Rosalind Brown-Grant - Böcker

Whilst French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have long enjoyed a privileged place in the literary history of France, romances from the later middle ages have been largely neglected by modern scholars, despite their central role in the chivalric culture of the day. In particular, although this genre has been seen as providing a forum within which ideas about masculine and feminine roles were debated and prescribed, little work has been done on the gender ideology of texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This study seeks to fill this gap in the scholarship by analysing how the views of gender found in earlier romances were reassessed and reshaped in the texts produced in the moralising intellectual environment of the later medieval period. In order to explore these topics, this book discusses fifteen historico-realist prose romances written in the century from 1390, many of which were commissioned at the court of Burgundy. It addresses key issues in recent studies of gender in medieval culture including the construction of chivalric masculinity, the representation of adolescent desire, and the social and sexual roles of husbands and wives. In addition to offering close readings of these texts, it shows how the romances of the period were informed by ideas about gender which circulated in contemporary works such as manuals of chivalry, moral treatises, and marriage sermons. It thus aims not only to provide the first in-depth study of this little-known area of French literary history, but also to question the critical consensus on the role of gender in medieval romance that has arisen from an exclusive focus on earlier works in the genre.

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.

Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) is justly renowned for its full-scale assault on the misogynist stereotypes which dominated the culture of the Middle Ages. Rosalind Brown-Grant locates the Cité in the context of Christine's defence of women as it developed over a number of years and through a range of different texts. Arguing that Christine tailored her critique of misogyny according to the genre in which she was writing and the audience she was addressing, this study shows that Christine's case for women nonetheless had an underlying unity in its insistence on the moral, if not the social, equality of the sexes. Whilst Christine may not have been a radical in modern feminist terms, she was able to draw upon the cultural resources of her day in order to construct an intellectual authority for herself that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the day.

Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) is justly renowned for its full-scale assault on the misogynist stereotypes which dominated the culture of the Middle Ages. Rosalind Brown-Grant locates the Cité in the context of Christine's defence of women as it developed over a number of years and through a range of different texts. Arguing that Christine tailored her critique of misogyny according to the genre in which she was writing and the audience she was addressing, this study shows that Christine's case for women nonetheless had an underlying unity in its insistence on the moral, if not the social, equality of the sexes. Whilst Christine may not have been a radical in modern feminist terms, she was able to draw upon the cultural resources of her day in order to construct an intellectual authority for herself that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the day.

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.

This collection, which brings together scholarsfrom the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, and philosophy, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishingauthority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shapingreader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscriptculture.

First English translation of the chivalric biography of the foremost knight of the late Middle Ages.Jacques de Lalaing (c.1421-53) was undoubtedly the most famous knight at the court of the Burgundian duke, Philip the Good, one who was celebrated in his own lifetime for the dazzling feats of arms that he performed in jousts across Europe during the 1440s. Serving the duke first as a councillor and ambassador to launch a new crusade and then as a fearless military leader on a campaign to put down a revolt by the town of Ghent, Lalaing tragically met his death at the siege of Poeke at a relatively young age.The chivalric biography of Lalaing, written in the early 1470s, offers an entertaining and informative account of the life of a late medieval knight. Drawing on a variety of sources, it was designed not only to commemorate Jacques's deeds for posterity but also to encourage other young noblemen to imitate his shining example, with lavishly illuminated copies being made for members of his own family and other noble readers.This first English translation of the text, accompanied by an introduction and extensive notes based on new research into both archival and literary sources, aims to offer the reader an in-depth portrayal of Lalaing in the context of the chivalric, dynastic and political culture of his day.

An Open Access edition will be available on publication thanks to generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the University of Leeds; Drury University; Northwestern University; the University of Neuchâtel; and the Fondation pour la Protection du Patrimoine Culturel, Historique et Artisanal (Switzerland).This Casebook features the work of an international, interdisciplinary research group entitled ‘The Joust as Performance: Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry’ and funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Its focus is on the pas d’armes (English: ‘passage of arms’), a highly ritualised form of tournament and elite entertainment that was popular principally in Anjou, the Burgundian lands, France and Iberia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Part I of the volume provides a representative selection of sixteen translated and contextualised sources on the pas d’armes that includes narrative texts, administrative accounts and illuminated images. Part II, which comprises seven new scholarly essays on the pas d’armes, addresses the issue of how this type of tournament evolved through cultural transfer from court to court, offers in-depth analyses of a chronological and geographical range of pas d’armes from the perspective of text-image relations, heraldry, urban-court relations and manuscript commissioning, and focuses on broader themes such as the construction of masculinity and the representation of chivalric and non-chivalric bodies at these events. The Casebook also provides a map and table of all such tournaments known to have taken place between c. 1420 and c. 1520, some of which have been identified for the first time as pas d’armes, as well as a glossary of arms and armour, clothing and textiles typically featured at this type of event. It will be of interest to both specialist scholars and students of late medieval chivalric and tournament culture.