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346 Pages
TEXTUAL AND VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF POWER AND JUSTICE IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE
Thoroughly interdisciplinary in approach, this volume examines how concepts such as the exercising of power, the distribution of justice, and transgression against the law were treated in both textual and pictorial terms in works produced and circulated in medieval French manuscripts and early printed books. Analysing texts ranging from romances, political allegories, chivalric biographies, and catalogues of famous men and women, through saints’ lives, mystery plays and Books of Hours, to works of Roman, canon and customary law, these studies offer new insights into the diverse ways in which the language and imagery of politics and justice permeated French culture, particularly in the later Middle Ages.
Organized around three closely related themes—the prince as a just ruler, the figure of the judge, and the role of the queen in relation to matters of justice—the issues addressed in these studies, such as what constitutes a just war, what treatment should be meted out to prisoners, what personal qualities are needed for the role of lawgiver, and what limits are placed on women’s participation in judicial processes, are ones that are still the subject of debate today. What the contributors show above all is the degree of political engagement on the part of writers and artists responsible for cultural production in this period. With their textual strategies of exemplification, allegorization, and satirical deprecation, and their visual strategies of hierarchical ordering, spatial organization and symbolic allusion, these figures aimed to show that the pen and paintbrush could aspire to being as mighty as the sword wielded by Lady Justice herself.
Notes on Contributors
Mairé Bittore is Agrégée and Maitre de conférences in Medieval History at the Université de Lyon 3. Her current research on the theme of the relations between aristocracy and power extends from William the Conqueror to Henry III Plantagenet, and focuses on both France and England. Examples of her latest publications are: “La monarchie anglo-normande face a la conspiration. La révolte des Earls de 1075,” in Corinne Leveleux-Teixeira and Bernard Ribémont, eds., Le crime de l’ombre. Complots, conjurations, conspirations au Moyen Age, Paris: Klincksieck, 2010, pp. 41-62; and (with Isabelle Mathieu and Carole Avignon) La justice en France (VIII°—XV° siécle), Paris: A. Colin, 2012.
KristIN Bourassa is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of York, where she recently completed her PhD dissertation, “Counselling Charles VI of France: Christine de Pizan, Honorat Bovet, Philippe de Mézieéres, and Pierre Salmon.” Her research focuses on political culture, political literature, and the history of the book, including didactic literature in the “mirrors for princes” tradition as well as royal entries and their descriptions. Her MA thesis from the University of Ottawa, “Forto Tellen Alle the Circumstaunces: The Royal Entries of Henry VI (1431-32) and their Manuscripts,” was nominated for the Joseph de Koninck Prize for best MA thesis in an interdisciplinary program.
Cyntuia J. Brown is Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked on late medieval French literature and culture, the history of the book, the transition from manuscript to print, text/image relationships, female patronage and book culture, and text editing. Her most important publications include: Patrons, Poets and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1995, awarded the Scaglione Prize by the Modern Language Association; The Political and Cultural Legacy of Anne de Bretagne: Negotiating Convention in Books and Documents, Cambridge: D. 5S. Brewer, 2010; and The Queen's Library: ImageMaking at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477-1514, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
RosALIND BROWN-GRANT is Professor of Late Medieval French Literature at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are Christine de Pizan, late medieval French romance, Burgundian historical writing, and text/ image relations in manuscripts. Major publications include: a translation of Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1999; Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading beyond Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; and (co-edited with Rebecca Dixon) Text/Image Relations in Late Medieval French and Burgundian Culture (Fourteenth—Sixteenth Centuries), Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.
EsTHER DEHoux is Docteur en histoire and Maitre de conférences in History at the Université Lille 3 Charles-de-Gaulle. Her work on the iconography of warrior saints in the Frankish kingdom has focused on the strength of warriors and the chivalric world, the reform of the Church, and royal ideology. Among recent publications are: (with Karin Ueltschi), “La main du parjure,” in Maité Billoré and Myriam Soria, eds., La trahison au Moyen Age. De la monstruosité au crime politique (V'—-XV*° siécle), Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009, pp. 319-29; and “Décrire et condamner pour mieux s’affirmer. Le ‘malvais plait’ dans le Couronnement de Louis (c. 1130-1136),” in Corinne LeveleuxTeixeira and Bernard Ribémont, eds., Le crime de l’ombre. Complots, conjurations et conspirations au Moyen Age, Paris: Klincksieck, 2010, pp. 113-33; and Saints guerriers. Georges, Guillaume, Maurice et Michel dans la France médiévale (XI XIII’ siécle), Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014.
BarBARA DeEnis-More is Conservateur du fonds ancien at the Bibliotheque d’Avranches, with particular responsibility for the manuscripts of Mont Saint-Michel, and she is also an exhibition curator of contemporary art. Key publications include: “Justice et bien commun. Etude comparée du Bon Gouvernement d’ Ambrogio Lorenzetti et d’un manuscrit juridique bolonais,” Mélanges de l’Ecole francaise de Rome. Moyen Age, 2001, pp. 685-98; “Entre justice et infamie. La figure du bourreau dans I’enluminure a la fin du Moyen Age,” Cahiers d'histoire de l'art, 4, 2006, pp. 7-18; and Une iconographie de la répression judiciaire. Le chatiment dans l’enluminure en France du XIII* siecle au XV° siécle, Paris: CTHS/INHA, 2007.
YASMINA FOoEHR-JANSSENS is Professor of Medieval French Literature at the Université de Geneve. Her research has concentrated on collections of framed tales such as the Disciplina clericalis and the Seven Sages of Rome, miscellany manuscripts, narrative literature, and gender studies. Her most important publications include: Le Temps des Fables: le Roman des Sept Sages ou l'autre voie du roman, Paris: Champion, 1994; La Veuve en majesté: deuil et savoir au féminin dans la littérature médiévale, Geneva: Droz, 2000; (with Emmanuelle Métry), a translation of Jean de Haute Seille, Dolopathos ou le roi et les septsages, Turnhout: Brepols, 2000; and La Jeune Fille et l'amour: pour une poétique courtoise de l’évasion, Geneva: Droz, 2010.
ANNE D. HeEpEmaN is Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History, University of Kansas. Specializing in late medieval and northern Renaissance art and the history of the book, she has written three books and published articles in Art Bulletin, Gesta, and several anthologies. Most recently, she co-edited (with Clark Maines) a special issue of Gesta (48, no. 2, 2009), on the arts of memory; co-curated and co-authored (with Elizabeth Morrison) the international exhibition catalogue for Imagining the Past in France, 1250-1500, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010; and co-edited (with Karen Fresco) Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe (14"-17" centuries), Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2011.
BERNARD RisEMONT is Professor of the History of Medieval Literature and Culture at the Université d’Orléans. His research interests, which cover history of science, literature, philosophy, and history of law, range from the seventh century (Isidore of Seville) to the fifteenth century (Christine de Pizan). He is the founder of the Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes [Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies], director of the Juslittera research project, and editor of several collections by specialist publishers such as Champion and Klincksieck. He has published 13 books, edited 21 volumes and written over 150 articles.
LypwineE Scorpia is Agrégée d’histoire et docteur en histoire, and Maitre de conférences in Medieval History at the Université de Rouen. Her research focuses on the elaboration of the norms of royal power, the editing of quodlibetical and exegetical sources, and political theories of kingship. Among her chief publications are: Le roi doit vivre du sien. La théorie de l’impét en France (XIII*— XV’ siécles), Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, 2005; a facsimile edition of Pierre Choinet, Le Livre des trois ages, Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2009; (with Josiane Barbier and Monique Cottret) Amour et désamour du prince du haut Moyen Age a la Révolution francaise, Paris: Editions Kimé, 2011; and Louis XI. Mythes et réalités, Paris: Ellipses, 2014.
MICHELLE SZKILNIK is Professor of Medieval French Literature at the Université de Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. A specialist in medieval narrative, her works include: L’Archipel du Graal, Geneva: Droz, 1991; Perceval ou le Roman du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes, Paris: Gallimard, 1998; Jean de Saintré: une carriére chevaleresque au XV° siécle, Geneva: Droz, 2003; and editions such as Wauchier de Denain, L’Histoire des Moines d’Egypte, Geneva: Droz, 1993; (with Emmanueéle Baumgartner) Le Roman de Tristan en Prose, vol. 6, Geneva: Droz, 1993; Raoul de Houdenc, Meraugis de Portlesguez, Paris: Champion, 2004; and (with Chloé Horn and Anne Rochebouet) Le Pas du Perron Fée, Paris: Champion, 2013. She is currently preparing a new critical edition of the Jouvencel by Jean de Bueil.
KATHLEEN WILSON-CHEVALIER is Professor of Art History at the American University of Paris. Initially a Fontainebleau specialist, her primary research interest has shifted to female patronage in sixteenth-century France. Her publications in this field include: (co-edited with Eliane Viennot) Royaume de fémynie. Pouvoirs, contraintes, espaces de liberté des femmes, de la Renaissance a la Fronde, Paris: Champion, 1999; (co-edited with the collaboration of Eugénie Pascal) Patronnes et mécénes en France a la Renaissance, Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2007; and “Madeleine de Savoie et Anne de Montmorency: des batisseurs conjugaux,” in Sabine Frommel and Juliette Dumas, eds., Batir au féminin? Tradition et stratégies en Europe et dans l’empire ottoman, Paris, Picard, 2013, pp. 125-36.
Mary Beto Winn is Professor of French Studies at the State University of New York, Albany. Her research has focused on early French printing and patronage, text/image relations, transitions between manuscript and print, collections of poetry, Books of Hours, and text/music relations in the Renaissance chanson. Among her major publications are: Anthoine Vérard, Parisian publisher, 1485-1512: Prologues, Poems, and Presentations, Geneva: Droz, 1997; and the seven-volume set of chansons in Thomas Crecquillon: Opera Omnia, Middleton, Wisc.: American Institute of Musicology, 19982011. Her critical editions of Vérard’s editio princeps of Le Roman de Tristan, for Classiques Garnier, and of Robert Gobin’s Les Loups ravissans are in progress.
Acknowledgements
We are pleased to have this opportunity to express our thanks to Le STUDIUM, Loire Valley, for their financial and adminstrative support on the organization of the symposium from which this collection of essays has emerged, as well as to the School of Languages, Cultures, and Societies, University of Leeds, who also contributed to the financing of this event. We are likewise indebted to the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche, as funders of the Juslittera project at the Université d’Orléans and the Conseil Regional de la Région Centre (Programme Juslittera), for their support and generous contribution to meeting the costs of reproducing the color images in this volume. Our thanks are also due to the anonymous reader for Ashgate whose immensely helpful comments on the final draft of the book have been gratefully received and acted upon, as well as to all the other staff at Ashgate, particularly Erika Gaffney, for their advice, assistance, and encouragement.
Editorial Principles
In order to facilitate the reader’s access to this volume, we would like to take this opportunity to explain here some of our key editorial principles. First, given that the focus of all the studies in this volume is on material from medieval France, which is likely to be of interest to scholars whose first language is not necessarily English, we have included short summaries in French at the start of each chapter. Second, since for reasons of space we have used the author/date system in the bibliography of this volume for both primary and secondary sources, modern critical editions of texts have been cited using the name of the editor and the date of publication: hence “Bouchet 2002” = “Alain Chartier, Le Quadrilogue invectif.
Translated and annotated by Florence Bouchet. Paris: Champion, 2002.” Third, where contributors have cited Old or Middle French texts directly from manuscripts, minimal diacritics and modernized spelling and punctuation have been added in order to aid the reader's comprehension; where critical editions have been used, quotations have been exactly transcribed. Fourth, we have anglicized names of historical figures and fictional characters wherever possible, but have also respected convention where anglicization would actually lead to confusion: hence Louis of Orléans and Louise of Savoy, but Philippe de Mézieres and Christine de Pizan. Fifth, for those chapters dealing with a large or complicated corpus of manuscripts where a detailed description of date, authorship, and provenance has been deemed useful, this material has been placed in an appendix immediately following the relevant chapter. Finally, we have used the following abbreviations for referring to manuscripts from three major libraries: BL = British Library (London), BnF = Bibliotheque nationale de France (Paris), and BR = Bibliotheque royale (Brussels).
Introduction
Rosalind Brown-Grant
Issues such as the fitness of a leader to govern, the link between personal probity and the demands of public office, the proportionality of a punishment to a crime, and the causes that justify military intervention are currently being hotly debated—and with good reason—in these early decades of the twenty-first century by politicians, jurists, academics, journalists, and the general public through multiple forms of media: print, broadcast, internet, and social. Yet, these issues were deemed no less important by the rulers, moralists, historians, and theologians of medieval France who used all the media available to them—manuscripts or printed books, visual artefacts such as a tapestry, an item of clothing, a painting, public events such as a royal entry or the staging of a mystery play —in order to put forward their own opinions on these matters.
Indeed, such issues took on a particular urgency in the context of the later Middle Ages when France was hit by a series of crises such as the Hundred Years War with England, the civil war sparked off by the incapacitation of the mad king Charles VI, the oscillation between alliance with and hostility towards France’s increasingly powerful neighbor, the duchy of Burgundy, struggles for royal succession, and wars of territorial expansion against various Italian cities.’ From the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, intellectuals of very different backgrounds, including Philippe de Méziéres, Jean Gerson, Christine de Pizan, Laurent de Premierfait, Alain Chartier, André de la Vigne, Pierre Choinet, Robert Gobin, and Thomas Basin, as well as many figures whose names have not come down to us, responded to what they saw as a deteriorating political situation to try and teach contemporary rulers how to wield power with justice without abusing either royal or judicial authority.’
The centrality of the notions of power and justice in medieval political thought can be seen in the law itself—whether civil (Roman), canon, or customary — where divine justice and secular justice were inextricably linked through the figure of the ruler as judge. As Jean-Louis Gazzaniga has put it: “Le juge doit rendre a chacun son dt et faire régner la paix; il affirme ainsi son autorité; derriére le juge se cache le prince; la justice fait le souverain” [The judge must render to everyone their due and enable peace to reign; this is how his authority is affirmed; behind the judge lies the prince: it is justice which makes of him a sovereign].* Moreover, in the political and moral treatises of the period, such as those produced by John of Salisbury, Giles of Rome, and Brunetto Latini, justice is not only unfailingly presented as one of the four cardinal virtues (along with prudence, fortitude, and temperance) that the good ruler must personally possess if he is to be a successful governor of the body politic, but the upholding of matters of law and justice is also deemed key to his ability to perform his actions in this capacity, for example in the legitimate prosecution of armed conflict.
While legal texts and political treatises from the twelfth century onwards abound in teachings on justice as a prerequisite for good governance, other forms of writing throughout the French Middle Ages likewise sought to have a role in educating those who were destined to take up the reins of power. These works included historical accounts of the remote or recent past such those contained in chronicles or catalogs of famous men and women, works of imaginative literature belonging to the genres of epic, romance, political allegory, and chivalric biography, and texts of a specifically religious nature such as saints’ lives, mystery plays, and Books of Hours.
In all of these works, these textual lessons on good governance would often be accompanied by visual lessons in the form of either miniatures in a manuscript, woodcuts in the early printed book, or tableaux vivants in the public staging of a mystery play, even though the actual extent of such illustrations would vary according to the precise genre to which a text belonged. These images were designed to serve a number of different purposes: to reinforce and underline the key points of a text; to clarify and illustrate its arguments; to imprint these examples forcefully on the memory of the reader, listener, or spectator who viewed them; but also to add material of their own which could, as necessary, modify or even critique the textual content of the work. The legal writings of the period are a particular case in point with the work of Gratian on canon law being especially lavishly illustrated,° as are the copies of chronicles, particularly those of Jean Froissart and Enguerrand de Monstrelet, as well as the Grandes chroniques de France that were commissioned for noble patrons.° Even in genres which tended to receive less visual decoration, such as those in the “mirrors for princes” tradition, there were nonetheless some exceptions, most notably the early manuscripts of Nicole Oresme’s translations for Charles V of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics which, being overseen by Oresme himself, matched the text’s explanatory glosses of new political terms such as “democracy” and “oligarchy” with elaborate iconographical cycles that provided a visual complement to its explanatory verbal apparatus.’ The production of twinned or multiple copies of texts for different patrons, particularly those on opposite sides in a political conflict, also seems to have provided writers who took a keen interest in the way in which their works were illustrated with an invaluable opportunity to deliver pointed political lessons that were targeted at specific patrons, as in the case of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othéa for both her Armagnac and Burgundian ducal readers or Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues for both Charles VI and his heirs.®
While the majority of the recipients of these various forms of writing are likely to have been men, given that the exercising of power was, theoretically at least, reserved for the male sex, female audiences were neither neglected by these texts nor unfamiliar with the kinds of images that they contained. Certain genres like romances and Books of Hours have in fact long been seen by modern scholars as having a particularly faithful female following in this period, with catalogs of famous women also having a certain appeal even if, as in most cases from the fifteenth century, these texts were usually commissioned by men.’ These works would have provided women of high social status with textual and visual instruction on how to perform their circumscribed but nonetheless crucial roles in the body politic as providers of heirs, educators of the next generation through their own cultural patronage, and even as potential advisors to their husbands or sons in the brokering of peaceful political and social relations with their subjects.!° Examples of late medieval French duchesses and queens who are known to have played precisely these roles are Isabel of Portugal, third wife of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, and Anne of Brittany, wife of Charles VIII and later Louis XII."
Yet, if the modern scholarship on the representation of power and justice in medieval literary culture—whether directed principally at men or at women—is abundant in some areas of research, particularly that dealing with works in the “mirrors for princes/princesses” tradition,” the same cannot be said of others. This is particularly true of legal texts which, despite being the subject of several ground-breaking studies by art historians,’ have been comparatively neglected as sources by social, political, and cultural historians." Similarly, despite pioneering works on the representation of legal matters in Old French narratives by twentieth-century literary scholars such as Carl F. Riedel and R. Howard Bloch,” it is only in very recent years that close attention has been paid to what the interplay between law and literature can teach us about attitudes to power and justice in the vernacular culture of the Middle Ages. This potentially rich seam of critical enquiry is currently being mined with particular success by scholars in the POLEN (Pouvoirs, Lettres, Normes) research laboratory at the Université d’Orléans, France, who are working on the Juslittera project funded by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche. Comprising legal, political, cultural, and literary historians with expertise in late medieval and early modern studies, the Juslittera team has to date produced a large body of innovative work, published mainly in French, on the literary treatment of key aspects of medieval law such as the notions of crime and punishment, the relationship between extenuating circumstances and culpability, the judicial role of kings, and the links between ethics and legal practice.’
The chapters in this volume, all of which are in English, complement and add to the work of the Juslittera group by bringing in an art historical dimension and making their findings more easily accessible to a nonFrench speaking audience. These chapters have arisen out of a symposium organized in July 2012 by Rosalind Brown-Grant and Bernard Ribémont in Orléans under the auspices of the POLEN research laboratory and Le STUDIUM, Loire Valley, which took as its overarching theme the interaction of text and image in the representation of power and justice in the manuscript and early print culture of the Middle Ages. By bringing together specialists in art history, literary studies, and social and political history based at universities in France, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA, the aim of this volume is to stimulate a dialogue on the ways in which concepts such as the exercising of power, the distribution of justice, and the transgression of the law were inflected in both textual and visual terms across a wide range of works from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. The interdisciplinary focus on the relationship between text and image which all the contributors to the volume have been encouraged to employ, irrespective of their own particular academic specialism, is what gives this collection its distinctive quality. Indeed, this insistence on examining both the textual and visual dimensions of medieval writings is in fact a very timely one for specialists of all stripes working on the Middle Ages. Not only are historians taking an increasingly “linguistic/cultural turn” by focusing on “the role of language, and symbolic systems more broadly [speaking],”"’ as can be seen particularly in the approach to sources such as chronicles,’* but those working on medieval literature, enthused by the “new philological” approach which sees a specific work as actually a discrete entity each time it is produced in a new manuscript or early printed context, are readily turning to study of its accompanying visual decoration among other elements of its paratextual apparatus.” Equally, in art history, specialists of illuminated books have for some time now been honing their methodology by employing it in close proximity to specialists in the field of history and literature, with the result, as Richard K. Emmerson notes, that:
Showing how a cycle of miniatures creates a “visual text” that does not simply “reflect” —but is, in multifaceted ways, both related to and distinct from—the verbal text it accompanies is a vital contribution of interdisciplinary approaches to our understanding of medieval manuscript imagery and of the forms and strategies of their visual narratives.”
Moreover, the traditional separation between the manuscript and the early printed book, for so long heralded as a marker of the shift from the medieval to the Renaissance period, has itself come into question in recent years, with the result that continuity rather than rupture between the visual and textual culture of manuscripts and that of incunabula is fast becoming the critical consensus view, thus opening up new and fruitful avenues of enquiry for the ways in which works disseminated via these two different material forms would have interacted with and influenced each other as purveyors of cultural meaning.”
This collection covers a wide spectrum of writings from around 1170 to 1520, with a particular focus on those dating from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, many of which have received scant critical attention hitherto in histories of French literature, these having been dominated until relatively recently by discussion of famous works from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Offering fresh insights into the degree to which the language and imagery of politics and the law permeated different areas of the literary and visual culture of the Middle Ages, these studies aim to illustrate, mutatis mutandis, in the context of medieval France what Anthony Musson has shown to be operative in that of medieval England: The very expression of royal authority and administration in terms of law meant that law became inextricably linked with politics and a key aspect of royal governance. Arguably the law’s role went beyond this in that it provided not simply a framework but also a language for politics. Political discourse took many forms in various places, from the “orderly” parliamentary forum, to the preaching and sermonising of the clergy, the domain of satire and polemic in literary works and oral ballads, through to the “disorderly” activities of the rebels in the Peasants’ Revolt.”
What needs taking into account in order to add to Musson’s assessment of the pervasiveness of political/legal discourse in this period is, of course, the visual dimension of medieval writings, hence the focus throughout this collection on examining how the codes of both textual and pictorial language could be complementarily deployed to inflect or to critique prevailing ideas on power and justice.
The studies in this volume are thus organized around three closely related themes: the prince as a just ruler, the figure of the judge, and the role of the queen in relation to matters of justice. The first of these themes, with which roughly half the chapters presented here are concerned, is found principally in advice literature addressed to the noble male reader, ranging from catalogs of famous men and women, romance narratives, and chivalric biography to myriad forms of political allegory. Within this group of texts, two main expositional methods can be identified. Many authors chose to make their lessons palatable to the prince by using examples of figures from the historical past or fictional heroes—whose appearance, manner, and speech are all presented as bearing a close resemblance to those of the contemporary nobility —in order to illustrate the general principles by which the just ruler was expected and encouraged to govern. Others, however, preferred to address themselves to their princely readers through the veil of allegory, often building on the commonplace organic metaphor of the ruler as the head of the body politic who existed in a state of interdependence with, but also dominance over, the other limbs or members. Such metaphors were frequently coupled with personifications or animal analogies which could be exploited for the positive or negative connotations that were attached to the attributes of gender and bestiality in medieval thought.
Anne D. Hedeman’s chapter, which opens this group of chapters on the prince as a just ruler, uses Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, a Middle French translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, as a window into attitudes towards power and justice as expressed visually in the twinned ducal copies made around 1410-11 for Duke John of Berry and Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy: Geneva, Bibliotheque de Geneve, Mss. fr. 190/1 and 190/2, and Paris, Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 5193. These densely illustrated manuscripts, which were created at the same time and almost certainly under Laurent’s direction, contain several unique pairs of pictures, visual amplifications which focus attention on the portions of Boccaccio’s text that the French writer expanded in his translation. Several concentrate on examples of governmental change in times of stress, usually in response to the overweening ambition of tyrants such as Alcibiades and the Roman king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, father of the infamous Sextus Tarquinius who raped Lucretia. Revisiting these images by considering them in relation to their owners, the two powerful princes who were political opponents at the time when these manuscripts were made, Hedeman reads them against both the narrative of the antique past that they illustrate and that of the French fifteenth-century present in which they were experienced. She thus shows how opponents in the bloody French civil war appropriated images of power in order to further their own political agendas through, for example, the incorporation into the miniatures of heraldic motifs that identify their antagonist with notorious figures from classical antiquity and thus legitimate his subsequent punishment in the minds of the contemporary audiences of these works.
The importance of teaching the prince how to become a just ruler and so avoid being commemorated as a vicious tyrant is explored further in Rosalind Brown-Grant’s study of the Roman de Florimont, a mid-fifteenth-century Burgundian prose reworking of Aimon de Varennes’s twelfth-century verse text which recounts the life of the putative grandfather of Alexander the Great. Focusing on the sole known copy of this prose version, as preserved in Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 12566, which was commissioned by the chronicler and bibliophile Jean de Wavrin and lavishly illustrated by the Lille-based artist known as the “Wavrin Master,” Brown-Grant reveals how this redaction of the romance differs from Aimon’s original in downplaying the themes of love and largesse in favor of offering lessons in political leadership to its noble readers at the court of Valois Burgundy. Through the interplay of text and image in this manuscript, the romance narrative constructs itself as a veritable “mirror for princes,” one which highlights the exemplary conduct of the eponymous hero who is presented as a fictional forerunner of the Burgundian dukes themselves. Demonstrating justice in action, Florimont’s deeds reveal him undertaking just wars against tyrants and oppressors, granting mercy to his defeated enemies, using largesse as an instrument of justice to his friends and allies, and establishing a lasting peace in the realm that ensures its future prosperity. As Brown-Grant argues, these textual lessons on how to distinguish good rulers from bad are underscored in the miniatures of this manuscript through the use of contrasting visual devices such as chromatic harmony versus disharmony, compositional symmetry versus dissymmetry, sober versus elaborate costume, and restrained versus immoderate body language.
The specific challenges in matters of justice faced by the prince in his role as military leader are examined by Michelle Szkilnik in her analysis of Le Jouvencel by Jean de Bueil. This late fifteenth-century text, which is at once a chivalric biography and a manual of warfare, describes the social ascent of a young nobleman who, thanks to his bravery in different wars, becomes lieutenant of the king and, later, regent of the imaginary realm of Amidoine. Analysing a range of illustrated manuscripts of this text which date from the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth century, Szkilnik demonstrates that these representations of the man of war who takes on the role of lawgiver and bringer of justice evolve over time, as the various illustrations of the text reveal him making the shift from being a lowly soldier on a battlefield receiving orders from his sovereign to becoming a grand seigneur [great lord] in his own right, one who comes to occupy an ever more prominent and visually dominant place in the miniatures. Eschewing abstract teachings on justice for a series of concrete case studies, the combination of text and image in these miniatures shows the Jouvencel deciding on issues such as whether or not one has the right to torture captives, how to divide up booty amongst one’s allies, and when to show clemency or severity towards prisoners, his performance of his juridical duties thereby offering an authoritative textual and visual example to the princely reader/viewer.
If these three narrative works all use direct examples, whether historical or fictional, as a means of conveying their political messages about the wielding of power and the exercising of justice, those discussed by the authors of the next three chapters in the volume proceed by the more indirect means of allegory, with all its potential for delivering veiled yet trenchant critiques of those regarded as defective in their roles as members of the body politic. In her study of Philippe de Mézieéres’s Songe du vieil pelerin, an allegorical dream vision that was dedicated to Charles VI of France in 1389, shortly after his assumption of personal rule at the age of 20, Kristin Bourassa outlines how the author uses the female personification of Queen Truth as a highly rational and discerning judge in order to offer the beleaguered king an outstanding model of rulership and royal justice. Adopting a complex rhetorical framework, the text uses further levels of metaphor (tablets of commandments, the chariot of state, the chess board) to instruct Charles VI on the government of both the self and others, the need for judicial reform, and the scope of royal authority. Bourassa then goes on to argue that in Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 22542, a manuscript of the work produced after the death of the author and its original intended kingly reader, which has both a unique preface and an elaborate set of miniatures, the Songe du vieil pelerin is textually and visually reconfigured for anew, non-royal audience. Broadening out the original relationship of Queen Truth and Charles VI as teacher and pupil through the visual inclusion of members of other social groups, the Songe in this new manuscript version engages with political issues that were now current during the reign of Charles VII, such as the changes made to the constitution, the extension of the role of the Parlement, and the promotion of French privilege as a Most Christian nation, and reorientates its elaborate allegories so as to offer broader moral prescriptions to all good Christians of the realm rather than just the king himself.
If a female personification such as Queen Truth could thus be presented as a positive figure by Philippe de Mézieres, the less favorable connotations that could be attached to the feminine gender in medieval thought, such as emotional instability and irrationality, could also be fully exploited in political allegory, as Cynthia J. Brown shows in her chapter on the works of three late medieval writers who enjoyed the patronage of the royal court. Intended as literary contributions to the bolstering of male royal power against refractory sections of the French body politic, Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif (1422), André de la Vigne’s Ressource de la Chrestienté (1494) and Jean Marot’s Voyage de Génes (ca. 1507) respectively address the tensions surrounding the political ambitions of kings Charles VII, Charles VIII, and Louis XII. Each of these texts stages a debate, or pseudo-trial, during which personified estates such as the people, the clergy, the nobility, and the merchants, defend their conflicting political viewpoints before their leader who is personified as female—France, “Magesté Royalle,” and Genoa respectively — whose weakened and despairing state in each case leads her to call on the authority of the king to restore her fortunes. For Brown, the visual treatment of the individual plaintiffs in the elaborate miniatures that accompany each textual transcription in manuscripts Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 1687, Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 5091, and Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 24441, makes elaborate play of the possibilities of gender-bending, representing the feminine noun “La Chevalerie” as the masculine figure of a “chevalier,” for example, or assimilating the attributes of the rational “Dame Raison” to the masculine authority of the king himself by means of heraldic motifs and acrostics of his name in the borders of the illuminated page.
In striking contrast to both the benevolent, teacherly attitude adopted by a Philippe de Méziéres towards the princely reader of his Songe du vieil pelerin, and the propagandistic defense of royal power conducted by an Alain Chartier, André de la Vigne, or a Jean Marot, other writers in late medieval France did not hesitate to employ the resources of allegory, particularly that featuring animals, in order to conduct coded attacks on those rulers whom they judged to be failing in their duty to exercise power with justice for the good of all. As Lydwine Scordia argues in her chapter on the pastoral metaphor, which draws on biblical and ancient models in order to allegorize the shepherd, sheepdog, sheep, and wolf as actors of the state, this trope was used in the late fifteenth century as one of the most effective means of treating, defining, idealizing, or criticizing the powers that be, most notably during the reign of Louis XI (1461-83). For Scordia, in the hands of Louis’s contemporaries such as Jean de Roye, Pierre Choinet, Thomas Basin, Georges Chastellain, and Jean Molinet, this highly productive animal metaphor which lent itself readily to vivid pictorial interpretation—co-existing alongside others even more disparaging such as that of the monarch as a loathsome spider or a destructive whale—compared King Louis to the ideal of the just ruler and found him sorely wanting. In his excessive taxation of his subjects, his circumvention of the normal legal procedures of the Parlements, and his vacillation in delivering a timely punishment on those found guilty of sedition, the king as judged through these metaphors was shown not only to have failed in his duty to protect the common people, but actually to have become the state’s own wolf-like enemy within.
The second theme addressed in this collection concerns less the actual virtues expected of the prince as a good ruler and more the office and authority of the judge himself, whether in the literal application of temporal laws or in the figurative operations of divine justice. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including both normative texts of medieval law and works such as saints’ lives which have rarely before been examined from this perspective, the first two chapters in this section seek to determine the extent to which the conventional iconographical representation of the figure of the judge found in legal texts is modified according to the visual codes and rhetorical strategies employed in different literary contexts in which punishment for transgression of the law is being discussed.
As Barbara Denis-Morel observes, medieval society placed an extremely high premium on the integrity of the judge and his ability to perform his duties with the necessary dignity, probity, and impartiality, as can be seen in the views of jurists such Philippe de Beaumanoir and intellectuals such as Eustache Deschamps and Jean Juvenal des Ursins who all stress the importance of the king’s appointing good judges—ones answerable both to their sovereign and to their Maker, God himself—in order to maintain the peace and stability of the realm. Legal texts, especially those of Roman law belonging to the Corpus Iuris Civilis and those of customary law such as the Coutumiers of Artois and Burgundy, present an even more idealized visual image of the judge, one which frequently borrows from the iconographical codes of rulership, in order to show him as a supremely authoritative and unbending figure who is placed at a significant remove from the actual physical carrying-out of sentencing in criminal cases. By contrast, as DenisMorel goes on to argue, in historical texts such as the Grandes chroniques de France which are chiefly concerned with recounting the history of the French monarchy, it is the king himself who is shown playing the part of the judge rather than delegating this responsibility to his appointed representatives. These chronicle manuscripts thus feature plentiful images of rulers actively passing sentences that call for the most severe forms of physical punishment, in a manner often very different from the “regal,” stately figure of the judge found in the legal texts of Roman or customary law. In the miniatures of these historical texts, justice as exercised by the king thus serves as an important way of demonstrating royal power, whereas in legal texts it is the power invested in the judge by both the ruler and God himself which is presented as ensuring that true justice is done.
In their chapter on the depiction of the judge in the manuscripts of hagiographical accounts as contained in the Légende dorée, Speculum historiale, and royal breviaries, Maité Billoré and Esther Dehoux reveal the far greater levels of violence seen in the trials and persecutions of Christian martyrs, male and female alike, where decapitations, flayings, and hangings abound, than was found in the normative legal writings of the period. Yet, as Billoré and Dehoux also show, even though the judge in these hagiographical texts is most usually a pagan emperor, many of these works betray a distinct unease at showing figures of secular, royal authority in too negative a light, thus shifting onto the image of the actual executioner delivering the physical punishment of the martyr the distorted features, obscene dress, and contorted body language that bespeak their excessive cruelty and almost bestial state. Indeed, at times, these tales of supreme suffering for one’s faith turn the figure of the pagan persecutor, who is iconographically represented in all his legitimacy as an impartial dispenser of justice, into the unwitting instrument of God himself, who is thereby shown as the only true judge of when the martyr’s suffering can be truly and gloriously brought to an end.
The notion of the superiority of divine justice over the vagaries of human justice and how the imagery of the one can be used to critique the other is explored in the third chapter in this section, Mary Beth Winn’s analysis of Robert Gobin’s moral treatise, the Loups ravissans. First published by Anthoine Vérard around 1506 and decorated with elaborate woodcuts, this text is an allegorical satire of Church and State that features a villainous Archwolf who instructs his audience of young wolves in the abuse of justice and power, illustrating his lessons with a series of evil figures from the past who were condemned for their use of fraud and deception. Culminating in a mass trial and condemnation of the Archwolf’s acolytes for all their wicked deeds, the text and woodcuts of Vérard’s edition introduce a radically new interpretation of the theme of the Dance of Death in which the figure of Death, aided by his helper Accident, acts as an implacable judge rather than just as a leader of a dance who spares neither the rich nor the exalted from their fate. As Winn goes on to argue, these woodcuts proved so popular as a reimagining of this most traditional of scenes that they had a second existence in printed Books of Hours where, employed as images of the Last Judgment, they remind us that transgressions of human and temporal laws are ultimately subject to divine and eternal sanction, lessons intended to be heeded by all members, high and low, of the body politic.
The chapters devoted to the first two themes of this volume, the prince as just ruler and the figure of the judge, focus on works aimed principally at a male readership, which should not surprise us given the almost total exclusion of medieval women from these positions of royal and judicial power. Yet the presence that we have already noted above of female figures such as Lucretia in catalogs of famous men and women, where her story serves as a political lesson on the dangers of tyranny, and the recourse to female personifications in allegorical writings on good and bad government such as those of Philippe de Mézieres or André de la Vigne, where the positive connotations of women’s traditional link to mercy and the pursuit of peace could be invoked, should be sufficient reminders that women in medieval France were by no means unaffected by judicial processes and the part that these processes played in upholding the structures of power. The third and final theme engaged with in this volume is therefore dedicated to analysing how books intended for either the entertainment or the instruction of noblewomen of the highest social rank treated their dealings with the law and outlined the potential, if limited, place that could be reserved for them in the exercising of justice.
In the first of the two chapters in this section, Yasmina Foehr-Janssens examines the dynamics of women’s relationship to the law in the depiction of trial scenes in Old French romance narratives such as the Roman de Tristan, Lanval and the prose Lancelot, in which a queen stands accused of adultery or herself brings an accusation of adultery against either a female rival or a man on whom she seeks revenge. Discussing both the textual representations of these scenes and their visual counterparts in the manuscripts preserving these narratives, Foehr-Janssens shows how the figure of the queen, when acting as the accused, is always judged by those presiding over the judicial proceedings in terms of her physical appearance rather than any form of verbal defense, her aim being to excite those present to show her mercy as an unwitting, silent victim of the machinations of her accusers—even in those cases where she is in fact guilty as charged. When acting as an accuser, it is still the queen’s physical appearance that serves as the “proof” of whether or not her cause is good rather than any verbal arguments that she can muster, since her actual case has to be brought on her behalf by the king, her husband, his power to do so residing in his possession and display of this beautiful object to the members of his court. As Foehr-Janssens shows, although these romance narratives unmistakably adopt the language and imagery of the legal practices of the period, their actual engagement with questions of law and justice within the parallel world of the literary work leads them to offer some unexpected answers to questions such as how to establish culpability, what constitutes a proof and, ultimately, who determines the fitness of those allowed to judge in the first place, when the plaintiff or defendant at issue is a high-born woman.
If fictional queens could serve the writers of Old French narratives as a way of exploring the intricacies of a legal system in which women are shown having to circumvent the proscription on their right to speak by manipulating their potentially duplicitous appearance, to what extent could real, historical queens be presented as having an actual part to play in the operations of justice? This question is tackled by Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier in her study of how Queen Claude of France, wife of Francis I, was caught in the middle of a struggle for sovereignty between her parents, Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, and her own husband and his mother, Louise of Savoy, a struggle which crystallized around the issue of how much political power, if any, she could claim for herself as queen. Through an assessment of evidence from tomb sculpture, manuscript illuminations (with particular attention being paid to Claude’s Primer), royal entries, writings by Pierre Gringore and Jean Bouchet, and the interaction of all these multiple forms of communication with mystery plays, Wilson-Chevalier examines how the approaches to power and justice of two vying dynasties took shape and clashed. Through analysis of figures of female empowerment that were promoted in these various works by the different sides in the political conflict over sovereignty — principally that of Justice, as one of the cardinal virtues, or as a protagonist of the Parliament of Heaven, with Mercy by her side—Wilson-Chevalier sheds new light on Queen Claude’s largely overlooked attempts to promote a political state in which mercy and justice could flourish, in line with the proactive role many a French subject was counting on her to assume.
The chapters offered in this volume on power and justice in French culture of the Middle Ages therefore raise issues that continue to excite the modern imagination and stimulate fierce debate today, when discussion of what constitutes a just war, what sanctions should be placed on a head of state who turns against his own subjects, what constitutes an equitable level of taxation, what gender-specific qualities—if any—a woman can bring to political office, or who has the right to judge those who sit in judgment over others, are questions that affect many millions of people around the world. Given that, in medieval France, power was concentrated in the hands of a far smaller number of people, principally the male monarch, in his dual capacity as both ruler and judge, this role being deemed to have been ordained by God Himself as the ultimate arbiter of human actions, it is not surprising that so much attention should have been devoted by intellectuals in this period to determining and critiquing the monarch’s fitness to govern, in terms of his own personal ethics and internalization of the demands of his public role. What the studies in this collection have sought above all to show is how we can obtain a deeper understanding of the ways in which the structures of power and the mechanisms of medieval justice as wielded by the figure of the king —with his own wife acting as a potential helper in his attempts to bring peace and social stability to the realm—were symbolically conceived and disseminated by the writers and artists of France, particularly those active in the most acute phases of its crisis in the later centuries of the Middle Ages. It is perhaps not too strong a claim to say that those responsible for cultural production in this period should indeed be seen as politically engaged, since the textual strategies which they deployed on the written page such as exemplification, allegorization, and satirical deprecation, coupled with the visual strategies which they employed in the painted or printed image, such as hierarchical ordering, spatial configuration, or symbolic allusion, show how the pen, paintbrush, and printing press could aspire to being as mighty as the sword held aloft by Lady Justice herself .
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