifier” (“the art of meaning”). Grey fabric was in plentiful supply in the fifteenth c­ entury; the word gris refers both to a color and to a type of cloth, itself always colored grey.36 Michel Pastoureau writes of the rise in grey’s popularity in textiles, “Pour la première fois dans l’histoire du vêtement européen, cette couleur . . . ​séduit les princes et les poètes” (“For the first time in the history of Eu­ro­pean fashion, this color . . . ​ seduces princes and poets”).37 Pastoureau ascribes grey’s new prestige to technical advances—­the improved look of grey as dyes and their use w ­ ere progressively refined, the active elaboration of a series of desired tones rather than grey-­as-­failed-­black or grey-­as-­dirty-­white. Grey would take on g­ reat cultural import, but owed its initial entrance onto the color scene to dyers’ work: “En deux générations les teinturiers réussissent à faire du gris une couleur franche, unie, lumineuse, ce qu’ils n’étaient jamais parvenus à faire pendant de longs siècles. Pour obtenir ces tons de gris inconnus jusqu’alors, ils mordancent les bains d’écorce d’aulne ou de bouleau avec de nouveaux produits, ajoutent des sulfates de fer, parfois un peu de noix de galle. Le gris se sature, tend à foncer mais devient plus uniforme, plus solide, plus éclatant.” (“In two generations ­dyers succeed in turning grey into a straightforward, uniform, and luminous color, something they had not managed throughout centuries. To create ­these previously unknown shades of grey, they ­etch the baths of birch or alder bark with new products, add iron sulfates, sometimes a l­ittle gall nut. The grey deepens, becoming darker, but it becomes more uniform, more solid, more striking.”)38 Tastemakers seized on the novelty of grey: Duke Jean of Berry was in the vanguard; his personal colors w ­ ere the red and grey that the Second traicté du blazon would ­later describe as conveying the thought “espérer en haultes choses” (“hope of lofty t­ hings”).39 Duke Philip of Burgundy chose grey and black



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to signal “espérance de mieux avoir” (“hope of having better t­ hings”), King Charles VIII made grey and white his own “espérance de venir à perfection” (“hope of reaching perfection”), and René of Anjou, whose many titles included Duke of Anjou, Count of Provence, and King of Naples, took on himself the trio of grey, white, and black; the Second traicté du blazon devotes a special section to such triplings of color, advising that this par­tic­u­lar group “est très belle [livrée], et signifie espérance bien attrempée” (“is a beautiful [livery], and signifies well moderated hope”).40 Jean of Berry died in 1416, Philip in 1467, René of Anjou in 1480, and Charles VIII in 1498; across the fifteenth ­century, then, prominent men prized grey. But we have said that grey textiles reached a broader swath of society than only princely circles. A sense of their abundance can be gleaned from the admittedly unique cloth inventories of the ware­houses of Jacques Coeur (1395–1456), the richest and best-­k nown merchant of his day. When Coeur was famously condemned in 1453 on false charges so that his wealth could be seized and distributed, King Charles VII ordered his vast possessions inventoried. The king’s agent Jean Dauvet was sent to Tours, where in the hôtel of Jean Briçonnet he took stock of the quantities of cloth, jewels, and fur ­housed within (Tours was just one stop on a tour of Coeur’s ware­houses that included locales in Blois, Orleans, Paris, Rouen, and Berry). Dauvet kept a diary in which entries from August 6–12 list massive amounts of cloth, much of it grey. Over the course of nearly forty printed pages, the textile inventories are categorized first by color, then sometimes by location of manufacture (e.g., Lille, Rouen, Dinan, Bourges), and fi­nally by cloth type. The roll opens thus: Premièrement: Une pièce de gris tenant 4 aulne, prisé chacune aulne 45 s. vaillant 9 l. Une autre tenant cinq aulnes quart, prisé chacune aulne 40 s. vaillant 10 l. 10 s. Une autre tenant demie aulne, prisée 17 s. 6 d. [First: A piece of grey mea­sur­ing 4 aulnes, worth 45 s. per aulne, all together 9 l. Another mea­sur­ing five and a quarter aulnes, worth 40 s. per aulne, all together 10 l. 10 s. Another mea­sur­ing half an aulne, worth 17 s. 6 d.]41

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Its first section continues in this vein over the course of some one hundred entries, in which gris is both a sort of cloth and its color. The list then moves on to “black from Rouen and Lille” (six items), “green from Picardy and Saint-­Lô” (five items), “tan-­brown” (four) “dark blue from Rouen” (thirteen), and several ­others, before arriving at a much larger category, “gris de Dinan, et autres gris de plusieurs sortes” (“grey from Dinan, and other greys of dif­fer­ent kinds”): seventy-­three items. When the inventory proceeds to other types of cloth, with sections on velvet, satin, damask, and taffeta, grey is always represented. Other colors sometimes predominate, such as violet for velvet, and red and black for satin, but grey is most prevalent among the damasks, with twenty-­six entries; the next most frequent damasks are violet (seventeen) and black (nine). It is not difficult, then, to posit that grey appealed to many. Charles VIII and René of Anjou could don grey in costly stuffs, but the myriad mea­sures and bolts and cuts of grey that Jean Dauvet numbered in Tours w ­ ere destined to clothe p­ eople occupying points on a wider social spectrum. If the launch of grey dress into France-­and Flanders-­centered Eu­rope can be attributed to the innovations of dyers, such attire remains in our minds t­ oday by way of text and image. That is to say: we return to books. ­Earlier we examined the term “grisaille” and the range of media and color to which it can refer. Grisaille in manuscript illustration has more to do with tracery and shading, outline, and monochrome wash, than with the color grey per se. And as we have noted, the word itself is a seventeenth-­century invention retrofitted to medieval art forms. Grisaille is not gris, and so we must ask about the presence of the latter term, and the active choice of the color it names, in the written works of the period that link it with textiles and livrées (liveries). Literary Grey While the word gris is attested in Old French already in the tenth c­ entury and appears in documents of subsequent eras in reference to the color of stones, animal coats, monastic ­orders, or the hair and beard of aging men,42 the color it designates comes into its own as a purveyor of meaning when wool is woven and worn. In an article that collects multiple literary references to grey from the late French M ­ iddle Ages,43 Alice Planche consistently cites poetry whose verses evoke grey liveries. For example, a chanson by Charles of Orleans (1394–1465) that describes a lover’s yearning for his faraway lady offers as its refrain “Il vit en bonne esperance, / Puis qu’il est vestu de gris” (“He lives in good hope, / B ­ ecause



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he is clad in grey”).44 The lover’s grey clothing is the sign that he believes, or hopes, that he w ­ ill prevail on his lady to return his love; grey denotes desirous energy (rather than calm or neutrality, as a more modern sensibility might have it). The same meaning is ascribed to grey garb in a poem called Les Souhaits du monde, tentatively dated by its nineteenth-­century editor to 1513–1514; when representatives of series of walks of life—­k ing, doctor, priest, beggar—­ express what they most wish for, a character called “L’Amoureux” says: Je souhaite avoir la jouissance D’une pour qui le gris me fault porter Pour desmonstrer que vis en Esperance De ses regars tousjours estre en presence Et recepvoir ung baiser de sa bouche. [I wish for the happiness Of one for whom I must wear grey To show that I live in hope Always to be in the presence of her gaze And receive a kiss from her mouth.]45 As in the Charles of Orleans poem, wearing grey seems caught up with feeling hope—­indeed, the title of Planche’s essay is “Le gris de l’espoir” (“the grey of hope”). A second example from Planche reveals a similarly positive valence of grey by way of the negative connotation of other colors. An anonymous rondel declares: Noir et tanné sont mes couleurs. De gris ne veuil plus porter, Car je ne puis plus supporter Mes tres graves douleurs. [Black and tan are my colors. I no longer want to wear anything grey, ­Because I can no longer stand My very ­great sorrows.]46 The speaker resigns himself to wearing black and rust brown to express distress, aligning his exterior appearance with his inner state; b­ ecause grey is a color

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too—­what? spirited? optimistic?—it must be foresworn. We have already encountered forms or mentions of hope in connection with grey; the author of the list of livrées in the Second traicté du blazon often makes use of the word “espérance” in his explications. Grey with white is “hope of reaching perfection;” grey with black, “hope of having better t­ hings;” grey with pink, “hope of getting riches.”47 A poem of about 1500 by Jean Robertet entitled “L’exposition des couleurs” (“the exposition of colors”) brings the explicit associations of the blazon guide into the realm of the literary. Devoting one strophe to each of a series of colors, Robertet personifies Gris to say of itself: Je qui suis gris signiffie esperance, Couleur moyenne de blanc et noir meslée; Et soye seulle ou à autre assemblée, Le moyen tiens en commune actrempence. [I, who am Grey, signify hope, In-­between color, white and black mixed together, And ­whether alone or brought together with another, I hold the ­middle in common moderation.]48 Despite this satisfying repetition of the link between gris and espérance, hope is not, in fact, the only meaning encoded in wearing grey. Planche herself cites examples at variance with her main theme, such as an anonymous fifteenth-­ century chanson in which a w ­ oman deserted by her lover speaks of veiling her heart with grey and wearing black; the grey veil ­here, though meta­phorical rather than material, reflects a wounded resignation.49 In a work entitled L’Epistre du chevalier gris, grey denotes constancy or faithfulness: “Le chevalier . . . ​[prenait] le gris pour sa seule livrée, / Par quoy monstra qu’il n’avoit cueur divers” (“The knight took grey for his livery, / By which he showed that his heart was not fickle”).50 And perhaps most strikingly, gris evokes “le travail” in a work by renowned sixteenth-­century poet Clément Marot. The narrator cites his lady’s mournful colors and their meaning: Gris, tanné, noir, porte la fleur des fleurs Pour sa livrée, avec regrets et pleurs . . . . . . ​le noir dit la fermeté des cœurs; Gris, le travail; et tanné, les langueurs.



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[Grey, tan, black, the flower of flowers wears For her livery, with regrets and tears . . . Black means steadiness of hearts; Grey, work; and tan, languor.]51 This sad tableau is parsed as signaling the lady’s unmoving grief (black), her listless melancholy (rust-­brown), and, with grey, her work/effort/suffering/travails. The reason for the backslashes in the preceding sentence is that we cannot know just what proportion of effort and what proportion of tribulation the word “travail” covers. In any case, the lady leads a life steady in its dimmed and compassed aspect. Marot’s choice of associations for gris may approach our own; we see hints in his poem of the subdued demeanor linked with grey t­ oday. All of the preceding examples give only brief passages of verse. Even the Epistre du chevalier gris, by far the longest work at 554 lines, mentions grey just twice in its elaborate paean to the Virgin Mary. But one work, the late fifteenth-­ century Débat du Gris et du Noir, does carry associations of color and character throughout, in both text and illustrations.52 Two knights are identified by the color of their costume; rather than through f­ amily or given names, the reader encounters them only as Le Gris and Le Noir. What they wear further defines them in the manuscript pages of the debate: ­every time one or the other man speaks, a note in the folio margin specifies “Le Gris” or “Le Noir,” providing the reader with continual reminders of a contrast between ­these two shades.53 At the beginning of the nearly 2,000-­verse poem, Gris expresses worry and care, as the lady he loves rejects him. Yet his anxiety encompasses hope; when describing a dream of love, he posits the bond between hope and grey: A l’eure que [le rêve] m’advint, J’estoye tout vestu de gris, Car Esperance en moy la vint” [At the hour the dream came to me, I was dressed entirely in grey, ­Because hope came to me ­there].54 The causal conjunction “car” seals the connection; the knight was dressed in grey, he says, ­because hope came to inhabit him. Yet the phrasing of ­these verses also undercuts what they propose. If the knight was already dressed in

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grey as he dreamt his dream, he had chosen his clothing before Esperance buoyed him; his grey attire was a reflection of his chagrin, rather than of his positive conviction that the lady would be his. The grey of hope is more troubled than sometimes appears. The narrative action of Le Débat du Gris et du Noir sees Noir first endeavor to help lift Gris’s spirits. He offers advice on how to win the lady’s attention and then affection: Gris must learn to dance well and give generous gifts. Most especially, Gris must match the colors of his clothes to ­those of his lady, identifying himself with her through what he wears: Premièrement, tu feras faire Habillemens de telle sorte, Comme les siens, et pour mieulx plaire, Aultre couleur sur toy ne porte [First, you ­will have Clothes of the sort made Like hers, and, to better please, In a dif­fer­ent color from the one you are wearing.]55 Gris w ­ ill thus soon have to quit his own choice of emotion-­expressive colors to align himself with his object. In the meantime, however—­that is, during the space of the entire debate—­a series of miniatures consistently depicts him dressed head-­to-­toe in grey. A ­ fter Noir makes his suggestions for Gris’s amorous success, Gris turns the conversation to his companion: why does Noir seem so downcast? Noir’s explanation that he has lost his own beloved to death prompts Gris to respond that, indeed, Noir’s plight is worse than his own.56 The rest of the debate then reveals a par­tic­u­lar character in Gris; while he pities Noir, he soon begins to encourage him to find a new lady to love: “Tu es encore assez jeune homme / Pour avoir des biens en amours” (“You are still a young enough man / To have some good from love”).57 Noir rejects this idea out of hand; his devotion is absolute. Gris wants Noir to pray for his lady, but not to pine eternally: Il suffist, priez seulement Pour elle, non pas se tuer Par doloureux gemissement



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[It is enough just to pray For her, without killing oneself With sorrowful sights].58 He is matter-­of-­fact, remarking that less suffering is better than more: “Mieux vault souffrir une journee / Que deux, ainsi comme il me semble” (“It is better to suffer one day / Than two, it seems to me”).59 Fi­nally, imagining himself in Noir’s shoes, he cannot conceive that he would have Noir’s reaction; w ­ ere his lady to die, he would still choose to live: Mais oncques je ne fuz si nisse, Se adventure elle mouroit, Qu’après sa mort, pour rien je disse Que ma vie en acourcirait. [But I was never so silly That, if she happened to die, ­After her death, anything would make me say That I would shorten my life over it.]60 Thus, when Noir counsels Gris, he lays out the rules of the courtly chivalric code and exhorts Gris to adopt them entirely. But when Gris counsels Noir, he is down-­to-­earth, commonsensical, an even-­keeled observer. Perhaps the color message of this poem distinguishes between Noir’s allegiance to an ideal and Gris’s exploration of real­ity. Noir’s categorical ideas of correct be­hav­ior, ­whether in seeking love or showing grief, mark him as an archetype; Gris’s embrace of imperfect conditions—­both his anxiousness for love and his temperate attitude ­toward death—lends him more humanity. It may be useful ­here to recall a signal feature of grey: it is by definition a mixture of white and black, evoking a range or scale rather than the two endpoints of its component colors. It is in between, in the ­middle, and the ­middle space is broad, as in life. We could liken the swath of grey, or greys, that sit between black and white to the continuum of experience between one fixed idea and another, or even to the span of everyday days between milestones bounded by birth and death. Grey suggests a path as opposed to a destination, a durée rather than a punctuated moment. As such, it always calls for interpretation, the effort through which thoughts and actions reveal their contours. If the

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fifteenth c­ entury often designated grey as the color of hope, this may have referred less to a sense of optimism than to hope’s own status as a “­middle state,” a feeling neither dispossessed nor triumphant. Training attention on what passes and endures, on situations and contexts more than events, on perspectives that can go unremarked, could also connect grey’s other meanings in late medieval lit­er­a­ture: the sadness, the constancy, the exertion, and perseverance that appear alongside hope. In Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, Noir, unable to reconcile himself to his lady’s loss, exits the grove where he and Gris have conversed; he rides away on his (white) h ­ orse ­because his devotion must be unswerving, and his distress, therefore, immutable. Gris sets out a­ fter him—on foot, we should mention, for this suggests a difference of socioeconomic status and thus of effort expended ­toward an end. Gris catches up to his friend as he dismounts for the night, and hidden by hedges, observes and listens to Noir’s lament. Noir wants to die. Gris feels both deep pity and head-­shaking regret that Noir is impermeable to his point of view. In the end, Gris turns away. He ­will contend with his own love-­induced anx­i­eties, his solitude, and desires. What he can still do for both himself and his friend is to narrate both their stories—to account by way of the poem for the distinction between black and grey. To conclude, we return to Johan Huizinga, who claimed emphatically in his signature work that “excessive, dazzling extravagance” was a trait characteristic of the waning ­Middle Ages—­and that just such sumptuousness was in fact a marker of decline.61 “Tied to this admiration for ­things that shine,” he writes, “is the embellishment of clothing, which in the fifteenth ­century is sought mainly in the application of precious stones,” and asserts that “in ceremonial dress and festive finery, one is primarily struck by the predominance of red.”62 Accommodating his claims, we have nevertheless found a parallel movement in the burgeoning, then booming, taste for grey in the late medieval period. If a kaleidoscope of color bespeaks cultural ebb, does that mean that grey signals rebirth? A question so sweeping could not apply to all test cases. This study has moved across multiple de­cades, varied geographies, diverse economic contexts, and a wide range of artistic and artisanal objects. No one spirit or totalizing symbolism could animate grisaille glass as much as altarpiece panels, a silver Monkey Cup as much as figured grey brocade, or a courtly roundel as much as a missive of praise to the Virgin. But two remarks pre­sent themselves. First, what is physically rendered in grey, without the benefit or burden of bright color, gathers the gaze: it highlights line and shape and volume, making us look closely. And second, what is evoked or discussed as grey in words invites



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the mind’s attention; the “grey area” whets our perception and hones our discernment. Huizinga famously ascribed to his period a pair of preoccupations that he felt pointed to decay: one a devotion to form and the other a passion for detail. As both t­hese thought-­features seem well served by the production, ­application, and reading of grey, perhaps we should not be surprised at its fifteenth-­century heyday. But w ­ hether the taste for grey gives any proof of devolution would be quite a dif­fer­ent m ­ atter. Notes 1. Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens-­en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Haarlem, Netherlands: H.D. Tjeenk Willink and Son, 1952), 57; Johan Huizinga, Autumntide of the M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Graeme Small and Anton van der Lem, trans. Diane Webb (Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2020), translates the phrase as “always vacillating between black despair at the world and sheer delight in its vibrant beauty” (67). Huizinga certainly meant “vibrant,” but he also meant “colorful.” 2. Huizinga, Autumntide, 370. 3. ­There are eleven sites in France for which ­there is evidence of such glass; six of ­these eleven still contain examples of grisaille t­oday. See Helen Jackson Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), 4. 4. See Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia to Abbot William, excerpted in Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass, 206–209. 5. This unity was enhanced by the use of the same patterns from one architectural ele­ment to another; for example, a lattice pattern with superimposed circles used in win­ dow glass might also be found in floor tiles and architectural sculpture. Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass, 117. 6. Also known as yellow stain. 7. Claudine Lautier, “Les débuts du jaune d’argent dans l’art du vitrail, ou le jaune d’argent à la manière d’Antoine de Pise,” Bulletin monumental 158.2 (2000): 89. 8. Lautier, “Les débuts du jaune d’argent,” 99–100. 9. Peter Cockshaw, Miniatures en grisaille (Brussels, Belgium: Bibliothèque Royale ­Albert Ier, 1986), iii, exhibition cata­logue. 10. Jean le Bon’s Bible Moralisée is manuscript français 167 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BNF); King Charles’s Bibles historiales are Arsenal 5212 and The Hague, Huis van het boek, Museum MeermannoWestreenianum ms. 10 B.23; the Duke of Berry’s Book of Hours resides in Brussels as Koninklijke Bibliotheek (hereafter KBR) ms. 11060–61; Berry’s psalter, illuminated by André Beauneveu, is BNF français 3091 and his Bible Moralisée is BNF français 166. See Cockshaw, Miniatures en grisaille, iii–iv and 10, as well as Nigel Morgan and Elizabeth J. Moody, “Grisaille in Manuscript Painting c. 1320–­c.1450,” in Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Stella Panayotova, Deirdre Jackson, and Paola Ricciardi (Cambridge, UK: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2016), 246–269, exhibition cata­logue.

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11. Th ­ ese are the privately owned Ferrell-­Vogüé Machaut, ms. Vg (Ferrell 1), and BNF français 1584; both ­were executed in the 1370s: Cockshaw, Miniatures en grisaille, iv; Morgan and Moody, “Grisaille in Manuscript Painting,” 260–261. 12. The two Christine de Pizan manuscripts are BNF français 1740 (1401–1402) and Brussels KBR 11034 (1402–1403), the sole two single-­text copies of this work. See Gilbert Ouy, Christine Reno, Inès Villéla-­Petit, Olivier Delsaux, and Tania van Hemelryck, ­Album Christine de Pizan (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 361–371. Additional manuscripts of Christine’s works, such as the “Livre de Cristine,” BNF français 12779, are illuminated in grisaille; see Ouy, Reno and Villéla-­Petit, ­Album Christine, 224–225. The Grandes chroniques de France de Charles V is BNF français 2813 (1375–1380); its added frontispiece showing the coronation of King Charles VI, as well as numerous figures in miniatures throughout the original body of the text—­often troops in armor—­attest to the prevalence of grey. It should be noted that in all the manuscripts cited in the pre­sent note, color also plays a role in the decoration of the work, ­whether in deep-­hued backgrounds in Machaut’s collections, touches of color in thin washes in Christine de Pizan’s works, or a bold blue-­and-­ gold setting for the grisaille figures in the Chroniques frontispiece. 13. Morgan and Moody, “Grisaille in Manuscript Printing,” 251. 14. The Cronique et conquestes de Charlemaine is KBR ms. 9067 and 9068; Cy nous dit is KBR ms. 9017. 15. The “Monkey Cup” of New York’s Cloisters collection (Inv. 52.50) dates from 1425–1450. 16. See Mara Hofmann, Eberhard König, and Caroline Zöhl, eds., Quand la peinture était dans les livres, mélanges en l’honneur de François Avril (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007). 17. Quoted in Patrice Marandel, exhibition cata­logue Gray Is the Color. An Exhibition of Grisaille Painting XIII–­X Xth Centuries, Rice Museum, Houston, Texas, October 19, 1973–­January  19, 1974, citing André Malraux, La tête d’obsidienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 145. 18. See the chapter “Gray Areas” in David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, On Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 195–213. The essay focuses on photography. Kastan writes: “Zebras are black and white. Photo­g raphs are not . . . ​what they are is gray. ‘Gray’ photography is what it should be called,” 199. 19. Commissioned by French king Charles V ca. 1375. 20. Michel Pastoureau, Traité d’héraldique (Paris: Picard, 1979), 105, cites rare instances of arms containing a color called fer—­iron, or grey—in Germanic heraldry. The Dictionnaire du moyen français, ATILF Dictionnaire du moyen français (1330–1500), http:​/­www2​.­atilf​ .­f r​/­dmf​/­, in its extensive entry on meanings and uses of the word gris, cites a single example of its use in heraldry, from Les Mémoires de Messire Olivier de La Marche: maître d’hôtel et capitaine des gardes de Charles le Téméraire, ed. Henri Beaune and Jules d’Arbaumont, 4 vols. (Renouard: Paris, 1883–1888), composed in 1470. La Marche describes a shield on which figures a black lion, “moufflé de gris,” with a grey muzzle or nose. La Marche, Mémoires, 1: 81. La Marche’s story concerns the coat of arms of Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, in the late twelfth ­century. 21. The genesis of purple as an armorial color has in the past caused confusion, not ­because its codified heraldic name, pourpre, did not figure in armorial descriptions,



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but b­ ecause the shade to which the name referred evolved over time. Pastoureau writes that ­u ntil the beginning of the fifteenth ­century, it was a grey-­brown, described as a mix of all other colors. It subsequently came to designate a deep purplish red, or violet (Pastoureau, Traité d’héraldique, 101–102). Linguistic ambiguity on this color persists even ­today, as the French pourpre translates into En­glish not as its cognate purple, but as crimson. 22. See the ATILF Dictionnaire du moyen français (1330–1500), http:​/­www2​.­atilf​.­fr​/­dmf​/­, ­under the entry for “gris.” The saying is attested in Sotties des sots triumphans qui trompent chascun, ca. 1475, in Le Recueil Trepperel, ed. Eugénie Droz (Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkin Reprint, 1974), 40. 23. Sicile, herald of Alfonso, king of Aragon, Le blason des couleurs en armes, livrées et devises, ed. and notes Hippolyte Cocheris (Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1860), 29, 33. This treatise was composed by Jean Courtois, known as “Le héraut Sicile,” in Mons, in the province of Hainaut (Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy acquired the title of Count of Hainaut in 1433). We note that Le blason des couleurs, accompanied by a l­ ater second part entitled “Le second traité du blason”—­discussed below—­had already seen a printed edition in Paris by 1495. Michel Pastoureau cites a second edition from 1501 and six more throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in addition to multiple translations. See “Le blanc, le bleu et le tanné: Beauté, harmonie et symbolique des couleurs à l’aube des temps modernes,” in Désir n’a repos: Hommage à Danielle Bohler, ed. Florence Bouchet and Danièle James-­Raoul (Bordeaux, France: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2015), 115–132 (118). 24. Pastoureau, “Le blanc, le bleu et le tanné,” 122. 25. In heraldic hierarchies, argent can vie with or for first place. Gold is the more precious metal, whereas silver represents the clearest light. Interpretation becomes more complicated when argent and or are considered outside the armorial context and become simply white and yellow; white retains all its positive connotations, whereas yellow takes on negative traits. It is considered the color of falsity and betrayal. See Pastoureau, “Le blanc, le bleu et le tanné,” 122. 26. Sicile, Le blason des couleurs, 14–15. 27. “Livrée,” livery in En­glish, refers ­either to combinations of colors in outfits, or the outfits themselves. In the latter case, the outfits w ­ ere worn identically across a group, for example, among the men in the retinue of a king, prince, or duke. 28. See Guy de Poerck, La draperie médiévale en flandre et en artois: technique et terminologie 3 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1951), 1:168. 29. See the Second traicté du blazon, in Sicile, Le blason des couleurs, 77, 79, 82. For an enumeration and discussion of vari­ous shades of blue, see also Christian Mérindol, “Couleur, étoffe et politique à la fin du Moyen Age, les couleurs du roi et les couleurs d’une cour ducale,” in Recherches sur l’économie de la France médiévale. Les voies fluviales, la draperie. 112e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Lyon, 1987 (Paris: Editions du C.N.R.S., 1989), 227–230. 30. Second traicté du blazon, 88, 84. 31. The following page numbers in the Second traicté du blazon describe the meaning of grey combined with each of the colors cited: 78, 81, 83, 84, 86, 89, 90. 32. Michel Pastoureau, “Jésus teinturier: histoire symbolique et sociale d’un métier réprouvé,” Médiévales 29 (1995): 47–63, 53.

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33. Poerck, La draperie médiévale en Flandre, 2:168. 34. See note 41 below. 35. Mérindol, “Couleur, étoffe et politique à la fin du Moyen Age,” 249. 36. Poerck, La draperie médiévale en Flandre, 2:101; see also the online ATILF Dictionnaire du moyen français (1330–1500), http:​/­w ww2​.­atilf​.­f r​/­dmf​/­, which gives two sets of entries for gris as a noun (as well as several o­ thers for the adjectival form): the first is “gris (couleur) (grey [color])” and the second, “drap (gros ou fin) de couleur grise plus ou moins foncée (cloth [rough or fine] of more or less dark grey color).” 37. Michel Pastoureau, “A la recherche de l’incolore. Histoire d’un horizon théorique,” Histoire et géographie de la couleur, ed. Pascale Dollfus, François Jacquesson, and Michel Pastoureau (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 2013), 225–248, 238. 38. Pastoureau, “A la recherche de l’incolore,” 238. The author cites the de­cade of 1420–1430 as a time when multiple textile towns in France, the Low Countries, and Italy already specialized in d ­ ying grey cloth. 39. Jean of Berry’s dates w ­ ere 1340–1416; Michel Pastoureau suggests that the Second traicté du blazon was written about 1485. See Pastoureau, “Le blanc, le bleu, le tanné,” 3. 40. This list of eminent wearers of grey is cited by Pastoureau, “A la recherche de l’incolore,” 238, citing Laurent Hablot, “La devise, mise en signe du prince, mise en scène du pouvoir” (PhD diss., 2 vols., Poitiers, Université de Poitiers, 2001), 2:460, 480, and throughout. 41. Jacques Dauvet, Les affaires de Jacques Coeur: journal du procureur Dauvet: procès-­ verbaux de séquestre et d’adjudication, ed. Michel Mollat, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1952–1953). 42. See the online Dictionnaire Etymologique de l’Ancien Français (DEAF), http:​/­www​ .­deaf​-­page​.­de​/­f r​/­index​.­php, vol. G, columns 1415–1420. 43. Alice Planche, “Le gris de l’espoir,” Romania 94 (1973): 289–302. 44. Planche cites Chanson 81 from Charles of Orleans, Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1982–83), 1:252. 45. Anonymous poem in Anatole de Montaiglon and James de Rothschild, eds., Recueil de poésies françoises des XVe et XVIe siècles, 3 vols. (Paris: Daffis, 1855–78), 1:310. 46. Planche, “Le gris de l’espoir,” 292. 47. See note 31 above. 48. Jean Robertet, Jean Robertet: Œuvres, ed. Margaret Zsuppán (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1970), 138. Michel Pastoureau reproduces and discusses Robertet’s poem in “Le blanc, le bleu et le tanné,” 10–13 and 17–18. 49. The verses Planche cites read De gris je vestiray mon cœur Et de noir feray ma livree; C’est pour monstrer la grant douleur Ou mon amy m’a cy laissée. [I ­will dress my heart in grey And make my livery of black; This is to show my g­ reat sorrow In which my sweetheart has left me.]



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It is worth pointing out that in e­ arlier verses of the same poem, the lady declares that she had given her lover a livrée of yellow, green, and blue, “En esperance d’estre aymée” (“in hope of being loved”)—­hope unconnected with grey. See François Gevaert and Gaston Paris, Chansons du XVe siècle (Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1875), poem CXX, 120–122. 50. This poem seems to be the work of a Franciscan monk—­the “chevalier” is entirely devoted to his lady the Virgin Mary—­and Planche indicates that the mention of grey could refer to the color of this order’s habit. Planche, “Le gris de l’espoir,” 293–294. It seems worthy of note that the editor of ­these verses, Montaiglon, writing in 1856, comments succinctly about gris: “couleur d’espérance” (“color of hope”). Was this remark without context what led Alice Planche in turn to assert, then explore, the associations of grey? Montaiglon, Recueil de poésies françoises, 3:279. See also the previously cited 1:310, where Montaiglon evokes two references to grey in the poetry of Charles of Orleans which Planche examines at more length in her essay, 290–291. 51. Planche, “Le gris de l’espoir,” 294. 52. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir by Aymon de Montfaucon exists in two manuscripts: français 25421 (ms. B) and Rothschild 2798 (ms. A, fols. 22–61), both of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In their forthcoming edition of the text (ms. A), Emma Cayley and Olivier Delsaux date ms. B to before 1473, and ms. A to the last quarter of the fifteenth ­century. I am grateful to both scholars for having shared the files of their edition with me. Mss. B and A are both illustrated: B contains eight miniatures, and A, two. Only B ­will concern us h ­ ere, as the two miniatures in A do not reflect the colors represented in the debate; the two debating men are dressed largely in red and purple. 53. ­These markers appear consistently only in ms. B, the manuscript that concerns us ­here. 54. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, lines 373–375. Planche opens her essay with this quotation. See “Le Gris de l’espoir,” 289. 55. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, lines 737–740. 56. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, line 893. 57. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, lines 1053–1054. 58. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, lines 1193–1196. 59. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, lines 1221–1222. 60. Le Débat du Gris et du Noir, lines 1025–1028. 61. Huizinga, Autumntide, 369. 62. Huizinga, Autumntide, 406–407. Huizinga also mentions, however, that in the accounts of a well-­known fifteenth-­century Pa­ri­sian tailor, “[o]rdinary clothing already makes much use of gray, black, and purple.” Autumntide, 407.

c ha p te r t wo

Jean de Meun and Visual Eroticism in Fifteenth-­Century Culture Stephen G. Nichols

­ ere ends the testament of poor Villon H Who died a martyr to love This he swore on his testicle. . . . —­François Villon (1461) The eye is the organ with which we both observe and shape our interpretation of the world. —­Alexander von Humboldt (1845)

Almost a ­century ago, Johan Huizinga called attention to a blatantly erotic turn in fifteenth-­century French culture. His description of the Duke of Burgundy’s preparations for a del­e­ga­tion of envoys from London captures the casual licentiousness of everyday life at the time. The duke, he writes, “had the bath­ houses of Valenciennes put in order for the En­glish noblemen ‘pour eux et pour quiconque avoient de famille, voire bains estorés de tout ce qu’il faut au mestier de Vénus, à prendre par choix et par élection ce qu’on désiroit mieux, et tout aux frais du duc’ ” (“for them and all their retinue, baths provided with every­ thing required for the calling of Venus, so they would be able to indulge their preferred tastes, all at the expense of the duke”).1 Huizinga ascribes the erotic turn to a resurgence of a “primitive form of eroticism,” with much older roots “which glorified the sexual ­union itself.”2 He calls this sexual force, with its “shameless laugh and its phallic symbolism,” the “epithalamic style,” for its association with ancient “sacred rites belonging to the solemnization of the nuptials. At one time the marriage ceremony and the wedding feast had been 44



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undivided: one g­ reat mystery, focused on the coupling.” Such public cele­bration of sexual ­union naturally ran ­counter to Pauline orthodoxy and the Church’s claim of “sanctity and the mystery for itself,” which transposed both “to the sacrament of holy matrimony.”3 But the Church only controlled the marriage ceremony; what followed was a dif­fer­ent m ­ atter altogether. “No puritanical sensibility,” says Huizinga, “made the shameless publicity of the wedding night dis­appear from practice.”4 The new mode of realism in con­temporary chronicles leaves no doubt as to “the brazen exuberance with which princely and noble marriages tended to be celebrated around 1400. Examples include the obscene sniggering with which Froissart recounts the wedding of Charles VI with Isabeau of Bavaria, or the epithalamium that Deschamps dedicated to Anthony of Burgundy.”5 ­Here, Huizinga calls attention to a paradox in fifteenth-­century modes of eroticism. If the social mores of the time countenance the overtly erotic ideal of full and complete satisfaction, esthetic aspirations of the period prefer a more complex and nuanced mode that Huizinga terms covert eroticism. “But that which can serve as a form of life and an embellishment of life,” he writes, “is indirect eroticism, whose theme is the possibility of gratification, the promise, the longing, the deprivation, the approach of happiness. H ­ ere supreme satisfaction is relegated to the unspoken, enveloped in all the gossamer veils of expectation.”6 Huizinga’s formulation of overt and covert eroticism points to essential aspects of fifteenth-­ century poetics. But his demotion of overt eroticism in ­favor of a romanticized covert mode “capable of converting the sorrows of love into beauty, and . . . ​ therefore of infinitely more value for life” fails to grasp the particularity of the era’s poetics.7 As we w ­ ill see, Huizinga’s two modes do not function separately, as he thought, but in tandem. Villon’s Erotic Ecol­ogy What sets the poetics of this period apart is an erotic ecol­ogy born of a dynamic interchange between overt and covert eroticism. Eroticism is about tension; the drama of seeing and not seeing; or, more precisely, of seeing through the veil of language. Just as Alexander von Humboldt recognizes, “The eye (is) the organ with which we shape and interpret our worldview,” so visualization shapes the fifteenth ­century’s poetics of eroticism.8 We can see this dynamic at work in two stanzas of the last ballad of Le testament of François Villon. I choose t­ hese stanzas ­because the second of them is

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the subject of a brilliant commentary by Leo Spitzer in 1935—­written while he was still in Istanbul.9 This note elicited a coda four years l­ater in Romania10 where Spitzer skewers a German colleague who had deplored his sexual interpretation in his 1935 note on the meta­phors Villon uses while imagining his body’s reaction to being hanged. The stanzas in question are the first and third of the last ballad in Le Testament, Icy se clost le testament du pauvre Villon (“­Here ends the Testament of poor Villon”). Spitzer makes only a passing reference to the first stanza, which contains an overtly erotic image whose full meaning is only apparent from its covert context. As we ­will see, the overt/covert dynamic ­here is crucial for supporting the image Spitzer interprets in his discussion of stanza three. 1. Icy se clost le testament Et finist du pauvre Villon. Venez a son enterrement, Quant vous orrez le carillon, Vestuz rouge com vermeillon, Car en amours mourut martir; Ce jura il sur son coullon, Quant de ce monde voult partir. 1. [­Here ends and finishes The testament of poor Villon Come to his burial When you hear the bell ringing Dressed in vermilion For he died a martyr to love This he swore on his testicle As he made his way out of this world.]11 Villon’s language comes across as conversational, the fifteenth-­century equivalent of ordinary language, open and direct. “Come to his burial / when you hear the bell ringing” could hardly be clearer. One does not ­really need to know that, ­until recently, as a funeral cortege in France made its way to the cemetery, an altar boy would walk at the head of the pro­cession ringing a bell so that citizens could pay their re­spects, or—as Villon suggests—­join the pro­cession. Even when one reads the next two lines: “dressed in vermilion / for I died a martyr to love,” one understands the gist even without knowing, as Jaqueline Cerquiglini-­Toulet explains,



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that vermilion is the color of the sacerdotal robes worn by priests to celebrate mass for a martyred saint.12 In comparing his amorous tribulations to t­ hose of a Christian martyr, Villon is not simply being tongue-­in-­cheek. As Huizinga notes, “Expressing the sexual in ecclesiastical terms was practiced with exceptional candour in the ­Middle Ages.”13 Villon pushes this mode to the limit. Take, for example, the rhymes in “-­on:” Villon, carillon, vermeillon, coullon. The first and fourth rhymes enfold the ecclesiastical carillon and vermeillon between the poet’s name and body part, as though to enroll them in the com­ pany of holy martyrs. When we read, “ce jura il sur son coullon” (“this he swears on his testicle”),14 the ecclesiastical association deepens, but so unobtrusively that even scholars miss the reference. It is understandable in this case since Villon openly quotes an expression—­“to swear on one’s testicle”—­from Genesis 24: 2–9, which the Latin Vulgate, the Hebrew Bible, and vernacular translations all represent covertly, substituting femur, “thigh,” for “testicle,” or Hebrew ‫( ׃ ֽי ִכ ֵ רְי‬yə·rê·ḵî): “2. Dixitque ad servum se­niorem domus suae, . . . ​Pone manum tuam subter femur meum, / 3. ut adjurem te per Dominum Deum caeli et terrae, ut non accipias uxorem filio meo de filiabus Chananaeorum, inter quos habito” (Genesis 24:2–3) (2. “And Abraham said to his servant . . . ​ ‘Put your hand ­under my thigh, / 3. And I ­will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and of the earth, that you ­will not take a wife for my son from the ­daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell’ ”). This is not simply a case of Villon’s coyly evoking the overt/covert dynamic by stripping the veil from the biblical “thigh.” To begin with, “testicle” brings the biblical passage within the orbit of Villon’s erotic ecol­ogy by transferring the polyvalence of Latin testis—­“witness, testimony, and testicle”—to this final poem of Le Testament, now revealed as his own “testimony” or “oath” sworn on his testicle. When Abraham’s servant puts his hand on his master’s testicle, he makes a solemn oath regarding his responsibility ­toward Abraham’s son, Isaac, who contains the seed/semen that God had promised to bless in Genesis 15, 17, and 22. It is perhaps no accident that one Latin word, testes, connotes both “testicles” and “witnesses.”15 We w ­ ill have occasion below to see how Jean de Meun’s programmatic repetition of couilles in Le Roman de la Rose undoubtedly encouraged Villon’s unveiling of the biblical euphemism “femur.” At this point, as we move on to the third stanza, let us simply bear in mind Villon’s elegant interweaving of the overt/ covert visual mode, which allows him to reveal the biblical connotation of Genesis 24 in order to profit from the rich semantic field that testis offered him.

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3. Il est ainsi et tellement: Quant mourut, n’avoit q’un haillon; Qui plus, en mourant, mallement L’espoignoit d’Amours l’esguillon Plus agu que le ranguillon D’un baudrier lui faisoit sentir —­C ’est de quoy nous esmerveillon—­, Quant de ce monde voult partir. 3. [It was like this, so that By the time he died he had only a rag: What’s worse, as he died, sorely Love’s lance pricked him Sharper than the buckle-­tongue Of a baldric he could feel it This is a ­matter for won­der As he made his way out of this world.]16 Now turning to the lines of stanza three that Spitzer discusses in his notes of 1935 and 1939, we find that Villon mines another of his favorite sources of sexual meta­phor: the language of chivalric arms—­swords, shields, darts, lances, etc.—­each rich in phallic images. In the case of lines 2013–2017, it is a question of Love’s dart or spur that pricks the poet more sharply than the tongue of a sword b­ elt’s buckle at the moment when the noose tightens around his neck. Qui plus, en mourant, mallement L’espoignoit d’Amours l’esguillon Plus agu que le ranguillon D’un baudrier lui faisoit sentir. [What’s worse, as he died, sorely Love’s lance pricked him Sharper than the buckle-­tongue Of a baldric he could feel it.]17 The galvanic erotic urge of his ­dying self from the searing prick of Love’s lance, sharper than the metal pin of a baldric buckle, could hardly be more vivid. Nor could the repetition of equivalent words responsible for the image be more evocative. Greimas’s dictionary of M ­ iddle French notes that ranguillon (“metal pin



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or tongue of a b­ elt buckle”) is a stronger version of aiguillon/esguillon (“lance or dart”), and both mime—at least for Villon’s purpose—­the phallus. That it is Love himself who wields the lance, completes the erotic scene.18 Villon goes farther, though, by having the homonyms esguillon and ranguillon echo the shock rhyme coullon from stanza one, thereby assuring readers of his intact masculinity even in extremis. Spitzer does not bother to include so basic an analy­sis of this stanza in e­ ither of his two notes. I do so both to show how skillfully, if coyly, Villon juggles overt/ covert eroticism, and to set the stage for understanding Spitzer’s impatience with a certain “G. Moldenhauer,” who took issue with the former’s allusion, in his 1935 note, to the sexual reaction that hanging occasions in male victims.19 Moldenhauer may have been the only one to object publicly to Spitzer’s exegesis, but he was far from alone in missing the dramatic image concealed beneath the stanza’s sexualized meta­phors. Or at least they are not immediately apparent to the modern reader who lacks Villon’s familiarity with public hangings so common at Montfaucon on the outskirts of Paris in the fifteenth c­ entury.20 In brief, Spitzer’s “Zum Kommentar Villons” notes the pervasive theme of hanging in the poet’s work from the famous Ballade des pendus (“Ballad of the Hanged Men”), to the quatrain where he imagines his own reaction to the noose: Je suis François, dont ce me poise, Né de Paris emprès Pointoise, Qui d’une corde d’une toise Sçaura mon col que mon cul poise.21 [I am François which is my cross Born in Paris near Pontoise From a fathom of rope my neck ­Will learn the weight of my ass.]22 Spitzer notes that popu­lar humor and slang of the period referred to hanging as a “marriage”—­épouser la veuve (“marry the ­widow”), danser aux noces (“to dance at the wedding”), presumably b­ ecause the hangman—­known popularly as le marrieur—­tied the knot around the victim’s neck thus “marrying” him to the gallows.23 The “dance” of course is a macabre reference to the jerking motions of the victim as he dropped through the trap. It is precisely the convulsions caused by the abrupt tightening of the noose around the victim’s neck that forces blood into the penis giving the appearance of sexual arousal. That

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phenomenon, of course, only reinforced the association of hanging with marriage and the wedding night, which, as Huizinga noted, was a source of ribald commentary in the period.24 Although he does not explic­itly spell out the image that underlies t­ hese lines in 1935, Spitzer leaves no doubt as to his interpretation of the meta­phors at the heart of this stanza. Four years l­ater, faced with Professor Moldenhauer’s disbelief that Villon could possibly have treated his own death with ribald humor, Spitzer finds an explicit description in Joyce’s Ulysses of the tumescent state Villon alludes to. By now teaching at Johns Hopkins, Spitzer credits one of his students with drawing his attention to the following exchange: “­There’s one t­ hing (hanging) ­hasn’t a deterrent effect on,” says Alf. “What’s that?” says Joe. “The poor bugger’s tool that’s being hanged,” says Alf. “That so?” says Joe. “God’s truth,” says Alf. “I heard it from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me that when they cut him down ­after the drop it was standing up ­there in their ­faces like a poker.” “Ruling passion strong in death,” says Joe, “as someone said.”25 Imaging Erotic Ecol­ogy Huizinga’s Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages concedes the importance of painting in Franco-­Burgundian culture of the fifteenth c­ entury. “Franco-­Burgundian culture of the last period of the ­Middle Ages is best known to the pre­sent generation from its visual arts,” he writes. “The Van Eyck b­ rothers, Rogier van der Weyden, and Memling, along with the sculptor Sluter, dominate our image of ­those times.” 26 But he quickly warns that relying on art to comprehend this period is a m ­ istake, b­ ecause it fails “to see correctly the relationship between visual art and literary expressions of culture.”27 The observer must recognize the need to take into account “that the state of what has been handed down to us already places us in very dif­fer­ent positions with re­spect to art and lit­er­a­ ture.” 28 He believes that since we possess nearly all of the literary corpus of the late medieval period, “the lit­er­a­ture of the late M ­ iddle Ages is almost com29 pletely known to us.” While art was certainly “still absorbed by life in ­those days,” too l­ittle of it survives, he insists, to make it a reliable witness.30 Had he taken the time to look



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at the incredible wealth of paintings and drawings in manuscripts of the period, however, Huizinga might have been forced to revise his rather parochial view. One thinks, for instance, of the manuscripts produced for Charles V in the 1370s such as Nicole Oresme’s translation and commentary of Aristotle’s Politiques and Ycononomique currently preserved in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, the Royal Library in Brussels (Figures 2.1–2.3). Raoulet d’Orléans, the manuscript’s scribe and artist, painted exquisite scenes of daily life in his two-­fold transposition of Aristotle’s work into con­temporary French sights and speech. First, he transcribes Nicole Oresme’s version of the classical text with the latter’s glosses that mediate Aristotle’s ideas for medieval readers. Then, Raoulet shows his contemporaries how t­ hese ideas appear when portrayed in vernacular images. Pace Huizinga, this manuscript and o­ thers commissioned by Charles V to introduce classical works to French readers actually do illustrate French life and culture of the period. What concerns and intrigues me in this chapter, however, is another kind of manuscript, unique to this period, which creates—­indeed, that invents, so far as we can tell—an entirely new visual erotic ecol­ogy. Like Raoulet d’Orléans’s images of Oresme’s Aristotle, t­ hese manuscripts draw inspiration from accompanying literary texts, while inflecting them in unexpected ways. Intellectually, we know that they function like other manuscript miniatures, yet their boldness startles us b­ ecause e­ arlier manuscripts of the same works have nothing like what we see in t­ hese examples. They push graphic depiction to such a point as to force us to rethink the literary passages surrounding them. Faced with such vivid depictions, one’s first thought is to assume that they simply do not have poetry’s means of achieving veiled allusion. The raw impact of visualizing vio­lence against the body would seem to corroborate such a view. But closer study of the paintings in context may lead to a very dif­fer­ent understanding. What the images portray, in fact, is an example of ecological disruption thanks to the willful severing of the holistic body from its place in the natu­ral order. But I am getting ahead of the story. First, a word about ­these manuscripts, and what makes them notable. All w ­ ere produced in Northern France—­prob­ably Paris—in the fifteenth ­century. Two feature the Roman de la Rose, the other represents a version of Raoul de Presles’s translation of Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (City of God) which Charles V commissioned in 1371. All of them depict suicide, rape, violent death, betrayal of figures like Samson and Hercules, Nero’s assassination of Roman senators and cutting open his ­mother to reveal her womb, Jupiter’s revolt against Saturn, executions, and scenes of sexual

Figure 2.1. Aristotle, Livre de Politiques et Yconomique, trans. for Charles VI by Nicole Oresme, copied and illustrated by Raoulet de’Orléans, Paris 1376–1380, Brussels KBR ms 11201–11202, f. 36r. Reprinted with the permission of the Royal Library of Belgium.

Figure 2.2. Aristotle, Livre de Politiques et Yconomique, trans. for Charles VI by Nicole Oresme, copied and illustrated by Raoulet de’Orléans, Paris 1376–1380, Brussels KBR ms 11201–11202, f. 263r. Reprinted with the permission of the Royal Library of Belgium.

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Figure 2.3. Aristotle, Livre de Politiques et Yconomique, trans. for Charles VI by Nicole Oresme, copied and illustrated by Raoulet de’Orléans, Paris 1376–1380, Brussels KBR ms 11201–11202, f. 363v. Reprinted with the permission of the Royal Library of Belgium.

license. They also have in common explicit castration scenes. For Augustine’s City of God, the castrati include Attis, consort of the fertility goddess Cybele, and their priests, the self-­castrating Galli or Corybantes. The two fifteenth-­ century Rose manuscripts depict the castration of Saturn by his son Jupiter; the self-­mutilation of the third-­century Greek theologian Origen;31 while the Valencia Rose also shows a lively image of Abelard’s castration witnessed by a disconsolate Heloise. The Hague, Huis van het boek, Museum Meermanno-­Westreenianum manuscript (Figure 2.4) of La cité de Dieu (1475) is more copiously illustrated than other versions of Raoul de Presles’s translation, including the lavish pre­ sen­ta­tion manuscript prepared for Charles V in 1377.32 More importantly, unlike other versions, it portrays the castration scenes described so vividly in Books 2 and 7, where Augustine inveighs against Roman religions. He deplores them all but reserves his sharpest barbs for the rites of Cybele, the earth goddess, whose priests, the Galli, must castrate themselves in order to officiate in her

Figure 2.4. Augustine, La cité de Dieu, trans. Raoul de Presles, book 7, 25, Attis castrating himself, Paris 1475, The Hague, Huis van het Boek, ms MMW 10 A 11, f. 343v. Reprinted with the permission of the Huis van het Boek.

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t­ emples: “Quod Gallos huic deae ut seruirent fecerunt, significat, qui semine indigeant, terram sequi oportere; in ea quippe omnia reperiri” (“And their having made the eunuchs to serve this goddess, signifies that they who are in need of seed [semen] ­ought to imitate [sequor] the earth for in it all seeds [semina] are found”).33 Augustine describes and condemns ­these practices so vividly as to transform their ritual self-­mutilation into a morally charged negative example of sacred ecol­ogy. By heightening his narrative with forceful variations on the terms “cruel and shameful” (“crudele vel turpe, uel turpiter crudele uel crudeliter turpe”),34 he pre­sents the ­temple scene so boldly that we cannot help but visualize ­these acts of self-­mutilation. The scene imprints itself forcefully on the mind, transforming act into image and ultimately into morally charged concept, namely, self-­castration as an impious desecration of the body. In other words, Augustine transforms the Galli’s ritual of self-­mutilation into a potent exemplum, a weapon to be used against pagan religious rites.35 If Augustine’s rhe­toric is a weapon of religious war, so to speak, does that appear to be the case for The Hague manuscript’s rendition of the same scene? It is true that the repugnance of the ­woman turning away from the sight, as well as the disapproval of the men—­one of whose fin­gers points accusingly at the severed testicle and bleeding groin—­all bespeak Augustinian condemnation. But does the background of the image accord with the context of Augustine’s passionate denunciation of pagan rites? While the image corroborates the purport of the text, its calmer emotive register suggests an evolved meaning in keeping with the medieval clothes worn by ­those portrayed ­here, including the priest of Cybele himself. That agenda might well have to do with the verdant natu­ral setting, rolling green hills, and the towers of fifteenth-­century towns in the background. Since the ­whole scene bears a greater resemblance to a locus amoenus à la the Roman de la Rose than it does to a Roman t­ emple ritual, it may be that a­ fter twelve centuries the protest against the severed testicles may have shifted from the now defunct pagan religion to anxiety at disrupting the natu­ral order. The picture on the next folio (Figure 2.5) confirms this conjecture with its image of Saturn devouring his c­ hildren while four priests of Cybele—­testicles and knife in hand—­stand ­behind him. The ensemble pre­sents a world of grisly disorder and excess. More to the point, since nothing in the accompanying text corresponds to this plethora of mutilated priests or the infant-­devouring Saturn, we may assume the artist intends to portray something like the serious threat such disruption of the natu­ral order poses to society. Interestingly, the artist

Figure 2.5. Augustine, La cité de Dieu, trans. Raoul de Presles, book 7, 26, S ­ aturn devouring his ­children; Eunuch priests (Galli) of Cybele castrating themselves Paris 1475, The Hague, Huis van het Boek, ms MMW 10 A 11, f. 344v. Reprinted with the permission of the Huis van het Boek.

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Stephen G. Nichols Figure  2.6. Augustine, La cité de Dieu, trans. Raoul de Presles, book 7, 26, Saturn devouring his ­children; Jupiter chasing Saturn from the city, Paris 1475, The Hague, Huis van het Boek, ms MMW 10 A 11, f. 332v. Reprinted with the permission of the Huis van het Boek.

achieves this effect by transforming Augustine’s allegorical portrait of Saturn into a literal repre­sen­ta­tion of transgression. While Augustine has a lot to say about Saturn in Book 7, ­there are only two brief references to the god as a child eater. The first is an aside where he recounts without endorsement a story told by the Roman writer Varro (first ­century b.c.), according to which Saturn was given a stone to devour in place of his son Jupiter, thus allowing the latter to survive.36 In a second reference, ­after reporting that Saturn was considered to be both primal seed and earth, Augustine quotes Varro as saying that “Saturn was wont to devour all that sprang from him ­because seeds return to the earth from which they arise.”37 Ironically misreading Augustine, Figure  2.6 portrays Saturn as literally ­devouring h ­ uman c­ hildren, an image at odds with Augustine’s concerns in Book 7. In place of Augustine’s allegory evoking the natu­ral cycle of seeds returning to an earth (personified as Saturn) from which they sprang, we see a Saturn



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e­ nthroned in majesty who disrupts rather than facilitates the natu­ral cycle by literally devouring new life, the product of ­those seeds. The second sequence on the right side of the miniature, portrays yet another cosmic act of disorder. This time, Saturn’s son Jupiter usurps his f­ ather’s throne and, sword in hand, chases him from the city into the primeval forest. While Jupiter and Saturn figure prominently in Book 7 of The City of God, the actions portrayed in ­these miniatures bear l­ ittle resemblance to Augustine’s polemic. Instead, they dramatize anx­i­eties that are only latent in Augustine’s text. The Hague manuscript takes liberties with his argument to show that if pagan religion has receded as a threat, the dire consequences of upsetting the divine and natu­ral ­orders remain as menacing in the fifteenth ­century as in the fourth. Of course, the same would have been true in the 1370s when Raoul de Presles translated and glossed The City of God. But none of the early manuscripts of Raoul’s translation contain anything like t­hese pictures. They apparently manifest cross-­pollination from other sources. But where might the fifteenth-­century Hague manuscript have found inspiration for this curious nexus of eroticism, castration, Saturn, Jupiter, and the place of ­humans, or more specifically, the ­human body in nature? Jean de Meun, Architect of Visual Eroticism Johan Huizinga asked a similar question in Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages and found his answer in the Roman de la Rose: “In complete accordance with the general spirit of the ­later M ­ iddle Ages, which sought to represent all thoughts as exhaustively as pos­si­ble and incorporate it into a system, the Roman de la Rose had given the ­whole of erotic culture a form so variegated, so conclusive and so rich that it was like a trea­sure of profane liturgy, learning, and legend. And it was precisely the duality of the Roman de la Rose, the work of two poets totally dif­fer­ent in nature and outlook, that made it even more useful as a bible of erotic culture: it contained texts for vari­ous uses.”38 Huizinga says nothing about how Jean de Meun constructs this “trea­sure of profane liturgy, learning, and legend.” Furthermore, despite referencing “systems,” Huizinga never attempts to show how they create so vivid an erotic culture, or what part Jean played in its making. As we saw above, manuscripts did not figure in Huizinga’s evidence, but even so it is doubtful ­whether illuminations prior to the fifteenth c­ entury would have served his case. Moreover, unlike Guillaume de Lorris’s exquisite lyrical evocations of nature, Jean’s verse lends itself more to dialogue and exposition than it does to ekphrasis. When it suits his purpose, however, Jean de Meun is

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Figure 2.7. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, Jupiter castrating his ­father Saturn, Paris early fifteenth c­ entury, University of Valencia, Biblioteca Histórica, ms 387, f. 41r. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Valencia, Biblioteca Histórica.

indeed capable of writing scenes so vivid as to set fire to the imagination of an illuminator. Few manuscripts illustrate Jean’s challenge to illuminators more intriguingly than does Valencia 387, created in Paris at the beginning of the fifteenth c­ entury most likely for the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (d.1404) and now held in the Biblioteca Histórica of the University of Valencia, ms. BH 387.39 Originally the codex featured three castration scenes: Jupiter emasculating Saturn, the castration of Abelard, and an image of Origen’s self-­mutilation (subsequently excised). The first of ­these, Figure 2.7, shows a sequence of the Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus narrative that we recognize from The Hague codex, but is much rarer



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in Rose manuscripts. Note, for example, the image of Saturn devouring infants while carry­ing a scythe emblematic of his attribute as kronos or time. The main action takes place along a diagonal axis sloping downward from Saturn’s head to Jupiter’s thence on to Venus riding the waves. Meanwhile a parallel axis extends from Saturn’s gaping groin along the outspread arms of his son ending at Jupiter’s right hand holding his f­ather’s severed genitals that point straight at Venus. Strikingly, Venus not only f­aces Saturn’s severed members in Jupiter’s hand, but her lower half consists of an inverted image of the same scrotum and penis. To make absolutely clear that Venus r­ eally is the spawn of Saturn’s sea-­cast organs, the artist portrays her in the act of parturition from his testicles. It would be difficult to imagine a more vivid depiction of the generative power of Saturn’s seed or the libidinal force it transmits to Venus, whom Sarah Kay terms the symbol of “disorderly desire . . . ​ more vital and more in touch with our real drives.”40 The scribe and illuminator of Valencia 387 understood the importance of the castration of Saturn and birth of Venus not simply for Jean’s erotic epistemology, but also for the structure of his poem as a w ­ hole. Jean himself went to ­g reat—if unorthodox—­lengths to create a memorable moment close to the beginning of his narrative to assure that readers would mark and remember the episode. In effect he resorted to the rhetorical equivalent of a pistol shot in a parlor when he has Reason abruptly switch from courtly to crude language to say that Jupiter “cut off his ­father’s balls as though they w ­ ere sausages” (“Saturnus . . . ​/ cui Jupiter copa les coilles / son fis, cum ce fussent andoilles”).41 Then, ­after some 160 lines, he has the Lover refer back to Reason’s vulgarity: Mes or vous oï nomer ci, Si cum me semble, une parole Si esbaulevree et si fole Que qui voudroit, ce croi, muser A vous emprendre a escuser, L’en n’i porroit trover desfences. [But a moment ago I heard you use a word, or so it seems to me, so insane and foolish, that if anyone chose to accuse you (of lewd speech) no one would ever find a word in your defense.]42

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At first it seems as though the Lover’s accusation of linguistic impropriety merely launches a debate as to the appropriate terms for referencing body parts, the Lover opting for euphemisms, with Reason sticking resolutely with “balls” (coilles). We soon realize, however, that the dispute between Reason and the Lover has a broader purpose than an extended discussion of linguistic propriety. More exactly, Saturn’s castration deflects attention from the language game ­toward the deeper question of ­whether a treatise on love can openly treat sexuality including the sexual organs and their functions. The question reframes the remaining 1,600 lines of Reason’s discourse. Predictably, the Lover espouses Guillaume de Lorris’s courtly rhe­toric where it is unthinkable to discuss physical love overtly, and anathema to refer to the genitals in anything but the most genteelly couched euphemisms. In opposition, Reason adopts what she calls “ordinary language” (plain texte) to evoke the sexual organs as “noble ­things” (nobles choses) created by God to be named and used openly without shame. Onc en ma vie ne pechié, N’ancor n’ai je mie pechié, Se je nomme les nobles choses Par plain texte, sanz metre gloses, Que mes peres en paradis Fist de ses propres mains jadis, Et touz les autres instrumens Qui sont pilers et argumens A soutenir nature humainne, Qui fust sanz eus et casse et vainne. Car volentiers, non pas envis, Mist Diex en coilles et en vis Force de generacion Par merveillouse entencion . . .” [It’s no sin to name noble ­things in ordinary language rather than glossing them ­because in the beginning my ­Father in Paradise made ­these and all the other means to sustain ­human nature



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with his own hands, for without ­these ­humans would be destroyed. And so, willingly, not reluctantly, he infused balls and prick with generative life force to wondrous intent.]43 ­ ere we begin to see Jean’s logic in openly naming the generative organs. ReaH son uses parrhesia—­bold, even scandalous speech—to name the male organs as the most intrusive way of constraining readers to face the force de generation, or generative force, which drives love. As she says: Mes [Dieu] vot que non lor trovasse A mon plaisir, et les nomasse proprement et communement Por croistre nostre entendement; Et la parole me donna Ou mout (très) precieus don a. [(God) wanted me to find proper and common names for them as it pleased me, in order to increase our understanding, and he gave me speech, a most precious gift.]44 She continues: Coilles est biaus mos et si l’ains, Si sont par foi coillon et vit, Honz mes plus biaus gaires ne vit. Je fis les mos, et sui certainne Qu’onques ne fis chose vilainne; Et diex, qui sages est et fis, Tient a bien fait ce que j’en fis . . . [Balls is a good name and I like it and so, in faith, are ballocks and prick; none more beautiful have ever been seen, I made the words, and I am certain that

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I never made anything base, and God, who is wise and sure, considers what­ever I made to be well made.]45 To drive home her insistence on using “proper” names rather than euphemisms, Reason makes an intriguing statement to the effect that her use of bold speaking has a dif­fer­ent meaning than what the Lover imputes to it. Ordinary or everyday language, she says, can have a covert meaning ­every bit as significant as figurative speech: Si dist l’en bien en nos escoles Maintes choses par paraboles Qui mout sont beles a entendre. Si ne doit l’en mie tout prendre A la lettre, quanque l’en ot. En ma parole autre sens ot, Dont si briement parler voloie Au moins quant de coilles parloie, Que celi que tu i vues metre; Et qui bien entendroit la lettre, Le sens verroit en l’escriture Qui esclarsist la chose oscure. La verité dedans repote Seroit clere, s’ele ert espote. [In our schools many ­things are expressed in figurative language which is very fair to hear, and not every­thing one hears should be taken literally. My words, at least when I spoke of balls, which I wished to mention briefly, had a dif­fer­ent meaning from the one you want to give them, and anyone who understood the text properly would find a meaning in it which would clarify the discourse. The truth contained within would be clear if it ­were explained.]46



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Reason’s parting advice to the Lover circles back to Saturn’s castration, the origin of what for the Lover figures merely as the site of a language scandal. For Jean de Meun, however, this primal scene—­what we may consider ground zero for the poem—­firmly links the origin of sexuality and desire to the invention of language. God granted Reason the gift of speech, we are told, so she could “make beautiful names” for t­ hese “noble t­ hings.” Her final caveat to the Lover insists that the only proper understanding of ­these two words are the names she gave them: Por ce t’ai ces deus mos rendus, Se tu les a bien entendus, Qui pris doivent estre a la lettre Tout proprement, sans glose metre. [That’s why I gave you ­these two words. For you to ­really understand them, they must be taken literally and correctly, without a gloss.]47 The two words, of course, are coilles and vis (“balls” and “prick”), which Reason again insists must be understood literally. Her admonition underscores how consistently Jean uses parrhesia—­scandalous or bold language—to focus on the male sexual organs. This stems in part from the castration scene shaping Reason’s discourse, as it w ­ ill henceforth structure the entire work. It is even more meaningful, of course, if one takes Jean de Meun’s castration of Saturn as roughly analogous to Augustine’s description of the castrated priests of Cybele. But where Augustine emphasizes the lack of seed and fertility in the mutilated priests, Reason replays the castration scene in a dif­fer­ent key. In reminding the Lover of “­these two words I gave you,” and in elaborating her “credo” on the need to exercise sexual functions, Reason makes sexuality not just a fitting topic for a treatise on love, but its guiding light. Which is why we can see how the flaming arrow by which Venus ignites “the ­castle of prudery” near the end of the Roman de la Rose became a beacon inspiring ­future artists to explore the fertile realm of verbal and visual eroticism.

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Roses by Any Other Name In closing, I would like to return briefly to François Villon, one of Jean de Meung’s most canny disciples. We have already seen how adroitly Villon deploys Lady Reason’s “two words,” both overtly and covertly, in the closing ballad of the Testament. In that case a visceral eroticism unfolds as one penetrates the linguistic veil to discover Villon, his erect penis foremost, swaying on the gallows. While undeniably an example of parrhesia, this scene also suggests what Villon wanted graphically visceral eroticism to do for his poetry: namely, to figure a new aesthetic for a hybrid lyric coupling the courtly forms of huitain and ballad with the vernacular language of Pa­ri­sian street p­ eople. This coupling of court and demimonde allows the characters in the danse macabre orchestrated by the Testament to discuss sexuality, nudity, excrement, and copulation with the nonchalance Huizinga ascribes to the resurgence of “primitive eroticism” in the fifteenth ­century.48 We see this graphically in the lament of the Belle Heaulmière, who deplores the havoc old age has wreaked on her body as an impediment to her sex life. As though casting herself in the image of Jean de Meun’s La Vieille (“the Old Crone”), the helmet-­maker/prostitute apostrophizes her directly: “A! Viellesse felonne et fière.”49 XLVIII Tolu m’a ma haulte franchise Que beaulté m’avoit ordonné Sur clers, merchans, et gens d’Eglise, Car lors il n’estoit homme né Qui tout le sien m’eust donné, Quoy qu’il en feust de repentailles, Mais que lui eusse abandonné Ce que refusent truandailles. [You have stripped me of the power That I had by right of beauty Over clerks, merchants, men of the Church For then ­there ­wasn’t a man born Who ­wouldn’t have given me all he owned Repent though he might l­ater on If I’d just let him have What now tramps ­won’t take for ­free.]50



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A few strophes ­later, she launches a retrospective description of her (former) body reminiscent of Guillaume de Lorris’s ekphrastic evocations of courtly personifications like Oiseuse (Leisure) or the dancers—­Pleasure, Beauty, Wealth, Largesse, Courtesy, etc.—in the first part of the Roman de la Rose. But in this case, the body is proudly nude. “Qu’ est devenu . . .” (“What has become of . . .”) LIII Ses gentes espaulles menues, Ses braz longs et ces mains traictises, Petiz tetins, hanches charnues, Eslevees, propres et faictises A tenir amoureuses lices, Ses larges reins, ce sadinet Assiz sur grosses fermes cuisses Dedans son petit jardinet?51 [The delicate ­little shoulders The long arms and slender hands the small breasts, the full buttocks High, broad, perfectly built For holding jousts of love The wide loins and the sweet quim Set between thick firm thighs In its own ­little garden?]52 La Belle Heaulmière eschews euphemism in naming sexual organs, thereby siding with Jean de Meun’s Dame Reason against the Lover, which is precisely Villon’s point. If Jean de Meun faults Guillaume de Lorris and his Lover-­persona for failing to portray sexuality openly, Villon frankly names sexuality as the driving force in “love” in the ­here and now. In place of the closed world of allegorical plea­sure gardens and fountains that tell you whom to date, Villon offers a concrete world of Pa­ri­sian taverns and bawdy h ­ ouses where love rents by the hour: “S’ilz n’ayment fors que pour l’argent, / On ne les ayme que pour l’eure” (“Since they make love only for money / You love them only by the hour”).53 On his view, the role of time, aging, and death are active agents in any account of physical love as La Belle Heaulmière memorably exclaims when introducing the current state of her naked body:

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LV —­C ’est d’umaine beaulté l’yssue—­, Les bras cours et les mains contraictes, Des espaulles toutes bossues, Mamelles, quoy? Toutes retraictes, Telles les hanches que les tectes, Du sadinet, fy! Quant des cuisses, Cuisses ne sont plus, mais cuissectes Grivelees comme saulcisses. [This is what the ­human beauty comes to: The arms short, the hands shriveled The shoulders all hunched up The breasts? Shrunk in again The buttocks gone the way of the tits The quim? Faugh! As for the thighs They ­aren’t thighs now, but sticks Speckled all over like sausages.]54 It would be difficult to find a more visceral example of fifteenth-­century erotic realism as described by Huizinga in Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages with which this article begins. More powerfully, thanks to their per­sis­tent, ingenious, and graphic manipulation of sexuality, the huitains and ballads of Le Testament mark the end—or, more properly, the beginning of the end—of what Huizinga calls the 200-­year dominance of the Roman de la Rose as the authority on secular love.55 We take nothing away from Villon’s poetic achievement, however, by observing that when he introduces the castration of Saturn and the birth of Venus from his sea-­borne genitals into the Rose, Jean de Meun blazed a trail for Villon. Notes 1. Johan Huizinga, Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages, ed. Graeme Small and Anton van der Lem, trans. Diane Webb (Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2020), 171. 2. Huizinga, Autumntide, 168. 3. Huizinga, Autumntide, 168. 4. Huizinga, Autumntide, 168. 5. Huizinga, Autumntide, 168. 6. Huizinga, Autumntide, 171. 7. Huizinga, Autumntide, 171. 8. “The eye is the organ of Weltanschauung, the organ though which we view the world but also through which we interpret, understand and define it,” quoted by Andrea Wulf,



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The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 248. 9. Leo Spitzer, “Zum Kommentar Villons,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 36 (1935): 207–211. 10. Spitzer, “Zum Kommentar Villons.” 11. For Villon’s Testament poems in the original, see François Villon, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-­Toulet with Laëtitia Tabard (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), lines 1997–2003; for the translations into En­glish, see The Poems of François Villon, trans. Galway Kinnell (Hanover, NH: University Press of New ­England, 1982), 153. 12. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, line 799, n. 3. 13. Huizinga, Autumntide, 169. 14. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, line 2002; 153. 15. An excerpt from a Talmudic commentary—­for which I am indebted to my good friend, Kim Z. Golden of Baltimore—­elucidates the ritual. “According to Rashi, based on the Midrash Rabbah, it does not mean literally the thigh; it means the Milah (organ of circumcision). The reason is ­because one who takes an oath must hold in his hand a sacred object, such as a scroll of the Torah or phylacteries. And the circumcision was his (Abraham’s) first commandment and came to him through suffering. And it was beloved to him. And (therefore) he chose it (as the object upon which to take the oath).” Rashi, The Torah, with Rashi’s Commentary, trans., annotated, and ed. Rabbi Yisrael Isser Zvi Herczeg (New York: Mesorah Publications, Ltd., 1995), 248. 16. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, lines 2012–2019; 154. I have altered the third and fourth lines to represent more accurately both the terms and their meaning in this context; similarly, I have rephrased the penultimate line from Kinnell’s “This is what we marvel at.” 17. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, lines 2013–2017; 155. 18. Algirdas J. Greimas and Teresa Mary Keane, Dictionnaire du moyen français (Paris: Larousse, 1992), renguillon, 545a. 19. Leo Spitzer, “Sur le vers 2015 du Testament de Villon,” Romania 65 (1939): 101–103, 101. In all fairness, we should note that Spitzer fired the first shot at Gerhard Moldenhauer by concluding his 1935 note with a critique of the latter’s moralizing, nationalistic interpretation of Villon in an article published in the Germanisch-­romanische Monatsschrift in 1934. 20. The Gibbet of Montfaucon, the royal gallows from the thirteenth ­century ­until the reign of Louis XIII in 1629, stood on a small hill outside the city walls of Paris. A version of the Grandes Chroniques de France with miniatures by Jean Fouquet (ca. 1460) shows the “Royal Gibbet” as a rectangular foundation approximately forty-­six feet long and thirty-­ nine feet wide with a number of twenty-­foot upright pillars aligned in four rows and connected by cross-­beams at the top and at midpoint of the uprights. This created space to expose forty-­five bodies at a time, some hanged on this gibbet, some hanged elsewhere and brought to Monfaucon to be exhibited as a warning to prospective malefactors. Bodies generally hung till they disintegrated, or their space was needed for another criminal. 21. Cited by Spitzer, “Zum Kommentar Villons,” 208. 22. Villon, The Poems of François Villon, 207.

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23. Spitzer, “Zum Kommentar Villons,” 209. 24. Huizinga, Autumntide, 168 and following. 25. Spitzer, “Sur le vers 2015 du Testament de Villon,” 102–103. 26. Huizinga, Autumntide, 363. 27. Huizinga, Autumntide, 364. 28. Huizinga, Autumntide, 364. 29. Huizinga, Autumntide, 364. 30. Huizinga, Autumntide, 364. 31. This scene was cut out of manuscript 387 of the Biblioteca Histórica of the University of Valencia, fol. 117–118. 32. See Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BNF), français 22912–22913. 33. Augustini de Civitate Dei Liber VII, https://­w ww​.­thelatinlibrary​.­com​/­augustine​ /­civ7​.­shtml, book 7, chapter 24; Augustine, City of God, 206. 34. Augustine de Civitate Dei Liber II, book 2, chapter 7. 35. See Stephen G. Nichols, “Castration as Exemplum: The Making of a Medieval Trope,” Coups de maître. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Culture, in Honour of John D. Lyons, ed. Michael Meere and Kelly Fender McConnell (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2021), 423–440, 425. 36. Augustine, City of God, 7.9, 193. 37. Augustine, City of God, 7.19, 201. 38. Huizinga, Autumntide, 171. 39. Heidrun Ost, “Illuminating the Roman de la Rose in the Time of the Debate: The Manuscript of Valencia,” Patrons, Authors and Workshops: Books and Book Production in Paris around 1400, ed. Godfried Croenen and Peter Ainsworth (Louvain, Belgium: Peeters, 2006), 405–438, 406. 40. Sarah Kay, “The Birth of Venus in the Roman de la Rose,” Exemplaria 9, no. 1 (1997): 7–37, 7. 41. All references from the Roman de la Rose are from Poirion’s edition, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Garnier-­ Flammarion, 1974), lines cited; translations the author’s own. The entire passage reads: “Justice qui jadis regnoit / au temps que Saturnus vivoit, / cui Jupiter copa les coilles / son fis, cum ce fussent andoilles, puis les geta dans la mer, (mout ot ci dur filz et amer) / dont Venus la deesse issi” (“Justice who used to reign / during the time when Saturn lived / who ­ ere sausages, then threw them in the sea [he had cut off his f­ ather’s balls as though they w a very hard and b­ itter son], from which the goddess Venus arose”). Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 5535–5541. 42. de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 5700–5704. 43. de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 6955–6968. 44. de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 7091–7096. 45. de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 7116–7122. 46. de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 7153–7166. 47. Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 7181–7184. 48. Huizinga, Autumntide, 168. 49. Meun, Roman de la Rose, 2: 457.



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50. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, lines 461–468; 55. 51. A vulgar slang term for “vagina” in the fifteenth of sixteenth ­century, similar in linguistic register to coilles. Sadinet, from Lat. Sapidus, “sweet, savory, prudent, wise,” Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes, ed. Walther von Wartburg and Jean-­Pierre Chambon, 25 vols. (Bonn, Germany: F. Klopp, 1928–2002), 11: 202a; diminutive of M ­ iddle French sade, “agréable, gracieux,” Jean-­Baptiste La Curne de Sainte-­Palaye, Dictionnaire historique de l’ancienne langue françoise depuis son origine jusqu’au siècle de Louis XIV, 10 vols. (Paris: Niort, rue saint-­Jean 6, 1882), 9: 302–303; “sexe de la Femme,” http://­w ww​.­atilf​.­f r​/­dmf​/­definition​/­sadinet; Sadinet, “vulve,” André Burger, Lexique de la langue de Villon (Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie E. Droz, 1957); “la nature de la femme, et plus particulièrement le mons Veneris,” Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancien langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle (Paris: Émile Bouillon, Libraire-­Éditeur, rue Richelieu, 1892). Godefroy cites instances from several other fifteenth-­ century poets, but Villon’s two uses are the ones cited in the other dictionaries. 52. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, lines 501–508; 57–59. 53. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, lines 578–579; 63, with modification. 54. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, lines 517–524; 59. 55. “For about two centuries [the Roman de la Rose] . . . ​not only completely dominated the forum of aristocratic love, but, b­ ecause of its wealth of encyclopedic digressions into all sorts of other areas, was also the trea­sure ­house from which educated ­people drew the liveliest ele­ments of their intellectual development.” Huizinga, Autumntide, 127.

c ha p te r th ree

Jean Chartier and the End of the Historical Tradition at Saint-­Denis Derek R. Whaley

Over the previous two centuries, many historians have affirmed the importance of the late medieval chronicle tradition begun at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-­ Denis outside Paris. However, most focus only on t­ hose authors who wrote in the twelfth through the early fifteenth centuries, neglecting the final contributor to the tradition, Jean Chartier (d. ca. 1464). This monastic chanter completed and extended the Latin Chronicorum Karoli Sexti (“Chronicles of Charles VI”) written by Michel Pintoin, a prominent monk at Saint-­Denis. Chartier then compiled his own Latin and vernacular chronicles of the events that loomed large over his life. Re­nais­sance publishers of the Grandes Chroniques de France always included Chartier’s French chronicle in their printed collections. However, historians of the nineteenth c­ entury judged this work to be derivative and of inferior quality relative to t­ hose that preceded it—­a tired throwback, evidence of a waning of quality in the chronicle tradition as the ­Middle Ages drew to a close. A general consensus has formed within the modern historical community that Chartier’s chronicle is best left out of the canon of Dionysian historical lit­er­a­ture. This chapter reassesses Chartier’s place within the Dionysian corpus of historical works. The relatively negative evaluation of the writing of Chartier’s period as a ­whole, itself part of the narrative of decline made popu­lar by Huizinga, undoubtedly helps to account for the lack of interest in the work. But Chartier 72



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strategically employed an archaizing style to create closure for the Dionysian tradition, and closure is by no means the same ­thing as decline. The Historical Tradition at Saint-­Denis A new history of the reign of Charles VII of France has just hit the newsstands and critics are proving quite skeptical of its merit. Consensus is that Jean Chartier’s Chronique de Charles VII, Roi de France (c. 1420–1422) is dry and colorless, valuable for its accuracy but too short and lacking excitement. Many compare it unfavorably to the chronicle that preceded it, that of Michel Pintoin, arguing that this new piece has nothing in common with Pintoin’s magnificent work and calling it an imitation that reproduces the defects but none of the merits of its model. O ­ thers highlight the g­ reat picturesque qualities of Froissart and the philosophic tones of Philip de Commynes, emphasizing that this new compilation lacks all such stylistic embellishments. Indeed, as a rec­ord of a period that includes the exciting adventures of Jeanne d’Arc, this book is flat and conformist, incapable of arousing much admiration. Many have also attacked the author himself, g­ rand chanter at Saint-­Denis and royal historiographer of the king, calling him more notary than historian, a man unable to produce a unique and in­de­pen­dent idea, who lacks the lively intelligence and generous impartiality that made his pre­de­ces­sor Pintoin so remarkable. One critic even speculates that, had Chartier been more inspired, the modern view of Charles VII’s reign would doubtless have been radically dif­fer­ent. Even the volume’s editor concludes that this book, devoid of literary quality and critical commentary, represents the last stage of a genre in decline. It is, in short, a mundane collection of chronologically or­ga­nized documentary facts—­neglected, unwanted, and uninteresting to any serious scholar.1 The preceding criticisms reflect au­then­tic, usually offhand, statements made by respected modern historians regarding the quality of Chartier’s texts and the man himself. They directly reflect a long-­running debate over the historical value of regnal chronicles produced at Saint-­Denis during the late ­Middle Ages. Yet ­there is a vast difference in attitude ­toward Chartier compared to more favorable opinions t­ oward the other chroniclers in the Dionysian tradition, namely Suger, Rigord, Primat, Guillaume de Nangis, Richard Lescot, Pierre d’Orgemont, and Michel Pintoin. All of ­these men are now considered to have written impor­tant, if not always reliable, histories of their respective periods.

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Before exploring the reasons for this disparity in opinion, it is useful to briefly summarize the historiography of the Dionysian historiographical tradition. The abbey of Saint-­Denis dates to the sixth and seventh centuries, but its historical school was a late development emerging in the twelfth ­century, largely at the initiative of the abbot Suger.2 Besides rebuilding the abbey’s church, Suger wrote a complete biography of the reign of Louis VI as well as a partial history of Louis VII’s.3 Early in the next c­ entury, the monk Rigord wrote a partial biography of the life of Philip II to 1206.4 ­These Latin chronicles, along with several non-­Dionysian works, formed the basis for the first French vernacular chronicle produced at the abbey, the Roman des Rois, compiled, adapted, and translated by the monk Primat and presented to Philip III in 1274.5 From this point forward, the Dionysian historical school maintained two textual traditions—­one Latin, one French—­and both w ­ ere spread in­de­pen­dently by monastic scriptoria and commercial workshops throughout Northern France and the Low Countries.6 The monks at Saint-­Denis continued to add content to both traditions. Primat and Guillaume de Nangis wrote Latin and French accounts of con­ temporary events, which anonymous monks at the abbey continued throughout the early f­ourteenth c­entury.7 In 1329, a prolific monk, Richard Lescot, took charge of the scriptorium at Saint-­Denis and began the pro­cess of assembling all of the separate histories produced at the abbey since 1274 into one coherent narrative.8 His masterpiece was a continuous history of France from its origins ­until 1350, written in the vernacular.9 This, in turn, was incorporated into the Chroniques de France, produced u ­ nder the direction of Pierre d’Orgemont, chancellor to Charles V.10 Although not strictly a Dionysian text, this edition, which extends the narrative to 1379, indisputably fits within the Dionysian tradition due to its content and intent.11 Meanwhile, Lescot remained active during this period, writing a Latin history that ended with the death of Charles V in 1380.12 Following Lescot, Michel Pintoin, another monk at Saint-­Denis, continued such historical recording through the reign of Charles VI u­ ntil 1421, the year of Pintoin’s death.13 However, no vernacular chronicle paralleled Pintoin’s work, nor would a translation of his work appear for at least a de­cade.14 The occupation of Saint-­Denis by the En­glish in 1420 interrupted the three c­ entury–­long historiographical production at the abbey.15 It was in this environment that Jean Chartier entered the historical rec­ord as Pintoin’s continuator, serving as the first official royal historiographer while si­mul­ta­neously becoming the last Dionysian chronicler.



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Who Was Jean Chartier? As noted above, many nineteenth-­century scholars viewed Chartier’s continuations as poor attempts at copying the style and focus of Pintoin, derivative of other con­temporary authors such as Guillaume Cousinot and Gilles le Bouvier. ­These lingering biases have often caused modern historians to discount the importance of Chartier in Dionysian studies even while citing his texts regularly for the information they provide and acknowledging their status as the final entries in the centuries-­long historical school at Saint-­Denis. However, another issue impacting perceptions of Chartier is the long historiographical debate concerning his origins and life. Relatively l­ ittle is known about Chartier. Most of the information about which historians are certain derives from the chronicler’s own writings: the Chronique Latine, a Latin chronicle of the reign of Charles VII of France that ends prematurely in 1450, and the Chronique de Charles VII, Roi de France, a French chronicle of the same reign that concludes just ­after the death of the king in 1461.16 In the prologues to both chronicles, the monk outlines basic details of his life as royal historiographer. He states that his vernacular chronicle was “made and compiled by me, ­brother Jean Chartier, monk and chanter of the church of monseigneur Saint Denis, chronicler of the said kingdom, assigned, ordained, and deputed for this by the king, my sovereign lord.”17 Thus, he explic­itly names himself as author, something that few Dionysian writers had done before him.18 In his Latin prologue, he adds that he was personally given this appointment by Charles VII on November 8, 1437, and he was granted an annual salary of two hundred livres parisis.19 This makes him the first chronicler at Saint-­Denis to have verifiably been on the royal payroll.20 He ­later proves in his vernacular narrative that this fee was necessary in order to support him in his research. Although Chartier is not a frequent character within his own chronicles, he does directly identify himself on a number of occasions, which is unknown elsewhere within the Dionysian tradition.21 In his French text, his presence is implied when Paris was recaptured by the French in 1436 and cele­brations broke out in the town of Saint-­Denis.22 More specifically, Chartier states that he personally interviewed three Scottish priests who came to the abbey in 1449 to report an incursion made by the En­glish into Scotland.23 ­Later, in 1450, the chronicler reveals his presence at the siege of Harfleur, noting that he “certifies to have seen and been pre­sent, enduring ­g reat cold and suffering many vexations, although

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I was and am salaried and compensated for the expenses for both myself and my ­horses by the order and w ­ ill of the king.”24 This statement further suggests that Chartier may have been with the royal court throughout much of the Normandy campaign of 1449–1450, which explains why this significant portion of the chronicle is so detailed. Although l­ittle more can be inferred about Chartier from his textual productions, a few additional facts concerning Chartier and his works have been agreed on by historians over subsequent centuries that collectively provide more perspective on his life and the diffusion of his works. Although occasionally contested, a general consensus holds that Chartier died on February  9, 1464, a date found in a Saint-­Denis necrology.25 His successor as royal historiographer was Jean Castel, abbot of the Cluniac monastery Saint-­Maur-­des-­Fossés.26 ­There are two principal phases in the historiography relating to Chartier. During the first, between 1625 and 1902, historians associated him with the supposed ­brothers Guillaume Chartier, bishop of Paris from 1447 to 1472, and Alain Chartier, a court poet and royal secretary. This misplaced connection dominated biographies of Jean Chartier and influenced how historians came to perceive the author and his works. During the second phase, which began in 1869 and continues to the pre­sent, partially overlapping with the first, Chartier’s connection to his presumed siblings is first challenged and then dismissed. But without this familial link, his relationship with the king’s court at Bourges and the reason for his elevation to royal historiographer become mysterious. In order to fully understand who Chartier was as a historical entity, it is necessary to explore both of ­these phases of his historiography. Phase one has its origins in a history of Saint-­Denis written by one of the abbey’s monks, Jacques Doublet, in 1625. In this work, Doublet makes an offhand remark suggesting that Jean Chartier was the b­ rother of Guillaume Chartier, bishop of Paris.27 Why Doublet made this connection is unknown, but Guillaume does appear three times within Chartier’s chronicle during the years that the chronicler was itinerant with the court, so Doublet may have inferred an association.28 By 1706, the Chartier genealogy had expanded to include a third member: the court poet and Valois administrator Alain Chartier. Michel Félibien, a monk at Saint-­Maur-­des-­Fossés, was the first to elaborate heavi­ly on the life and familial relationships of the chronicler. He explained in his history of Saint-­Denis that Chartier had served as provost of Mareuil, a satellite cloister of the abbey, which gave him sufficient prestige to serve as interim head of Saint-­Denis during a vacancy following the death of the abbot, Guillaume de



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Farréchal, in 1440.29 Modern historians largely agree with Félibien’s descriptions relating to Jean’s role at the abbey, but his lack of citation and tendency to make assumptions regarding the monk’s familial relationships nonetheless make his conclusions suspect. He is also the only historian in this study to unabashedly praise Chartier, emphasizing that his close proximity to the royal court made his accounts reliable, accurate, and, indeed, the most original works to come from the period, conclusions that l­ater historians challenged. While ­Félibien or Doublet may well have had access to material long since lost, especially since Doublet operated within Saint-­Denis, without t­hese sources their biographical descriptions must be treated as unverifiable. By the nineteenth ­century, kinship between Jean, Guillaume, and Alain went undisputed. In an article published in 1842, Paul Pézet outlines an extended history of the Chartier ­family. He primarily responds to two questions relating to the ­family: was Alain from Normandy, and ­were Jean and Guillaume his ­brothers? On the former point, Pézet is adamant that Alain was, indeed, Norman and born in Bayeux, citing numerous sources that prove this.30 Regarding the latter point, the author admits that t­ here is no con­temporary proof whatsoever that Jean and Alain are related, yet the abundance of secondary sources stating as much assures him that the attribution is correct.31 He goes so far to say that “we have just seen that it is incontestable that Jean was the b­ rother of Alain,” a­ fter which he uses the same line of reasoning to prove Guillaume’s kinship to both supposed ­brothers.32 Pézet argues further that all three ­brothers ­were the sons of Jean (I) Chartier.33 Auguste Vallet de Viriville uses Pézet’s biography as the basis for his own study of the chronicler, but he goes even further and provides a complete backstory for the f­ amily in the preface to his critical edition of Chartier’s chronicle.34 He explains how the Chartiers w ­ ere actually minor Norman nobles who fled the duchy when the En­glish conquered it in the 1410s. Once at the court in Bourges, Alain became the dauphin Charles’s secretary and Guillaume became the first clerk of parlement.35 The prob­lem is that none of this has anything to do with Jean. Vallet de Viriville never actually associates him with his supposed ­brothers, relying instead on the arguments made by e­ arlier historians. He immediately transitions from discussing the Chartier ­family to discussing Jean as the chronicler and monk, tacitly implying that their shared name is enough to prove their kinship.36 By presenting this more thorough biography of Jean Chartier in such a seemingly well-­referenced manner, Pézet and Vallet de Viriville established a new status quo for historians. For example, Félicie d’Ayzac, in yet another history

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of Saint-­Denis published in 1860, explains that Jean’s position within the abbey was due in large part to the influence of Alain, although she provides no sources to support this assertion. She then attempts to describe the character of Jean, writing that “nothing could better suit the serious tastes of Jean Chartier, one of ­those religious types who found their delights in the s­ ilent walls of the scriptorium.”37 Her biography appears to be more prose poem than summary of historical facts. The second phase in the historiography relating to Jean Chartier begins with a study on the Chartier ­family produced in 1869 by Gaston du Fresne de Beaucourt.38 Beaucourt challenges the claim that Jean was a b­ rother of Guillaume and Alain, but he also dismisses a necrology of Saint-­Denis that places the monk’s date of death in 1464, nonetheless conceding that Chartier likely died before the Chroniques de France ­were first printed in 1476.39 Following this study, Francis Pérot documents an entire genealogy for the Chartier ­family, from the early f­ ourteenth c­ entury to 1900, deriving the medieval portion from the writings of Hubert, a late seventeenth-­century canon at Orleans.40 But Perot’s adherence to this early modern source c­ auses him to downplay the increasing controversy, first set in motion by Beaucourt, over Jean’s relationship to Guillaume and Alain, and he dismisses outright two fifteenth-­century sources that name the third Chartier b­ rother “Thomas” as opposed to “Jean.”41 Like his pre­ de­ces­sors, Pérot also ignores the Dionysian necrology and instead extends Jean’s life to at least 1497, the latest date given for his death by any historian.42 By 1900, this biography of Chartier, with all its faults and internal contradictions, was widely accepted by the historical community. But its heavy reliance on secondary sources and unfounded assumptions would prove to be its undoing. The ­Great Revision It had become clear by the turn of the twentieth ­century that a number of assumptions regarding Jean Chartier did not stand up to scrutiny. Contradictory stories about his ancestry, origins, and early life certainly troubled some historians, while his date of death remained widely disputed. But a number of aspects of his life remained uncontested, including most prominently his relationship to Guillaume and Alain. Beaucourt was the first to openly challenge this construct, and he would find an ally in Charles Samaran, who wrote a half ­century l­ater and definitively put an end to most of the debates surrounding Chartier’s identity and life.



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Beaucourt’s analy­sis of the Chartier ­family, the first study reliant almost e­ ntirely on primary and near-­contemporary sources, untangled many of the myths that had arisen around the chronicler. According to Beaucourt’s research, Chartier first enters the historical rec­ord in 1430 as the provost of Garenne, a position that involved the management of multiple abbey properties.43 In 1433, he was, as noted by Félibien ­earlier, appointed provost of Mareuil, a post he held for a year.44 Following this, Chartier r­ ose to the rank of abbey commander, or trea­surer, the penultimate rank within the abbey hierarchy.45 Chartier also served as the abbey’s l­awyer throughout most of his c­ areer, a position that undoubtedly brought him into frequent contact with the En­glish parlement in Paris and, ­later, the Valois parlement in Bourges.46 In 1437, as the monk himself writes, he became historiographer as well as a royal chaplain.47 Beaucourt borrows from Félibien at this point to describe how Chartier was appointed one of the co-­regents during the two-­year interabbacy following the death of Guillaume de Farréchal in 1440.48 It was shortly a­ fter this, in 1445, that Chartier received his highest rank at Saint-­Denis, that of g­ rand chanter.49 The remainder of the narrative mostly follows Chartier’s own writings, although Beaucourt reverts to old traditions when it comes to stating the chronicler’s date of death. What is most revolutionary, however, is that following a prolonged discussion regarding the relationship between Guillaume and Alain and their order of birth, Beaucourt comes to the unorthodox conclusion that Jean was never their ­brother.50 Directly confronting the assumptions that led to this association, the historian dismisses each in turn, drawing attention to the fact that t­ here w ­ ere at least four other Jean Chartiers operating within the courts of Charles VII and Louis XI, none of whom is ever associated with Guillaume and Alain.51 Furthermore, con­temporary evidence strongly supports Thomas Chartier, a royal secretary and notary, as being the third ­brother.52 Although Pérot dismisses Beaucourt’s conclusions in his 1900 study, two other con­temporary sources acknowledge the possibility that Jean was not related to Guillaume and Alain: Auguste Molinier writes in 1904 that “this fact seems false,” while the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica states that “Jean Chartier . . . ​was not, as is sometimes stated, also a ­brother of the poet.”53 Nevertheless, at least one influential historian as late as 1903 still associated Jean with Alain.54 The m ­ atter was only put to rest in the 1920s ­after careful analy­sis by Charles Samaran. Samaran was an im­mensely influential medieval French historian whose works span eight de­cades and who died at the age of 102 in 1982.55 In 1926, Samaran presented his own concise history of Chartier, drawing heavi­ly from

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Beaucourt’s biography but expanding on it as well. One of his first suggestions is that Chartier succeeded as ­grand chanter soon ­after November 1, 1441, when the incumbent, Hue Pain, died.56 This placed his promotion to the rank in the ­middle of the interabbacy period, when Chartier was one of the custodians of Saint-­Denis. Samaran also emphasizes that Chartier’s death in 1464 should not be contested. In addition to repeating the fact that Jean Castel took over as historiographer that year, he also adds that Jean Jaloux became ­grand chanter at Saint-­Denis, thus providing further proof that Chartier was deceased by this time.57 ­Because of this, Chartier clearly could not have been personally involved in the publication of the Chroniques de France in 1476.58 Other­wise, Samaran largely agrees with the conclusions of Beaucourt and a combination of their biographies of the chronicler is now generally accepted as the definitive version of the monk’s life. ­Today, of ­those who do discuss the chanter, many feel inclined to mention his previous association with Guillaume and Alain but for the purpose of dismissing it.59 Chartier’s Chronicles Modern historians agree that Jean Chartier produced two chronicles, one in Latin, one in French, and most also acknowledge him as the author of the final three years of Pintoin’s Chronicorum Karoli Sexti, the chronicle of Charles VI. However, the centuries of fabricated and erroneous history regarding the monk’s biography have left a substantial impact on how modern historians approach Chartier. Confusion regarding his biography has led most historians simply to ignore him as a historical individual and instead focus exclusively on his literary output. More certainty over his biography is desirable, ­because it would simplify the job of determining the relationship between the chronicles and their ­ ere written, and why they w ­ ere written in the manner in sources, when they w which they appear. Bernard Guenée, the most prolific historian of the final ­century of the Dionysian school, questioned the date that Saint-­Denis ceased to function as the royal scriptorium, suggesting that Chartier may have ­either died before 1464 or had his title revoked by Louis XI.60 Meanwhile, Peter Lewis speculated that Chartier began his continuation of Pintoin’s Latin chronicle soon ­after his pre­de­ces­sor died in 1421, seemingly ignoring Samaran’s evidence, discussed below, that suggests the continuation was only begun ­after Chartier’s appointment as historiographer in 1437.61 Such contradictory conclusions



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demonstrate that a high level of uncertainty remains regarding the life of Jean Chartier. In order to address ­these contradictions, a basic literary chronology must be drafted. Michel Pintoin died in 1421, a year ­after Saint-­Denis was given to the En­glish in the Treaty of Troyes.62 It appears that no abbey historian replaced Pintoin a­ fter his death, or, if one was appointed, he neither continued Pintoin’s work nor contributed anything that survived. Chartier even states this outright, explaining in his Latin prologue that “tria lustra supplere deffectum necessitas me compellit. . . . ​A quo siquidem tempore nullatenus execucioni aut saltem quid modici gesta denotabuntur a nullo. Quare dictum tempus [recuperare] sigillatim necessitas me compellit” (“Necessity compels me to fill a fifteen-­year gap. . . . ​Moreover, since this time [1422], the deeds have by no means been recorded, or [only] a small amount has been done to provide any rec­ord of events. It is for this reason that necessity compels me to recover the said time, piece by piece”).63 French forces captured and lost Saint-­Denis twice: first, ­under Jeanne d’Arc in 1429 and then u­ nder Jean, bastard of Orleans, in 1435, but neither occupation prompted a revival of the historical school at the abbey.64 Thus, it was only a­ fter Chartier was appointed historiographer in 1437 that literary output again issued from the abbey. Once installed, Chartier completed Pintoin’s chronicle, continuing it to 1450, and then translated it into French and extended it, with elaborations, to just ­after the death of Charles VII in 1461. The earliest work attributed to Chartier is the material found in the final three years of the Chronicorum Karoli Sexti, which Pintoin left unfinished in 1421.65 Louis Bellaguet, who produced a critical transcription and translation of the chronicle in 1852, noted that the final sections appear to be in a dif­fer­ent style and of a lesser literary quality than the preceding passages. Following this revelation, Samaran used comparative analy­sis and orthography to find key textual similarities between the ­later sections of Pintoin’s chronicle and Chartier’s Chronique Latine, concluding that Chartier must have added the final sixteen chapters to his pre­de­ces­sor’s text.66 Furthermore, Samaran discovered that Pintoin’s chronicle placed the age of the dauphin Charles—­the ­future Charles VII— at thirty-­four in 1419, an age he did not actually attain ­until 1437, the earliest year in which Chartier could have composed ­these chapters if he only began writing ­after his appointment as historiographer. Only a single complete copy of this continuation survives (BNF latin 5959) and, revealingly, the beginning of an early edition—­likely the first—of Chartier’s Chronique Latine follows it. This

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provides further evidence of a shared authorship and an intention on the part of Chartier to continue the work of Pintoin.67 Chartier’s authorship of the two lives of Charles VII, one Latin, one French, is not disputed. In the prologues to both chronicles, Chartier names himself explic­itly. However, in his Latin chronicle, he does not give himself the title of chanter, which he received between 1441 and 1445, suggesting that he began this chronicle no more than eight years ­after his appointment as royal historiographer.68 Another chronological touchstone is suggested in his prologue, which is significantly longer than that found in his French chronicle. In this, he dedicates his text to the pope, the emperor, and the kings of France, E ­ ngland, and Sicily. This follows precisely the same order and format that Pintoin used in the introductions to each of the “books” (annual breaks) in his chronicle, thereby providing further evidence that Chartier intended his Latin chronicle to serve as a continuation and imitation of Pintoin’s text.69 The fact that no emperor actually reigned during the years included in Pintoin’s chronicle does not stop Pintoin from mentioning the emperor in his list of notable personages, and it was prob­ably this format that Chartier was mimicking. Nonetheless, it is pos­si­ble that the mention of an emperor could potentially link the date of this prologue to the period 1433 to 1437, the years in which Sigismund of Luxembourg, the only ruler to be crowned emperor in the first half of the fifteenth ­century, reigned as emperor.70 Chartier made the decision to end the Chronique Latine prematurely, not with the death of the king in 1461 but at the end of the Normandy campaign in August 1450. A ­ fter recounting the French capture of Cherbourg, Chartier appends a short epilogue that states that the king’s victory over the En­glish serves as an appropriate conclusion to this work.71 Few historians have questioned this premature ending, but the reason for it may lie in a theory suggested by Samaran, discussed below. More generally, though, this Latin chronicle appears to be l­ittle more than an executive summary of the ­battles fought against primarily the En­glish throughout the reign of Charles VII, with occasional asides that hint at wider con­temporary social and po­liti­cal issues. This Latin chronicle subsequently served as the basis for Chartier’s next proj­ect, a vernacular history of the reign of the king. Chartier began writing his Chronique de Charles VII between 1441 and 1445, ­after he became chanter, the title that he gives himself in his prologue.72 In general, this chronicle serves as a direct translation of his Latin text, but it includes many extended sequences and new chapters and continues beyond the end of Charles VII’s life to conclude with the escalating civil war in ­England.73



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­ ecause it was repeatedly copied throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuB ries and was included in the printed editions of the Chroniques de France, it is this text that has received more attention from historians and been cited more heavi­ly. Nonetheless, it is intimately dependent on Chartier’s Chronique Latine, and both shared the same sources and w ­ ere created u ­ nder sponsorship by the French king. Most of the narrative differences between the two texts revolve around po­liti­cal issues, especially t­hose relating to Burgundy, a fact that Philippe Contamine, Olivier Bouzy, and Xavier Hélary argue reveals a growing po­liti­cal awareness by the author.74 Only the final eleven years of the narrative are completely unique to this chronicle and, notably, material relating to four of ­those years is almost completely absent, as is any hint of the rehabilitation trial of Jeanne d’Arc.75 Chartier states in his Latin prologue that he relied on several sources to fill the sixteen-­year gap between Pintoin’s death in 1421 and his appointment as historiographer in 1437. However, historians have failed to agree on what t­hese sources ­were. For the final years of Charles VI’s reign, no contributing source is known. For the years 1422 to 1429, Vallet de Viriville, among o­ thers, believed that the Chronique de la Pucelle, attributed to Guillaume Cousinot, served as Chartier’s main source of information.76 Samaran, investigating this claim, compared chapters of La Pucelle to passages in both of Chartier’s chronicles, proving that ­there is a relationship, but that he could not determine the specifics of it.77 René Planchenault also compared the texts and found that the first twenty-­ nine chapters of La Pucelle almost exactly match passages in Chartier’s texts but that l­ ater chapters differ significantly.78 ­Because of this variance, Samaran speculated that Chartier’s chronicles actually served as the basis for the La Pucelle, rather than the reverse, thereby leaving the source for Chartier’s texts unknown.79 Lewis has since argued that La Pucelle was actually written around 1456, possibly by Jean Juvénal des Ursins, archbishop of Reims, rather than Cousinot, as evidence to assist in the trial of Jeanne d’Arc.80 Thus, it seems impossible that it would have served as a source for the Chronique Latine, which was begun prior to 1445. Many historians, including Vallet de Viriville and Molinier, have also debated w ­ hether the Histoire de Charles VII by Gilles le Bouvier, herald of the king in Berry, provided material for Chartier’s chronicles.81 Much of the confusion derives from the fact that Chartier and Le Bouvier wrote at the same time and, therefore, discussed the same subject m ­ atter.82 Samaran, again using comparative analy­sis, found no significant similarities in word usage or style to

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suggest a relationship between the texts for the period 1420 to 1437.83 Unfortunately for modern historians, this means the original source material that Chartier used to fill in the pre-1437 gap remains unknown. On the other hand, Samaran did find abundant similarities between the two texts for the years 1449 to 1450, which suggests ­either that Chartier’s Latin chronicle was the source for Le Bouvier’s history or that the chronicles shared an other­wise unknown source.84 The latter theory is compelling. Samaran theorizes that the Valois government may have commissioned a French-­language rec­ord of the campaign in Normandy, which both Le Bouvier and Chartier copied and which Chartier also translated into Latin. If this is true, it means that most of Chartier’s—­and Le Bouvier’s—­rec­ords for this time do not reflect personal knowledge but are simply copies and translations of government reports given to them to include in their chronicles. It may even imply that all of their writings ­were simply derivative of government-­provided material, which would explain why so l­ittle is known about their sources.85 This challenges arguments that ­these works have an “undeniable originality” or that Chartier’s chronicle was “the most original piece we have of this time.”86 However, without possession of the original source documents, which likely ­were lost in the French Revolution when over four million books and medieval manuscripts ­were destroyed, this is just speculation.87 The only fact historians know regarding the sources used for Chartier’s chronicles is that they once existed in some form but are now lost. Three Centuries of Tradition Chartier’s Chronique de Charles VII represents a translation and continuation of the Chronique Latine, itself presumably the continuation of Pintoin’s Latin chronicle. The Chronique Latine ends abruptly in 1450, eleven years before the death of Charles VII. This fact and the subsequent diffusion of the Chronique de Charles VII throughout northern France and the Low Countries following its inclusion in the ­Grand Chroniques de France render the vernacular chronicle more impor­tant than its Latin counterpart. In 1476, printer Pasquier Bonhomme made the work the concluding piece in the Chroniques de France, which was or­ ga­nized as a chronological sequence of vernacular chronicles, many of which ­were originally produced u ­ nder royal commission, spanning the entire history of the French monarchy from the mythical fall of Troy and the rise of the Merovingians in the fifth ­century to the death of Charles VII in 1461. Dionysian authors include Primat, Guillaume de Nangis, Richard Lescot, and Jean



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Chartier, supplemented with Pierre d’Orgemont’s lives of Jean II and Charles V, as well as a life of Charles VI formed through adapted translations by Jean Juvénal des Ursins and Gilles le Bouvier of Pintoin’s Chronicorum Karoli Sexti.88 So situated, the Chronique de Charles VI seems to form one part of a single continuous narrative of French history spanning antiquity to 1461. Did Chartier in fact view t­ hese e­ arlier chronicles as a continuum and did he consider his own writings as continuations to them?89 Chartier certainly viewed his chronicles as of a similar quality and status as the works of his pre­de­ces­sors. In the prologue to his vernacular chronicle, Chartier promises to rec­ord history “le plus véritablement que je pourray, et sans porter faveur à aucun, ne parcialité” (“as truthfully as I can and without displaying f­ avor or partiality to anyone”).90 This is not a disclaimer to protect the monk from accusations of propagandism; rather, it reflects an adherence to a standard of quality and approach long practiced at the scriptorium at Saint-­ Denis. In this, it is similar to other disclaimers found in written products produced at monastic institutions throughout Eu­rope. For example, Primat, in the prologue to the Roman des Rois, assures readers that he has added nothing of his own, taking all of his material from e­ arlier writers who had complied their histories according to the deeds of the kings and following their language.91 Thus, ­there is a common concern for accuracy and impartiality among monastic writers, including t­ hose at Saint-­Denis, and Chartier is situating himself within this standard of quality. More specifically, though, Chartier also patterns his Chronique Latine directly off the formatting of Pintoin, as discussed above, and he directly mentions his pre­de­ces­sor’s chronicle twice in his Chronique de Charles VII: once at the beginning of the text when recounting the divisions caused by the Treaty of Troyes and again when discussing the death of Queen Isabeau in 1435.92 Therefore, it is clear that he considers both his chronicles to be continuations of Pintoin’s Chronicorum Karoli Sexti (“Chronicles of Charles VI”). But such a direct reference to a pre­de­ces­sor’s work is highly unusual within the Dionysian tradition and suggests that another issue was at stake for Chartier: legitimacy. Saint-­Denis was occupied by the En­glish for sixteen years prior to Chartier’s appointment as historiographer. During this time, the town and abbey neither put up much re­sis­tance to the En­glish nor enthusiastically supported the three French conquests. This implies, at worst, collusion with the ­enemy and, at best, tacit indifference. While the final recapture of Saint-­Denis by the French in April 1436 was certainly a morale boost for the Valois cause,

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the fact cannot be ignored that the town’s enthusiasm for the dynasty was lacking. Franck Collard, borrowing partially from Bernard Guenée, argues that with “the abusive use of the oriflamme during the Armagnac-­Burgundian civil war and their ac­cep­tance of En­glish authority, the monks of St. Denis loosened the ties between the Valois and the monastery,” leading Louis XI to entrust the position of royal chronicler to a monk of a dif­fer­ent abbey.93 Therefore, to Collard, the occupation of Saint-­Denis negatively impacted the reputation of the abbey, although the new king did not act on this sentiment ­until ­after Chartier’s death in 1464. Nonetheless, it remains unclear why Chartier was even appointed royal historiographer since he lacked any known connection to Charles VII or the court at Bourges. This fact doubtless motivated ­earlier historians to associate Jean with more notable Chartiers. Within this context, it appears that Chartier did every­thing in his power to dispel suspicions that he and the abbey ­were complicit in the En­glish occupation by repeatedly positioning himself as the successor to Pintoin. Furthermore, by self-­consciously saturating his works with the styles and norms of the abbey’s historiographical tradition, Chartier crafted texts that appear au­then­ tic, trustworthy, and aligned with the chronicles produced prior to the En­glish conquest, when Valois authority was uncontested. However, such strict adherence to Dionysian standards has been perceived by modern historians to degrade the quality of his compositions, making them appear formulaic and derivative. In other words, Chartier’s chronicles appear to be boring imitations precisely b­ ecause he followed tradition in order to legitimize himself and redeem the abbey’s reputation. Historically ­there ­were two parallel literary traditions at Saint-­Denis, one of Latin productions, the other of French. But by the time Chartier resumed work on the chronicles at the abbey, the vernacular tradition had been in abeyance for over eighty years. The substantial work produced ­under the direction of Orgemont for Charles V in the late 1370s—­considered by many t­ oday to be the definitive Grandes Chroniques de France—­was not compiled at the abbey nor did it utilize abbey resources for the final thirty years of its chronology. Only the Latin tradition continued unbroken at Saint-­Denis, and it is within this tradition that both of Chartier’s chronicles, Latin and French, must be situated. In ­every way, Chartier serves as the continuator of Pintoin, who, in turn, had likely seen himself as extending Lescot’s chronicle. This chronicle undoubtedly derived material from the Latin works of Guillaume de Nangis, Primat, Rigord, and Suger, all of which ­were relatively straightforward accounts primarily



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composed of government documents, eyewitness reports, and personal observations. ­There is nothing stylistically remarkable about any of ­these texts, but neither are any of them more or less exciting or inspired than the o­ thers. Why then did Chartier decide to compose a French chronicle so long a­ fter the tradition had lapsed? Lewis argues that it was “­because of the difficulty of writing up modern technical terms in Latin.”94 This explanation is not entirely satisfying since much of both chronicles focuses on sieges, a topic common to many Latin histories of the ­Middle Ages. Yet ­there may be a kernel of truth ­here. Samaran suggests that the difficulty of translating French governmental documents into Latin may have been beyond the capability of the Dionysian chanter.95 Chartier himself apologizes in his Latin prologue—­but not his French—­that “Lingua mea et calamus scribe pueriliter scribantis (sic)” (“my language and my style are t­ hose of a child”) and “Vereor equidem ne incultus sermo mei labilis intellectus, rudisque ac incompositus, tedium generet, aut aures audiencium vel ooculos legencium aliquateuus offendat” (“I fear that my uncultivated speech and fallible intellect [which are] rough and disor­ga­nized, ­will generate boredom or offend the ears of the audience or the eyes of readers”).96 While such self-­deprecation and humility are not uncommon in chronicle prologues, Chartier waxes excessive, suggesting his sentiments may be genuine. The monk even reveals that he was largely unfamiliar with the rules of Latin rhe­toric, the historical volumes held at Saint-­Denis, or biblical scripture.97 All of this emphasizes that Chartier was not a scholar but a bureaucrat, evidenced by his appointments to administrative and l­egal posts at the abbey. The decision to write in French, therefore, was prob­ably made out of con­ve­nience and practicality rather than any intention on the part of the author to revive a long-­ dormant literary tradition. French-­language texts ­were far more popu­lar than Latin chronicles among the laity, and Chartier’s commission as historiographer was intended for just such an audience: the royal f­ amily and government officials.98 It therefore makes no sense to criticize his vernacular chronicle as lacking in the originality and style of e­ arlier chronicles. What­ever Chartier’s ­actual intention relative to the Dionysian vernacular tradition, his work certainly marks its final end, as well as that of all significant literary output from the abbey. Saint-­Denis was dispossessed of its royal patronage in 1464 and the historiographical school t­ here essentially closed permanently. Meanwhile, the study of history was itself undergoing a transition away from the mythologized tales of Trojan origins and chivalric valor and ­toward more empirical studies.99 Thus, the Chroniques de France published in

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1476 served both as a monument for this tradition and its headstone: the publication acknowledged the impor­tant role the abbey had served in perpetuating a single, authoritative narrative history of France.100 The volume was subsequently reprinted three times, with additional non-­Dionysian continuations, u ­ nder the inflated name Grandes Chroniques de France: in 1493 by Antoine Vérard, and in 1513 and 1518 by Guillaume Eustache.101 But the tradition had run its course. Chartier’s vernacular chronicle was published in­de­pen­ dently for the first time in 1661 by Denys Godefroy, albeit with no critical commentary or preface. A more detailed edition was produced two centuries ­later in 1858 by Vallet de Viriville, who, in his introduction examined many aspects of the chronicle, the author, and the historical period, judging the work very harshly.102 For both the Latin and French Dionysian traditions, Jean Chartier offered closure to a 300-­year-­old monastic tradition of historiography and a certain way of narrating the history of France. Chartier, drawing on his pre­de­ces­sors, produced a chronicle that imitated their style and vision. Although his work represented a concluding chapter, its existence in printed form and repeat printings suggest that it continued to satisfy some longing on the part of readers into the sixteenth ­century and beyond. The end of the historical tradition at Saint-­Denis, like the abbey’s loss of patronage, signals closure. But this is not the same as decline. Notes 1. Critiques adapted from statements made in Philippe Contamine, Olivier Bouzy, and Xavier Hélary, ed., Jeanne d’Arc: Histoire et dictionnaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2012), 619; Bernard Guenée, “Histoires, annales, chroniques: Essai sur les genres historiques au Moyen Age,” Annales HSS 28, no. 4 (1973): 1013; Bernard Guenée, Un roi et son historien: Vingt études sur le règne de Charles VI et la Chronique du Religieux de Saint-­Denis, Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-­lettres, new series, vol. 28 (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1999), 72; Paul Lacroix, Science and Lit­er­a­ture in the M ­ iddle Ages and at the Period of the Re­nais­sance (London: Bickers and Son, 1878), 474; Auguste Molinier, Les Sources de L’histoire de France. IV. Les Valois, 1328–1461 (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1904), 241; “Review,” The Saturday Review of Politics, Lit­er­a­ture, Science, and Art 31, no. 814 (June 3, 1871): 712; and Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Jean Chartier’s Chronique de Charles VII, roi de France, new edition, 3 vols., ed. Auguste Vallet de Viriville (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858), 1:xvi, xxxi, xxxiv. All translations are the author’s own, ­unless other­wise noted. 2. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis: A Survey (Brookline, MA: Classical Folia Editions, 1978), 15–19. 3. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 34–36, 44–45. 4. This life was concluded by Guillaume le Breton, a canon at Senlis and Philip II’s chaplain. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 59–61, 64.



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5. Bernard Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques de France: Le Roman aux roys (1274– 1518),” in Les lieux de mémoire II: La nation. Bibliothèque illustrée des histoires, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 191–192; Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4. Most of the Latin source material for the Roman des Rois was found in manuscript Latin 5925 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BNF). Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 68, 78, 79–80. The Primat version is Bibliothèque de Sainte-­ Geneviève 782. 6. Chris Jones, Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and its Rulers in Late-­Medieval France (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), 86–90; Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 121. 7. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 90, 96–122. 8. Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques,” 197. 9. Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques,” 197, 201; Isabelle Guyot-­Bachy and Jean-­Marie Moeglin, “Comment ont été continuées Les Grandes chroniques de France dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 163, no. 2 (2005): 385–433, 415–424. 10. BNF français 2813. See Guenée, “Histoires, annales, chroniques,” 101; Douglas  A. ­ iddle Ages,” in Medieval Multilingualism: Kibbee, “Institutions and Multilingualism in the M The Francophone World and its Neighbours, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Eu­rope, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz and Keith Busby (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), 63–81 (79); Léon Lacabane, “Recherches sur les auteurs des Grandes Chroniques de France, dites de Saint-­ Denys,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 2, no.  1 (1841): 66–74; Richard  H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500, 2 vols. (Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000), 272. 11. Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques,” 203. 12. Bernard Guenée, “Chancelleries et monastères: La mémoire de la France au Moyen Age,” in Les lieux de mémoire II: La nation, ed. Pierre Nora (Évreux, France: Gallimard, 1986), 5–30 (29); Guyot and Moeglin, “Comment ont été continuées les Grandes Chroniques de France.” 13. Bernard Guenée, L’opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Age d’après la Chronique de Charles VI du Religieux de Saint-­Denis (Paris: Perrin, 2002), 163–164; Guenée, Un roi et son historien, 36. For the identification of Pintoin as the religieux, see Nicole Grévy-­Pons and Ezio Ornato, “Qui est l’auteur de la Chronique Latin de Charles VI, dite du Religieux de Saint-­Denis?” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 134, no. 1 (1976): 85–102. 14. Hedeman, The Royal Image, 180; Peter Lewis, “L’histoire de Charles VI attribuée à Jean Juvénal des Ursins: Pour une édition nouvelle (information),” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres 140, no. 2 (1996): 567 n.10; Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 125. 15. Guenée, “Chancelleries et monastères,” 28. 16. Estelle Doudet, “Chartier, Jean,” Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. Graeme Dunphy and Cristian Bratu (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 267; Guenée, Un roi et son historien, 71–72; Charles Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite de Jean Chartier (1422–1450) et les derniers livres du Religieux de Saint-­Denis,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 87 (1926): 152.

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17. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:25. 18. Rigord names himself directly in the prologue to his life of Philip II. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 56. Primat is named in a poem that concludes the original text of manuscript 782 of the Bibliothèque de Sainte-­Geneviève on Paris, but this was prob­ably inserted by the abbot, Mathieu de Vendôme, rather than the author. Hedeman, The Royal Image, 15. 19. Jean Chartier, “Fragment inédit de la chronique de Jean Chartier,” ed. Auguste Vallet de Viriville, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France, second series, I (1857–1858): 214. 20. It can be assumed, however, that BNF français 2803, composed u ­ nder the watchful eyes of Pierre d’Orgemont, was also a government commission and that the authors, Henri de Trévou and Raoulet of Orleans, w ­ ere paid bureaucrats. Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, ed., Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting: 1250–1500 (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 181. 21. Orgemont appears on a similar number of occasions, but only ever in his official government roles. 22. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:226. 23. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:91. 24. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:180. 25. Charles Samaran, “Études sandionysiennes,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 104 (1943): 60, transcribing a document found in the Archives Nationales in Paris, series LL, 1320. 26. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 126. 27. Jacques Doublet, Histoire de l’abbaye de S. Denys en France (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1625), 269. 28. See Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:200, 3:77, and 3:117. 29. Michel Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-­Denys en France (Paris: Frederic Leonard, 1706), 360. 30. Paul Pézet, “Recherches historiques sur la naissance et la parenté d’Alain, Jean et Guillaume Chartier, et sur la maison où ils sont nés,” Mémoires de la Société d’agriculture, sciences, arts et belles-­lettres de Bayeux 1 (1842): 244–247. 31. Pézet, “Recherches historiques sur la naissance,” 251. 32. Pézet, “Recherches historiques sur la naissance,” 253. 33. Pézet, “Recherches historiques sur la naissance,” 263–264. 34. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1: v. 35. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1: vi–­vii. 36. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1: vii. 37. Félicie d’Ayzac, Histoire de l’abbaye de Saint-­Denis en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1860), 1:276. Most of Ayzac’s history of Chartier was outlined in his article, “Le ­grand chantre de Saint-­Denis. Fragment d’une monographie inédite, intitulée Saint-­Denis en France,” Revue archéologique 15, no. 2 (1858–1859): 385–396. 38. Gaston du Fresne de Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier (Caen, France: Le Blanc-­Hardel, 1869). 39. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 26. Doublet, Félibien, and Vallet de Viriville all believed that Chartier was still alive in the 1470s and



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directly participated in the printing of the Chroniques de France. Doublet, Histoire de l’abbaye de S. Denys en France, 269; Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-­Denys en France, 360; Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1: xiv. 40. Francis Pérot, Recherches sur la filiation de Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier: Leur généalogie de 1290 à 1900 (Vannes, France: Imprimerie Lafolye, 1900), 6, 10. 41. Pérot, Recherches sur la filiation de Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 12, 51. See also BNF français 24440. 42. Pérot, Recherches sur la filiation de Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 12. 43. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 21. 44. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 22; Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-­Denys en France, 360. 45. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 23; Maxime L’Héritier, “Le chantier de l’abbaye de Saint-­Denis à l’époque gothique,” Médiévales 69 (2015): 135. 46. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 26. 47. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 23. 48. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 24. 49. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 24. 50. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 42. 51. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 38–40. 52. Beaucourt, Les Chartier: recherches sur Guillaume, Alain et Jean Chartier, 41, 49. 53. “Chartier, Jean,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, 29 vols., ed. Hugh Chisholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–11), 953; Auguste Molinier, Les sources de l’histoire de France. IV. Les Valois, 1328–1461 (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1904), 241. 54. François Bethune, “Les écoles historiques de Saint-­Denis et Saint-­Germain-­des-­ Prés dans leur rapport avec la composition des Grandes Chroniques de France,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 4 (1903): 29 n. 2. 55. See the report in “La vie de la Société 1982,” Annuaire-­Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France (1981–1982): 51–54. 52. For a complete bibliography of his works, see “Biblio­g raphie des travaux de M. Charles Samaran,” Annuaire-­Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France (1954–1955): 187–247; and “Biblio­g raphie: Des travaux de M. Charles Samaran Supplément,” Annuaire-­Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France (1878–1980): 117–131. 56. Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 145. 57. Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 146, 148–149. 58. Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 149. 59. See, for example, Contamine, Bouzy, and Hélary, Jeanne d’Arc: Histoire et dictionnaire, 619; and Robert Garapon, “Introduction à la lecture d’Alain Chartier,” Annales de Normandie 9, no. 2 (1959): 91–108 (92). 60. Guenée, “Histoires, annales, chroniques,” 1013. 61. Peter Lewis, “Some Provisional Remarks upon the Chronicles of Saint-­Denis and upon the [Grandes] Chroniques de France in the Fifteenth ­Century,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995): 146–181 (154).

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62. Guenée, Un roi et son historien, 36; Juliet Baker, Conquest: The En­glish Kingdom of France 1417–1450 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 28. 63. Chartier, “Fragment inédit de la Chronique de Jean Chartier,” 214–215. The author would like to thank Matthew Firth and Lisa Rolston for their assistance with the translation. 64. The En­glish ­were permanently expelled from Saint-­Denis in April 1436. Baker, Conquest: The En­glish Kingdom of France 1417–1450, 135–136, 219, 231, and 243. 65. Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 150, 152–156. Samaran’s conclusions motivated Grévy-­Pons and Ornato to identify the religieux de Saint-­Denis as Michel Pintoin in 1976. See Grévy-­Pons and Ornato, “Qui est l’auteur.” 66. Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 143. See Pintoin, Chronique du religieux de Saint-­Denys, 6:444 and following. 67. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 125. 68. Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 159. The only complete copy of the Chronique latine is BNF nouvelles acquisitions 796. See Chartier, “Appendice: Jean Chartier, Chronique Latine, Relevé des chapitres et texte des chapitres inédits (Bibl. nat., ms. 1796 des nouv. acq. lat).” 69. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:1 n. 2; Chartier, “Fragment inédit de la Chronique de Jean Chartier,” 213. See, for example, Pintoin, Chronique du religieux de Saint-­ Denys, 1:306. 70. The next emperor was not crowned u ­ ntil 1452, a­ fter the conclusion of Chartier’s Chronique Latine. Charles Cawley, “Hungary,” http:​/­fmg​.­ac​/­Projects​/­MedLands​/­HUNGARY​ .­htm, and “Austria,” http:​/­fmg​.­ac​/­Projects​/­MedLands​/­AUSTRIA​.­htm, Medieval Lands, accessed October 31, 2022; Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 157. 71. Samaran, “La chronique latine inédite (1422–1450) et les derniers livres,” 159. 72. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:25; Contamine, Bouzy, and Hélary, Jeanne d’Arc: Histoire et dictionnaire, 619. 73. Lewis, “Some provisional remarks upon the chronicles of Saint-­Denis,” 154; Charles Samaran, “La chronique latine de Jean Chartier (1422–1450),” Annuaire-­Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 63, no. 2 (1926): 213; Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 124. For a chapter-­by-­chapter comparison of differences between the two chronicles, see Charles Samaran, “Jean Chartier: Chronique Latine: Relevé des chapitres et texte des chapitres inédits,” Annuaire-­Bulletine de la Société de l’histoire de France 63, no. 2 (1926): 215–273. Vallet de Viriville concludes that the earliest and likely original edition of this manuscript is BNF français 5051. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:xix. 74. Contamine, Bouzy, and Hélary, Jeanne d’Arc: Histoire et dictionnaire, 619. 75. Material is missing for the years 1451, 1452, 1459, and 1460. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:xxxi. 76. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:xxx; Lewis, “Some provisional remarks upon the chronicles of Saint-­Denis,” 159; Molinier, Les sources de l’histoire de France, 241; René Planchenault, “La ‘Chronique de la Pucelle,’ ” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 93 (1932): 55–104 (57).



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77. Samaran, “La chronique latine,” 196–200. 78. Planchenault, “La ‘Chronique de la Pucelle,’ ” 57. 79. Samaran, “La chronique latine,” 199–200. 80. Lewis, “L’histoire de Charles VI attribuée à Jean Juvénal des Ursins,” 567–568; Lewis, “Some provisional remarks upon the chronicles of Saint-­Denis,” 159. 81. Molinier, Les sources de l’histoire de France, 241; Samaran, “La chronique latine,” 200; Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:xxx. 82. Lewis, “Some provisional remarks upon the chronicles of Saint-­Denis,” 159. 83. Samaran, “La chronique latine,” 200–201. 84. Samaran, “La chronique latine,” 201–210, 212. 85. Samaran, “La chronique latine,” 212. 86. Jean Favier, La guerre de cent ans (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 620; Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-­Denys en France, 360. 87. Eltjo Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 208–209. 88. Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques,” 207. 89. For a study of the continuity of ­these texts and how the dif­fer­ent authors portrayed members of the royal f­ amily, see Derek R. Whaley, The Wilted Lily: Repre­sen­ta­tions of the Greater Capetian Dynasty within the Vernacular Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 1274–1461 (PhD diss., University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2018). 90. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:27. 91. Les Grandes chroniques de France, ed. Jules Viard, 10 vols. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1920–1953), 1:3. 92. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:28, 209. 93. Franck Collard, “Ranimer l’oriflamme. Les relations des rois de France avec l’abbaye de Saint-­Denis à la fin du XVe siecle,” Saint-­Denis et la royauté: études offertes à Bernard Guenée, ed. Françoise Autrand, Claude Gauvard, and Jean-­Marie Moeglin (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 561–581 (579–580). Cf. Guenée, “Histoires, annales, chroniques,” 1012–1013. 94. Lewis, “Some provisional remarks upon the chronicles of Saint-­Denis,” 154. 95. Samaran, “La chronique latine,” 212. 96. Chartier, “Fragment inédit de la Chronique de Jean Chartier,” 215. 97. Chartier, “Fragment inédit de la Chronique de Jean Chartier,” 215. 98. Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 181. 99. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-­Denis, 125–126. 100. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:xiv. 101. Guenée, “Histoires, annales, chroniques,” 148; Morrison and Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France, 276. 102. Vallet de Viriville’s introduction to Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 1:xxx–­xxxv.

cha p te r fou r

“Pre­sent en sa personne” Identity and Celebrity in Fifteenth-­Century Franco-­Burgundian Lit­er­a­ture Helen Swift

Remaniement—­the practice of creative response to and reworking of existing works—is a staple feature of late medieval French literary culture, especially in relation to the thirteenth-­century bestseller Le Roman de la Rose, extant in over 300 manuscripts and several incunables and early print editions.1 In the fifteenth ­century, respondents took to tackling not only the text, but also its author. Late medieval writers dramatized in their works’ imaginative fictions an embodied and personalized engagement with their vernacular heritage. Such animated genealogizing sometimes resurrected authors such as Jean de Meun or Boccaccio in “talking head” conversation, ­whether to invoke their authority or to call them to account. At other times, it commemorated them through first-­person epitaphs in a cemetery fiction, making them live on through posthumous impersonation. It also fostered intertextually dense quarrels, launching the literary ­career of the Belle Dame sans merci. What emerges from ­these works’ preoccupations with authority, lineage, and legacy is an increasing sense of celebrity identity, together with an interrogation of the nature of fame. Concern with the person of an author rather than simply their position as an auctoritas affected in par­tic­u­lar con­temporary medieval writers (­whether French or Italian) against a backdrop of the increasing literary treatment of fame as earthly renown, the increasingly publicly engaged role of writers,2 and the significant developments in the pro­cesses of book production that s­ haped relations between poets, patrons, and printers.3 Using words like “increasing” and 94



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“development” risks mapping an unduly teleological trajectory on the fifteenth ­century—­from the maximally author-­involved manuscript production of Christine de Pizan,4 to the publisher as king when compiling an anthology such as Antoine Vérard’s Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique.5 It furthermore risks distorting our apprehension of the period by tacitly invoking an implied endpoint of a Re­nais­sance culture of individual selfhood. One must not smooth out the creases nor, indeed, focus on only one center of literary production, such as the court, at the expense of university and juridical milieus. In the interests of appreciating creases, I apply the concept of celebrity to fifteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture. I do not stake a claim for the invention of celebrity in that era; rather, I pursue the useful anachronism of conceiving of literary identity in terms of celebrity so as to privilege what does not fit ­those terms as much as what does, thereby valorizing the specificity of this period’s promotional poetics and concepts of identity.6 Celebrity is itself “a broad category which defines the con­temporary state of being famous.”7 It is held to be distinct from the older concept of “renown,” which was restricted to an elite hierarchy (socially as much as culturally), and “brought honour to the office, not the individual,”8 while celebrity may concern notoriety as much as fame. As a phenomenon predicated on “urban democracy” and “the radical individualisation of modern sensibility,”9 it seems ill suited to late medieval cultural life, though it may help us interrogate our understanding of poetic identity, which we have perhaps come to view rather tamely in our scholarly scrupulousness to distinguish “persona” from “author,” textual from extratextual je. We might usefully invest our judicious juggling of narrative levels with insights from the emergent discipline of “persona studies,” which has itself been considered as a method for studying celebrity.10 “Persona describes the wider practice of constructing and constituting forms of public identity,” with personas being “the material forms of public selfhood,”11 such as, in a fifteenth-­century context, the ways in which text and paratext interact in a medieval manuscript to proj­ect an authorial identity.12 Celebrities provide “some of the most vis­i­ble, performative and pedagogic examples of the practice.”13 An approach to celebrity through persona studies would privilege “the potential of celebrity as a model of public pre­sen­ta­tion that contributes to the explication of networks, mediation, communication, participation, agency, affect and identity per­for­mance,”14 and would thereby shine the spotlight on pro­cess. In the third section of this essay, I consider perhaps the most pungently performative literary case of public self-­presentation, Villon’s “ je, François Villon,” a

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particularly richly networked and exuberantly communicated identity. Where that section highlights the implication of the celebrity themself in the pro­cess through which cultural identity is negotiated, my first section focuses on the repre­sen­ta­tion pro­cesses employed by audiences in constituting celebrity, which “does not reside in the individual: it is constructed discursively.”15 The role of the public is not only generative; it also “productively consume[s]” the celebrity as a commodity,16 which is demonstrated amply by the remaniement of Jean de Meun, the controversial continuator of the Rose. Celebrity figures “are transformed into what they are by the compulsions and fantasies” of o­ thers.17 This applies to historical figures, such as de Meun when he positively embodies vernacular authority or negatively represents misogyny on account of some of the discourses included in his work.18 But it may also apply to fictional characters, of which an especially striking fifteenth-­century case is the Belle Dame sans merci, the focus of my second section: her fame was inaugurated by Alain Chartier’s poem, but spread and endured to become “a name which . . . ​makes news by itself,”19 carry­ing a range of meanings. It gets particularly densely networked in manuscript and early print compilations, demonstrating a kind of “micropublic” in action.20 All of this leads to the function of celebrity, its role “as a location for the interrogation and elaboration of cultural identity.”21 Jean de Meun “en personne” One might believe the pervasive didacticism of late medieval lit­er­a­ture would militate against any consideration of celebrity: didacticism privileges the type above the individual, the position above the person, in its rhe­toric of exemplarity. However, moralizing is no stranger to celebrity, in how “­these public lives embody key meanings of the day”22: emphasis falls on the representative value of the individual, and that value may, of course, be negative. A figure of longstanding prominence whose fame experiences variation in value is Jean de Meun (d. 1305), continuator of the Roman de la Rose, and translator from Latin into French of Boethius and the letters of Heloise and Abelard. It is his scholastic status as university maître that enables his writing and thus his reputation, but the position and the person interweave interestingly as his persona evolves posthumously into the fifteenth ­century. The text of the dual-­authored Rose speaks of its two contributors’ activity,23 and their role receives significant audience attention: late medieval manuscript miniatures often pictured a suc-



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cession scene (not pre­sent in the poem).24 Such miniatures, whilst seeming to promote authorial identity—­for example, by illustrating Guillaume de Lorris handing over the book to Jean de Meun—in fact promote the text itself: the book’s composition is served by its authors, rather than vice versa; authorship rather than the author’s person. But response to Jean de Meun’s person develops beyond the Rose. Honorat Bovet’s Apparicion maistre Jean de Meun (1398) imagines him appearing to a prior. In the garden of de Meun’s former residence: “un grant clerc bien fouré de menu ver, sy me commença a tancer” (“a g­ reat cleric dressed in fur began to lecture me”).25 His scholarly stature is brought to bear on Bovet’s narrator, whom he reproaches for not making profitable use of the place as a didactic writer. The shift from courtly locus amoenus to clerkly demesne expands the scope of de Meun’s sway as social commentator: on the one hand, this generalizes his authority; on the other, it particularizes it in relation to a certain po­liti­cal moment at the turn of the fifteenth ­century—­the Apparicion is dedicated to Louis, duke of Orleans, and addresses a range of con­temporary controversies, such as the banishment of the Jews from France and the University of Paris’s hostility to the Jacobins. De Meun is not only petitioned for his renown, but also prosecuted for notoriety. His fifteenth-­century reputation is far from stable, and it is ill repute that fosters appreciation of the person as well as his position. While Bovet is lauding his authority, Christine de Pizan is lambasting him as “felon mesdisant” (“vicious backbiter”) in her Epistre au dieu d’amours (1398),26 in which the god of Love alleges his misogyny. She develops her criticism in the so-­called Querelle du Roman de la Rose (“Quarrel over the Romance of the Rose”), an epistolary exchange involving Christine de Pizan and certain Paris clerics: her letters amplify her ethical castigation of the Rose as text—­“ains est exortacion de vice confortant vie dissolue” (“thus it preaches vice, encouraging a dissolute life”)27—­and of its continuator as ­human individual: “qui fu seul home” (“who was only a man”).28 A key point of debate is de Meun’s authorial responsibility: the extent to which he is morally imputable for every­thing in his work. Christine personalizes the discussion by casting aspersions on his character: she won­ ders why a “moult grant clerc soubtil et bien parlant” (“very ­great cleric, intelligent and eloquent”) should so misapply his skill, “mais je suppose que la grant charnalité, puet estre, dont il fu remply, le fist plus habonder a voulenté que a bien prouffitable” (“but I suppose that maybe he acted more in accordance with the ­great carnality, with which he is filled, than with utility”).29 De Meun’s person

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is also invoked when Jean Gerson, chancellor of Paris, weighs in against the Rose’s immorality. In the allegorical courtroom of his Traité contre le Rommant de la Rose (1402), an anti-­Rose advocate imprecates Fol Amoureux, a figure collapsing together authorial and narratorial identities to identify the writer as liable for his text’s contents. The prosecution wishes to resurrect him to face trial: “ je vouldré bien . . . ​que l’aucteur que on accuse fust pre­sent en sa personne par retournant de mort a vie” (“I would like that the author whom we accuse be personally pre­sent, returning to life from the dead”)30 to repent his misdeeds. Christine and Gerson each strive to inflect de Meun’s public image, but si­mul­ta­neously risk propagating his celebrity, as Pierre Col points out: “Toy et aultre—­qui s’eufforcent comme toy a impugner ce tres noble escripvain Meung— le loués plus en le cuidant blasmer que je ne pouroye le louer pour y user tous mes membres, fussent ilz ores tous convertis en langues” (“You and the ­others—­who strive like you to impugn this very noble writer Meun—­laud him more when you believe that you are criticizing him than I could manage with all of my faculties, even if they w ­ ere turned into tongues”).31 Denunciation is doubly effective promotion. Such potential impact perturbs Christine since her primary concern is not so much “the man himself as . . . ​the significance of his actions for the society,”32 as a corrupting influence “a metre cuer humain en dampnable herreur” (“to put the ­human heart in damnable error”).33 Christine applies the same princi­ple to her own authorial self-­representation, constructing a public identity through text and paratext in the manuscript pre­sen­ta­tion of her works to illustrious dedicatees.34 What­ever celebrity status we imagine her cultivating—­overseeing prominent depiction of her persona in miniatures or fashioning her œuvre by quoting previous compositions in subsequent works—it is yoked into the ser­vice of the public good. She defines her authority differently ­ oman who calls out antifeminist from other, con­temporary writers, partly as a w aspects of certain established authorities’ work, and partly as an Italian, favoring Dante as a forefather rather than de Meun.35 Fifteenth-­century French writers frequently engaged in genealogizing: ­locating themselves in relation to ­others, tracking literary lineage and thereby constructing a kind of canon.36 This was not as monolithic an enterprise of consolidating the renown of g­ reat men as it might at first seem. A pertinent context is the popularity of the cata­logue as literary form, deriving in large part from the influence of Boccaccio, manifested, for instance, in the several fifteenth-­ century French translations of his De casibus virorum illustrium and De mulieri-



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bus claris.37 Neither Latin text concerns renown univocally: De mulieribus addresses ­women both “famous” and “infamous” (as meanings of clara) whilst De casibus addresses the vicissitudes of fate and Fortune’s wheel, considering the unfortunate ends of g­ reat men (and a few w ­ omen). French responses to t­ hese texts sometimes deploy an updating strategy to render topical their cast of characters: George Chastelain’s ­Temple de Bocace (1463–65) and Oliver de La Marche’s Chevalier délibéré (1483), for instance, are preoccupied with the recently dead. A cemetery fiction is often deployed to assem­ble a canon, most famously in René of Anjou’s Livre du coeur d’amour épris (1457), whose tombs of unfortunate lovers include six specially honored writers of love, alternating between Latin/Italian and French figures: Ovid, Machaut, Boccaccio, Jean de Meun, ­Petrarch, Chartier. Octovien de Saint-­Gelais revisits this list in his Séjour d’honneur (1494), whose cemetery reserves a precinct for scholars, dedicating an area specifically to medieval figures: Jean de Meun, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chartier, and Jacques Milet (the latter still being alive when René of Anjou compiled his canon). The cast list experiences ­limited change, buttressing thereby, one might say, the renown of each writer, but is flexible, responding to the par­tic­u­lar context and agenda of the text at hand, which might, for instance, be a compositional manual rather than a literary fiction. The so-­called arts de seconde rhétorique, vernacular treatises on versification, commended poets for their formal mastery. For example, the Instructif de seconde rhétorique (ca. 1470) enumerates admired prac­ti­tion­ers of the serventois in “tres notable rethoricale stile” (“very notable rhetorical style”), “en la langue galicane fertile” (“in the fertile Gallican language”): Alain Chartier, Arnoul Greban, Christine de Pizan, Jean Castel (Christine’s son), Pierre de Hurion, George Chastelain, and Vaillant. Its target audience was amateur poets in the law courts of Paris.38 ­These lists convey a strong impression of identity as a networked entity, ­whether general recognizability (situating the pre­sent writer in relation to established figures) or more specific targeting of a certain audience: for example, in a Burgundian milieu, when Jean Lemaire de Belges composes an Epitaphe en maniere de dialogue (1507–1508) in honor of his pre­de­ces­sors, Jean Molinet and George Chastelain, as court historiographer.39 In a late medieval culture of localized textual per­for­mance and bespoke manuscript production, it is pos­si­ble to speak of what twenty-­first-­century celebrity studies call “micropublics,”40 and study how a certain collective—­both audience to and consumer of a ­celebrity—is constituted through the development of a par­tic­u­lar persona,

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who may not even be real. Late medieval cata­logues often blended together for their exemplary worth figures from history, myth, and legend (ancient and con­temporary). Naming the Belle Dame Sans Merci One of the most striking figures of literary fame in the second and third quarters of the fifteenth c­ entury is a fiction: La Belle Dame sans merci—­she is, in that sense, pure celebrity, as a discursive construct who is famous for being famous: “as much image as actuality,”41 ­because only image, but an image treated as having impact on actuality. The Belle Dame acquires her name at the end of the eponymous poem by Alain Chartier (1424), which survives in forty-­four manuscripts, together with numerous early printed editions and translations. Following a long dialogue in which a lady repeatedly spurns the advances of her suitor, she is baptized by an eavesdropping narrator: Celle que m’oyez nommer cy, Qu’on peut appeller, se me samble, La belle dame sans mercy. [This lady whom you ­will now hear me name, and who should be called, it seems to me, The Belle Dame Sans Mercy.]42 What is remarkable about the Belle Dame’s celebrity is how emphatically her identity as a commodity becomes fixed (i.e., that she is merciless), notwithstanding Chartier’s narrator’s caveats and qualifiers. Two prose letters follow the poem in over half its extant manuscripts, purportedly written by gentlemen and ladies of the court. They convey considerable consternation at Chartier’s portrayal of a w ­ oman who “cruelly” denies a lover her f­ avor, fearing, from the male courtiers’ perspective, lest she serve as an example to spoil their suits. The letters enjoin “maistre Alain” to make amends, which prompts Chartier’s Excusacion de maistre Alain, in which personified Love chastises the author for defaming ­women.43 Such repeated expression of alarm—­potentially all generated by Chartier himself to promote his subject as a cause célèbre—­lends potency to the Belle Dame as image and incites a desire to negotiate with it. It duly gave rise to a w ­ hole series of engagements in the form of poetic responses. Mostly working through a fictional trial framework—­the same scenario deployed to



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take Jean de Meun to task “en personne”—­they try and re-­try the lady to determine her guilt in response to a question that Chartier left intriguingly unanswered: did the suitor die—­his hedging narrator reports that someone told him so—­and so did the lady, by her refusal, kill him? ­These “productive consumptions”44 of the Belle Dame each generate more discourse around her: Baudet Herenc’s Accusation contre la Belle Dame sans mercy brands her “crüelle et plaine de faulx tours” (“cruel and practiced at deceit”)45 and amplifies her infamy in inflammatory rhe­toric: “la merveilleuse nature / De ceste femme” (“the astounding nature / Of this ­woman”).46 The anonymous Dame lealle en amours (“the Lady loyal in love”) claims she already has a lover; Achille Caulier’s Cruelle femme en amours (“the Cruel w ­ oman in love”) refutes that as “fiction fainte” (“fake fiction”)47 and further escalates the charge: “Pour quoy la puis, sans surnonmer, / Appeller la Faulse Tirande” (“Which is why I might, without exaggeration, / Call her a ‘false tyrant.’ ”).48 Each text innovates material to intensify the significance of her identity and the apparent urgency of resolving her fate—­“apparent,” since each intervention both carries the trial action forward and stalls it through some procedural disruption that enables debate to keep ­going intertextually. Even once she has been sentenced to death, her case is revived when her heirs seek redress in Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy: Mais il leur souffisoit d’oster Le faulx nom, le bruit, et la note Tournant en malureuse sorte. [But it would have satisfied them to cast off the falsely attributed name, the scandal, and the gossip, which ­were causing their unhappy destiny.]49 The Belle Dame’s identity is her “nom,” which, according to Herenc’s court, “doit estre ditte infame” (“should be hailed as disgraceful”).50 Use of the qualifier “faulx” flags up ironically how far we are from dealing with a true/false binary, since t­ here is no foundation of objective fact to the Belle Dame’s existence. This is why I asserted before that she is pure celebrity: “a discursive effect; that is, ­those who have been subject to the repre­sen­ta­tional regime of celebrity are repro­ cessed and reinvented by it”51; for the Belle Dame, that pro­cessing and invention are constitutive of her selfhood.

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The real­ity of the Belle Dame’s celebrity is affirmed in Martin Le Franc’s mid-­fifteenth-­century defense of ­women debate poem, Le Champion des dames (ca. 1442), which features a cemetery of noble w ­ omen including the grave of the Belle Dame (defended ­here as being “de tres leal propos” [“of very loyal intent”]52) alongside t­ hose with con­temporary historical pertinence: recently deceased ladies of the Burgundian court (Mary of Burgundy, the duchess of Savoy [d. 1422], and her d ­ aughter, Bonne, countess of Montfort [d. 1430]), to whose duke, Philip the Good, Le Franc dedicates the text. The Belle Dame’s identity is also networked; her fame and that of her spurned lover of uncertain fate are intertwined, the one evoked through the other, as in Jacques Milet’s allegorical poem La Forest de Tristesse (1459), whose first section narrates the persona’s oneiric journey through a wasteland of amorous devastation in the demesne of Lady Melancholy: “Illec viz gesir lamoureux / De celle qu’on dit sans mercy” (“­There I saw lying the lover / Of the one they say to be without mercy”).53 Minimal reference is required to prompt recognition: familiarity with this hypervisible “celle” (the one) and with her identity as allegation (“on dit” [they say] is assumed. The Belle Dame and Jean de Meun come together in the Forest: the “paragon of ladies,” imprisoned in Melancholy’s “forest of ennuy,” impugns the author for his misogynistic text: “A toy lacteur qui lentrepris” (“to you, the author who undertook it”),54 and the second section of the poem duly prosecutes her case in the court of Love against both Jean de Meun and Matheolus. Like the Belle Dame’s ­trials, theirs, too, is unresolved—­guilt is determined and sentence meted out, but commuted to banishment in de Meun’s case. An uncertain but nonetheless insisted-on end fosters further productive consumption and production, fanning fame, and especially infamy. Olivier Driessens questions the time and space of celebrity, proposing plural, localized celebrity cultures.55 A single poem, like Milet’s Forest, is a snapshot of the intersecting celebrity of Jean de Meun, historical thirteenth-­century author, and La Belle Dame, fifteenth-­century fictional figure, in the m ­ iddle of that l­ ater c­ entury. A single manuscript, such as Paris, Arsenal, manuscript 3523, from the late fifteenth ­century, offers a material cultural space for con­temporary fame: its thirty-­five items gather together many contributions to the Belle Dame debate, with a number of elegiac, epitaphic, and testamentary poems ­either by mid-­fifteenth-­century writers (Pierre de Hauteville, Michault Taillevent, and François Villon) or commemorating recent noble deaths, Charles VII (d. 1461) or Marguerite of Scotland (d. 1445).56 The early print anthology of 1501, Le



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J­ ardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique, also materially discloses the celebrity of the Belle Dame, but through absence rather than presence. It encompasses many poems of the quarrel, and several related texts, mostly dating from 1425 to 1470, such as Milet’s Forest; indeed, the overall narrative thread of the volume follows a lover through rejection by a lady to bereavement and death.57 But Chartier’s poem does not feature ­here; it is implicitly pre­sent as touchstone.58 Ambiguously answerable questions (was Jean de Meun misogynistic?) and unresolvable riddles (did the Belle Dame’s lover die? Does she merit her title?) stimulate a sense of enigma, which captivates attention and thereby accords charisma to the persons being debated, further enhancing their celebrity. “Jean de Meun” and “La Belle Dame” are news-­making names in fifteenth-­century poetry; neither is simply a case of renown—of honor and devotion pertaining to the office rather than to the person as an individual—­since the fame of both is fostered by aspects of notoriety and their intersecting quarrels get personal. Their lives—­Christine’s conjectures about de Meun’s lust or the courts’ condemnations of the lady’s cruelty—­are made “to embody key meanings of the day”59 relating to the morality of poetic writing, authorial responsibility for allegory, courtly ethics, or the status of ­women. But is e­ ither properly a celebrity in the modern sense? Their attributed identity is not individuality, and both are the product of socially exclusive milieus—­the university and the court as medieval sites of ­limited literary production and circulation. Villon: “ne scet comment on me nomme” My final case study offers the most compelling and curious case for conceiving of literary identity in the fifteenth ­century in terms of celebrity: François Villon—­a figure whose very name (or, at least, the name by which we know him)60 enmeshes history and fiction, cultivates enigma, and constitutes a remarkable publicity grab. The man ­behind the name, to whom we attribute the Lais, Testament, and vari­ous lyric poems across a range of literary registers, had a university education and frequented both princely courts and the judicial system, being imprisoned at least twice. The person projected through much of his poetry as “Villon” is an extraordinary ordinary man, at home in the underbelly of Pa­ri­sian urban life between tavern and brothel, which he recollects with dazzling rhetorical dexterity and learned allusion, while apparently breathing his last on his deathbed. His work famously offers so l­ittle to

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piece together of the persona’s biographical identity that we are left not so much with an unfinished jigsaw, as one barely started, whose disparate pieces make us more conscious of its gaps, and of our inability, but also our thirst, to fill them coherently.61 We have “too many Villons,” and, at the same time, not enough: “Villon’s exuberance . . . ​resists resolution while implying . . . ​that resolution is just within our readerly grasp.”62 Villon’s Testament (ca. 1463) is about the social construction of identity: that undertaken by a poet in re­spect of his persona, that enacted in multiple ways by the persona, that elicited of a con­temporary audience (or, rather, audiences, if we assume dif­fer­ent types of knowledge mobilized by dif­fer­ent micropublics, such as t­ hose to whom the named beneficiaries are known), and that exercised by subsequent generations of readers. The persona postures a variety of pungent identities—­a devastatingly poor person; a truant scholar; a bon viveur; a martyr for love; a pimp; a vagabond. Each is rhetorically, vigorously tailored and tinged with irony, revealing thereby the pro­cess of its construction. He self-­ promotes through self-­deprecation: “de tous suis le plus imparfait” (“I am the most imperfect of all”)63 might read penitentially, but more likely cultivates the covert prestige of superlative slyness. Self-­contradiction is similarly flamboyant: “de viel porte voix et le ton, / Et ne suis qu’un jeune cocquart” (“I have the voice and sound of an old man, / And yet I’m only a young gun”).64 When it comes to fixing posthumous reputation in his epitaph, he precisely unfixes it into evanescence by insisting that it be inscribed “de charbon ou de pierre noire, / Sans en rien entamer le plastre” (“in coal or black stone / without damaging the plaster at all”).65 Identity is vehemently affirmed and staunchly resisted in the same moment. The name “Villon” that he claims to have borrowed from his adoptive f­ather is compellingly pre­sent materially (as a repeated acrostic) and sonically (as a frequent rich rhyme, especially intensively in the poem’s concluding ballad), but the person whom it designates remains dislocated from this label. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-­Toulet takes a cue from the bedev­ iled executor whom the persona nominates, Jean de Calais, a man who has not seen him in thirty years (we recall that the opening lines of the poem posit his age as around thirty) and “ne scet comment on me nomme” (“does not know what I’m called”):66 she proposes that “nous sommes tous des Jean de Calais” (“we are all Jean de Calais”).67 In a sense, we are, but we are also doubly bedev­iled in that we have a name, but no one to whom to securely attach it. Villon is the star, and we pursue his identity by creating it through productive consumption. The history of Villon reception demonstrates in abun-



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dance “the commonplace of celebrity that its figures are transformed into what they are by the compulsions and fantasies of ­those who throng to see them.”68 “­Every age creates its own Villon” and “we construct our par­tic­u­lar Villons . . . ​by reading very selectively.”69 Hence our having too many. While we tend to construe the Testament’s Villon as in all senses a singular figure, the poem itself was never transmitted alone; identity is always networked, and among its com­pany ­were, for example, the testamentary and epitaphic pieces in Arsenal manuscript 3523 mentioned above. In the twenty-­first c­ entury, as a celebrity for our age, Villon has appeared in demo­cratic forms of modern popu­lar culture, and across languages: a multivolume French comic book (2011–2016); a young adult autofiction entitled Testament (2012) by Canadian writer Vickie Gendreau; or a song on a U.S. Billboard top five ­a lbum, Regina Spektor’s “Prayer of François Villon” (2012),70 which is available to download as a ringtone. Productive Consumption and Fifteenth-­Century Poetics “Most celebrities just come and go.”71 Literary controversy in the fifteenth ­century revisited afresh an already-­established author (Jean de Meun), generated an instantly famous icon through debate (La Belle Dame), and was consciously cultivated to promote a scandalous, enigmatic identity (Villon). All three figures ­were productively consumed in a variety of incarnations over several centuries; alongside Villon, the Belle Dame sans merci found echo in diverse cultural contexts—­from John Keats’s eighteenth-­century poem, to pre-­Raphaelite painting, Flanders and Swann’s 1950s comic radio mention of “the beautiful lady who never says thank you,” and a current gothic horror comic book series.72 Their fame endures, but perhaps this is more pertinently viewed in terms of celebrity, given the diverse, localized subcultures involved in the “pro­ cess of individual and collective remembering and forgetting of celebrities” (indeed, most often forgetting Chartier when remembering the Belle Dame).73 Each figure’s revisitation is a fresh ephemerality, specific to and evanescently hypervisible in a par­tic­u­lar moment and milieu. In the preface to his critical edition of Villon in 1533, Clément Marot plays up the cultural specificity of the Testament, remarking that, in order to understand its bequests, “il faudroit avoir esté de son temps à Paris, & avoir congneu les lieux, les choses, & les hommes dont il parle” (“you would have to have been in Paris during his time and known the places, t­ hings, and ­people he speaks of ”).74

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The fifteenth c­ entury’s literary life was driven by a “participatory, social poetics—­a poetics of dialectic and debate.”75 As participants in this community, its writers and editor-­publishers engaged in both competition and collaboration, self-­promotion and negotiation.76 Reflecting on their own position in the constant awareness of ­others, they dramatized through their work—­ individual compositions, responses to their own or ­others’ works, or the compilation of an anthology—­the pro­cesses through which authorial identity is negotiated. Turner speaks of celebrity’s role as a location for the interrogation and elaboration of cultural identity;77 celebrity as a perspective for critical enquiry helps us to articulate an acute fifteenth-­century consciousness of the importance of persona, of playing an identity effectively (­whether a projection of oneself or of a third party, or both in dialogue) through productive consumption to serve a range of ends: to perform a social function—­for Christine de Pizan, exercising authorial responsibility in the moral interests of the public good; to experiment ideologically with courtly discourse, in the Belle Dame quarrel; or to virtuosically stage the composition of identity through death (if this is one of Villon the poet’s impossible to discern motives). As my comments above on manuscript compilation indicated, Jean de Meun, the Belle Dame, and Villon ­were far from discrete concerns in the courtroom drama of late medieval French lit­er­a­ture. More generally, the Rose runs through its verse like a stick of rock, intertextually informing both poetics and content of Chartier’s poem and the Testament, constantly being refreshed through remaniement, and demanding “a highly knowing audience” in the literary cultures of princely court, law court, and university.78 This essential interconnectedness—­ the sophisticated intertextual expertise presupposed of a fifteenth-­century audience and the intersubjectivity of authorship as a pro­cess of exchange and networked self-­definition—­boosted “celebrity capital” or “recognizability”: “accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media repre­sen­ta­tions.”79 Writers sought both cooperatively and competitively to benefit from and further fuel the “attention-­getting, interest-­riveting, profit-­generating value”80 of key figures of reference, for fame or infamy (Jean de Meun and the Belle Dame), or to produce this capacity by self-­identifying as such a figure (Villon). Figures become so recognizable that they no longer need ­actual presence: in 1501 and beyond, in the eight editions of the Jardin de plaisance, a highly knowing audience was still expected. Its lynchpin texts—­the Rose, Belle Dame, and Testament—­are absent from the compilation, ­because they are presumed already pre­sent in the anthology of the audience’s mind.81



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Notes 1. Pierre-­Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au quatorzième siècle: étude de la réception de l’œuvre (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1980); Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, ed., Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the “Rose” to the Rhétoriqueurs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 2. Joël Blanchard, “L’Entrée du poète dans le champ politique au XVe siècle,” Annales HSS 41, no. 1 (1986): 43–61. 3. Cynthia J. Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 4. Olivier Delsaux, Manuscrits et pratiques autographes chez les écrivains français de la fin du moyen âge. L’exemple de Christine de Pizan (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2013). 5. Jane H. M. Taylor, The Making of Poetry: Late-­Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), 229–291. 6. Fred Inglis proposes that celebrity as a phenomenon is no more than 250 years old in A Short History of Celebrity (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010), 12; most scholars see print culture as a prerequisite for its applicability. For consideration of celebrity in relation to the early modern period, see, for example, Antoine Lilti, Figures publiques. L’Invention de la célébrité (1750–1850) (Paris: Fayard, 2014). 7. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, “A Journal in Celebrity Studies,” Celebrity Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 4. 8. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, 10. 9. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, 10. 10. David P. Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour, “Persona as Method: Exploring Celebrity and the Public Self through Persona Studies,” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 3 (2015): 288–305. 11. Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, “Persona as Method,” 289, 290. 12. Charlotte Cooper, “A Re-­Assessment of Text-­Image Relations in Christine de ­Pizan’s Didactic Works” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2017). 13. Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, “Persona as Method,” 289. 14. Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, “Persona as Method,” 289. 15. Holmes and Redmond, “A Journal in Celebrity Studies,” 4. 16. Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004), 20. 17. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, 20. 18. Helen Swift, Gender, Writing, and Per­for­mance: Men Defending W ­ omen in Late Medieval France, 1440–1538 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 19. Cited in Irving J. Rein, Philip Kotler, and Martin R. Stoller, High Visibility (London: Heinemann, 1987), 15. 20. Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, “Persona as Method,” 291. 21. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 24. 22. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, 19. 23. Notably in the midpoint speech by Amor, Lorris, and de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1992), lines 10497–10682. 24. See David F. Hult, Self-­Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 77–89.

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25. Honorat Bovet, “L’apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun” et le “Somnium super materia scimatis,” ed. Ivor Arnold (Paris: Les Belles, 1926), 5. 26. Christine de Pizan, Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. and trans. Mary Carpenter Erler and Thelma S. Fenster (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1990), 54, line 423. 27. Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, ed. Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1977), 56. 28. Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 57. 29. Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 20, 21. 30. Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 66. 31. Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 89. 32. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, 10. 33. Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 146. 34. On single-­author manuscript collections, see Taylor, The Making of Poetry, 13–81. 35. Christine is first to articulate t­ hese, but is not alone in this objection and preference; see Swift, Gender, Writing, and Per­for­mance. 36. See Kevin Brownlee, “Christine de Pizan: Gender and the New Vernacular Canon,” in Strong Voices, Weak History: Early ­Women Writers and Canons in ­England, France and Italy, ed. Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 99–120. 37. Carlo Pellegrini, ed., Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese (Florence: Olschki, 1971). 38. Taylor, The Making of Poetry, 41–45, 252–253. 39. Jean Lemaire de Belges, Œuvres de Jean Lemaire de Belges, ed. Jean Auguste Stecher, 4 vols. (Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 4:32. 40. Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, “Persona as Method,” 291. 41. Richard Howells, “Heroes, Saints and Celebrities: The Photo­graph as Holy Relic,” Celebrity Studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 113. 42. Alain Chartier, Alain Chartier: The Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans mercy, ed. and trans. Joan E. McRae (New York: Routledge, 2004), 92–93, lines 798–800. All quotations and translations from the Quarrel texts refer to this edition, page, and line, where cited. 43. Chartier, Alain Chartier, 111–117, lines 15–112. 44. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 20. 45. Chartier, Alain Chartier, 156–57, line 472. 46. Chartier, Alain Chartier, 148–49, lines 329–330. 47. Chartier, Alain Chartier, 266–67, line 577. 48. Chartier, Alain Chartier, 270–72, lines 671–672. 49. Chartier, Alain Chartier, 344–45, lines 795–797. 50. Chartier, Alain Chartier, 156–57, line 475. 51. Turner, “Approaching Celebrity Studies,” 13. 52. Martin Le Franc, Champion des dames, ed. Robert Deschaux, 5 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1999), line 1910. 53. Antoine Vérard, Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique: reproduction en fac-­similé de l’édition publiée par Antoine Vérard vers 1501, ed. Eugénie Droz and Arthur Piaget, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1910–24), 1: fols. 203v–224v, vv. 1614–1615. 54. Vérard, Le Jardin de plaisance, 1: fols. 203v–224v, line 639.



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55. Olivier Driessens, “Theorizing Celebrity Cultures: Thickenings of Celebrity Cultures and the Role of Cultural (Working) Memory,” Communications 39, no. 2 (2014): 109–127. 56. Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Appendix A; Taylor, The Making of Poetry, 25–26. 57. Taylor, The Making of Poetry, 236. 58. Helen Swift, Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-­Medieval France (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 140. 59. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, 19. 60. François Villon, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-­Toulet with Laëtitia Tabard (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), Testament, ix–xi. 61. Archival documents on Villon constitute a mere thirty-­six pages of the Œuvres complètes. 62. Jane H. M. Taylor, The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 173, 176. 63. Citations from the Testament refer to Œuvres complètes, ed. Cerquiglini-­Toulet and Tabard. I cite page, along with the line. Testament, 47, line 261. 64. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 79, lines 735–36. 65. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 157, lines 1880–1881. 66. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, line 155, 1847. 67. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, x. 68. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, 20. 69. Taylor, The Making of Poetry, 1. 70. Spektor is a Russian-­born American; the song, originally written by the Rus­sian poet Bulat Okudzhava, is the bonus track on the deluxe edition of Welcome to the Cheap Seats. 71. Driessens, “Theorizing Celebrity Cultures,” 121. 72. P. M. Buchan and Karen Yumi Lusted, La Belle Dame sans merci, self-­published in four chapters: https://­w ww​.­pmbuchan​.­com​/­la​-­belle​-­dame​-­sans​-­merci. 73. Driessens, “Theorizing Celebrity Cultures,” 121. 74. Clément Marot, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris: Bordas, 1990–1993), 2:777. 75. Taylor, The Making of Poetry, 3. 76. Adrian Armstrong, The Virtuoso Circle: Competition, Collaboration, and Complexity in Late Medieval French Poetry (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2012). 77. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 24. 78. Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry, 176. 79. Olivier Driessens, “Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity Using Field Theory,” Theory and Society 42, no. 5 (2013): 543–560, 552. 80. Rein, Kotler, and Stoller, High Visibility, 15. 81. See Taylor, The Making of Poetry, 243, 273–281.

cha p te r fi v e

Rethinking Patronage in Late Medieval France Networks of Influence in Manuscript Production and Reception Anneliese Pollock Renck

This essay takes up the subject of patronage in the fifteenth ­century, ultimately arguing that the late medieval period in France saw the rise of a number of practices of manuscript production and distribution that problematize the ways in which scholars have typically approached studies of medieval patronage. Using the example of one late fifteenth-­century manuscript translation of Ovid’s Heroides by Octovien de Saint-­Gelais, I tease out the ways in which the traditional patron-­writer or patron-­artist relationship model is inadequate when applied to a corpus of exemplars from the period, or, indeed, to a single manuscript copy. I then propose a new way of looking at ­these relationships that focuses not on discrete components of the manuscript (text or illumination) or the individu­ hole and the als responsible for t­ hese components, but on the manuscript as a w networks that influenced the production and reception of late medieval texts and images. In par­tic­u­lar, I take issue with a scholarly insistence on conceiving of medieval patronage as a bilateral relationship between e­ ither artist and patron, or artist and potential patron. While this model holds up quite nicely in many studies of early medieval patronage, the fifteenth ­century—­and especially the ­later fifteenth c­ entury—­necessitates an examination of proj­ects of literary sponsorship that are multilateral rather than bilateral. How do we acknowledge, for example, that a manuscript’s text is influenced by its accompanying illuminations, 110



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which most likely ­were not sponsored by the same individual to whom the verbal contents of the manuscript would have been dedicated? How do we make room in our analyses for t­hings like gift giving, second­hand acquisition and subsequent modification, manuscripts produced by libraires, and the changing paratexts accompanying each manuscript copy’s text?1 Deborah McGrady raises similar questions in a special issue of Digital Philology dedicated to patronage in the ­Middle Ages, writing that “scholarship places ­under the patronage umbrella a large spectrum of exchanges said to have fostered the literary enterprise while excluding other partnerships that are seen to destabilize the system.”2 This essay unpacks a manuscript tradition that reveals a number of partnerships that destabilize our understandings of literary and artistic patronage and push us to think about new ways of looking at this relationship, or new ways of conceiving of mécénat, in fifteenth-­century France. Medieval Patronage The first section of this chapter lays out how scholars have typically conceived of patronage in the M ­ iddle Ages and the Re­nais­sance, pointing in par­tic­u­lar to the differing approaches often taken by art historians and literary scholars when addressing this relationship between producer and owner. In the art historical realm, scholars have often focused both on the patron as an individual who commissions vari­ous works of art3 and what ­these commissions reveal about the sponsor’s motivations, ­whether cultural,4 po­liti­cal,5 or religious. For example, Amédée Boinet focuses on the library of Anthony of Burgundy, le grand Bâtard, especially the manuscripts in which Anthony took a par­tic­u­lar interest.6 Anthony’s bibliophilic tastes formed an in­ter­est­ing contrast with his life as a warrior, writes Boinet, but nonetheless he collected beautifully illustrated luxury manuscripts all ­ fter surveying of his life, amassing a large library at his Château de la Roche. A Anthony’s manuscripts, Boinet concludes with a discussion of Anthony’s own hand in some of his manuscripts. I term this the “art historical approach” ­because this study often focuses more on instances of sponsorship of illuminative proj­ects than on ­those of textual ones: a patron identifies the works they want to see put into manuscript form rather than the ones they want to see in­ ven­ted or written. What I term the “literary approach” instead tends to focus in on one par­ tic­u­lar writer or text and its history of funding, leading to a study of an author

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and his or her work. One example h ­ ere is Pascale Charron’s study of the reception of Martin Le Franc’s Champion des dames at the Burgundian court.7 Less frequently, we see studies on the proj­ect(s) of a patron who sponsored multiple written works. An example of such scholarship is Deborah McGrady’s study of Charles V’s literary patronage.8 McGrady traces how the king implemented what she terms his “Sapientia proj­ect,” a vast effort to have learned Latin volumes translated into the vernacular for the purposes of creating a legacy for himself and spreading knowledge throughout the kingdom.9 A number of studies apply the literary approach more broadly to demonstrate what royal patronage looked like during the ­later M ­ iddle Ages.10 An additional area of literary scholars’ research is the study of prologues, the moment where the author pre­sents their work to the king or royal audience.11 While some scholarly volumes include both types of scholarship—­the art historical approach, that is, studies of book commission and owner­ship; and the literary approach, that is, studies of textual production and sponsorship12—­ other volumes limit themselves to scholarship representing one or the other approach exclusively. Such a separation according to scholarly discipline often makes sense when we look at how medieval manuscript corpora ­were produced. Only in rare cases did one workshop produce both text and image; more commonly we have a text that was taken up by a workshop, patron, or illuminator, and ­later put into a commissioned book. Below, I propose a model that reconceives of patronage in such a way as to look at the production of a codex as a ­whole rather than focus on its texts and images as separate stories. This essay is not, however, the first to point to a need for a reconceptualization of patronage studies. Tracy Cooper calls for a reconsideration of the patron-­client relationship that transforms our hierarchical view to “a more dynamic, transactional model that concentrates on the mutuality of the relationship and on the pro­cess,”13 and Helen Swift employs Stewart Clegg’s model of cir­cuits of power to similar ends, to allow for the writer’s agency in the relationship.14 ­These two critiques nevertheless insist on the bilateral nature of patronage: patron and client, writer and potential patron. The model that I propose is somewhat dif­fer­ent, based on relationships—­dynamic, transactional, and negotiational—­that are not bilateral, but multilateral. This approach makes clear how complex and unique each finished manuscript was, and opens a win­ dow onto a literary world where texts ­were always works-­in-­progress, always ready to be transformed into something new by the group involved in committing them to manuscript form.



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The Manuscript Corpus: the XXI Epistres d’Ovide in Late Medieval France The story begins with Octovien de Saint-­Gelais’s translation in the last de­cade of the fifteenth ­century of Ovid’s Heroides. Saint-­Gelais dedicated his translation to Charles VIII.15 This dedication is written into the translator’s prologue, found in six of sixteen surviving manuscript copies of the work.16 We have no evidence, however, that Charles VIII commissioned or contributed in any way to this textual production or to the production of any of ­these sixteen extant codices. One volume contains a dedication miniature clearly representing the king,17 but it is one of the less luxurious exemplars of the work and is thus unlikely to be a pre­sen­ta­tion copy. And even if we w ­ ere able to identify a copy in Charles’s library, this is not to say that he commissioned it. Indeed, the translator clearly states in his prologue that he wanted to offer something to the king, not that the king asked him to do so: “[P]laise vous scavoir, sire, que je, toute ma vie desireux d’executer et parfaire selon l’estandue du myen pouvoir aulcune chouse qui donnast plaisir a vostre oeil, recreacion de cueur et resfrigere de pancee pour la descharge du faiz de vostre solicitude et des songneux affaires qui par office royal gissent et reppousent soubz vostre septre” (“Please know, Sire, that I have all of my life desired to create and perfect something, in accordance with the level of my capability, that gives plea­sure to your eye, entertainment to your heart, and refreshment to your thought in order to unburden you of your worry and the difficult affairs which by virtue of royal office lie and repose u­ nder your sceptre”).18 Moreover, he humbly asks the king to accept the volume in which the prologue is found: “Et pour ce vous ay volu ce pre­sent volume diriger par translacion faicte selon ce que pouvoir de treshumble sugect se monte, lequel vous plaira doulcement et a gré recevoir” (“And therefore I wanted to direct the pre­sent volume to you through a translation carried out according to the power of your very lowly subject, which you w ­ ill be sweetly pleased with and receive willingly”).19 The situation gets more complicated. Saint-­Gelais enjoyed close ties to Charles of Angoulême and his wife, Louise of Savoy,20 and the latter commissioned a copy of the work, identified as manuscript français 875 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, hereafter BNF français 875.21 ­Because this copy, apparently completed in 1475, is one of the oldest surviving copies of the translation, Maulde-­La-­Clavière argues that Saint-­Gelais originally translated the work for Louise.22 This raises the prob­lem of dates. The translator’s prologue in multiple

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manuscript copies cites 1497 as the date of its translation or the exemplar’s transcription.23 The first folio of another exemplar, BNF français 873, reads: “[C]y commencent les Espistres d’Ovide translatées de latin en françois, le XVIe jour de febvrier mil CCCC IIIIxx XVI, par Révérend Père en Dieu, maistre Octovian de Saint-­Gelès, à présent évesque d’Angoulesme” (“­Here begin the Epistles of Ovid translated from Latin into French, the 16th day of February 1496, by the Revered ­Father in God, master Octovian de Saint-­Gelais, currently Bishop of Angoulême”).24 A volume containing five of the twenty-­one translated letters was clearly made for Anne of Brittany even e­ arlier, in 1492.25 The 1496–1497 date can be interpreted e­ ither as the date of the completion of the translation or as the date of the individual manuscript’s transcription. ­Either interpretation is equally plausible. If the date is of the completion of the translation, the five letters in the manuscript of Anne of Brittany would mean that Saint-­Gelais had not yet completed his work when he offered ­those letters to the queen. If the date is of the transcription, Saint-­Gelais could well have completed his translation and offered it to Anne of Brittany prior to writing the prologue for Charles VIII. If the date is of the transcription of the specific volume, this is complicated by the fact that two other volumes, BNF français 25397 (fols. 1r and 209v) and Vienna Österreischische Nationalbibliothek, codex 2624 (fol. 138r) contain this same date. ­These three volumes, however, could have simply copied the date from one of the ­others or from a lost exemplar. Who then should be understood as the translation’s patron? Complicating this prob­lem even further, what if we want to examine the production and possession of each individual manuscript exemplar? We could approach t­ hese questions by borrowing Helen Swift’s concept of cir­cuits of power: that Saint-­ Gelais was in search of a patron throughout his w ­ hole ­career, but that is not to say that he necessarily obtained all of the patronage for which he applied.26 Over the course of his life, the Bishop of Angoulême dedicated works to Charles VIII,27 Charles of Angoulême,28 and Louis XII29; of all the relationships he attempted or ultimately forged, the most fruitful seems to have been that with Charles and Louise, which eventually gained him his placement as bishop.30 Yet in looking at solely the textual production of the XXI Epistres d’Ovide, we cannot with any certainty point to one individual who financed or other­wise supported Saint-­Gelais’s translation. While this could always be due to the loss of rec­ords or of a pre­sen­ta­tion copy of the work, it is my conten-



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tion that it is more likely to be due to the fact that multiple individuals ­supported the bishop’s work over the course of his life. In the next section, I turn to two specific exemplars of Saint-­Gelais’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides, BNF français 873 and 874,, to tease out their histories of production and reception. I argue below that we must conceive of each volume as the product of multiple producers, both artistic and textual, and multiple o­ wners, w ­ hether as commissioners or t­ hose to whom the volume was offered in some manner. I propose the model of a network, rather than a bilateral relationship, to help us conceive of manuscript patronage in late medieval France. BNF Français 873: Multiple ­Owners BNF français 873 was illuminated by Jean Pichore31 ­after 1497.32 Beyond the markers of owner­ship that I discuss below, the codex represents a fairly typical example of a manuscript copy of the XXI Epistres d’Ovide. That is to say, the volume begins with the translator’s prologue dedicating the work to Charles VIII, then includes the twenty-­one letters, each one preceded by a full-­page illustration of the protagonist. The translator’s prologue and the letters do not distinguish themselves in any par­tic­u­lar way from other exemplars of Saint-­Gelais’s translation. However, we can use this codex as a case study in examining how to address the production of the volume, in that it forces us to examine both text and image in deciding who was responsible for its confection. The inclusion of the translator’s prologue in the codex brings to the fore the association with the king, which would have helped the intended audience to situate the translation within its royal milieu. But the translator’s prologue, as discussed above, does not mark this copy as a pre­sen­ta­tion copy, and the prologue’s text clearly identifies the king as an individual to whom the translation is offered, not one at whose request it was created. In terms of the manuscript’s illustrator, Jean Pichore, we know he made manuscripts for members of the same circle as our translator, that is to say, for Louise of Savoy, Anne of Brittany, and Louis XII.33 We do not know for whom BNF français 873 was made. ­There are three possibilities: that it was a commissioned codex; a codex made to be offered as a gift (thus commissioned by one individual to be offered in exchange for the patronage, or at least goodwill, of another); or a volume made for a librairie without a specific destinataire in mind at the time of production. But even though in this case we have more questions

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than answers in trying to determine the impetus for the manuscript’s creation, it is clear that the typical bilateral and hierarchical conceptions of patronage outlined above do not apply. Rather than one producer, we have at least two: Octovien de Saint-­Gelais and Jean Pichore. And rather than one commissioner or dedicatee, we have at least two individuals to whom this work was directed in some way or another: Charles VIII, addressed in the prologue; and whoever ­else received it as a gift, commissioned it, or bought it. An in-­depth look at the markers of possession left by two subsequent o­ wners of the codex, King Louis XII and Louise of Savoy, can tell us something about the value placed on the volume by ­these individuals. This codex was first held in the library of Louis XII,34 eventually passing into the hands of Louise of ­Savoy.35 This transfer is witnessed by the windmills and wings, emblems of Louise of Savoy, that appear on the top layer of paint in the manuscript’s folios. The letter “L” that appears on multiple folios and would have first marked Louis XII’s owner­ship is sometimes partially obscured by ­these symbols marking Louise’s ­later owner­ship of the codex.36 While t­ hese marks of owner­ship do not change the meaning of ­either the texts or images contained in the volume, they do indicate that Louis XII may have commissioned its production. If this is the case, who would be the patron: Charles VIII or Louis XII? And the creator: Octovien de Saint-­Gelais or Jean Pichore? Thinking of patronage in a bilateral way would force us to pick one individual on e­ ither side of the production-­ownership divide. Unable to do so in this case, we would be forced to simplify the circumstances of the production of BNF français 873 and thereby fail to adequately address the questions of who produced the work and why.37 Although we may not be able to answer ­these questions precisely, we can use this codex as an example of why the bilateral model is insufficient, reinforcing Deborah McGrady’s contention that scholars exclude certain cases from conceptions of patronage that are “seen to destabilize the system.” BNF Français 874: Networks of Textual and Iconographical Production I now turn to my second case study, BNF français 874. Regarding the questions of who produced the work and why, this codex offers much food for thought ­because, relative to our first object of study, BNF français 873, significant modifications have been written into its text and painted into its images. This man-



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uscript w ­ ill help us to tease out the multiple producers and consumers that point to a network model for the patron-­client relationship instead of the binary one ­these two terms typically indicate. BNF français 874 was also illuminated by Jean Pichore “in collaboration with other Pa­ri­sian paint­ers,”38 and completed ­after 1502.39 Two particularities of this volume highlight the collaborative and distinct nature of its production. First, both the text and images situate the volume and its contents in Normandy.40 Second, an anonymous author has added an original prologue to the w ­ hole manuscript along with unique prefaces to each of the Heroïdes’s letters. Th ­ ese anonymous additions modify the invited reading of the volume’s text and images from one oriented ­toward royal recreation as put forward in Saint-­Gelais’s prologue to one focused on the narratives as love letters. ­These modifications made to XXI Epistres as compared to other exemplars point to a specific proj­ect that distinguishes this volume from t­ hose more oriented ­toward the royal dedication and milieu. The anonymous author’s texts and the illuminator’s images correspond in such a way as to suggest that the author and artist must have been familiar with each other’s work. The clearest example of this collaboration, or at least familiarity, concerns Hypermnestra’s letter to Lynceus. In the preface inserted before the letter, the detail that Hypermnestra’s f­ ather put her into prison is succeeded by the following: “[son père] la condempna à avoir chascun jour ung membre coupé jusques à tant qu’elle fust morte. Et le premier jour luy fist couper une jambe dont du sang qui en sailloit elle escripvit à Lynus son mary l’espitre qui s’ensuit” (“her ­father condemned her to have a limb cut off each day and from the blood that flowed from it she wrote the following letter to her husband Lynceus”).41 This detail is not found in any other source I have identified, certainly not in Saint-­ Gelais’s translation of the Hypermnestra’s letter that follows this introductory summary. The illuminator has responded to this textual turn of events, painting Hypermnestra writing her letter with the blood of her cut-­off foot.42 One further example marks the confluence of text and image as they work together, this time the assertion that the story of Hero and Leander takes place in Normandy. First, the text prefacing their letters indicates that the two lovers live in Fécamp and Honfleur, Leander swimming across the “bras de mer” that separated the two cities.43 True, this is a flawed understanding of the geography of Normandy. However, the artist is reading the text, or is at least aware of the overall Norman theme, ­because the illuminations that follow this geo­graph­i­cal precision include architectural details to help the viewer visually situate the

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connection to Normandy. The roofs of the buildings are clearly meant to represent the style of Rouen.44 In terms of the reading invited by the codex’s texts and images, while the original letters translated by Saint-­Gelais remain the same, the anonymous additions and the absence of the original translator’s prologue significantly ­re­orient the volume’s intended message. As we saw above, BNF français 873 is presented to Charles VIII for “entertainment” and “refreshment to your thought in order to unburden you of your worry.” This message of BNF français 874 is dif­fer­ent. Clearly articulated by the anonymous author of the codex’s prologue, the message has to do with understanding love. Ovid compiled (recueillit) the letters “pour la grant singularite et amour qu’[Ovide] congneut qui estoit entre ceulx qui se escripvoyent les dictes lettres et epistres” (“for the g­ reat singularity and love that [Ovid] knew to be between ­those who wrote the aforementioned letters and epistles”).45 In underlining the importance of love as organ­izing and justifying princi­ple of the volume, the anonymous author of the prologue separates this textual tradition from its royal milieu and also from its more explic­itly educational objectives in the early medieval period.46 In so d ­ oing, the author situates the text to follow as a series of letters with their own inherent value, without po­liti­cal or practical objective. The author closes out his prologue with a discussion of the more general value of love, creating an explicit link between this volume and religious values, writing that: “en ce monde ny a chose qui vaille tant que amour. Car dieu mesire mourt par amour” (“in this world ­there is no ­thing that is as valuable as love. ­Because God died for and by love”).47 Thus, the author of the prologue can justify the volume’s contents, all the while distinguishing this version from other versions of the Heroides, namely, versions that put forward princely recreation as their objectives (i.e., other copies of Saint-­Gelais’s translation), and ­those that seek the moral edification of their readers. This emphasis on love, secular and religious, as organ­izing princi­ple in BNF français 874 is also taken up in the short texts prefacing each letter. I discuss elsewhere how the prefaces to Penelope’s, Canace’s, and Phyllis’s letters put forward this message surrounding the value of love and how this contrasts with the ­earlier medieval schoolroom tradition. To summarize, while the short prefaces pre­sent love as a unifying princi­ple in the volume, the medieval schoolroom tradition uses individual female characters in the Heroides as exempla, models to follow or reject in terms of h ­ uman comportment.48



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Networks of Influence In short, this copy of the XXI Epistres d’Ovide puts forward its own narrative, both visual and textual. In it, the contributions of multiple actors—­anonymous author of the new prologue and prefaces to each letter, illuminators, and the original translator—­function in tandem. No longer the work of one author or artist, the manuscript requires us to come up with a dif­fer­ent way of describing ­those individuals who ultimately offer their ­labor to be consumed. As for patronage, it is equally unclear who the individual sponsor of this codex might be. I discussed above how no one emerges unequivocally as the patron of Saint-­Gelais’s translation. Regarding the production of BNF français 874, I suggest elsewhere that this volume might have been commissioned by Georges d’Amboise, a Norman cardinal who frequently commissioned manuscripts and then offered them to Louis XII.49 This also fits ­under our vague umbrella of patronage, this time the nobleman searching for his king’s support through offering his own gift. Yet, in this case, we have more of a chain than a bilateral arrangement, a chain in which manuscript producers submit work to the cardinal who then submits that work to the king. And recognizing that this chain also has to take into account production of the text, b­ ecause text and image are intertwined in the manuscript’s folios, we again find ourselves confronting a network, not a binary relationship. Using the model of a network of influence rather than a binary patron-­ client relationship allows us to enlarge our field of analy­sis in examinations of medieval manuscript production. Rather than being obligated to assign two individuals each of two roles, he who produces and he who finances, we can recognize the multiple roles each individual could hold, or the multiple individuals who might participate in the volume’s reception and production. Such a move, a figurative zooming out of the scholar’s camera lens, enables an examination of all of the actors who participated in the manuscript’s production and reception. The application of a network model to studies of fifteenth-­century patronage also makes a larger point about book production more generally at the end of the ­Middle Ages. In short, by adopting a model that necessarily takes into account the multimodal nature of the manuscript volume itself and the multiple actors involved in its production and reception, we are also able to more fully conceptualize late medieval practices of book production and circulation and to situate the fifteenth c­entury as a key moment in the history of the book in Eu­rope.

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Notes 1. Impor­tant studies of libraires and their practices of manuscript production and distribution include Mary Beth Winn, Anthone Vérard, Pa­ri­sian Publisher, 1485–1512: Prologues, Poems and Pre­sen­ta­tions (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1997); and Brigitte Buettner, “Jacques Raponde, marchand de manuscrits enluminés,” Médiévales 14 (1988): 23–32. See also Paul Delalain, Étude sur le libraire parisien du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Paris: Delalain frères, 1891). 2. Deborah McGrady, “Introduction: Rethinking the Bound­aries of Patronage,” Digital Philology 2, no. 2 (2013): 145–154 (145). 3. For example, André Vernet, Les manuscrits de Claude d’Urfé (1501–1558) au château de La Bastie. Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres 120, no. 1 (1976): 81–97. A ­g reat deal of attention has been paid to female patrons of late. See Laure Fagnart and Elizabeth L’Estrange, ed., special issue: Le mécénat féminin en France et en Bourgogne, XVe–­XVIe siècles: Nouvelles perspectives, Le Moyen Age 117, no. 3–4 (2011), and Kathleen Wilson-­Chevalier, ed. Patronnes et mécènes en France à la Re­nais­sance (Saint-­ Etienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-­Etienne, 2007). 4. Francis Salet describes mécénat as “générosité désintéressée à mobiles culturels,” in “Mécénat royal et princier au Moyen Age,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres 129, no. 4 (1985): 621. 5. See Tracy Adams’s work on Isabeau of Bavaria, “Isabeau de Bavière, le don et la politique de mécénat,” Le Moyen Age 117 (2011): 475–486, and Olga Karaskova’s on Marie of Burgundy, “Le mécénat de Marie de Bourgogne: entre dévotion privée et nécessité Politique,” Le Moyen Age 117, no. 3 (2011): 507–529. 6. Amédée Boinet, “Un bibliophile du XVe siècle: le g­ rand bâtard de Bourgogne,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 67 (1906): 255–269. 7. The examples are abundant. In addition to Pascale Charron’s “Les réceptions du Champion des dames à la cour de Bourgogne: ‘Tres puissant et tres humain prince . . . ​veullez cet livre humainement recepvoir,’ ” Bulletin du bibliophile 1 (2000): 9–29, see Deborah McGrady, “Eustache Deschamps as Machaut’s Reader,” in her Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Helen Swift, “Martin Le Franc et son livre qui se plaint. Une pe­tite énigme à la cour de Philippe le Bon,” L’écrit et le manuscrit à la fin du Moyen Age, ed. Tania Van Hemelryck and Céline Van Hoorebeeck (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 329–342; and Patrick De Winter, La bibliothèque de Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne (1364–1404) (Paris: CNRS, 1985). 8. Deborah McGrady, The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Plea­sure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 9. Bruno Petey-­Girard conducts an extensive study of the relationship between the royal patron and writers in Le Sceptre et la Plume. Images du prince protecteur des Lettres de la Re­nais­sance au ­Grand Siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2010). 10. As in the case of Douglas Kelly, “The Genius of the Patron: The Prince, the Poet, and Fourteenth-­Century Invention,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 20 (1987): 77–97; Salet, “Mécénat royal et princier au Moyen Age”; Jean Balsamo, “Le prince et les arts en France au XVIe siècle,” Seizième Siècle 7 (2011): 307–332; Caroline Prud’Homme, “Donnez, vous recevrez. Les rapports entre écrivains et seigneurs à la fin du Moyen Age à travers le don du livre et la dédicace,” COnTEXTES, http://­journals​.­openedition​.­org​/­contextes​



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/­4259, accessed June 10, 2022; and Joël Blanchard, “Le corps du roi: mélancolie et ‘recréation.’ Implications médicales et culturelles du loisir des princes à la fin du Moyen Age,” Représentations, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Age, Actes du colloque organisé par l’Université du Maine, les 25 et 26 mars 1994 (Paris: Picard, 1995), 199–211. 11. Some examples are Erik Inglis, “A Book at Hand: Some Late Medieval Accounts of Manuscript Pre­sen­ta­tions,” Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 5 (2002): 67–71; and Claude Thiry, “La présentation au prince,” in Mythes à la cour, mythes pour la cour, actes du XIIe congrès de la Société internationale de littérature courtoise (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2010), 107–130. 12. A recent example is Cynthia J. Brown and Anne-­Marie Legaré, ed., Les femmes, l’art et la culture en Eu­rope entre Moyen Age et Re­nais­sance (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016). 13. Tracy E. Cooper, “Mecenatiso or Clientelismo? The Character of Re­nais­sance Patronage,” in The Search for a Patron in the ­Middle Ages and the Re­nais­sance, ed. David G. Wilkins and Rebecca L. Wilkins (Lewiston, ME: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 19–32 (20). 14. Helen Swift, “Cir­cuits of Power: A Model for Rereading Poet-­Patron Relations in Late-­Medieval Defences of ­Women,” Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 2, no. 2 (2013): 222–242 (235). 15. On this translation and its translator, see Anneliese Pollock Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis in Three Works by Octovien de Saint-­Gelais,” Le Moyen Français 73 (2013): 89–110. For the dating of the translation, see 95, n.25. ­ ese are listed in Anneliese Pollock Renck, Female Authorship, Patronage, and 16. Th Translation in Late Medieval France: From Christine de Pizan to Louise Labé (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018), 124, n.2. This prologue is transcribed in Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis,” 108–110. 17. This is Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BNF), Arsenal 5108 réserve, fol. 1r. 18. BNF français 25397, fols. 3r–3v; transcription from Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis,” 108. 19. BNF français 25397, fol. 4v; transcription from Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis,” 110. 20. René de Maulde-­La-­Clavière, Louise de Savoie et François Ier: trente ans de jeunesse (1485–1515) (Paris: Librairie Académique Didier, 1895), 38–42. 21. For a discussion of Louise’s commande of BNF français 875, see Anneliese Pollock Renck, “Traduction et adaptation d’un manuscrit des XXI Epistres d’Ovide appartenant à Louise de Savoie (BNF français 875),” in Les femmes, l’art et la culture en Eu­rope entre Moyen Age et Re­nais­sance, ed. Cynthia Brown and Anne-­Marie Legaré (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016), 221–239; and Anneliese Pollock Renck, “Reading Medieval Manuscripts Then, Now, and Sometime in Between: Verbal and Visual Mise en Abyme in Huntington Library Manuscript HM 60 and BNF français 875,” Manuscripta 60, no. 1 (2016): 30–72. 22. Maulde-­La-­Clavière, Louise de Savoie et François Ier, 50. For further discussion of this manuscript, see Renck, “Traduction et adaptation,” and Renck, “Reading Medieval Manuscripts.”

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23. Cynthia J. Brown, The Queen’s Library: Image-­Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477–1514 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 350, dates Saint-­Gelais’s translation to 1497 (new style) rather than 1496 (old style). 24. Cited in Henri-­Joseph Molinier, Essai biographique et littéraire sur Octovien de Saint-­ Gelays, Évêque d’Angoulême 1468–1502 (Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine Reprints, 1972), 67. 25. For information on this manuscript, see Cynthia J. Brown, “Cele­bration and Controversy at a Late Medieval French Court: A Poetic Anthology for and about Anne of Brittany and Her Female Entourage,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Re­nais­sance 72 (2010): 541–573. 26. Swift explains this concept of failed patronage in “Cir­cuits of Power.” 27. Namely, the XXI Epistres d’Ovide discussed h ­ ere, and the Complaincte et Epitaphe du feu roy Charles dernier trespassé. For this second work, see Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis,” 103, n. 47. 28. L’estrif de Science, Nature et de Fortune. See Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis,” 91–95. 29. L’Énéide. See Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis,” 103–107. 30. Maulde-­La-­Clavière, Louise de Savoie et François Ier, 48. 31. Caroline Zöhl, “Ovide,” in France 1500: entre Moyen Age et Re­nais­sance, ed. Geneviève Bresc-­Bautier, Thierry Crépin-­L eblond, Elisabeth Taburet-­Delahaye, and Martha Wolff (Paris: Éditions de la Ré­union des musées nationaux, 2010), 126. According to François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 (Paris: NF/ Flammarion, 1993), 408, Pichore also illuminated BNF français 874, manuscript 1466 of the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale, and Vienna, Österreischische Nationalbibliothek, codex 2624. Most recently, Avril identifies his participation in the painting of Oxford Balliol ms. 383 with the collaboration of other artists, as discussed in Renck, “Traduction et adaptation,” 222, n.4. 32. Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auctoritatis.” For the dating of the translation, see 95, n. 25. 33. The manuscripts painted by Pichore for t­ hese three patrons are discussed in Anneliese Pollock Renck, “Les Vies des femmes célèbres: Antoine Dufour, Jean Pichore, Anne of Brittany and a Manuscript’s Adaptation of an Italian Printed Book,” The Journal of the Early Book Society 18 (2015): 161–162. 34. According to Paul Durrieu and Jean-­Joseph Vasselot, Les manuscrits à miniatures des Héroïdes d’Ovide traduites par Saint-­Gelais et un g­ rand miniaturiste français du xvie siècle (Extrait de L’Artiste, May and June 1894) (Paris: Beaux-­Arts, Belles Lettres, 1894), 8. 35. Brown identifies Louise’s arms and symbols, wings, in The Queen’s Library, 200. Zöhl proposes this chronology of owner­ship in “Ovide,” 202. 36. I discuss elsewhere how this transfer of owner­ship may have taken place, in Anneliese Pollock Renck, “Les Héroïdes à la fin du Moyen Age: pour une définition élargie de l’acte traducteur,” Anabases 29 (2019): 237–251, 243–244. 37. Jeanette Patterson takes up the relationship between patronage and new o­ wners’ additions in “Stolen Scriptures: The Bible Historiale and the Hundred Years’ War,” Digital Philology 2, no. 2 (2013): 155–180. 38. Zöhl, “Ovide,” 125. My translation.



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39. Fol. 1r reads: “Cy commence les epistres dovide lesquelles ont este translatees: par feu monsieur levesque dangoulesme nomme octovien de saint gelais” (­Here begin the Epistles of Ovid which w ­ ere translated by the late Bishop of Anglouême, named Octavion of Saint Gelais). “Feu” means deceased, which means that the manuscript must have been confected a­ fter 1502, the year of Saint-­Gelais’s death. 40. For a discussion of this point, see Renck, “Les Héroïdes à la fin du Moyen Age,” 248–250. 41. See BNF français 874, fol.169r 42. BNF français 874, fol. 175v. 43. See BNF français 874, fol. 118r. 44. See fols. 119v, 123r, and 130v. Further elaboration on this point can be found in Renck, “Les Héroïdes à la fin du Moyen Age,” 248–250. 45. For a discussion of the utilization of the Heroides as moral exempla in the early medieval period, see Renck, “The Prologue,” 96–97. 46. For a discussion of the utilization of the Heroides as moral exempla in the early medieval period, see Renck, “The Prologue,” 96–97. 47. BNF français 874, fol. 1r. 48. For further elaboration on this point, see Renck, “Les Héroïdes à la fin du Moyen Age,” 247–249. 49. Renck, “Les Héroïdes à la fin du Moyen Age,” 248–250.

c ha p te r si x

The Rhétoriqueurs and the Transition from Manuscript to Print Cynthia J. Brown

The following remarks, as well as the core of my scholarship over the last forty years, fully endorse Johan Huizinga’s conviction that a study of cultural productions in the form of material objects and written documents, such as the manuscripts and early printed books examined ­here, exposes, often in unanticipated ways, a society’s ideas and attitudes. Nevertheless, his perception that the late M ­ iddle Ages in France witnessed a decline of cultural and artistic production merits reexamination, especially in light of how the advent of print in the fifteenth c­ entury generated new means of expression and new modes of thinking. Indeed, when Daniel Poirion, Franco Simone, and o­ thers laid the intellectual and cultural groundwork in the 1960s for what would become a new field in French literary studies, namely one examining the late medieval period encompassing the f­ ourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the previously misunderstood and even maligned Moyen Age tardif (late M ­ iddle Ages) was thereby rehabilitated as an area of research with its own identity that could no longer be simply encompassed ­under the ­Middle Ages rubric.1 With Simone uncovering signs of the Re­nais­sance in late medieval France, a new generation of scholars was all the more inspired to explore this period in ways it had never previously been examined. Arguably the most significant cultural development that defined the fifteenth c­ entury as it pressed forward into the sixteenth ­century was the advent 124



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of print. For the transition from manuscript to print culture prompted a critical shift in the dynamics of literary creation, with groundbreaking means to reproduce and disseminate writings and the emergence of a new manifestation of authorial self-­consciousness. Accompanying t­ hese technical and social transformations was a concomitant po­liti­cal change from a patron-­dominated system, in which authors penned works aimed at pleasing their benefactors, to a system in which publishers, printers, and, to varying degrees, authors shared in the creation and reproduction of lit­er­a­ture. Less beholden to (but not entirely in­de­pen­dent of) the patronage system, writers increasingly asserted their authorial rights both in collaborative association with some printers and in challenges to o­ thers. This trajectory can be traced through case studies of the Rhétoriqueur poets, whose works, which dominated the period from 1450 to 1530,2 ­were impacted and redefined by ­these manuscript-­to-­print developments. Just as this evolution did not emerge in straightforward fashion—­manuscript production coexisted with print reproduction for many decades—­a number of writers of the Rhétoriqueur generation, including Jean Marot and Octovien de Saint-­Gelais, did not engage with this pioneering invention. The literary output of Jean Molinet (1435–1507), André de la Vigne (ca. 1470– ca. 1515), and Pierre Gringore (ca. 1475–ca. 1539) represents three dif­fer­ent, albeit overlapping, phases of Rhétoriqueur activity that provide insight into how the advent of print fueled the gradual change from a patron-­dominated system to a printer-­dominated enterprise in which the author’s voice and presence became more manifest.3 While most of Molinet’s work followed conventional practice, appearing in manuscript form, the publication of several writings at the end of his ­career reveals his late interest in the new possibilities introduced with the advent of print. In its passage from script to print, André de la Vigne’s La Ressource de la Chrestienté (1494) reveals a progressive redefinition of authorship during the poet’s lifetime. La Vigne’s successful lawsuit in 1504 against the printer Michel Le Noir dramatically set the next stage for the next phase in this poet-­printer evolution, exemplified by Pierre Gringore, whose works appeared from the outset in print, many u­ nder his control as publisher.4 Gringore essentially institutionalized the l­egal judgment handed down to La Vigne by obtaining from the Pa­ri­sian Parlement in December 1505 the first of many author privileges, an “ordonnance” that ceded control over the publication of Les Folles entreprises to the poet for one year, which the printer Pierre Le Dru publicized in the book’s colophon. It was especially through an exploitation of paratextual material in their publications that ­these writers and their printers revealed to

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their contemporaries—­and modern-­day scholars—­their increasing involvement in the reproduction of their works and concomitant appropriation of (some of ) the rights to control their own words. In addition to such advertisement of procured author privileges, more directly articulated signatures and more self-­ promotional images provide concrete evidence of ­these innovations. Jean Molinet It is with Jean Molinet that late medieval authors’ needs to protect, defend, and identify with their works accelerated and reshaped their self-­images, roles, and literary creations. As the official historiographer of the Burgundian court, Molinet began to write poetry before printing reached Burgundy, but ­toward the end of his life he directly or indirectly engaged with the new invention: six of his works w ­ ere printed during his lifetime, the most popu­lar being Le ­Temple 5 de Mars. A comparative study of the eight manuscripts and twelve printed editions of this work confirms the poem’s success in two concurrent systems of reproduction. What about the poet himself? Molinet likely offered his patron, Charles the Bold, a copy of this allegorical narrative that celebrates peace in fall 1475.6 But none of the versions of the ­Temple de Mars that appeared in manuscript collections—­manuscripts of the work appearing during Molinet’s lifetime include Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BNF) manuscript français 1642 (fols. 456r–460v); BNF Arsenal manuscript 3621 (fols. 288r–292v); and Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek manuscript II. 2545 (fols. 275r–280v)—­ identified him in the paratext. Nor do imprints that appeared during Molinet’s lifetime identify him in the paratext, whereas the printer was often named in editions of this work, indicating who controlled its paratextual space. We find no indication of author or printer in the ca. 1476 Flemish or Netherlands publication; the ca. 1491 Pa­ri­sian edition of printer Le Petit Laurens bears on the title page the printer’s mark and the colophon; Jean Trepperel’s ca. 1497–98 and ca. 1506–09 Pa­ri­sian editions show the printer’s mark prominently displayed on the title page and name and address at the end of the first edition; Jean de Vingle’s 1502 Lyon edition offers a date and place of publication in the colophon; and a ca. 1501–1505 Pa­ri­sian edition without publication details is attributed to Michel Le Noir. In contrast, three sixteenth-­century posthumous manuscript collections do identify Molinet as poet of the ­Temple de Mars: BNF français 1717 (fol. 70v);



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BNF français 12490 (fol. 148v); and BNF nouvelles acquistions francaises 10262 (fol. 194r). Not all posthumous single editions of the ­Temple d’honneur (dating from ca. 1520) publicize the author’s name, but he is identified in a 1526 collection of multiauthored poems; in three editions of his collected works, Les Faictz et dictz (1531, 1537, 1540), Molinet’s name shares title-­page space with the bookseller-­publisher Jean Longis or the printer Alain Lotrain. By the time of his death in 1507 and prob­ably ­earlier, Molinet’s reputation had reached beyond Valenciennes, and he was increasingly identified as author of the ­Temple de Mars and other writings. In the first known collection of Molinet’s verses alone, he is not identified as author of the ­Temple de Mars (fols. 119v–126r), but the manuscript’s scribe addressed a laudatory dedication to the poet. B ­ ecause t­ hese verses in the Tournai, Bibliothèque communale manuscript 105, in which the dedication appears, refer to ­f uture readers of this book who w ­ ill mourn Molinet’s death, it is unclear if the poet was still alive at the time or had just died.7 The text itself does draw attention to the author, for the last words of the ­Temple de Mars contained Molinet’s meta­phoric signature,8 “Pour Dieu, excuses ma simplesse, / S’il est obsur, trou­ble ou brunet: / Chascun n’a pas son molin net” (“For God, excuse my simple-­mindedness / if it is obscure, troubled, or dark: / Not every­one has his mill clean”), which certain contemporaries doubtless recognized. But how aware w ­ ere editors and book purchasers in Paris and Lyon of the meaning of this pun? How aware was Molinet of ­those spurious Pa­ri­sian editions that advertised his work as promoting war? Woodcuts in the editions of printers Le Petit Laurens, Trepperel, and Le Noir glorify war rather than peace. Authorial anonymity also characterized Antoine Vérard’s 1493 publication and Jean Trepperel’s 1499 edition of L’Art de rhétorique, which eliminated mention of Molinet’s authorship, even though his name figured in the incipit and dedicatory prologue of a fifteenth-­century and sixteenth-­century manuscript of the work.9 Yet both Vérard and Trepperel advertised their names and marks in the paratext of their respective editions. Dedicatory images in Vérard’s edition and hybrid copies of it reflect t­ hese per­sis­tent ambiguities concerning the author’s identity. Molinet’s name in the manuscripts’ dedicatory prologue is ­actually replaced by that of Henri de Croy in two vellum copies of Vérard’s edition.10 Thus, one won­ders if Molinet’s decision sometime before 1500 to manage the publication of three of his works in single editions was a conscious act of

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self-­defense vis-­à-­vis French publishers who omitted his name in the paratext of their editions. His motivation in bringing Jean de Liège to Valenciennes to print La Resource du petit ­people, La Robe de l’archiduc, and La Naissance de Charles d’Autriche could well have been a premeditated action to ensure greater control over his publications and advertisement of his authorship. Even French publishers began paratextual announcements of Molinet’s authorship a short time ­later, naming him directly, not through a pun, on the title pages of Le ­Roman de la Rose moralisé published by Vérard (Paris, ca. 1503) and printed by Guillaume Balsarin (Lyon, 1503),11 while their names and marks are featured at the end of their editions. The paper copies of Vérard’s edition bear the same ambiguous dedication woodcut as in the publisher’s Art de rhétorique edition, making it difficult to identify the men in it, but the miniature painted over the woodcut in a luxury copy (BNF Réserve Vélins 1101) features a large moulin next to the person dedicating the work, a visual rendition of Molinet’s meta­phoric name that ensures his identification. However, this version would not have been widely circulated. The absence of any extant single manuscript of the Naissance de Charles d’Autriche suggests that the author may have deliberately chosen print as the optimal form of reproduction to announce to a broad public the birth of the archduke. Published ­after March 7, 1500, the first edition features woodcuts advertising Valenciennes and a peace arch with Burgundian emblems, balanced by the printer’s name in the colophon and an unusual illustration of a moulinet or child’s toy (in keeping with his subject perhaps) on which is inscribed “molinet.” This specially crafted emblem represents the first known printed mark advertising the participation of an author writing in French in the publication of his work. Having lost his authorial association with the Paris editions of his ­Temple de Mars and Art de rhétorique, Molinet may have sought to redress that situation through a new exploitation of paratextual space in this and his other Valenciennes editions. Molinet is featured on the title page of La Robe de l’archiduc as “maistre Jehan molinet,” while Jean de Liège’s name and address are relegated to the colophon. Balsarin again recognized the poet’s new status when he fashioned the title page of his edition of the Naissance (Lyon, ca. 1503) in such a way that Molinet’s name figures prominently alone on the last line, followed by a generic author woodcut. As in the case of the Roman de la Rose moralisé editions, Molinet’s newly acquired visibility on the first folio of a French publication all but confirmed his enhanced literary status at the end of his c­ areer, due in part to early printing challenges.



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André de la Vigne During the same period that Molinet increasingly engaged with the reproduction of his works in print, André de la Vigne also showed signs of consciously seeking to control the publication of his writings. The evolution of his Ressource de la Chrestienté, an allegorical scenario about the controversy surrounding King Charles VIII’s projected military expedition to Italy in the last de­cade of the fifteenth ­century, provides one of the most striking examples of the changes introduced with the advent of print over a thirty-­year period, from the royal manuscript of the work dedicated to the French king around 1494,12 to its first printing as a single work in Angoulême by André Cauvin and Pierre Alain in ca. 1495, to a reconfiguration of the prosimetrum writing as the lead composition in an anthology known as Le Vergier d’honneur, which appeared in six editions dating from ca. 1502 to 1525.13 A comparison of the paratextual features of La Vigne’s Ressource de la Chrestienté from manuscript to print—­its decoration, display of signatures, depiction of the patron-­king, evolving author images, and acknowl­edgment of its bookmakers—­reveals critical shifts in the system of patronage, for the original overwhelming presence of the patron is tempered over time. For example, La Vigne’s presence is downplayed in the manuscript version of the Ressource de la Chrestienté: depicted on bended knee offering his work to his ­future patron and implicit protagonist of the work, Charles VIII,14 in an opening miniature that displays the French king’s symbols, followed by an elaborate decorative program of royal emblems in e­ very folio’s margins and acrostic-­generated stanzas that reference the monarch. La Vigne, by contrast, is not identified u ­ ntil the last verse in a meta­phoric signature.15 However, the printed editions of the Vergier d’honneur call attention to La Vigne from the outset: he is named as one of the authors on the title page, a generic woodcut of an author—­not the patron—­appears on the title page verso in all editions, and the final verses of the Ressource de la Chrestienté draw our attention to the poet’s identity by naming him directly instead of through the original pun as the king’s “treshumble orateur De la vigne” (“most h ­ umble orator De la vigne”). La Vigne comes to share paratextual space with the printers or publishers of his work as well: while the two editions whose production he apparently oversaw do not feature bookmakers’ names, the four subsequent editions do so. Jean Trepperel’s name, address, and printer’s mark appear at the end of the third edition, whereas Jean Petit’s bookseller-­publisher mark has moved forward to the title page of the fourth edition; Philip Le Noir’s name and address figure

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on the title page and in the colophon of the fifth edition, followed by his printer’s mark, and the same printer’s initials and address are printed prominently on the title of the sixth edition, with his address repeated in the colophon.16 Of note is one special copy of the second edition of the Vergier d’honneur (published ­under the author’s direction as a result of his 1504 l­ egal victory), BNF Réserve Vélins 2241. A hand-­decorated hybrid volume printed on vellum, it pre­ sents an individualized staging of La Vigne himself on the title page verso. Painted over the generic author-­woodcut that appears in the paper copies of this edition, this miniature, placed opposite the opening lines of the Ressource de la Chrestienté, depicts in stunning fashion the poet, seated on a chaire—­a kind of throne that resembles the king’s in the dedication manuscript miniature—­pen in hand as he composes his work, which is imaginatively staged with the personified characters from his work debating before him.17 La Vigne’s allegorical vision is thereby visually realized, with his author-­portrait essentially replacing that of the original patron and the generic author-­image in this specially made copy. Given that La Vigne was the writer who sued Le Noir over the impending publication of the Vergier d’honneur in 1504, it is clear he had a special investment in the collection. We know that he authored its opening work as well as the second composition, Le Voyage de Naples, an account La Vigne had been hired by Charles VIII to maintain during his 1494–1495 military expedition to Italy.18 Other works in the corpus w ­ ere also signed by La Vigne, although he did not compose all writings in the recueil. Octovien de Saint-­Gelais, whose name precedes La Vigne’s on the title page of the Vergier d’honneur (most likely ­because he was more well-­known at the time) and to whom this volume was for a long time attributed, was the author of prob­ably only one piece in the collection, the Complainte et Epitaphe du feu roy Charles dernier trespassé.19 Nevertheless, by launching his lawsuit, La Vigne served as a ­legal advocate for the entire printed collection, to which he had made significant contributions. Holding positions as Charles VIII’s “facteur” (agent) ­until a­ fter his return from Italy in November 1495 and prob­ably ­until the king’s death in 1498, named secretary of the Duke of Savoy at an unknown date and fi­nally hired as Charles’s queen, Anne of Brittany’s secretary in late 1504, La Vigne inhabited si­mul­ta­ neously the world of manuscripts,20 more clearly associated with the French court at the time, and the more commercial world of print. He definitely “bought into” the print industry, since the Vergier d’honneur and several ­later works w ­ ere published. Indeed, it seems likely that during the transitional period between



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the French king’s death and his appointment as Anne of Brittany’s secretary, La Vigne was intent on printing the works he had composed for his deceased patron, perhaps in the hopes of advertising his talent and obtaining a court position. When Anne of Brittany became queen of Louis XII ­after Charles VIII’s death, she may well have rewarded La Vigne’s tributes to her first husband by commissioning him to rec­ord her November 1504 Pa­ri­sian entry.21 It is difficult to ascertain La Vigne’s exact involvement in the print world before his 1504 lawsuit against Michel Le Noir. La Vigne’s Complaintes et epitaphes du roy de la Bazoche appeared on the market around the same time as the Vergier d’honneur, but nothing indicates that the author had any control over its printing.22 However, it is noteworthy that Pierre Le Dru, identified as the printer of the first edition of Le Vergier d’honneur (ca. 1502–1503) for Antoine Vérard, also printed the second edition of the work (post 1504), whose publication and distribution La Vigne controlled. This association suggests that he and Le Dru collaborated to some degree in its printing and marketing. La Vigne went on to have published a number of his pamphlets written in support of King Louis XII’s military ventures in Italy in 1507–1509: L’A[t]tollite portas de Gennes, La Patenostre des Genevois, Les Ballades de Bruyt Commun sur les aliances des roys, des princes et provinces avec le tremblement de Venyse, and Le Libelle des cinq villes d’Ytallye contre Venise.23 La Vigne’s propagandistic compositions figured among many such publications during this period ­because, unlike his pre­de­ces­sor, Louis XII exploited the press for his po­liti­cal aims during his reign and supported proroyal po­liti­cal imprints like La Vigne’s. In each of ­these editions, La Vigne is identified on the title page or in other paratextual material as author and the queen’s secretary, whereas the printer-­publishers remained unnamed. Soon a­ fter the queen’s death in January 1514, La Vigne also ­ ere both integrated produced his Épitaphes en rondeaux de la royne, which w anonymously into Pierre Choque’s multiple manuscripts of the Commémoration de la mort de madame Anne . . . ​Royne de France and appeared as a separate collection in printed form for a public outside of court circles; La Vigne’s name and position are advertised on the title page, although no publication information is provided.24 Pierre Gringore Perhaps inspired by La Vigne’s successful lawsuit in 1504, Gringore, among all the Rhétoriqueurs, was the writer most engaged with the print industry and

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most effective in controlling the reproduction of his works. The paratexts of his publications, especially t­ hose printed in Paris from 1499 to 1518, provide insight into his collaborative and occasional conflictual relationships with printers.25 Gringore doubtless had confidence in Philip Pigouchet and Simon Vostre, the premier publishing team known for its elaborately printed Books of Hours, when they produced four editions of his first known work, Le Chasteau de l­abour, between October 22, 1499, and March 31, 1501 (n.s.). This last edition, a revised version of the original, prob­ably prompted by the rival Rouen publication of the work by Jacques Le Forestier in November 1500, suggests that Gringore consciously chose to continue his association with the same printer and publisher;26 their names appeared prominently on the title pages of all the editions,27 whereas the poet’s identity was relegated to the last stanza, generated by his acrostic signature. That is, while the author controlled his text and his self-­ advertisement in it, a feature he, along with Molinet and La Vigne often exploited, the printer of the Chasteau de ­labour was in charge of the layout and design of both text and paratext. This included the introduction of twenty-­six specially crafted woodcuts that depict the protagonist’s actions in the work, including his interaction with vari­ous allegorical figures, as well as metal cuts of the seven vices and virtues borrowed from Vostre’s material.28 What­ever the commercial arrangement between Gringore and his publishers might have been, their association appears to have been mutually beneficial: the Pigouchet-­Vostre team presumably profited from their four editions of the work—­why e­ lse would they have produced so many?—­and Gringore, a virtually unknown author at the time, would have established his reputation as a writer of moralistic compositions while gaining critical knowledge about the printing pro­cess. Moreover, his presence in the paratextual spaces of his works increased as his participation in the publication pro­cess intensified. This heightened involvement was likely precipitated by the incursion into his very textual space by the printer Michel Le Noir. In May 1500 (at least before June 26, 1500), at approximately the same time that they placed the third edition of Gringore’s Chasteau de ­labour on the market (May 31, 1500), Pigouchet and Vostre published the first edition of Le Chasteau d’amours.29 While Pigouchet’s printer’s mark alone figured on the title page, a novel use was made of acrostic signatures at the end of the work: the last four stanzas ­were generated by the printer’s last name, the bookseller-­publisher’s first and last names and the author’s last name. In each case, a rubric directed the reader to reconstruct the identities of the three bookmakers, thereby visually placing them on a more or less equal footing. That Gringore most likely cre-



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ated t­ hese verses suggests he wished to continue his printing venture with the Pigouchet-­Vostre team. This juxtaposition of the names of the three collaborators at the end of the Chasteau d’amours hints at a closer association among them following the publication of the Chasteau de ­labour, an alliance that contrasted with subsequent printings of the work. Michel Le Noir’s publication of the Chasteau d’amours on February 4, 1501 (n. s.), features no textual reference to the author, for Gringore’s original acrostic signature was replaced by two stanzas that vertically produced the printer’s full name, introduced by rubrics,30 and Le Noir’s printer’s mark filled the final folio of the edition. Curiously, the acrostic stanzas that had featured the names of “Pigouchet” and “Simon Vostre” w ­ ere retained in Le Noir’s edition, without, however, their introductory rubrics. Published at a ­later date, Le Noir’s second edition of the work displays the original publishers’ acrostics and the new printer-­generated acrostic signature, although no printer’s mark appears in this edition.31 Gringore obviously did not sanction the replacement of his acrostic signature with that of Le Noir, for it erased his only identification with the Chasteau d’amours in t­ hose editions. However, since protocols to protect authors (or printers and publishers) in such cases w ­ ere non­ex­is­tent during t­ hese early years of print, no laws prohibited Le Noir from appropriating the Chasteau d’amours as his own and erasing its author’s name. And yet, it was just three and half years ­later, in December  1505, that Gringore did seek ­legal protection, when he succeeded in obtaining an author privilege granting him control over the printing and selling of the Folles Entreprises for one year. If it is true that Gringore consciously countered Le Noir’s unauthorized appropriation of his Chasteau d’amours by procuring privileges for almost all of his subsequent works printed in Paris up to his 1518 departure from the city, the printer Pierre Le Dru, the same individual who had been authorized by La Vigne to print the second edition of the Vergier d’honneur post 1504,32 played a major role as Gringore’s associate between 1505 and 1512. Even more than with Pigouchet, the author-­printer association between Gringore and Le Dru appears to have been fairly equitable, for the paratexts of the works printed by Le Dru feature an increasingly marked focus on Gringore, not only as author, but also as editor and even bookseller of his own editions. Gringore likely found in Le Dru a printer who was willing to share decision-­making with him, someone who allowed Gringore to take greater control of his shorter works, while acting as a partner when more costly investments for longer works w ­ ere necessary. Gringore’s paratextual presence was clearly more manifest during this period when Le

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Dru was his “go-to” printer, signaling the author’s greater engagement with the publication of his works. Le Dru’s name is absent from his edition of Gringore’s La Complainte de trop tard marié in October 1505, whereas the colophon both identifies the author, following his standard acrostic-­signature stanza, and announces that he served as his own editor of this brief 320-­verse work: it was “Fait et composé par Pierre Gringore. Et imprimé pour icelluy a Paris” (“Made and composed by Pierre Gringore. And printed for him in Paris”). Gringore thus began to expand his control beyond the textual space of his printed poem by appropriating its paratextual space as well. This first-­known of his editorial ventures was likely a dry-­run before publication two and half months l­ater of the more consequential Folles Entreprises (2,552 verses), again in collaboration with Le Dru. At least four dif­fer­ent issues of this first edition w ­ ere produced, all dated December 23, 1505, but differentiated by spelling variations, the presence or absence of marginal Latin sources and of some woodcuts and two dif­fer­ent title pages: one featured the printer’s mark with a generic author woodcut on the verso,33 the other a woodcut of ­Mother Folly, Gringore’s theatrical alter ego, holding the hand of two sots (“foolish ­people”), with a generic dedication woodcut on the verso.34 Below each title-­page woodcut the book purchaser would have found Gringore’s address, “A lenseigne de mere sote” (“at the sign of M ­ other Folly”), indicating that the author served in a new role as bookseller. The colophon in all of ­these first-­edition issues identified Gringore as author and editor alongside Le Dru as printer and publicized the “ordonnance” that authorized Gringore to control the printing and selling of his book for one year. It is very likely that some form of agreement between author and printer spelled out a sharing of publication costs, which must have been considerable, given the work’s many specially confected woodcut illustrations. Four years ­later Gringore remained in a cooperative association with Le Dru, who printed his L’Union des princes around April 1509,35 a short 287-­verse propagandistic work. The same generic dedication woodcut that had appeared on the title page verso of some versions of the first edition of the Folles Entreprises figured this time on the title page itself. Moreover, the text of the author-­privilege granting Gringore control over the reproduction and distribution of his work was printed on the title page verso, instead of in the colophon; the paratext makes no mention of the printer. This reconfiguration of paratexual ele­ments, especially the relocation of Gringore’s privilege granting him control over the initial reproduction of his work, made this information more readily accessible to the



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book purchaser and afforded the poet a more prominent presence on the edition’s first folio. Just a few months ­later, in June 1509, Le Dru and Gringore collaborated again in marketing the author’s longest work to date, Les Abus du monde, whose 3,385 verses ­were illustrated with twelve specially made woodcuts.36 In October 1509 Le Dru printed a second edition of the work, this time with Latin sources in the margins, suggesting that profitable sales of the first edition warranted another edition for a dif­fer­ent clientele. The increasingly familiar M ­ other Folly woodcut appeared below the title of the Abus du monde, followed by a generic dedication woodcut on the verso side. Gringore’s acrostic signature generated the last stanza and the author-­privilege in the colophon identified Le Dru as printer and Gringore as author-­publisher who was granted control over the printing and sale of his work for one year. A new addition appeared on folio 2, namely the rubric “Sensuivent les abuz du monde com / posez par pierre gringore dit mere sotte” (“Les Abus du monde follows, written by Pierre Gringore, a.k.a. ­Mother Folly”), clarifying for the first time the association between the author and the title-­page woodcut, which had come to function as both an author’s and publisher’s mark, displacing the printer’s mark. The Abus du monde woodcuts in Le Dru’s two editions likely attracted a broad readership, making the additional investment in images a profitable venture. Le Dru continued his association with Gringore in the publication in August 1510 of the 240-­verse La Coqueluche in two slightly dif­fer­ent issues, characterized again by the M ­ other Folly woodcut on the title page, the generic dedication woodcut on its verso, the poet’s final acrostic signature, and a privilege-­ identifying printer, author, and publisher (Gringore). A rubric on the second folio once again linked the author and the ­Mother Folly illustration: “La coqueluche cōposee par Pierre / Gringore dit mere sotte” (“La Coqueluche written by Pierre / Gringore, a.k.a. ­Mother Folly”).37 Shifts in Power Gringore’s rewarding association with Le Dru came to an end with the publication in 1512 (sometime a­ fter February 23) of a dramatic series he authored and in which he played the role of ­Mother Folly, Le Jeu du Prince des Sotz et Mere Sotte. Le Dru’s M ­ other Folly woodcut, showing signs of deterioration, was printed yet again on the title page, and, as before, the colophon announced that the dif­fer­ent plays ­were written by and printed for “Pierre gringoire dit mere

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sotte.” Nowhere is Le Dru identified.38 It was presumably due to Le Dru’s death in 1515 that Gringore turned to the well-­known Pa­ri­sian publisher, Jean Petit, to market his subsequent work, Les Fantasies de Mere Sote, which first appeared in print on October 27, 1516.39 The now conventional paratextual features of this last of his works printed before he left Paris figured once again in this edition, including the ­Mother Folly woodcut and printed privilege along with his acrostic signature. For the first time Gringore’s work was endorsed with a royal privilege obtained by the author—­“Cum priuillegio regis” is advertised on the title page—­the text of which is articulated in its entirety on folios 2r–2v.40 We learn therein that Les Fantaisies de Mere Sote was printed not for the author but for Jean Petit, whose address follows (the work’s printer is never identified) and that Gringore was transferring his privilege to Petit. And yet, the privilege details for the first time Gringore’s active involvement in the publication pro­cess: he not only had the work’s illustrations created at his own expense, suggesting he had been involved in the confection of woodcuts for his ­earlier works, but he was also seeking to protect ­these woodcuts with the privilege, protesting that his rights had been infringed on by pirated printings, and that it was by controlling distribution of his work that he could recoup the money he had invested in the publication. A careful assessment of the paratexts of the works of Molinet, La Vigne, and Gringore exposes the subtle shifts in power among commissioners, creators, and publishers of literary texts during the transition from manuscript to print. Increasing self-­promotional strategies, including more author-­centered images, more prominently publicized names, more directly accessible signatures, and the adoption of privileges signaled a new consciousness among authors about their craft and the need to adopt protective postures in the challenging world of print. Notes 1. See Franco Simone, La coscienza della Rinascita negli umanisti francesi (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1949), translated by Gaston Hall as The French Re­nais­sance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Re­nais­sance in France (London: Macmillan, 1969); see also Daniel Poirion, Le poète et le prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Grenoble, France: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de Grenoble, 1965). 2. See Paul Zumthor, Le Masque et la lumière (Paris: Seuil, 1978), which recovered the work of the Rhétoriqueurs as part of a new understanding of late medieval France. 3. Other Rhétoriqueurs, such as Jean Lemaire de Belges and Jean Bouchet, can be examined in this same light.



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4. For details about this lawsuit, see Cynthia J. Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 5. ­Those works printed in single editions while he was still alive include Le ­Temple de Mars, La Resourse du petit peuple, L’Art de rhétorique, Le Roman de la Rose moralisé, La Robe de l’Archiduc, and La Naissance de Charles d’Autriche. 6. The work likely commemorated the Treaty of Soleuvre that Charles and Louis XI signed on September 13, 1475. 7. Tournai, Bibliothèque communale manuscript 105 was destroyed in 1940, but described and dated to the early sixteenth ­century by Noël Dupire, Etude critique des manuscrits et éditions des poésies de Jean Molinet (Paris: Droz, 1932), 9. The scribe’s admiration for the talents of Molinet, named in a rime équivoquée, is evident: “Pour collauder, o gentil Molinet, / Ton nom, ton art, ton sens, ta theoricque, / J’ay reduict en ce beau mol lit net, / Qui bien escript en orthographié n’est, / Plusseurs tes fais en prose ou rethoricque” (“To laud, o noble Molinet, / your name, your art, your meaning, your theory, / I have set in this lovely, soft, clean bed, / which is neither well written nor well spelled, / several of your works of prose or verse”). 8. Jean Molinet, Les Faictz et dictz, ed. Noël Dupire, 3 vols. (Paris: SATF, 1936), 1:76. 9. See BNF français 2159 and 2375. 10. For details on the images, see Cynthia J. Brown, “Eveil d’une nouvelle conscience littéraire,” Le Moyen Français 22 (1988): 18–23. 11. “Cest le romant de la ­rose / Moralise cler et net / Translate de rime en prose / Par ­ umble molinet” (“This is the Romance of the ­rose / Clearly and neatly moralised / vostre h Translated from rhyme into prose / By your ­humble Molinet”). 12. This ca. 1494 version of Ressource de la Chrestienté is in Bibliotheque nationale de France (hereafter BNF) français 1687. 13. For further details, see Brown’s critical edition of André de la Vigne, La Ressource de la Chrestienté (Montréal: CERES, 1989), and Brown, Poets, Patrons and Printers, 79–99. 14. The French king is represented in the work by the personified Magesté Royalle. 15. “La Ressource de la Chrestienté / Qui a vous, sire, de presenter n’est digne / Ne plus ne mains que le fruyt De la vigne” (“Which to you, Sire, does not merit being presented / Neither more nor less than the fruit of La Vigne”) (de la Vigne, Ressource de la Chrestienté, lines 1467–1469). 16. While the 1504 lawsuit prohibited Michel Le Noir from selling the copies of the Vergier d’honneur he had already printed for a year, Michel’s son, Philip Le Noir, ­after inheriting his ­f ather’s presses in 1520, published two editions of Le Vergier d’honneur in ca. 1521–1522 and 1525. The first edition was likely the one his ­father had printed fifteen years e­ arlier but was banned from selling at the time. 17. For additional details and illustrations of ­these changes, see Brown, Poets, Patrons and Printers, 85–91, 103–107, 110–117. 18. See Voyage de Naples, ed. Anna Slerca (Milan: Pubblicazioni della Università Cattolica, 1981). 19. However, the expression “Avec autres” follows the names of Saint-­Gelais and La Vigne. In addition, on fol. viii verso of the first edition, a rubric indicates that the many works that appear ­after the Voyage de Naples ­were “faictes & composees tant par les devant

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ditz acteurs [La Vigne and Saint-­Gelais] que plusieurs aultres fatistes, orateurs & habilles compositeurs” (“made and composed by the aforementioned authors [La Vigne and Saint-­ Gelais] as well as several other makers, orators, and skilled composers”), all but confirming that La Vigne did not author all the compendium’s poems. He did write the following, ­because he is identified as their author: “Les Louanges du roy faictes par l’Eglise, Noblesse, Prouesse et Honneur,” “Le Temps de l’annee moralisé sur l’aage et vie de l’homme,” “Le Dist de Chascun,” four “Epistres d’Ovide” and likely the last piece titled “Honneur des dames.” See Werner Helmich’s edition in Moralités françaises, Réimpression fac-­similé de vingt-­deux pieces allégoriques imprimées aux XVe et XVIe siècles. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1980), 87–101. 20. La Vigne’s works that remained in manuscript form during his lifetime include three plays commissioned in May 1496 by Philip de Hochberg for the town of Seurre, all appearing in BNF français 24332, Le Mystère de saint Martin (for modern edition see André Duplat, ed., Le Mystère de saint Martin [Geneva: Droz, 1969]), La Moralité de l’Aveugle et du Boiteux (for modern edition, see André Duplat, ed., “La Moralité de l’aveugle et du boiteux d’Andrieu de la Vigne,” Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 20 [1983]: 41–79), and La Farce du Meunier (for modern edition, see André Tissier, ed., in La Farce en France de 1450 à 1550 II [Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1976], 129–184); Le Récit du sacre d’Anne de Bretagne et son entrée à Paris (18–19 novembre 1504), appearing in ms. 22 of the Waddeston Manor collection in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK, and in the Bibliothèque Sainte-­Geneviève, ms. 3036, Paris (for modern edition, see Pierre Gringore, Les Entrées royales à Paris de Marie d’Angleterre (1514) et Claude de France (1517), ed. Cynthia J. Brown [Geneva: Droz, 2005], 215–256); Le Blason de la guerre du pape, ses aliez prelatz, gens d’eglise et les Veniciens ensemble, contre le roy tres chrétien in BNF français 2248 (for modern edition, see Blasons, poésies anciennes des XV et XVI siècles, ed. Dominique Méon [Paris: Guillemot & Nicolle, 1809], 260–269); a prize-­winning chant royal and fifteen other poems submitted to the Puy de Rouen in 1511 in Oxford Bodleian Library manuscript Douce 379, fols. 52–58, 69, 83–85, 92v–93v, 96v–97; and “Croniques . . . ​du . . . ​roy Françoys premier de ce nom” in BNF nouvelles acquisitions françaises 794. 21. See the previous note. 22. The edition contains no publication details, but its modern editors, Montaiglon and Rothschild, in Recueil de poésies françoises des XVe et XVIe siècles, 13 vols. (Paris: Daffis, 1855–78), 13:386, claim it was printed in Paris around 1501 by Jean Trepperl (who would produce the third edition of the Vergier d’honneur), based on comparative woodcut evidence. The following punning signature t­ oward the end of the work (line 619) confirms La Vigne’s authorship: “Cy j’est andré de la vigne ung vert jus.” 23. L’A[t]tollite portas de Gennes appeared in ca. 1507 (n. p., n. d.); La Patenostre des Genevois in 1507 in La Louenge des roys de France (Paris: E. de Brie); Les Ballades de Bruyt Commun (n. p., n. d.) ­after 1508; and Le Libelle des cinq villes d’Ytallye contre Venise in 1509 (Lyon: N. Abraham). For a modern critical edition of ­these works, see Cynthia J. Brown, The Shaping of History and Poetry in Late Medieval France (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1985), 163–186. 24. See BNF Réserve 1371. 25. Several observations ­here are based on Cynthia J. Brown, “Pierre Gringore et ses imprimeurs (1499–1518): Collaborations et Conflits,” Seizième Siècle 10 (2014): 67–87.



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26. Pigouchet was the printer and Vostre the libraire, or bookseller-­publisher. For details about the material added to the original version of the Chasteau de labeur, see Brown, Poets, Patrons and Printers, 234–235. See the critical edition of the work in Gringore, Œuvres moralisatrices (1499–1510), ed. Cynthia J. Brown (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2020). 27. Beneath an imposing printer’s mark that features Philip Pigouchet’s name, the title reads: “Ce pre­sent liure appellee le chasteau de ­labour a este a / cheue le.xxii.iour de octobre. Mil.CCCC.iiiixx.& dix / neuf pour symon vostre: libraire demourāt a paris en la / rue neufue nostre dame a lenseigne saīt iehā leuāgeliste” (“The pre­sent book entitled The ­Castle of ­Labor was / completed the 22nd day of October 1499 / for Simon Vostre, bookseller living in Paris on the rue Neuve Notre Dame at the sign of Saint John the Evangelist”). 28. For a discussion of ­these woodcuts, see Cynthia J. Brown, “La Mise en scène du texte dans Le Chasteau de ­Labour de Pierre Gringore” in Le Discours du livre, ed. Anna Arzoumanov, Anne Réach-­Ngô, and Trung Tran (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011), 79–110, and “The Drama of the Visual Editing of Pierre Gringore’s Chasteau de L ­ abour,” Le Moyen Français 81 (2018): 41–74. For details on Gringore’s ­career, see Charles Oulmont, La poésie morale, politique et dramatique à la veille de la Re­nais­sance: Pierre Gringore (Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine, 1976). 29. See my edition of this work in Gringore, Œuvres moralisatrices (1499–1510). 30. “Le nom de limprimeur trouuerez / par les lectres capitalles” (“You w ­ ill the name of the printer / by the capital letters”) and “Le surnom” (The surname). The one known copy of this edition is ­housed in the British Library (IA. 40470). 31. A copy of Le Noir’s second edition of Le Chasteau d’amours is ­housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms Réserve Ye 1019. Although the date in the colophon of this edition is December  20, 1500, according to Ursula Baurmeister’s “notice” in the online BNF cata­logue, the year cited (“mil.cccc”) is incomplete, ­because the title-­page woodcut dates from post 1511. It is noteworthy that Jean Trepperel published the first 341 verses of the Chasteau d’Amours in a six-­folio quire ca. 1500, based on the state of Trepperel’s title page printer’s mark. ­Because Trepperel and his son-­in-­law Le Noir shared in the publication of their editions, it is likely that Le Noir based his 1501 edition on Trepperel’s partial edition, if, in fact, it appeared before Le Noir’s. Both editions are the only ones that bear the title Le Casteau damours and display the same woodcut of David and Bethsheba. 32. It is likely that La Vigne sought out the Le Dru-­Vérard team to print and publish the first edition of the work as well. 33. This same woodcut appears on the title page verso of Le Dru’s post 1504 edition of Le Vergier d’honneur. 34. An edition of this work can be found in Gringore, Œuvres moralisatrices (1499–1510). 35. Emile Picot identified the characters and woodcuts of this edition as the material of Pierre Le Dru in Cata­logue des livres de la Bibliothèque de M. le Baron James de Rothschild, 5 vols. (Paris: Morgand, 1884), 4:153). Th ­ ere are no extant printed works authored by Gringore between 1505 and 1509. 36. For an analy­sis of ­these woodcuts, see Cynthia J. Brown, “Les Abus du monde de Pierre Gringore: de l’imprimé au manuscrit?” in La Génération Marot: Poètes français et néo-­latins (1515–1550), ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Champion, 1997). A critical edition of this work is forthcoming.

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37. See the critical edition of this work in Gringore, Œuvres moralisatrices (1499–1510). 38. Alan Hindley identifies Le Dru as the printer, based on his printing material, in Pierre Gringore, Le Jeu du Prince des Sotz et Mere Sotte (Paris: Champion, 2000), 13. Gringore did not obtain a privilege for this edition, perhaps b­ ecause the live per­for­mance of ­these plays would have been more critical. 39. Between 1512 and 1516 Gringore’s Obstination des Suysses appeared in print (1512–1513) (see Pierre Gringore, Oeuvres polémiques rédigées sons le règne de Louis XII, ed. Cynthia J. Brown [Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2003], 323–338), L’Entrée de Marie d’Angleterre à Paris was dedicated in manuscript form to Queen Mary Tudor a­ fter November 1514 (see Gringore, Les Entrées royales, 127–155), and his Poèmes pour François Ier (BNF français 2274) ­were dedicated to the new French king (before February 15, 1515). 40. For the text of the privilege, see R. L. Frautschi, ed., Pierre Gringore’s Les Fantasies de Mere Sote (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 223–224.

c ha p te r s even

François Villon and France Emotional (De)constructions Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier

In an allocution pronounced in Paris in 1937 and l­ ater published in Conferencia ­under the title “Villon et Verlaine,” Paul Valéry proposes a comparative analy­ sis of the works of the two poets: “L’un et l’autre, admirables poètes,” he affirms, “l’un et l’autre, mauvais garçons . . . ​fréquentant, selon l’humeur, les églises ou les tavernes, [et] contraints à d’amers séjours en vase clos, où ils se sont moins amendés de leurs fautes qu’ils n’en ont distillé l’essence poétique de remords, de regrets et de craintes” (“They are both admirable poets; they are both bad boys . . . ​frequenting, according to their moods, churches or taverns and both constrained to ­bitter periods of isolation where they did not so much amend their faults as distill the poetic essence of remorse, regrets, and fears”).1 But most in­ter­est­ing for this essay, François Villon and Paul Verlaine part com­pany when it comes to the impenetrability of Villon’s personality. Even if we completely understood the historical and social contexts of the poet, his texts would remain difficult ­because he himself was such a complicated and shady figure. Valéry observes: Les difficultés que nous opposent les textes de Villon ne sont pas seulement les difficultés dues à la différence des temps et à la disparition des choses, mais elles tiennent aussi à la particulière espèce de l’auteur. Ce Parisien spirituel est un individu redoutable. Ce n’est point un écolier ni 141

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un bourgeois qui fait des vers et quelques frasques, et borne là ses risques, comme il borne ses impressions à celles que peut connaître un homme de son temps et de sa condition. Maître Villon est un être d’exception. . . . ​ Il en résulte que ce poète traqué, ce gibier de potence (dont nous ignorons encore comment il a fini, et pouvons craindre de l’apprendre) introduit dans ses vers mainte expression et quantité de termes qui appartenaient à la langue fuyante et confidentielle du pays mal famé. . . . ​ Même quand sa signification nous échappe, nous devinons, sous la physionomie brutale ou caricaturale des termes, des trouvailles, des images fortement suggérées par la forme même des mots.2 [The difficulties of the texts of Villon go beyond t­ hose caused by temporal difference and the disappearance of ­things. They also have to do with the very essence of the author. This spiritual Pa­ri­sian is a formidable individual. He is neither a scholar nor a bourgeois who happens to write poetry and act like a daredevil. He does not limit his risks to ­these, any more than he limits his impressions to ­those which a man of his time and condition would experience. Master Villon is truly an exceptional being. . . . ​As a consequence, this hunted poet, this gallow’s bird (whose end we still do not know and do not want to know) introduces into his verse many expressions and terms that belonged to an elusive and secretive language of a world of ill repute. . . . ​Even when we cannot completely grasp the meaning, we can guess at, beneath the brutal or grotesque form of the words, discoveries, images strongly suggested by the very form of the words themselves.] Valéry’s assessment of Villon’s fundamental mysteriousness is certainly accurate. And yet, as Valéry also notes, even where we cannot completely grasp all of Villon’s language, we sense hidden trea­sures beneath the words themselves. An impor­tant ele­ment of ­these “trouvailles” (discoveries) is their emotional impact: however obscure some of his references, the emotions that Villon’s poetic persona expresses seem clear. Johan Huizinga himself noted the rhetorical and intellectual achievement of Villon. In chapter 14 of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (“The Coming of the New Form”), Huizinga praised Villon as one of the few fifteenth-­century poets who managed to compose from the heart. And yet, in keeping with the original thesis of his book, he also noted that ­these noble rhetoricians of France “bewaren nog veel van middeleeuwschen geest en vormen” (“still demonstrate to a large degree medieval spirit and forms”).3



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Far from seeing Villon as a writer turned t­ oward the past, I read him as a bricoleur of old forms who produced an emotional reconstruction of urban France that amounts to a new doxa, a new way of imagining the population. His Testament represents the focal point of an emotional community, a group “in which p­ eople adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value— or devalue—­the same or related emotions,” encompassing t­ hose addressed in the work as well as Villon’s own circle, some of whom w ­ ere conversant in the “secretive language of a world of ill repute” woven through the poem.4 But the community that Villon created extends beyond his contemporaries, addressing ­future readers as well. I argue that in the Testament, Villon offers a novel vision of the kingdom as a dynamic emotional community bound together by the solidarity or shared sympathy of the excluded, past and pre­sent. His vision is therefore profoundly dif­fer­ent from other conceptions of the kingdom. Undoubtedly, much of what Villon wrote remains opaque for modern readers summoned into his community. Still, the emotions that bind the members of the community continue to resonate. Text, ­People, Place The Testament, written primarily in huitains (verses of eight lines), is an amazing mix of personal and popu­lar history, reflections on death, and, from huitain LXXXVI on, bequests. The huitains are interspersed with ballades that reinforce the poem’s themes. The work is filled with anchors to Villon’s life, the key moments of which he clearly identifies throughout the text. We learn in the poem’s first lines, for example, of his misery at the hands of Thibault d’Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans, and of his release from Thibault’s prison by Louis XI when, newly ascended to the throne, the king passed through Meung-­sur-­Loire where Villon was being held: “Escript l’an soixante et ung, / Lors que le roy me delivra” (“Written in the year sixty-­one / When the good king had freed me”). He reveals his profound emotional attachment to this savior king—­his life returned to him, Villon ­will forever feel compelled to ­humble himself before Louis XI. We also know that he was writing poetry before his first exile from Paris, and that some of his acquaintances wanted to profit from it: Sy me souvient, ad mon advis, Que je feiz a mon partement

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Certains laiz, l’an cinquante six, Qu’aucuns, sans mon consentement, Voulurent nommer Testament; Leur plaisir fut, non pas le myen. Mais quoy! on dit communément: Ung chascun n’est maistre du scien.5 [So I have kept in mind That when I departed, Certain lais or legacies that I wrote in fifty-­six Some wanted, without my consent, To call Testament; The wish was theirs, not mine. But what are you ­going to do? They always say No one is master of his own ­things]. Villon’s poetic persona is inextricably linked to fifteenth-­century Paris, comprehensible only as the product of this restricted time and place. Over the years, scholars have emphasized again and again that Villon re­creates in an almost carnal way the Paris he knew so intimately through the individuals he describes. Each of them lived in a place, and ­these places w ­ ere known to his first readers, even if the individuals may not have been known to all or even represented genuine living h ­ uman beings. Peter Haidu described a sort of multilayered collectivity that served to perpetuate Villon’s legacy. The Testament, as Haidu explained, addresses Villon’s contemporaries in such a way as to “staple the ­surface of the writer’s body-­text to survivors, real persons often well-­known enough to leave archival traces. A collectivity defines the poem to ensure his survival.”6 David A. Fein, in his two seminal works on Villon,7 notes the crucial importance of the Pa­ri­sian setting re­created in the poems, which serves to authenticate the poet’s narratorial persona, suggesting that “if the Testament is a poem of the tavern, it is also in many ways a poem of the streets.”8 Fein also underscores the importance of acknowledging that Villon’s writings target a par­ tic­u­lar con­temporary audience. They w ­ ere not meant for mass distribution, but had a rather specific local readership in mind.9 But the emotions that Villon evokes in what amounts to his social cartography of Paris have attracted less attention. Th ­ ese emotions, I suggest, would have arisen from the association that contemporaries would have made between the characters described, whom they knew, and the spaces t­ hese characters in-



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habited, that is, from the intimate knowledge of the social layout of Paris. Defining “place,” Sally Mackey distinguishes the concept from “site” and “space.” She describes site as “a geo­graph­i­cal location without par­tic­u­lar personal attachment or inhabitation;” space as “the physical dimensions and dynamics of places; amorphous, untenanted, non-­tangible areas that are generalised as ‘space’ (e.g. the space on a website; spaces of desert . . .); external, global networks that interact with place (the spaces of the internet; the spaces of global finance . . .); a descriptive term for an area of thought and action (e.g. safe spaces; creative spaces).”10 In contrast, “place” carries an emotional resonance that I believe makes it useful for interpreting Villon’s Testament. Mackey explains, “[P]lace is space (or site) animated through operations and actions and made personal. Place is geo­ graph­i­cally located . . . ​inhabited briefly or over a longer period, constructed through a range of operations, actions and be­hav­iors and, through t­ hese, a psychological relationship is developed with place. This latter may not necessarily be a positive relationship although frequently place is associated with ‘attachment.’ ”11 Throughout the ­later parts of the Testament in par­tic­u­lar, Villon inundates the reader with characters who inhabited Paris, recounting the possessions that he ­will supposedly leave to them. ­These characters can often be linked to a par­tic­u­lar place. Mackey explains that a “psychological relationship is developed with place” through the interactions that occur between the place and the person who occupies it. Villon’s Testament activates the emotions associated with the places inhabited by his characters to create an emotional totality, the emotional community that is his Paris. A few examples w ­ ill clarify: through his guardian Guillaume de Villon, Villon evokes the Church of Saint-­Benoit-­le-­Bistorné, where Guillaume served as the chaplain; through Jean Mahe, a torturer at the Châtelet, Villon evokes the horror of that place; through more than one reference to Robin Turgis, owner of the Pomme de Pin tavern, he arouses the conviviality of the tavern; and through Friar Baude he evokes the residence of the Carmelites and the contempt he felt for the mendicant ­orders. Even when a character’s place of residence is not explic­itly mentioned, contemporaries would have known where it was and experienced the reference emotionally. For example, “sire Denis / Hyncelin (or Hesselin), esleu de Paris” (XCVIII), is a person well known to historians, an officer of Louis XI, his pannetier, who occupied a fine ­house with lovely baths, an hôtel particulier which they undoubtedly would have known, from the outside at least, one which they could only have envied, although Villon does not acknowledge this. Also not mentioned by Villon is that Hesselin was charged with taxing consumables,

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including wine. As such, he certainly would not have been popu­lar with Villon’s circle, who, knowing that Villon had been imprisoned for theft, would have appreciated the sarcastic gift of “fourteen casks of wine that Villon himself stole”: Item, donne a sire Denis Hesselin, esleu de Paris, Quatorze muys de vin d’Aulnis Prins sur Turgis a mes périls. S’il en buvoit tant que péris En fust son sens et sa raison. Qu’on mette de l’eaue es barils; Vin pert mainte bonne maison. 12 [Item, I give Denis Hesselin Elect of Paris, The fourteen casks of Aulnis wine That I stole from Turgis at ­great risk; If, by drinking, imperiled Are his sense and reason, Let us put ­water in the barrels, Many a good ­family has been lost through wine]. We do not know of any personal connection between Hesselin and Villon: one assumes that Villon did not run in the circles of the king’s favorites. Nor do we know why the poet taunts the official about the dangers of drink. We are missing crucial information. But the negative valence of the emotion that the relationship, even if impersonal, aroused in Villon and o­ thers of his circle, is quite discernible. The religious ­orders come in for mocking, too, target of the popu­lar ridicule aimed at the mendicant o­ rders for their hy­poc­risy regarding poverty and chastity: Item, aux Frères mendians. Aux Dévotes et aux Béguines, Tant de Paris que d’Orléans, Tant Turlupins que Turlupines, De grasses souppes jacopines Et flaons leur fais oblacion;



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Et puis après, soubz les courtines, Parler de contemplacion.13 [Item, to the Mendicants ­Brothers, The Devout and the Beguines, ­Whether in Paris or Orleans, And Turlupins and Turlupines, as well, With soups and flans from the Jacobins I make my offering to them, And then ­later ­behind bed curtains, Make them speak of contemplation.] Once again, Villon does not specifically mention a place. Nonetheless, numerous places in Paris would have sprung to mind for contemporaries, for example, the ­grand beguinage, founded in 1260 by Louis IX in the Marais. At times Villon refers to places sure to arouse poignant emotions: Item, ne sçay qu’a l’Ostel Dieu Donner n’a povres hospitaulx; Bourdes n’ont icy temps ne lieu, Car povres gens ont assez maulx. Chacun leur envoyë leurs oz: Les Mendïans ont eu mon oye; Au fort, ilz en auront lez oz; A meunes gens menue monnoye. 14 [Item, I ­don’t know what to give the Hotel-­Dieu And the poor­houses; This is neither the time nor place for jokes, ­Because the poor have trou­ble enough. Every­one sends them their bones; The Mendicants got my goose; At the most, the poor ­will get the bones; The ­little guys get the small change.] The Hôtel-­Dieu was located next to Notre Dame. One thinks of the painting Episodes from the Life of a Bishop-­Saint from ca. 1500 by the master of Gilles depicting the poor gathered to request aid with the Hôtel-­Dieu clearly vis­i­ble

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in the background. Villon knows that his poorest and sickest “frères humains” (“fellow h ­ umans”), like t­ hose pre­sent at the Hôtel Dieu, are worthy of re­spect and seriousness. His insolence is not directed t­ oward them. While they deserve more, the mendicants have already taken every­thing Villon had to give. In spite of his re­spect and emotional connection to the poor at the Hôtel Dieu, he w ­ ill not be able to help them, and thus he denounces the greed of the ­Orders, for whom he seems to have nothing but scorn. If such h ­ uman detail adds a layer of “veracity” to Villon’s poem, allowing the reader to authenticate the writing, I suggest that it is also integral to the proj­ect of creating a genuine emotional community. Certainly, individuals might serve as the focus of strong emotion. But Villon is writing from a par­tic­u­lar place and time, and his references evoke often-­verifiable h ­ uman beings who lived t­ here at the same time. His first readers would have i­magined the places associated with the figures he referenced, and t­ hese places would have been associated with similar emotions. For members of Villon’s wider emotional community much remains obscure in t­ hese references to the long-­dead inhabitants of Villon’s Paris. Still, the general sentiments that the references aroused for ­those in the know can be appreciated even t­ oday. Villon and Emotions: Fear of Death But before Villon’s poetic persona distributes gifts, he expresses regrets for the life he led and reflects on death. B ­ ecause this is a testament, we are not surprised to find such musings. But unlike the legacy huitains t­ hese ones are not l­ imited to Villon’s own immediate situation. Barbara N. Sargent-­Baur has hypothesized that in meditating on “the h ­ uman condition, assimilating the rec­ords of classical antiquity and the Bible to his own recent and pre­sent experiences, and taking up anew some of the age-­old themes of lit­er­a­ture, [Villon] moves away from 1461 into timelessness, and from a small, immediate audience to a much larger one.”15 In this section, I take Sargent-­Baur’s assessment as a point of departure to suggest that Villon’s many reflections on death and the emotions that he ­reports in the Testament represent what we might think of as the “macro” or universal emotional states of ­those he evokes in “micro” in his references to individual inhabitants of Paris. As the w ­ ill of a d ­ ying narrator, the Testament is a document about death. The narrator reflects long and deeply on death, not just for what it means to himself on a micro level, but what it means more generally, on a macro level, for the larger community that he is gathering. Describing the



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emotionality of Villon’s writings, John Fox too sees the poet as attempting to suggest the universal through the personal. Fox writes in the final section of his 1962 study: “Alone of all medieval lyric poets of France, Villon breaks through the carapace of personal emotions, spreading and universalizing his feelings, attaining in the end to a vision, fleeting and imperfect though it may be, of men.”16 Villon’s reflections on his misspent youth are highly personal. So too are the regrets that he expresses, seemingly trying to make amends. Je suys pécheur, je le sçay bien; Pourtant Dieu ne veult pas ma mort, Mais convertisse et vive en bien; Mieulx tout autre que péché mord, Soye vraye voulenté ou enhort, Dieu voit, et sa miséricorde, Se conscience me remord, Par sa grace ­pardon m’accorde. 17 [I’m a sinner, I know this well, And yet, God does not wish that I die, But that I repent and live well, Better than ­others bitten by sin; That I be of right ­will or exhortation God sees, and his mercy; If my conscience makes me remorseful, By His grace he ­will ­pardon me.] When Villon moves into reflections on death, however, his narrator begins to speak as a sort of everyman. In huitain XXXIX he draws all into his community: every­one, what­ever his or her condition, must die. Je congnois que pouvres et riches Sages et fous, prestress et laiz, Nobles, villains, larges et chiches, Petiz et grans, et beaulx et laitz . . . Mort saisit sans excepcïon. 18 [I know that the poor and the rich, Wise and foolish, religious and lay, Noble, peasant, generous, stingy,

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Small and ­great, handsome and ugly, Ladies with their collars laid up . . . Death grabs them without exception.] Huitain XLI shows him reflecting on the leveling effects of death: La mort le faict fremir, pallir, Le nez courber, les veines tendre, Le col enfler, la chair mollir, Joinctes et nerfs croistre et estendre. Corps feminin, qui tant est tendre, Polly, souef, si precieulx, Te faudra-il ces maulx attendre? Ouy, ou tout vif aller ès cieulx.19 [Death makes him shake and go pale, The nose bends, neck swells, the veins tighten, The neck swells, the flesh softens, Joints and nerves grow and extend; The female body, so tender, Polished, fragrant and precious, Must you too expect to feel this agony? Yes, or enter living into heaven.] The “le” (“him”) which death ­causes to shake and grow pale is “whoever dies,” referring back to the huitain just before, which means humankind in its totality. Villon’s point is to remind his readers that every­one is equal before death, ­because ­ ill all p­ eople, what­ever their condition, as he had explained in huitain XXXIX, w eventually die. His repre­sen­ta­tion of death’s physical effects insists on the fact that death terrifies every­one. Inevitable end of all living creatures, death is painful even before it happens, b­ ecause it c­ auses so much worry. The “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (“Ballade of ladies of yesteryear”), following huitain XLI, further makes the point. The ladies in question are part of the history of the French kingdom, their lives spanning centuries of intellectual, spiritual, and historical life. But Joan of Arc, with whom Villon concludes his list, ties Villon’s own history to the larger one he has just offered. Joan was executed in 1431, which coincides with the supposed date of birth of the poet.



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She represents his bridge with the past, with the “temps jadis” (“time gone by”). Villon thus builds his story into ­those yesteryears. The past—­that is, history—is part of the individual’s pre­sent. The refrain of this ballade, repeated throughout, evokes the danger that an incommensurate attachment to the past may cause: we should not regret the past but simply enjoy the memories. Princes, n’enquerez de sepmaine Ou elles sont, ne de cest an, Qu’a ce reffrain ne vous remaine: Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan? 20 [Prince, do not ask in which week they are or which year; But only remember this refrain: Where have the snows of yesteryear gone?] Temporality vanishes, the past and pre­sent are conflated. As for the f­ uture, it seems to be settled already: as he is writing a testament, his writing and his life are in the past. His death, which he announces, is the only temporality on which to focus, even if it is grim. Following this ballade, “Ballade des seigneurs du temps jadis” (“Ballade of lords of yesteryear”), reiterates the same message. Its refrain too insists on the absurdity of longing for the “good old times.”21 This ballade is then followed by “Autre ballade à ce propos en vieux langage français” (“Another ballade taking up the same theme in Old French”),22 which is written in Old French, a language that was no longer spoken or written when Villon was writing. The refrain of that ballade builds on and nuances the message of the two ballades that precede it. ­Here, death is clearly presented as inevitable, but, nevertheless, precisely for that reason, it should not be a subject for sadness: Princes à mort sont destinez, Et tous autres qui sont vivans: Si sont courciez ou attinez, Autant en emporte ly vens. 23 [Princes are destined for death And all other living ­things,

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­ hether they are furious or not W They are gone with the wind!] The word “destinez” (“destined”) does not carry the gravity it normally does ­here; on the contrary, “autant en emporte ly vens!” (“gone with the wind!”) deprives the statement of any pos­si­ble tragedy. ­There is no use in sadness and ­despair. Every­body dies: the best ­thing to do is to enjoy one’s time as much as pos­si­ble, we learn in the huitain that follows: Puys que papes, roys, filz de roys, Et conceuz en ventres de roynes, Sont enseveliz, mortz et froidz, En aultruy mains passent leurs resnes; Moy, pauvre mercerot de Renes, Mourray-je pas? Ouy, se Dieu plaist; Mais que j’aye faict mes estrenes, Honneste mort ne me desplaist. 24 [Given that popes, kings, and king’s sons, And ­those conceived in wombs of queens, Have been buried, dead and cold, And pass their reigns on to ­others, Me, a poor hawker from Rennes, ­Will I not die? Yes, when it pleases God: But if I’ve had a good time, An honest death does not bother me.] All three of ­these ballades explic­itly evoke the theme of temporality, tempus fugit, and nostalgia, which they si­mul­ta­neously soften by recalling that all humankind is equally touched by such sadness. The three ballades build solidarity, creating a bond of shared fear across time and place. To tie t­ hese into the schema of macro and micro emotions that I laid out above, history, on the macro level, softens the blows of individual history by drawing all of humankind into one large, perpetual community. Villon, in a sense, starts anew following his g­ reat revelation. That is, ­after the moment where he realizes that death should not be feared, he turns to distributing his possessions, to create place for his own history within French history. At this moment he can fully start the pro­cess of giving.



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Building on the solidarity that the certainty of death guarantees, Villon creates an emotional community through the distribution of his goods. Emotions for Villon are not merely personal but universal, his own representing t­ hose of humankind, and the community he creates in the Testament aspiring to a sort of universality. Certainly his poetry arises from and describes his own physical and emotional world. But the Testament represents not only a personal legacy, a trace of this individual and ­those around him, but rather a vision of an emotional community firmly associated, on a micro level, with local places, and, on a macro level, with France as a w ­ hole and, fi­nally, with the universal kingdom of the poor and downtrodden. Villon’s France David Fern underlines the importance of Paris in Villon’s poetry, observing that it is not pos­si­ble to understand or even imagine Villon’s writings without placing them in the more general context of the city, to whose culture they contribute. Building on Fern’s argument, I suggest that Villon creates not only a “history of Paris,” but also a “history of France.” Villon erects through language an entire world, a unified ­whole, which reflects and encompasses the sum of his own impressions and emotional experience of the time. As we have seen, Villon begins the Testament with a scathing denunciation of the Bishop Thibault d’Aussigny, who threw him in prison in Meung-­sur-­Loire. Several huitains l­ ater he lauds Louis XI who delivered him from the terrible place. The emotional community that the reader is enjoined to enter is one whose bound­aries exceed Paris alone, one that includes the glorious king but excludes his unjust (Thibault) and greedy (Dennis Hesselin) administrators. As an emotional community it does not coincide precisely with France, excluding through mockery t­ hose authority figures who destroyed Villon. Nonetheless, it is a wide world, containing multitudes, ­those oppressed by injustice in any sense. The members of this community are bound together by a black, satirical humor that they turn on the power­ful and on themselves, laughing at their fear of death. Moreover, language of this community is eloquent and vivacious, surpassing in quality the vernacular of any other land. In the ballade whose refrain repeats “Il n’est bon bec que de Paris” (“The Parisiennes have the greatest gift of gab”), situated between huitains CXLIV and CXLV, we see another example of Villon’s larger focus. The Parisiennes’ language is compared not to that of

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­women within France, who spoke a patchwork quilt of va­ri­e­ties of French, but, instead, to that of ­women of other entities: kingdoms, duchies, regions. Their capacity for gab surpasses that of all the w ­ omen of Eu­rope: Prince, aux dames parisiennes, De bien parler donnez le prix; Quoy qu’on die d’Italiennes, Il n’est bon bec que de Paris. 25 [Prince to the Parisiennes Give the prize for gab; No ­matter what they say about Italian ­women, The Parisiennes have the greatest gift of gab]. This envoy comes at the conclusion of an impressive list of ­women whose chatter is deemed inferior to that of Pa­ri­sian ­women.26 ­Women from all of Eu­rope and beyond have qualities. Neapolitan w ­ omen, for instance, “De beau parler tiennent chayeres” (“have endowed chairs in beautiful speech”).27 However, what­ ever the place—­even Rome!—­the wit of non-­French w ­ omen cannot compare with that of Pa­ri­sian w ­ omen. Even w ­ omen from other regions of the kingdom such as Brittany, Gascony, Toulouse, or Lorraine are not at the level of Pa­ri­sian ­women. I believe that Villon envisions the emotional community of Paris as encompassing a linguistic community, represented ­here by the gab of ­women. Before Du Bellay and his Deffense et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), Villon understood the importance of the use of the French language. The unifying force of language is such that it marks the superiority of Paris—­even before France—­and the wit of its inhabitants. Villon’s France, then, is a place where the language is adequate to expression. Clément Marot, one of the earliest French poets of the historical and literary period that we t­oday recognize as the French Re­nais­sance, was the first editor and critic of the works of Villon. In the prologue to his edition of Villon, he denounces e­ arlier treatments of the poetry by printers who had no idea what they ­were dealing with, lamenting the “ignorãce de ceulx qui l’imprimerent” (“the ignorance of ­those who printed it”).28 But as much as he castigates printers of ­Villon, it is almost certainly ­because of printing that Marot knew Villon’s poetry at all and was able to pass it on to ­future generations. In this sense, then, Villon is par­tic­u­lar to the fifteenth ­century: his work prob­ably would have vanished had it not been preserved and circulated through printing.



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Moreover, Marot, writing in 1533, is already conscious that understanding Villon’s poetry depends utterly on understanding Villon’s own time and place: “il fauldroit avoir este de son tẽps a Paris, & avoir congneu les lieux, les choses, & les hõmes dõt il parle: la mémoire desquels tãt plus se passera, tãt moins se cõgnoistra icelle industrie de cez lays dictz” (“It would have been necessary to be in Paris during his time and to have known the places, the ­things, and the men of whom he speaks: the more the memory of ­these passes, the less ­will be recognized the work in ­these lais and dits”).29 Marot recognizes that something had changed between Villon’s and his own time to make that poet only partially understandable. For this reason, too, Villon is a product of the fifteenth ­century: he is one of the rare poets of late medieval France whose work continues to be read and inspire modern versions. Like the works of Christine de Pizan, Villon’s works have guaranteed the continued existence across the centuries of an emotional community that he instigated in the fifteenth ­century through an infusion of autobiographical traces. In Luigi Critone and Jean Teulé’s bande dessinée version of Je, François Villon, a romanticized novel of the life of the poet, Louis XI and Villon meet at the jail in Meung-­sur-­Loire. As we have seen, Villon recounts his gratitude to the king for rescuing him from the prison where he had been tortured and held captive following his arrest by Thibault. In their discussion, the king emphasizes the significance of Villon’s poetry to the idea of France. He says, “Villon, je sais que tu mêles à tes ballades tous les patois: poitevin, limousin, picard, flamand, normand, breton, angevin, lorrain et des quantités de jargons” (“Villon, I know that you mess around with ballades in all the dif­fer­ent patois: poitevin, limousine, picard, flamand, normand, breton, agnevivn, lorrain and all sorts of jargons”). The king then invites himself into the emotional community, noting, “Nous travaillons en même temps, moi à l’œuvre d’unité de la nation et toi à l’œuvre d’unité de notre langue. Nous sommes tous les deux larrons de quelque chose: moi, de province et de morceaux de royaume, toi” (“We work together, at the same time, me trying to unite the nation and you trying to unite our language. We are both stealing something: me, provinces and parts of the kingdom, you”). Villon replies with his typical sarcasm, “De rôts et de fromages” (“Burps and cheeses”).30 Notes 1. Paul Valéry, “Villon et Verlaine,” in Charles Villon, Œuvres complètes, ed. Cerquiglini-­ Toulet (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 630–631. Originally published in Paul Valéry, Œuvres,

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ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1:427–443. U ­ nless stated other­w ise, all translations in this essay are mine. 2. Valéry, “Villon et Verlaine,” 633–34; 427–443. 3. Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens-­en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Harlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink and Son, 1952), 396. 4. Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early ­Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2. 5. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 81, lines 753–760, LXXV. Citations from the Testament refer to the Pléiade edition of the text, Œuvres complètes, ed. Cerquiglini-­Toulet and Tabard. I cite page, along with the line and number of the huitains or ballades. 6. Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 329. 7. David  A. Fein, François Villon Revisited (London: Prentice Hall, 1997), and ­David A. Fein, François Villon and His Reader (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 8. Fein, François Villon Revisited, 51. 9. See Fein, François Villon and His Reader, 15–30. 10. Sally Mackey, “Place Theory,” Performing Places, http:​/­www​.­performingplaces​.­org​ /­theory​.­html. 11. This quote is taken from the Performing Places website referenced in the previous note. However, a more developed analy­sis of this term, and how Mackey uses it to demonstrate the intricate relation between applied theatre and space, can be found in her chapter “Performing location: place and applied theatre,” in Hughes and Nicholson, ed., Critical Perspectives on Applied Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 107–126. 12. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 99, lines 1014–1021, XCVIII. 13. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 109, lines 1158–1165, CXVI. 14. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 141, lines 1644–1651, CLIII. 15. Barbara Sargent-­Baur, “Communication and Implied Audience(s) in Villon’s Testament,” Neophilologus 76 (1992): 35–40 (39). 16. John Fox, The Poetry of Villon (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1962), 115. Italics mine. 17. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 37, lines 105–112, XIV. 18. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 51, lines 305–312. 19. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 51, lines 321–328. 20. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 53, lines 353–356. 21. Its refrain is “Mais ou est le preux Charlemagne” (“But where has the brave Charlemagne gone?”) The allusion is to the historical yet quasimythical figure of Charlemagne, who could be seen as one of the quin­tes­sen­tial rulers of the French kingdom. It thus reignites the motif of temporality or of the lack of power­ful figures nowadays. The absurdity lies in the fact that to come up with a ­great ruler we have to look back 500 years into the past. 22. This title is absent from the original text edited by Cerquiglini-­Toulet, and the poem is only referred to as “ballade.” However, Marot’s edition of Villon pre­sents it as such (“autre ballade a ce propos, en vieil langage Françoys”).



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23. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 57, lines 409–412, XLI. 24. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 57, lines 413–420. 25. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 135, lines 1539–1542. 26. The w ­ omen in this poem represent the vari­ous cultures of Eu­rope, such as the “Florentines” (Florentines), “Venicïennes” (Venitians), “Lombardes” (Lombardians), “Roumaines” (Romanians), “Genevoyses” (Genevans), “Pimontoises” (Piedmontese), “Savoysïennes” (Savoyards), “Nappolitaines” (Neapolitans), “Allemandes et Prucïennes” (Germans and Prus­sians), “Grecques” (Greeks), “Egipcïennes” (Egyptians), “de Hongrie” (Hungarians), “Espaignoles ou Castellanes” (Spanish or Castilians), “Brectes” (Bretons), “Souyssez” (Swiss w ­ omen), “Gasconnes” (Gascons), “Toullousïennes” (Toulousans), “Lorraines” (Lorraines), “Angleches” (En­glish), “Callesïennes” (Calaisians), “Picardes” (Picards), “Vallencïennes” (Valenciennes). See Villon, Œuvres complètes, 133, lines 1515–1538. 27. Villon, Œuvres complètes, Testament, 133, line 1523. 28. All the quotations from Marot’s prologue on Villon’s work come from François Villon, Les œuvres de Françoys Villon, de Paris, reveues et remises en leur entier, par Clément Marot, valet de chambre du roy, ed. Clément Marot (Paris: Galiot du Pre, 1533), no pagination. 29. Villon, Les œuvres de Françoys Villon. 30. All quotations in this paragraph from Luigi Critone, Je, François Villon (Paris: Delcourt, 2017), 168.

c ha p te r e i g ht

La Belle Dame of Chartier Manuscripts Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier Joan E. McRae

La Belle Dame sans mercy is unquestionably Alain Chartier’s best-­known poem. Although his reputation as the “père de l’éloquence française” (“­father of French eloquence”) may be based more on his prose works such as the Quadrilogue invectif or his prosi-­metric Livre de l’Espérance,1 it is this seemingly traditional love debate with its witty repartee and unexpected ending that has inspired generations of response from poets and critics alike. It was copied, imitated, translated, and debated throughout fifteenth-­century Eu­rope and beyond.2 Indeed, in the nineteenth c­ entury, John Keats resurrected the Belle Dame in his own fay with a poem that motivated the pre-­Raphaelites to paint both her and her creator Alain, renewing their fame.3 Sprung from the debate over the Roman de la Rose that preceded it by a generation, La Belle Dame sans mercy would give birth to a widespread literary debate. This “quarrel” continued into the next generations through the Querelle des femmes, which would accelerate the debate over the nature and the rights of ­women.4 The purpose of this essay is to explore one particularly beautiful manuscript version of La Belle Dame sans mercy of the mid-­fifteenth ­century known as the Clumber Park Chartier, ­today held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library as manuscript 1216, and speculate on for whom it may have been commissioned.

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Alain Chartier and His Manuscripts Alain Chartier was born in Bayeux around 1386 to a bourgeois f­ amily. He studied at the University of Paris before entering the employ of Yolande of Anjou sometime before 1412 in the capacity of secretary. By 1417, he had begun serving the young Charles, who was engaged to Yolande’s d ­ aughter Marie. Alain accompanied Charles, now dauphin ­after the death of his older b­ rothers, to Paris before the violent Burgundian takeover of the capital in May of 1418. Escaping with the dauphin into the safety of the Touraine region during the massacre, Alain worked for Charles as secretary, notary, diplomat, propagandist, poet, and phi­los­o­pher, as attested through a variety of works from diplomatic letters to love poems.5 Chartier wrote in prose and verse, in Latin or in French, according to the audience he wished to address. As a member of the first French Humanist movement, he was inspired by the authors of antiquity, including Sallust, an extant copy of whose work bears his signature,6 Juvenal, Virgil, Horace, and especially Seneca, whose style he would integrate into his own.7 Indeed, he modestly referred to himself as the “lointain imitateur des orateurs” (“distant imitator of orators”) in the closing of his Quadrilogue invectif. He left a relatively small literary legacy, especially in comparison to his near contemporaries Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, and Christine de Pizan. He did not take care to collect his works together and oversee their distribution in order to ensure his reputation as did the aforementioned authors. For Alain, ser­vice to the rightful king of France was of primary importance. It is therefore all the more remarkable that around two hundred manuscripts have survived to attest the impact of his work on the fifteenth ­century.8 Very few of them can be dated to the early fifteenth c­ entury, before or around the time of Chartier’s death in 1430. However, a growing appreciation of the poet is affirmed by a series of luxury manuscripts produced in the mid-­fifteenth ­century that collect his works, often beautifully copied on parchment, though rarely illuminated. According to Camille Serchuk, only around 15 ­percent of Chartier manuscripts are illustrated—­these ­were the volumes typically produced for the higher echelons of society, the very wealthy,9 and they w ­ ere made 10 to be read, not just seen as luxury objects. They ­were commissioned by members of the royal entourage who recognized the worth of Alain’s œuvre as well as his long and committed ser­vice to Charles VII.11 ­These codices include two pendant manuscripts made for the third wife of Charles of Orleans, Marie of Clèves, and Marguerite of Rohan, the wife of Charles’s b­ rother Jean of

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Angoulême.12 A luxury manuscript of Chartier’s works was also in the possession of Jacques de Brézé, son of Pierre de Brézé, a favorite courtier of both the king and the king’s mistress, Agnès Sorel. Jacques de Brézé would marry the ­daughter of Agnès and Charles, Charlotte, in 1461.13 Yet another extant manuscript is inscribed with the arms and signatures of the ­daughters of Jean Daillon, who served at the courts of Charles VII and his son Louis XI.14 The scribe Jean Herlin produced yet another for Jeanne of Laval, a­ fter her marriage to Rene of Anjou, decorated with her new arms.15 The Talbot Shrewsbury book16 includes a Chartier text, the Breviaire des nobles; it was made for Marguerite of Anjou, ­daughter of René of Anjou, to commemorate her marriage to Henry VI in 1445. Another splendidly illuminated Talbot masterpiece was commissioned in 1450 by the rich and power­ful échevins of Rouen for their library, branded on the frontispiece with their ensign, containing Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif and his Livre de l’Espérance, along with his Dialogus familiaris Amici et Sodalis.17 It was at this point, in mid-­century, that Charles VII was successful in expelling the En­glish from France and resolving the internecine conflict with the Burgundians. The resurgence of interest in the works of Chartier, as indicated by t­ hese manuscripts, produced a generation a­ fter his death in 1430, is surely an acknowl­edgment of his prescient advice to the princes and p­ eople of the kingdom, as well as a testament to the inspiring passion of his unflagging patriotism. Chartier’s writings had e­ arlier served, and now again would serve, as a vehicle for the French royal voice to call countrymen to unite. La Belle Dams sans Mercy of Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier Most striking of ­these mid-­century manuscripts is an extraordinary, illuminated codex that has reappeared a­ fter an absence of almost one hundred years, the Clumber Park Chartier, of which we had only a few black-­and-­white photos and an incomplete and inaccurate description found in the Clumber Sale cata­logue produced for the Sotheby’s sale of the Duke of Newcastle’s estate in 1937. It recently has been acquired by Yale’s Beinecke Library, where it has been digitized and is available online for consultation.18 This lavish manuscript is the largest, the most beautiful, the superlative, of all the Chartier manuscripts. Twenty-­two illuminated initials and nineteen illuminations grace its 136 leaves, making it the most extensively illustrated of all



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Chartier manuscripts;19 several of the illustrations occur uniquely in this manuscript. Its contents include eleven of Chartier’s French texts: Le Quadrilogue invectif, Le Livre des quatres dames, Le Lay de paix, Le Livre de l’esperance, Le Breviaire des nobles, La Belle Dame sans mercy and the texts of the Querelle des femmes, La Requeste baillée aux dames contre l’acteur, and Les Lettres envoyées par les dames à l’auteur, with Alain’s response in L’Excusacion aux dames, Le Débat des deux fortunés d’amour, La Complainte contre la mort, as well as four ballades and twenty-­three rondeaux. Also copied are five poems frequently attributed to Chartier and inspired by the Querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy. ­These include Le Débat du cuer et de l’œil, now attributed to Michault Taillevent; La Belle Dame qui eust mercy, once attributed to Piaget by Oton de Grand­son, although that attribution has been abandoned by recent editors;20 La Cruelle femme en amours and L’Ospital d’amours, both written by Achilles Caulier, and, appended as a final quire some ten to twenty years ­later, Simon Greban’s Epitaphe de Charles VII. The texts are beautifully decorated with eight large illuminations, eleven small illuminations, initials in pink or blue on burnished gold grounds with pansies, stanza markers with pansies on a gold ground, and filigree and floral flourishes. The illuminations pre­sent unique and original compositions designed to comment on or even, at times, to “correct” the texts. Each illuminated page has an elaborately painted border featuring fauna and flora and, at the bottom, a plethora of pansies, and a pair of “A’s” entwined with a black-­tasseled cord. ­These borders, teeming with flowers and fo­liage, and birds and beasts, along with the original compositions, offer us clues about the provenance and purpose of the manuscript even as they interpret the texts they illustrate. Christie’s consulting art historian, Catherine Reynolds, recently dated the manuscript between 1450–1460 and identified the artist as the Dunois master who worked out of Paris, often with the workshop of the Bedford master in l­ater years.21 Seven of the illuminations are unique to this manuscript, illustrating Chartier’s Belle Dame sans mercy, his Excusacion aux dames and Lay de paix, Michel Taillevant’s Debat du cuer et de l’oeil, Achilles Caulier’s L’Ospital d’amours, and his Cruelle femme en amours, as well as the anonymous Belle Dame qui eust mercy. More on ­these unique images follows in the analy­sis of the codex’s composition. ­These unique illustrations are an indication that the manuscript was conceived as a Chartier corpus, without doubt, and more specifically as a compendium of the love quarrel that made the poem famous. This par­tic­u­lar “book of the Belle Dame,” as the quarrel has been called,22 may well have been produced

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to honor and remember that real-­life Belle Dame who reigned over Charles VII’s court, Agnès Sorel, official mistress of the king, who was known as the most beautiful ­woman in the kingdom and hailed as “la dame de Beauté.”23 Her influence on Charles, it was said, inspired him to cast off his dejection at the miserable state of the kingdom, rise to his rightful status, and drive the En­glish from France.24 What more fitting vehicle to commemorate the beauty of the ­woman who loved the king and her country as passionately as did Chartier, both of them instruments of inspiration for the king at this time of national regeneration and return to sovereignty? The Clumber Park Chartier: A Memorial? The Clumber Park Chartier bears no coat of arms, no motto, no indication of its commissioner’s status beyond the luxurious gold and exquisite quality of ­these beautiful, bountiful, and unique illuminations and the mysterious double “A” initials. The commissioner had to be very rich, but the lack of coat of arms or another emblem indicates that he or she might not have been, or was not yet, noble. ­Those initials “AA,” bound usually with a black tasseled cord, reoccur throughout the entire manuscript, surrounded by a profusion of pansies. Th ­ ese pansies in the margins even find their way into the illustrations proper, on one lady’s dress in the illustration of the Belle Dame; on the fourth lady’s dress in the Excusacion along with figures that appear to be the letter “A.” The obvious question is, what could the initials “AA” stand for? Are they the initials of the commissioner, or do they refer to something ­else, perhaps a message that the artist or the commissioner wished to convey? Although they might indicate the first letter of a first or ­family name, they might also reference the first letters of a slogan. A recently sold Book of Hours made for Le ­Grand Bâtard, Anthony of Burgundy (the oldest bastard son of Philip the Good), had beautiful margins adorned with his motto and his crest and two sets of mysterious letters: “AC” and “NE.” The meaning of the first set of initials, (Anthony and something ­else?) is still unknown, but the second set appear to be a repetition of the first and last letters of his motto: “Nul ne sy frote” (“No one touches me”). In other words, the letters “AA” may not be initials at all, but letters in a secret message. In this vein, in the Hours of Simon de Varie, the meaning of the repeated initials “T” and “R,” linked by a tasseled cord, remains mysterious.25 Nevertheless, I would like to ­hazard a working hypothesis that simplifies the mystery: that the double “A” represents the initial of someone pre­sent



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in the court of Charles VII, king of France reigning during the period of the manuscript’s fabrication, and that the pansies proliferating in the decoration symbolize “pensées” (“thoughts” or “memories”),26 indicating that this manuscript was commissioned as a memorial for someone, and that the person who commissioned it, or for whom it was commissioned, was not a nobleperson. Who could this be? The Sotheby’s 1937 sale cata­logue description suggested that the manuscript was made for Anne of France (or Beaujeu) (1461–1522). Recent observations, however, reveal that the painting style predates any commission for Anne, and so this idea must be discarded. It has further been suggested that the manuscript was created for Agnès Sorel’s first cousin Antoinette de Maignelais, who in 1450 married André de Villequier, nobleman of an illustrious ­family, one of the king’s favorite courtiers; she was widowed just four years l­ ater. This widowhood and the first initials of her name and her husband’s would explain the double “A’s” in the black knot. Antoinette may well be the ultimate possessor of the book, as Hanno Wijsman proposes.27 A space for doubt opens, however, in the fact that such a prestigious noble position as that of Antoinette or André was not prominently indicated in such a luxurious commission. Such an omission prompts us to consider other possibilities. Who then might be the actors involved in realizing a memorial to Agnès?28 Many of Agnès’s close friends, ­those in the close circle around Charles, ­were bibliophiles. Pierre de Brézé, who may have crossed paths with Chartier at the court of Anjou, prob­ably owned the Chartier manuscript (referenced e­ arlier) inherited by his son; Pierre also commissioned a beautifully illustrated Destruction de Troye from the makers of the Talbot Chartier.29 ­There is also Etienne Chevalier to consider, a mécène who is now best remembered for his commission, prob­ably around 1452, of one of the most famous and lavishly illuminated Book of Hours held at the Musée Condé in Chantilly. As a close friend, even named as an executor of Agnès’s ­will, he would have known of Agnes’s interest in books and education, as she was trained in the lively and erudite court of René of Anjou and Isabelle de Lorraine (it was for their ­daughter Marguerite that the aforementioned Talbot Shrewsbury book was made). Chevalier also commissioned the Melun diptych for the church of his birthplace from French court painter Jean Fouquet, who is reputed to have modeled the features of the Virgin Mary, a Virgo Lactans, on t­ hose of Agnès. Erudition extended from parents to ­children: the three ­daughters Agnès had with Charles w ­ ere also known to have been educated, especially the eldest

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Marie, born around 1444, who was sent to the illustrious bibliophile Prégent de Coëtivy to be raised and tutored. Prégent was killed in 1450 on the battlefield; his precious ward was passed to his younger b­ rother Olivier who, a­ fter serving time as prisoner in ­England, was invited to marry Marie by her ­father the king. He would make a happy marriage with Marie in 1458; she was young, thirteen or fourteen.30 Their library includes letters between the married ­couple and an impressive collection of books, including a book Marie may have studied as a child, the Coëtivy Hours, executed around 1445 by the Dunois master, the same artist who painted the Clumber Park Chartier.31 It remains speculative who may have commissioned the work ­after Agnès’s death, w ­ hether it was Antoinette or one of Agnès’s friends. What seems more certain is that the manuscript is a memorial, but to whom? I suggest that it may be addressed to an ulterior destinataire, whose identity is suggested within the illuminations of the manuscript: Agnès Sorel. In 1450, at the age of twenty-­eight, Charles VII’s beautiful and very pregnant mistress, Agnès Sorel, attempting to warn him on the battlefront of treachery, died of mercury poisoning.32 ­There are numerous indicators of this dedicatee. Several female images in the Clumber Park illuminations appear to depict Agnès. In the illuminations of the Belle Dame sans mercy and the Quarrel poems which dominate this manuscript, we see the Belle Dame (Agnès?), marked, again and again, by the pansies on her dress as she who is to be remembered. In the illumination of the work that follows the Belle Dame, we see pictured three named ladies, Marie, Jeanne, and Katherine, along with a fourth unnamed lady, dressed in a robe of pansies with a black chaperon. This fourth lady might well be a repre­sen­ta­tion of the recently deceased Agnès Sorel, the Belle Dame of France, the black cap signifying that she was no longer living. Agnès may also have served as the model for Dame France in the Quadrilogue invectif, in the frontispiece of the codex (Figure 8.1). Such a theory is validated not only by Dame France’s blond hair but also by the three lambs lounging on the train of the robe. Charles’s nickname for Agnès, as well as her saint’s emblem, was the agneau or agnel, meaning “lamb” in French; ­there are three lambs and one bovine, surely indicating her three surviving ­children with Charles, as well as the one who died with her. Her tomb, commissioned by the king, features lambs at her feet, angels at her head. In the image that illustrates Le Lay de Paix, unique to this manuscript (Figure 8.2), another female image appears to be Agnès, who was also called the Lady of Peace.33 ­Behind the Goddess of Peace in the illumination we



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Figure 8.1. Alain Chartier, Le Quadrilogue invective, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 1r. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

see the same red rank of angels that appear ­behind the Virgo Lactans in the Melun diptych, whose features are reputed to be modeled a­ fter Agnès’s, and in the Coëtivy Hours.34 The kingly grotesque on fol. 115r, just beside the lover in the Ospital d’amours (see Figure  8.8) may signify Charles’s recovery from his years of depression thanks to the love of Agnès; the red, green, and white color palette of ­these scenes recalls Charles’s livery and hints that he is the lover who has entered the hospital due to his love for the Belle Dame. The illumination of the Complainte contre la Mort (see Figure  8.7, below) may rec­ord the untimely death of Agnès and the grief of the inconsolable king at her loss. Closer

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Figure 8.2. Alain Chartier, Le Lai de Paix, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 39r. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

examination of the construction and illuminations of the manuscript ­will help justify this attribution of memoriam to the “belle Agnès.” Documenting the Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans Mercy The manuscript’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the Quarrel begins just ­after the center of the codex with the Belle Dame sans mercy (94v) and continues u ­ ntil the penultimate quire, encompassing a broad swathe of many but not all of the Quarrel poems. Included in this “book of the Belle Dame” are La Requeste baillée aux dames contre l’acteur and the Lettres envoyées par les dames à l’auteur, with Alain’s response in L’Excusacion aux dames, Le Débat des deux fortunés d’amour, La Complainte



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contre la mort, and the pseudo-­Chartier poems La belle Dame qui eut mercy, L’Ospital d’amours, La Cruelle femme en amours, and Le Debat du cuer et de l’oeil. This series of poems witnesses a literary quarrel akin to, and likely inf luenced by, the debate of the Roman de la Rose between Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson, on the one hand, and, on the other, members of the Pa­ri­sian and university intelligent­sia, including Jean de Montreuil and ­brothers Gontier and Pierre Col. The Belle Dame sans mercy, a traditionally conceived eight-­ hundred-­line octosyllabic poem written in 1424 or 1425,35 is an exquisitely balanced love debate between lover and lady overheard by an eavesdropping narrator. However, the unexpectedly problematic poem soon incited a poetic response similar to the epistolary debate of the Roman de la Rose, and over the same issues: the reputation of ­women and the responsibility of an author for the influence of his or her text on its audience. The Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans mercy, a series of response poems to the Belle Dame, was first documented for modern scholars by Arthur Piaget in a series of articles that appeared in Romania.36 However, scribes con­temporary to the Quarrel had long been collecting the poems together in manuscript (or early printed editions) to preserve an ongoing exchange.37 The contents of ­these manuscripts indicate the progression of the debate as well as the relative popularity of each individual poetic contribution. Extant in varying number and distribution in thirty-­one of the fifty or so Belle Dame and Quarrel manuscripts, ­these poems allude to Chartier’s Belle Dame or to subsequent poems in the Quarrel as they rec­ord differing reactions to the Belle Dame.38 The jewel of the collection is the Belle Dame itself. In the poem’s framework, the narrator sets out riding alone, grieving the death of his lady and swearing he w ­ ill never write “ joyeuses choses” (“ joyful ­things”) again. He comes upon a party and is cajoled by friends to join the dinner. Once inside, he sees a forlorn, black-­clad lover waiting at dinner for his love interest, a most beautiful lady. The narrator watches the lover, contemplating that “autel fus comme vous estez” (“I was once as you are now”).39 As the dancing begins, the lover draws the lady outside to the garden so he can speak to her alone. The narrator, who had fatigued of the fanfare and left the party, eavesdrops on the ­couple from ­behind a trellis as the lover attempts to persuade the lady to accept his ser­vice of love. The debate ends in an unexpected way, for the lady steadfastly refuses to be convinced by his traditional love rhe­toric, as she categorically states: “Je suis franche et franche veuil estre” (“I am f­ ree and wish to remain so”).40 This response upends all of the “Art of Love” that has been taught assiduously for the

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past 150 by the extremely popu­lar Roman de la Rose. Instead of the foolish lover, it is reason who prevails, as the lady responds to each new supplication of the lover with a logical and firm riposte to his emotional pleas. In the end, the lover is left ­behind, definitively rejected, as the lady goes back to the party to join the dancing. L ­ ater, in what would prove a shocking twist, the narrator reports that he has heard that the heartbroken lover has died of his sorrow. Chartier’s courtly poem was considered scandalous at the dauphin’s court. Some courtiers wrote a letter to the ladies decrying Chartier’s attempt to ruin the ladies’ reputation by creating a female character lacking in pity. The ladies responded with a letter to Chartier requesting that he come to court and explain himself and his intentions; they sign their names, Marie, Jeanne, and Katherine.41 Chartier, delayed by an impor­tant ambassadorial assignment, sent them another short poem in response: the Excusacion, a dream vision in which he makes his case to the irate God of Love. Chartier begs the God of Love to read the ­whole book before judging it, and his defense of his poem is two-­fold. First, the God of Love should agree with him that ­women do not, nor should they, bestow their grace on just anyone who requests it. Second, why should he be condemned when, as an author, he has simply written down the words he overheard? He proclaims his devotion to all ladies, promotes their right to make their own choice in m ­ atters of love, and is fi­nally forgiven by the God of Love. He pays penance for his audacity by recording his encounter in this poem a­ fter he awakens. The quarrel has just begun, however. Borrowing the verse form and often the characters of Chartier’s Belle Dame, some eigh­teen poems cata­logued by Piaget can be included in the quarrel. Four of ­these poems act as sequels to the Belle Dame; in the continuing narrative, the Belle Dame is held responsible for her lover’s death of unrequited love and indicted for murder before the allegorical court of love. Some fourteen other poems classified by Piaget rewrite Chartier’s poem, correcting e­ ither character or consequence of the amorous debate between lover and lady. In many manuscripts, the trial is broken into a series of three poems, consisting of the Les Accusations contre la Belle Dame sans mercy, La Dame loyalle en amours, and La Cruelle femme en amours.42 In the first of the series the Belle Dame, arraigned for murder, is brought before love’s court and accused: her refusal to grant her pity to the lover caused his death. The prosecutor condemns her with her very own words in the indictment, and, ­because the Belle Dame cannot find a ­lawyer bold enough to defend her, the trial is delayed. In the sec-



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ond stage, the Dame loyalle en amours, the lady requests the ser­vices of two l­ awyers to defend her: Loyalty and Truth. A ­ fter reiteration of the previous l­egal pre­sen­ta­tion, the defense ­lawyers argue before the court that the Belle Dame is not responsible for the death of the lover. In yet another surprising narrative twist, they reveal that the reason the lady refused the lover’s advances was ­because she already had a secret lover to whom she wished to remain loyal. The doctrines of love, therefore, justified and even required her refusal of the lover. She is acquitted and renamed the “Lady Loyal in Love.” In the third poem, La Cruelle femme en amours, a friend of the defunct lover requests an appeal of the verdict of the previous trial. He claims that it had been won by trickery, for Truth and Loyalty, the Belle Dame’s ­lawyers, ­were none other than Fiction and Falsity, disguised to pass as the more noble figures. Truth, called in to verify the claim, proves the deception of the previous case by pointing out that the Belle Dame herself denied having any lover when she said “Je suis franche et franche veuil estre” (“I am ­f ree and wish to remain so”). Since her innocence was based on false testimony, the verdict is overturned, and the trial begins anew. The accusations against the Belle Dame are once more introduced. Over the course of the trial, the probity of her creator, Alain Chartier, is reestablished; however, his merciless lady is forced to confess her crime of deliberate murder. Condemned to drowning in the well of tears, the Belle Dame is punished in the severest terms. In the Clumber Park manuscript, the Quarrel is succinctly summarized by its inclusion of just the third poem, which essentially retells the previous two. In addition, this third poem displays the greatest poetic prowess, whereas the other two are somewhat less accomplished,43 and thus is eminently worthy of inclusion in this most beautiful of Belle Dame manuscripts. In addition to the elaborate murder trial of the Belle Dame, courtiers and poets responded to Chartier’s poem by altering the story line or composing prequels or sequels to the story.44 Often the compiling of a “book of the Belle Dame” in a manuscript incorporates additional works by Chartier as well as work by other poets. In this manuscript, for example, the prequels to the saga include, on folio 86r, Le Débat du cuer et de l’oeil, by Taillevant; on 91r, Chartier’s Reveil matin; and, on 93r, Chartier’s Lai de plaisance. ­These poems focus on the initial stages of love. Only the first of ­these is illustrated, uniquely in the Clumber Park Chartier. Alterations to the story include La Belle Dame qui eust mercy, in which the lady’s response to the lover is reversed, copied on 102r; Chartier’s Debat des deux fortunés d’amours, in which the fortunes of love are debated,

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on 104v, Chartier’s Complainte contre la Mort, in which we first learn of the death of Chartier’s lady, on 112r, and Achilles Caulier’s L’Ospital d’amours, in which the lover is treated for love sickness, on 113v. All four of ­these poems are highlighted with an illumination to mark their importance in the overall Quarrel narrative. The importance of the Belle Dame Quarrel to the organ­ization of the manuscript is evident: of the eigh­teen items copied in the manuscript, twelve can be considered participants in the Quarrel. Moreover, the collection’s compilation constitutes a Chartier codex: The first five items of the codex are the most popu­lar of Chartier’s poetic works in French. Th ­ ese are, beginning on 1r, Le Quadrilogue invectif, extant in more than fifty manuscripts; on 18r, the Livre des quatre dames, extant in thirty-­three manuscripts; on 39r, Le Livre de paix, extant in at least forty-­eight manuscripts; on 41r, the Livre de l’esperance, extant in at least thirty-­seven manuscripts; and on 83r, Le Breviaire des nobles, extant in at least fifty-­three manuscripts. The Clumber Park manuscript offers several elaborate illuminations to illustrate the Belle Dame and the Excusacion.45 On 94v (Figure 8.3), the opening of the Belle Dame, the artist demonstrates exemplary use of the techniques evolved in the workshop of the Bedford master:46 his depiction of multiscene narration within a continuous setting of landscape and architecture makes pos­ si­ble the pre­sen­ta­tion of multiple scenes of action with a single illumination. The double-­paned composition that illustrates La Belle Dame sans mercy offers a reading that begins in the bottom left pane with the narrator, clad in pink with black hose, arriving on ­horse­back to the party. We see him enter the château by mounting the stairs, an action that directs our eyes to the upper pane, where the narrator then encounters the Belle Dame, identified by the pansies on her dress and letter “A” on her hennin. Is this “A” for Agnès, the incarnated Belle Dame? In the next scene the sympathetic narrator witnesses the Belle Dame now being served at the dinner ­table by the forlorn lover, clad in red tights and a blue jacket. The m ­ usic and dancing have begun as the lover escorts the lady away into the lower right pane’s garden, complete with a trellis ­behind which the narrator lurks to eavesdrop on the debating c­ ouple. The technique of composing multiscene panes proves an ideal tool for incorporating as much of the action as pos­si­ble while setting the scene and translating visually the complex imagery of the poem. The margins are filled with exquisite grotesques, flora, and fauna with an attention to detail also typical of the Bedford master.47 In the lower margin two



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Figure 8.3. Alain Chartier, La belle dame sans mercy, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 94v. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

collared beasts are linked by a chain wrapped around a tree blooming with pansies while a swallow swoops down from above. In this lower margin, the love scene is reenacted: the chain reifies the emotional inseparability of the two creatures who look longingly at each other. The pansy tree implants memory; the flying swallow symbolizes longing and sorrow for loss. Accentuating each new stanza, a paragraph marker features a pansy, insistently evoking the memory of the Belle Dame and her incarnation, the Dame de Beauté. A second double-­scene illumination on folio 100v (Figure 8.4) illustrates Chartier’s Excusacion. The first scene shows the ladies of the court receiving the poem, rolled in a scroll from the hand of Alain. The second scene reveals the reading: the God of Love’s visit to Chartier as he lies dreaming in bed. A thin stone column in the foreground offers a visual break between the scenes. In the first scene the three ladies, Marie, Katherine, and Jeanne, are pre­sent, in accordance with the text, but they are accompanied by a fourth black-­capped lady with pansies on her dress. Who might this lady be? Following the tradition of the insertion of images of a patron into illuminations, we might consider

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Figure  8.4. Alain Chartier, L’Excusacion, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 100v. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

this fourth lady to be someone outside of the narrative, the patron perhaps or, more likely, the one for whom the manuscript was designed. In the second scene the God of Love has been altered from the masculine figure of the text and depicted as a w ­ oman.48 This female God(dess) of Love wears the same crown as Dame France from the Quadrilogue invectif frontispiece; on her dress is imprinted, again, the letter “A.” Alain is shown, now clad in black, sleeping deeply on his bed as the red-­winged God(dess) of Love leans over his bed, her bow arched. In the left margin two bears grapple or embrace above the ubiquitous, black-­tasseled rope knotted around the pansy tree to link the two initials “A.” In the lower margin the altercation of the second register’s illumination is reenacted as a wild man clad in a toga, perhaps ludically recalling Alain’s reputation as a “lointain imitateur des anciens” (“distant imitator of the ancients”), brandishes a mask and club against the winged dragon, a re­imagined and dangerous Goddess of Love. Just ­after this lustrously illustrated “book of the Belle Dame” is copied one of the most popu­lar Quarrel poems, the antipode of Chartier’s La belle Dame sans mercy, whose title has been altered to reflect the anticipated change at the end of the new poem: La belle Dame qui eust mercy.49 This revision of La Belle Dame sans mercy, mistakenly attributed to Chartier in several manuscripts and



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in all the early editions, seeks to correct the outcome of Chartier’s story: the lover ­will succeed in convincing the Lady to capitulate to his requests with his love rhe­toric. The poem opens without a narrator; the lover woos his lady with flattery and pleas for mercy. Initially, she is as resistant and skeptical as Chartier’s Belle Dame. She refers to a husband, the reason for her initial refusal, although she does not clarify w ­ hether he is still living or has died. A ­ fter thirty-­three stanzas of debate she is overwhelmed with passion for the lover, and, extracting a promise from him to be discreet and faithful, she commits to being his sweetheart, and they promise to have “bon temps ensamble” (“a good time together”).50 A single small image illustrates the poem, the traditional love scene of lover and lady, occupying the top half of the b column on folio 102r (Figure 8.5). The page is further adorned with relatively simplified borders of blue, red, and gold, featuring strawberries and blue and pink flowers, but no creatures. It is perhaps the work of a dif­fer­ent border painter who pre­sents a second style; this lovely border recalls t­ hose found in the Hours of Simon de Varie.51 The “AA” initials are discreetly tucked into the right edge of the border, tied by a subtle, blue-­ tasseled cord; the pansies are restricted to the illuminated initial that begins the poem. The narrative is displayed through a double register illustration, the composition in the upper pane showing two scenes: the lover, accompanied by a friend, enters and is greeted with a kiss by the lady; in a second moment the lover is seated and debates with the lady as her companion looks on. The lower pane consists of a single scene: the lover and lady, with another of her companions, sit in a walled garden (presumably the garden of delight). The lady indicates her decision to accept the lover by putting a ring on his fin­ger. The lady is sumptuously robed in a gold and blue gown with matching hennin. The first lady-­in-­waiting in the upper pane is dressed in green, the second, in the lower pane, in pink. No identifying markers within the illumination offer clues to identify the characters. La Belle Dame qui eust mercy is followed by two of Chartier’s poems: Le Debat des deux fortunés en amour and La Complainte contre la Mort. ­These two poems are tangential to the Quarrel proper but are often included in the manuscripts that collect the Quarrel poems. Both of them are illustrated with unique illuminations.52 The first poem, Le Débat des deux fortunés en amour, also called Le Gras et le Maigre, is narrated by a young Chartier who is observing the ladies and courtiers as they tell courtly tales. He describes himself as “ardent d’apprendre” (“­eager to learn”),53 ­because he is, of all the com­pany gathered, “le

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Figure 8.5. Anonymous, La belle dame qui eust mercy, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 102r. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

plus nice et le mendre” (“the most ignorant and inferior”),54 ­because he is but “un s­ imple clerc . . . ​qui parle ainsi d’amours par ouïr dire” (“a s­ imple clerk . . . ​ who speaks of love by hearsay”).55 The story then segues into a debate between the Fat Knight, who speaks of the joys of love, and the Thin Knight, who reveals its tortures. In the quarter-­page illumination on folio 104v. (Figure 8.6), framed in border decoration of the second style, the artist depicts the ladies and courtiers discussing love on the porch of a chateau, a green-­curtained bed vis­i­ble in the back of the room. Just to the left of the bed we see a sad man clad in black, his hand lifted as he speaks; to the right of the scene is a smiling man in gray. ­These



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Figure  8.6. Alain Chartier, Deux fortunés, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 104v. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

must be the two interlocutors on ­either side, le Maigre in black, le Gras, in grey. Through a subtle and clever choice, the artist has arranged the composition so that the black garment allows for a double identity: the Thin Knight on the left, clad in black, doubles as the author and narrator, Alain, whom we have seen dressed similarly in several of the other illuminations56 and who was well known for the melancholic tone of his work. Certainly melancholy and despair characterize La Complainte contre la Mort, the item copied next in the codex. In the twelve stanzas of decasyllabic verse, the author uses apostrophe to address Death directly, accusing him of cruelty for taking his beloved, confessing his despair, and expressing his desire to follow his lady in death. It is a lamentation of death and an exhortation of the virtues of his beloved. The Complainte is often included with the Quarrel poems ­because it is thought to precede and justify the prologue to La Belle Dame sans mercy, in which the narrator grieves his recently departed lady. We see, too, a foreshadowing of the fate of the unrequited lover who ­will ultimately die of sorrow at the end of the Belle Dame.57 The quarter-­page illumination on folio 112r (Figure 8.7) depicts the narrator, clad in black, watching aghast as skeletal Death

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Figure  8.7. Alain Chartier, Complainte contre la Mort, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 112r. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

stabs the lady with his red dart. Ironically, dart is the same word used to express how the God of Love pierces the eye of lovers, that same dart grasped by the God of Love presiding over his court in the illustration of the La Cruelle femme en amours (fol. 122v). The gold-­robed lady sways back as she succumbs to Death’s assault. The large red jewel that appears around her neck which matches that of the black-­clad narrator-­lover accentuates their shared heart, uniting them even in death. It also recalls that large red jewel on the clasp of Dame France’s cloak in the frontispiece illustration of Le Quadrilogue invectif (fol. 1), linking the ­dying beloved with Dame France. The richly decorated border in the second style features the ubiquitous “AA” initials to the right, surrounded by muted blue acanthus, gold leaves, and blue columbines. The inclusion of columbines in the border underscores the pathos of the text. The rhyme between the French word for columbine, “ancolie,” and “mélancholie” was frequently exploited to create an auditory association of the flower with sadness and death.58 On folio 113v, the overarching narrative and visual plan continues with L’Ospital d’amours,59 a text attributed for many years to Chartier; Du Chesne



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even included the poem in his 1617 edition of Chartier’s works. However, the acrostic A-­C-­J-­L-­E-­S deciphered in the initial letters of the first six stanzas of the poem, the same acrostic found in the final stanzas of the next item in this codex, La Cruelle femme en amours, identifies the author of the final two items of the originally conceived codex as Achilles Caulier.60 L’Ospital d’amours is the imitation poem most frequently copied with the Belle Dame and is considered an integral part of the Quarrel. Achilles introduces himself as a narrator in much the same position as the lover of the Belle Dame, but instead of ­dying of his grief, this lover w ­ ill make his way to the hospital of love for treatment. The Belle Dame lover’s fate is recast in hopeful terms: the lover achieves a l­imited success with regard to a formerly pitiless lady and is given the promise of recovery. The narrative is uncomplicated as it reworks the ele­ments of Chartier’s poem. Restless with desire, instead of sorrow, the narrator arrives at a party where he spies his lady. A ­ fter revealing his love for her, he is rebuffed and wanders off alone, overcome with heartache. He finds himself on the road named “Too Harsh Response,” which leads him through a macabre valley strewn with the corpses of famous lovers and past the fountain of Narcissus. Patience and Hope come to help him escape from this place and leave him in front of the hospital of love. Fair Welcoming is the porter, Pity the prioress, Courtesy the nurse, and Hope the physician. A ­ fter being triaged by Courtesy and put in a sumptuous bed, Hope brings him a potion of Sweet Thought. This medicine heals him enough to ask Pity permission for a kiss. On receiving the kiss, he feels better and strolls through the cemetery where he sees the tombs of loyal lovers, including Alain Chartier and the lover who died from the Belle Dame’s refusal. On the other side he sees the graves of unfaithful lovers, including that of the ­ oman in Love.” Suddenly he is beset by desire and falls one called the “Cruel W ill again. Understanding and Hope visit him in his hospital bed, and then he falls asleep. In his dream the God of Love comes to him to remind him of his teachings, which the narrator had forgotten. Love reminds him by recounting the story of the emblematic lover, not omitting any of the tribulations or tortures that must be endured before a lady fi­nally listens to her lover’s request and grants him her grace. The narrator awakens and immediately returns to his lady for another kiss, but he quickly retreats b­ ecause of the threats of Envy and Foul Mouth. He returns to the hospital of love, where he graciously thanks ­those who have helped him. The sleeping narrator is disturbed by the sound of voices and gets up to write down this dream which he plans to pre­sent to his lady.

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Figure  8.8. Achilles Caulier, L’Ospital d’Amours, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 115r. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The image detailing the story is a large miniature on. fol. 115r (Figure 8.8), several folia a­ fter the poem begins. The figures are enclosed in the elaborate ­architecture of several contiguous buildings. ­There are five moments in this composition. In the left foreground the sick lover, dressed in red, is greeted at the garden entrance by Bel Acueil (Fair Welcoming), who holds the keys to the hospital. She leads him into the hospital room, which we see through a large win­dow. The lover is laid on a green bed, where he requests a kiss. The image shows a kiss being given from his lady in a golden gown and hennin with “A’s” on it—­again to mark the identification of she who can heal the lover, la dame de Beauté, Agnès. The fourth moment shows the lover, again stricken, on a red bed. Outside the architectural frame of the hospital room, we see the red-­



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clad lover who has awakened from his dreamed encounter with the God of Love and is mounting his ­horse to go to the garden to see his beloved again, where he ­will receive the second kiss. Just as detailed in the text, rubies and grey marble form the foundation that supports the hospital; a hedge of flowers lines the foundation. In the margins we see a variety of floral ele­ments, including the ubiquitous pansies with a pansy tree, columbines, bellflowers, acanthus leaves. A swallow swoops from the upper margin; under­neath the double “A” initials tied with the black-­tasseled cord, a m ­ other quail with her chicks struts at the base of the pansy tree (­here the artist may have mistakenly inserted a fifth chick ­behind the pansy tree, one more offspring than Agnès had with Charles, or perhaps the five chicks represent the ­children of Agnès’s ­daughter Marie de France, who had five ­children with her husband Olivier de Coëtivy, or, again, the number may be due to a pleasing visual composition). On ­either side of the quail are white-­clad grotesques: the first a female figure with wings and beastly paws, the other a bagpipe-­playing male astride a Blemmya. In the right hand margin we see a magnificent grotesque created from the crowned head of a man, the wings and claws of an ea­gle, and the hindquarters of a lion forming a majestic monster who is at once the king of man, the king of birds, and the king of beasts, most certainly indicating Charles VII, who was once attended in a figurative hospital of love by the dame de Beauté. An incipit on fol. 122r (Figure 8.9) announces the resumption of the narrative of the trial of the Belle Dame saga: “Le proces et condempnacion de la belle dame sans mercy” (“The trial and conviction of the belle dame sans mercy”). Often called La Cruelle dame en amours for its conclusion that renames the Belle Dame, this trial poem is the third in the series; it succinctly summarizes the previous two trial poems and thus must have been believed essential by the complier of the Clumber Park Chartier. Since request for a retrial made by the defunct lover’s friend occurs sometime ­after the lover’s death, the poem has been located at the end of the manuscript to close the story with the accused ­woman’s sentencing and death. The only trial poem to be illustrated in any manuscript, the poem is complemented with a remarkable illumination. In a richly complex composition, the action is depicted in two moments, and the characters occupy several levels delineated by the architectural features of a courtroom: the bars, the bench, and the gallery. On the bench at the top of the stairs, members of the court of love are seated; the winged God of Love, presented as a ­woman brandishing her dart, is flanked by four ladies in fine dresses and hennins, except for the lady to her immediate right to whom she reaches out, whose head is covered

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Figure 8.9. Achilles Caulier, La Cruelle femme, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 122r. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

by a black hat, recalling that black hat worn by the extraneous fourth lady in the illumination of the Excusacion. In the foreground, to the left, the prosecutor Desire argues his case against the accused lady, exposing the fraud of her ­lawyers, Fiction and Falseness, painted as old and ugly, located across the courtroom ­behind the bar at the extreme right. The real Truth and Loyalty, dressed in red and black to mirror their imposters, are featured to the extreme left in the box b­ ehind Desire who is depicted as youthful and gracious. The Cruelle femme, in a s­ imple light blue or white dress devoid of pansies or lettering that might identify her, listens defensively with crossed arms as Desire pre­sents the case against her; in the next movement she is led away, having been sentenced to drowning in the well of tears. In the gallery ­under the win­dows male onlookers are crowded, likely the poets and courtiers participating in the Quarrel, a visual expression of the blending of the world of real­ity within that of the text. The margins are filled with flora and fauna. We see swallows, dragonflies, an owl, a quail with five chicks, a peacock, several dragons, as well as a man, burdened by a heavy sack, riding a donkey. The pansy tree decorates the lower margin, flanked by the initials “AA”



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linked with the black-­tasseled cord. Pansies and columbines, strawberries and acanthus are scattered throughout the gold border. The Belle Dame of Chartier manuscripts The Belle Dame is now dead. Most appropriately, the final item of the Clumber Park also focuses on death, the death of the king and implied lover in the manuscript. An appended quire copied sometime a­ fter the death of Charles VII in 1461 contains the Epitaphe de Charles VII which we now know to have been written by Simon Greban. The decorative pattern of this quire, including the large illumination that introduces it on fol. 132r (Figure 8.10), attempts, albeit imperfectly, to match that of the original codex, including the double “AA’s” knotted now with a silver cord in the upper margin and a single “A” between the two columns of text. Catherine Reynolds suggested in the Christies sale cata­logue description that the artist may be the master of the Apocalypse of Aymar de Poitier, who was active ca. 1480–1490 and localized to the southeast of France, perhaps the Dauphiné, although this may be an ­earlier work executed closer to court circles. The elaborate border features scenes from the text. An erased square to the left of the text, which might have identified the patron who added the final quire, has been scraped away. The emblem of Brittany, the ermine, appears on the pennants in the background of the central illumination, but this detail is absent from the side panel illustrations. The central frame shows Death striking the enthroned king surrounded by his courtiers; in the lower panel the poet dreams of “Cuer Loyal” who reports the death to the shepherds and then to an assortment of figures in the lower margin. In the top right-­side panel three ladies, two of them with black hennins, the third coiffed with what appears to be an old-­fashioned headdress known as an escafflon, attend the dead king’s tomb. A single lady with the black hennin is pictured again in a lower pane beside the tomb; the lady with the escafflon is seen praying for the dead king below. Who ­these ladies represent is difficult to tease out but they might be the queen and the queen m ­ other, along with another lady. Agnès?61 Based on this final appended quire Wijsman hypothesizes that Agnès’s cousin, Antoinette de Maignelais, may have commissioned or acquired the manuscript. Not long ­after Agnès’s death, Antoinette appears to have taken her place as Charles’s subsequent mistress, although none of her ­children w ­ ere fathered by him. Wijsman proposes that Antoinette took the book with her when,

Figure 8.10. Simon Gréban, Epitaphe de Charles VII, Beinecke MS 1216, Clumber Park Chartier, fol. 132r. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.



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no longer the favorite, she became the mistress of the Duke of Brittany in 1458 or possibly before.62 Antoinette would have commissioned the final quire a­ fter Charles’s death to commemorate this impor­tant figure in her life, Wijsman suggests. Or perhaps Antoinette originally commissioned the manuscript, and the double “A’s” indicate Agnès and Antoinette, loving cousins in the ser­vice of their beloved king, whose presence opens and closes the codex. If, indeed, the Clumber Park manuscript inscribes the memory of Agnès by painting her into the illuminations and the margins, this beautiful and power­ ful ­woman takes her place in the Querelle des femmes as a ­woman who chose her lover on her own merits and was challenged, perhaps even murdered,63 for the power and influence she wielded over the king. She was a lightning rod. Some appreciated her positive influence on the king, some detested her.64 Kathleen Wellman confirms that “Agnès and her reputation must thus be set in the context of the fifteenth-­­century “ ‘quarrel over ­women’ ” for “[a]s prominent a ­woman as Agnès could not fail to elicit criticism. Invectives against her thus belong to the lit­er­a­ture that blamed ­women for social and economic disruption and denounced them for usurping positions traditionally and appropriately occupied by men.”65 Featuring her in a book of the Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans mercy, a literary debate on m ­ atters of love, then, inserted her into that ever-­expanding quarrel on the place and the role of ­women in society. Lauding and memorializing the œuvre of Alain Chartier and the Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans mercy, the Clumber Park manuscript, as the most beautiful of Chartier manuscripts, also praises the merits of the one memorialized, the most beautiful ­woman of her time, the Dame de Beauté, the Belle Dame of France. In the literary world before the advent of the printing press, this codex, richly ornamented and outrageously expensive, was a fitting instrument to commemorate the precious quality of the works of Alain Chartier and the beauty of Agnès Sorel. The Clumber Park Chartier is, indeed, the Belle Dame of Chartier manuscripts. Notes 1. For Jean Bouchet, Chartier is “des orateurs français le chartier” (“the char­i­ot­eer of French orators”). Jean Bouchet, Le T ­ emple de bonne renommée (Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1516), fol. LXII. In the version of Les annales d’Aquitaine. Faicts et gestes en sommaire des Roys de France et d’Angleterre, Pays de Naples et de Milan (Poitiers, France: A. Mounin, 1644), Bouchet elaborates that “ledit Charretier avoit fait son quatrilogue qui est une petit œuvre digne de g­ rand recommandation. Depuis il fit un œuvre plus excellent, qui est le charroy de foy, & Esperance” (“the said Chartier had composed his quadrilogue, which is a short

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work worthy of ­great praise. Since then he has composed a still more excellent work, which is the Livre de l’espérance”) (252). Etienne Pasquier called Chartier “le ­grand orateur, le ­Sénèque des temps modernes” (“the g­ reat orator, the Seneca of modern times”). Cited in Joël Blanchard and Jean-­Claude Mühlethaler, Écriture et pouvoir à l’aube des temps modernes (Paris: Presses universitaires françaises, 2002), 36. 2. Ashby Kinch, “Chartier’s Eu­ro­pean Influence,” A Companion to Alain Chartier, ed. Daisy Delogu, Joan McRae, and Emma Cayley (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 301. 3. See especially the paintings of the pre-­Raphaelites, including: Edmund Blair Leighton’s Alain Chartier (1903), depicting Marguerite of Scotland’s fabled kiss of Chartier; Arthur Hugh’s La Belle Dame sans merci (1863); John William Water­house’s La Belle dame sans Merci (1893); Frank Dicksee’s La Belle Dame sans Merci (1902); and Frank Cadogan Cowper’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1926). 4. See especially Armelle Dubois-­Nayt, Nicole Dufournaud, and Anne Paupert, Revisiter la Querelle des femmes Discours sur l’égalité/inégalité des femmes et des hommes, de 1400 à 1600 (Saint-­Etienne, France: Université de Saint-­Etienne, 2013). 5. For the scant details of Alain’s life, see Laidlaw’s introduction to Alain Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974) and Cornelius J. H. Walravens, Alain Chartier: études biographiques, suivies de pièces justificatives, d’une description des éditions et d’une édition des ouvrages inédits (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-­Didier, 1971). 6. Now Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BNF) Latin 5746, fol. 1, an image of which can be seen on the inside cover of Pierre Champion’s Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1923), 1: plate 1. 7. Champion, Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, 1:6. 8. Laidlaw’s introduction to Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, 43. 9. Camille Serchuck, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” A Companion to Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430), ed. Daisy Delogu, Joan McRae, and Emma Cayley (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 72. 10. Serchuk states that “all the evidence suggests that ­these volumes ­were read, rather than displayed or simply shelved. Images may have added value, but they also made the challenging texts more accessible and easier to understand.” Serchuk, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” 94–95. 11. Re­spect for Alain as author is shown through the illustrations. Serchuk concludes: “In t­ hese images, artists sought to express through visual means the distinct character and reputation of Chartier’s voice.” Serchuk, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” 118. 12. BNF français 20026 (Pj) and BNF français 2230 (Pf). For descriptions, see Laidlaw’s introduction to his edition of Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, 108–112. 13. Identified by his motto on fol. 1r, “Au besoing. Maulevrier.” Section romane, notice “SANKT-­PETERBURG, National Library of Rus­sia, fr. f° line XIV. 0007,” in the database Jonas-­IRHT/CNRS (http:​/­jonas​.­irht​.­cnrs​.­f r​/­manuscrit​/­56294). For a complete description, see Olivier Delsaux, “Découverte d’un témoin inédit d’une ballade de François Villon (Testament, vv. 1422–1456). Le manuscrit Saint-­Pétersbourg, Bibliothèque nationale de Russie, fr. f° v. XIV. 7,” Le moyen français 73 (2013): 3–24. This manuscript may have



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l­ ater belonged to Louis Malet de Graville, his motto appearing on fol. 2r, “Pour mons(eigneur) de Marcousys.” See also Laidlaw’s introduction to Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, 130–131. 14. BNF Rothschild 440. See Laidlaw’s introduction to Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, 114. 15. Bodleian Library ms. Clark 34, Oxford. See Serchuk, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” 78, and Laidlaw’s introduction to Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, 95–96. 16. British Library Royal ms. 15 E VI, London. 17. On the échevinage’s library, see Claudia Rabel, “Artiste et clientèle à la fin du Moyen Age: les manuscrits profanes du Maître de l’échevinage de Rouen,” Revue de l’Art 84 (1989): 48–60. 18. This can be viewed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University’s digitized collection, https:​/­brbl​-­dl​.­library​.­yale​.­edu​/­vufind​/­Record​/­4517730. 19. Discussion and description of the illuminations in the Chartier manuscripts can be found in Serchuk, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” 72–118; for the Pa­ri­sian manuscripts, see also Patricia Gathercole, “Illuminations on the Manuscripts of Alain Chartier,” Studi Francesi 20 (1976): 504–510. 20. A new edition and En­glish translation of the Belle Dame ou mercy has recently appeared: Joan Grenier-­Winther, ed., La Belle Dame qui eust mercy et Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame, MHRS Critical Texts 60 (Cambridge, UK: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018). See also Joan McRae’s edition, Alain Chartier: The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy (New York: Routledge, 2004). 21. Illuminated Manuscripts from the Collection of Maurice Burrus (London: Christies, May 25, 2016), 26–31. 22. See also the Diesbach manuscript, recently rediscovered in the local library of ­Fribourg, L1200. See Joan McRae, “A Community of Readers: The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy,” in A Companion to Alain Chartier, ed. Daisy Delogu, Joan McRae, and Emma Cayley (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 200–222. 23. Among the chroniclers who documented reactions to her, Olivier de La Marche declared that she was one of the most beautiful w ­ omen he had ever seen; Jean Le Clerc claimed that among beautiful w ­ omen, she was the youn­gest and most beautiful; Thomas Basin referred to her as “Beautiful Agnès.” Cited in Kathleen Wellman, Queen and Mistresses of Re­nais­sance France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 38. 24. Wellman, Queen and Mistresses of Re­nais­sance France, 37–38. 25. See Illuminated Manuscripts from the Collection of Maurice Burrus, 36–43, for a description and pictures of Anthony of Burgundy’s Hours; and James H. Marrow, ed., The Hours of Simon de Varie (Malibu, CA: Getty Museum Monographs, 1994), 13, for Simon de Varie’s Book of Hours. 26. Mirella Levi-­d ’Ancona, The Garden of the Re­nais­sance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting (Florence, Italy: Leo Olschki, 1977), 289–290. 27. Hano Wijsman, “Le Recueil Chartier d’Antoinette de Maignelais, maîtresse du roi Charles VII,” https://­libraria​.­hypotheses​.­org​/­345, and Hano Wijsman, “Poésie, politique

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et emblématique dans un manuscrit enluminé. Le recueil Chartier d’Antoinette de Maignelais, maîtresse de Charles VI,” in Florence Bouchet, Sébastien Cazalas, and Philippe Maupeu, ed., Le pouvoir des lettres sous le règne de Charles VII (1422–1461) (Paris: Champion, 2020), 89–108. Wijsman pre­sents a rich description of the manuscript and an intriguing investigation. 28. This would not be the only Chartier manuscript created as memorial; two of the manuscripts of the Livre des quatre dames are even more obviously designed to memorialize: BNF Arsenal, ms 2940 with its frontispiece featuring a black, knotted draping frame, and its nearly identical copy at the British Library, Add. 21247, prob­ably made for Anne of Laval, with the addition of a white insignia that reads “au pouvre prisonnier” (“to the poor prisoner”), who has not yet been identified. See Serchuck, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” 101–102, especially n. 50. 29. Paul Durrieu describes his investigation of the manuscript and the identifying coat arms, “Les filles d’Agnès Sorel,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres 66, no. 3 (1922): 163. 30. Details of Marie’s tutelage and marriage are found in Pierre Champion, Agnès Sorel. La Dame de Beauté (Paris: Champion, 1931), 75–78. 31. The Dunois master may also have been the artist who painted some miniatures for Prégent de Coëtivy, identified in a Guiron le Courtois manuscript and some cut from Lancelot manuscript. See Catherine Reynolds, “The Workshop of the Duke of Bedford: Definitions and Identities,” in Godfried Croenen and Peter Ainsworth, ed., Patrons, Authors and Workshops: Books and Book Production in Paris around 1400 (Louvain, Belgium: Peeters, 2006), 442. 32. Philippe Charlier, “Qui a tué la Dame de Beauté? Étude scientifique des restes d’Agnès Sorel (1422–1450),” Histoire des sciences médicales 40, no. 3 (2006): 255–263. 33. Wellman, Queen and Mistresses, 39, 49. 34. We also see this same bank of red angels in the Hours of Simon de Varie, ed. Marrow, plate 31, 179, b­ ehind the Virgin in the coronation of the Virgin and surrounding God in ­David in Penitence, plate 32, 180. Both of ­these are attributed to the chief associate of the Bedford master, the Dunois master. For the Virgo Lactans of the Melun diptych see figure 9.1. 35. Sylvia Lefèvre proposes a date of 1425 in her article “ ‘Le cachet de la poste faisant foi.’ La Belle dame sans mercy et sa datation au miroir des lettres de réception et de leur lecture,” Romania 131 (2013): 83–99. 36. Arthur Piaget, “La belle dame sans mercy et ses imitations,” Romania 30 (1901): 22–48, 317–351; Romania 31 (1902): 315–349; Romania 33 (1904): 179–208; Romania 34 (1905): 375–428, 559–597. 37. Laidlaw, in his division of manuscripts, includes manuscripts that contain one or more Quarrel poems in the group “Q.” See Laidlaw’s introduction to Chartier, The Poetical works of Alain Chartier, 44. 38. For a discussion of the manuscripts, see Alain Chartier: The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, ed. and trans. Joan McRae; see also Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 39. The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, 150–151, line 120. All references to this text cite the verse numbers of the original and pages of McRae’s translation.



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40. Laidlaw’s edition of Chartier uses the variant “france” for the more standard form of “franche,” highlighting the symbolic role that the Belle Dame might be playing in Chartier’s eyes. “Je suis france et france veuil estre,” Chartier, The Poetical Works, 341, line 286. The Clumber Park manuscript, however, follows the more traditional spelling. 41. Champion offers pos­si­ble identities for t­ hese three ladies: Jeanne Louvet (Madame de Bothéon), Marie Louvet (Madame de Vaubonnais, wife of Jean of Dunois, Charles of Orleans’s half-­brother), and Catherine de l’Isle-­bouchard, the wife of Pierre de Giac, all ladies-­in-­waiting of Queen Marie of Anjou. Champion, Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, 1: 71. 42. A fourth poem, the Erreurs du jugement de la Belle dame sans mercy, is included in four l­ ater manuscripts. See Chartier, The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, 295–364. 43. See Adrian Armstrong, The Virtuoso Circle: Competition, Collaboration, and Complexity in Late Medieval French Poetry (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2012), especially chapter 1. 44. Cf. Piaget, “La belle dame sans mercy et ses imitations,” Romania 30, 22–48. 45. Only two other manuscripts of La Belle Dame sans mercy are illustrated: The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (hereafter KBR) ms. 71 E 49, has a miniature of a c­ ouple playing chess (which can be seen on the cover of Cayley, Debate and Dialogue), an activity not mentioned in the text itself, and Arnhem Openbare Bibliotheek, ms. 79, which includes a crude drawing of a ­couple standing side by side to depict the debating lover and lady. 46. The artist, thought to be the Dunois master as mentioned above, worked closely with the Bedford master, perhaps serving as his assistant and even taking over the workshop when the Bedford master s­ topped his activity. The Dunois master is also credited with painting another Chartier manuscript: BNF Rothschild 2796. See Serchuk, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” 9, and François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 (Paris: BNF/Flammarion, 1993), 36–37. 47. The Bedford master was originally a foliate border specialist and a painter of books of hunting. The accuracy of his rendering of vegetation, animals, birds, and landscape ele­ ments shows unmistakable distinction between dif­fer­ent species. This attention to detail has clearly been a­ dopted by the border paint­e r(s) of the Clumber Park Chartier. See Eberhard König, The Bedford Hours: The Making of a Medieval Masterpiece, trans. Christiane Roth and Christopher de Hamel (London: The British Library, 2007), 39. 48. Emma Cayley pointed out the altered sex of the God of Love in an unpublished paper, “The French and Latin Works of Alain Chartier: The Popu­lar Voice of Authority,” delivered by at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, 2016. 49. It is not clear ­whether this poem was originally penned before or ­after Chartier’s. A truncated version of it appears in Westminster Abbey Library ms. 21, a manuscript which appears to predate Chartier and contains several works of Christine de Pizan. The poem’s popularity in the fifteenth c­ entury is certainly dependent on its expansion and inclusion as a quarrel poem. It is extant in eigh­teen manuscripts. 50. The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, line 376, 480. 51. See especially plates 19–68, in the Hours of Simon de Varie, ed. Marrow, 166–217. 52. The Debat des deux fortunés en amours is illustrated in one other manuscript, BNF français 2262; the illustration of the Complainte is unique to the Clumber Park.

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53. Line 16, 158. Citations from Laidlaw’s edition of Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, are of line and page number. 54. Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, line 19, 158. 55. Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, lines 1245–1246, 195. 56. Alain is shown dressed in black, color appropriate for a cleric, but also a color of mourning. See the frontispiece, fol. 1, as well as in the Excusacion miniature cited above, in the Complainte, and in the Debat des deux fortunés en amours. 57. The Complainte accompanies the Belle Dame sans mercy in twenty-­eight of thirty-­ seven manuscripts in which it is extant. See Hult and McRae, Le Cycle de la Belle Dame sans mercy, 1, n. 1. 58. See Avril’s n. 6  in “Simon de Varie, Patron of the Hours,” 132–133 and Levi-­ d’Ancona, The Garden of the Re­nais­sance, 105–108. 59. Recent editions and translations can be found in En­glish in McRae’s edition and translation of Chartier, Alain Chartier, and, in French, in Hult and McRae, Le Cycle de la Belle dame sans mercy. 60. The third work that we know to have been written by Achilles Caulier appears in the Hours of Simon de Varie, “Lay a l’onneur de la Vierge Marie,” text illustrated with the patron kneeling in front of the Virgin and child on fol. 1r, The Hague KBR ms. 74 G 37 (plate 62, 211, in The Hours of Simon de Varie, ed. Marrow). Only three other copies of the poem are extant, in BNF français 190, fols. 144r–146r; BNF Arsenal, ms 3521, fols. 259–261 (also a Quarrel manuscript); and Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Codex Gall 38, fols. 172–176. A still missing fourth copy was described in the Didot sale cata­logue of 1881, item 7, 41–43: see The Hours Simon de Varie, ed. Marrow, 233, for its identification. 61. As the late Kay Sutton at Christies whimsically suggested to me in our series of conversations about this manuscript. My gratitude to her and to her colleague Catherine Reynolds for sharing their expertise. 62. See Guitton, “Fastes et malheurs du métier de favorite: Antoinette de Maignelais, de la cour de France à la cour de Bretagne (1450–1470),” in Juliette Dor, Marie-­Élisabeth Henneau, and Alain Marchandisse, ed., Maîtresses et favorites, dans les coulisses du pouvoir du Moyen Age à l’Epoque modern (Saint-­Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-­Étienne, 2019), 155. 63. See Tracy Adams’s chapter in this volume. 64. Wellman, Queen and Mistresses, gives a concise summary of the controversies and differing opinions surrounding Agnès and references to the chroniclers’ remarks; Champion gives a more exhaustive account in La Dame de Beauté. 65. Wellman, Queen and Mistresses, 45.

c ha p te r ni ne

Agnès Sorel, Celebrity, and Late Medieval French Visual Culture Tracy Adams

On or around February 11, 1450, Agnès Sorel received a dose of mercury, a common cure for worms.1 For reasons unknown, however, the dose that she was given exceeded the normal amount by a ­factor of ten thousand to one hundred thousand—­the difference between the amount that could fit on the head of a pin and what could fit in a tablespoon—­and she died in agony shortly ­after ingesting it.2 ­Because Agnès was the beloved mistress of King Charles VII, news of her passing traveled, and, although the cause of death was not known at the time, the sudden onset and brutality of the precipitating illness caused many to speculate that she had been poisoned. Examining the death itself leads to an impasse. The care with which medicines w ­ ere handled seems to exclude an accident, but we ­will likely never ­really know what happened. If the details of Agnès’s death remain mysterious, what happened afterward, however, is clear. Cut down in the prime of life, her glorious beauty still intact, Agnès became the ideal of the royal mistress, achieving a celebrity that endures to this very day, as evidenced by her presence on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and in fandoms, novels, and documentaries. This essay begins with a brief overview of Agnès’s ­career. Nothing in descriptions of her activities by contemporaries foreshadowed her posthumous celebrity. True, her f­ amily asserted control of her reputation a­ fter her death, to salutary effect, as I discuss in the second part of the essay. But to fully account for the ­later fame of the ­woman known during her own time as the Dame de 189

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Beauté, I turn in the third part of the essay to her association with the lactating Virgin in Jean Fouquet’s Melun diptych. Does the Melun Virgin r­ eally bear Agnès’s features? The assumption enjoys a general although not unan­i­mous consensus. I review the arguments to show that the evidence for the identification is very strong. Most impor­tant in the context of this volume, I suggest that such an image could only have been produced during the fifteenth ­century and that it represents the convergence of several dif­fer­ent fifteenth-­century forms that work together to create a lasting positive persona for a ­woman who occupied a morally dubious position. To conclude, I trace the effects of this iconic image on the f­ uture of the French royal mistress. The image of Agnès resurged in sixteenth-­century court society, and, ­whether or not Fouquet gave his Virgin her features, the characteristically fifteenth-­century Melun Virgin was central to the construction of the tradition of the French royal mistress, representing a persona for Agnès that served as the ideal of the French royal mistress throughout the following centuries. Who Was Agnés Sorel? In April 1444, King Charles VII, along with Queen Marie of Anjou, the queen’s b­ rother, Duke René of Anjou, and René’s duchess Isabelle, joined some of the ­great lords of the kingdom and En­glish diplomats in Montils-­lès-­Tours to negotiate, sign, and celebrate a twenty-­year truce with the En­glish.3 Although Agnès Sorel receives no mention in any source related to the events, she must have been pre­sent, accompanying ­either Isabelle or Queen Marie of Anjou. We do not know which: Agnès began her ­career in Isabelle’s ­house­hold, moving into the ser­vice of the queen in 1444, but the precise date of her transfer is not known.4 Nor is it known ­whether Agnès met the king for the first time at the festivities in Montils-­les-­Tours or knew him already from the Angevin court in Saumur where he had spent time the previous year.5 We cannot even date the beginning of their affair. All we can say is that it must have begun before the crowds at Montils-­lès-­Tours dispersed in June, b­ ecause the king set out on July 10 to assist René of Anjou in laying siege to Metz, and, before the end of the year, he had already gifted Agnès with the Château de Beauté.6 The profundity of the king’s attachment is suggested by further gifts: in 1446, he bestowed on her the châtellenie de la Roquecezière in Rouergue; in 1447, he awarded her a pension of three thousand livres; in 1449, Issoudun and Vernon-­sur-­Seine.7 Agnès’s magnificent lifestyle was noted and disapproved by con­temporary chroni-



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clers. Georges Chastellain reported that the queen daily endured the presence of her husband’s ribaude, his strumpet, to avoid discord and safeguard her own estate (presumably ­because the king let no attack on his mistress go unavenged).8 Jacques Du Clercq remarked that Agnès’s estate was greater than that of the saintly queen.9 It was not only the luxury in which she lived that made her such a controversial figure, however. Agnès began her ascent at a time of renewed court intrigue and betrayal a­ fter a period of respite, and, in addition to providing emotional comfort to the king, she was believed to exert po­liti­cal influence over him. The king, against the wishes of the ­great lords of the kingdom, began in the early 1440s to create for himself a circle of favorite advisers, mignons, or men of minor nobility, too young to have been directly implicated in the conflicts related to the Praguerie of 1440, an uprising in which his own son, the dauphin Louis, had been involved.10 Signs of tension ­were reported by the Milanese ambassador in a letter of May 26, 1445, describing the “­great jealousies and burning disputes” agitating the kingdom.11 That same summer, the king’s favorite Pierre de Brézé raised the alarm that a coup against the king to be led by the king’s brothers-­in-­law René and Charles of Anjou was being plotted.12 The sudden death of the dauphine, Marguerite of Scotland, in August distracted the royal f­ amily momentarily, but shortly afterward the king dismissed some “grans seigneurs” from the court, ordering them to stay away ­until he called them back.13 Along the way ­there ­were suspicions that the dauphin was preparing to lead a new coup against the king. Starting in September 1446, the king ordered the depositions of men accused of conspiring with the dauphin; they appear to have been frightened and returned to the king.14 But by January 1447, the dauphin had fled to the Dauphiné, never to return to the royal court during his ­father’s lifetime. As for Agnès’s role in ­these imbroglios, memoirist Olivier de La Marche seemed to make her responsible for the rise of at least some of the mignons, remarking that she “brought before the king young men-­at-­arms and excellent companions, by whom the king has since been well served.”15 Agnès’s influence over the king was perceived in other ways as well. In a deposition of 1446, a courtier suggests that Brézé was “destroying every­thing with the help of Agnès, through whom he held the king in subjection.”16 She is also mentioned in documents that came to light in October 1447 detailing a particularly elaborate scheme of espionage apparently instigated by Brézé to increase the bad blood between the king and the dauphin as well to ensure Brézé’s own dominance at court. The documents

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suggest that Brézé occupied a position of influence with the king partly “through the help of Agnès.”17 Her tenure halted abruptly with her death in 1450. In late 1449 or early 1450, while Charles VII was reconquering Normandy from the En­glish, Agnès made the 350-­kilometer trip from Loches in the Loire Valley to the abbey at Jumièges in Normandy, heavi­ly pregnant, to warn the king of a plot to betray him and deliver him to his old enemies the En­glish, as chronicler Jean Chartier reported. The king reacted with laughter.18 Shortly a­ fter her arrival, she fell ill and died in atrocious pain on February 11, 1450.19 The cause of death was rumored to be poison and the perpetrator the dauphin, although the charge was never proven. ­Today, as I have noted, we know that she was poisoned, although the identity of the perpetrator remains a mystery. The Creation of a Legend A number of mistresses of power­ful men who lived within a c­ entury of Agnès ­ ere also murdered. Alison Du May, mistress of Charles Duke of Lorraine, was w assassinated by a mob in Nancy shortly a­ fter the duke’s death; lover of crown prince Peter of Portugal, Inês de Castro, was beheaded in front of her own ­children at the order of the king; Agnes Bernauer, mistress and then wife of Albrecht, heir of Duke Ernst of Würtemberg, was ordered to be drowned by her father-­in-­law. Although the violent deaths of beautiful ­women tend to arouse morbid fascination, the afterlives of ­these victims have not been as glamorous as Agnès’s. The fate of Agnès’s first cousin Antoinette de Maignelais, who was reputed to have been as beautiful as Agnès herself and who may have become Charles VII’s mistress a­ fter Agnès’s death, also offers a useful comparison.20 Chroniclers describe Antoinette as just one among many of the king’s flings. Chastellain and Du Clercq, whose comments about Agnès I noted above, assess Antoinette even more harshly than they do her cousin. Chastellain writes that Charles VII, primed by Agnès, persisted in sexual transgression a­ fter her death, first with Antoinette, the “demoiselle de Villequier.” He then acquired a third mistress called “Madame la Régente,” followed by a ­daughter of a pastry chef known as “Madame des Chaperons.”21 Jacques Du Clercq’s depiction of Antoinette is more detailed and significantly more insulting than Chastellain’s, characterizing her not only as Charles VII’s mistress but as his procurer for the, by



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then, sexually insatiable king.22 To this very day, Antoinette’s reputation remains negative, with the exception of a c­ ouple of recent revisionist studies.23 What then accounts for Agnès’s long-­lasting posthumous celebrity? I have noted that the key is the Melun diptych, but, before turning to that image, the efforts of her friends and f­amily to cultivate a positive persona for Agnès require consideration. ­These begin shortly ­after her death, and, in the long run, they overshadowed the negative impressions passed down in some chronicles. As Helen Swift suggests in this volume, the recent field of “persona studies,” which are sometimes used to study celebrity, offers a useful approach for analyzing the constitution of a public persona and for detailing “the way in which the individual is interpreting their production of their transforming public image.”24 Agnès, of course, was not in a position to control her own image ­after her death, but her friends and f­ amily took up the job on her behalf, assuring her what scholars have referred to as “posthumous” celebrity.25 The king himself contributed to his mistress’s celebrity, having magnificent tombs erected in her memory in Loches and Jumièges. Although the tomb in Jumièges no longer exists, damaged by Huguenots and destroyed during the Revolution, the Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-­Pierre de Jumièges, written by monk Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) explains that this tomb bore the same epitaphs as the tomb in Loches, one epitaph lauding her dove-­like quality and charity ­toward the Church and the poor, the other praising her administration of La Roquecezière, Vernon, and Issoudun, and describing her as “gentle in her words, soothing quarrels and scandals.”26 No other royal mistress, except perhaps Inês de Castro, whose corpse Peter of Portugal had exhumed and crowned queen when he ascended the throne in 1355, has ever been interred in such a lavish tomb. Along with the king, Agnès’s ­family crafted a positive persona for the beau­ oman. Agnès bore Charles VII three d ­ aughters who lived to adulttiful young w hood, two of whom married into families who justified her position and tended her reputation. The king and Agnès’s youn­gest d ­ aughter, Jeanne, was married to Antoine, son of Jean de Bueil, Charles VII’s admiral of France, author of the Jouvencel, a roman-­à-­clef about the wars of Charles VII’s reign composed in the first years of the 1460s.27 Agnès is immortalized in the work as a “very beautiful young lady” who urges the king to take up arms in an episode where a group of young w ­ omen accompany the queen to post-­d inner entertainment in the king’s chambers. The king replies that all has already been won by the eponymous Jouvencel. Still, the young w ­ oman persists, insisting that “­great kings are

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involved in g­ reat affairs.”28 This image of Agnès urging the king to take arms was passed down, as we ­will see, forming the basis of the narrative of the young ­woman as savior of France, along with Joan of Arc. Agnès’s ­family further s­ haped her memory by associating her with Bathsheba to suggest that Charles VII had pursued her with an ardor that she ultimately could not resist. Agnès’s eldest ­daughter, Marie, was married to ­Olivier de Coëtivy, ­brother to Prégent, admiral of France prior to Jean de Bueil; ­Marie’s d ­ aughter Marguerite, owned a Book of Hours with an illumination of Bathsheba ogled by David. Bathsheba stands at the win­dow of a structure that recalls the Sainte Chapelle, her eyes cast modestly downward.29 Another bas-­ de-­page David repents, gazing up at Bathsheba. James Kren has associated this Bathsheba with Agnès, hypothesizing that, in the eyes of Marguerite, the depiction “honoured the controversial Agnès’s position as object of royal desire.”30 Antoinette de Maignelais seems also to been active in promoting Agnès’s posthumous reputation along the same lines. As Joan McRae suggests in this volume, concurring with Hanno Wijsman, Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier, may very well have been commissioned by or belonged to Antoinette.31 But McRae makes a further intriguing argument: that the manuscript may have been conceived of and illustrated in remembrance of Agnès. Corroborating evidence for McRae’s argument can be found in the form of some decorations in the Chateau de La Guerche, which the king awarded to Antoinette’s husband, royal favorite André Villequier. The walls of the Chateau de La Guerche w ­ ere once decorated with frescoes depicting Agnès. Th ­ ese frescoes, although no longer extant, are detailed in a 1778 article on Agnès’s portrayal in histories of Charles VII, which was published in the periodical Bibliothéque universelle des romans.32 According to the article, the images traced the events of Agnès’s life, illustrating a beautiful person, “rather tall, perfectly ­shaped, her hair blond, her features regular, and her expression . . . ​sweet and spiritual,” in the midst of “dif­ fer­ent ornaments and allegorical figures related to the dif­fer­ent situations of her life.”33 One illustration, picking up on the Bathsheba motif, depicted Agnès trying to dodge the attentions of the king, discouraging his advances, and initially refusing royal gifts.34 But eventually she surrendered, continues the article, ­because every­thing conspired to push her into the arms of Charles VII. Who can refuse a king? Moreover, this king required Agnès’s gentle guidance to learn first the lessons of love and then valor. Further supporting McRae’s argument, which draws attention to the letter “A’s” proliferating throughout the Clumber Park Chartier manuscript, the pe-



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riodical’s editor, Antoine-­René de Voyer, Marquis de Paulmy and d’Argenson, who bought the Chateau de la Guerche in 1735, remarks that its walls w ­ ere also decorated with the letter “A.” The Marquis incorrectly asserts that the chateau was built by Agnès, but notes that “one sees everywhere her letter,” and, in what is surely a reference to the frescoes, that “her portrait is repeated many times.”35 A manuscript and a chateau both adorned with images of Agnès and the letter “A”: the Dame de Beauté’s reputation seems to have been carefully tended by her extended ­family. In addition to Agnès’s ­family, Guillaume de Gouffier, another favorite of the king and special protector of Agnès, appears to have played a gatekeeping role. Gouffier must have passed the story of Agnès on to his own son, Artus de Boisy, preceptor and then ­g rand maître d’hôtel of François I (r. 1515–1547). The wife of Artus collated an ­album of sketches of François I’s living courtiers, including along with them a sketch of Agnès, dead at that point for sixty-­five years, which appears to be based on a “cartoon,” that is, a preparatory sketch for a painting, in this case, presumably the sketch that Fouquet would have prepared before beginning the Melun Virgin. As we ­will see, François I’s ­mother Louise of Savoy then commissioned her own ­album based on Madame de Boisy’s, retaining the sketch of Agnès and thereby bringing this royal mistress and her legend into the royal court. Still one more sign of ­family curation is the story of Agnès transmitted by Bernard de Girard, Seigneur du Haillan, named historiographer of the king ­under Charles IX (r. 1560–1574).36 The first time that Haillan treats Agnes, in De l’estat et succez des affaires de France of 1572, he has nothing positive to say about her, depicting her as distracting the king from his duties. But then something changed Haillan’s mind. For in the Histoire générale des roys de France, first published in 1576, Haillan supplements his ­earlier narrative to give Agnès a positive role, repeating and embellishing the legend of the young ­woman’s arousing the king’s sense of valor that we first saw being promoted by Agnès’s ­family, giving us a scene that ­will remain central to her legend. Agnès informed the king that when she had been a girl, an astrologer had told her that she would be loved by one of the most courageous and valorous kings in Christendom, but she now thought he could not have meant Charles VII, who was letting the En­ glish remain in France. Humiliated, the king began to cry but then went out and chased the En­glish from France.37 What had happened to change the story as Haillan initially recounted it? René de Villequier, son of Antoinette’ son, ­Artus de Villequier, and therefore Antoinette’s grand­son, had been the force

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b­ ehind Haillan’s appointment to the job of official historiographer of the king. Haillan himself affirms this in a pamphlet for Charles IX detailing his plans for a new history of France.38 One might reasonably guess that René passed along the positive legend of his ancestor to Haillan a­ fter seeing her disparaged. Agnès, then, emerges from the pages of con­temporary chronicles as a beautiful young w ­ oman who, involved in an illicit relationship with the king, accumulated g­ reat wealth and a lifestyle to which she was not entitled and mortified the queen along the way.39 But her ­family managed to pass down to posterity a far dif­fer­ent story, one that casts Agnès as an innocent young ­woman specially favored by the king, who loves him in return and inspires him to glory. However, that narrative was bolstered by the most enduring and influential image of Agnès—if it is indeed an image of Agnès—­that of the two-­panel donor painting known t­ oday as the Melun diptych, masterpiece of Jean Fouquet. Without this image, Agnès undoubtedly would have been recognized as a significant female figure. But her association with the Melun diptych made her a celebrity, still recognized t­ oday on all variety of social media platforms. The Melun Diptych: A Uniquely Fifteenth-­Century Image Commissioned in about 145240 by Etienne Chevalier, one of the three executors of Agnès’s ­will, and donated by him to the Collegiate Church of Notre Dame of Melun, the Melun diptych is generally agreed to show the influence of Van Eyck but also the Italian Re­nais­sance masters whose work Fouquet studied firsthand.41 It therefore manifests both the style that incited Huizinga to signal the end of an era and a style that he describes as a completely dif­fer­ent, one heralding the Re­nais­sance. I w ­ ill return to the significance of this hybridity of style. The two thirty-­six by thirty-­two inch oak panels depict, on the left, Chevalier flanked by his patron saint, Étienne or Stephen, and, on the right, the Virgin with child perched on a throne surrounded and possibly carried by small seraphim and cherubim.42 Dif­fer­ent from other examples of the lactating Virgin, however, this portrait exudes a more erotic than maternal feeling. Although the Virgin’s lowered eyes temper the impression of sexuality, the startlingly pearly complexion and breast are the foci of attention (Figure 9.1). Are the Virgin’s features r­ eally modeled on Agnès’s? The first written identification of the Virgin with the king’s mistress appears in the entry for March 10, 1608, in the diary of Jean Héroard, tutor of the dauphin who became Louis XIII. Héroard



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Figure  9.1. Jean Fouquet, Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim, Antwerpen, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, inv. no. 132. Reprinted with the permission of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.

states that he and the dauphin had gone to marvel at “the painting of the beautiful Agnès and that of Étienne Chevalier. . . .”43 It has been argued that the identification of the Virgin with Agnès cannot be au­then­tic ­because it is attested in writing only 150 years a­ fter the diptych was painted. But this is hardly proof against the identification. If Fouquet did indeed reference Agnès’s features, it would likely have been only friends of Chevalier, the

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king, and the king’s deceased mistress who ­were even aware of the resemblance. Why would ordinary parishioners of the Collegiate Church of Notre-­Dame in Melun where the painting hung ­until around 1775 have known of it, or, had they been aware of it, why would they necessarily have written about it? Moreover, as we have seen, Agnès was represented in two glorious marble sculptures in Jumièges and Loches, and, except for accounts, no extant written source mentions ­these e­ arlier than the late sixteenth c­ entury. And even ­a fter 1608 the identification is made in written documents only twice more before the nineteenth c­ entury: in a long description of the diptych in the church in Melun by Denis Godefroy of 166044 and in a note dated 1775 on the back of the painting itself.45 As for positive evidence, moving backward from the 1608 identification, art historians point to the sixteenth-­century sketches that I mention above, which seem to be copies made from an original preliminary cartoon that Fouquet would have drawn to prepare for painting the Virgin (Figure 9.2).46 ­Under infrared light the Melun diptych itself reveals that Fouquet made use of such cartoons in this painting.47 As for the facial features depicted in the copies, they seem quite clearly to reference the same model referenced by the Virgin’s features (Figure  9.3). Fifteenth-­century portraits repeat certain salient features to indicate identity rather than create the sort of realistic likenesses that we associate with portraiture; keeping this in mind, we see that the images of the Virgin and the w ­ oman depicted in the Uffizi sketch share a rounded forehead, delicately pointed nose, tapered chin, bow-­shaped lips, and thin eyebrows, as François Avril observes.48 If we imagine the eyes closed and the spare lines of the sketch filled in with color and shadow, the face becomes that of the Melun Virgin. As further evidence of the identification, Stephan Kemperdick cites the Virgin’s glamorous appearance, which is “completely unpre­ce­dented in repre­ sen­ta­tions of the Madonna,” even among Fouquet’s other Madonnas. Other Virgins, he writes, “have fashionably high foreheads and white skin, but the forehead of the ­woman in the diptych is blatantly shaved, and the black fillet ­under the crown further emphasizes the stylish, erotic aspect of her appearance. Such ribbons, placed beneath a headdress, ­were part of the adornment of noble ­women and are frequently seen in repre­sen­ta­tions of noble ladies . . . ​but never of the Virgin Mary.”49 Citing Claude Schaefer, Kemperdick also notes the similarities between the Melun Virgin and the verbal imagery that the epi-

Figure  9.2. Jean Fouquet, Agnès Sorel, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Gabinetto ­Disegni et Stampe, inv. no. 3925. Reprinted with the permission of the Uffizi Gallery.

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Figure  9.3. Jean Fouquet, Madonna Surrounded by ­Seraphim and Cherubim, Antwerpen, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, inv. no.  132. Reprinted with the permission of the Royal ­Museum of Fine Arts.

taphs on Agnès’s tombs evoke: whiteness of skin, dovelike qualities, duchess-­ like aspect, and ascent into heaven.50 It has also occasionally been argued that no court painter would have dared give the Virgin the features of the king’s mistress. But this is quite simply not true. Italian paint­ers applied the features of their courtesan models to depictions of sacred and profane w ­ omen,51 and connoisseur of art and con­temporary of Caravaggio Giulio Mancini wrote that Caravaggio’s Virgin in “Death of the Virgin” was reputed to have been modelled a­ fter a prostitute.52 Peter Lely’s 1664 Virgin and child modelled on Charles II’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, and her son with the king, Lord Fitzroy, offers a particularly audacious example of such an identification. It is true that Protestant observers of Restoration E ­ ngland would have experienced such a pairing very differently from Catholics in late medieval France. “Witty playfulness is very much a feature of Lely’s female portraits in which sitters are figured as saints, and mistresses as Madonna, in a manner that, especially in this last case—­the Countess of Castlemaine with Lord Fitzroy—­disrupts the association between



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the timeless symbol and the sitter,” writes Peter Sharpe.53 But Agnès as Madonna also emerges from a distinct set of traditions that would have ­shaped reception of the image in such a way as to make to make it acceptable. To begin, the genre of painting in which the Virgin appears offered a unique opportunity to iconize Agnès as a gentle mediator figure. The devotional portrait diptych with the donor depicted in prayer on one panel, the Virgin and baby Jesus on the other, is itself a product of the fifteenth ­century. Popu­lar from roughly 1430–1540 in the Burgundian Netherlands, the genre includes some early examples in France, but almost none in Germany, Italy, Spain, or eastern Eu­rope.54 In his private devotion, Chevalier likely would have approached the Melun Virgin in the same way that the devout approached any icon, as an incarnation of an archetype that mediated their relationship with the divine. He would have been aided in his prayer by the familiar lovely features of his friend, but t­ hese would not have been the target of his communication. In addition to this framework of devotion before images, some other aspects of fifteenth-­century visual culture, and especially religious drama, offer a broad context for imagining how the superimposition of Agnès’s features on the Virgin would have been received by contemporaries. For Johan Huizinga, the Melun diptych is an example of “the continual reduction of the infinite to the finite” that he ascribed to late medieval culture in general, which reveals a “blasphemous frankness with re­spect to the sacred.”55 But he incorrectly assumes that fifteenth-­ century observers, like their modern counter­parts, always read repre­sen­ta­tions of f­ aces whose features they recognized as straightforward portraits of the individuals in question. From this perspective, the diptych’s “realism,” that is, the relatively lifelike appearance of the Virgin, would have inspired the observer to experience her personally and directly. If the viewers saw Agnès when they regarded the Virgin, so the argument goes, they would have related to her, not the Virgin, and committed blasphemy. However, scholarship on visual culture of the period casts doubt on such apparently commonsense assumptions about viewers’ relationships with images, and, indeed, I suggest that the opposite would have been true.56 Images, both inanimate and h ­ uman, served a variety of functions in per­for­ mances, which w ­ ere a common feature of fifteenth-­century life. Elaborate and often ingeniously staged entries where local ­people represented figures from sacred history and classical my­thol­ogy, tableaux vivants, theatrical productions featuring both ­human actors and images, statues, beautiful tapestries proposing narratives w ­ ere common. As noted in the introductory chapter, Huizinga

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describes such theatrical production as “absorbed by life” ­because art did not yet exist as a discrete category of experience.57 Laura Weigert evokes the “participatory experiences t­ hese per­for­mances prompted, the expansiveness of their spatial contours, their improvisational verve.”58 Although we have no rec­ord of how medieval viewers responded to paintings of holy figures whose facial features resembled t­hose of living ­human beings whom they knew, religious theater in par­tic­u­lar offers an impor­tant parallel. Around 1450 when Fouquet painted the Melun diptych, the transition from religious play to theater, paradigmatic manifestation of the theatricalization of space, had not yet taken place: the theater of what Sarah Beckwith calls “disguises,” with which we are familiar, in which actors are merely actors counterfeiting characters, had not yet replaced the theater of “signs,” in which actors “participated in a story larger than themselves for a day and looked at their lives in relation to that story.”59 Fouquet himself seems to have depicted a dramatic enactment of the martyrdom of Saint Apolline being performed in what appears to be a sort of theater-­in-­the-­round.60 By the time religious plays began to be experienced as blasphemous, the relationships among theater, actor, and character had begun to be perceived in ways similar to the ways in which we ­today understand ­these relationships.61 But prior to this shift, modern assumptions about theater cannot be applied to fifteenth-­ century per­for­mances. For us, an actor assumes a character, embodies it, and remains “in character” throughout the duration of a given per­for­mance. The audience suspends its disbelief, and, before their eyes, actors become the characters they are playing. In contrast, the medieval personnage, the term commonly used to describe the pro­cess of acting a role, signifies something like a relationship between the actor and character. Weigert explains that descriptions of medieval religious plays being performed “explic­itly recognize and register the world of make-­ believe to which a repre­sen­ta­tion belongs.” Actors do not “convey and maintain a consistent similarity to the natu­ral world ­either through their physical likeness to it or their believability as faithful surrogates” but move between the dif­ fer­ent worlds, the “fictional and lived worlds, while proclaiming their status as fiction.”62 Medieval audiences would have remained aware of the pro­cess by which an actor “assumes the guise of a character while retaining [his or her] distinctive qualities and identity” rather than focused solely on the character that the actor had become, as is common practice among modern theatergoers.63 Moreover, religious theater was not enacted on a stage representing a discrete l­ittle world, separate from the everyday one, but took place in the midst



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of real life, in towns, in the streets, sometimes in the space in front of the church, sometimes on pageant wagons, that is, in familiar and already meaningful settings. Such theater was “a transformation of local p­ eople and places.”64 Biblical locations ­were mapped onto the city, fusing the “symbolic space of the per­for­ mance” with the “real space” of the physical setting in which it was performed.65 In this context, to borrow Sarah Beckwith’s formulation, the signifier—­the actor—­and the signified, the biblical figure—­were both pre­sent and “physically differentiated . . . ​coexisting and not competing as signs.”66 Just such a relationship between profane and sacred was created for Charles VIII’s 1486 entry to Troyes, when the king “was welcomed as Christ and led into ‘his celestial city’ by the townspeople.”67 The prob­lem of blasphemy arises when the relationship between an image and the h ­ uman disguised b­ ehind it collapses and the disguise pre­sents itself (or is received) as the ­thing itself. But steeped in fifteenth-­century theatrical practices, spectators who had known the king’s mistress would have understood the relationship between Agnès and the Virgin as one of personnage. Spectators who ­were in on the secret of the Madonna’s features would not have experienced outrage any more than church goers kneeling before a statue of the Virgin or a community gathered to watch ­people they may have known, ordinary sinful mortals, perform in a mystery play. Returning to my point about the diptych’s hybrid style, the public would have been aware of the fictive nature of the diptych’s Virgin, aware that, like the personnages of a mystery play weaving in and out of another world and their earthly real­ity, the figures of the diptych occupied two spaces si­mul­ta­neously. The earth-­bound Chevalier gazes at the baby Jesus, who points his fin­ger directly back at Chevalier. The Italianate realistic style of Chevalier’s panel invites the viewer into what is clearly a church with white stone walls and inlaid floors. But this world contrasts with the more stylistically Gothic one of the Virgin, where three-­dimensional space is not clearly indicated, where the heavenly throne hovers in mid-­air, seemingly supported by cherubim and seraphim, even though it is decorated with authentic-­looking, pearl-­encrusted, and fringed onyx knobs. As for the image of the Virgin, it is a fiction that offers access to the sacred, that makes the holy manifest, but it is not the Virgin. Recent scholarship on the French royal mistress has stressed that the role became vis­i­ble when it was integrated into the court system and defined by a series of implicit and yet nonnegotiable rules. Pascal Firges, for example, has dissected ­under what circumstances female adultery was permissible in

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s­ eventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century French court society, and Flavie Leroux has detailed the pro­cess Louis XIV followed in selecting and then establishing his mistresses.68 But Charles VII’s court lacked any concept of the royal mistress as a power­f ul and iconic figure. Legitimacy and authority are produced as much through symbols and ritual as force. The king was ­free to shower riches on his mistress, install her at court, and consult her whenever he wished, but this did not in itself create a position for her that was acknowledged and accepted as part of the court system. The position of royal mistress existed when the king and his courtiers together tacitly agreed that it existed and accorded it a place among o­ thers of the court. Agnès may be the first widely known favorite royal mistress of a French king, but no evidence suggests that her role was recognized as one. Although she would eventually and retrospectively be written into the tradition of the French royal mistresses, in the 1440s, the structures for conceiving of such a position in a positive way did not exist. However, the Melun diptych, a bricolage of forms par­tic­u­lar to fifteenth-­ century France—­the donor portrait, religious theater, the belief in the Virgin as mediator between the secular and the divine, and the narrative of Agnès as savior of France—­created a lasting way of imagining Agnès and guaranteed her ­future celebrity. To be specific, the diptych suggests how Agnès would have been perceived as royal mistress by her friends at court, as a positive influence on the king and mediator for the requests of ­those trying to reach him. If con­temporary chronicles reporting on such activity could imagine it only as illicit, the diptych retrospectively justifies Agnès’s influence, symbolically transposing it into a sacred register. William Egginton has written about dramatization before the advent of modern theater that it “makes pre­sent, gives a bodily dimension, to a narration that is already in some sense real.”69 Fouquet illustrates just such a narration being made pre­sent: we see the narration of the Virgin as mediator between God and humanity being made pre­sent in the implied communication between Chevalier and God via the Virgin-­Agnès. The historically specific visual culture within which the Melun Virgin was produced offered a win­dow of opportunity for the king’s mistress to be referenced in spectacular fashion: to return to Huizinga’s terminology of life and thought forms but move it in a dif­fer­ent direction, certain medieval forms ­were in this case used in new ways to create something innovative. As seventeenth-­ century copies of the diptych testify by removing the baby Jesus from the portrait, ­later observers in Catholic France ­were uncomfortable with the depiction.70 But for fifteenth-­century observers, at least for friends and ­family of Agnès, the



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diptych would have aroused no embarrassment. On the contrary, Stephan ­Kemperdick, once again citing Claude Schaefer, suggests that Chevalier intended his commission in part as an homage to Agnès and further notes that it may have been intended as an homage to the king, as well.71 The nacreous cast of the Virgin’s complexion has suggested to art historians that Fouquet meant to signal that his model was dead, the cherubim and seraphim carry­ing her throne into heaven.72 Agnès’s premature death, along with her unusual beauty, the ­limited possibilities for representing ­women in her world, the concept of personnage, the popularity of the donor portrait, and Chevalier’s obvious affection converged at this par­tic­u­lar historical moment in the Melun diptych. Agnès’s Legacy Agnès’s positive memory flourished, winning out over the more unflattering evaluations that circulated in the centuries a­ fter her death. As we saw, Agnès received negative publicity from some chroniclers, but her f­amily and friends carefully cultivated her image, and, as we have seen, sketches of her related to the Melun diptych Virgin circulated among the royal f­ amily and nobility in the 1520s. In 1526 Louise of Savoy, ­mother of King François I, commissioned an ­a lbum of fifty-­one crayon portraits of the king’s courtiers, known ­today as the Aix or Montmor ­album, tapping into a trend for such ­albums.73 Among the sketches of living or recently deceased courtiers, Louise included one of Agnès. A quatrain attributed to King François I on the back of the sketch picks up on the legend instigated in the Jouvencel, praising the “gentille Agnès” as the savior of the kingdom, a tradition perpetuated by Haillan, as we have seen, followed by Brantôme, and ­others. The specific context of Louise’s a­ lbum was the king’s capture by imperial troops during the disastrous French defeat at the ­Battle of Pavia in 1525, where the flower of French nobility fell. Louise, who served as Francois I’s regent when he led troops into Italy, first in 1515, and again in 1524, was distressed when news of the calamity reached her on March 1, 1525,74 but she rallied and, aided by her financial officer Florimond Robertet and her ­daughter, Marguerite, l­ ater queen of Navarre (1492–1549), she kept the kingdom in order ­until the king’s return. The ­album seems to have been a means of dealing with the devastation of the French court occasioned by the terrible defeat, of symbolically recreating the circle of intimates. Agnès’s image was eclipsed during the tenures of the royal mistresses Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly and Diane de Poitiers, favorites of François I and Henri II.

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However, she came back into vogue in the 1570s, lauded in poems, like the 1573 verses by Jean-­Antoine de Baïf praising her for having motivated the lovesick king to take up arms and drive the En­glish from France,75 and histories, including, as I have noted, Haillan’s story of her rousing Charles VII from his inaction. Henri IV, ascending the throne in 1594, was aware of Agnès as a muse for valor and embraced her image as a model of the ideal mistress. As we have seen, the tutor of Henri IV’s young heir Louis took his charge to visit the “the portrait (tableau) of the Belle Agnès and that of Étienne Chevalier” in 1608. A note in a document related to the church at Melun verifies that the king unsuccessfully tried to buy that portrait from the church for ten thousand livres.76 Henri IV’s interest in Agnès as a model mistress is also mentioned in the memoir of royal secretary Jules Gassot, who describes the king comparing his passion for Gabrielle d’Estrées to Charles VII’s for Agnès, writing that “[the king] never got tired of such loves, saying that King Charles VII with the belle Agnès, his love had conquered his kingdom.”77 Beginning at the end of the sixteenth ­century, paintings obviously inspired by Fouquet’s Virgin begin to appear. François Avril believes that the king may have been the force ­behind ­these new paintings.78 Some leave the exposed breast, o­ thers do not, but none leaves Agnès as the Virgin, all omitting the baby Jesus. A portrait of Agnès based on the Melun Virgin still hung in the chateau of Ugny-­le-­Gay in Picardy, seat of one branch of the Sorel ­family, in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury.79 Throughout Old Regime France, Agnès remains the ideal of the royal mistress. But the French Revolution brought an end to the court culture that had cultivated her image, and the tradition of the royal mistress vanished along with the Old Regime. Although nineteenth-­century French monarchs and the emperor had mistresses, the position never again achieved the degree of power and prestige that had marked it before the Revolution. Agnès’s celebrity continued into the nineteenth c­ entury, but in this new environment, her image would undergo in­ter­est­ing and significant shifts, refracted through the prism of gallantry.80 With or without the Melun diptych, Agnès surely would have attracted the attention of historians, popu­lar and scholarly. But it is difficult to imagine anything like the flowery declamation that is the “Praise for Agnès Sorel, known as la Belle Agnès,” presented by Thomas Riboud at the Society for Emulation at Bourg-­en-­Bresse, September 23, 1785, without the inspiration provided by the vivid image of her. “Agnès Sorel was loved by a sad and sensitive prince,” Riboud announces, “and she made of him a ­g reat king, and her counsel saved



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France.” His rhe­toric soars as he entreats Agnès to “[b]reak the chains of death, dear and respectable ghost; come, suffuse my soul with the celestial fire that beauty inspires, and perhaps I w ­ ill be worthy to speak of you.”81 Although Agnès’s fame was, to a large extent, a product of chance, the conditions of the creation of the Melun diptych which helped to secure that fame must be located in the fifteenth ­century. Had she been born ­earlier or ­later, she would have missed being immortalized and been i­ magined very differently. No subsequent royal mistress lent her features to the Virgin. And yet, once the painting existed, it pleased spectators throughout the centuries, supporting, as we have seen, a discourse on Agnès as inspiration to valor that paralleled the growth of the tradition of the royal mistress. To be legible, a social role requires a narrative. Agnès’s death, commemorated in her iconic fifteenth-­century image as the Virgin, provided the visual support for a uniquely positive narrative. Notes 1. Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, roi de France, new edition, 3 vols., ed. Auguste Vallet de Viriville (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858), 2:184–185. The black marble plaque ­under which Agnès’s heart once lay in the cathedral at Jumièges gives the date of death as February 9. See Pierre Champion, Agnès Sorel La Dame de Beauté (Paris: Champion, 1931), 64. 2. For details of the tests that showed that Agnès died of mercury poisoning, see Philippe Charlier, “L’empoisonnement de la Dame de Beauté,” Dossier pour la science 50 (2006): 108. 3. Louis A. Barbé, Margaret of Scotland and the Dauphin Louis: An Historical Study Based Mainly on Original Documents Preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale (London: Blackie and Son, 1917), 123. 4. Jean de Bourdigné, priest and native of Angers who died in 1545, rec­ords in his chronicle of Anjou that Agnès from a very young age was raised by Isabelle. Chroniques d’Anjou et du Maine, ed. and intro. Théodore de Quatrebarbes, 2 vols. (Angers, France: Cosnier and Lachèse, 1842), 2:199. Listed as a member of Isabelle’s ­house­hold in an account covering January–­July 1444, Agnès might have moved to the royal court at any point between the two dates. The list is reproduced in Auguste Vallet de Viriville, “Recherches historiques sur Agnès Sorel. Documents inédits ou restitués, relatifs à sa famille, à sa personne et à ses enfants,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 11 (1850): 297–326 and 477–499 (304). 5. Gaston du Fresne de Beaucourt details the itineraries to show the overlap in Histoire de Charles VII, 6 vols. (Paris: A. Picard, 1881–1891), 3:290–291. 6. Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:47. 7. Vallet de Viriville, “Recherches historiques,” 312–318. 8. Georges Chastellain, Œuvres de Georges Chastellain, ed. Joseph Kervyn de Lettenhove, 8 vols. (Brussels, Belgium: Heussner, 1863–1866), 4:365–366. 9. Jacques Du Clercq, Mémoires. Choix de chroniques et mémoires relatives à l’histoire de la France, ed. Jean-­Alexandre Bûchon (Orleans, France: H. Herluison, 1875), 175.

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10. Accounts detail gifts to t­ hese men and their constant appearance at the king’s side. See Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:177–179, for evidence of gifts. On the dauphin at that time, see Malcolm G. A. Vale, Charles VII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 88, and, on the Praguerie, 75–81. 11. Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:102. 12. Guillaume Gruel, Chronique d’Arthur de Richemont, conné­table de France, duc de Bretagne (1393–1458), ed. Achille Le Vavasseur (Paris: Renouard, 1890), 187. 13. See Mathieu d’Escouchy, La Chronique de Mathieu d’Escouchy, ed. Gaston du Fresne de Beaucourt, 3 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1863–1864), 1:68–69. 14. For the date of composition, see Jean de Bueil, Le Jouvencel, intro. Camille Favre, ed. Léon Lecestre, 2 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1887–1889), 2:335–347. 15. Olivier de La Marche, Les Mémoires de Messire Olivier de La Marche: maître d’hôtel et capitaine des gardes de Charles le Téméraire, ed. Henri Beaune and Jules d’Arbaumont, 4 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1883–1888), 2:55. 16. Bueil, Le Jouvencel, 2:342. 17. Escouchy, Chroniques, 3:268. 18. See Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII. The king left Agnès in Loches with Guillaume Gouffier, 4:217, n. 2; and Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181. 19. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:184–185. 20. The assumption that Antoinette was the king’s mistress is based on Chastellain and Du Clerq, but also on the gifts given to her by Charles VII in the years a­ fter Agnès’s death. See Auguste Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII, roi de France, et de son époque, 1403–1461 (Paris: Renouard, 1862–1865), 3:247, n. 1, for the references to the relevant documents. Still, the king offered many gifts, to both men and ­women. ­There is no conclusive evidence one way or the other, but it is suggestive that both Antoinette and Charles VII had many c­ hildren—­just not with each other. Antoinette had two sons, Artus and Antoine, with her husband André de Villequier, who died in 1454. She had no c­ hildren between the date of André’s death and the date of the first of her four ­children with François II Duke of Brittany ca. 1461–1462; that is, she had no c­ hildren during the period of about seven years when she was supposed to have been the king’s mistress. For Antoinette’s ­children, see Anselme de Sainte-­Marie, et al., Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, g­ rands officiers de la Couronne, de la Maison du Roy et des anciens barons du royaume, 9 vols. (Paris: La compagnie des libraires, 1726–1733), 2:1332, 8:54. On Artus and Antoine, see Charles VIII, Lettres de Charles VIII, 332. 21. Chastellain, Œuvres de Georges Chastellain, 4:366–368. 22. Du Clercq, Mémoires, 90–91. 23. See Laurent Guitton, “Fastes et malheurs du métier de favorite: Antoinette de Maignelais, de la cour de France à la cour de Bretagne (1450–1470),” Maîtresses et favorites, dans les coulisses du pouvoir du Moyen Age à l’Epoque modern, ed. Juliette Dor, Marie-­ Élisabeth Henneau, and Alain Marchandisse (Saint-­Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-­Étienne, 2019), 153–167; and Christine Juliane Henzler, Die Frauen Karls VII und Ludwigs XI (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau Verlag, 2021).



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24. David P. Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour, “Persona as Method: Exploring Celebrity and the Public Self through Persona Studies,” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 3 (2015): 292. 25. On the concept, see John David Ebert, Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010); and Ruth Penfold-­Mounce, Death, The Dead and Popu­lar Culture (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, 2018). 26. Jean Mabillon, L’Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-­Pierre de Jumièges, ed. Julien Loth, 3 vols. (Rouen, France: Métérie, 1882–1885), 2:191–197. See also Champion, Agnès Sorel, 64. 27. Bueil, Le Jouvencel, 1:CCCIX. 28. Bueil, Le Jouvencel, 2:136–137. 29. See James Kren, “Bathsheba in French Books of Hours Made for ­Women, ca. 1470–1500,” in The Medieval Book: Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ed. James H. Marrow, Richard A. Linenthal, and Andrew Noel (Houten, Netherlands: Hes and de Graf, 2010), 169–182. 30. Kren, “Bathsheba in French Books of Hours,” 178. 31. See Joan McRae’s essay in this volume, and Hanno Wijsman, “Poésie, politique et emblématique dans un manuscrit enluminé. Le recueil Chartier d’Antoinette de Maignelais, maîtresse de Charles VI,” in Le pouvoir des lettres sous le règne de Charles VII (1422–1461), ed. Florence Bouchet, Sébastien Cazalas, and Philippe Maupeu (Paris: Champion, 2020), 89–108, and Hanno Wijsman, “Le Recueil Chartier d’Antoinette de Maignelais, maîtresse du roi Charles VII,” https://­libraria​.­hypotheses​.­org​/­345. 32. For the article, see “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel, tirée des meilleurs ouvrages historiques concernant le règne de Charles VII,” Bibliothèque Universelle du roman (October 1778): 115–206. The author is not named. The periodical ran from 1775–1789. For the fresco description see 129–130. See also Emile Roy, La vie et les œuvres de Charles Sorel, sieur de Souvigny (1602–1674) (Paris: Hachette, 1891), 424–449. 33. “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel,” 129–130, 141. 34. “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel, ” 142, 129. 35. Yves Combeau, Le comte d’Argenson, 1696–1764: Ministre de Louis XV (Paris: École nationale des chartes, 1999), 414, citing the Bibliothèque nationale de France Arsenal ms 4562, fol. 91–92. 36. François Fossier, “A propos du titre d’historiographe sous l’Ancien Régime,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 32:3 (1985): 378. 37. Bernard de Girard du Haillan, Histoire générale des roys de France, 2 vols. (Paris: Sonnius, 1627), 1: 1055–1056. Brantôme borrows the story almost word for word, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, 11 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1864–82), 9:393–394. 38. Paul Bonnefon, “L’historien Du Haillan,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 22 (1915): 460, 480. 39. I note the exception of chronicler Jean Chartier, who claims that the king never touched Agnès below the chin. Chronique de Charles VII, 2:183.

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40. On dating, see Stephan Kemperdick, “Cata­logue 1: Jean Fouquet and the Melun Diptych,” in Jean Fouquet: The Melun Diptych, ed. Stephan Kemperdick (Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2018), 136–142. The estimate is based on the fact that Chevalier’s wife, Catherine Budé, who died in in 1452, is not pictured beside him; also, dendrochronological analy­sis of the wood on which the diptych is painted verifies a date of post-1450. 41. See Philippe Lorentz, “Jean Fouquet et les peintres des anciens Pays-­Bas,” in Jean Fouquet: peintre et enlumineur du XVe siècle, ed. François Avril (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France/ Hazan, 2003), 38–49; and, in the same volume, Fiorella Sricchia Santoro, “Jean Fouquet in Italie,” in Jean Fouquet: peintre et enlumineur du XVe siècle, ed. François Avril (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France/ Hazan, 2003), 50–63. 42. For ­these details, see the descriptions of François Avril, ed. Jean Fouquet: peintre et enlumineur du XVe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France/Hazan, 2003), 121; ­Norbert Schneider, The Art of the Portrait (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2002), 42. 43. Jean Héroard, Journal de Jean Héroard sur l’enfance et la jeunesse de Louis XIII (1601– 1628) extrait des manuscrits originaux, ed. Eudoxe Soulié and Edouard de Barthélemy, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1868), 1:323. For the Godefroy description, see Denis Godefroy, Charles VII, roy de France (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1661), 885. 44. Godefroy, Charles VII, 885. 45. Judith Förstl, “Étienne Chevalier, Jean Fouquet et Melun,” Communication of the Conseil régional d’Île-­de-­France, http://­patrimoines​.­i ledefrance​.­f r​/­sites​/­default​/­fi les​ /­medias​/­2015​/­02​/­etienne​_­chevalier​.­pdf, 6. 46. Two reside in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the Département des Estampes, as Rés. Na 21, fol. 13 and Rés. Na 21, fol. 28. A nearly identical version of the latter sketch resides in the Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, as inv. no. 3925 (figure 19). A fourth resides in the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-­en-­Provence as Rés. ms. 20, fol. 29. The sketch is less skilfully rendered, but it clearly shows the same w ­ oman in the same position. 47. Karen Dyballa, “Cata­logue 5. Portrait of Agnès Sorel,” in Jean Fouquet: The Melun Diptych, 176. 48. See Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, 148, 129–130; and Champion, Agnès Sorel, 138–148. 49. Stephan Kemperdick, “Fouquet le peintre: The Panel Painter Jean Fouquet and the Melun Diptych,” in Jean Fouquet: The Melun Diptych, 24, 31–32. In addition, see the compelling arguments in f­ avor of the identification in Eberhart König, “Étienne Chevalier as a Client of Jean Fouquet,” in Jean Fouquet: The Melun Diptych, 61. 50. Kemperdick, “Fouquet le peintre,” 25–26. 51. See, for example, Luke Syson, “Belle: Picturing Beautiful ­Women,” in Art and Love in Re­nais­sance Italy,” ed. Andrea Bayer (New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2008), 246–248. 52. Pamela Askew, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 50. 53. See Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 99; see also Sharpe’s “ ‘Thy Longing Country’s Darling and Desire’: Aesthetics, Sex, and Politics in the E ­ ngland



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of Charles II,” in Politics, Transgression, and Repre­sen­t a­tion at the Court of Charles II, ed. Catharine ­Macleod and Julia Marciari Alexander (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–32. 54. For a history of donor portraits see Laura Gelfand, “Fifteenth-­Century Netherlandish Devotional Portrait Diptychs: Origins and Function” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1994), 39. On the genre, see also Ingrid Falque, Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2019), and Falque, “Du dynamisme de l’herméneutique dévotionnelle à la fin du Moyen Age. L’exemple des Andachtsbilder flamandes,” Méthodes et interdisciplinarité en sciences humaines 5 (2016): 77–109, and Johanna Scheel, Das altniederländische Stifterbild: Emotionsstrategien des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis (Berlin, Germany: Mann, 2014). 55. Johan Huizinga, Autumntide of the M ­ iddle Ages: A study of forms of life and thought of the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France and the Low Countries, ed. Graeme Small and Anton van der Lem, trans. Diane Webb (Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2020), 234, 240. 56. A large bibliography now exists; in addition to Laura Weigert’s impor­tant works, French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), and “Stage,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 24–46, see Alain Dierkens, Gil Bartholeyns, and Thomas Golsenne, ed., La Per­for­mance des images (Bruxelles, Belgium: Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, 2009) for an introduction to the ways in which late-­medieval visual culture is being rethought, especially the introduction by Jérôme Baschet, 9–14. 57. Huizinga, Autumntide, 364; Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens-­en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Harlem, Netherlands: H. D. Tjeenk Willink and Son, 1952), 307. 58. Weigert, French Visual Culture, 10. 59. Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 60. Although opinion on exactly what Fouquet meant to signify with the apparent theater-­in-­the-­round layout is disputed. See Véronique Domínguez, “La scène et l’enluminure. L’Apolline de Jean Fouquet dans le livre d’Heures d’Etienne Chevalier,” Romania 122 (2004): 468–505. 61. Beckwith, Signifying God, 121–157. 62. Weigert, French Visual Culture, 7–8. 63. Weigert, French Visual Culture, 7. 64. Beckwith, Signifying God, 133. 65. William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 59. 66. Beckwith, Signifying God, 155. 67. Murphy, “Re­nais­sance France,” 179. 68. See Pascal Firges, “The Tacit Rules of Female Adultery: Framing Marital and Extramarital Relationships in Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century French Court Society,” in Femmes à la cour de France. Charges et fonctions (XVe–­XIXe siècle), ed. Caroline zum Kolk and Kathleen Wilson-­Chevalier (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Septentrion, 2018), 293–302;

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and Flavie Leroux, “L’intégration des maîtresses royales au ‘système de la cour’ (1661– 1691),” in Femmes à la cour de France, 303–319. 69. Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, 50. 70. For a discussion of l­ ater copies of the diptych see Avril, Jean Fouquet, 130, 150–151. 71. Kemperdick, “Fouquet le peintre,” 25–26. 72. See Sandro Lombardi, Jean Fouquet (Florence: Libreria editrice Salimbeni, 1983), 130. 73. See Alexandra Zvereva, “ ‘Chose qui me donne de la peine et continuel travail plus que je ne vous puis dire.’ Louise de Savoie et les recueils de portraits,” in Louise de Savoie (1476–1531), ed. Pierre Brioist, Laure Fagnart, and Cédric Michon (Tours, France: Presses universitaires François-­Rabelais de Tours, 2015), 185. Louise commissioned the ­album at a date between the death of Marguerite’s husband, the Duke of Alençon in April 1525 (in ­ idow’s weeds) and January 1527 when Marguerite her sketch, Marguerite is depicted in w married Henri of Navarre (in her sketch, Marguerite does not bear the title of Queen of Navarre). 74. See Aimé Champollion-­Figeac, Captivité de François Ier (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1847), 81, 394. 75. Jean-­Antoine Baïf, Oeuvres en rime de Jean-­Antoine de Baïf, ed. Charles Marty-­ Laveaux, 5 vols. (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1881–1890), 2:92–95. 76. See Avril, Jean Fouquet, 130. Avril cites pièce 663v of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) ms français 8224, which is vol. 9 of Épitaphes de Paris et ses environs, collected in 1887. On the verso we read that “it is said that Henri IV wanted to give 10,000 livres for [the diptych].” 77. Jules Gassot, Sommaire mémorial de Jules Gassot, secrétaire du roi, 1555–1625, ed. Pierre Champion (Paris: Champion, 1934), 232. 78. Avril, Jean Fouquet, 151. 79. Achille Peigné-­Delacourt, “Agnès Sorel était-­elle Tourangelle ou Picarde?” (Noyon, France: Andrieux-­Duru, 1861), 2, n.2. 80. See Tracy Adams, Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy: History, Gallantry, and National Identity (York, UK: ARC Humanities Press, 2022), 118–127. 81. Thomas-­Philibert Riboud, Éloge d’Agnès Sorel, surnommée la Belle Agnès, lu à la Société d’émulation de Bourg-­en-­Bresse, le 23 septembre 1785 (Lyon, France: Faucheux, 1785), 8–9.

cha p te r ten

No Job for a Man Fifteenth-­Century France and the Invention of the Institution of Female Regency Zita Eva Rohr

Aubrée David-­Chapy contends that, during the fifteenth ­century, “female power in France was the fruit of a paradox, residing in the opposition between the Lex Salica, definitively excluding ­women as well as their male descendants from royal power, and the ordinances regarding regency, which first emerged during the reigns of Charles V (r. 1364–1380) and Charles VI (r. 1380–1422).”1 The pre­sent contribution explores the place of fifteenth-­century royal w ­ omen, showing that the legislative programs of Charles V and his successor, Charles VI, in the late ­fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries created a space for power­ful royal w ­ omen to exploit—­one that Christine de Pizan was only too pleased to cheer on.2 From the pragmatic legislative activity of Charles V and his successor, Charles VI, to the unofficial regency of Anne of France’s younger b­ rother Charles VIII in the fifteenth ­century, which Anne intelligently exploited, female regency was eventually institutionalized, setting a pre­ce­dent for and enabling self-­aware princesses and queens of the sixteenth ­century and beyond to carve out power­ful roles for themselves in the superstructure of the French monarchical system.3 However, neither Anne of France nor her cousin, pupil, and successor to the post of regent, Louise of Savoy (Anne’s m ­ other, Queen Charlotte of Savoy, and Louise’s ­father, Philip of Savoy, ­were siblings) was the originator of feminine power in France’s complex premodern and frequently misunderstood polity. What they did do, as David-­Chapy argues, was to institutionalize that power. 213

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Their trailblazing footsteps w ­ ere followed by French queens-­regent Catherine de Médicis (regent from 1560–1563, who remained power­ful well beyond this official regency); Marie de Médicis (regent from 1610–1617); and Anne of Austria (regent from 1643–1551). This despite the fact that the last governing regent of the kingdom of France was male. Philip of Orleans was regent for his nephew, the five-­year-­old Louis XV, the child-­k ing’s ­mother, the dauphine Marie-­ Adélaïde of Savoy, having died three years before he ascended the throne of his grand­father Louis XIV in 1715. Honing in on seven generations of Anne of France’s influential matrilineal dynasty, we find that it had its genesis in the medieval Mediterranean with the influential queen of Sicily Elisabeth of Carinthia (d. 1352). The dynasty moved to Aragon-­Catalonia with the marriage of her ­daughter Elionor of Sicily (d. 1375) to Peter IV of Aragon. It continued with the agency of her daughters-­in-­law Violant of Bar (d. 1431) and María of Luna (d. 1409), respectively queens-­consort of Aragon. It returned to the territories of the insular and peninsular kingdoms of Naples-­Sicily, and was si­mul­ta­neously transported across the Pyrenees into France with Yolande of Aragon (d. 1442). It established itself with the regency of Isabeau of Bavaria (d. 1435) and crossed the channel to ­England with Marguerite of Anjou (d. 1482). ­These w ­ omen represent but the trunk and canes of Anne’s fecund matrilineal vine, many more of her cousins and aunts awaiting exploration among its flowers and tendrils—­a boundless source of scholarly delight for ­those of us determined to shed light on the unexceptionality of premodern stateswomen. The transfer and agency of Anne’s foremothers influenced and underwrote the successful territorial monarchies of Aragon-­ Castile, France, and ­England. They provided her with a template of lived po­liti­cal experience on which to construct her own gendered po­liti­cal theory and its practice. Anne herself reminded her only surviving child, Suzanne of Bourbon, that “only foolish ­women think nothing of their foremothers,” admonishing her to “never underestimate or discredit your ancestors, from whom you are descended, ­because that would be against [God], right, and reason.”4 Nothing Much to See ­Here: The Alleged Misogyny of France’s Fifteenth-­Century Valois Legislation Much energy has been expended and ink spilled bemoaning the ways in which French royal w ­ omen w ­ ere excluded from the succession by t­ hose dreadful male



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scribblers of fifteenth-­century Valois chancelleries. The prob­lem is that this received and insufficiently nuanced view, still held by some ­today, is the product of de­cades of mythmaking and twenty-­twenty timeworn hindsight.5 Michael Wolf contends that “[h]istorical hindsight offers a deceptive prescience when we are interpreting how ­people in past socie­ties coped with the myriad prob­lems that beset them individually and communally,”6 while Lucy Grant reminds us that “[f]ocus upon misogyny can lead one to ignore the prevalence of ­bitter criticism of power and the power­ful in general.”7 Sarah Hanley’s fragile assumptions regarding the Valois imperative to keep the crown in French hands loom large in her determination to sweep aside incon­ ve­nient and very specific historical contexts and concerns. Moreover, she ­either misapprehends or verbals P. S. Lewis’s discussion of Jean de Montreuil and the Lex Salica as she endeavors to drive home her thesis that “[i]n his works, Montreuil fastened on a popu­lar theme in­ven­ted by French propagandists: the illusion of En­glish designs on the French throne (supposedly stemming from 1328),” which has been refuted definitively by Craig Taylor.8 Lewis actually states that “[t]he use of the Salic law as a weapon against the En­glish claim to the throne seems to have owed at least its popularity to Jean de Montreuil.”9 Furthermore, he says, “Jean Juvenal, and Jean de Montreuil and the author of Pourceque pluseurs, had a purpose beyond than that of encouraging the loyalty of their compatriots: they ­were intent as well upon providing the government and its diplomats with a case to argue against their opponents,” and “Jean de Montreuil seems to have set the fashion for an historical analy­sis of En­glish rights in the pays of France.”10 The En­glish menace was no illusion; it was an existential threat to the sovereignty of Charles VI exacerbated by his frequent and intense bouts of ­mental illness, and the unstoppable ambition and incendiary conflict between the princes of his own line. Hanley defends her claim: “But, [Montreuil’s] noteworthy introduction of a Salic text actually was provoked by events in French circles, especially by Christine de Pizan’s case, made in 1405 for female inclusion.”11 Christine de Pizan was devoted to the Valois monarchy; its members ­were her principal patrons. Nowhere does she make a case for female royal succession ­because to do so would have played into En­ glish hands and damaged her c­ areer and reputation.12 Brushing aside such situational logic, Hanley is convinced that the introduction by Montreuil of a Salic text into his po­liti­cal and diplomatic treatises in the context of Henry V’s ambitions and the conflict between the French princes was due entirely to the famous Querelle des femmes being conducted in

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intellectual, literary, and chancellery circles at the time. This too has been refuted by Taylor.13 Hanley blends aspects of the Querelle, Christine de Pizan’s writing in support of ­women as stateswomen and guardians, and cherry-­picks the writing of Montreuil to pre­sent and argue a thesis that ignores France’s very real issues of sovereignty at the time: an episodically mad king, an imperfect regent, and self-­interested and ambitious French princes set against an able and determined opponent in Henry V of E ­ ngland. The regalvanized Lex Salica was not a misogynist construct designed specifically to keep French princesses off the throne—­though this was undeniably one of its consequences. In refashioning the Lex Salica and deploying it to serve specific diplomatic and po­liti­cal ends, Montreuil and his colleagues did not resort to tired tropes of misogynist discourse.14 Theirs was a strategy to deny foreign princes—­the potential consorts of French princesses—­access to French sovereignty and power. Combined with this po­liti­cal and diplomatic chancellery strategy ­were the domestic legislative programs of Charles V and Charles VI, which sought to find ways to put a brake on the ambitions of their closest male relatives and neutralize in-­fighting among ambitious princes of the blood. With ­these two overlapping imperatives at the forefront of our thinking, why and how did the position of regent in France, traditionally in the hands of the se­nior male relatives of minor kings, come to be regarded as no job for a man during and beyond the fifteenth ­century? The answer is tied to masculine ambition, specifically the masculine ambition of Charles V and Charles VI’s closest male relatives. Arising from a second “Capetian” miracle (or curse!)—­there ­were just too many boys with too much time on their hands and far too much ambition on their minds.15 Assertion of a Latent Po­liti­cal Power So, how did the maternal authority of queens-­consort assert its latent po­liti­cal power to embed the regencies of queen-­mothers (and other female relatives) into the superstructure of premodern French state-­building?16 More significant than specific conditions that rendered female regency an “exceptional” form of rulership, the royal female embodied multiple facets that played into the nomination of female regencies.17 The histories of female participation in the affairs of state must be reinserted into the framework of their ruling families b­ ecause royal w ­ omen w ­ ere at the nexus of private and public spheres of agency and influence.



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This is most clearly exposed in the much-­studied case of Blanche of Castile, ­ other of St. Louis IX, king of France. In 1226, Queen Blanche found herself m unexpectedly widowed and, conforming to the 1225 testament of Louis VIII, guardian and tutor of his heir, their twelve-­year-­old son Louis IX and his seven surviving siblings.18 The Grandes Chroniques rec­ords her fulfilment of Louis VIII’s final instructions regarding the guardianship and education of the adolescent Louis IX: “Queen Blanche, his m ­ other, indoctrinated and taught him so well ­because she had the guardianship of him due to her tutelage and supervision of his affairs, and the assistance of the most prudent and wise counselors that she could assem­ble, both clerics and laity, who illuminated legality and provided the imperative loyalty for the government of the kingdom.”19 Blanche’s influence on her son endured well beyond her “regencies,” and it was profound and durable.20 The queen became the touchstone for the selfless fulfilment of the post of queen-­consort and the pre­ce­dent for an office that would l­ ater transform into female regency. She was raised repeatedly as the argument in support of the regency of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria.21 Matthew Paris tells us that Blanche was “feminine in sex, but masculine in counsel,”22 an appreciation reworked time and again in defining ruling ­women such as Blanche as “exceptional.” And yet, they ­were entirely unexceptional, as evidenced by the most recent research, across a variety of scholarly disciplines, in female agency and influence.23 The only exceptional ­thing about such ­women was their rank, wealth, and membership of a minority elite, which was equally true of their male counter­parts. Gender was not always a feature of the primary agenda, and, when it was, ­women ­were naturally the most practiced in the manipulation of societal and religious expectations of their sex.24 Lindy Grant observes quite rightly that “Blanche’s life story casts light on what it meant to be a ruler and a member of the medieval elite, not ‘ just’ a queen and a medieval elite ­woman, and her life story can be told only if one refocuses the lens to look beyond queenship as such.”25 Grant’s contention adds weight to Theresa Earenfight’s stance that premodern rulership was a corporate undertaking in which queens had a power­ful and influential role to play.26 Like many other royal ­women, Blanche of Castile occupied three distinct, yet intersecting, institutional positions as a w ­ oman of power and influence: she was a queen-­consort; a queen-­mother, a dowager queen; and regent or ruler. Many royal w ­ omen, once widowed, fought hard to remain po­liti­cally relevant and retain power, especially when it appeared to be slipping away from them. The assertive French princess, Violant of Bar (1365–1431), queen-­consort of Aragon

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and great-­great-­grandmother of Anne of France, went to considerable lengths to avoid the wilderness of po­liti­cal irrelevance in 1396 on the death of her husband, Joan I of Aragon, and ­later on the death of his heirless successor, Martí I, in 1410.27 In 1374, Charles V (d. 1380) promulgated an ordinance granting his queen, Jeanne of Bourbon, the guardianship of their son should he become king before his ­fourteenth year. At the same time, he allocated the reins of government—­ the regency—to his ­brother, Louis I of Anjou (d. 1384) who was required to seek the counsel of the princes of the blood and the most distinguished and trusted officers of the crown. Charles V’s innovation was to fix the majority of the king once he had attained his f­ ourteenth year, dissolving the official powers of any sitting regent.28 Unfortunately for twelve-­year-­old Charles VI, his ­mother, Jeanne of Bourbon, predeceased his f­ather, opening up a vacuum that the younger of his u ­ ncles, Philip II of Burgundy, who had no claim on the regency except in the case of the death of the elder u ­ ncle, Louis I of Anjou,29 to exploit and fill. This was an opportunity that Philip grasped boldly, passing on his unjustified sense of entitlement to his son Jean I, duke of Burgundy, who succeeded him in 1404.30 The next phase of the Valois legislative program had its genesis in the summer of 1392. The first episode of the Charles VI’s madness provided a windfall that enabled Henry V of ­England and ­others to lay their hands on the French crown.31 Charles’s chronic illness presented Philip of Burgundy with a serendipitous opportunity to reclaim his lost power and influence over his nephew. However, Philip needed to suppress the po­liti­cal ambitions of his younger nephew Louis, by then twenty years old. While Philip’s protégée, Queen Isabeau, should have had a significant role to play as queen-­consort, her motherly responsibilities kept her more than occupied. Since her marriage in July 1385 at the age of fifteen she had given birth four times, with the first dauphin Louis only about six months old at the time of his f­ ather’s first episode of madness. In addition to Isabeau’s domestic preoccupations, she was unschooled in the arts of ruling and diplomacy—no one had expected her to one day become queen of France, least of all the teenaged Elisabeth von Wittelsbach-­Ingolstadt herself. Reportedly, she was not fluent in French32 and had hitherto appeared to have prioritized the pomp and party aspects of being queen over the more tedious aspects of queenly influence and diplomacy.33 Notwithstanding this, Isabeau understood that she had a significant role to fulfil and she stepped up to challenge to the best of her ability.



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Charles VI issued patent letters to emphasize that, in the event of his inability to govern or his death, his infant heir’s majority must be respected by his nominated governor, obliging his b­ rother Louis of Orleans to swear to uphold his edict. Th ­ ese letters, published in November 1392, reiterate the edicts of his ­father and his own letters promulgated in January 1392, prior to his first episode of madness.34 The strug­gle for ascendancy over his compromised throne between Louis of Orleans and Philip of Burgundy threatened to explode in 1401. ­Here, Isabeau played a central role in bringing the parties together—­mediation being the long-­established purview of queens-­consort. On January 14, 1402, she convened a ­g reat council, summoning the pair to her presence as well as the king’s cousin and mediator-­at-­large Louis II of Anjou, king of Jerusalem and Sicily; the king’s u ­ ncles, the dukes of Bourbon and Berry; the Constable of France, Louis of Sancerre; the king’s chancellor, Arnaud of Corbie; the patriarch of Alexandria, Simon of Cramaud; and sundry and assorted prelates and high barons. Burgundy and Orleans soon realized that neither had managed to draw any advantage from Isabeau, and the crown stabilized briefly through the workings of its queen and her more disinterested allies and counsel. Isabeau was not, however, the sole architect of this happy outcome as some have implied. The conciliar nature of this outcome is an illustrative example of the corporate nature of rulership wherein both sexes had essential and complementary roles to play.35 Having convoked this group so effectively, on March 16, 1402, Charles VI accorded Isabeau “full power and authority” to act for him during his “absences,” most particularly to mediate conflict between his ­brother Orleans and his u ­ ncle Burgundy and to work more generally to safeguard his sovereignty, in accordance with his wishes and with the aid of sound counsel.36 Unfortunately, while Philip of Burgundy was away from court, Louis of Orleans pushed the envelope of Isabeau’s nascent lieutenancy to impose new taxes.37 On July 1, 1402, Charles VI reinforced Isabeau’s authority to act for him during his “absences,” buttressing her power further by according her absolute control over his trea­sury, believing perhaps that this would put the battling dukes on an even footing with neither in the fiscal ascendancy.38 Notwithstanding this mea­sure, a more permanent regency plan needed to replace the mend and make do with remedies that had been manipulated by interested parties.39 Emergency ad hoc mea­sures would no longer suffice to address this dilemma.40 By 1403, Charles conceded that his illness would continue to reoccur, removing his ability to govern, and that the near constant bickering that had broken out between Louis and Philip would escalate to the detriment of his kingdom.41

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Charles VI promulgated a second set of regency provisions on April 26, 1403. Rachel Gibbons most succinctly frames the 1403 provisions, believing that they represent a natu­ral progression in the overall policy and legislative program of Charles VI. For her, the 1403 ordinance “is aimed at ensuring collective responsibility when the king was not fit to govern personally and also as a next stage onwards from the rather open-­ended July ordinance, in that mea­sures ­were no longer emergency provisos, but the setting up of an administration that had to be prepared to govern frequently and come together instantly when required.”42 The real difference between the 1402 and 1403 legislative programs of Charles VI is not all that shattering. The biggest practical difference is that regency is eliminated altogether. Henceforth, the heir, regardless of his majority or other­wise, assumes power immediately on the death of his pre­de­ces­sor with his authority and rule assured and protected by the position and prestige of his ­mother who would “naturally” have his best interest and that of his kingdom at the forefront of her thinking. While maintaining the status of the queen as president of the Royal Council—an initiative perhaps of Philip of Burgundy who seems to have been confident in Isabeau’s ability to perform her duties as queen-­consort—­the ordinances subtly shift “from autonomy for the queen to the democracy of the Council”43 over which she herself would preside.44 Predictably, before the month was out, ­under the combined pressure of Isabeau and Louis of Orleans, the April 1403 edict was revoked, pointing to the ongoing instability of Charles’s government.45 This casual revocation of legislative mea­sures designed to protect the king’s authority and the security of the dauphin’s position explains the multiple precautions included by Charles or his advisers in his subsequent regency ordinance, read in a specially convened lit de justice on December 26, 1407. This ordinance should be contextualized in light of his ­brother Louis of Orleans’s brutal assassination less than a month before by agents of Jean of Burgundy. ­Here, Charles VI asserts his sovereign authority to establish a princi­ple for the functioning of the royal state. In keeping with his ­father’s objectives, but with considerably greater ­legal force, Charles VI institutes a “founding” law, establishing an irrevocable po­liti­cal foundation for the royal state and imposing a code of conduct for his successors.46 At the same sitting, an ordinance designating the then ten-­year-­old dauphin Louis regent for his f­ather during his episodes of illness.47 Unable to act unilaterally without resorting to Council and denied absolute control over the king’s finances,48 Isabeau nonetheless maintained the guardianship and tutelage of Charles’s underage heir and



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therefore the regency, which Charles had officially abolished in its ancient form already in 1403.49 Charles’s ordinance specifies that minor kings must be: gardez, gouverez & nourriz, & les faiz, affaires & besongnes d’eux et du Royaume, traictiez & appoinctiez par nostredit, & autres aisnez fils de nozdiz successeurs, de leur auctorité & en leur nom, par les bons advis, deliberacion & conseil des Roynes leurs meres, se elles vivoient, & des plus prouchains du lignage & sang royal qui lors seroient; & aussi par les advis, deliberacion & conseil des connestable & chancellier de France, & des saiges hommes du conseil, qui seroient lors à nous & a nozdiz successeurs. [looked ­after, guided, and nourished, and that the deeds, business, and needs of them and ­those of the kingdom be treated and appointed by our said son and other eldest sons of our successors, by their authority and in their name, by the sound advice, deliberation, and counsel of the ­ others, if they are living, and by the closest of their linQueens their m eage and of their royal blood; and also by the advice, deliberation, and counsel of the constable and chancellor of France and the wise men of the council, who are with us now and ­those who ­will be with our said successors.]50 The innovation Charles had brought to bear in his conception of regency, whereby all f­ uture minor kings w ­ ere to be recognized as kings regardless of their age, represented a rupture between the medieval conception of exploitable and open-­ended regency (of which he had himself been a victim early in his reign) and his pared-­down “modern” French form. The king was no longer dead: his heir, who was one with him,51 would ascend the never vacant throne immediately.52 Henceforth regents would have the task of counselling the king in the exercise of his duties, well positioning him to perfect and hone his po­liti­cal education. The young sovereign was to govern, seconded in this by she who, more often than not, had charge of his education. Charles VI established the link between tutelage and government, which had in the past been carefully separated.53 His modernization of regency re­united a conception of the office whereby the council held the place of government while the education of the prince was guaranteed by his exercise of authority with the advice of the person closest to him in blood—­his ­mother.54 Charles’s December 1407 ordinance heralded the birth of the modern regency and with it the eventual institutionalization of

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f­emale regencies in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.55 It did this not ­because it always endured in practice—­political rivalries soon got in the way—­but b­ ecause the position and role of the queen-­mother emphasized the importance of the royal ­family, especially of the queen-­mother, standing shoulder to shoulder with the young sovereign. To square the circle of our discussion, far from being contradictory, the ordinances of 1374, 1403, and 1407 combined with the regalvanized version of the Lex Salica should be understood as being complementary. Excluding females from the throne but delivering them direct access to government via their blood ties allowed for an institutionalized role for royal ­women within the French monarchical system. The essential function of the Lex Salica was to protect the French throne from foreign investiture, and none of the terms of the “law” denounce the po­liti­cal incapacity of ­women. On the contrary, the presence of princesses at the head of the state in the context of a weakness in royal power was a consequence of their exclusion from royal succession, while their inability to mount the throne was an additional guarantee against the existential risk of domestic or foreign usurpation.56 Anne of France, Madame la Grande: The Genesis of a Vocation Sensing that his end was near, Louis XI, f­ ather of the hyperintelligent and po­liti­cally savvy twenty-­one-­year-­old Anne of France and his very underprepared, health-­compromised, yet affable heir, the thirteen-­year-­old dauphin Charles, made strenuous efforts to avoid naming an official regent for the boy.57 Louis took ­great care to ensure that his method of governing and po­liti­ cal program would be adhered to by his successor, directing the adolescent dauphin to swear an oath to this effect in September 1482.58 While Louis clearly held fears concerning the capacities of his heir, Anne too was damned seemingly with faint praise by their f­ ather in conversation with his chamberlain and seneschal, Gaston du Lion. Responding to Gaston’s assertion that Anne was the wisest ­woman in the kingdom, Louis famously riposted that he had not said that Anne was “la plus sage, mais dites moins folle que les autres; car de femme sage il n’y en a point au monde” (“the wisest ­woman in the kingdom, but that she was the least foolish of all the ­others; for of wise ­women ­there are none in the world”).59 We should, however, be very circumspect in leaping to the words sexist and misogynist in our appreciations of Louis XI’s many recorded inflammatory utterances. Louis XI was a complex man, marked by a



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fairly perverse, even cruel, sense of humor. He loved to shock, ­either for effect or as part of some par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal strategy aimed at unsettling his adversaries. We should be therefore very cautious in taking any of his incendiary utterances at face value. He knew, and occasionally acknowledged, that his immediate circle of female relatives and foremothers was characterized by wisdom and po­liti­cal acuity.60 Conscious of the potential pitfalls w ­ ere he to name his d ­ aughter regent of France thereby placing her in the full glare of politicking, Louis chose instead to nominate Anne and her husband, Pierre of Beaujeu the young king’s joint governors and tutors, declaring the adolescent Charles VIII the depository of maxima auctoritas entirely in keeping with his grand­father Charles VI’s December 1407 ordinance.61 In Louis’s instructions to his son dated September 20, 1480 at Amboise, he was specific on one par­tic­u­lar point: Charles was to keep his existing advisers and counselors close to him to assist him as he began to rule.62 The dauphin’s closest guardians, counselors, and relatives ­were his elder ­sister Anne and her husband, Pierre of Beaujeu. This meant that Anne could place herself ­behind the scenes to better control the government.63 This is precisely the template established by Anne’s most successful foremothers, most notably, by Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442), in whose h ­ ouse­hold Louis XI had spent his formative years.64 Avoiding a formal regency largely neutralized the po­liti­cal ambitions of his nephew and spare heir Louis II of Orleans. Louis XI was determined to smother Louis II of Orleans’s po­liti­cal ambitions, which is why he had married him to his younger d ­ aughter, the physically compromised and pious Jeanne of France.65 In 1473, on the death of his elder ­daughter Anne’s fiancé Nicolas of Lorraine,66 Louis betrothed her to his trusted and loyal favorite, Pierre of Beaujeu. Reading against the Grain: A Guide for “Machiavellis in Skirts”? By way of Anne’s distinctly female understanding of prudential politics, her Enseignements reveals the potential of female h ­ ouse­holds to become domestic republics of power and influence.67 Encouragingly, t­ here has been a marked shift in early modern po­liti­cal history away from the study of formal institutions and officials t­ oward informal po­liti­cal spheres. Modern po­liti­cal systems have all been produced within an informal po­liti­cal arena alongside government. It has already been shown that w ­ omen acted as conduits and bonds linking male-­office ­bearers and rulers in the premodern era.68 Premodern elite and royal w ­ omen

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such as Anne of France w ­ ere no mere horizontal conduits of support and influence for the benefit of their male relatives and spouses: they ­were po­liti­cal actors in their own right. A successful premodern elite female h ­ ouse­hold was consciously curated by its alpha w ­ oman to enhance her reputation, her influence, and her po­liti­cal effectiveness. Read hastily, Anne of France’s Enseignements is “tout à fait déroutant” (“wholly disconcerting”).69 We should not so readily judge that it is a conventional mirror for a princess ­because this book, “so full of tact, sweetness and humility,” cannot be reconciled with Anne’s undoubted power and influence.70 The Enseignements appears to dictate a series of rigorous recommendations designed to fashion her adolescent d ­ aughter Suzanne into a pious and obedient wife. However, reading it against the grain reveals that Anne does not instruct Suzanne to become a submissive, pious l­ittle ­woman, but rather a princess of spotless reputation, conscious of her antecedents, impervious to slander and gossip, engaged and confident of her self-­worth, po­liti­cally relevant, and a strategic flatterer and dispenser of largesse. Anne grooms Suzanne to be an actor in circles of power and influence, instilling the idea that irreproachable conduct and an unassailable reputation are gendered tools of power and influence. Anne instructs Suzanne on the correct organ­ization and maintenance of a power­ful, po­liti­cally effective, and impeccable royal w ­ oman’s h ­ ouse­hold.71 She also demonstrates how such a h ­ ouse­hold, combined with a spotless reputation, is a gendered template for the acquisition and maintenance of authority, power, and influence. At the core of Anne’s Enseignements is a detailed description of how Suzanne should galvanize a trusted and trustworthy circle of aristocratic w ­ omen around her. They must be tutored and husbanded to second her, deployed strategically by her to attract and retain loyal magnates to the party of their ruling partnership.72 Such orga­nizational skill demanded cultural acuity and social ingenuity as well as the mea­sured deployment of “practical morality and the politics of visibility,”73 a concrete example of Christine de Pizan’s notion of “ juste ypocrisy” (“ just hy­poc­risy”).74 Masquerading as a m ­ other’s mirror for a princess, Anne of France’s Enseignements should be regarded as a revolutionary po­liti­cal text too long absent from the canon of early modern po­liti­cal thought b­ ecause it dovetails with a ­whole tradition of a broader sixteenth-­century praxis of prudential understandings of politics. Suzanne is instructed to “act against all her natu­ral inclination to be honest,” but only to further the greater good of her ­house and her sub-



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jects.75 As a nostrum to mitigate ill feelings occasioned by her de facto authority, power, and influence, Anne crafted her Enseignements conventionally, and so it continues to be regarded mistakenly by some scholars t­ oday. Anne was a highly perceptive, astute, and experienced politician who knew that her adversaries believed that she had risen above her gender, if not her rank. Some still believe that ­there is very ­little feminine assertiveness and po­liti­cal advice to be found in the Anne’s Enseignements,76 but Anne had plenty to say to Suzanne: in the context of early modern polities, in par­tic­u­lar, the domestic was of paramount importance. Moreover, it was the foundation of a premodern and early modern stateswoman’s powerbase. Anne’s Enseignements is a circumspect preparation for a “double life” and a durable po­liti­cal existence, “a guidebook on governance,” for both ­house­hold and state.77 Anne of France’s Bourbon Legacy: An “Escolle de Vertu et Perfection” Anne assumed the tutelage and guardianship of her younger b­ rother, Charles VIII, in August 1483, but his three-­year-­old fiancée, Marguerite of Austria, had already been placed ­under Anne’s guardianship in May 1483.78 In the care of her governess, Madame de Segré, Marguerite was raised as a d ­ aughter of France ­under Anne’s watchful eye from whom she received her education in queenship.79 Accompanying her was sixteen-­year-­old Philippa of Guelders, who had entered Marguerite’s h ­ ouse­hold in Ghent on the death of her f­ ather, Adolf of Guelders, in 1477. Enigmatic, yet po­liti­cally astute, Philippa would marry Anne’s cousin, René II of Lorraine, in 1385.80 Seven-­year-­old Louise of Savoy’s ­mother, Marguerite of Bourbon, died in April 1483, and her ­father, Anne’s ­uncle, Philip, duke of Savoy, promptly dispatched Louise to Anne’s court, whose educative influence on her ­future c­ areer as regent for her son François I would be profound. In 1491, fourteen-­year-­old Anne of Brittany married Charles VIII, which marked the end of his elder ­sister Anne’s official tutelage and guardianship of him.81 From 1494, Anne oversaw the education and well-­being of her ­future son-­ in-­law, Charles de Montpensier, and that of his ­brothers, Louis and François. When six-­year-­old Diane de Poitiers’s ­mother died in 1505, she was sent to Anne’s court, her parents having long been intimate members of the inner royal circle.82 ­These are just the most celebrated of Anne’s pupils: “For the child’s salvation, for the parent’s honor, for the efficacy of government, the stakes w ­ ere

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c­ onsiderable in the education of noble c­ hildren and adolescents.”83 Anne put ­these imperatives into both the theory and practice of educating the young nobles in her care.84 She believed that education lay at the heart of the moral and intellectual development of e­ very prince and princess, the seam of gold that runs through her Enseignements and in her practical strategies for educating the princesses and princes in her care. For Anne, virtuous knowledge was the foundation of any good education.85 Anne embraced her destiny with alacrity, taking her role as unofficial regent and educator to heart. Inspired by both her royal ancestor Blanche and her nearer foremothers, Anne seized her ­po­liti­cal and intellectual inheritance with dedication and enthusiasm.86 She was wholly invested in the mission to educate and guide princes and princesses ­toward divine grace so that they governed well.87 Her educative philosophy was founded on the acquisition of letters and an initiation into courtly life, the fundamentals of which Anne drew from her own practical experience.88 Her prestige as a ­daughter of France lent additional weight to her undertaking. In many ways, her role exemplified a symbolic maternity, which made of her both the protector and the educator of a multitude of royal and princely ­children sent to the court of Charles VIII during his minority. Given her heavy po­liti­cal responsibilities, she did not personally implicate herself in the education of all t­ hese c­ hildren, although she supervised their instruction with considerable care.89 She did, however, pay special attention to ensuring that her younger ­brother was raised in wisdom and in virtue, an education that turned inevitably t­ oward the quest for salvation. She also molded a ­future queen in Marguerite of Austria and produced two other notably cultivated w ­ omen, Louise of Savoy and Philippa of Guelders, who both went on to be dispensers of knowledge, wisdom, virtue, and education in their respective courts and to their own ­children. In welcoming such orphaned ­children as Louise and Philippa to her court, Anne surpassed her role as a ­daughter of France, which was to offer protection and education to young princesses issuing from allied h ­ ouses. Anne’s educative agency obeyed politico-­d iplomatic considerations ­because she was a conduit in concluding or reinforcing alliances with the families of ­these c­ hildren. It also enhanced the prestige of the ­house of Bourbon.90 Brantôme, whose grand­mother had been raised at court with Anne, testifies to this recording that Anne, the king’s guardian, was “toujours accompaignée de ­grand’quantité de dames et de filles qu’elle nourrissoit fort vertueusement et sagement” (“always accompanied by a g­ reat quantity of ladies



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and girls whom she nourished very virtuously and wisely”).91 ­Under Anne’s stewardship, the ­house of Bourbon became a center of excellence sought ­after by French and Eu­ro­pean nobility. Brantôme observes: “n’y a guières heu dames et filles de g­ rand’maison de son temps qui n’ayt appris leçon d’elle, estant allors la maison de Bourbon l’une des grandes et splendides de la chrestientë” (“­there ­were no ladies or girls of any ­great ­house of the time, who had not learnt their lessons from her, the ­house of Bourbon being one of the greatest and most influential in all of Christendom”).92 Power Is a Duty Despite Huizinga’s judgement that fifteenth-­century France was not a very dynamic phase wedged between the High ­Middle Ages and the Re­nais­sance, a series of exceptionally significant politico-­cultural advances occurred in France, of which the genesis of a genealogy of female regents is but one. Like her distinguished thirteenth-­century foremother in both blood and regency, Blanche of Castile, by the end of the fifteenth ­century, Anne of France was omnipresent in France and in Eu­rope. It is claimed that she was respected and consulted like a king.93 She educated the offspring of ­future emperors and princes—­particularly young ­women and girls—­who would be dispatched to play impor­tant roles in Eu­rope in the de­cades that followed. Anne remains an essential player for us to consider in this period, and, like her patron Saint Anne, teaching was one of her primary vocations and perhaps her most durable and influential legacy. The rather cold and imposing bearing of Anne that has survived to us through the work of the master of Moulins, Jean Hey, in the painting Anne of France, Duchesse de Bourbon, Presented by St John the Evangelist, ca. 1492–1493, residing ­today in the Louvre, would seem to reflect the austere, imperious, and dutiful character of the person described by her contemporaries in letters and chronicles. The character she fashioned for herself appears to have accentuated ­these perceptions, and she privileged her royal prestige above all ­else. None of her contemporaries w ­ ere in any doubt as to her lineage and position in French and wider Eu­ro­pean politics. She was a true ­daughter of France, the ­bearer of heavy responsibilities, a ­woman of power and influence to be respected above all ­others—­male or female. She provided the template that enabled her cousin Louise of Savoy to advance the institutionalization of French female regency. Anne of France’s unwavering conviction was that “power is not a plea­sure, but rather a duty.”94

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Notes 1. My paraphrasing. Aubrée David-­Chapy, “Une femme à la tête du royaume, Anne de France et la pratique du pouvoir,” in Thierry Crépin-­Leblond and Monique Chatenet, ed., Anne de France. Art et Pouvoir en 1500 (Paris: Editions A. et J. Picard, 2014), 28. 2. See, for example, Rosalind Brown-­Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of ­Women: Reading beyond Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Rose Rigaud, Les Idées féministes de Christine de Pisan (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973). 3. Such female agency has been most recently explored by David-­Chapy in her monograph, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, inventions d’un pouvoir féminin (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016). 4. Anne de France, Enseignements à sa fille suivis de l’Histoire du siege de Brest, ed. Tatiana Clavier and Eliane Viennot (Saint-­Etienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-­Etienne, 2006), 58–59. All translations are mine u­ nless other­wise stated. 5. See also Fanny Cosandey’s instructive and durable article, “De lance en quenouille. La place de la reine en l’État moderne,” Annales HSS 52 (1997): 799–820. 6. Michael Wolf, “Introduction: Becoming French in Early Modern Eu­rope,” in ­Michael Wolf, ed., Changing Identities in Early Modern France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1. 7. Lindy Grant, Blanche of Castile, Queen of France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 1–4. 8. Sarah Hanley, “Identity Politics and Rulership in France: Female Po­liti­cal Place and the Fraudulent Salic Law in Christine de Pizan and Jean de Montreuil,” in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, 80; Craig Taylor, “The Salic Law, French Queenship, and the Defense of ­Women in the Late M ­ iddle Ages,” French Historical Studies 29, no. 4 (2006): 544–549. 9. My emphasis. 10. Hanley, “Identity Politics and Rulership in France,” 80–81; P. S. Lewis, “War, Pro­ ngland,” Transactions of paganda, and Historiography in Fifteenth ­Century France and E the Royal Historical Society 15 (1965): 12–13 and 13 n.1, 16, 18. 11. Hanley, “Identity Politics and Rulership in France,” 80–81. 12. See Tracy Adams, “Christine de Pizan, Isabeau of Bavaria, and Female Regency,” French Historical Studies 32 (2009): 1–32. 13. Craig Taylor, “The Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French Crown,” French History 15 (2001): 360, 360 n.7 and 8. 14. Taylor, “The Salic Law, French Queenship,” 549. 15. The House of Valois was a ju­nior branch of the direct Capetians and its kings ruled over France from 1328 to 1589. The Capetians ran out of direct male heirs in 1328 with the death of Charles IV. 16. See Fanny Cosandey, “Puissance maternelle et pouvoir politique. La régence des reines mères,” Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire 21 (2005): 1–15. 17. Cosandey, “Puissance maternelle et pouvoir politique,” 1. 18. “Testament de Louis VIII,” June 1225, in the Archives Nationales in Paris, series J 40. The document was established prior to his departure on the Albigensian Crusade, which went on for some twenty years (1209–1229), determined to wipe out the Cathar “her-



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esy” in southern France. Louis VIII, le Lion, led the largest contingent of arms ever to have been taken up against the Cathars. He set off in June 1226 and died of dysentery in Auvergne in November of the same year, having ­earlier returned to Paris. In accordance with his 1225 testament, the “tutelle and bail” (“the education and guardianship”) of their surviving c­ hildren was granted solely to Queen Blanche, with a council of her own choosing to assist her in this significant responsibility. The term “regency” was not yet in use. 19. Les Grandes chroniques de France, ed. Jules Viard, 10 vols. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1920–1953), 8:34–35. 20. Grant, Blanche of Castile, 1. 21. See Jean Juvénal des Ursins’s allocution in Michel Pintoin, Chronique du Religieux de Saint-­Denys, ed. Louis Bellaguet, 3 vols. (Paris: Centre du Comité des travaux scientifiques et historiques, 1994), and Tracy Adams, Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014), 114–116, 124. 22. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, 5:354. Cited by Grant, Blanche of Castile, 1. 23. See Zita Rohr, Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442) F ­ amily and Power: The Reverse of the Tapestry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3–4. See also the collected essays in Heather J. Tanner, ed., Medieval Elite ­Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400: Moving beyond the Exceptionalist Debate (New York: Palgrave, 2019). 24. See Zita Rohr, “Rocking the Cradle and Ruling the World: Queens’ House­holds in Late Medieval and Early Modern Aragon and France,” in Royal and Elite House­holds in Medieval and Early Modern Eu­rope: More than Just a C ­ astle, ed. Theresa Earenfight (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 309–337. 25. My emphasis. Grant, Blanche of Castile, 3. 26. See Theresa Earenfight, “Without the Persona of the Prince: Kings, Queens and the Idea of Monarchy in Late Medieval Eu­rope,” Gender and History 19, no. 1 (2007): 1–21. See also Rohr, Yolande of Aragon, 2–4. 27. See Zita Rohr, “Playing the Catalan: The Rise of the Chess-­Queen; Queenship and Po­liti­cal Motherhood in Late Medieval Aragon and France,” in Virtuous or Villainess? The Image of the Royal M ­ other from the Early Medieval to the Early Modern Era, ed. Carey Fleiner and Elena Woodacre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 178–182; and Núria Silleras-­Fernández, “Widowhood and Deception: Ambiguities of Queenship in Late Medieval Crown of Aragon,” in Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds and Deceits (1300–1650), ed. Mark Crane, Richard Raiswell, and Margaret Reeves (Toronto: Centre for Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies, 2004), 185–207. 28. Charles V’s detailed and explicit 1374 ordinance naming his queen, guardian, and tutor of his son, the dauphin Charles, and his eldest b­ rother, Louis I, duke of Anjou in control of the affairs of state and the common good of his kingdom. Pierre Dupuy, Traité de la majorité de nos Rois et des Regences du Royaume (Paris: chez la Vve M. Du Puis et E. Martin, 1655), 155–161. 29. See Dupuy, Traité de la majorité de nos Rois, 161–167, for his explicit instructions regarding the duke of Anjou’s responsibilities as a potential regent for Charles VI in his minority and promises made and oaths sworn by Louis of Anjou to uphold the office of regent in accordance with his b­ rother Charles V’s instructions and wishes. 30. See Rohr, Yolande of Aragon, 55–56, 64.

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31. See Pintoin, Chronique du religieux de Saint-­Denys, 2:17–23. 32. See Jean Froissart, Œuvres de Froissart. Chroniques, ed. Joseph-­Marie-­Bruno-­ Constantin Kervyn de Lettenhove, 26 vols. (Osnabrück, Germany: Biblio Verlag, 1967), 10:3, who writes that at the time of her marriage as a fourteen-­year-­old in 1385: “[L]a jeusne fille de Baviere, nonobstant que de sa nature elle estoit propre et pourveue de sens et de doctrine mais point de françois elle ne sçavoit” (“the young girl from Bavaria, although clean or upright and possessing acuity and knowledge, did not know any French”). See also Froissart, Chroniques, 14, where the chronicler gives long and detailed descriptions and reports of gift-­g iving and receiving, quoting the thanks and acknowledgement given by Charles VI to his bourgeois subjects: “Grant merchy, respond le roy, bonnes gens, ilz sont biaulx et riches” (“Many thanks, responds the king, good p­ eople, t­ hese are beautiful and rich”) (10:18–19). At a similar gift-­g iving event on the same day, this time in the presence of Isabeau, no thanks are recorded by the usually meticulous chronicler (10:19). The bourgeois gift-­g ivers then move on from the queen to pre­sent their gifts to the newly arrived duchess of Touraine, Isabeau’s bilingual cousin, and freshly minted sister-in law, Valentina Visconti who on receiving her pre­sents Froissart recounts that: “Le pre­sent resjoÿ grandement la duchesse de Thourainne, et ce fut raison, car il estoit tres riche et bel, et remerchia grandement et sagement ceulx qui presente l’avoient et la bonne ville de Paris par qui le prouffit venoit” (“The pre­sent filled the Duchess of Touraine with joy, which was right, for it was rich and beautiful, and she thanked grandly and wisely t­ hose who had presented it and the good city of Paris from which it came”) (10:20). Now, I do not for one moment wish to suggest that Isabeau was unaware of the protocol involved in receiving and acknowledging gifts from her Pa­ri­sian subjects on the occasion of her coronation and first ceremonial entry into Paris. Rather, that her apparent silence (and indeed that of her chronicler Froissart) would seem to point to a lack of fluency in French at least from the time of her arrival in 1385 to her coronation in 1389. Moreover, ­there is nothing to suggest that Isabeau was a particularly skilled orator, or even spoke much publicly, at any point in her c­ areer. This appears to be at odds with her more fluent cousin Valentina, particularly around the time of her husband, Louis of Orleans’s assassination at the instigation of the duke of Burgundy in 1407 in her subsequent appeals for an impartial hearing into the crime in 1408. See Pintoin, Chronique du religieux de Saint-­Denys, 2:749–753. 33. Zita Rohr, “Lessons for my ­Daughter: Self-­fashioning Stateswomanship in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon,” Self-­fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Laura Delbrugge (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Press, 2015), 49, 51–52, 65–71. See also Adams, “Christine de Pizan, Isabeau of Bavaria, and Female Regency,” 6–14. Adams claims a “first po­liti­cal phase” for Isabeau during a period when she appears to have mediated primarily in situations that weighed on her Bavarian natal ­house. During this phase, Isabeau sought a Florentine alliance with France against her cousin (and sister-­in-­law from 1389) Valentina’s ­father, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, lord, ­later duke of Milan from 1395, who had overthrown her grand­father Barnabò Visconti in 1385. For a detailed and alternative point of view see Marcel Thibault, Isabeau de Bavière, reine de France. La Jeunesse (1370–1405) (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1903), especially chapter 4, “Rôle diplomatique d’Isabeau,” 315–371. 34. Dupuy, Traité de la majorité de nos Rois, 161–168, 168–178, 178–181, 181–200.



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35. The document establishing the Treaty of Paris dated January 14, 1402 is very clear on this point. The opening statement reads: “Ysabel, par la grâce de Dieu royne de France, Loys, par celle mesme grâce Roy de Jhérusalem et de Sicile, duc d’Anjou et conte du Maine, Jehan duc de Berry ­etc.” (“Isabel, by the grace of God queen of France, Louis, by the same grace King of Jerusalem and Sicily, Duke of Anjou and Count of Maine, Jean Duke of Berry ­etc.”). Along the fold of the same document a further statement reads: “Par l’ordenance et commandement de la Royne, du Roy de Jhérusalem et de Sicile, et de nosseigneurs les ducs de Berry et de Bourbon” (“By order and command of the Queen, the King of Jerusalem and Sicily, and our lords the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon”). Zita Rohr, “The Practice of Po­liti­cal Motherhood in Late Medieval France: Yolande of Aragon, Bonne-­Mère of France,” in Image, Perception and Monarchy in Medieval and Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Sean McGlynn and Elena Woodacre (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 34–35; Thibault, Isabeau de Bavière, 301–305; and Louis Douët-­d ’Arcq, Choix des pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI. 2 vols (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1863), 1:220–226. Both cited by Rohr. See also Adams, The Life and Afterlife, 15–16. 36. Douët-­d ’Arcq, Choix des pièces, 1:227–229. See also Adams, The Life and Afterlife, 16–17. 37. Thibault, Isabeau de Bavière, 307. 38. Adams, The Life and Afterlife, 17. See also Douët-­d ’Arcq, Choix des pieces, 1:227–239. 39. See Pintoin, who rec­ords the early episodes of madness endured by Charles and his subjects. Chronique du religieux de Saint-­Denys RSD, 1:16–23; 1:46–47; 1:402–409; 1:684–687. 40. See Rachel Gibbons, “Isabeau de Bavière: reine de France ou ‘lieutenant-­général’ du royaume?” in Femmes de pouvoir, femmes politiques durant les derniers siècles du Moyen Age et au cours de la première Re­nais­sance, ed. Eric Bousmar, Jonathan Dumont, Alain Marchandisse, and Bertrand Schnerb (Brussels, Belgium: Editions De Boeck Université, 2012), 101–112, and, in En­glish, “Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France: Queenship and Po­liti­ cal Authority as ‘Lieutenante-­Générale’ of the Realm,” in Queenship, Gender, and Reputation in the Medieval and Early Modern West, 1060–1600, ed. Zita Eva Rohr and Lisa Benz (Basel, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 143–160. 41. In the Archives Nationales in Paris, series J 402, pièce 16. Cited by Thibault, Isabeau de Bavière, 309. 42. Gibbons, “Isabeau of Bavaria,” 150. 43. Gibbons, “Isabeau of Bavaria,” 150. 44. See also Thibault, Isabeau de Bavière, 373–378. 45. Cosandey, “De Lance en quenouille,” 804. 46. Cosandey, “De Lance en quenouille,” 804–805. For the text of the 1407 ordinance see François André Isambert, Decrusy, and Alphonse-­Honoré Taillandier, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 7:153–157. 47. See Isambert, Decrusy, and Taillandier, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1784, 29 vols. (Paris, 1829), 7:157. 48. Charles VI published letters dated January 7, 1407/8 regarding the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of his trea­sury and judiciary, which defined the number and duties of ­these respective

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officers. Isambert, Decrusy, and Taillandier, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 157–167. 49. His intention was to eliminate the old-­style regency practice with a regent that was all power­f ul during the minority of the king. Cosandey, “De Lance en quenouille,” 805–806. 50. Isambert, Decrusy, and Taillandier, Recueil général des anciennes lois francaises, 7:154–155, cited by Cosandey, “De Lance en quenouille,” 808. 51. See Jean Gerson’s 1405 sermon, Vivat rex for his thoughts on this concept. Gerson, Vivat rex, Jean Gerson, Œuvres completes, Œuvres complètes, ed. Palémon Glorieux. 10 vols. (Paris: Tournai, 1960–1973), 7:2, 1131–1185. 52. Gerson, Vivat rex, Jean Gerson, Œuvres complètes, 7:2, 1131–1185. 53. Except in the notable case of Blanche of Castile, see above, especially the account recorded in Les Grandes Chroniques, 8:34–35. 54. Cosandey, “De Lance en quenouille,” 808. 55. Cosandey, “De Lance en quenouille,” 807. 56. Cosandey, “De Lance en quenouille,” 814. 57. The soon-­to-­be-­k ing Charles l’Affable, had already entered his ­fourteenth year and was ­really no longer in his minority. However, con­temporary accounts point to the fact that he was po­liti­cally vulnerable, suffered fragile health, and was very unready to rule. 58. “Lettres royales contenant des Instructions données par le roi de France Louis XI, peu avant sa mort, à son fils, depuis Charles VII, sur l’administration du royaume,” in Les Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, ed. Denis-­Francois Secousse, et al., 21 vols. (Paris: L’Imprimerie nationale, 1723–1849), 19:56–60. The count of Beaujeu, Pierre, is the third signatory to this document, delivered at Amboise on September 21, 1482. The editor notes that t­ hese letters w ­ ere the first wherein the dauphin is named as being pre­ sent. See Les Ordonnances des rois de France, 19:60. 59. Or so it is reported in a history of France first published in 1755, Villaret and ­Garnier, Histoire de France, depuis l’établissement de la Monarchie, 19: 368–369. 60. Rohr, “Rocking the Cradle,” 326 and 326 n. 84. 61. Crouzet, “Préface,” to David-­Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, inventions d’un pouvoir féminin, 13; and David-­Chapy in the same volume, 65. 62. See note 16 above regarding Louis VIII’s provisions for Blanche’s regency. See also Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires de Philippe de Commynes, ed. Emilie Dupont, 3 vols. (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1840–1847), 2:252–256. 63. Commynes, Mémoires de Philippe Commynes, 2:252–256. While still in the cradle, in 1461 Anne was engaged to her thirteen-­year-­old cousin, Nicolas of Lorraine, grand­son of René I of Anjou. On the death of Nicolas in 1473, twelve-­year-­old Anne was betrothed to Pierre of Beaujeu who was twenty-­three years her se­nior. 64. Cf. Rohr, “Lessons for My D ­ aughter;” and, by the same author, Yolande of Aragon, and, “Rocking the Cradle.” 65. Louis of Orleans, Anne’s cousin, eventually Louis XII of France, was, from Louis XI’s point of view, difficult, ambitious, and troublesome and therefore needed to be neutralized po­liti­cally (and maritally).



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66. Cf. Preuve 321, “Lettre aux habitants de Nogent-­sur-­Seine,” Paris, October 7, 1467, Louis XI, Lettres de Louis XI, roi de France, publiées d’après les originaux e­ tc, ed. Joseph Vaeson and Etienne Charavay, 11 vols. (Paris: H. Loones, 1883–1909), 5:173–174. 67. Cf. Preuve 321, “Lettre aux habitants de Nogent-­sur-­Seine,” Paris, October 7, 1467, Louis XI, Lettres de Louis XI, roi de France, publiées d’après les originaux e­ tc, ed. Joseph Vaeson and Etienne Charavay, 11 vols. (Paris: H. Loones, 1883–1909), 5:173–174. 68. Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Stanley Chojnacki, ­Women and Men in Re­nais­sance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 69. Eliane Viennot, “Anne de France (1461–1522),” http:​/­cahiersducelec​.­univ​-­st​-­etienne​ .­f r​/­i ndex​ .­p hp​ ?­o ption​ = ­c om ​ _­c ontent&view ​ = ­a rticle&id ​ = ­2 6%3Acahiers​ -­d u​ -­c elec​-­n d​ -­3&Itemid​=­2, accessed November 6, 2018. 70. Viennot, “Anne de France (1461–1520)”; Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Oeuvres completes, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, 11 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1864–1882), 8:99–105. 71. Anne de France, Enseignements, 71–79; 80–88. 72. Anne de France, Enseignements, 80–81; Sharon L. Jansen, Anne of France: Lessons for My D ­ aughter (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 59–61. 73. Brown-­Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of ­Women, 193–206. 74. See Rohr, “Rocking the Cradle”; and Adams, “Appearing Virtuous,” for discussions of juste ypocrisie. See also Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 200–203. 75. Anne de France, Enseignements, 47; Jansen, Anne of France: Lessons for My ­Daughter, 76. 76. Constance Jordan, Re­nais­sance Feminism: Literary Texts and Po­liti­cal Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; Jansen, Anne of France: Lessons for My D ­ aughter, 77. 77. Jansen, Anne of France: Lessons for My D ­ aughter, 77. 78. Florence Trombert, “Une Reine de quatre ans à la cour de France: Marguerite d’Autriche, 1484–1485,” in Autour de Marguerite d’Écosse. Reines, princesses et dames du XVe siècle, ed. Geneviève and Philippe Contamine (Paris: Champion, 1999), 123–162. 79. Élodie Lequain, “La maison de Bourbon, ‘escolle de vertu et de perfection’ Anne de France, Suzanne de Bourbon et Pierre Martin,” Médiévales 48 (2005): 40. Lequain cites Pierre Martin, who dedicated his Traité de l’érudition et de l’enseignement des enfants des nobles to Suzanne of Bourbon in 1517. The expression appears in his text (Bibliothèque de Sainte-­ Geneviève ms. 22221, fols. 2–72). Also cited by David-­Chapy, Anne de France, 573 n. 125. 80. Her personal motto was “Ne mi toques, il point” (“Do not strike me, it ­will sting”). See Tranié, “Philippe de Gueldre” (1465–1447),” and, by the same author, “Un exemple d’articulation du féminin et du masculin à travers le mécénat.” 81. Paul Pélicier, Essai sur le gouvernement de la Dame de Beaujeu 1483–1491 (Chartres, France: Imprimerie Edouard Garnier, 1882), 198–215. 82. Ivan Cloulas, Diane de Poitiers (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 12–13. 83. Lequain, “La Maison de Bourbon, ‘escolle de vertu et de perfection,’ ” 44. 84. See Lequain, “La Maison de Bourbon, ‘escolle de vertu et de perfection,’ ”44; and Rohr, “Rocking the Cradle.”

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85. David-­Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, 572. 86. David-­Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, 573. 87. David-­Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, 573. 88. David-­Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, 574. 89. David-­Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, 574. 90. David-­Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, 578. 91. Brantôme, Œuvres compètes, 8:104. 92. Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, 8:105. 93. Teyssot, “Anne de France,” 24. 94. Teyssot, “Anne de France,” 23.

​C on c lus i on

French Historians in Search of the ­Historiographical Identity of the French Fifteenth ­Century Franck Collard (translated by Tracy Adams)

Historians’ use of the notion of “­century” reminds us of what anthropologists call acting without belief: they do not seriously believe that history unrolls in hundred-­year increments. —­Patrick Boucheron (2014)

In scholarship written in French, the concept of “­century” is common among art historians and lit­er­a­ture specialists, who apply it to the names of journals or use it to classify scholars.1 Specialists of sixteenth-­century French lit­er­a­ture publish articles in the Nouvelle revue du XVIe siècle,2 a journal called Dix-­septième siècle attracts submissions from specialists in the lit­er­a­ture of that ­century,3 and scholars of Marivaux or Beaumarchais are “dix-­huitièmistes.” But if scholars working on the lit­er­a­ture of the time of Christine de Pizan, François Villon, or the ­Grands Rhétoriqueurs are routinely referred to as “quinzièmistes,” and if art historical studies specifically take the fifteenth ­century—­a period understood, by the way, to be unjustly underappreciated4—as a frame of reference, the notion of ­century enjoys ­little currency among historians, who are inclined to think of themselves as “medievalists,” or, sometimes, “early modernists,” without further precision.5 In general, historians tend not to designate themselves according to the c­ entury they study, with the exception of twentieth-­century specialists, who apply the concept to their major journal, founded in the 1980s, the title of which announces its discipline for the express purpose of distinguishing it from 235

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literary journals: Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire.6 No such equivalent exists for ­earlier centuries or at least for the medieval centuries. Does this mean that, beyond differences in the conventions of the disciplines, the French fifteenth c­ entury lacks a clear identity as a historical period in the eyes of its specialists? That dif­fer­ent from its Italian counterpart the Quattrocento, which refers primarily but not exclusively to art and culture, the French fifteenth ­century does not constitute a meaningful temporal framework for historical thought?7 If so, how do we qualify this supposed lack of identity? Is the prob­lem that no coherent vision of the period exists? Or that it lacks a stable set of bound­aries? Or a sufficiently precise set of defining features? Is the fifteenth c­ entury in French history simply a meaningless chronological marker, a made-up framework that inhibits rather than enhances our understanding of the time? The following remarks are intended to be neither comprehensive nor definitive. They arise out of a more general reflection on periodization that is by no means new—­Jacques Le Goff was already exploring the subject several de­cades ago—­but that has recently under­gone a revival (see Le Goff’s final work8) and that considers the fraught question of how best to divide up historical periods. The fifteenth ­century occupies a central place in ­these debates b­ ecause, from an academic perspective, it lies at a crucial boundary, between the uppermost reaches of the ­Middle Ages and the lowest limits of the modern era. In what follows, I examine the historiographical status of the fifteenth c­ entury, relying on several studies from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­first centuries. The goal is to review the meanings that have been given to this c­ entury over the years and to consider to what degree they remain useful. The Fifteenth ­Century during the Fifteenth ­Century Before turning to this brief overview, it ­will be useful to examine some of the ways in which contemporaries understood the fifteenth ­century, keeping in mind that, defined as a period of one hundred years, the “siècle” (­century) was a concept unknown to historians before the sixteenth ­century. Moreover, this concept was a­ dopted within the discipline of history to divide up periods (as an “opérateur de périodisation,” as Patrick Boucheron put it9) only from the nineteenth ­century on. Its specific purpose was to classify ­those periods without imposing the name of a hero or monarch on them, as had been the common practice throughout the Old Regime.10 Except for using the word in the gen-

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eral sense of “period,” contemporaries of Joan of Arc and Anne of France, including chroniclers, did not express their sense of belonging to their own age in terms of a numbered c­ entury. To do so would have seemed too abstract and disembodied. They thought instead in terms of reigns—­that is, in physical, concrete terms. The Norman historian Thomas Basin, whose life spanned most of the fifteenth ­century (1412–1491) and whose historical corpus covers the years 1407–1483, identified the period with Charles VII, as a new golden age that was quickly mythologized ­after the king’s death in 1461. This period itself had succeeded the “good time of Monseigneur Saint Louis,” the common name for the thirteenth ­century, which is still called the “­Century of St. Louis” in some recent historiographies.11 The ancients spoke of the “­Century of Augustus” and Voltaire of the “­Century of Louis XIV” in the same way. Our notion of ­century is far removed from the m ­ ental categories of p­ eople of e­ arlier ages whose method of dividing historical time was not based on markers like round numbers—­ hundreds or thousands—­except in the case of sacred history. The proof is that the idea of a special commemoration of the baptism of Clovis one thousand years ­after this foundational episode of the French royalty never occurred to contemporaries of Charles VIII or Louis XII.12 In the minds of ­those living during the fifteenth ­century, the word “­century” simply meant a long stretch of time. It did not signify a period meaningful in terms of what had happened during its years. The texts of the famous Journal des Etats généraux de 1484 by Jean Masselin use the Latin word “saeculum” (from which the French took “siècle,” near equivalent of the En­glish “­century”) at times to emphasize the length of a period of tribulation, and, more rarely, the opposite, the duration of a happy period.13 ­These texts cast a somber backward glance at the preceding de­cades, b­ ecause of the war with the En­glish and the war between the Armagnacs and Burgundians, as well as the war between the g­ reat lords of the kingdom and the king. Claude Seyssel, too, discusses the dismal ­earlier days of the fifteenth ­century in his Louenges du roy Loys XII. But his point is to better emphasize the glory of Louis XII. The idea of characterizing the period preceding the ascension of this king in terms of a c­ entury ­running from roughly 1400 to 1500 never would have occurred to him. Seyssel thinks rather in terms of monarchical reigns that, however worthy, did not equal that of Louis XII, “­Father of the P ­ eople.” Moreover, Seyssel includes Louis XII’s three pre­de­ces­ sors in his chronicle, not ­because he wants to highlight their achievements but ­because readers would have remembered them and therefore would have compared the brilliance of the reigning king with the darkness of his pre­de­ces­sors.14

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Philip de Commynes, writing in the second-­to-­last de­cade of the fifteenth c­ entury also did not have any interest in characterizing the fifteenth ­century. His interest lay rather in the conduct and morals of the power­ful. And yet, it is impor­tant to nuance this apparent indifference to the concept of ­century as a way of thinking about time. One aspect in par­tic­u­lar should be taken into account: the cultural shifts of the late fifteenth c­ entury which generated what Boucheron has called a “shared contemporaneity” within a few restricted circles.15 Italian Humanists from the time of Petrarch had tended to oppose their own age of rebirth and renewal to the dark centuries that had preceded them.16 Prob­ably influenced by t­hese Humanists, representatives of a “second French Humanism” like Guillaume Fichet or Robert Gaguin began to praise their own era—to call it their own ­century would be ­going too far—as seeing the “restitutio latinitatis” (“the restoration of Latin letters”), the rise of the “studia humanitatis” (“Humanist studies”), and the invention of the “ars artificialiter scribendi” (“the art of artificial writing,” i.e. printing), which had arrived just in time to help spread Humanist thought and aesthetics. Fichet, in a letter to Gaguin of 1472 celebrating the printing press, which appeared in a Humanist volume published by the Sorbonne University Press, opposes the past ­century to the pre­sent one. In his mind, this new c­ entury clearly begins in the ­middle of the fifteenth c­ entury.17 Still, he uses the Latin word “aetas” (“age”) rather than “saeculum.” His correspondent and disciple Gaguin revives the same idea some twenty years ­later. But h ­ ere Gaguin uses the word “saeculum”: (“aetatis secula” [“the ­century”]) during which he lives is wonderful.18 However, it is impor­tant to note that his euphoria is not total. In 1491, he complains that ­because of scholasticism, Latin inelegance has endured for 250 years, that is, since approximately the m ­ iddle of the thirteenth c­ entury.19 Neither Fichet nor Gaguin, then, designate a French Quattrocento as a period of literary flowering corresponding to the bound­aries of the ­century. The latter carefully avoids characterizing the preceding “dark ages” as a period of a thousand years, as Petrarch had done, to better highlight the ­great centuries of French intellectual diffusion. Still, he misses the chance to construct a discrete fifteenth ­century marked by the rebirth of Belles Lettres, a rebirth that he believes to have been late and slow. And yet, such a construction would have been pos­si­ble. As of the 1360s, as Franco Simone has shown,20 a first French Humanism blossomed although it was prevented by the war between the Armagnacs and Burgundians and the massacres of 1418 from becoming a “movement” analogous to the one developing in Italy at the same moment.21 Fichet and Gaguin,

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however, ­either pretended to ignore or truly did not know of their pre­de­ces­sors Gonthier and Pierre Col, Jean de Montreuil, Laurent de Premierfait, or Nicolas de Clamanges,22 dating the beginning of the movement to the second half of the fifteenth c­ entury. In this way, they assumed for themselves the flattering role of pioneers. However, the price was a certain dependence on the Italian concept of centuries. This dependence has in fact been relativized to an extent by specialists over the past twenty years, but the notion of a weak first French Humanism destroyed by the conflicts of the 1410–1420s remains.23 To create continuity, then, the French fifteenth c­ entury squandered its first precocious chance to come into being. What came next? The Invention of the French Fifteenth ­Century The historiographical categories still current ­today w ­ ere formulated during the nineteenth c­ entury. Sixteenth-­century Humanists, led by Guillaume Budé, had denigrated ­earlier times, relegating them to the trash heap of history and bringing the long, dark millennium to a close with the ascension of King François I.24 ­Little by ­little the repugnant and contemptible ­Middle Ages became an academic period, the dictionary of the “Académie française” giving it an in­ter­est­ing definition in its 1798 edition: it ­stopped the period at the fifteenth ­century, ­century of the “rebirth of Belles Lettres.” In this context, the ­century occupied an ambiguous position, twilight of one era, dawn of another. It is impor­tant to note, however, that the designation did not apply uniquely to France but to the West more generally. For the academicians, ­after all, the Re­nais­sance took place in Italy during that c­ entury, not in the rustic kingdom of the Valois. Developed in the nineteenth ­century out of the areas of history and literary studies,25 medieval studies assigned a par­tic­u­lar coherence, even an essence, to the fifteenth ­century. This was ­because medieval studies emphasized language—­ even if “moyen français” (“­Middle French”) continues beyond that ­century—​ ­and literary aesthetics. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on December 9, 1885, Gaston Paris treated his topic, the poetry of the fifteenth ­century, as something possessing a soul or a spirit.26 In addition, medievalism flourished during t­ hese years (think for example of Quentin Durward or Notre-­ Dame de Paris), with visual or architectural aesthetics drawing on the ­Middle Ages for their strongest inspiration, as Christian Amalvi has shown.27 It would seem that their obsession with French national genius (“génie national”) and the steps of its creation would have led nineteenth-­century scholars

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to reflect on the French fifteenth c­ entury qua c­ entury, but historians of the savant Gaston Paris’s time do not approach the issue in this way. The many histories of France produced at the time had some trou­ble thinking through a period that presented such a stark contrast with their major preoccupations, that is, the construction of the centralized state along with the birth of the nation. In the second volume of his Histoire de France racontée à [ses] petits enfants, which first appeared in 1873, François Guizot approaches his material through the lenses of royalty and warrior culture. First, he discusses the Hundred Years War in chapters 23 and 24 (1380–1461), then the Italian Wars in chapters 26 and 27 (1483–1515). The dividing chapter (25) he devotes to Louis XI. We find no characterization of the fifteenth ­century as such. On the other hand, the historian clearly outlines one in his Histoire de la civilisation en Eu­rope (1828), applying the concept to France in par­tic­u­lar: “it was characteristic of [the fifteenth ­century] that it had fi­nally to create something that had not ­really existed ­until then, that is, ­peoples and governments.”28 No such vision is to be found in the work of national history that most influenced the nineteenth c­ entury, that of Jules Michelet. Michelet composed this work over several de­cades and, in the case of some volumes, published them as separate works. His famous book on Joan of Arc was published in 1853 a­ fter originally appearing as a chapter in volume 5 of the Histoire de France, published in 1841. Michelet followed volume 5 with a sixth volume, devoted to the reign of Louis XI and published in 1844. With that he set his proj­ect aside for about ten years, returning to it in 1854 with volume 7, which dealt with the Re­nais­ sance. Scholars of Michelet, beginning with Jacques le Goff,29 have demonstrated that the interruption in his writing was accompanied by a shift in his once-­ positive view of the ­Middle Ages, which he had regarded as the childhood of the French nation, powerfully embodied in the Maid. We see this in his long introduction to volume 7, where he argues that the last three centuries of the ­Middle Ages (1300–1500) had in some sense sterilized the national genius, and he paints the fifteenth ­century, like the previous one (which ­will become the age of witchcraft), with the dull colors of iron and lead.30 He gives the ­Middle Ages over all a personality, one that is entirely negative. As for the fifteenth ­century in par­tic­u­lar, this is when the shadows of witchcraft darken; it is a time of somber public spirit, when prosaic platitude triumphs over Molinet. The old Gothic world cannot manage to dis­appear for good, its agony prolonged, and even the fruits of innovation like the printing press are initially put to the ser­ vice of the old scholasticism and the worst superstitions (the Hammer of Witches

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appeared in print as soon as it was written). In fact, “it is the character of this ­century that the best t­ hings do it damage,” a time of trou­ble, grey tones, false gaiety, yawning, fits of dark insanity, he writes.31 According to Michelet, possibly inspired by Charles of Orleans whose poetry makes the period into a time of sorrow and suffering, the work that best captures the c­ entury in its entirety is the Farce de Pathelin, a mirror of the decline of the nobility and the vulgar mixing of the masses, the bourgeoisie and the p­ eople.32 At the death of Louis XI, with which volume 7 begins, Michelet writes that no one could have believed that renewal was so close. His fifteenth ­century, then, which closes with the end of the ­bitter reign of Louis XI, has an identity, a mood, which is the inverse of the glorious period to come. The fifteenth c­ entury is an outlier, a sterile period, having nipped in the bud hopeful promises like the one offered by the appearance of the Maid, obstructed the birth of a new era, and, one might assume, “downgraded” France. In many ways, this declinist vision inspired Huizinga’s famous work, published in 1919 in the original Dutch and interested above all in sensations, ideas, forms, emotions.33 Was this vision shared by contemporaries and admirers of Michelet? Henri Martin’s Histoire de France reveals no such division into centuries. His fifteenth ­century straddles the work’s third part, devoted to France of the ­Middle Ages, and the fourth, which deals with Re­nais­sance France.34 Oddly, the author chooses 1456 for the line of demarcation between the two periods, and his perspective is principally military and monarchical. Touching on the wars with Burgundy, the unofficial regency of Anne of France, and the Italian Wars, he approaches the second part of the ­century from a “cultural” perspective, as we would say ­today, explaining that from that point on, the urge to civilize arose no longer from within the kingdom, as it had during the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, but from the outside. It came in par­tic­u­lar from Italy, itself enriched by Greek culture, which he sees as a consequence of the immigration of Byzantine intellectuals driven out by the Turks. France temporarily lost its initiative. But Martin is not as pessimistic as Michelet. His fifteenth c­ entury is not as calamitous as that of his colleague. The ­century also does not receive a clear treatment in the famous Histoire de France edited by Ernst Lavisse. Charles Petit-­Dutaillis’s narrative, written in 1902, runs from 1422 to 1492. The volume devoted to the fifteenth c­ entury (eighth in the original edition) accords the period ­limited impact on the ­future and gives it arbitrary bound­aries (it begins with a new reign and concludes with an extranational event) and ­little that is worthy of notice. The author gives the volume

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neither introduction nor conclusion, offering no general observations about the seventy years covered within. The Modern Fifteenth ­Century The vogue for large histories of France edited by impor­tant historians returned in the 1980s, a­ fter a period during which the genre had been strongly challenged ­because of its traditional framework: the nation along with traditional periodization, including division according to ­century and the propensity to attribute t­ hese periods with souls, had been vigorously questioned. Some examples ­will demonstrate the fate reserved for the fifteenth ­century in ­these new works. This fate is quite varied. The c­ entury is sometimes given no significance at all (in the sense that it is attributed no overall impact), but is at times recognized as a period impor­tant in itself. Before considering t­ hese examples, however, it w ­ ill be useful to examine the only work of history to take the fifteenth ­century as its specific object of study. It was composed not by an academic but by prolific author Emmanuel Bourassin, who has written widely on the M ­ iddle Ages as well as the modern era. His Pour comprendre le XVe siècle, which appeared in 1989 with Tallandier and which represents the companion work to Pour comprendre le siècle de la Re­nais­sance, which appeared the following year, carves out a period that begins with one crisis of royal health, the first episode of madness of King Charles VI in 1392, and ends with another, the fatal head injury of Charles VIII at the château of Amboise on April 7, 1498. Nonetheless, despite its title, the book does not ­really offer a global reading of the time or tools for understanding it. Alternating narratives of the reigns and thematic descriptions, the author concludes that the ­century u ­ nder discussion falls into two contrasting halves, one of desolation and calamity, the other of growth and prosperity. The perspective remains somewhat teleological, one of the “dawn of modern times,” a “tormented daybreak with signs forecasting a new spirit hidden beneath old forms,” as he writes, imitating Huizinga, in the introduction to the work.35 The medieval volume of the Histoire de France which appeared with Hachette in 1987 was entrusted to Georges Duby. Although he had e­ arlier been interested in Joan of Arc, and especially in her trial,36 the ­great specialist of the central M ­ iddle Ages leaves out the end of the period almost entirely. He therefore has practically nothing to offer on the fifteenth ­century, even though he makes use of the concept of centuries, with two of his chapters, “Thirteenth

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­Century” and the “­Fourteenth ­Century,” devoted to the seeds of the nation and the state. The fifteenth ­century receives a brief overview in one section called “La Pucelle d’Orléans,” but Duby does not extend beyond 1460.37 It is clear that this c­ entury does not interest the historian of the Mâconnais. To Emmanuel Le Roy-­Ladurie falls the task of treating the second half of the ­century in the series’ second volume, which extends to 1610. Jacques Le Goff, too, directed a Histoire de la France. L’Etat et les pouvoirs, which appeared in 1989. He isolates the fifteenth ­century even less, approaching it, as I noted above, as a continuum reaching far beyond 1500. For him, a break at the end of the fifteenth ­century is highly problematic, except in the sense that such a break represents an impor­tant ele­ment in its po­liti­cal context, that is, as the end of the ­great principalities. He cordons off the half-­century ­running from 1380 to 1431 but gives no further dates. He distinguishes a period of difficulties (from the ascension of Charles VI to the burning of the Maid in Rouen), then a period during which the monarchical state affirmed itself. He then reflects on the genesis of the nation. Seeing both the twilight of one era and the dawn of another, the g­ reat medievalist nonetheless does not follow the declinist vision of Huizinga who had described the ­century as a fading autumn38 in a state of morbid decomposition. For Le Goff, this decomposition was fruitful. This almost contradictory hybridity clearly seems to characterize the period, whose bound­aries he never ­really draws.39 During t­ hese same years, Jean Favier too devoted himself to writing such a history, taking over the second volume of Histoire de France, entitled Le temps des principautés, of a multiple-­volume work.40 Eminent specialist of the fifteenth c­ entury, of its greatest figures (Villon, Louis XI, Cauchon), and of Paris of the time,41 he chose a long chronology (1392–1515) divided up by reigns (1422, 1460) without searching the “génie” of the c­ entury. Philippe Contamine made a greater effort to define the writing of French history in the Histoire politique de la France, published by Seuil in 2002. For him, as for Le Goff, the fifteenth ­century is the time of the “fragmentation of the four more or less autonomous and coherent power­ful territorial entities.”42 It is the time of the end of the principalities, an idea that he takes up in the introduction to a colloquium entitled Noblesse et États princiers en Italie et en France au XVe siècle, published in 2009.43 And yet, at the same time, this c­ entury was also a high point for principalities—­Burgundy, for example—­ which makes any general understanding of the time as a w ­ hole somewhat difficult. In her works for the general public, handbooks, and in her own research, the ­great medievalist Claude Gauvard lends the ­century between 1392 and 1492

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no special treatment,44 although she disputes the latter boundary. But judging by the title of the second section of her text, “La grant monarchie de France,” an allusion to the work that Claude de Seyssel dedicated to François I in 1519, it seems that the boundary should be pushed ahead by twenty-­five years.45 Two moments mark the hundred years, first, a period of competition between the king and the princes, then, ­after 1440, a time of clear ascendancy for the monarchy.46 But the historian sees an overlapping of signs of the coming modernity and remnants of the vanis­hing M ­ iddle Ages, pointing to the example of the “Voyage de Naples” of 1494, which is as much a chivalrous dream based on rights of succession (the Neapolitan succession) as a modern adventure story.47 In one of the most recent examples of ­these national histories, this one published by Belin, the fifteenth ­century is dismembered again, cut into four periods. Indeed, not only is the period covered in two separate volumes, the line of demarcation is 1453 (which in fact turns out to be 1461). Moreover, one part is covered by a medievalist, Boris Bove, who spends a chapter situating the end of the ­Middle Ages,48 and the other by a modernist, Philippe Hamon, who extends the Re­nais­sance beyond its usual French limits.49 In the prologue to the volume by Bove, the editorial director claims that this rupture was chosen to highlight the strong continuity between the end of the ­Middle Ages and the first part of the sixteenth c­ entury.50 Obviously this is nothing new; we saw it already in the Hachette history of France. But it certainly complicates how historians think in general about the fifteenth ­century. Rational Tool, Lure, or Fabrication? For Jacques Le Goff, to periodize is to rationalize, to make comprehensible.51 But is the ­century in fact a rational tool for periodization? Is it not rather a lure or a ­simple fabrication? With no consistent editorial or institutional recognition from French historians who show no “attachment to their c­ entury,”52 unlike their counter­parts in literary studies or art history, the fifteenth ­century does not constitute a specific framework for historical reflection on the ­matter of the history of France. And yet, as an “unthought horizon of medieval history,”53 it is nonetheless of major interest, constituting “a decisive passage,” a readiness to emerge from the shadows of the ­fourteenth or sixteenth ­century, as Patrick Boucheron writes.54 Indeed. And yet, Boucheron is not referring to the French fifteenth c­ entury but, rather, to the global fifteenth c­ entury. Only the entire world, he observes, can form the stage sufficient to bring the period

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into focus.55 A proj­ect analogous to writing a history of the fifteenth-­century world but at the national level is less imaginable ­today than ever among medieval historians. Th ­ ere is no French Quattrocento;56 ­there is not even a “first” or “second” fifteenth ­century as we sometimes say for the sixteenth c­ entury.57 ­There is no obvious fifteenth ­century with its own essence. ­There is just a period still much frequented by medievalists, used as a chronological framework from diverse thematic perspectives—­urban history and the history of royal space, in particular58—­fascinating for its violent contrasts and the interpenetration of contradictory ele­ments, but difficult to imagine as a discrete unit and perilous to consider in its entirety, not r­ eally an entry into modernity and yet nonetheless a c­ entury of innovations (cultural, technological, geo­graph­i­cal, administrative) and a turning point for changes begun before and continued beyond,59 far beyond the sudden shift of 1494. Notes 1. Translator’s note: This chapter offers a perceptive analy­sis of the notion of “siècle” and its significance. The term “siècle,” object of the essay’s analy­sis, corresponds closely to the En­glish “­century.” However, the words’ dif­fer­ent etymologies at times create dif­fer­ent nuances: “siècle” derives from the Latin “saeculum,” which meant something like the approximate lifetime of a ­human being or the time necessary for total renewal of a given ­human population, whereas “­century” comes from the Latin “centuria,” a substantive built on the word “centum,” meaning one hundred. It is impor­tant to note that, dif­fer­ent from “­century,” “siècle” is not by definition a period of one hundred years. It is true that in En­glish “­century” does not always refer literally to one hundred years. But ­because the concept of one hundred, “centum,” is embedded in the word, “­century” evokes first and foremost a period of one hundred years. Despite ­these differences, it seems appropriate to consistently translate “siècle” with “­century” b­ ecause in an academic context the terms are used in exactly the same way. 2. The journal has been published with Droz since 1983. 3. The journal has been published since 1949. 4. See Christiane Prigent, ed., Art et société en France au XVe siècle (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1999): “[T]he fifteenth ­century does not yet enjoy the attention it deserves,” she writes in the prologue; see also Yves Bottineau-­Fuchs, Peindre en France au XVe siècle (Paris: Actes Sud, 2006). 5. Boucheron, “Un siècle malgré tout,” 209. 6. Published since 1984 by the Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques. 7. The Dizionario storico della lingua italiana gives no information on when the term first appeared in its widely understood sense; neither the Sudoc cata­logue nor that of the Bibliothèque nationale de France mentions works with the word in the title from ­earlier than 1880.

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8. Jacques Le Goff, Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches (Paris: Seuil, 2014). 9. Boucheron, “Un siècle malgré tout,” 203. 10. “We no longer name them a­ fter our heroes. We number them, wisely, in numerical order,” writes Marc Bloch. Cited by Boucheron, “Un siècle malgré tout,” 204. 11. See Alain Saint-­Denis, Le Siècle de Saint Louis (Paris: Presses universitaires françaises, 1994). 12. See Franck Collard, “Écrire l’histoire de Clovis vers 1500,” in Clovis, histoire et mémoire, Le baptême de Clovis. II. Son écho à travers l’histoire. Actes du Colloque international de Reims (septembre 1996), ed. Michel Rouche (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-­Sorbonne, 1997), 249–276. 13. Jehan Masselin, Journal des États généraux tenus à Tours en 1484 sous le règne de Charles VIII, ed. and trans. Adhelm Bernier (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1835), especially 44, 62, and 466. 14. Claude de Seyssel, Les Louenges du roy Loys XII, ed. Patricia Eichel-­Lojkine and Laurent Vissière (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2009). 15. Boucheron, “Un siècle malgré tout,” 212. 16. The subject has generated a massive bibliography. See especially Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Age, une imposture (Paris: Perrin, 2008), and Giuseppe Sergi, L’idée de Moyen Age. Entre sens commun et pratique historique (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). 17. Epître adressée à Robert Gaguin: “Magna me voluptas capit, eruditissime Roberte, quum musas et omnes eloquentiae partes (quas prior aetas ignoravit) in hac urbe florere conspicio . . . ​Quo circa magis aetatis nostrae quam superiori quidem illi congratulor quandoquidem video cum studiis tum libris artificiose scribendi dicendique scientiam assecutum iri quamplurimos” (“I feel a ­g reat plea­sure, most erudite Robert, when I see the muses and all areas of eloquence [which the previous age did not know] flourish in this city . . . ​ I rejoice at the superiority of our age to the last since I see both scholarship and so many printed books and scientific discussion taking over”) (n.p.). 18. Gaguin, Epistole et orationes, letter of 1496, n. 77, 2:26: “gratulari propterea non segniter debemus seculi hujus felicitati in quo . . . ​excitantur plurimorumque ingenia rapere cum Prometheo a celestibus splendidum sapientie lumen” (“We must rejoice therefore, strongly, at the fortune of this ­century in which . . . ​such a ­great number has been aroused to steal with Prometheus the splendid light of knowledge from the heavens”). In a letter of 1498, n. 89 bis, 2:79, he cries: “O felicia nostre aetatis secula!” (“Oh blessed centuries of our age!”). 19. Robert Gaguin, Epistole et orationes, ed. Louis Thuasne (Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine Reprint, 1977), 1: 337–338, n.51: “Desident fere omnes qui litterati apud nos estimari volunt; et si quid scibunt, tale est quod nullo dicendi splendore illustretur . . . ​Est unus omnium stilus, eadem scribendi forma quam ii qui questionarii appellantur paulo magis supra ducentos quingenta annos, magno litterarum detrimento, invexerunt” (“Nearly all among us who esteem the letters are helpless; and if they write something, it demonstrates no splendor . . . ​ The style is all the same, the same form of writing that t­hose who ­were called questioners [scholastics] imported over 250 years ago, to the ­great detriment of letters”). 20. See especially Franco Simone, La coscienza della Rinascita negli umanisti francesi (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1949), and Simone, “Influenze italiane nella formazione dei primi schemi della storiografia letteraria francese,” Lettere italiane 17, no. 3 (1965): 275–299;

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The French Re­nais­sance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Re­nais­sance in France, trans. H. Gaston Hall (London: Macmillan, 1969); “Sur quelques rapports entre l’humanisme italien et l’humanisme français,” in Pensée humaniste et tradition chrétienne aux XV et XVI siècles: essais, notes et documents, ed. Henri Bédarida (Paris: Éditions Contemporaines, Boivin & Cie., 1950), 241–279; and the volume collected in honor of Simone, Dario Cecchetti, Lionello Sozzi, and Louis Terreaux, ed., L’Aube de la Re­nais­sance, études réunies pour le 10e anniversaire de la mort de Franco Simone (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1991). 21. Clémence Revest, “La naissance de l’Humanisme comme mouvement au tournant du XVe siècle,” Annales HSS 68, no. 3 (2013): 665–696. 22. On the authors of the first French Humanism, see Gilbert Ouy, Monique Ornato, and Nicole Grévy-­Pons, ed., Pratiques de la culture écrite en France au XVe siècle (Louvain-­ la-­Neuve, Belgium: Fidem, 1995), and Carla Enzo Ornato, Préludes à la Re­nais­sance, aspects de la vie intellectuelle en France au XVe siècle (Paris: éditions du CNRS, 1992). 23. See especially the work of Evencio Beltran and, in par­tic­u­lar, his article, “Continuité de l’humanisme français au XVe siècle: l’exemple de Pierre de la Hazardière,” in L’Aube de la Re­nais­sance, 123–136. 24. Guillaume Budé, De philologia libri II, ed. and trans. Marie-­Madeleine de la ­Garanderie (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 2001). 25. See Isabelle Guyot-­Bachy and Jean-­Marie Moeglin, ed., La naissance de la médiévistique. Les historiens et leurs sources en Eu­rope (XIXe-­début du XXe s.) (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2015); Simone Bernard-­Griffiths, Pierre Glaudes, and Bertrand Vibert, eds., La ­Fabrique du Moyen Age au XIXe siècle. Représentations du Moyen Age dans la culture et la littérature française du XIXe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2006). 26. See Pierre Toubert and Michel Zink, ed., Moyen Age et Re­nais­sance au Collège de France (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 82, n.10. 27. Christian Amalvi, Le Goût du Moyen Age (Paris: Plon, 1996). 28. Cited by Solal Abélès, “Le développement de l’état à la fin du Moyen Age,” in Générations historienne, ed. Yann Potin and Jean-­Francois Sirinelli (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2019), 594. 29. Jacques Le Goff, “Les Moyen Age de Michelet,” in Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 19–45. 30. Jules Michelet, L’histoire de France, 17 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1833–1867), 7, lxvi. 31. Michelet, Histoire de France, 7: xcix, cv. 32. Michelet, Histoire de France, 7: 74, in the revised 1870 version published by Flammarion. 33. Johan Huizinga, L’Automne du Moyen Age. The first version appeared in 1932 ­under the title Le Déclin du Moyen Age, which, like The Waning of the ­Middle Ages, does not accurately reflect the original Dutch. 34. Henri Martin, Histoire de France depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’en 1789, 17 vols. (Paris: Furne, 1860–1862), vols. 6–8. 35. Emmanuel Bourassin, Pour comprendre le XVe siècle (Paris: Tallandier, 1989), 7. 36. Georges and Andrée Duby, Les procès de Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 37. Georges Duby, Le Moyen Age, 987–1460 (Paris: Hachette, 1987). 38. Johan Huizinga, L’Automne du Moyen Age, (Paris: Payot, 1975), ii.

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39. Jacques Le Goff, ed., Histoire de la France. 2. L’Etat et les pouvoirs (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 40. Jean Favier, Histoire de France. 2. Le temps des principautés, de l’an mil à 1515 (Paris: Fayard, 1984). 41. Jean Favier’s Paris au XVe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1974), published as volume 4 of the Nouvelle histoire de Paris, extends from 1380 to 1500. In 2001, Fayard published his Louis XI, in 1982 François Villon, and in 2010 Pierre Cauchon. 42. Philippe Contamine, ed., Histoire politique de la France. Le Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 288. 43. Pierre Savy and Marco Gentil, Noblesse et Etats princiers en Italie et en France au XVe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2009), 6: “The fifteenth c­ entury ­will be considered. In France, this c­ entury sees the sharpest conflict between the princes and the king, but it is also the ­century when many principalities die out.” 44. Claude Gauvard, La France au Moyen Age, du Ve au XVe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires françaises, 1996). 45. In fact, in Le temps des Valois, 1328–1515, published in 2013 by the Presses universitaires françaises, in the collection “Histoire personnelle de la France,” Gauvard also restricts her scope to follow the title of the section devoted to the second half of the fifteenth ­century. But she covers the reign of Louis XII, a sign of the uncertainty regarding where to end the period. 46. “The fifteenth ­century in France is indeed the history of a social lamination and a reclassification of power,” she writes in the introduction to the volume of art history ­edited by Christiane Prigent, Art et société en France au XVe siècle, 30. 47. This is the vision found in the volume of the New History of Medieval France series significantly entitled “time of crises, time of hope.” Temps de crise, temps d’espoir. Nouvelle Histoire de la France médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1990), edited by Alain Demurger, is a volume that assigns the c­ entury to the years 1407–1498. Half dark, half light: such is the composition of the ­century. 48. Boris Bove, Le temps de la guerre de Cent Ans, 1328–1453 (Paris: Belin, 2009). 49. Philippe Hamon, Les Re­nais­sances, 1453–1559 (Paris: Belin, 2009). 50. Bove, Le temps de la guerre de Cent Ans. 51. Jacques Le Goff, Un long Moyen Age (Paris: Tallandier, 2004), 13. 52. Boucheron, “Un siècle malgré tout,” 214. 53. Patrick Boucheron, ed., Histoire du monde au XVe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 38. 54. Boucheron, Histoire du monde au XVe siècle. The author denies having exaggerated the importance of the c­ entury and the part played by French theater regarding the claim that the ­century was the c­ entury of Joan of Arc (28). 55. Boucheron, “Un siècle malgré tout,” 210. 56. A recent book devoted to the history of the book uses the expression the “En­glish Quattocento.” See David Bundle, The Re­nais­sance Reform of the Books and Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Alain Erlande-­Brandenburg judges “delicate all appreciation of this period” ­because of the diversity of forms and works, “Les édifices religieux.” See “Les édifices religieux et le décor architectural à l’époque flamboyante,” in Art et société en France au XVe siècle, ed. Christiane Prigent (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1999), 36.

Conclusion

249

57. Hamon uses the expression in his volume Les Re­nais­sances (115) but to explain that it also covers the second half of the preceding ­century. 58. See Pierre-­Henri Guittonneau, Dans l’ombre de la capitale. Les pe­tites villes sur l’eau et Paris au XVe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016); Léonard Dauphant, Le royaume des quatre rivières. L’espace politique français, 1380–1515 (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 2012). 59. Pauline Guéna and Annabelle Marin, “Finir le Moyen Age,” Questes 33 (2016): 13–29.

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Contributors

Tracy Adams is professor in Eu­ro­pean languages and lit­er­a­tures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance, The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria, Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, and Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy: History, Gallantry, and National Identity. With Christine Adams, she edited Female Beauty Systems: Beauty as Social Capital in Western Eu­rope and the US, ­Middle Ages to the Pre­sent and, also with Christine Adams, coauthored The Creation of the French Royal Mistress from Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry. Cynthia J. Brown is research professor of French (emerita) at University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in late medieval and Re­nais­sance French lit­ er­a­ture and culture, the history of the book, and female patronage. Her books include the award-­winning Patrons, Poets and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France and The Queen’s Library: Image-­Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477–1514. Edited volumes include The Cultural and Po­liti­cal Legacy of Anne de Bretagne, ­Women, Art and Culture in Medieval and Re­nais­sance Eu­ rope (with Anne-­Marie Legaré) and Manuscript to Print, Print to Digital: Editions in Per­for­mance and Per­for­mance in Editions in Late Medieval and Re­nais­sance France. Volume 3 of her edition of Pierre Gringore’s works, Les Œuvres moralisatrices (1499–1510), recently appeared with Droz. In 2013 she was named Chevalier des Palmes Académiques. Franck Collard specializes in the French fifteenth c­entury and has been teaching in medieval history at Paris Nanterre University since 2006. Since completing a PhD dissertation dedicated to the writing of history by Robert Gaguin (1433–1501), he has published numerous books and articles on the crime of poisoning along with treatises on poison in the Western M ­ iddle Ages, most 277

278 Contributors

recently Les écrits sur les poisons. He remains fascinated by the period, as evidenced by his most recent publications, his study of Joan of Arc, La passion Jeanne d’Arc: mémoires françaises de la Pucelle, and his collaboration on a new edition of Thomas Basin’s Historiae Karoli septimi et Ludovici undecimi. Joan E. McRae is professor of French in the Department of World Languages, Lit­er­a­tures, and Cultures at M ­ iddle Tennessee State University. Her research interests encompass medieval manuscript studies, fifteenth-­century French poetry, Arthurian and Grail lit­er­a­ture, and the Romance of the Rose. She has published two critical editions, in En­glish and in French, of the poems of the Querelle de femmes of the Belle Dame sans mercy. She coedited the Arthurian cycle held at Yale University, Beinecke MS 229, La Mort le Roi Artu and La Queste del Saint Graal: From the Illustrated Lancelot Prose of Yale 229, with series editor E. M. Willingham, and assembled a book of essays with Daisy Delogu and Emma Cayley on Alain Chartier, A Companion to Alain Chartier. Her current proj­ect is a monograph on the literary quarrels of the Romance of the Rose and the Belle Dame sans mercy. Charles-­Louis Morand-­Métivier is associate professor of French at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on late medieval and Re­nais­sance French lit­er­a­ture and the history of emotions. He has written on Christine de Pizan, Ronsard, du Bellay, Philippe de Mézières, and Re­nais­sance Theater. He is the coeditor of Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Eu­rope. His translation and critical edition of the anonymous Tragédie du sac de Cabrières is forthcoming with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies in 2022. He is working on two books: Shaping an Emotional Kingdom: Lit­er­a­ture and Nation in the Reign of Charles VI and Performing Emotional Massacres: Popu­lar Culture in the French Wars of Religion. Stephen G. Nichols, James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities, and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, is a fellow of the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Medieval Acad­ emy of Amer­i­ca, and an honorary se­nior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory. A Yale University PhD in Comparative Lit­er­a­ture, he has written or edited some twenty-­seven books on the M ­ iddle Ages, including Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography, which received the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding book. Other books include: From

Contributors

279

Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Lit­er­a­ture in the Digital Age, Spectral Sea: Mediterranean Palimpsests in Eu­ro­pean Culture, and Mind and Environment in Medieval Manuscripts. Nichols holds an honorary Docteur ès Lettres (University of Geneva), is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (France), and received The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize in 2008, and again in 2015. Nichols codirects JHU’s Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts and cofounded the journal Digital Philology, A Journal of Medieval Culture. Anneliese Pollock Renck received her PhD in French with emphases in medieval lit­er­a­ture and second language acquisition from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before coming to Carroll College in 2017, she taught at Bucknell University and is author of the book Translating ­Women into Early Modern France: From Christine de Pizan to Louise Labé. She has published numerous articles on the material reading experience in the late medieval period, on early modern translation practices, and on the transition from manuscript to print in Italy and France. She has been awarded grants from the International Center of Medieval Art, the Mellon Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation in Eu­ro­pean Studies, and the Partner University Fund for Exchange between the United States and France. Zita Eva Rohr holds a PhD in French studies and history. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an honorary research fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and an honorary lecturer in the Department of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Some of her publications include Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442) ­Family and Power: The Reverse of the Tapestry and two edited collections with Lisa Benz, Queenship, Gender, and Reputation in the Medieval and Early Modern West, 1060–1600, and Queenship and the ­Women of Westeros: Female Agency and Advice in Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire. With Jonathan Spangler she edited Significant O ­ thers: Aspects of Deviance and Difference in Premodern Courts. In 2004, she was admitted to the Ordre des palmes académiques for her commitment and contribution to French education and culture. Helen Swift is professor of Medieval French Studies and tutorial fellow at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. Having focused for several years on the Querelle des femmes, including Gender, Writing, and Per­for­mance: Men Defending ­Women in Late Medieval France, she now explores more broadly

280 Contributors

questions of narrative voice and identity, especially in thematic relation to death and in the material context of poetic anthologies, as in Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-­Medieval France (runner-up for the Society for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize). Andrea Tarnowski teaches in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College, where she also directs the sequence of humanities courses and serves as associate director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities. Her research focuses on late medieval French lit­er­a­ture and culture, with emphasis on the ways meaning is produced by material objects and by manuscript organ­ ization, layout, and illustration. A scholar of the autofictional and allegorical modes in authors such as Philippe de Mézières, Christine de Pizan, and Alain Chartier, she is also interested in allegory’s visual repre­sen­ta­tion, in personal emblems and devises. Derek R. Whaley is a research librarian at Auckland Libraries in New Zealand where he investigates the history of North Shore and the former Rodney County. He received his PhD in history from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, in 2018. His research focuses on medieval and early modern Eu­ ro­pean dynasties, especially the Capetian dynasty of France, and how they are presented within royal chronicles. Being originally from California, he also maintains an interest in the history of Santa Cruz County and its environs.

Index

Abelard, Peter, 54, 60, 96 Angoulême, Charles of, 113, 114, 122, 129, 160, 268 Anjou, René of, 19, 31, 32, 99, 159, 160, 163, 187, 190, 191, 207, 214, 218, 219, 229, 231, 232 Anne de France, 163, 213, 214, 218, 222, 224, 226–228, 232–234, 237, 251, 264, 266, 274 argent, 26–27, 39, 41, 67, 266 Aristotle, 51–54 Augustine, Saint, 51, 54–59, 65, 70, 251 Beaujeu, Pierre of, 163, 223, 232–233, 269, 274 Berry, Jean, duke of, 23, 30–31, 39, 42, 83, 219, 231 blason des couleurs, 27–28, 41, 254 Bourbon, Suzanne of, 214, 224–225, 235, 266 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de, 19, 205, 209, 226–227, 233, 234, 251, 266 Brézé, Pierre de, 160, 163, 191 bricolage, 10, 14, 204 Brittany, Anne of, 122, 131, 225, 257, 270, 277 Budé, Guillaume, 210, 239, 247, 251 Burgundian Low Countries, 2, 4, 18, 255 Burgundy, Anthony of, le ­grand bâtard, 162, 185 Burgundy, Jean, duke of, 218 Burgundy, Philip, duke of, 24, 41, 60, 218 Castile, Blanche of, 217, 226–229, 232, 262 Caulier, Achilles, 101, 161, 170, 177–178, 180, 188 celebrity, v, vi, 94–95, 98–109, 189, 191, 193, 195–197, 201, 203–07, 209, 211, 260, 263, 264, 267, 273 Charles V, king of France, 5, 23, 40, 51, 74, 85, 112

Charles VI, king of France, 40, 45, 52–54, 72, 74, 80, 83, 85, 88, 89, 93, 209, 213, 215–216, 218–221, 229–231, 242, 243, 262, 267, 274 Charles VII, king of France, 7, 11, 13, 14, 19, 73, 75, 79, 81–83, 86, 90–92, 102, 113–116, 118, 129–131, 159–164, 179, 181–182, 185–186, 189, 190, 192–195, 203–04, 207, 210, 232, 237, 259, 273, 278 Charles VIII, king of France, 7, 31, 32, 113–116, 118, 129–131, 203, 208, 213, 223, 225, 226, 237, 242, 246, 252 Chartier, Alain: Clumber Park Chartier, v, 13, 158, 160, 162, 164–166, 169–172, 174–176, 178–180, 182–183, 187, 194; La Belle dame sans mercy, 12, 13, 100, 101, 108, 158, 161, 164, 166–168, 170–172, 175, 179, 183, 185–188, 252, 264, 266–267, 269, 278; Quadrilogue invectif, 158–1161, 164, 165, 170, 172, 176, 183 Chartier, Jean, v, 11, 72, 74–81, 88–93, 192, 207, 209, 252, 269, 271, 274 Chevalier, Etienne, 163, 196, 211, 260 Cistercians, 22, 39, 275 Coëtivy, Marie de, 164, 165, 186, 194 Cœur, Jacques, 31, 42, 99, 252 Commynes, Philippe de, 73, 232, 238, 252 Contamine, Philippe, 19, 83, 88, 91, 92, 233, 243, 248, 259, 273 cultural history, 2, 4, 6, 17–19, 258, 259, 264, 268 Débat du Gris et du Noir, 35, 36, 38, 43 decline, narrative of, 2, 3, 4, 10, 72 Deschamps, Eustache, 45, 120, 158 Dionysian historical tradition, 11, 72–93 Duby, Georges, 1, 242–243, 247, 260

281

282 Index Fichet, Guillaume, 238, 244, 258 Fouquet, Jean, 14, 69, 163, 190, 195, 205, 208, 212, 225, 239, 244, 258, 267, 271 François I, king of France, 5, 121, 122, 140, 195, 205, 208, 212, 225, 239, 244, 258, 267 French Humanism: first French Humanism, 238–239, 247; second French Humanism, 238 Froissart, Jean, 45, 73, 230, 252 Gaguin, Robert, 238, 246, 252 Gerson, Jean, 98, 167, 232 Grandes chroniques de France, 11, 23, 40, 69, 72, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 229, 253, 256, 262, 263, 265 Gringore, Pierre, 13, 125, 131–136, 138, 139, 140 grisaille, 22–27, 32, 38–40, 259, 267, 268, 275 Heloïse, 54, 96 Heraldry, 26, 28, 40 Heroides, 110, 113, 115, 118, 123 heteroglossia, 10 history of the emotions, 19, 270, 278 Huizinga, Johan: Autumntide of the ­Middle Ages, 1, 2, 4, 15–20, 39, 43, 50, 59, 68, 69, 70, 71, 211, 264; life and thought forms (levens-­en gedachtenvormen), 2, 17, 39, 156, 211, 264; Waning of the ­Middle Ages, The, 15, 247, 257 Hypermnestra, 117 Isabeau of Bavaria, queen of France, 45, 85 Jean de Meun, vi, 11, 12, 44–71, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100–05, 251, 254 Joan of Arc, 7, 150, 194, 237, 240, 242, 248, 278 Jouvencel, Le, 193, 205, 208, 209, 251 La Guerche, Chateau de, 194, 195 Late medieval France, v, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, 107, 110–123, 124, 136, 155, 200, 231, 255, 257, 267, 270, 271, 273, 277, 279 La Vigne, André de, 13, 125, 129–132, 136, 137, 138, 253 Le Dru, Pierre, 125, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 139, 140 Le Goff, Jacques, 1, 8, 19, 20, 236, 240, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 266 Le Noir, Michel, 125, 126, 131, 132, 133, 137

Lewis, Peter, 80, 83, 87, 89, 91–93, 228, 267 “littérature connectée,” 9, 10, 20, 272 Lorris, Guillaume de, 59, 60, 62, 67, 70, 97, 107, 254 Louis VIII, king of France, 217, 228, 229, 232 Louis XI, king of France, 7, 19, 79, 80, 86, 137, 143, 145, 153, 155, 160, 222, 223, 233, 240, 241, 243, 248, 254, 256, 266 Louis XII, king of France, 5, 7, 114–116, 119, 131, 140, 237, 253 Louis XIII, king of France, 69, 196, 210, 253 Maignelais, Antoinette de, 163, 181, 185, 186, 188, 192, 194, 208, 209, 263, 274 Marot, Clément, 34, 35, 105, 109, 139, 154–157, 254, 255, 257 Melun diptych, 14, 163, 165, 186, 190, 193, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210, 260, 265 Michelet, Jules, 16, 20, 240, 241, 247, 266, 268, 273 Molinet, Jean, 13, 18, 99, 125–129, 132, 136, 137, 240, 254, 260 Montreuil, Jean de, 167, 215, 216, 228, 239, 259, 263, 268 Oresme, Nicole, 51, 53, 54 Origen, 54 Orleans, Charles of, 32, 33, 42, 43, 159, 187, 241, 252 Orleans, Louis of, 219, 220, 230, 232 Orleans, Raoulet of, 51, 52, 53, 90 Ovid, 99, 110, 113–115, 118, 119, 122, 138, 260, 270, 275 Pastoureau, Michel, 27, 29, 30, 40, 41, 42, 269 patronage, late medieval French, 110–123 persona studies, 12, 95, 107, 193, 209, 267 personnage, 202–03, 205 Philip II, king of France, 74, 88, 90 Pichore, Jean, 115–117, 122, 270 Pintoin, Michel, 72–75, 80–86, 89, 92, 229, 230, 231, 232 Pizan, Christine de, 23, 40, 95, 99, 106, 107, 108, 155, 159, 167, 187, 213, 215, 216, 224, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235, 252, 255, 258, 259, 260, 263, 268, 270, 277–280 Primat, 73, 74, 84–86, 89, 90

Index 283 Quattrocento, 15, 236, 238, 245 Querelle des femmes, 13, 158, 183, 184, 215, 260, 279 remaniement, 94, 96, 106 Re­nais­sance, 5, 6, 18, 19, 20, 88, 120, 121, 188, 231, 247, 248, 249, 257, 263, 264, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274 Rigord, 73, 74, 86, 90 Roman de la Rose, 47, 51, 56, 59, 60, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 94, 96, 97, 107, 108, 128, 137, 158, 167, 168, 254, 256, 264, 268 Saint-­Denis, abbey of, 72–93 Sainte Chapelle, 22, 194 Saint-­Gelais, Octovien de, 99, 110, 113–119 Salic Law, the, 215, 228, 273 Saturn, 51, 54, 56–62, 65, 68, 70 Savoy, Louise of, 113, 115, 116, 195, 205, 213, 225, 226, 227

Seyssel, Claude de, 237, 244, 246, 249 siècle, 16, 18, 30, 42, 43, 71, 89, 107, 120, 122, 138, 184, 187, 210, 211, 231, 233, 235, 236, 237, 242, 243, 246–249, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260–268, 270 Sorel, Agnès, vi, 13, 14, 160, 162–164, 183, 186, 189–212, 253–255, 258, 260, 269, 274, 277 Spitzer, Leo, 46, 48, 49, 50, 69, 70, 272 Suger, 73, 74, 86 Valéry, Paul, 141, 142, 155, 254 Van der Weyden, Rogier, 24, 50 Van Eyck, Jan, 3, 4, 20, 24, 50, 196, 265 Venus (goddess), 44, 60, 61, 65, 68, 70, 265 Verlaine, Paul, 141, 155, 254 Villon, François, v, 12, 13, 44, 45–50, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 95, 102–106, 141–157, 184, 235, 243, 248, 254, 255, 258, 259, 260, 261, 268, 271–273