"The Autumn Of The Middle Ages By Huizinga 2 (Ch 8 - )"

Full text of "The Autumn Of The Middle Ages By Johan Huizinga (z Lib.org)"

Chapter Eight 

RELIGIOUS EXCITATION AND RELIGIOUS FANTASY 

FROM THE TIME IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY WHEN the lyrical 

mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux had begun the fugue of flowering 

emotion over the passion of Christ, the medieval mind came in ever 

increasing measure to be filled with devout empathy with the story 

of his passion; consciousness was entirely permeated and saturated 

with Christ and the Cross. In earliest childhood the image of the 

Crucifixion was planted in tender minds in such large and somber 

dimensions that it overshadowed all other emotion with its dark 

mood. When still a child, Jean de Gerson was told by his father, 

who was standing in front of a wall with his arms outspread, “Look, 

my boy, here is how your God, who created and saved you, was 

crucified and died.” The image remained etched in his memory even 

in old age, and he blessed his pious father for it on the day of his 

father’s death, which fell on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. 1 

Colette, when a child four years of age, heard her mother weep and 

sigh during her daily prayers as she vicariously suffered the 

mockery, the beatings, and the martyrdom of the Passion. The 

memory of these prayers became fixed in her oversensitive mind 

with such intensity that she experienced daily throughout her whole 

life a most intense tightening and pain in her heart at the hour of 

the Crucifixion. She suffered more than any woman in childbirth 

during the times she was reading about the sufferings of the Lord.2 

A preacher might occasionally stand silently in front of his 

congregation, in the position of the crucified Lord, for a quarter of 

an hour.3 

The mind was filled with Christ to such a degree that the 

Christological note immediately began to sound whenever any act 

or thought showed even the slightest congruence with the life or 

suffering of the Lord. A poor nun who carries firewood to the 

kitchen imagines that she is carrying the Cross. The notion of 

carrying wood by itself is enough to bathe the activity in the bright 

glow of the highest act of love. A blind woman, washing her 

laundry, imagines the washtub and washroom to be the manger and 

the stable.4 The profaning overflow of princely homage into 

religious ideas, such as the comparison of Louis XI with Jesus or of 

the Emperor and his son and grandson with the Trinity,5 was 

equally the result of that overabundance of devotional content. 

The fifteenth century displays this strong religious emotion in a 

dual form. On the one side it reveals itself in those vehement 

moments when an itinerant preacher periodically seizes a whole 

crowd with his words, igniting all that spiritual fuel like dry tinder. 

This is the spasmodic expression of that Christological emotion: 

passionate, intense, but highly transitory. The other aspect is shown 

by a few individuals who lead their sensitivity into a path of eternal 

quietude and normalize it into a new life form, that of 

introspectiveness. This is the pietistic circle of those who, fully 

conscious of being innovators, call themselves the Modern Devotees, 

that is contemporary people of piety. As a formal movement the 

devotio moderna is restricted to the northern Netherlands and lower 

Germany, but the spirit that gave rise to it also existed in France. 

Little remains to us of the forceful impact of the sermon on 

spiritual culture. We know what tremendous influence preachers 

had,6 but it is not granted to us to relive the actual excitement they 

generated. The written versions of sermons do not touch our hearts; 

how could they? The people of the time had already become 

indifferent to the written versions. Many who heard Vincent Ferrer 

and then read his sermons, says his biographer, assure us that they 

are barely a shadow of what they experienced when they heard 

them out of his own mouth.7 No wonder. What we have in the 

printed sermons of Vincent Ferrer or Olivier Maillards is barely 

more than the basic material used by their eloquence, stripped of all 

oratorical heat and apparently formal in their divisions into 

sections, first, seventh, etc. We know that the people were always 

moved by the gripping account of the terror of hell, by the 

thundering threats of the punishment of sin, and by all the lyrical 

outpourings about the Passion story and God’s love. We know the 

devices employed by the preachers; no effect was too crude, no 

change from laughter to tears too abrupt, no intemperate raising of 

the voice too crass.9 But we really have to guess about the kinds of 

excitement they generated on the basis of always identical reports 

about quarrels between cities over who would have the favor of the 

next sermon and over the ostentation, usually reserved for princes, 

lavished by the officials and the people on the procession 

welcoming the preacher into the city; and about how the preacher 

would occasionally have to interrupt his sermon because of the 

weeping of the crowd. During a sermon by Vincent Ferrer, a man 

and a woman under sentence of death were led past the site. 

Vincent asked that the execution be delayed, hid the pair beneath 

his pulpit for the duration, and preached about their sins. After the 

sermon, nothing was found beneath the pulpit but a few bones. The 

people believed nothing but that the words of the saintly man had 

burnt the sinners and at the same time saved them. 10 

The tense emotions of the masses as they listened to the words of 

the preacher always evaporated without a chance of becoming a 

part of the written tradition, but the “introspectiveness” of the 

modern devotion we know much better. In every pietist circle, 

religion not only supplies the form of life, but also the forms of its 

socialization: the cozy spiritual intercourse in quiet intimacy 

between simple men and women whose vast heaven covered a tiny 

world over which sweeps the mighty rustle of eternity. The friends 

of Thomas a Kempis admire his ignorance of mundane things; a 

prior of Windesheim is given the complimentary nickname Jan I- 

Don’t-Know. They have no use for the world unless it is simplified; 

they purify it by excluding evil.11 Within this narrow sphere, they 

live in the joy of a sensitive mutual fondness. They keep one 

another in constant view so that all the signs of blessedness can be 

detected; visits are their delight,12 hence their special inclination 

towards biographical description to which we owe our detailed 

knowledge of their spiritual state. 

In the regulated form in the Netherlands, the devotio moderna 

created a strong conventional form for the pious life. Devotees were 

recognized by their calm, measured motions, their stooped way of 

walking, some by the broad smile on their face or their new clothes 

that were intentionally patched. Not least of all, there were their 

copious tears: “Devotio est quaedam cordis teneritudo, qua quis in 

pias faciliter resolvitur lacrimas.”—Devotion is a certain tenderness 

of the heart that allows an individual to easily dissolve in tears. One 

has to ask God for the “daily baptism of tears,” they are the wings 

of prayer or, in the words of St. Bernard, the wine of angels. One 

should surrender to the bliss of praiseworthy tears, should be ready 

for them, and encourage them, throughout the year, but especially 

during Lent, so that one will be able to say with the Psalmist, 

“Fuerunt mihi lacrimae meae panes die ac nocte.” Sometimes tears 

come so readily that we pray with sighs and wailing (“ita ut 

suspiriose ac cum rugitu oremus”), but if they do not come of 

themselves, one should not squeeze them out too hard, but be 

satisfied with the tears of the heart. In the presence of others, the 

signs of an unusual spiritual devotion should be avoided.13 

Vincent Ferrer shed so many tears every time he celebrated mass 

that nearly all those present wept with him and occasionally 

produced a wailing like that over a death. Weeping was such a joy 

to him that he was reluctant to withhold his tears.14 

In France the new pietism did not experience such a strange 

forcing into a particular form such as that of the Dutch Fraterhouses 

or Windesheim Congregations. Related spirits in France either 

remained in the secular world or joined existing orders where the 

new pietism did then gradually lead to the implementation of a 

stricter observance. In France, the phenomenon is not widely known 

among bourgeois circles. This may have accounted for the fact that 

French piety had a more passionate, spasmodic character than its 

Dutch counterpart. It resorted more readily to exaggerated forms 

but also evaporated more easily. Towards the end of the Middle 

Ages, visitors from more southern regions to the northern 

Netherlands notice on more than one occasion the serious and 

general piety that they observe to be a special characteristic of the 

people of this country.15 

Dutch devotees abandoned the contact with intensive mysticism 

that had been characteristic of the initial stages of their life form 

and along with that abandonment they managed to keep dangerous 

and fantastic heretical deviations in check. Dutch modern devotion 

was obedient and orthodox, practical, decent and occasionally even 

sensible. In contrast, French devotion seems to have oscillated much 

more widely, touching time and again on the more extravagant 

phenomena of faith. 

When the Groningen Dominican Mattheus Grabow went to 

Constance to present to the council all the complaints of the 

mendicant orders against the new Brothers of the Common Life and, 

if possible, to get them condemned, it was in the great leader of 

conservative church politics, Jean de Gerson himself, that the 

disciples of Gerard Groote found their defender. Gerson was 

completely competent to judge whether this was an expression of 

genuine piety and a permitted form of organization, since the 

distinction between genuine piety and exaggerated expressions of 

faith was one of those points to which he was constantly attentive. 

Gerson had a cautious, conscientious, academic mind, honest, pure, 

and of good will. He had a cautious concern for good form that 

frequently betrayed the fact that his fine mind had risen from its 

humble origin to its truly aristocratic reputation. Moreover, he was 

a psychologist and had a sense of style. As we know, sense of style 

and orthodoxy are most intimately related. Small wonder that the 

contemporary expressions of the life of faith repeatedly aroused his 

suspicion and concern. It is strange that the types of piety of which 

he disapproved as exaggerated and dangerous strongly remind us of 

the modern devotion that he defended. But this is understandable. 

His French sheep lacked a secure sheepfold, a discipline and 

organization that would hold all those zealous believers within the 

borders of what the church could tolerate. 

Gerson saw the dangers of popular devotion everywhere. He 

considered it a mistake to take mysticism into the street.16 The 

world, he says, is in the last period shortly before the end and, like 

a demented old man, is victimized by all kinds of fantasies, visions, 

and illusions, which make many individuals stray from the truth.17 

Lacking proper guidance, many succumb to all too strict fasts, all 

too extended vigils, and superfluous tears with which they cloud 

their brains. They turn a deaf ear to admonitions for moderation. 

Let them be on guard, because they can easily fall victim to the 

Devil’s delusions. A short time ago, he had visited a wife and 

mother in Arras who, against the wishes of her husband, engaged in 

total fasts that lasted two to four days, for which she was greatly 

admired. Gerson had talked with her, had thoroughly tested her, 

and found that her abstinence was arrogant and stubborn because 

she ate with insatiable voracity when such fasts ended. As a reason 

for her self-inflicted austerities, she stated nothing other than that 

she was unworthy to eat bread. Her external appearance already 

betrayed her approaching insanity.18 Another woman, an epileptic, 

whose corns twinged whenever a soul went to hell, who read sins 

from foreheads, and who claimed that she saved three souls a day, 

confessed under threat of torture that she only behaved this way 

because it was her means of making a living.19 

Gerson did not value very highly the visions and revelations of 

recent times that were available to the reading public everywhere. 

He even rejected those of famous saints such as Bridget of Sweden 

and Catherine of Siena.20 He had heard so many revelations that he 

had been robbed of his trust in them. Many declared that it had 

been revealed to them that they would become pope; a learned man 

had even described it with his own hand and had supported it with 

various proofs. Yet another had been convinced, in succession, that 

he would become pope, still later, that he would become the 

Antichrist, or at least his forerunner, and had for this reason 

entertained the idea of committing suicide so that Christendom 

would be spared such an evil.21 Nothing is so dangerous, says 

Gerson, as ignorant devotion. If the pious poor hear that Mary’s 

spirit exulted in God, they try to exult too and, sometimes in love, 

sometimes in fear, imagine all kinds of things to happen. They see 

all kinds of visions that they cannot distinguish from the truth and 

that they take for miracles and proof of their excellent devotion. 22 

This, however, is exactly what the modern devotion prescribed: “He 

who is intent upon making himself, by this path, with all his heart 

and by all his efforts, equal in spirit to the sufferings of the Lord, 

should strive to make himself humble and fearful. And if he is in 

danger, he should join this danger to the danger of Christ and be 

ready to share it with him.”23 

The contemplative life is fraught with great dangers, says Gerson; 

many have become melancholy or mentally ill because of it.24 He 

knows how easily overlong fasts can lead to madness or 

hallucinations; he also knows of the role of fasts in magic.25 Now, 

where is the man with such a keen eye for the psychological 

element in the expressions of faith to draw the boundary between 

what is holy and permissible and what should be rejected? He 

himself sensed that-the question of orthodoxy alone did not suffice; 

as a trained theologian it was easy enough to pronounce judgment 

whenever there was evident departure from dogma. There 

remained, however, those cases that were outside the pale of 

dogma, where an ethical evaluation of the expressions of faith had 

to be his guide and where his sense of appropriateness and good 

taste had to prompt his judgment. There is no virtue more lost from 

sight in these miserable times of the schism than that of “discretio,” 

says Gerson. 26 

While to Jean de Gerson the criterion of dogma was no longer the 

only one to tip the scale in distinguishing between false and true 

piety, so much the more are we today inclined to judge types of 

religious intensity not only by the yardstick of their orthodoxy or 

heresy, but according to their psychological nature. Dogmatic 

distinctions were not seen by the people of that time themselves. 

They received from the heretical Brother Thomas just as much 

edification as they did from the saintly Vincent Ferrer; they 

denounced St. Colette and her successor as swindlers and 

hypocrites.27 Colette displays all those characteristics that James 

called the theopathic state,28 which is rooted in the soil of a most 

painful supersensitivity. She cannot stand the sight of fire or 

tolerate its heat. Candles are the only exception. She has an 

exaggerated fear of flies, slugs, ants, stench, or impurity. She feels 

the same sickening disgust for sexuality that was in later times 

displayed by St. Aloysius Gonzaga. She prefers to have only virgins 

in her congregation, loathes married saints, and regrets that her 

mother took her father in a second marriage.29 This passion for 

purest virginity was praised by the church as uplifting and worthy 

of emulation. Virginity was harmless as long as it proclaimed itself 

in the form of a personal disgust for anything sexual. But this same 

feeling became dangerous, both to the church and to the individual 

proclaiming his adherence to it, in another form: whenever virginity 

no longer, like a snail, pulled in its feelers so as to lock itself 

securely into a sphere of purity of its own, but rather desired this 

preoccupation with chastity to be applied to the church and the 

social lives of others. The church had to deny this striving for purity 

time and again whenever it assumed revolutionary forms and 

expressed itself in vehement attacks on the impurity of priests or the 

debauchery of monks, because the medieval church knew that it 

was not in her power to turn away these evils. Jean de Varennes 

paid for his insistence in the miserable prison in which he was 

locked by the bishop of Reims. This Jean de Varennes was a learned 

theologian and a famous preacher who seemed to be in line for a 

bishopric or even a cardinal’s hat while he was serving at the papal 

court of Avignon as chaplain to the young cardinal of Luxembourg. 

But all this had come to an end when he abruptly renounced all his 

benefices, with the exception of a sinecure at Notre Dame at Reims, 

renounced his rank and returned from Avignon to his native region 

where he began to lead a saintly life and to preach in Saint Lié. “Et 

avoit moult grant hantise e poeuple qui le venoient vier de tous 

pays pour la simple vie trés-noble et moult honneste qui il 

menoit.”*! People thought that he would become pope; he was 

called “le saint homme de S. Lié.”+2 Many tried to kiss his hand and 

touch his gown because of his miraculous powers. Some considered 

him to be a messenger of God or even a divine being; all of France 

spoke of nothing else.30 

But not everyone believed in the sincerity of his intentions; there 

were those who spoke of the “fou de S. Lié”+3 or suspected him of 

using these sensational means for the purpose of gaining the high 

clerical offices that had escaped him so far. Jean de Varennes, as 

many earlier individuals, allows us to see how a passion for sexual 

purity is transposed into revolutionary ways of thought. It is as if he 

reduces all the complaints about the degeneration of the church to 

one and the same evil: unchastity. He preaches, red-hot in his 

outrage, protests, and complaints, against the church authorities, 

most of all against the archbishop of Reims. “Au loup, au loup,” §4 

he shouts to the masses, and they understand only too well who is 

meant by the “wolf” and eagerly shout back, “Hahay, aus leus, mes 

bones gens, aus leus.” But it seems that Jean de Varennes did not 

have all the courage of his convictions. In his defense from prison 

he claims that he had never said that he meant the archbishop; he 

was only quoting the proverb “qui est tigneus, il ne doit pas oster 

son chaperon” (“he who has head sores should not take off his 

cap”).31 No matter how far he may have actually gone, what his 

audience had heard in the sermon was the old teaching that had so 

often threatened to disrupt the life of the church: the sacraments of 

a priest living an unchaste life are invalid. The host he celebrates is 

nothing but bread, baptism and absolution are worthless if done by 

him. In the case of Jean de Varennes this was only part of a more 

extremist program of chastity: priests should not be allowed to live 

even with a nun or an old woman; twenty-two or twenty-three sins 

are connected with marriage; adulterers should be punished 

according to the old covenant; Christ himself would have stoned the 

woman taken in adultery if he had been certain of her guilt; there 

was no chaste woman in all of France; no bastard could do good or 

be blessed.32 

The church always had to defend itself out of its sense of self- 

preservation against this insistent form of disgust over unchastity. 

Once doubts were to be raised about the efficacy of the sacraments 

dispensed by unworthy priests, the entire life of the church would 

be shaken to its foundations. Gerson put Jean de Varennes on the 

same level as Jan Hus, someone with originally good intentions led 

astray by zealousness.33 

On the other hand, the church was usually very indulgent in 

another area, tolerating highly sensuous depictions of the love of 

God. But the conscientious chancellor of the University of Paris saw 

danger here, too, and warned against it. 

He knew this danger from his great psychological experience and 

in various aspects, dogmatic as well as ethical. “One day would not 

be sufficient for me,” he said, “if I had to count all the many crazed 

acts of those in love, of those who have lost their senses: amantium, 

immo et amentium.”34 Indeed, he knew from experience, “Amor 

spiriritualis facile labitur in nudum carnalum amorem” (“Spirtual 

love easily turns into purely carnal love”).35 Who else but himself 

could Gerson have meant when he speaks of a man known to him 

once who had, out of praiseworthy devotion, cultivated a trusting 

friendship in the Lord with a spiritual sister: “In the beginning there 

was no fire of a carnal nature, but gradually a love grew from the 

regular meetings that was no longer rooted in God, so that he could 

no longer resist visiting her or thinking of her in her absence. Still, 

he suspected nothing sinful, no devilish deceit, until a more 

prolonged absence caused him to gain an insight into the danger 

and God turned him away from it just in time.”36 From then on, he 

was “un homme averti” and benefited from it. His entire work, “De 

diversis diaboli tentationibus,”37 is a keen analysis of a state of 

mind comparable to that of the Dutch modern devotees. Above all, 

it is the “dulcedo Dei,” the “sweetness” of the Windesheimers that 

Gerson distrusted. The Devil, he says, sometimes offers man an 

immeasurable and wondrous sweetness (dulcedo) of a kind like 

devotion and resembling it, so that one makes that enjoyment and 

sweetness (suavitas) his sole goal and only loves and follows God in 

order to attain that enjoyment.38 Elsewhere39 he says of the same 

dulcedo dei: Many have been defeated by the all too intense 

cultivation of such feelings; they have turned to the ravings of their 

heart as if they were embracing God, and have been miserably 

mistaken. This excess leads to all kinds of useless effort. Some try to 

attain that state of complete insensitivity and passivity in which all 

their acts are the result of the will of God, or that mystic realization 

of and union with God wherein He is no longer conceived of as a 

being or truth or goodness.—This was also the basis of Gerson’s 

critique of Ruusbroec,40 in whose naiveté he did not believe. He 

criticizes Ruusbroec’s notion of the “Ornament of the Spiritual 

Wedding,” which implies that the perfect soul viewing God does not 

only view Him by means of the clarity that is the divine essence, but 

by means of the fact that this soul is God, Himself.41 

The sense of the destruction of individuality that the mystics of 

all times have enjoyed could not be admitted by a defender of the 

moderate, old-fashioned Bernardinian mysticism such as Gerson. A 

visionary had told him that her spirit had been destroyed in a real 

act of destruction while viewing God, and had then been created 

anew. “How do you know that?” he asked her. She herself had felt 

it, was her answer. The logical absurdity of this explanation is 

triumphant proof, to the intellectual chancellor, of how 

reprehensible such a feeling is.42 It was dangerous to express such 

emotions intellectually; the church could only tolerate them in the 

form of images such as the one that had the heart of Catherine of 

Siena transformed into the heart of Christ. But Marguerite Porete of 

Hennegouw, a member of the Brothers of the Free Spirit, who had 

also felt her soul to be destroyed in God, was burnt at the stake in 

Paris in 1310.43 

The great danger posed by the feeling of annihilation of self was 

the conclusion reached by Indian as well as Christian mystics that 

the perfect, viewing and loving soul is no longer capable of sinning. 

Immersed in God, it no longer has a will of its own; what remains is 

only the divine will and if there should exist any carnal inclinations 

there can be no sin in them.44 Innumerable poor and ignorant 

persons have been misled by such teachings into a life of the most 

terrible excesses, as illustrated, for example, by the sects of the 

Bégards, the Brothers of the Free Spirit, and the Turlupins. 

Whenever Gerson spoke about the dangers of the mad love of 

God,45 he remembers the warning examples of those sects.46 But 

nearly identical emotions are found among the devotees. The 

Windesheimer Hendrik van Herp accuses his own spiritual relatives 

of spiritual adultery.47 There were in this sphere of thought devilish 

traps, producing the most perverse godlessness. Gerson tells of a 

respected man who had confessed to a Carthusian that he would not 

be barred from the love of God by a mortal sin, and he specifically 

named unchastity, that rather it inflamed him to praise and to 

desire the divine sweetness the more intensely.48 

The church was on guard as soon as the stirrings of mysticism 

were transformed into clearly formulated convictions or found 

social applications. As long as the results were mere passionate 

fantasies of a symbolic nature, the church permitted even the most 

exuberant of them. Johannes Brugman was allowed to apply all the 

characteristics of a drunkard to the Incarnation of Christ, a 

drunkard who forgets himself, sees no danger, does not get angry 

when mocked, gives everything away. “O, and was he not drunk 

when love forced him to come from the highest heaven into this 

lowest valley of the world?” He walks around heaven and serves the 

prophets from well-filled jugs, “and they drank until they burst and 

then David with his harp jumped before the table as if he were the 

fool of my Lord.”49 

Not only the grotesque Brugman, but also the pure Ruusbroec 

liked to picture the love of God in the guise of drunkenness. Next to 

drunkenness there is the image of hunger. They may both be an 

allusion to the biblical “que edunt me, adhuc esurient, et qui bibunt 

me, adhuc sitient,”50 which, uttered by Sapientia, was taken to be 

the word of the Lord. The metaphor of the human spirit constantly 

visited by an eternal hunger for God was put in this manner: “An 

eternal hunger begins here which is never satisfied. This is an 

internal longing and desire of the loving power and of the created 

spirit for an uncreated good. . . . These are the poorest people alive 

because they are greedy and voracious and they are possessed by 

greed. No matter how much they eat and drink, they never become 

satiated by it, because this kind of hunger is eternal. . . . And if God 

were to grant to these unfortunates, all the gifts of the saints save 

the gift of Himself, the gaping greed of the spirit would yet remain 

hungry and unsatisfied.” But just as the guise of drunkenness, that 

of hunger is subject to a reversal. 

Christ’s hunger is great beyond measure; he devours us all to the ground, 

because he is a greedy indulger and his hunger is insatiable. He devours 

the marrow from our bones. Yet we do not begrudge it and we will 

begrudge it less the better we taste him. No matter what he eats of us he 

cannot become satiated for he is greedy and his hunger is beyond 

measure. Although we are poor, he pays no mind to it and has no wish to 

leave anything to us. First he prepares his food and burns all our sins and 

infirmities in love; when we are cleansed and roasted in love he yawns 

greedily to swallow all this. . . . If we could see the greedy lust which 

Christ has for our bliss, we would not be able to stop flying into his 

mouth. And if Jesus devours us entirely, he gives us, in turn, himself; and 

he gives us the spiritual hunger and thirst to partake of Him with eternal 

lust. He gives us spiritual hunger and to our heartfelt love his own body 

as food. And if we eat this body and, within us, enjoy it with deep 

devotion, from it will flow his glorious hot blood into our nature and into 

all our veins. . . . Look, thus we will always eat and be eaten, and rise 

and fall with love, and this is our life in eternity.51 

One small step more and we have gone once again from the 

highest mysticism to a flat symbolism. “You will eat him,” says Jean 

Berthelemy speaking of Communion in Le livre de crainte amoureuse, 

“roasted in fire, well cooked, but not burnt. Just as the Easter lamb 

was well cooked and roasted between two fires of wood or coal, so 

was sweet Jesus tied on Good Friday on the spit of the worthy cross 

and, between the two fires of very painful death and suffering and 

that of all consuming love and Minne which he bore for our souls 

and for our bliss, he was roasted and slowly cooked in order to save 

us.”52 

The metaphors of drunkenness and hunger by themselves 

contradict the view that the feeling of religious bliss had to be 

symbolized erotically.53 The influx of the divine influence was felt 

just like drinking or becoming satiated. A female devotee feels 

flooded by the blood of Jesus Christ and faints.54 The blood fantasy 

that was continually invigorated by the belief in transubstantiation 

expresses itself in the most intoxicating extremes of red-hot 

emotion. The wounds of Jesus, says Bonaventura, are the blood red 

flowers of our sweet and blooming paradise, above which the soul, 

like a butterfly, has to fly, drinking first from one flower and then 

from another. Through the wound in his side, the soul has to 

penetrate to His heart itself. At the same time, His blood flows in 

the brooks of paradise. All the warm, red blood has flowed through 

Suso’s mouth into his heart and soul.55 Catherine of Siena is one of 

the saints who have drunk from the blood flowing from the wound 

in Christ’s side, just as it was granted to others to taste the milk 

from Mary’s breast, as, for instance, St. Bernard, Henry Suso, and 

Alain de la Roche. 

Alain de la Roche, in Latin Alanus de Rupe, called Van der Klip 

by his Dutch friends, may be regarded as one of the most noticeable 

types of the French, more extreme devotion, and of the ultra- 

concrete fantasies of faith of late medieval times. Born around 1428 

in Brittany, he was active as a Dominican primarily in the north of 

France and in the Netherlands. He died in 1475 in Zwolle among 

the Brethren of the Common Life, with whom he maintained lively 

relations. His main task was agitation for the use of the rosary; for 

this purpose, he founded a worldwide prayer brotherhood for which 

he prescribed the fixed system of Hail Marys alternating with Our 

Fathers. In the printed works of this visionary, mainly sermons and 

descriptions of his visions,56 we notice the strongly sexual element 

of his fantasy, but at the same time the absence of any note of a 

glowing passion which could justify his sexual emotions. The 

sensual expression of the all dissolving love of God has here become 

mere procédé. It contains nothing of the overflowing fervor which 

elevates the fantasies about hunger, thirst, blood, and love of the 

great mystics. His meditations about every part of Mary’s body, 

which he recommends, his exact description of how he had 

repeatedly been refreshed by Mary’s milk, in his systematic 

symbolism in which he identifies each word of the Lord’s Prayer as 

the bridal bed of one of the virtues, all this reveals a spirit on the 

decline, the decay of the strongly colored piety of the late medieval 

period into the form of a flower past its prime. 

The sexual element also has a place in the satanic fantasies. Alain 

de la Roche sees the monsters of sin with disgusting genitals from 

which a fiery and sulphur-like cloud is emitted that darkens the 

earth with its smoke. He sees the meretrix apostasiae*° who devours 

the apostates, vomits them up and devours them again, kisses and 

cuddles them like a mother, and from her womb gives birth to them 

over and over again.57 

This is the dark side of the “sweetness” of the devotees. As an 

inevitable complement to the sweet heavenly fantasy, the mind 

harbored a black cesspool of hellish notions that were expressed in 

the fiery language of earthly sensuality. It is not so strange that 

there are connections between the sedate circles of the 

Windesheimers and the darkest product of the Middle Ages in their 

final years: the witch-hunting madness that had by then grown into 

that fatally concluding system of theological zeal and judicial 

severity. Alanus de Rupe is a link in the chain. He was the teacher 

of his fellow Dominican, Jacob Sprenger, who not only coauthored 

the Hammer of Witches58 with Heinrich Institoris, but was also the 

promoter in Germany of Alanus’s Brotherhood of the Rosary. 

Chapter Nine 

THE DECLINE OF SYMBOLISM 

RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS ALWAYS TENDED TO TRANSFORM 

themselves into lively images. The mentality of the time believed it 

had come to understand a mystery once it had placed it before its 

eyes. Therefore, this need to worship the inexpressible through 

visible signs resulted in the constant creation of new images. In the 

fourteenth century, the image of the cross and the lamb were not 

any longer sufficient to contain the overflowing love of Jesus; added 

to them was the veneration of the name of Jesus itself, and, for 

some, the new image threatened to become dominant. Henry Suso 

had the name of Jesus tattooed over his heart and compared it to 

the picture of the beloved that a lover has sewn into his clothing. 

He sent handkerchiefs with the sweet name embroidered on them to 

his spiritual children.1 Bernardino of Siena, concluding his powerful 

sermon, lit two candles and displayed a tablet a yard square on 

which the name of Jesus, in blue on gold and surrounded with an 

aurora, could be seen. “The people who filled the church, fell to 

their knees sobbing and crying over the love of Jesus.”2 Many other 

Franciscans and preachers of other orders imitated the practice. 

Denis the Carthusian was depicted holding such a tablet raised in 

his hands. The sun-like rays around the crest on the arms of Geneva 

are derived from this form of veneration.3 The practice appeared 

suspect to the church authorities; there was talk of superstition and 

idolatry, and riots for and against the custom occurred. Bernardino 

was invited to appear before the Curia, and Pope Martin V 

prohibited the practice.4 However, the urge to worship the Lord in a 

visible sign soon found a different and sanctioned form: the 

monstrance,5 which displaced the Host itself as an object of 

veneration. Replacing the form of a tower, which it had at the time 

of its first appearance in the fourteenth century, the monstrance 

took the shape of the radiant sun, the symbol of divine love. Again, 

the church had reservations; at first the use of the monstrance was 

restricted to the week of the Festival of the Sacraments. 

The excess of elements into which the declining Middle Ages 

dissolved almost everything would have resulted in nothing but a 

wild phantasmagoria had it not been for the fact that almost every 

image could find a place in the huge, all encompassing mental 

system of symbolism. 

There was no great truth of which the medieval mind was more 

certain than those words from the Corinthians, “Videmus nunc per 

speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem” (“For now we 

see through a glass darkly; but then face to face”). They never 

forgot that everything would be absurd if it exhausted its meaning 

in its immediate function and form of manifestation, and that all 

things extend in an important way into the world beyond. That 

insight is still familiar to us as an inarticulate feeling in those 

moments when the sound of rain on leaves or the light of a lamp on 

a table penetrates momentarily into a deeper level of perception 

than that serving practical thought and action. It may surface in the 

form of a sickening obsession to the effect that all things seem to be 

pregnant with a threatening personal intent or with an enigma that 

we must solve but cannot. It may also, more frequently, fill us with 

that calm and strengthening certainty that our own life shares in the 

mysterious meaning of the world. The more that feeling condenses 

into awe of the One from which all things flow, the more readily it 

will move from the clear certainty of isolated moments to a lasting, 

ever present feeling or even to an articulated conviction. “By 

cultivating the continuous sense of our connection with the power 

that made things as they are, we are tempered more towardly for 

their reception. The outward face of nature need not alter, but the 

expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It 

is like the difference between looking on a person without love, or 

upon the same person with love. ... When we see all things in God, 

and refer all things to him, we read in common matters superior 

expressions of meaning.”6 

This is the emotional foundation from which symbolism arises. In 

God, nothing empty or meaningless exists. “Nihil vacuum neque 

sine signo apud Deum.”7 As soon as the idea of God was 

conceptualized, everything originating in Him and finding meaning 

in Him also crystalized into thoughts articulated in words. And thus 

comes into being that noble and lofty idea of the world as a great 

symbolic nexus—a cathedral of ideas, the highest rhythmic and 

polyphonic expression of all that can be thought. 

The symbolic mode of thought is independent of and of equal 

value to the genetic mode. The latter, perceiving the world as 

development, was not as alien to the medieval mind as is often 

depicted. But the arising of one thing from another was only seen in 

the naive figure of direct procreation or in a branching off and, by 

logical deduction, applied to the things of the mind. One could see 

it in the structure of genealogies, of the branches of trees: an “arbor 

e origine iuris et legnum” ordered everything, as far as the law was 

concerned, into the image of a tree and its widely spreading 

branches. In this deductive application, evolutionary thought 

retained a somewhat formalized, arbitrary, and barren quality. 

Viewed from the standpoint of causal thinking, symbolism 

represents an intellectual shortcut. Thought attempts to find the 

connection between things, not by tracing the hidden turns of their 

causal ties, but rather by suddenly jumping over these causal 

connections. The connection is not a link between cause and effect, 

but one of meaning and purpose. The conviction that such a link 

exists may come into existence whenever two things share an 

essential quality that relates to something of general value. Or, in 

other words, any association on the basis of any identity may be 

directly transformed into an awareness of an essential and mystic 

connection. From a psychological vantage point this may appear to 

us as a very meager intellectual function. From an ethnological 

viewpoint we can see that it is also very primitive. Primitiveness of 

thought reveals itself in its weak ability to perceive the boundaries 

between things; it attempts to incorporate into the idea of a 

particular thing all that which constitutes by its very presence any 

kind of connection based on similarity or membership in a 

particular category. The symbolizing function is most intimately 

related to this. 

But symbolism loses any semblance of arbitrariness and 

immaturity as soon as we realize that it is inseparably linked to that 

worldview that was known as realism during medieval times and 

that we, somewhat less fittingly, call Platonic idealism. 

The symbolic postulation of identity on the basis of shared 

characteristics is only meaningful if the qualities shared by the 

symbol and the thing symbolized are regarded as being truly 

essential. White and red roses bloom among thorns. The medieval 

mind immediately sees in this fact symbolic significance: virgins 

and martyrs shine in glory among those who persecute them. How 

is this postulate of identity achieved? By virtue of the identity of the 

qualities: beauty, tenderness, purity. The blood red tint of the roses 

is also that of the virgin and the martyr. But this connectedness is 

only truly meaningful and full of mystic significance if the linkage, 

the quality, the essence between the two constituents of the 

particular symbolism are shared by each of them. In other words, 

where red and white are regarded not as mere labels for physical 

differences on a quantitative basis, but as real entities, as realities 

themselves. Our intellect is still capable of seeing things in this way 

at any times if we can momentarily capture the wisdom of primitive 

man, the child, the poet, or the mystic. For all these, the natural 

essence of things is locked up in their general quality. This 

characteristic is their being, the nucleus of their essence. Beauty, 

tenderness, whiteness by being essences are identities: everything 

white is beautiful, tender, and everything that is white has to be 

connected, has to have the same basis to its existence, has to have 

the same importance before God.—This is why, in medieval 

thought, an inseparable link exists between symbolism and realism 

(in the medieval sense of the word). 

We should not be too concerned, here, with the quarrel over 

“universals.” To be sure, the realism proclaimed by the universalia 

ante res, which ascribed essence and preexistence to general terms, 

did not dominate medieval thought. There were also nominalists: 

the universalia post rem had its defenders. However, the thesis is not 

too daring that radical nominalism has never been something else 

other than a countercurrent, a reaction, an opposition, and that the 

younger, more moderate nominalism only accommodated certain 

philosophical reservations about an extreme realism, but placed no 

obstacle in the path of the inherent-realistic thought of medieval 

intellectual culture in general.9 

Inherent to the entire culture. Because what matters is not 

primarily that dispute among keen-minded theologians, but the 

ideas that completely dominate the life of fantasy and thought as it 

is expressed in art, ethics, and daily life. They are all extremely 

realistic, not because high theology had been educated in a long 

tradition of neo-Platonism, but because realism, independent of 

philosophy, is the primitive mode of thought. To the primitive 

mind, everything that is capable of being named immediately 

assumes an essence, be it a quality, a form, or something else. They 

project themselves automatically on the heavens. Their essence may 

almost always (but not necessarily always) be personified; the dance 

of anthropomorphic terms may begin at any moment. 

All realism in the medieval sense is ultimately 

anthropomorphism. If the thought that ascribes an independent 

essence to an idea wishes to make it visible, there is no other way 

except through personification. Here is the locus where symbolism 

and realism turn into allegory. An allegory is symbolism projected 

on a superficial power of imagination; it is the intentional 

expression and, with it, also the exhausting of a symbol; the 

transposition of a passionate cry into a grammatically correct 

sentence. Goethe describes the contrast as follows: “Allegory 

changes manifestation into a term, the term into an image, but does 

so in such a way that the term can always be kept linked to the 

image and preserved in it. The term is completely captured in the 

image and expressed by it. Symbolism changes the manifestation 

into an idea, the idea into an image and does so in such a manner 

that the idea remains forever effective and unreachable and, though 

spoken of in all languages, inexpressible.”10 

Allegory has the potential of being reduced to a pedantic 

commonplace and, at the same time, of reducing an idea to an 

image. The manner by which allegory entered medieval thought, 

namely as a literary product of late antiquity, in the allegorical 

productions of Martianus Capella and Prudentius, increased its 

pedantic and senile character. However, it would be wrong to 

believe that medieval allegory and personification lack authenticity 

and vitality. If it lacked these, why did medieval culture cultivate 

allegory so consistently and with such dedication? 

Taken together, these three ways of thought—realism, symbolism, 

and personification—illuminated the medieval mind like a flood of 

light. Psychology is prone to deal with symbolism in its entirety in 

terms of the association of ideas. Historians of culture, however, 

have to view that form of thought with greater reverence. The value 

for life of a symbolic interpretation of all of existence was 

incalculable. Symbolism created an image of the world more strictly 

unified by stronger connections than causal-scientific thought is 

capable of. It embraces in its strong arms all of nature and all of 

history. In both, it creates an indissoluble order of rank, an 

architectural structure, a hierarchical subordination. Since in any 

symbolic context one thing has to be higher and another lower, 

things of equal value cannot be symbols of each other, but, 

together, can only point to a third that is higher than they. There is 

ample room in symbolic thought for an immeasurable variety of 

relationships among things, since anything with its individual 

qualities can be the symbol of yet other things, and may, with one 

and the same quality, signify quite various other things, since the 

highest things are symbolized by thousands of lower things. Nothing 

is too low to signify the highest of things and to point to it for the 

purpose of its glorification. The walnut signifies Christ; the seed 

kernel is the divine nature, the outer shell His human nature, and 

the woody membrane in between is the cross. All things offer 

support and stability to the mind as it climbs to the eternal; all 

things lift each other to the heights. Symbolic thought causes the 

continuous transfusion of the feeling for God’s majesty and for 

eternity into everything that can be perceived and thought. It never 

allows the fire of the mystic life to be extinguished. It permeates the 

idea of anything with heightened aesthetic and ethical value. Just 

try to imagine the enjoyment of seeing every jewel sparkle with the 

splendor of its symbolic value, of the moment when the identity of 

roses with virginity is more than just poetic Sunday dress, the time 

when identification points to the essence of both. It is a true 

polyphony of thought. In a completely thought-out symbolism, each 

element reverberates in a harmonious musical chord of symbols. 

Symbolic thinking yields to that intoxication of thought, leads to 

that pre-intellectual obscuring of the definition of things, that 

muting of rational thought, which lifts the intensity of the feeling 

for life to its very peak. 

All realms of thought are joined in this harmonious 

connectedness. The facts of the Old Testament have meaning, they 

prefigure those of the New Testament. Profane history reflects them 

both. In any thinking, just as in a kaleidoscope, a beautiful 

symmetric figure takes shape from the chaotic mass of particles. 

Every symbol, by virtue of the fact that all of them are ultimately 

aligned around the central miracle of the Eucharist, attains a super- 

value, a much stronger degree of reality, and at this level 

signification is no longer symbolic, it is identity; The Host is Christ. 

And the priest who eats it becomes the tomb of the Lord because of 

his act. The derived symbol partakes in the reality of the highest 

mystery, every act of signification becomes a mystic one-being. 11 

Through symbolism it becomes possible both to honor and enjoy 

the world, which, by itself, is damnable, and to ennoble the earthly 

enterprise, since every profession has its relationship to the highest 

and holiest. The labor of the craftsman is the eternal generation and 

incarnation of the word and the alliance between God and the 

soul.12 Even between earthly and divine love the threads of 

symbolic contact run to and fro. The strong religious individualism, 

that is the cultivation of one’s own soul to attain virtue and bliss, 

found its wholesome counterweight in realism and symbolism that 

separated one’s own suffering and one’s own virtue from the 

particular character of the individual personality and elevated both 

into the sphere of universals. 

The ethical value of symbolic thought is inseparable from its 

formative value. Symbolic formulation is like music added to the 

text of logically formulated doctrinal statements that would sound 

stiff and insufficient without the music. “En ce temps oti la 

speculation est encour toute scolaire, les concepts définis sont 

facilement en désaccord avec les intuitions profondes.”13*1 

Symbolism opened the entire wealth of religious notions to art, 

which could express them with rich sound and in full color and, at 

the same time, bestow on them both an obscure and a soaring 

quality that allowed art to become the vehicle for the most 

profound intuitions on their way to the understanding of the 

inexpressible. 

The waning14 Middle Ages display this entire world of thought in 

its last flourishing. The world was perfectly pictured through that 

all encompassing symbolism, and the individual symbols turned into 

petrified flowers. From the time of antiquity, symbolism had a 

tendency to become purely mechanical. Once established as a 

principle of thought, symbolism arises not only from poetic 

imagination and enthusiasm, but attaches itself to the intellectual 

function like a parasitic plant and degenerates into pure habit and a 

disease of thought. Whole perspectives of symbolic contact arise, 

particularly when the symbolic contact comes from a mere 

correspondence in number. Symbolizing becomes simply the use of 

arithmetical tables. The twelve months are supposed to signify the 

twelve apostles, the four seasons the Evangelists, and the entire year 

is then bound to mean Christ.15 

Conglomerates of systems based on the number seven take shape. 

The Seven Cardinal Virtues correspond to the seven requests of the 

Lord’s Prayer, the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, The Seven Praises 

of Bliss, and the Seven Penitential Psalms. These, in turn are related 

to the Seven Moments of the Passion and the Seven Sacraments. 

Every individual unit of the sevens corresponds again as contrast or 

cure for the Seven Cardinal Sins, which are represented by seven 

animals that are followed by seven diseases.16 For a true healer of 

souls and moralist such as Gerson, from whom the above examples 

are taken, the practical ethical value of the symbolic relations 

predominates. For a visionary such as Alain de la Roche, it is the 

aesthetic element in the relationship that is most important.17 He 

has to establish a system depending on the numbers ten and fifteen 

because the prayer cycle of the Brotherhood of the Rosary, which 

commanded his zealous support, comprises 150 aves interrupted by 

fifteen paters. The fifteen paters are the fifteen moments of the 

Passion, the 150 aves are the Psalms. But they mean much more. 

Multiplying the eleven heavenly spheres plus the four elements by 

the ten categories: substantia, qualitas, quantitas, etc. yields the 150 

habitudines naturales; the same habitudines naturales one obtains by 

multiplying the Ten Commandments by the fifteen virtues. The 

three theological, the four cardinal, the seven capital virtues 

amount to fourteen, “restant duae: religio et poenitentia,” which 

means that there is one too many, but Temperantia, the Cardinal 

Virtue, corresponds to Abstinentia,18 the Capital Virtue, which 

means that fifteen are left. Each of these virtues is a queen who has 

her bridal bed in one of the segments of the Lord’s Prayer. Each of 

the words of the ave means one of the Fifteen Perfections of Mary 

and at the same time a precious stone on the rupis angelica, which is 

Mary herself; every word drives away a sin or the animal 

symbolizing it. They are also branches of a tree laden with fruit in 

which all the saints are sitting, and the steps of a stair. For example, 

the word ave signifies Mary’s innocence and a diamond. It drives 

away pride, which, in turn, is symbolized by a lion. The word Mary 

means her wisdom and a carbuncle; it drives away envy, symbolized 

by a black dog. In his vision, Alain sees the disgusting figures of the 

sin-symbolizing animals and the shining colors of the precious 

stones. The stones’ miraculous powers, long famous, give rise, in 

turn, to new symbolic associations. The sardonyx is black, red, and 

white just as Mary was black in her humility, red in her pain, and 

white in her glory and mercy. Used as a seal, wax will not stick to 

this stone. This signifies the virtue of honorability, it drives away 

unchastity and causes people to be honorable and chaste. The pearl 

is the word gratia and also Mary’s own mercy. It is generated inside 

a seashell from a heavenly dew “sine admixtione cuiuscunque 

seminis propagationis.” Mary herself is this shell; in this instance 

the symbolism is slightly shifted because one would expect that 

Mary would be the pearl if one were to follow the pattern of the 

other precious stones. The kaleidoscopic nature of symbolism is also 

strikingly expressed here: the words “created from heavenly dew” 

also call to mind, albeit not made explicit, the other trope of the 

virgin birth, the fleece on which Gideon prayed that the holy sign 

might descend. 

The symbolizing mode of thought had been almost entirely spent. 

Finding symbols and allegories had become mere play, a superficial 

fantasizing on a simple association of ideas. A symbol retains an 

emotional value only by virtue of the holiness of the thing it 

symbolizes; as soon as symbolizing shifts from the purely religious 

realm to one exclusively moral, its hopeless degeneration is 

exposed. Froissart, in an elaborate poem “Le orloge amoureus,” 

manages to connect all the qualities of love to the different parts of 

a clockwork.19 Chastellain and Molinet compete in political 

symbolism. In the three estates the characteristic qualities of Mary 

are represented; the seven Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, three 

spiritual and four secular, represent the three Theological and the 

four Cardinal Virtues; the five cities, St. Omer, Aire, Lille, Douai, 

and Valenciennes, that remained loyal to Burgundy in 1477 become 

the Five Wise Virgins.20 Actually, this is a reverse symbolism; the 

lower does not point to the higher, but rather the higher to the 

lower, since, in the mind of the inventor, the earthly things that he 

intends to glorify with some heavenly ornamentation are fore-most. 

The Donatus moralisatus seu per allegoriam traductus, occasionally 

ascribed to Gerson, blended Latin grammar with theological 

symbolism: the noun is man, pronouns show that he is a sinner. At 

the lowest level of signification is a poem such as “Le parement et 

triumphe des dames,” by Olivier de la Marche, in which the entire 

female toilette is compared to virtues and outstanding qualities. The 

old courtier’s worthy sermon is punctuated by an occasional 

facetious wink of the eye. The slipper signifies humility: 

De la pantouffle ne vous vient que santé 

Et tout prouffil sans griefve maladie, 

Pour luy donner tiltre d’auctorité 

Je luy donne le nom d’humilité. *2 

In this way shoes become caution and industry; stockings 

endurance; the garter resolution; the shirt honorability; and the 

corset chastity.21 

But even in their most listless expressions, symbolism and 

allegory retained for the medieval mind much more lively 

emotional value than we might realize. The function of symbolic 

equations and personalized figures was so fully developed that any 

thought would almost automatically be transposed into a 

“personage,” that is into a character. Any idea was regarded as an 

entity, any quality as substance, and as entity it was immediately 

personified by the intelligence that conceived it. Denis the 

Carthusian saw the church in his visions in just as personal a shape 

as it had when it was presented onstage at the court festivity at 

Lille. In one of his revelations, he envisions the future Reformatio 

that the church sought brought about by the fathers of the Council 

and by Denis’s brother-in-spirit, Nicholas of Cusa: the church to 

come in its future purity. He envisions the spiritual beauty of that 

purified church as a marvelous and very precious garment, of 

indescribable physical beauty in its artistic blend of colors and 

figures. In another instance, he sees the church oppressed: ugly, 

mangy, bloodless, poor, weak, and downtrodden. The Lord says to 

Denis, Hark to your mother, my bride, the Holy Church, and Denis 

hears an inner voice as if it emanates from the figure of the church, 

“quasi ex persona ecclesiae.”22 In this, the idea is so bound up with 

the image that it is hardly felt to be necessary to trace back from 

the image to the idea, or that the allegory be explained in all its 

details. Only the theme need be given, no matter how imperfectly. 

The colorful garment is completely adequate for conveying the ideal 

of spiritual perfection; this is the dissolution of a concept into an 

image; a phenomena that is familiar to us from moments when 

ideas dissolve into music. 

We should remind ourselves at this point of the allegorical figures 

from the Roman de la rose. When we encounter the names Bel- 

Accueil, Doulce Mercy, Humble Requeste, it is only with difficulty 

that we think of something tangible. But for the people of the time 

they were realities clothed in living form and imbued with passion. 

They are perfectly comparable to Roman divinities that were also 

derived from abstractions, such as Pavor, Pallor, and Concordia, etc. 

What Usener says about them is almost perfectly applicable to 

medieval allegorical figures: “The conception confronted the soul 

with sensual force and exercised such power that the word that 

designated it could be considered a divine individual, in spite of all 

the adjectival mobility that it had left at its disposal.”23 Otherwise 

the Roman de la rose would have been unreadable. Doux-Penser, 

Honte, Souvenirs, and the others lived in the heads of the declining 

Middle Ages as semi-divine beings. In the case of one of the Rose 

figures an even further concretization took place: Danger, originally 

the menace threatening the suitor during the courtship, became, in 

the jargon of love, the betrayed husband. 

Repeatedly allegories are employed to express ideas particularly 

important to an argument. The bishop of Chalons, intent upon 

issuing a very serious warning over political activities to Philip the 

Good, presents the remonstrance which he gave on St. Andrew’s 

Day in the castle of Hesdin, to the duke, the duchess, and the 

entourage, in the form of an allegory. He has Haultesse de Signourie, 

who first resided in the Empire, later at the French and finally at the 

Burgundian court, sitting and wailing inconsolably about the fact 

that she was threatened in Burgundy by “Uncaring of Princes,” 

“Weakness of Councils,” “Envy of Servants,” “Extortion of Subjects.” 

He has these confronted by other personalities such as “Alertness of 

Princes,” and so forth, who have to expel the unfaithful servants of 

the court.24 Every quality has been rendered independent and 

personified. This was obviously the way to make an impression, 

something that we will find understandable if we realize that 

allegory still served a very vital function in the thought of those 

times. 

The Burgher of Paris is a conventional fellow rarely given to the 

enjoyment of cleverly turned phrases or mental games. Yet, when 

approaching the most terrible events he has to describe, the 

Burgundian murders that permeated Paris in June 1418 with the 

same stench of blood smelled in September 1792, he resorts to 

allegory:25“Lors se leva la deesse de Discorde, qui estoit en la tour 

de Mau-conseil, et esveilla Ire la forcenée et Convoitise et Enragerie 

et Vengence, et prindrent armes de toutes manières et bouterent 

hors d’avec eulx Raison, Justice, Memoire de Dieu et Atrempance 

moult honteusement.” *3 This continues in the same vein, 

alternating with direct descriptions of the atrocities. “Et en mains 

que on yroit cent pas de terre depuis que mors estoient, ne leur 

demouroit que leurs brayes, et estoient en tas comme porcs ou 

millieu de la boe . . . “;/4 torrents of rain wash the wounds clean. 

Why are allegories employed at this juncture? Because the author 

wants to rise to a higher intellectual level than that of the 

description of everyday events in the other parts of his diary. He has 

a need to see these terrible events rising out of something other 

than mere personal intentions, and allegory serves him as a means 

to express the tragic sentiment. 

How much of the function of personifying and allegorizing was 

still alive in late medieval times is demonstrated exactly in those 

places where it irritates us the most. In the tableau-vivant, where 

conventional figures are draped in nonessential garb, thus telling 

people that this is only play, we, too, are still somewhat able to 

enjoy allegory. But during the fifteenth century holy, as well as 

allegorical, figures went about in everyday garb, and new 

personifications could be added at any moment to serve any ideas 

one wanted to express. When Charles de Rochefort in “L’abuzé en 

court” wants to tell about the Moralité of the careless youth who 

had strayed from the path because of his experiences at court, he 

pulls out of his sleeve a number of new allegories in the style of the 

Roman de la rose. All of them, beginning with Fol cuidier and Fol 

bombance, are completely lacking in lifelike qualities to our taste. 

Towards the end, when Pauvreté and Maladie drag the youth to the 

hospital, they appear, in the miniatures that illustrate the poem, as 

noblemen of the time; even Le Temps requires no beard or scythe 

but appears dressed in regular vest and pants. The personifications 

appear too primitive to us because of the naive rigidity of the 

illustrations; everything tender and moving that is felt by the age 

itself in the conception of the figures is thereby lost to us. But in the 

commonplace nature of the piece is the sign of its vitality. Olivier 

de la Marche was not embarrassed at all by the fact that the twelve 

Virtues, performing an estrement during a court festival in Lille in 

1454, begin to dance, “en guise de mommerie et a faire bonne 

chiere, pour la feste plus joyeusement parfournier,”*> after their 

poem had been read.26—In our understanding, human 

characteristics can still be somewhat linked, albeit unintentionally, 

to virtues and emotions, but the medieval mind does not hesitate to 

turn ideas into persons, even in cases where we fail to see 

anthropomorphic links. Lent, as a personified figure, taking to the 

field against the army of Carnival is not a creation of Brueghel’s 

mad imagination; the poem “Bataille de Karesme et de charnage,” 

in which the cheese fights against the roach, the sausage against the 

eel, originated as early as the end of the thirteenth century and was 

already imitated by 1330 by the Spanish poet Juan Ruiz.27 Lent 

appears in proverbs, too: “Quaresme fait ses flans la nuit de 

pasques” (“During Easter week, Lent bakes his cakes”). Elsewhere 

the formative process goes still farther; in some northern German 

churches a doll was suspended in the choir of the church and called 

“Lent.” Wednesday before Easter these hungerdocks were cut down 

during mass.28 

Was there any difference between the reality of the holy figures 

and the purely symbolic? The former were confirmed by the church, 

had a historical character of their own, and had been shaped into 

images of wood and stone. On the other hand, the latter had points 

of contact with the life of one’s own soul and with free fantasy. One 

may in all seriousness consider that Fortune and Faux-Semblant 

were just as alive as St. Barbara and St. Christopher. Let us not 

forget that one figure rose from free fantasy outside of any dogmatic 

sanction and acquired a greater reality than any saint and survived 

them all: Death. 

There is actually no essential contrast between the allegory of the 

Middle Ages and the mythology of the Renaissance. In the first 

place, the figures of mythology are companions to free allegories 

during a good part of the Middle Ages; Venus plays her part in 

poems that are purely medieval. Second, free allegory is still in full 

bloom until well into the sixteenth century and beyond. During the 

fourteenth century, a virtual contest between allegory and 

mythology took place. In the poems of Froissart next to Doux- 

Semblant, Jonece, Plaisance, Refus, Danger, Escondit, Franchise 

there appears a strange collection of mythologems sometimes 

disfigured beyond recognition: Atropos, Clothos, Lachesis, Telephus, 

Idrophus, Neptisphoras! As far as the wealth of their forms is 

concerned, the gods and goddesses still come out on the short end if 

compared to the personages of the Roman de la rose; they remain 

hollow and shadowlike. Or, in cases where they have the scene all 

to themselves, they become extremely baroque and unclassical, as 

in the “Epistre d’Othéa” of Christine de Pisan. This relationship is 

reversed with the arrival of the Renaissance. Gradually the 

Olympians and the nymphs come to replace the Rose and the 

symbols in importance. From the treasures of antiquity, the classical 

figures obtained a wealth of style and sentiment, a poetic beauty, 

and, above all, a sense of unity with nature, in the face of which 

once lively allegory faded and wasted away. 

Symbolism, with its handmaid allegory, had become a mere 

mental game; the meaningful had became meaningless. Symbolic 

thought prevented the development of causal-genetic thinking. This 

is not to say that symbolism precluded it; the natural-genetic 

connection of things has its place alongside the symbolic 

connection, but it remained unimportant as long as interest had not 

shifted away from symbolism and turned towards the natural 

development of things. One clarifying example: for the relationship 

between spiritual and worldly authority, the medieval world had 

settled on two symbolic comparisons: one was that of the two 

heavenly bodies, the one that God had placed above the other at the 

time of the creation; the other was that of the two swords that the 

disciples had with them when Christ was arrested. To the medieval 

mind, these symbols were by no means merely clever comparisons; 

they established the basis of the relationships between authorities 

that were not allowed to shed this mystic linkage. These images 

have the same conceptual value Peter has as the rock of the church. 

The force of the symbol gets in the way of examining the historical 

development of both powers. When Dante recognizes secular 

authority to be necessary and decisive in De monarchia, he first must 

destroy the power of the symbol by questioning its applicability in 

order to clear the path for the historical investigation. 

A comment by Luther attacks the evil of arbitrary, haphazard 

allegory in theology. He is speaking of the great masters of medieval 

theology, of Denis the Carthusian, of Guilielmus Durandus, the 

author of the “Rationale divinorum officiorum,” of Bonaventura and 

Gerson, when he exclaims, “Allegorical studies are the work of idle 

people. Or do you think it would be difficult to spin an allegory 

about any given matter? Who is so poor in mind that he could not 

try his hand at allegory?”29 

Symbolism was a poor means of expressing those connections that 

we know to be essential at times when they rise to consciousness as 

we listen to music—“Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate.” 

There was an awareness of looking at an enigma yet here were 

attempts to distinguish the images in the mirror, to explain images 

through images, and to hold up mirrors to mirrors. The whole world 

was capsulated in independent figures; it was a time of overripeness 

and the falling of blossoms. Thought had become too dependent on 

figures; the visual tendency, so very characteristic of the waning 

Middle Ages, was now overpowering. Everything that could be 

thought had become plastic and pictorial. The conception of the 

world had reached the quietude of a cathedral in the moonlight in 

which thought was allowed to rest. 

Chapter Ten 

THE FAILURE OF IMAGINATION 

SYMBOLISM WAS VERY NEARLY THE LIFE’S BREATH OF medieval 

thought. The habit of seeing all things in their meaningful 

interrelationships and their relationship to the eternal both muted 

the boundaries between things and kept the world of thought alive 

with radiant, glowing color. Once, however, the symbolizing 

function has disappeared or become merely mechanical, the grand 

edifice of God-willed dependencies becomes a necropolis. A 

systematic idealism that everywhere presupposes a relationship 

between things as a result of their assumed essential general 

characteristics leads to a rigid and barren cataloguing in which the 

division and subdivision of terms, carried out purely deductively, is 

all too convenient. Ideas can be made to fit into the vault of the 

world edifice so readily. However, with the exception of the rules of 

abstract logic, there is no corrective that could ever point to an 

error in classification, so that the mind is deceived as to the value of 

its conclusions and the infallibility of the system itself is 

overestimated. All terms, precise and imprecise, stand like stars in 

the firmament and in order to come to know the nature of a thing 

one does not inquire into its internal construction or into the long 

shadow of its historical development, but looks towards the heavens 

where it shines as an idea. 

The habit of always extending things towards the ideal along an 

imaginary line is shown continuously in the medieval treatment of 

political, social, and ethical disputes. Even what is most mundane 

and common must be viewed in a universal context. For example, 

there was an ongoing controversy at the University of Paris as to 

whether any kind of payment should be asked for the degree of 

licentiate. Pierre d’Ailly himself took the floor to oppose the fee in 

opposition to the chancellor of the university. Instead of debating 

whether the demand was historically justified or debating its 

validity according to the legal code, d’Ailly framed his argument 

entirely in a scholastic manner: based on the text “Radix omnium 

malorum cupiditas,” d’Ailly took on the task of proving three things: 

that to demand the payment constituted simony; that it went 

against natural and divine law; and that it was a heresy.1 In order to 

criticize specific excesses that had disgraced a certain procession, 

Denis the Carthusian puts together everything concerning the 

procession from its beginning: as things happened under the old 

law, etc.2 without dealing with the issues themselves. This is the 

reason for the tedious and disappointing nature of almost any 

medieval proof; it points immediately to the sky above and loses 

itself from the very beginning in cases from Holy Scripture and in 

moral generalities. 

This perfect idealism reveals itself everywhere. Every mode of 

life, every social estate or occupation found itself circumscribed by 

a religious-ethical ideal according to which everyone has to reform 

himself to meet the requirements of his profession in order to serve 

the Lord properly.3 The emphasis given by Denis the Carthusian to 

the sanctity of the earthly profession has been interpreted as a sign 

of the new times, something characteristic of the Reformation. In 

the tract De vita et regimine, episcoporum, archidiaconorum, etc., 

which he ultimately summarized, for his friend Brugman, in two 

volumes collectively entitled De doctrina et regulis vital 

christianorium, he held up to every profession the ideal of the 

sanctifying fulfillment of duty; to the bishop, the prelate, the 

archdeacon, the canon, the pastor, the disciple, the prince, the 

nobleman, the knight, the merchants, the married, the widows, the 

young maidens, the brothers in the monasteries.4 But there is 

something truly medieval about just this separation of each estate 

into something independent, and the detailed description and 

teaching of duties has about it only abstract and general qualities 

and does not touch the real character of the profession. 

This universal tracing back to the general is a quality that, under 

the label “typism,” Lamprechts singled out as the very special 

characteristic feature of the medieval mind. But this feature is a 

mental consequence, a need, that arises from deeply rooted 

idealism. It is not so much an inability to see things in their own 

individuality as much as it is the deliberate desire to indicate the 

relationship of things to the highest point of reference, to their 

ethical ideality and their general significance. It was precisely the 

impersonal element that was sought out in everything; the value of 

anything was taken to be its value as a normal and model case. This 

lack of interest in a thing’s individuality and uniqueness, to a 

certain degree intentional, is a universalizing habit of thought 

characteristic of a low degree of intellectual development. 

The medieval mind busied itself to the highest degree with 

dissecting the entire world and all of life into independent ideas, 

only to arrange these ideas into numerous large feudal relationships 

or intellectual hierarchies. Thus the medieval mind was able to 

separate every concept from the context to which it belonged and 

see it in its essential independent existence. When Bishop Fulco of 

Toulouse was rebuked for giving alms to an Albigensian woman, he 

answered, “I do not give it to the heretic, but to the poor woman.” 

And the French Queen Margareta of Scotland, who had kissed the 

sleeping poet Alain Chartier on the mouth, excused her behavior, 

“Je n’ay pas baisé l’homme mais la précieuse bouche de laquelle 

sont yssuz et sortis tant de bons mots et vertueuses paroles.”6*! A 

saying had it, “Haereticare potero, sed haereticus non ero.”7}2 Does 

all this—in these examples from the realm of ordinary thought— 

correspond to what in the highest speculation of theology was 

meant to distinguish between God’s voluntas antecedens,’ desiring 

the salvation of all, and his voluntas consequens,§* which extends 

salvation only to the elect?s 

It all became an insomniac’s gnawing mulling over of all things 

unrestrained by the causal connections seen in reality; a virtually 

automatic analysis that finally amounted to nothing more than an 

endless exercise in numbering. No arena was more tempting for 

such elaborations than that of virtues and sins. Every sin has its 

fixed number of causes, its derivatives, its daughters, and its 

harmful effects. Twelve errors, said Denis, cheat the sinner: he 

deceives himself, he surrenders to the devil, he takes his own life, 

he rejects his wealth (his virtue), he sells himself for nothing (while 

he himself has been bought with the blood of Christ), he turns away 

from his most faithful lover, he thinks he is resisting the Almighty, 

he serves the devil, he acquires absence of peace, he opens for 

himself access to hell, he blocks his path to heaven, and he follows 

that to hell. Each one of these errors is illustrated, depicted, and, in 

a way, defined with passages of scripture, images, and details. It is 

so defined that it acquires the decided certainty and independence 

of a figure on a church portal. Then the same sequence is given 

anew with a deeper meaning: the seriousness of a sin has to be 

measured from seven standpoints: from the standpoint of God, from 

that of the sinner, the content, circumstances, purpose, from the 

standpoint of the nature of sin itself, and from that of its 

consequences. Several of these points are, in turn, again subdivided 

into eight or fourteen others; for example, the second into fourteen: 

the sin is heavier or lighter depending on the received benefits, on 

knowledge, earlier virtues, the office, the consecration, the ability to 

offer resistance, faith, age. There are six weaknesses of the spirit 

that make one prone to sin.9 This process can be compared to 

Buddhism: there too, we find this kind of systematic morality that is 

designed to provide guidance for the exercise of virtue. 

This anatomizing of sin could easily have weakened the feeling of 

guilt that it was supposed to strengthen, deflecting it into acts of 

squeezing the classifications for all they were worth, if it had not at 

the same time stimulated the imagination of sin and the notion of 

punishment. No human can perfectly grasp or completely 

understand the enormity of sin in his present life.10 All moral 

conceptions are made to carry an intolerably heavy burden by 

directly linking them over and over again to the majesty of God. 

Every sin, no matter how trivial, affects the entire universe. Just as 

Buddhist literature, encountering the great deed of a bodhisattva, 

hears the applause of the heavenly beings in the form of rains of 

flowers, shining light, and gentle earthquakes, Denis—in his more 

somber mood—hears how all the blessed and the just, the heavenly 

spheres, all the elements, and even unintelligent beings and soulless 

objects shout the condemnation of the unjust.11 His attempt to 

sharpen the fear of sin, death, justice, and hell in a most painful 

manner by offering detailed descriptions and dreadful images does 

not fall short of a terrifying effect, perhaps precisely because of the 

nonpoetic way his mind worked. Dante touched the darkness and 

cruelty of hell with beauty: Farinata and Ugolino are heroic in their 

corruption and Lucifer, flapping his wings, impresses us with his 

majesty. The monk Denis remains totally unpoetic in spite of his 

mystic intensity. He presents hell to us exclusively in terms of 

highest dread and misery. Pain and suffering are described in acid 

colors that the sinner should make every effort to imagine as 

realistically as possible. “Let us always keep before our mind’s eye,” 

says Denis, “an overheated and glowing stove and inside a naked 

man, supine, who will never be released from such pain. Does not 

his pain appear unbearable to us for even a single moment? How 

lost he appears to us! Just imagine how he is writhing in the stove, 

how he screams, cries, lives, what dread he suffers, what sufferings 

pierce him, particularly when he realizes his unbearable pain will 

never end!”12 

The question may occur to us, how those who kept these images 

of hell before them could have burnt people alive on earth. Denis 

presents the heat of the fire, the gruesome cold, the disgusting 

worms, the stench, hunger, thirst, the chains and the darkness and 

the unspeakable filth of hell. The endless echo of wailing and 

screaming, the sight of the devil—all this spreads like a suffocating 

nightmarish shroud over the soul and senses of the readers. But 

even more cutting is the dread of the cerebral pain, of repentance, 

fear, the empty feeling of infinite deprivation and condemnation, of 

the unspeakable hatred of God and the envy of the bliss enjoyed by 

his chosen. In the minds of the damned there is nothing but 

confusion, compulsion, and a consciousness filled with error and 

delusions, blindness and frenzy. The knowledge that all this will 

remain so for all times and all eternity raises the awareness to a 

height of dizzy terror.13 

There is no need to substantiate the fact that the fear of eternal 

pain, either as a sudden “divine dread” or as a gnawing and 

prolonged sickness, is frequently cited as motivation for a life of 

quiet contemplation and devotion.14 Everything was geared to this 

end. A tract about the four last things, death, judgment, hell, and 

eternal life, perhaps borrowed from the one authored by Denis, 

provided the customary reading at mealtime for the guests of the 

Windesheim convent.15 Truly a bitter seasoning! But such spicy 

means served to motivate people to continuously seek ethical 

perfection. Medieval man resembles somebody who has been 

treated for too long with strong medicines, now he will react only to 

the most potent stimulants. In order to let the praiseworthy quality 

of a particular virtue shine in its fullest glory, nothing but the most 

extreme examples would do for the medieval mind. In these 

examples, less extreme notions of ethics would already have been 

sufficient to turn virtue into its own caricature. For patience we are 

offered the example of St. Giles who, wounded by an arrow, asked 

God that his wound never heal as long as he lived; for temperance, 

the example of those saints who mixed ashes with their food; for 

chastity, the model of those who took a woman to bed with them to 

test their fortitude or that of the pitiful fantasies of virgins who, in 

order to escape their virtue’s enemies, grew a beard or thick body 

hair. The attraction of the example can be vested just as well in the 

extreme youth of the saint: St. Nicholas refusing his mother’s milk 

on high holy days. For steadfastness, Gerson recommends St. 

Quiriçus—a martyr aged three years or even only nine months— 

who refused to be consoled by the prefect and was tossed into the 

abyss. 16 

The need to experience the glory of virtue in such strong potions 

is again linked to the all dominating idealism. To view virtue as an 

idea pulled, so to speak, the ground of everyday life from under its 

appreciation; its beauty was seen in the utmost perfection of its 

independent existence and not in the daily round of failure and new 

beginnings. 

Medieval realism (that is, hyperidealism) has to be regarded as a 

primitive mode of thought, all the impact of Christianized neo- 

Platonism notwithstanding. We are dealing with the attitude of 

primitive man (but for the medievals freely sublimated by 

philosophy), who assigns essence and being to all abstract matters. 

While we may be justified in regarding the hyperbolic veneration of 

virtue as a product of high religion, in its counterpart—the 

contempt of the world—we clearly recognize the link that ties 

medieval thought to the thought forms of a distant past. I have in 

mind the fact that the tract De contemptu mundi*° cannot avoid 

placing too much weight on the evil of everything material. There is 

no greater motivation to despise the world than disgust over bodily 

functions; that is, secretion and procreation. This is the most pitiful 

part of medieval ethics: the disgust over man as “formatus de 

spurcissimo spermate, conceptus in puritu carnis sanguine menstruo 

nutritus, qui fertur esse tarn detestabilis et immundus, ut ex ejus 

contactu fruges non germinent, arescant arbusta . . . et si canes inde 

comederint, in rabiem efferantur.”;© What else is this sensuality 

bent into its opposite but a remnant of primitive realism in which 

savages fear magic substances in excrements and in everything 

accompanying conception and birth. There is a straight and rather 

short line that links the magic fear, which prompted primitive 

peoples to turn away from women and the most female of their 

female functions, to the ascetic hatred and cursing of women that 

disfigures Christian literature since Tertullian and Jerome. 

Everything is thought of as having substance. This is nowhere 

expressed as clearly as in the teaching of the thesaurus ecclesiae17 

about the treasure of supererogation (operum superogationum) of 

Christ and all the saints.18 Even though the concept of such a 

treasury and the notion that all the faithful as members of the 

corpus mysticum Christi—the church—partake of this treasury is very 

old, the teaching that these good works constitute an inexhaustible 

store that can be distributed by the church and particularly by the 

pope appeared only during the thirteenth century. Alexander of 

Hales is the first who uses the thesaurus in that technical sense of 

the word that it has retained ever since.19 The teaching met 

resistance until it finally found its complete description and 

explanation in the bull Unigenitis of Pope Clement VI in 1343. The 

treasury is treated in this bull just like a capital account that Christ 

entrusted to Peter and his disciples. It not only increases day by 

day, but the more people are made to follow the right path through 

its application, the larger the treasury of merits becomes. 20 

If good works were so substantial, sins, perhaps even more 

intensely, could be so regarded. Even though the church 

emphatically taught that sin was neither an entity nor a thing, 21 it 

was inevitable that ignorant minds came to be convinced—given 

the technique of forgiving sin on the part of the church, in 

conjunction with the colorful presentation and the elaborate 

systematization of sin—that sin was a substance (just as it is viewed 

in the Artharva-Veda). The perception of sin as an infectious 

substance could only be reinforced when Denis—even though he 

intended these examples only as metaphors—calls sin a fever, a cold 

and corrupted humor, and the like.22 That the law, not so timidly 

concerned with dogmatic purity, reflects such perception is shown 

by the fact that English jurists employed the idea that a felony 

involved the corruption of the blood.23 The blood of the savior, too, 

was subjected to the same hypersubstantial view: it was a real 

substance; one drop would have been sufficient to save the world, 

but we are given it in abundance, says St. Bernard, and St. Thomas 

Aquinas waxes poetic: 

Pie Pelicane, Jesu domine, 

me immundum munda tuo sanguine 

cuius una stilla salvum facere 

Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.24*7 

In Denis the Carthusian we observe a desperate struggle to define 

the conceptions of eternal life in spatial terms. The eternal light is of 

immeasurable dignity; to enjoy God within oneself is infinite 

perfection; the Redeemer was necessarily of infinite majesty and 

effectiveness (efficacia); sin is of infinite enormity because it is a 

transgression against infinite holiness; for this reason the act of 

atonement requires a subject with infinite ability.25 The negative 

space-adjective “infinite” here has in every instance the function of 

making conceivable the importance, the potential of the holy. In 

order to convey to his reader a sense of eternity, Denis employs an 

image: imagine a sand hill as large as the universe. Every hundred 

thousand years a grain of sand is removed from the hill. It will be 

leveled, but even after such an incomprehensible length of time, the 

punishment of hell will not have been shortened, nor will it be any 

closer to its end than it was when the first grain of sand was 

removed. Nonetheless, it would greatly console the damned if they 

knew that they would be liberated as soon as the mountain 

disappeared.26 

If the attempt is made to express the joys of heaven or the 

majesty of God in a similar manner, all that happens is that the idea 

itself is presented in ever higher pitched clamor. The expression of 

the joys of heaven remain extremely primitive. Human language is 

unable to evoke a vision of bliss equally drastic as the one it 

conceives of terror. One has only to delve deeply into the low dens 

of mankind to find raw material for the description of ugliness and 

misery; but to describe the highest bliss would require one to strain 

one’s neck trying to look to the heavens. Denis exhausts himself in 

desperate superlatives; that is, in a purely mathematical 

reinforcement of the idea of bliss, without, however, rendering it 

clearer or more profound. “Trinitas super substantialis, 

superadoranda et superbona . . . dirige nos ad superlucidam tui 

ipsius contemplationem.”Godis, “supermisericordissimus, 

superdignissimus, superamabilissimus, supersplendidissimus, 

superomnipotens et supersapiens, supergloriosissimus.”27*8 

But of what use is it to pile up superlatives, or qualitative visions 

of height, width, immeasurability, and inexhaustability? These are 

mere images, exercises in reducing the idea of infinity to images 

born of the finite world. This leads inevitably to a weakening and 

externalization of the concept of eternity. Eternity is not 

immeasurable time. Every sensation, once expressed, loses its 

directness; every quality ascribed to God takes something away 

from his majesty. 

At this point begins the gigantic struggle to climb with the help of 

the powers of the human mind to the absolute imagelessness of the 

deity: a struggle that remains everywhere and everytime the same 

and is not tied to any particular culture or era. “There is about 

mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a 

critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical 

classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.” 28 

—The props of the imagination cannot be immediately dispensed 

with. One by one the shortcomings of the means of expression 

become evident. The concrete embodiments of the idea and the 

colorful garb of symbolism are the first to go. Once this has 

happened, there is no longer any mention of blood or atonement, of 

the Eucharist, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. There is almost no 

mention of Christ in Eckhart’s mysticism and just as little of the 

church and the sacraments. But still the expressions for the mystic 

vision of being, for truth, for the deity remain tied to natural 

concepts, those of light and expansion. Later, these turn into 

negatives, into silence, emptiness, darkness. Thereupon, the 

shortcomings of these terms, devoid of form and content, is 

realized, and the attempt is made to remove their deficiencies by 

continuously coupling them with their opposites. Ultimately, there 

is nothing left but pure negation: the deity that is recognized in the 

Nothingness of what exists, because it stands above all, is called by 

the mystics, Nothing. This is what Scotus Eriugena29 does, and 

Angelus Silesius when he says: 

God is a pure Nothing, unperturbed by Now and Here. The more you try 

to grasp him, the more he is lost to you.30 

This progression of the viewing mind, by stages, to the 

abandonment of all concepts did not, of course, take place in this 

strict sequence. Most mystic statements show all the phases 

synchronically, mixed and blended with one another. They already 

existed in India, were already fully developed in Pseudo-Dionysius 

the Areopagite, who is the source of all Christian mysticism, and are 

revived in the German mysticism of the fourteenth century. 

The following passage from the revelation of Denis the Carthusian 

may serve as an example.31 He is talking to God, who is angry: “At 

this answer the friar, turning inward, saw himself transposed into a 

sphere of infinite light and most sweet. In a tremendous silence he 

called out with a secret voice that did not sound outside of himself 

to the most secret and truly hidden, incomprehensible God: ‘O 

Thou, super-loveable God, Thou Thyself art the light and the sphere 

of light in which Thy chosen ones go sweetly to their rest, to regain 

their strength, find peaceful slumber and true sleep. Thou art like an 

ever-level, immeasurable desert in which the truly pious spirit— 

entirely purified by special love, enlightened from above and 

vibrantly inflamed—roams without becoming lost and becomes lost 

without roaming, succumbs in bliss and recovers without having 

been weakened.” In this passage there is first the image of light— 

still positive—followed by that of sleep, then the desert, and finally 

by the opposites that cancel one another. 

The image of the desert, the horizontal notion of space, alternates 

with the vertical notion of the abyss. The latter was a tremendous 

store of mystic formulations. The expression of the absence of any 

particular qualities of the deity, in Eckhart’s words, “the mannerless 

and formless abyss of the silent, empty deity,” unites the infinite 

horizontal and vertical extensions to create a sensation of vertigo. It 

is said of Pascal that he constantly envisioned an abyss at his side; 

such a sensation is here reduced to a standard mystic expression. In 

these visions of the abyss and the silence, the most vibrant 

descriptions of the indescribable mystic experience are reached. 

Susa jubilantly exclaims, “Wol uf dar, herz und sin und muot, in daz 

grundlos abgriind aller lieplichen dingen!”32*? Master Eckhart, in 

his breathless fixation, says, 

“Dirre funke (the mystic nucleus of the individual being) . . . engniieget 

an vater noch an sune noch an heiligem geiste noch an den drin 

personen, als verre als ieclichiu bestét in ir eigenschaft. Ich spriche 

wérliche, daz diseme selben liehte niht begnüeget an der einberkeit der 

fruhtberlichen art gotlicher natûre. Ich wil noch mé sprechen, daz noch 

wunderlicher lûtet: ich spriche bi guoter wârheit, daz disem liehte niht 

genueget an dem einveltigen stillestanden gotlichen wesenne, daz weder 

gît noch ennimet, mêr: ez wil wizzen, wannen diz wesen har kome, ez wil 

in den einveltigen grunt, in die stillen wüeste, dâ nie unterscheit in 

geluogete weder vater noch sun noch heiligeist; in dem innegen, da 

nieman heime ist, da benüeget ez inme liehte, unt da ist ez einiger dan in 

ime selber; want dirre grunt ist ein einvetic stille, diu in ir selber 

unbegeglich ist.” Only in this way will the soul come completely to 

blessedness, “daz sie sich wirfet in die wüesten gotheit, da noch were 

noch bilde enist, daz si sich da verliese unde versenke in die 

wüestenunge.”33110 

Tauler says, “In this, the beatified and purified spirit plunges into 

the divine darkness, into calm silence and an incomprehensible and 

inexpressible union. In this immersion is lost all notion of equal and 

unequal; in this abyss the spirit loses itself and knows nothing of 

God nor of itself nor of equal and unequal nor of utility . . . because 

it is joined to God’s unity and has lost all ability to separate.” 34 

Ruusbroec uses all these means of expressing the mystic 

experience even more realistically than the Germans: 

Roept dan alle met openre herten: 

O gheweldich slont! 

Al sonder mont, 

Voere ons in dinen afgront: 

Ende make ons dine minne cont*11 

The enjoyment of the bliss of the union with God “is wild and 

chaotic, like losing oneself since there is neither guidance, nor way, 

nor path, nor statutes, nor measure.” “We shall be de-elevated, de- 

immersed, de-widened, de-lengthened (the cancelation of all 

notions of space), losing ourselves in an eternal state, which knows 

no return.”35 The enjoyment of bliss is such “that God and all saints 

and elevated men who experience it are devoured into an 

undefinable state that is one of not-knowing and of eternal 

immersion.”36 God gives the fullness of bliss to all alike, “but those 

who receive it are not alike, and yet there is something for 

everyone.” That is, in the union with God, they cannot hold 

themselves against the wealth of bliss offered to them. “But after 

being lost in the darkness of the desert, there is nothing left. There 

is neither giving nor receiving, but simple pure being. In it, God and 

all those united with him are immersed and lost and they shall 

never more find Him in this formless mode of being.”37 

All negations have been united in the following passage: 

Thereupon follows the seventh step (of love), the noblest, the highest that 

can be experienced in time and eternity. It comes at the moment when 

we find within ourselves a groundless not-knowing that is beyond all 

confessing and knowing; when we die and lose ourselves in an eternal 

namelessness beyond all those names that we bestow on God or on 

creatures; when we see, then find within ourselves, an eternal state of 

not-doing beyond any desire for practicing virtues, and where no one is 

able to assert his individual desire, and when, beyond all blessed spirits, 

we find a bottomless bliss where we are all one and are the same one that 

is bliss itself in its own selfhood, and when we see all the blessed spirits, 

their being immersed, departed and lost, into their supra-existence, into 

an unknown formless darkness.38 

In this simple, artless blissfulness all difference of creatures is 

dissolved. “They take leave of themselves. losing themselves in a 

bottomless state of groundless ignorance; there all clarity is 

returned to darkness and the three personages give way to the 

essential unity.”39 

Always there is the futile effort to do away with all images, to 

express “our empty state which is mere formlessness”—which only 

God can grant. “He rids us of all images and pulls us back to our 

origin. There we find nothing but a wild, void, unformed emptiness 

forever corresponding with eternity.”40 

In these quotations from Ruusbroec the two last mentioned 

elements of description are exhausted: light transforming itself into 

darkness and pure negation, the abandonment of all positive 

knowledge. The practice of calling the innermost secret essence of 

God his darkness originates with the Pseudo-Areopagite. His 

namesake, admirer, and commentator, Denis the Carthusian, 

elaborates on this expression. “And the most unexcelled, 

immeasurable, invisible fullness of Your eternal light is called 

darkness in which, as it is said, You dwell, who makes darkness his 

refuge. And the divine darkness itself is veiled from all light and 

hidden from all sight because of the indescribable, impenetrable 

splendor of its own clarity.”41 Darkness is not knowing, the ending 

of every concept. “The more the spirit approaches Your super- 

shining divine light, the more Your unapproachability and 

incomprehensibility become apparent and as soon as the spirit has 

entered into this darkness all names and all thought soon succumb 

entirely [omne mox nomen omnisque cognitioprorsus deficient]. But 

this will be granted the spirit: to see You, to see that you are 

entirely invisible. The clearer the spirit sees this, the clearer it will 

see you. We ask to become like this super-light darkness, O Blessed 

Trinity, and to see You by virtue of invisibility and not-knowing and 

to recognize that You are above all seeing and knowing. You appear 

to those above who have overcome and left behind all that which 

can be perceived and comprehended and everything that is created, 

including themselves. They enter into the darkness in which you 

truly are.”42 

Just as light becomes darkness, the highest life changes itself into 

death. Once the soul has understood, says Master Eckhart, that no 

creature can enter God’s kingdom, then the soul will go its own way 

and no longer seek God. “Und allhie so stirbit si iren eigenen 

hohsten tot. In disem tot verleuset di sele alle begerung und alle 

bild und alle vestentnüzz und alle form und wirt beraubt aller 

wesen. Und dez seit sicher als got lebt: als wenik mag di sele, di also 

geistlich tot ist, einik weis oder einik bild vorgetragen einigen 

menschen. Wann diser geist ist tot und is begraben in der gotheit.” 

*12 Soul, if you cannot drown yourself in this bottomless sea of the 

Deity, you cannot confess this divine death.43 

Denis says elsewhere that viewing God through negations is more 

perfect than doing so through affirmations. “Because if I say, God is 

kindness, essence [essentia]), life, I seem to hint at what God is as if 

that which He is had anything in common with creation or 

resembled it to any degree. It is certain that He is incomprehensible 

and unknown, unfathomable and inexpressible, and is separated 

from everything he creates by an immeasurable and totally 

incomparable difference and uniqueness.”44 He calls the unifying 

wisdom (sapientia unitiva) unreasonable, meaningless, and foolish. 45 

How similarly and yet how differently these sounds echo from 

ancient India. 

The disciple came to the master and said, “Teach me the Brahma, O 

Honored One! But the master remained silent. When the other repeated 

for the second and third time, “Teach me the Brahma, O Honored One!,” 

the master said, “I'll teach you, but you won’t understand it. This âtman 

[the self] is quiet.” 46 

The Gods wanted to know atman from Prajapati. They lived with him 

for thirty-two years as Brahma students. Then he taught them that the 

little man one sees in another’s eye or the reflection in the water is the 

self. Then looking after them as they departed, he said to himself, There 

they go without having comprehended the self. After another thirty-two 

years he revealed to Indra, in response to his objections, that he who 

walks in a dream, he is âtman. And after once more the same interval, 

“That which, when man has fallen asleep, is immersed, has come entirely 

to rest, is no longer seen in any dream,—that is the self.” “But he, the 

atman is neither this nor that.”47 

The entire sequence of opposing negations is now exhausted to 

explain the self’s nature. 

Like someone who, embraced by a beloved woman, is not conscious of 

what is external or internal, thus the spirit, embraced by the self, which 

is cognition, is not conscious of what is external or what is internal. That 

is the form of its being: craving satisfied, he himself is his craving, being 

without craving, and divorced from suffering. Then father is not-father, 

mother is not-mother, world is not-world . . . 48 

Had the power of images been overcome? Not a single thought 

can be expressed without image or metaphor. When we speak of the 

incomprehensible essence of things, every word is image. The mind 

is not satisfied with speaking only in negation of that which is 

highest and most fervently desired, and the poet has to come to the 

rescue whenever the wise man with his definitions and terms 

reaches an impasse. From the snowy peaks of his formal visions, the 

sweet lyrical mind of Suso always found the way back to the 

flowery fantasies of the older mysticism of St. Bernard. In the midst 

of the ecstasy of the highest contemplation, all the color and form of 

allegory return. Suso sees his betrothed, Eternal Wisdom: “si swepte 

hoh ob ime in einem gewiiltigen throne (Heaven): sie luhte als der 

morgensterne, und schein als diu splindiu sunne; ire krone waz 

ewikeit, ihr wat seliket, ihr wort süzzkeit, ihr umbfang alles lustes 

gnuhsamkeit: si waz verr und nahe, hoh und neider; siwaz 

gegenwürtig und doch verborgen; si liess mit ir umbgan, und moht 

si noch nieman begriffen.”49* 13 

There were still other ways back from the lonely heights of an 

individual, solitary, formless, and imageless mysticism. Those 

heights could be reached only by exhausting the mystery of the 

sacraments and liturgy; only if one had completely exhausted the 

symbolic aesthetic miracle of the dogmas and sacraments could one 

shake off the forms of images and ascend to the nonconceptual 

vision of the mystics. But the mind was incapable of enjoying its 

clarity at any time and as often as it desired; clarity was restricted 

to moments of unusual grace and short duration. Moreover, the 

church was always waiting below with its wise and economic 

system of mysteries. In its liturgy the church had concentrated the 

contact of the mind with the divine into the experience of definite 

moments and had imposed on the mystery form and color. That is 

why ritual always survived unbridled mysticism: it saved energy. 

With equanimity the church tolerated aesthetic mysticism’s wild 

flowers of the imagination, but it feared true, radical mysticism, 

which put to the flames everything on which the church was built: 

its harmonious symbolism, its dogmas and sacraments. 

“Unitive wisdom is unreasonable, meaningless and foolish.” The 

path of the mystic leads to the infinite and to unconsciousness. By 

denying any connection between the Deity and anything created, 

transcendence is destroyed. The bridge back to life is burnt. “Alle 

creatire sint ein lûter niht. Ich sprich niht, daz sie kleine sin oder 

iht sin, sie sind ein liter niht. Swaz niht wesens hat daz ist niht. Alle 

creatûre hant kein wesen, wan ir wesen swebet an der 

gegenwertigkeit gotes.”50114 

Intensive mysticism means a return to a pre-intellectual spiritual 

life. All intellectualism is lost in it, is overcome and rendered 

superfluous. But if, all this notwithstanding, mysticism has borne 

rich fruit for culture, this is the result of the fact that mysticism 

always proceeds through preparatory stages and only gradually 

discards the forms of custom and culture. Its fruits for civilization 

are born in its first stages below the upper limit of vegetation. This 

is where the orchard of ethical perfection blossoms as the required 

preparation for anyone who wishes to achieve the vision: peace and 

gentility of mind, the suppression of desire, the virtues of simplicity, 

moderation, industriousness, seriousness, and fervor. This was the 

case in India and the same thing is true here: the initial impact of 

mysticism is moral and practical, consisting above all in the practice 

of practical charity. All the great mystics have lavishly praised 

practicality. Master Eckhart himself ranked Martha above Mary51 

and said that one should even abandon the ecstasy of Paul if one 

could help a pauper with a bowl of soup. The history of mysticism, 

beginning with Eckhart and continuing with his disciple Tauler, 

points more and more in the direction of dignifying the practical 

element. Ruusbroec, too, praises quiet unassuming work, and Denis 

the Carthusian represents in person the union of a practical sense of 

daily religious life and the most intense individual mysticism. In the 

Netherlands began that movement in which these concomitant 

elements of mysticism—moralism, pietism, charity, industriousness 

—became the main focus. This meant that from the intense 

mysticism of the remote moments of a few flow the extensive 

mysticism of the everyday life of the many, the ongoing communal 

fervor of modern devotees, in place of lonely and rare ecstasy. The 

sober mysticism, one is tempted to say. 

In the Fraterhouses and the monasteries of the Windesheim 

Congregation, we find, constantly poured over quiet daily work, the 

radiance of religious fervor that was constantly present in the mind 

of the congregation. The flexible lyrical and the unrestrained 

striving elements have both been abandoned and, together with 

them, have evaporated the danger of faith gone wrong. The brothers 

and sisters are perfectly orthodox and conservative. It was 

mysticism en detail: one had not been struck by lightning, one had 

only received a little spark, and experienced in the small, quiet, 

unassuming circle the transport of ecstasy in the form of intimate 

spiritual communion, the exchange of letters and self- 

contemplation. Emotional and spiritual life was cultivated like a 

greenhouse plant; there was much narrow puritanism, much moral 

exercise, a stifling of laughter and of basic human drives, and much 

pietist simplemindedness. 

But the most powerful and beautiful work of that period, the 

Imitatio Christi, arose in those circles. Here we meet the man, no 

theologian, no humanist, no philosopher, no poet, and actually also 

no mystic, who wrote the book destined to become for centuries a 

source of solace. Thomas à Kempis, quiet, introverted, full of 

tenderness for the miracle of the mass and with a most narrow 

perception of divine guidance, knew nothing about the outrage over 

church administration or secular life, such as inspired the preachers, 

or of the multifaceted ambitions of a Gerson, Denis, or Nicholas of 

Cusa, or of the wild fantasies of a John Brugman or of the colorful 

symbolism of an Alain de la Roche. He looked only for the element 

of quietude in all things and found it “in angello cum li bello”: “O 

quam salubre quam iucundum et suave est sedere in solitudine et 

tacere ei loqui cum Deo!” (“O how wholesome, how pleasant and 

sweet it is to sit in solitude and to be silent and speak with 

God!”).52 And his book, of simple wisdom for living and dying, 

addressed to resigned minds, became a book for all the ages. In this 

book all neo-Platonic mysticism has been abandoned. Its only basis 

is the voice of the beloved Bernard of Clairvaux. It does not present 

any development of philosophical thought, it only contains a 

number of the most simple ideas grouped in the form of sayings 

around a central point. Every one of them is couched in short, 

straightforward sentences; there is no subordination and hardly any 

correlation of ideas. There is none of the lyric resonance of a Henry 

Suso or the tense sparkle of a Ruusbroec. Ringing with the sound of 

parallel sentences and weak assonances, the Imitatio would appear 

to be prose, if it were not for that monotonous rhythm that makes it 

resemble the ocean on a soft rainy evening or the autumnal sigh of 

the wind. There is something miraculous about the effect of the 

Imitatio. The thinker does not captivate us with his power or élan, as 

for example, Augustine, or by flowering prose, as St. Bernard, nor 

with the depth or fullness of his thought. Everything is even and 

melancholy, everything is kept in a minor key. There is only peace, 

calm, a quiet, resigned expectation, and solace. “Taedet me vitae 

temporalis” (“Earthly life is a burden to me”), Thomas says 

somewhere else.53 And yet, the words of this man, removed from 

the world, are able to strengthen us for life in this world as are 

those of no other. There is something this book for the tired of all 

ages shares with the expressions of intense mysticism: here too, the 

power of images is overcome as far as possible and the colorful garb 

of glittering symbols is discarded. For this very reason, the Imitatio 

is not limited to one cultural epoch; like ecstatic contemplations of 

the All-One, it departs from all culture and belongs to no culture in 

particular. This explains its two thousand editions as well as the 

different suppositions concerning its author and its time of 

composition that fall into a range of three hundred years. Thomas 

did not speak that “Ama nesciri” (“You must love to remain alone”) 

in vain. 

Chapter Eleven 

THE FORMS OF THOUGHT IN PRACTICE 

TO UNDERSTAND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT IN ITS TOTAL unity, it is 

necessary to study the fixed forms of thought not only as they occur 

in the conceptions of faith and in the realms of higher speculation, 

but also as they are found in everyday wisdom and mundane 

practices, since medieval thought was dominated by the same large 

patterns in both its higher and more common expressions. While in 

matters of faith and contemplation the question is always open as to 

how far the forms of thought are the result or the echo of a long 

written tradition going far back to Greek and Jewish, or even 

Egyptian and Babylonian, roots, common forms of life as we 

encounter them in their naive and spontaneous expressions are 

unencumbered by the weight of neo-Platonism and the like. 

In his daily life medieval man thought in the same forms as in his 

theology. The foundation is furnished in both instances by that 

architectural idealism which the scholastics call realism: the need to 

separate each insight and conceive of it as an individual entity and 

then to link the entities into hierarchical units and to continuously 

erect temples and cathedrals with them, like a child playing with 

building blocks. 

Everything that had won for itself a secure place in life, that was 

melded into the forms of life, was taken to be ordained by God’s 

plan for the world. This applied to the most ordinary customs and 

usages as well as the highest of things. This is clearly evident, for 

example, in the perception of the rules of court etiquette revealed in 

the descriptions of the courts by Olivier de la Marche and Alienor 

de Poitiers. Old Alienor regards those rules as wise laws that were 

at one time implemented in the courts of kings by judicious choice 

and that are to be observed for all times to come. She speaks of 

them as if they were the wisdom of the centuries: “et alors j’ouy 

dire aux anciens qui sçavoient . . . ”*!5 She sees the times 

degenerating. For about ten years, a few ladies in Flanders have 

placed the maternity bed before the fire, “de quoy l’on s’est bien 

mocqué”;16 this has never been done before; where will it lead? 

“Mais un chacun fait à cette heure à guise; par quoy est à doubter 

que tout ira mal.”1+17 

La Marche asks himself and his readers important questions with 

respect to the rational cause of all these ceremonial things: why 

does the “fruitier” have “le mestier de la cire” in his department? 

The answer is that the wax is sucked by the bees from the same 

flowers from which come the fruit: “pourquoy on a ordonné trés 

bien ceste chose.”2818 This strong medieval tendency to create an 

organ for each function is nothing but the result of that way of 

thinking which ascribed independence to any quality, and which 

saw each one as a separate idea. The King of England had an official 

under his magna sergenteria **!9 whose office it was to hold the 

head of the king whenever he crossed the channel and became 

seasick. In 1442 this position was held by a certain John Baker, who 

passed it on to his two daughters.3 

The habit of giving names to all things, even those that are 

inanimate, should be regarded in the same light. This is a faint whiff 

of primitive anthropomorphism that occurs even today in military 

life, itself in many respects a return to a primitive form of life, when 

cannons are given names. That urge was much stronger during 

medieval times. Just as the swords in the knightly novels, the 

bombards of the wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had 

their names: “le Chien d’Orléans,” “la Gringade,” “la Bourgeoisie,” 

“de Dulle Griete.” A remnant of this practice remains in that 

individual diamonds still have names. Several of the jewels of 

Charles the Bold were named: “le sancy,” “les trois fréres,” “la 

hote,” “la balle de Flandres.” That ships in our time have retained 

their names, but houses and church bells have not, may be due to 

the fact that a ship changes its location and has to be recognizable 

at any time, but also in part because a ship retains more of a 

personal quality than a house; a feeling that is expressed by 

speakers of English who use the pronoun “she” when referring to a 

ship. The personal perception of inanimate objects was much more 

prominent during medieval times; then everything was given a 

name: the cells in a prison just as well as every house and every 

clock.4 

Medieval men sought, as they put it, the “morality,” the hidden 

lesson in everything, the essential ethical significance. Every 

historical or literary incident has the potential to crystalize into a 

parable, into a moral example, into evidential proof; every 

statement could become a dictum, a text, or a saying. Just like the 

holy symbolic links between the Old and the New Testaments, 

moral links come into being that make it possible to immediately 

hold up to any event the mirror of a model, an exemplary type from 

the Bible, history, or literature. To prompt someone to forgiveness, 

confront him with biblical cases of forgiveness. To warn of the 

dangers of marriage, string together all instances of the unfortunate 

marriages of antiquity. John the Fearless, in order to excuse the 

murder of Orléans, compares himself to Joab and his victim to 

Absalom, and claims to have been better than Joab because the king 

had not expressedly prohibited murder. “Ainssy a voit le bon duc 

Jehan attrait ce fait à moralité.”5*20 This is a broad and naive 

application of the principles of jurisprudence that only now is 

beginning to be seen in modern legal practice as a residue of an 

obsolete way of thinking. 

Every serious attempt to arrive at proof will be grounded in a text 

as the point of support and departure. The twelve propositions for 

and against revoking obedience to the Avignon pope with which the 

matter of the schism was debated during the national Council of 

Paris in 1406 were all based on a scriptural passage.6 A worldly 

orator will begin, just like a preacher, with his text.7 

There is no more striking example of all the features mentioned 

above than the notorious plea by Master Jean Petit with which he 

attempted to justify the assassination of Louis d’Orléans at the 

instigation of the duke of Burgundy. 

More than three months had passed since the brother of the king 

had been cut down one evening by the hired assassins for whom 

John the Fearless had secured lodging in a house in the Rue Vieille 

du Temple just prior to the event. The Burgundian initially 

expressed great sorrow during the funeral service, but as soon as he 

saw that the investigation would lead to the hôtel d’Artois where he 

had the murderers hidden, he conferred with his uncle Berry and 

confessed to him that he had ordered the murder to be carried out 

because he had succumbed to the instigations of the Devil. He 

thereupon fled from Paris to Flanders. At Ghent he proclaimed his 

first justification for his crime and returned to Paris relying on the 

hatred directed by everyone towards Orléans and on his own 

popularity with the Parisians, who, in fact, did gladly welcome him 

back. In Amiens, the duke had consulted with two men who had 

distinguished themselves as orators during the 1406 church 

assembly in Paris: Master Jean Petit and Pierre aux Boeufs. They 

were given the task of sprucing up the plea given at Ghent, which 

had been written by Simon de Saulx, so that it could be presented at 

Paris before the princes and nobles and ensure that they be dutifully 

impressed and the duke’s actions justified. 

Therewith, Master Jean Petit, biblical scholar, preacher, and poet, 

appears on March 8, 1408, in the Hôtel de Saint Pol in Paris before 

a most exhalted audience, among whom the Dauphin, the King of 

Naples, the dukes of Berry and Brittany are the front rank. He 

begins with appropriate humility, I, wretch that I am, am neither 

theologian nor jurist, “une très grande paour me fiert au cuer, voire 

si grand, que mon engin et ma mémoire s’en fuit, et ce peu de sens 

que je cuidoie avoir, ma ja du tout laissé.” “21 He then proceeds to 

elaborate, in a highly restrained style, on a masterpiece of dark 

political malice that his mind had erected on the text “Radix 

omnium malorum cupiditas.” The entire plea is artfully illustrated 

with scholastic distinctions and secondary texts; it is illustrated by 

examples from scripture and history. From the colorful details with 

which the defense describes the perfidy of the slain Orléans, the 

plea acquires a devilish liveliness and romantic tension. It opens 

with a list of the twelve obligations binding the duke of Burgundy 

to favor, love, and avenge the King of France. Commending himself 

to the aid of God, the Virgin, and St. John the Evangelist, Petit 

begins to detail his evidence for the defense, which is divided into 

major and minor proofs and a conclusion. At the head of them all 

he states his text: “Radix omnium malorum cupiditas.” Two 

practical applications are derived from it: greed generates apostates, 

it creates traitors. The evils of apostasy and treason are divided and 

subdivided and then demonstrated by the use of three examples: 

Lucifer, Absalom, and Athalias are conjured up in the minds of the 

audience as the types of traitors. This is followed by eight truths 

that justify the murder of tyrants: he who conspires against the king 

deserves death and damnation, the more so the higher his position; 

anyone is free to kill him. “Je prouve ceste verité par douze raison 

en ‘honneur des douze apostres”:*22 three pronouncements from 

doctors of the church, three from philosophers, three from jurists, 

and three from Holy Scripture. The plea continues in this manner 

until the eight truths are covered. A quotation from “De casibus 

virorum illustrium” by “le philosophe moral Boccace” is given in 

proof that the tyrant may be killed from ambush. The eight truths 

produce eight “correlaria” to which a ninth is added that hints at all 

the dark events in which slander and suspicion had assigned 

Orléans a gruesome part. All the old suspicions that had followed 

the ambitious and reckless prince since the days of his youth are 

again fanned to a state of red heat, how he, in 1392, had been the 

deliberate instigator of the fateful “bal des ardents” during which 

his brother, the young king, had barely escaped the fiery death of 

his companions, who, disguised as ruffians, had come in contact 

with a carelessly held torch.9 Orleans’s conversations with the 

“magician” Philippe de Méziéres in the monastery of the Celestines 

furnished material for all kind of insinuations about plans for 

murder and poisonings. His generally known predilection for magic 

gives rise to the most lively horror stories: for example, Orléans was 

said to have gone, one Sunday morning, to La Tour Montjay on the 

Marne in the company of an apostate monk, a page, and a servant; 

the monk made two brown and green clad devils named Heremas 

and Estramain appear. In a hellish ceremony they consecrated a 

sword, a dagger, and a ring, whereupon the travelers took down a 

hanged man from the gallows at Montfaucon, and so forth. Master 

Jean even manages to extract some dark meanings from the 

meaningless ramblings of the mad king.10 

After things have been raised in this way to the general-ethical 

level by putting them into the light of biblical patterns and moral 

dictums, thus artfully feeding the fires of disgust and horror, there 

bursts forth in the minor proofs, which step by step follow the 

structure of the major proofs, the flood of direct accusations. All the 

passionate party hatred at the disposal of a mind unleashed is used 

to attack the memory of the murder victim. 

Jean Petit held the floor for four hours. After he had finished, his 

client, the duke of Burgundy, said, “Je vous avoue.”*2° The text of 

the justification was presented to the duke and his closest relatives 

in four precious volumes, bound in pressed leather, decorated with 

gold, and illustrated with miniatures. One copy is still preserved in 

Vienna. A printed version of the tract could also be purchased.11 

The need to elevate any event of life into a moral model, to raise 

all sentences to maxims, whereby they became something 

substantial and unassailable, in short, that process of crystalizing 

thought, finds its most general and natural expression in the 

proverb. The proverb had a very lively function in medieval 

thinking. Hundreds were in general use, almost all of them deft and 

hitting the mark. The wisdom shown in proverbs is at times 

conventional, occasionally beneficial and profound; the tone is 

frequently ironic, the mood mostly kind and always resigned. The 

proverb never preaches opposition, always only surrender. With a 

smile or a sigh, it allows the egoist to triumph, lets the hypocrite go 

scot-free. “Les grans poissons mangent les plus petis.” “Les mal 

vestus assiet on dos ou vent.” “Nul n’est chaste si ne besongne.” 

Many sound cynical. “L'homme est bon tant qu’il craint sa peau.” 

“Au besoing on s’aide du diable.” But beneath them all resides a 

gentle spirit that does not desire to be judgmental. “Il n’est si ferré 

qui ne glice.”t24 The lamentations of the moralists over human 

sinfulness and corruption are confronted by the smiling 

understanding of folk wisdom. In the proverb, the wisdom and 

morality of all times and spheres are condensed into a single image. 

On some occasions the tone of the proverbs is nearly evangelical, 

but they also sometimes are almost paganly naive. A people with 

many proverbs in living use leaves matters of dispute, motivation, 

and argumentation to the theologians and philosophers; the 

proverbs settle every argument by reference to a judgment that hits 

the nail right on the head. They scorn weighty arguments and avoid 

much confusion. The proverb cuts through knotty problems; once a 

proverb is applied, the matter is settled. This ability to crystalize 

ideas has significant advantages for culture. 

It is surprising how many proverbs were familiar in late medieval 

times.12 In their common utility they conform so much to the 

intellectual content of literature that the authors of those days make 

generous use of them. For example, poems in which every stanza 

ends with a proverb are very popular. After a scandalous incident, a 

slanderous poem, written in this form by an unknown author, is 

directed against the prévôt of Paris, Hugues Aubriot.13 Other 

examples are Alain Chartier’s “Ballade de Fougéres,”14 Molinet in a 

number of different pieces from his “Faictz et Dictz,”15 Coquillart’s 

“Complaincte de Eco,”16 and Villon’s ballade that is entirely made 

up of proverbs.17 Robert Gaguins’s “Le passe temps d’oysiveté” 18 

belongs to this category. With few exceptions, all its 171 stanzas 

end with a suitable proverb. Or, do these proverb-like moral 

dictums (of which only a few can be found in collections of 

proverbs familiar to me) spring from Gaguin’s own poetic mind? If 

this should be the case, it only would provide stronger proof of the 

vital function allotted to proverbs in late medieval thought. In this 

instance we would be able to prove that, linked to a poem, they 

arose consciously from the mind of an individual poet to provide 

well-rounded, fixed, generally understandable judgments. 

Even sermons do not shun putting proverbs side by side with 

sacred texts, and they both mingle together in debates during 

church or state assemblies. Gerson, Jean de Varennes, Jean Petit, 

Guillaume Fillastre, Olivier Maillard employ the most common 

proverbs in their sermons in support of their arguments: “Qui de 

tout se tait, de tout a paix,” “Chef bien peigné porte mal bacinet.” 

“D’aultrui cuir large courroye.” “Selon seigneur mesnie duite.” “De 

tel juge tel jugement.” “Qui commun sert, nul ne l’en paye.” “Qui 

est tigneux, il ne doit pas oster son chaperon.”19*25 There is even a 

link between the proverb and the Imitatio Christi, which, in form, is 

based on collections, or “rapiaria,” of wisdom of various kinds and 

origins. 

There are, in the waning Middle Ages, many authors whose 

powers of judgment do not really rise above the level of the 

proverbs they employ so consistently. A chronicler from the late 

fourteenth century, Geoffroi de Paris, laces his rhymed chronicle 

with proverbs expressing the moral lessons of the events he 

records.20 In the use of this technique he is wiser than Froissart and 

Le Jouvencel, whose homemade dictums frequently sound like half- 

baked proverbs: “Enssi aviennent li fait d’armes: on piert une fois et 

l’autre fois gaagn’on.” “Or n’est-il riens dont on ne se tanne.” “On 

dit, et vray est, que il n’est chose plus certaine que la mort.” 2126 

Another crystalized form of thought similar to the proverb is the 

motto, a favorite object of careful cultivation during late medieval 

times. Mottoes are not, as are proverbs, wisdom generally applied, 

but are entirely personal adages. The motto was raised to the status 

of a kind of insignia for the person who possessed it, attached with 

golden letters to his own life to serve as a lesson that, by virtue of 

its formal repetition, resulting from the fact that it was attached to 

all pieces of clothing and personal objects, was expected to provide 

support for himself and others and to suggest ideas to both. The 

sentiment of the motto, in most instances, is one of surrender, just 

as in the case of proverbs, or one of expectation, occasionally with 

the touch of an unarticulated element to render the motto 

mysterious: “Quand sera ce?” “Tost ou tard vienne” “Va oultre” 

“Autre fois mieulx.” “Plus deuil que joye.” £27 The great majority of 

them refer to love: “Aultre naray.” “Vostre plaisir.” “Souvienne 

vous” “Plus que toutes.” *28 These are knightly mottoes displayed 

on saddle blankets and armor. On rings we find some of a more 

intimate nature: “Mon cuer avez.” “Je le desire.” “Pour toujours” 

“Tout pour vous.” t29 

Emblems complement mottoes. They either illustrate the mottoes 

in tangible form or are loosely connected with them, like the knotty 

staff joined to the motto “Je l’envie,” and the porcupine with 

“Cominus et enimus” of Louis d’Orléans, and the plane with “Ic 

houd” of his enemy John the Fearless, or the flint and steel of Philip 

the Good.22 Motto and emblem have their home in the heraldic 

sphere of thought. To medieval man, the coat of arms is more than 

a genealogical hobby. A man’s arms assume a significance like that 

of a totem.23 Lions, lilies, and crosses become symbols in which an 

entire complex of pride and aspiration, fidelity and sense of 

community are expressed in an independent, indivisible image. 

The need to isolate every case as an independently existing entity, 

to see it as an idea, expresses itself as the strong medieval 

inclination towards casuistry: another result of the far-reaching 

idealism. To every question, there is an ideal solution; this ideal 

solution is arrived at as soon as one has recognized the correct 

relationship between the case at hand and the eternal truths. This 

relationship is to be deduced by the application of formal rules to 

the facts. Not only questions of ethics and law are answered in this 

way; the casuistic view also dominates a number of other spheres of 

life. Wherever style and form are the main concern, wherever the 

element of play comes to the forefront in a cultural form, casuistry 

is triumphant. This is true, first and foremost, in matters of 

ceremony and etiquette. Here the casuistic view has its proper 

place; here it is an adequate form of thought for the questions raised 

because they involve only a sequence of cases that are determined 

by honored precedence and formal rules. The same is true for the 

similar “games” of the coat of arms and the hunt. As mentioned 

earlier,24 the conception of love as a beautiful social game of stylish 

forms and rules gave rise to the need for an elaborate casuistry. 

Finally, all kinds of casuistry were attached to the customs of war. 

The strong influence of the chivalric idea on the entire notion of 

war gave to the latter an element of play. Issues such as legal claims 

to booty, the opening of hostilities, the adherence to a word of 

honor were joined to that category of rules that governed the 

tournament and the amusements of the hunt. The need to limit the 

application of force by laws and rules arose not as much from an 

instinct for international law, as from chivalric conceptions of honor 

and style of life. Only by a conscientious casuistry and the 

formulation of strictly formal rules was it possible to bring the 

conduct of war somewhat into harmony with the honor of the 

knightly estate. 

The beginnings of international law are therefore mixed with the 

rules of the game involving the use of weapons. In 1352, Geoffroy 

de Charny put a number of casuistic questions before King John II 

of France for his decision in his capacity as Grand Master of the 

Order of the Star, which he had just founded: twenty of the 

questions concern the “jouste,” twenty-one concern the tournament, 

and ninety-three, war.25 Twenty-five years later, Honoré Bonet, 

prior of Selonart in the Provence and doctor of canon law, 

dedicated to the young Charles VI his Arbre des batailles, a tract 

about martial law, which, according to later editions, still had 

practical value in the latter part of the sixteenth century.26 The tract 

contains a mixture of questions, some of which are of greatest 

significance for international law while others are of trifling value 

and only concerned with the rules of the game. Is it permissible to 

wage war against the infidel without compelling reason? Bonet 

answers most emphatically: No, not even for the purpose of 

converting them. Is a prince allowed to refuse passage through his 

territory to another prince? Does the sacred protection (much 

violated) that the plowman and his ox enjoy against the force of 

war extend to his asses and servants?27 Is a clergyman obligated to 

help his father or his bishop? Is someone who has lost his borrowed 

armor during battle obligated to return it? Is it permissible to do 

battle on holy days? Which is better, to do battle on an empty 

stomach or after a meal?28 To all these questions the prior has 

answers based on biblical passages, canonical law, and the 

commentaries. 

The most important points of the rules of war were those 

involving the taking of prisoners. The ransom of a noble prisoner 

was among the most tempting prospects of battle for nobleman and 

mercenary alike. Here was an unlimited field for casuistic rules. 

Here too, international law and chivalric “point d’honneur” are 

scrambled. Are Frenchmen permitted to make, on English soil, 

captives of poor merchants, farmers, and herdsmen because a state 

of war exists with England? Under what circumstances is it 

permissible to escape from captivity? What is the value of a safe 

conduct?29 In the biographical novel Le Jouvencel such cases are 

dealt with in terms of practical experiences. A dispute between two 

captains over a prisoner is brought before the commander: “I first 

grabbed him,” says the one, “first by the arm and his right hand and 

ripped off his glove.” “But,” says the other, “he gave me his right 

hand and his word first.” Both actions established claims to the 

precious possession, the prisoner, but the latter is recognized as 

having precedent. To whom belongs a prisoner who escapes and is 

recaptured? The solution is this: If the case happens in the area of 

the battle, the prisoner belongs to the new captor, if outside the 

battlefield, he remains the property of the original owner. Is a 

prisoner who has given his word allowed to run away if his captor 

puts him in chains in spite of his having given his word not to run 

away? What if the captor had neglected to have him give his word? 

= The medieval inclination to overestimate the independent value 

of a thing or a case results, aside from the casuistic way of thinking, 

in another consequence. We are familiar with Francois Villon’s 

grand satiric poem “The Testament,” in which he bequeathed all his 

possessions to friends and enemies. There are several such poetic 

testaments; for example, that of “Barbeau’s Mule” by Henri Baude.31 

The testament is a handy form, but it is only intelligible if we keep 

in mind that medieval men were accustomed to disposing in a will 

of even the most trivial of their possessions separately and in great 

detail. A poor woman bequeaths her Sunday dress and her bonnet 

to her parish; her bed to her godchild, a fur to her nurse, her 

everyday dress to a pauper, and four pounds turnoise, which 

constitutes her only wealth, together with yet another dress and 

bonnet to the Minorites.32 Is this not a very trivial example of the 

frame of mind that postulated every case of virtue to be an eternal 

example and that saw in every fashion a divine ordinance? The 

adhesion of the mind to the particularity and value of each single 

thing is what dominates the mind of the collector and the miser like 

a disease. 

All the features listed above may be summarized under the term 

formalism. The inherent conception of the transcendent reality of 

things means that every notion is defined by fixed borders, that it 

stands isolated in a plastic form, and that this form is all important. 

Mortal and venial sins can be distinguished according to fixed rules. 

The sense of justice is unshakable; it need not sway for a moment: 

as the old legal dictum has it, the deed judges the man. In judging a 

deed, the formal content is always the main point. Long ago, in the 

primitive law of ancient Germanic times, that formalism was so 

strong that the dispensations of justice did not take into account 

whether intent or negligence was involved: the deed was the deed 

and brought in its wake its punishment. A deed left undone, or a 

crime merely attempted, went unpunished.33 Even in much more 

recent times, an accidental lapse during the recitation of the oath 

formula could still lead to the loss of legal rights: an oath is an oath 

and is very sacred. Economic interests meant the end of that 

formalism. The foreign merchant who had only an imperfect 

command of the local language could not be exposed to this risk 

without raising the possibility that commerce might be impeded. It 

is only to be expected that in the laws of the cities, the “Vare,” the 

danger of losing one’s rights in this way was eliminated; initially as 

a special privilege and ultimately as a general rule. However, the 

vestiges of a far-reaching formalism in legal matters remain quite 

numerous in later medieval times. 

The extreme sensitivity to anything touching external honor is a 

phenomenon rooted in formalistic thought. In 1445 a certain Jan 

van Domburg had fled into a church in Middelburg in order to seek 

asylum because of a charge of murder against him. As was the 

custom, the place of refuge was surrounded on all sides. His sister, a 

nun, was observed repeatedly urging him to be killed fighting rather 

than force his family to endure the shame of having him fall into 

the hand of his executioners. When this finally happened, the 

Domburg maiden claimed his body so that at least he could be given 

a dignified burial.34 For tournaments the saddle blanket of a 

nobleman’s horse was customarily decorated with his coat of arms. 

Olivier de la Marche finds this rather improper because the horse, 

“une beste irraisonnable,” might stumble and the arms be dragged 

in the dirt. The entire family would be dishonored.35 Shortly after 

the duke of Burgundy had paid a visit to the Chastel en Porcien, a 

nobleman in a fit of madness attempted suicide there. The event 

causes indescribable horror, “et n’en savoit-on comment porter la 

honte après se grant joye demenée.”*30 Although it was well known 

that the act was caused by madness, the unfortunate perpetrator 

was banned from the chateau after his recovery, “et ahonty a tous 

jours.”36}31 

A telling example of the plastic way in which the need to 

rehabilitate violated honor was met is provided by the following 

case. In 1478 a certain Laurent Guernier was erroneously hanged in 

Paris. He had received a pardon for his crime, but he was not 

informed in time. This was discovered after a year, and his body 

was given an honorable funeral at the request of his brother. The 

bier was preceded by the four town criers replete with their rattles, 

the coat of arms of the dead man on their chests. Surrounding the 

bier were four candle bearers and eight torchbearers. All wore 

mourning clothes and displayed the same coat of arms. The funeral 

party proceeded through Paris from the Porte Saint Denis to the 

Porte Saint Antoine. From there, the body was transported to its 

birthplace in Provins. One of the criers shouted repeatedly, “Bonnes 

gens, dictes voz patenostres pour l’âme de feu Laurent Guernier, en 

son vivant demourant a Provins qu’on a nouvellement trouvé mort 

soubz ung chesne.”37}32 

The great strength of the principle of blood revenge, which 

particularly thrived in such prosperous and highly cultured regions 

as northern France and the southern Netherlands, is also linked to 

the formalistic nature of thought.38 The motivation in such cases of 

revenge is frequently not fiery rage or relentless hatred, but rather 

that the honor of the offended family has to be given its due by the 

shedding of blood. Sometimes, a decision is made not to kill 

someone and instead the attempt is made to wound him in the 

thighs, arms, or face. Special care is taken not to be burdened with 

the responsibility of having had one’s opponent die in a state of sin. 

Du Clercq tells of a case where people who wanted to murder their 

sister-in-law took pains to bring along a priest.39 

The formal character of atonement and revenge, in its turn, 

creates the situation wherein injustice is corrected by symbolic 

punishments or exercises of penance. In all the great reconciliations 

of the fifteenth century strong emphasis is placed on the symbolic 

element: the demolition of the houses that are reminders of the 

transgression, the donation of memorial crosses, the walling shut of 

gates, not to mention public ceremonies of penance and the funding 

of masses for the souls of the departed or chapels. This happened as 

part of the suit brought by the house of Orléans against John the 

Fearless; the peace of Arras in 1435; the penance of rebellious 

Bruges in 1437; and the even more severe penance given to Ghent 

in 1453, where the entire population dressed entirely in black, 

without belts, with bare heads and feet and, led by the main 

perpetrators, who wore nothing but their shirts in a heavy 

downpour, marched in procession to plead with the duke in unison 

for forgiveness.40 During the reconciliation with his brother in 

1469, Louis XI first demands the ring with which the bishop of 

Lisieux had installed the prince as duke of Normandy and then, at 

Rouen, has the ring broken on an anvil in the presence of 

notables.41 

The generally prevailing formalism is also at the base of that faith 

in the effect of the spoken word which reveals itself in primitive 

cultures in all its fullness and still survives in late medieval times in 

the form of formulas of blessing, of magic, and of condemnation. A 

solemn appeal still has something of the quality of a wish in a fairy 

tale. When intense pleas fail to move Philip the Good to grant 

clemency to a condemned man, the task is given to Isabella of 

Bourbon, Philip’s beloved daughter-in-law, with the hope that he 

will not be able to turn her down, because, says she, “I have never 

asked you for anything important.”42 And the plan works.—The 

same spirit is also revealed in Gerson’s expressed surprise that 

morals have not improved in spite of all the preaching: I don’t know 

what I can say, sermons are given all the time, but always in vain. 43 

Those qualities that frequently give the mind of the later Middle 

Ages its hollow and superficial character are directly spawned by 

general formalism. First is the unusual simplification of motivation. 

Given the hierarchical order of the system of classification, and 

taking as the point of departure the plastic independence of any 

notion and the need to explain any connection on the basis of a 

generally valid truth, the causal mental function works like a 

telephone switchboard: all kinds of connections may occur at any 

time, but always only of two numbers at a time. Only isolated 

features of any condition or any connection are seen and these 

features are greatly exaggerated and variously embellished; the 

picture of an experience always shows the few and heavy lines of a 

primitive woodcut. One motif always suffices as an explanation with 

a predilection for the most general, the most direct, or the crudest. 

For the Burgundians, the motive for the murder of the duke of 

Orléans can be only one thing: the king has asked the duke of 

Burgundy to avenge the adulterous affair of the queen with 

Orléans.44 A pure question of the style of a formal letter is enough 

explanation in the minds of contemporaries for the great uprising at 

Ghent.45 

The medieval mind loves to generalize a case. Olivier de la 

Marche concludes from a single case of English impartiality in 

earlier times that the English were virtuous in those days and that, 

for that very reason, they would be able to conquer France.46 The 

tremendous exaggeration that results directly from the fact that 

cases are seen as too highly colored and too isolated is further 

strengthened by virtue of there always being for every case ready 

parallels from Holy Scripture that elevate the case into a sphere of 

higher consequence. When, for example, in 1404 a procession of 

Parisian students is disrupted and two of the students are injured 

while another has his coat ripped to shreds, the outraged chancellor 

is placated by a suggestive connection, “les enfants, les jolis 

escoliers comme agneaux innocens,” *33 whereupon he immediately 

compares the case to the slaughter of the Innocents in Bethlehem. 47 

Where for every case an explanation is so easily at hand and 

where this explanation, once it has been accepted, is firmly 

believed, an unusual potential for mistaken judgments prevails. If 

we have to assume, with Nietzsche, that “to do without mistaken 

judgments would make life impossible,” then the vigorous life that 

attracts our attention in earlier times has to be credited in part to 

these very mistaken judgments. Any age demanding an 

extraordinary mobilization of all its strength demands that mistaken 

judgments come in a higher degree to the assistance of the nerves. 

Medieval men may be said to have lived continuously in such an 

intellectual crisis; they were unable, even for a moment, to do 

without the crudest of mistaken judgments that, under the influence 

of partisanship, reached an unparalleled degree of viciousness. The 

Burgundian attitude towards the great enmity with Orléans 

demonstrates this. The numerical proportions of the dead of both 

sides were distorted by the victors to a ridiculous degree: 

Chastellain has five noblemen killed in the battle of Gavere on the 

side of the princes as compared to twenty or thirty thousand on the 

side of the Ghent rebels.48 It is one of Commines’s most modern 

characteristics that he does not indulge in these exaggerations. 49 

What are we to make of the peculiar rashness that is continuously 

revealed in the superficiality, inexactness, and credulity of the 

waning Middle Ages? It is almost as if they had not even the 

slightest need for real thought, as if the passage of fleeting and 

dream-like images provided sufficient nourishment for their minds. 

Purely outward circumstances, superficially described: that is the 

hallmark of scribes such as Froissart and Monstrelet. How did the 

endlessly indecisive battles and sieges over which Froissart wasted 

his talent manage to rivet his attention? Side by side with 

determined partisans, we find among the chroniclers men whose 

political sympathies cannot be determined at all, for example, 

Froissart and Pierre de Fenin, because their talents are exhausted to 

such a large degree in narrating the minutiae of external events. 

They do not distinguish the important from the unimportant. 

Monstrelet was present at the conversation between the duke of 

Burgundy and his captive Jeanne d’Arc, but does not recall what 

they talked about.50 This inexactness, even with respect to events 

that were important to themselves, knows no bounds. Thomas 

Basin, who supervised the process of rehabilitating Jeanne d’Arc, 

says in his chronicle that she was born in Vaucouleurs. He has her 

brought by Baudricourt himself, whom he identifies as the lord 

rather than the captain of the city of Tours, and miscalculates the 

date of her first meeting with the Dauphin by three months.51 

Olivier de la Marche, the jewel among all the courtiers, errs 

consistently in matters of descent and relationship in the ducal 

family and even is mistaken about the date (in 1468) of the 

marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. He had himself 

participated in the festivities of the event, but dates them after the 

siege of Neuss in 1475.52 Even Commines is not free of such 

confusions: he repeatedly multiplies any given span of years by two, 

and repeats his tale of the death of Adolph of Gelder three times.53 

The lack of an ability to make critical distinctions and the degree 

of credulity are so clearly manifest on each page of medieval 

literature that it is unnecessary to cite examples. Naturally there are 

large gradations depending on the level of education of particular 

individuals. Among the people of Burgundy that peculiar form of 

barbaric credulity still dominated that never really believed in the 

death of an imposing ruler; this credulity was alive with respect to 

Charles the Bold so that as late as ten years after the battle of 

Nancy, people would still lend money on the terms that it would be 

repaid when the duke would return. Basin sees in this nothing but 

foolishness, as does Molinet; he mentions it among his “Mervilles du 

monde:” 

J’ay veu chose incongneue: 

Ung mort ressusciter, 

Et sur sa revenue 

Par milliers achapter. 

L’ung dit: il est en vie, 

L’autre: ce n’est que vent. 

Tous bons cueurs sans envie 

Le regrettent souvent. 54*34 

However, given the influence of strong passion and the all too 

ready power of imagination, belief in the reality of imagined facts 

easily took root among the people. Given the disposition of the 

mind to think in terms of strongly isolated conceptions, the mere 

presence of an idea in the mind soon led to the assumption of its 

credibility. Once an idea had begun to bounce about in the brain 

with a particular name or form, it likely would be taken into the 

system of moral and religious images and automatically come to 

share their high credibility. 

While on the one hand, ideas, by virtue of their sharp definition, 

their hierarchical connections, and their frequently 

anthropomorphic character, are particularly fixed and immobile, 

there is, on the other hand, the danger that in the vivid form of the 

idea its content would be lost. Eustache Deschamps dedicated a long 

allegorical and satirical didactic poem, “Le Miroir de Mariage,”55 to 

the disadvantages of marriage. One of its major characters is Franc 

Vouloir, “2° spurred on by Folie and Désir to marriage, but 

prevented from doing so by Repertoire de science. 

What meaning does the poet intend to confer on the abstraction 

Franc Vouloir? In one sense he is the gay freedom of the bachelor, 

but at other times, free will in the philosophical sense. The 

imagination of the poet is so strongly absorbed by the 

personification of Franc Vouloir, in its own right, that he does not 

feel any need to clearly define the idea of his figure, but allows him 

to move from one extreme to another. 

The same poem illustrates in another way how an idea, once 

elaborated, becomes amorphous or evaporates entirely. The tone of 

the poem echoes the familiar philistine and basically sensuous 

ridicule of the weakness and virtue of women; an amusement 

throughout the Middle Ages. To our sensibilities, the pious praises 

of a spiritual marriage and of the contemplative life itself, which 

Repertoire de science serves up to his friend Franc Vouloir in the 

latter part of the poem, are a crass dissonance with that tone.56 But 

it is equally strange to us that the poet occasionally puts high truths 

in the mouths of Folie and Désir, truths that we would expect to 

come from the other side of the dispute.57 

Here, as is frequently the case in the expressions of the Middle 

Ages, we are faced with the question: Did the poet take what he 

praised seriously? Just as we could have asked: Did Jean Petit and 

his Burgundian patrons believe all the gruesome details with which 

they soiled the memory of Orléans? Did the princes and noblemen 

really take all the bizarre fantasies and comedies with which they 

embellished their knightly schemes and vows seriously? It is 

extremely difficult, in matters of medieval thought, to clearly 

separate seriousness from play, the honest conviction from that 

mental disposition that the English call “pretending,” which is the 

disposition of a child at play that also occupies such an important 

place in primitive cultures,58 and that is expressed less through 

geveinsdheid (“make-believe”) than through aacnstellerij (“act as if”). 

This blending of seriousness and play is characteristic of several 

areas. Above all, it is war into which people like to inject a comic 

element. The ridicule directed by the besieged upon their enemies is 

something they are sometimes made to pay for dearly. The people 

of Meaux put an ass on their wall to torment Henry V of England; 

the people of Condé declare that they are not yet able to surrender 

because they were still baking their Easter cakes; in Montereau the 

burghers standing on the walls dust off their helmets after the 

cannons of the besiegers fire.59 In the same vein, the camp of 

Charles the Bold at Neuss was set up like a vast country fair; the 

noblemen have, “par plaisance,” their tents built in the form of 

castles complete with galleries and gardens. All kinds of 

amusements are provided.60 

There is one area where the addition of ridicule to the most 

serious matters seems garish: the dark arena of the belief in devils 

and witches. Although the fantasies about devils were directly 

rooted in the deep fear that nourished this belief, the naive 

imagination nevertheless rendered such figures so childishly 

colorful and so familiar to everyone that they sometimes lost their 

terrifying aspect. It is not only in literature that the Devil appears as 

a comic figure; even in the gruesome seriousness of the witchcraft 

trials Satan’s company is frequently fashioned in the manner of 

Hieronymus Bosch and the hellish smell of sulfur blends with the 

fluff of the farce. The devils who, under their captains Tahu and 

Gorgias, threw a cloister of nuns into disorder have names “assez 

consonnans aux noms de mondains habits, instruments et jeux du 

temps présent, comme Pantoufle, Courtaulx et Mornifle.”61*36 

The fifteenth century is more than any other the century of the 

persecution of witches. At the very moment with which we 

customarily conclude the Middle Ages and delight in the flourishing 

of humanism, the systematic elaboration of the witch craze, that 

terrible outgrowth of medieval thought, is revealed by the Malleus 

maleficarum and the Bulle summis desiderantes (1487 and 1484). No 

humanism, no Reformation prevents this madness. Does not the 

humanist Jean Bodin, even after 1550, in his Demonomie give the 

most learned and substantial nourishment to this persecution 

mania? The new times and the new knowledge did not immediately 

reject the cruelties of the witch-hunts. Oddly, the more temperate 

pronouncements about witchcraft that were proclaimed by the 

Gelder physician Johannes Wier were already widely suggested 

during the fifteenth century. 

The attitude of the late medieval mind towards superstition, that 

is witchcraft and magic, is quite vacillatory and fluid. The age is not 

quite as helplessly given to all this witchcraft madness as one is 

tempted to conclude given its general credulity and lack of critical 

thinking. There are many expressions of doubt and of rational 

thought. Time and again evil erupts from a new cauldron of 

demonic mania and succeeds in surviving for a long time. Magic 

and witches were at home in special regions, for the most part 

mountainous areas: Savoy, Switzerland, Lorraine, and Scotland. But 

epidemic eruptions occur outside of those areas. Around 1400 even 

the French court was a hotbed of sorcery. A preacher warns the 

court nobility that care must be taken lest the phrase “vieilles 

sorciéres” gradually come to be “nobles sorciers.”62 Particularly the 

atmosphere of the circles around Louis d’Orléans was charged with 

the devilish arts; the charges and suspicions raised by Jean Petit did 

not, in this respect, lack all justification. Orléans’s friend and 

adviser, the aged Philippe de Méziéres himself, suspected by the 

Burgundians to be the mysterious instigator of all those misdeeds, 

reports that he had learned magic from a Spaniard some time ago 

and how much effort it had cost him to forget this evil knowledge. 

As late as ten or twelve years after he had left Spain, “a sa volenté 

ne povoit pas bien extirper de son cuer les dessusdits signes et 

Veffect d’iceulx contra Dieu,”*?7 until he was finally saved through 

confession and resistance with the help of God’s mercy, “de ceste 

grand folie, qui est à l’âme crestienne anemie.”63 Masters of 

witchcraft were preferably sought in remote regions; a man desirous 

of conversing with the devil and unable to find anyone to teach him 

this art is told to go to “Ecosse la sauvage.” 64738 

Orléans had his own masters of witchcraft and necromancers. He 

had one of them, whose skill did not satisfy him, burnt at the 

stake.65 Admonished to check whether in the opinion of the 

scholars his superstitious practices were permissible, he responded, 

“Why should I consult them? I am well aware that they would 

counsel against it and yet I am absolutely determined to keep acting 

and believing as before, and I will not give it up.”66 Gerson links 

these stubbornly sinful practices to Orléans’s sudden death; he 

disapproves of the attempts to cure the mad king with the help of 

magic; one practitioner had already died in the flames for his lack 

of success.67 

One special magical practice in particular is repeatedly mentioned 

as having been current at princely courts; this practice, called 

invultare in Latin and envoûtement in French, is the attempt, known 

all over the world, to destroy one’s enemies by having a baptised 

wax figure, or another image, cursed in his name, or melted or 

pierced. Philip VI of France is said to have had such an image of 

himself, which had come into his possession, thrown into the fire 

with the words, “We will see who is the more powerful, the devil to 

ruin me or God to save me.”68—The Burgundian dukes, too, were 

persecuted in this manner. “N’ay-je devers moy”—complains 

Charolais bitterly—“les bouts de cire baptisés dyaboliquement et 

pleins d’abominables mystères contre moy et autres?”69*39 Philip 

the Good, who, in contrast to his royal nephew, represents in many 

ways a more conservative view of life, such as in his preference for 

chivalry and splendor, in his crusade plans, in the old-fashioned 

literary forms that he protected, seems to have been leaning to a 

more enlightened opinion in manners of superstition than the 

French court, particularly Louis XI himself. Philip puts no store in 

the inauspicious day of the Innocent Children that repeats itself 

every week; he does not seek information about the future from 

astrologers and fortune-tellers, “car en toutes choses se monstra 

homme de lealle entiére foy envers Dieu, sans enquerir riens de ses 

secrets,”}49 says Chastellain, who shares the same position.70 

Through the duke’s intervention the terrible persecution of witches 

and magicians in Arras in 1461, one of the great epidemics of the 

witch craze, came to an end. 

The terrible delusion of which the persecution of witches is in 

part the result was contributed to by the fact that the concepts of 

magic and heresy had become confused. In general, everything 

emotionally linked to the disgust, fear, and hatred of intolerable 

transgressions, even such things outside of the direct realm of faith, 

was expressed by the term heresy. Monstrelet, for example, calls the 

sadistic crimes of Gilles de Rais simply “hérésie.”71 The common 

word for magic in fifteenth-century France was vauderie, which had 

lost its particular link with the Waldensians. In the “Vauderie 

d’Arras,” we can trace both the terrifyingly sick delusion that was 

shortly to hatch the Malleus maleficarum72 and the general doubt, 

among common people and nobles alike, as to the reality of all the 

misdeeds that were uncovered. One of the inquisitors claimed that 

one-third of Christianity was soiled by vauderie. His trust in God led 

him to the terrifying conclusion that anyone accused of sorcery 

would of necessity be guilty. God would not allow someone not a 

magician to be accused of such practices. “Et quand on arguoit 

contre lui, fuissent clercqs ou aultres, disoit qu’on debvroit prendre 

iceulx comme suspects d’estre vauldois.”*41 If someone insists that 

some of the apparitions are the products of imagination, this 

inquisitor calls him suspicious. The inquisitor even claimed that he 

could tell if someone was involved in vauderie merely by looking at 

him. The man went mad in his later years, but the witches and 

magicians had been burnt at the stake in the meantime. 

The city of Arras acquired such an evil reputation as a result of 

these persecutions that its merchants were refused lodging or credit 

out of fear that, on the next day, they might be accused of 

witchcraft and lose all their possessions to confiscation. All this 

notwithstanding, says Jacques du Clercq, outside of Arras not one in 

a thousand believed in the truth of all this: “onques on n’avoit veu 

es marches de par decha tels cas advenu,” t42 When the victims are 

forced to recant their evil deeds prior to their execution, the people 

of Arras themselves have their doubts. A poem, full of hatred for the 

prosecutors, accuses them of having started it all out of greed; the 

bishop himself calls it a conspiracy, “une chose controuvée par 

aulcunes mauvaises personnes.”73:¢43 The duke of Burgundy asks 

the faculty of Louvain for advice, and several of its representatives 

declare that vauderie is not real, that it is a mere illusion. There 

upon Philip sends his king of arms, Toison d’or, to the city and 

thenceforth there were no more victims and those still under 

investigation were treated more gently. 

Finally, the witch trials of Arras were entirely annulled. The city 

celebrated the occasion with a joyful feast and edifying moral 

plays.74 

The view that the delusions of the witches themselves, their rides 

through the sky and their sabbath orgies, were nothing but figments 

of their own imagination is a position that had already been 

advanced during the fifteenth century by several individuals. But 

this did not mean that the role of the Devil has been dropped from 

the agenda, because it is he who creates this fateful illusion in the 

first place; it is an error, but one which originates with Satan. This 

is still the position of Johannes Wier in the sixteenth century. 

Martin Lefranc, prior of the Church of Lausanne, the poet of the 

great “Le Champion des dames,” which he dedicated in 1440 to 

Philip the Good, expressed the following enlightened position on 

witchcraft: 

Il n’est vielle tant estou(r)dye, 

Qui fist de ces choses la mendre 

Mais pour la faire ou ardre ou pendre, 

L’ennemy de nature humaine, 

Qui trop de faulx engins scet tendre, 

Les sens faussement lui demaine. 

Il n’est ne baston ne bastonne 

Sur quoy puist personne voler, 

Mais quant le diable leur estonne 

La teste, elles cuident aler 

En quelque place pour galer 

Et accomplir leur volonté. 

De Romme on les orra parler, 

Et sy n’y auront jâ esté. 

Les dyables sont tous en abisme, 

—Dist Franc-Vouloir—enchaienniez 

Et n'auront turquoise ni lime 

Dont soient ja desprisonnez. 

Comment dont aux cristiennez 

Viennent ilz faire tant de ruzes 

Et tant de cas désordonnez? 

Entendre ne sçay tes babuzes. *44 

And, at another place in the same poem: 

Je ne croiray tant que je vive 

que femme corporellement 

Voit par l’air comme merle ou grive, 

—Dit le Champion prestement.— 

Saint Augustine dit plainement 

C’est illusion et fantosme; 

Et ne le croient aultrement 

Gregoire, Ambroise ne Jherosme. 

Quant la pourelle est en sa couche, 

Pour y dormir et reposer, 

L’ennemi qui point ne se couche 

Se vient encoste allé poser. 

Lors illusions composer 

Lui scet sy tres soubtillement, 

Qu’elle croit faire ou proposer 

Ce qu’elle songe seulement. 

Force la vielle songera 

Que sur un chat ou sur un chien 

A l’assemblée s’en ira; 

Mais certes il n’en sera rien: 

Et sy n’est baston ne mesrien 

Qui le peut ung pas enlever.75+45 

Froissart considers the case of the Gascon nobleman and his 

demon companion, Horton, whom he describes so masterfully, to be 

an “erreur.”76 Gerson displays a tendency to take his evaluation of 

devilish illusion one step further and seek a natural explanation for 

all kinds of superstitious phenomena. Many of them, he says, arise 

simply from the human imagination and melancholy delusions, and 

these, in turn, are based in most instances on some corruption of the 

power of imagination that itself can be caused by damage to the 

brain. Such a view seems enlightened enough; even as that which 

holds that pagan vestiges and poetic inventions play a part in 

superstition. But even though Gerson admits that many alleged 

devilish deeds can be attributed to natural causes, he too ultimately 

gives credit to the Devil; that internal damage to the brain is itself 

the result of devilish illusion.77 

Outside the frightful sphere of the persecution of witches, the 

church countered superstition with effective and suitable means. 

The preacher Brother Richard has “Madagoires” (mandrakes, 

mandragora, alraun) brought to be burned, “que maintes sotes gens 

gardoient en lieux repos, et avoient si grant foy en celle ordure, que 

pour vray ilz creoient fermement, que tant comme ilz l’avoient, 

mais qu’il fust bien nettement en beaux drapeaulx de soie ou de lin 

enveloppé, que jamais jour de leur vie ne seroient pouvres.”78*46— 

Burghers who had their palm read by a band of gypsies are 

excommunicated, and a procession is held to ward off that evil 

which could come from godlessness.79 

A tract by Denis the Carthusian shows clearly where the border 

between faith and superstition was drawn, on which basis church 

doctrine attempted to reject some ideas and to purify others by 

imparting to them a truly religious content. Amulets, acts of 

conjuration, blessings, and so forth, says Denis, do not by 

themselves have the power to cause an effect. In this, they differ 

from the words of the sacrament, which, when recited with the 

correct intentions, do have an undeniable effect because God has, so 

to speak, tied his power to these words. Benedictions, however, are 

only to be regarded as humble requests, are only to be uttered with 

the appropriate pious formulation, and are only based on faith in 

God. If they usually have an effect, this is the case either because 

God imparts to them, if properly done, that effect or because, in 

cases where they are done differently—if, for instance, the Sign of 

the Cross is made improperly—their effect, should they actually be 

effective in spite of everything, is a delusion of the Devil. But the 

Devil’s works are not miracles, because the devils know the secret 

powers of nature; the effect is therefore a natural one just as the 

premonitions of birds, etc., are based on natural causes.—Denis 

concedes that in folk practices all those blessings, amulets, and the 

like appear to have an evident worth, but he denies their value and 

voices the opinion that clerics should rather prohibit all such 

things.80 

Generally speaking, the attitude towards anything that appeared 

to be supernatural may be characterized as vacillating between 

rational, natural explanations, spontaneous pious affirmation, and 

the distrust of the tricks of the Devil and devilish deceit. The dictum 

“Omnia quae visibiliter fiunt in hoc mundo, possunt fieri per 

daemones” (“Everything that appears visible in this world could be 

caused by the Devil”), affirmed by the authority of St. Augustine 

and St. Thomas Aquinas, caused uncertainty among the pious. The 

cases in which a miserable hysteria drove the burghers into a short- 

lived frenzy only to be unmasked after it had run its course are not 

counted among the rarer of occasions.81 

Chapter Twelve 

ART IN LIFE1 

FRENCH-BURGUNDIAN CULTURE OF LATE MEDIEVAL times is 

best known to the present age through its fine art, most notably its 

painting. Our perception of the time is dominated by the brothers 

Van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Memling, and the sculptor 

Sluter. This has not always been the case. Some fifty years ago or 

even somewhat earlier, the average educated person knew those 

times primarily through their history. This knowledge was not, 

certainly, as a rule acquired directly from Monstrelet and 

Chastellain, but rather from De Barante’s Histoire des Ducs de 

Bourgogne, which is based on those two authors. And is it not the 

case, that over and beyond De Barante, it was mostly Victor Hugo’s 

Notre Dame de Paris that embodied the image most people had of 

that period?2 

The image that came from these sources was grim and somber. 

The chroniclers themselves, and those who dealt with the subject 

during the Romantic period of the nineteenth century, allowed the 

dark and repulsive aspects of late medieval times to emerge: its 

bloody cruelty, its arrogance and its greed, its lust for revenge and 

its misery. The lighter colors in this depiction come from the 

splendidly bloated vanity of the famous court festivities that were 

replete with the sparkle of worn allegories and unbearable luxury. 

And now? Now that age basks in our perception in the lofty, 

dignified seriousness and the deep peace of the Van Eycks and 

Memling; that world half a millennium ago appears to us to be 

permeated by a splendid light of simple gaiety, by a treasure of 

spiritual depth. The formerly wild and dark image has been 

transformed into one of peace and serenity. It seems as if all the 

evidence we have, in addition to the fine arts of that period, testifies 

to the presence of beauty and wisdom: the music of Dufay and his 

disciples, the words of Ruusbroec and Thomas a Kempis. Even in 

those places where the cruelty and misery of those times still 

reverberates loudly, in the history of Jeanne d’Arc and the poetry of 

Villon, we perceive nothing but loftiness and empathy. 

What is the reason for this profoundly deep difference between 

the two images of this time, the one reflected in art and the other 

derived from history and literature? Is it a characteristic of that 

particular age that there was a great gulf between the different 

spheres and forms of life? Was the sphere of life from which the 

pure and spiritual art of the painters arose different and better than 

that of the princes, nobles, and litterateurs? Is it possible that the 

painters, along with Ruusbroec, the Windesheimers, and the folk 

song, belonged to a peaceful limbo on the outskirts of a glaring 

hell? Or is it a common phenomenon that the fine arts leave a 

brighter image of an age than the words of poets and historians? 

The answer to the last question is absolutely affirmative. As a 

matter of fact, the image we have fashioned for ourselves of all 

earlier cultures has become more cheerful since we have turned 

from reading to seeing, and since our historical sense organ has 

become increasingly visual. The fine arts, the primary source for our 

perception of the past, do not openly lament. The bitter aftertaste 

produced by the pain of the ages evaporates in the fine arts. Once 

articulated in words, the lamentations over the suffering of the 

world always retain their tone of immediate grief and 

dissatisfaction, touching us always with sadness and pity; while 

suffering expressed through the means of the fine arts at once slips 

into the elegiac and serenely peaceful. 

Those who think that an age can be comprehended in its entire 

reality through art leave a general error in historical criticism 

uncorrected. In respect to Burgundian times in particular, there is, 

moreover, the danger of a specific error of perception: the failure to 

correctly assess the relationship between the fine arts and the 

literary expressions of culture. 

The observer is drawn into this mistake if he does not take into 

account that he begins by taking a very different position towards 

art than he does towards literature because of the difference in their 

state of preservation. The literature of the late medieval period, 

with a few individual exceptions, is known to us nearly completely. 

We know it in its highest and lowest forms, in all its categories and 

styles, ranging from the most lofty to the most ordinary, from the 

most theoretical to the most concrete. The entire life of the age is 

reflected and expressed in its literature. Further, the written 

tradition is not exhausted by literature alone; the entire corpus of 

official papers and documents is at our disposal to complete our 

information. The fine arts, in contrast, which already, by virtue of 

their particular nature, reflect the life of the age less directly and 

comprehensively, are only available to us in fragments. Only very 

few remnants survive outside of church art. All of the secular fine 

arts, most of the applied arts, are nearly completely missing; most 

lacking are those forms in which the changing facets of the 

connection between the production of art and the life of the 

community is revealed. What the limited treasury of altarpieces and 

tomb monuments teach us about this connection is far from enough; 

the image offered by art remains isolated outside our knowledge of 

the robust life of that age. For comprehending the function of the 

fine arts in life, the admiring study of the surviving masterpieces 

does not suffice: that which has been lost also demands our 

attention. 

Art was still an integral part of life during that age. Life was 

shaped by strong forms and held together and measured by the 

sacraments of the church, the annual sequence of festivals, and the 

divisions of the day. The labors and joys of life all had their fixed 

forms: religion, knighthood, and courtly Minne provided the most 

important of these forms. Art had the task of embellishing the forms 

in which life was lived with beauty. What was sought was not art 

itself, but the beautiful life. In contrast to later ages, one did not 

step outside a more or less indifferent daily routine in order to 

enjoy art in solitary contemplation for the sake of solace or 

edification; rather, art was used to intensify the splendor of life 

itself. It is the destiny of art to vibrate in concert with the high 

points of life, be it in the highest flights of piety or in the proudest 

enjoyment of earthly moments. During the Middle Ages art was not 

yet perceived as beauty per se. It was for the most part applied art, 

even in cases where we would consider the works to be their own 

reason for being. That is to say, for the Middle Ages, the reason for 

desiring a given work of art rested in its purpose, rested in the fact 

that artworks are the servants of any one of the forms of life. In 

cases where, disregarding any practical uses, the pure ideal of 

beauty guides the creating artist himself, this happens to a large 

part subconsciously. The first sprouts of a love for art for its own 

sake appear as a wild growth on the production of art: princes and 

noblemen piled up objects of art until they became collections; this 

rendered them useless: they were then enjoyed as curiosities, as 

precious parts of the princely treasury. The actual sense of art that 

arises during the Renaissance has this foundation. 

In the appreciation of the great works of art of the fifteenth 

century, particularly of altarpieces and tomb art, contemporaries 

went far beyond aesthetic considerations. Their importance and 

purpose outweighed their beauty by far. They had to be beautiful 

because the object was sacred or its purpose lofty. The purpose was 

always more or less practical in nature. Altarpieces have a twofold 

significance: ceremonially displayed during high festivals, they 

serve the purposes of elevating the piety of the congregation and 

keeping the memory of the pious donors alive. We know that the 

altarpiece of the Adoration of the Lamb by Hubert and Jan van Eyck 

(plates 8, 9) was only rarely opened. Whenever the administrators 

of the cities of the Netherlands ordered plaques illustrating famous 

judgments or legal acts to decorate the law courts in the town halls, 

for example the Judgment of Cambyses by Gerard David in Bruges 

(plate 10), or the Judgment of the Emperor Otto by Dirk Bouts at 

Louvain (plate 11), or the lost paintings from Brussels by Rogier van 

der Weyden, the purpose was to keep before the eyes of the judges a 

solemn and vibrant reminder of their duty.—Just how sensitive the 

reactions to the content of the depictions decorating the walls were 

is shown by the following instance. In 1384, a meeting was called in 

Lelinghem that, it was hoped, would lead to an armistice between 

France and England. The duke of Berry had the barren walls of the 

old chapel in which the princely emissaries were to meet decorated 

with tapestries depicting the battles of antiquity. But when John of 

Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, saw them upon entering the chapel, 

he demanded their removal: those aspiring to make peace should 

not have war and destruction depicted before them. In their place 

other tapestries were hung depicting the implements of the Passion 

of Christ.3 

The portrait is inseparably tied to its practical significance and, 

even in our own day, has retained its moral value as a family 

possession, because the feelings about life, the love of parents and 

family pride, which it serves, are much less used up than the forms 

of social life to which the legal scenes belong. Portraits also had the 

additional function of making those to be engaged to be married 

known to one another. Among the emissaries whom Philip the Good 

sent to Portugal in 1428 to find a bride for him was Jan van Eyck, 

who was to paint the portrait of the princess. Sometimes the fiction 

is maintained that the bridegroom had fallen in love with the 

unknown bride merely by looking at the portrait, as, for example, in 

the case of the courtship of Richard II of England with the six-year- 

old Isabella of France.4 There are even occasional claims that a 

choice had been made by comparing different portraits. When the 

young Charles VI of France has to take a wife and the choice falls 

among the daughters of the dukes of Bavaria, Austria, and Lorraine, 

an excellent painter is dispatched to paint portraits of all three 

candidates. The king is shown the pictures and chooses the 

fourteen-year-old Isabella of Bavaria, because he finds her by far the 

prettiest.5 

Nowhere else is the purpose of a work of art so predominantly 

practical as in the case of tomb monuments, which confronted 

sculpture in that age with its highest task. But the practical function 

of art was not restricted to sculpture alone. The intense desire for a 

visible image of the deceased had to be satisfied even during the 

funeral. On occasion, the deceased was represented by a living 

individual. During the funeral of Bertrand du Guesclin at St. Denis, 

four mounted knights in armor appeared in the church, 

“representans la personne du mort quand il vivoit.”6*! A bill from 

the year 1375 mentions a funeral ceremony in the house of 

Polignac, “cing sols a Blaise pour avoir fait le chevalier mort a la 

sepulture.”7/2 For royal funerals, a leather puppet fully dressed in 

princely regalia is most often used; the goal is always a near 

resemblance.s It appears on some occasions that more than one 

such image would be present in a procession. The emotions of the 

people were focused on the sight of those images.9 The death mask, 

which made its appearance in France during the fifteenth century, 

probably originated in the fashioning of these funeral puppets. 

A work almost always has a particular end, a particular purpose 

connected with daily life. This obscures the boundary between the 

fine arts and the crafts, or better, this boundary is not yet drawn. 

Neither does a boundary yet exist with regard to the person of the 

artist himself. Among the group of highly individual masters in the 

service of the courts of Flanders, Berry, and Burgundy, the creation 

of individual paintings by the artists alternates freely with the tasks 

of illuminating handwritten manuscripts and polychroming 

sculptures. They also have to lend their hands to painting coats of 

arms on shields and banners and designing tournament costumes 

and official robes. Melchoir Broederlam, initially painter to Louis of 

Male, the count of Flanders, subsequently to Louis’s son-in-law, the 

first duke of Burgundy, decorated five carved chairs for the house of 

the count. He repaired and painted the rare mechanical 

contraptions in Hesdin Castle that sprayed the guests with water or 

powder. He worked on the duchess’s carriage. Still later, he 

supervised the sumptuous decorations of the fleet that was 

assembled by the duke of Burgundy in 1387 in the port of Sluis for 

an expedition against England that never took place. Court painters 

were always employed during princely weddings and funerals. In 

the workshops of Jan van Eyck statues were painted and he himself 

fashioned a kind of world map for Duke Philip on which cities and 

countries could be seen minutely and clearly painted. Hugo van der 

Goes painted advertisements for indulgences. Gerard David is 

reputed to have painted scenic decorations on the railings or 

shutters of the room in the Broodhuis * in Bruges wherein 

Maximillian was incarcerated in 1488 so as to make the stay of the 

royal prisoner more pleasant. 

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PLATE 1. Wheel of Fortune. Codex miniature. Biblioteca Nazionale, 

Florence, Italy. Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 2. Velazquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva. The Maids of Honor. Prado, 

Madrid. 

eurent alo peccundi mille figure. Dore gs min’ pene imnamotie habet 

à Dabo mosi niro! i 

Bado mod peluk baalu, — belli ceetami 

fapatia. mittram, Aolene Que Ne Victor, Doxten non okt 

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E 

Bblies trompettes, darone, 

, Et mefuines fano fommeilier, 

Les dames folice reneillier: 

. Deograno,et Xo e. 

pe pes pri 

PLATE 3. Marchand, Guyot. Danse Macabre. 1486. Bibliothèque Nationale, 

Paris. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New York. 

CNRS 

PLATE 4. French School. Figure of Death from the Cemetery of the 

Innocents, Paris. 16th century. Louvre, Paris. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art 

Resource, New York. 

mt hl Ci ay? 

PLATE 5. Broederlam, Melchior. The Flight into Egypt. Musée de Beaux-Arts, 

Dijon. 

PLATE 6. Foucquet, Jean. Melun Madonna. Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp. 

PLATE 7. Foucquet, Jean. Etienne Chevalier with St. Stephen. 

Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Courtesy of Foto Marburg/Art 

Resource, New York. 

PLATE 8. Van Eyck, Jan. Ghent Altarpiece, closed. 1432. Cathedral St. 

Bavo, Ghent. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 9. Van Eyck, Jan. Ghent Altarpiece, open. 1432. Cathedral St. Bavo, 

Ghent. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New York. 

Re Ste 

a 

PLATE 10. David, Gerard. Judgement of Cambyses. Municipal Museum, 

Bruges. Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 11. Bouts, Dirk. Judgement of the Emperor Otto (Scene 1). Musée 

Royaux, Brussels. 

(Scene 2) 

PLATE 12. Breughel, Pieter the Elder. The Old Port of Naples. Palazzo 

Doria, Rome. Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 13. Baerze, Jacques de. Retable of the Crucifixion. Musée des Beaux- 

Arts, Dijon. 

PLATE 14. Van der Weyden, Rogier. Last Judgement Altarpiece (open). Hotel- 

Dieu, Beaune, France. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New York. 

DO Bet. 

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PLATE 15. Van Eyck Jan. Autun Altarpieoe. Louvre, Paris. Cliché des Musées 

Nationaux, Paris. 

PLATE 16. Van Eyck, Jan. Autun Altarpiece: detail of landscape in 

background. Louvre, Paris. Cliché des Musées Nationaux, Paris. 

PLATE 17. Van der Weyden, Rogier. Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments. 

Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp. 

PLATE 18. Juan de la Huerta/Antoine le Moiturier. Tomb of John the 

Fearless. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon. 

PLATE 19. Claus Sluter/Claus de Werve. Tomb of Philip the Bold. Musée de 

Beaux-Arts, Dijon. 

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PLATE 20. Sluter, Claus. Moses from The Well of Moses. 1395-1404. 

Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New 

York. 

PLATE 21. Van Eyck, Jan. Wedding Portrait (Giovanni Amolfini and Cenami 

Arnolfini). Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, 

London. 

PLATE 22. Van der Weyden, Rogier. Bladelin Altarpiece. Gemaeldegalerie, 

Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New York. 

Ce 8 A eee 

PLATE 23. Van Eyck, Jan. St. Jerome in His Study. c. 1435. Oil on linen 

paper on oak, 20.6 cm. x 13.3 cm. Accession no. 25.4. Photograph ©The 

Detroit Institute of Arts, 1995. City of Detroit Purchase. 

PLATE 24. Van Eyck, Jan. Margaretha van Eyck. Municipal Museum, Bruges. 

Courtesy of Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 25. Van Eyck, Jan. Baudoin de Lannoy. Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche 

Museen, Berlin. Courtesy of Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 26. Van Eyck, Jan. Madonna of Canon van der Paele. Municipal 

Museum, Bruges. Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 27. Van Eyck, Jan. Giovanni Arnolfini. Gemaeldegalerie, Staatlich 

Museen, Berlin. Courtesy of Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 28. Van Eyck, Jan. Leal Souvenier. Reproduced by courtesy of the 

Trustees, National Gallery, London. 

PLATE 29 (opposite). Van Eyck, Jan. Annunciation. Andrew W. Mellon 

Collection, © 1994 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

D.C. 

PLATE 30. De Witte, Emmanuel. The Fishmonger’s Stall. Courtesy of Museum 

Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 

PLATE 31. Sint Jans, Geertgen tot. Nativity. Reproduced by courtesy of the 

Trustees, The National Gallery, London. 

PLATE 32. Limburg Brothers. September (Grape Harvest). Calendar page 

from the manuscript Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Musée Conde, 

Chantilly. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 33. Limburg Brothers. March. Calendar page from Très Riches Heures 

du Duc de Berry. Musée Conde, Chantilly. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art 

Resource, New York. 

yore 

PLATE 34. Limburg Brothers. December. Calendar page from Trés Riches 

Heures du Duc de Berry. Musée Conde, Chantilly. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art 

Resource, New York. 

PLATE 35. Limburg Brothers. February. Calendar page from Très Riches 

Heures du Duc de Berry. Musée Conde, Chantilly. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art 

Resource, New York. 

PLATE 36. Campin, Robert (Master of Flémalle). Annunciation (right panel). 

All rights reserved. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

PLATE 37. Van Eyck, Hubert and Jan. The Three Marys at the Open 

Sepulchre. Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 

PLATE 38. Limburg Brothers. Purification. From Très Riches Heures du Duc de 

Berry. Musée Conde, Chantilly. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New 

York. 

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PLATE 39. Limburg Brothers. Visitation. From Trés Riches Heures du Duc de 

Berry. Musée Conde, Chantilly. Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New 

York. 

PLATE 40. Breughel, Pieter the Elder. The Battle between Carnival and Lent. 

Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 

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PLATE 41. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. The Beggars. Courtesy Foto 

Marburg/Art Resource, New York. 

PLATE 42. Murillo, Bartolomé. Beggar Boy. Louvre, Paris. Cliché des Musées 

Nationaux-Paris. 

PLATE 43. Steinlen, Theophile. Flower Sellers on the Boulevard. Musée de la 

Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. 

Sar y n re e 

PLATE 44. Northern Netherlands School: Lysbeth van Durenvoode. 

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 

PLATE 45. Master of the Bonner Diptych: Love Magic. Museum der 

Bildenden Künste, Leipzig. 

Of the many works from the hands of the great and not so great 

artists only a fraction of a rather special kind have been preserved. 

These are primarily tomb monuments, altarpieces, portraits, and 

miniatures. With the exception of portraits, only very little survives 

of secular painting. Of the ornamental arts and crafts, we have a 

number of specific categories: church utensils, clerical vestments, 

some furniture. How much would our insight into the character of 

the art of the fifteenth century be improved if we could place the 

bathing scenes of Jan van Eyck or Rogier van der Weyden or the 

hunting scenes side by side with the many pietàs and madonnas. We 

are hardly able to form any understanding of the entire field of the 

applied arts. To do so, we would have to see the ecclesiastical 

paraments and the stately robes of the court, bedecked with 

precious stones and bells, all together. We would have to be able to 

see the splendidly decorated ships of which the miniatures convey 

only a highly deficient, mechanical notion. There are only a few 

things whose beauty aroused so much enthusiasm in Froissart as 

that of ships.10 The banners, richly decorated with coats of arms, 

fluttering from the tops of the mast, were sometimes so long that 

they touched the water. In the paintings of ships by Peter Breughel 

these unusually long and broad streamers can still be seen (plate 

12). The ship of Philip the Bold, on which Melchior Broederlam 

worked in 1387 at Sluis, was covered with blue and gold; large 

coats of arms graced the pavilion of the aftercastle. The sails were 

strewn with marguerites, the initials of the ducal couple and their 

slogan, “Il me tarde.” Noblemen vied with one another to see whose 

ship was most expensively decorated for the expedition to England. 

Painters are well off, says Froissart,11 they are able to demand any 

price, and there are never enough of them. He claims that many 

ships had the masts covered with gold leaf. Guy de la Trémoille, in 

particular, spared no expense: He spent more than two thousand 

pounds for gilding. “L’on ne se povoit de chose adviser pour luy 

jolyer, ne deviser, que le seigneur de la Trimouille ne le feist faire 

en ses nefs. Et tout ce paioient les povres gens parmy France... “ 

*4 

This taste for splendid extravagance would undoubtedly catch our 

attention forcefully if we could see the lost secular decorative arts. 

The surviving works of art most decidedly do share that tendency 

towards extravagance, but since we value this quality in art least, 

we pay less attention to it. We only seek to enjoy the profound 

beauty of any given work. Everything that is mere splendor and 

pomp has lost its attraction for us. For contemporaries, however, 

this very pomp and splendor was of tremendous importance. 

French-Burgundian culture of the waning Middle Ages counts 

among those cultures in which beauty is replaced by splendor. Late 

medieval art reflects the spirit of the late Middle Ages faithfully, a 

spirit that had run its course. What we had posited as one of the 

most important characteristics of late medieval thought, the 

depiction of everything that could be thought down to the smallest 

detail, the oversaturation of the mind with an endless system of 

formal representation, this, too, constitutes the essence of the art of 

that time. Art, too, tries to leave nothing unformed, unpresented, or 

undecorated. The flamboyant Gothic is like an endless organ 

postlude; it breaks down all forms by this self-analyzing process; 

every detail finds its continuous elaboration, each line its 

counterline. It is an unrestrainedly wild overgrowth of the idea by 

the form; ornate detail attacks every surface and line. That horror 

vacui, which may perhaps be identified as a characteristic of end 

periods of intellectual development, dominates in this art. 

This all means that the boundaries between splendor and beauty 

become less distinct. Embellishment and ornamentation no longer 

serve the glorification of the naturally beautiful, but rather 

overgrow and thus threaten to choke it. The farther the departure 

from purely pictorial art, the more unrestrained the wild 

overgrowth of formal ornamentation covering content. There is 

little opportunity for sculpture to engage in this wild growth of 

forms as long as it creates freestanding figures: the statues of the 

Moses Fountain and the “plourants”12 of the tombstones compete, 

in their strict, simple, naturalness, with Donatello. But as soon as 

the task of the art of sculpture is of a decorative nature or falls into 

the realm of painting and, bound by the reduced dimensions of the 

relief, reproduces entire scenes, sculpture, too, overindulges in 

restless, overloaded displays. Those who see the carvings by Jacques 

de Baerze at the tabernacle in Dijon next to the paintings of 

Broederlam will notice the disharmony between them (plate 13). In 

painting, wherever it is purely representational, simplicity and 

quietude dominate; carving, by its very nature decorative, treats the 

shaping of figures ornamentally, and one perceives the phenomenon 

of forms crowding each other out as something that supplants the 

quietude of the painted object. The difference between painting and 

tapestries is of the same kind. The art of weaving, even in cases 

where it assumes a task of a purely representational nature, by 

virtue of its set technique, stands closer to ornamentation and is 

unable to extricate itself from the exaggerated need for 

embellishment. Tapestries are overcrowded with figures and colors 

and remain apparently archaic in form.13 Departing still further 

from the pure fine arts, we encounter clothing. Clothing, too, 

belongs undeniably to art, but it is part of its very purpose that 

allure and ostentation predominate over beauty itself. Moreover, 

personal vanity pulls the art of clothing into the sphere of passion 

and sensuousness where the qualities that comprise the essence of 

high art, balance and harmony, come second. 

An extravagance like that found in the style of dress between 

1350 and 1480 has not been experienced in later ages, at least not 

in such a general and sustained way. Certainly there have been 

extravagant fashions in later times, such as the dress of the 

mercenaries around 1520 and aristocratic French costume in 1660, 

but the unrestrained exaggeration and overprofusion so 

characteristic of French-Burgundian dress for a century has no 

parallel. In their dress we are privileged to observe what the sense 

of beauty of that age, left to its own undisturbed impulses, would 

accomplish. A court costume is overburdened with hundreds of 

precious stones and all its proportions are exaggerated to a 

ridiculous degree; the headdress of women assumes the sugarloaf 

form of the hennin; natural hair is hidden or removed at the 

temples and from the area of the forehead at the hairline, so that 

the curiously vaulted foreheads that were considered beautiful were 

prominently displayed. The décolletage began abruptly. Male 

garments, however, displayed still more numerous extravagances; 

most striking of all, the elongated toes of the shoes, the poulaines, 

which the knights at Nicopolis14 had to cut off in order to be able to 

flee, the narrow waists, the balloon-like puffed-up sleeves that rose 

at the shoulders, the houpelandes dangling to the feet, and the short 

jackets that barely covered the hips, the tall caps or hats narrowing 

at the tips or shaped like a cylinder, the bonnets wondrously draped 

around the head reminiscent of a cock’s comb or a flickering flame. 

The more festive the more extravagant, since all this beauty was 

equated with splendor, stateliness, estat.15 The mourning dress that 

Philip the Good wears after the murder of his father while receiving 

the King of England is so long that it trails from the tall horse he is 

riding all the way to the ground. 16 

All this wasteful splendor reaches its climax in the festivities of 

the court. Everyone remembers the descriptions of the Burgundian 

court festivities, such as the banquet at Lille in 1454, where the 

guests took their vows to participate in the crusade against the 

Turks while the pheasants were being served, or the wedding feast 

of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York at Bruges in 1468.17 We 

cannot imagine a greater distance than that which exists between 

the consecrated atmosphere of the Ghent and Louvain altars and 

these expressions of barbaric princely ostentation. The descriptions 

of all those estremets with pastry from within which musicians 

performed, the overly ornate ships and castles, the monkeys, 

whales, giants, and dwarfs, and all the worn allegory belonging to 

them force us to see them as unusually insipid performances. 

However, isn’t the distance we perceive between the two 

extremes of church art and the art of the court festivities easily 

exaggerated in more than one respect? First of all, we have to be 

clear about the function that the festivity served in society. It still 

had the purpose that it had among primitive peoples; that is, to be 

the sovereign expression of the culture, to be the form in which the 

highest joy of life was expressed by the community, and to express 

the sense of that community. During times of great social renewal, 

such as at the time of the French Revolution, festivities sometimes 

regain that important social and aesthetic function. 

Modern man is in a position to seek individually the confirmation 

of his view of life and the purest enjoyment of his joie de vivre 

during any moment of leisure in self-chosen relaxations. But an age 

in which the spiritual luxuries are still poorly distributed and less 

accessible requires for the purpose of renewal a communal act: the 

festival. The greater the contrast with the misery of daily life, the 

more indispensable the festival and the stronger the means required 

to bestow splendor on life by virtue of the ecstasy of beauty and 

enjoyment that lights up the darkness of reality. The fifteenth 

century was an age of great emotional depression and thorough 

pessimism. We have already mentioned earlier the permanent 

pressure from injustice and violence, hell and damnation, 

pestilence, fire and hunger, Satan and the witches, under which the 

century lived. Mankind in its wretchedness needed more than the 

daily repeated promise of heavenly bliss and God’s watchful care 

and benevolence: from time to time a glorious, solemn, and 

communal affirmation of the beauty of life was required. The 

enjoyment of life in its primary forms—play, love, drink, dance, and 

song—does not suffice. Life has to be ennobled through beauty, to 

be stylized in a social expression of the joy of life. For the 

individual, relief through the reading of books, listening to music, 

seeing art, or enjoying nature was still out of reach; books were too 

expensive, nature too dangerous, and art was no more than a small 

part of the festival. 

The folk festival had only song and dance for its original sources 

of beauty. For the beauty of color and form folk festivals based 

themselves on church festivals, which had both in abundance, and 

usually took place immediately after a church festival. The 

separation of the urban festival from the church form, and its 

establishment of a decor of its own, took place throughout the 

entire fifteenth century through the labor of the rhetoricians. Prior 

to this time, the princely courts had been in a position both to 

arrange a purely secular festival with an attendant display of art 

and to bestow on the festival a splendor of its own. But display and 

splendor are not sufficient for festivals; nothing is as indispensable 

for them as style. 

The church festival possessed style because of its liturgy. In a 

beautiful communal social gesture the church festivals always 

managed to give moving expression to a lofty idea. The sacred 

dignity and noble stateliness of the ceremonies were not destroyed 

even by the most extreme overgrowth of festive details, which 

bordered on the burlesque. But from where were court festivals to 

obtain style? On which conception was it to be based?—The answer 

could be none other than the chivalric ideal, because the entire life 

of the court was based on it. Was the chivalric ideal tied to a style, 

to a liturgy, so to speak? Indeed; everything related to the act of 

bestowing knighthood, the rules of orders, tournaments, préséance, 

hommage, and service, the entire game of the kings at arms, heralds, 

coats of arms, constituted the style. To the degree the court festival 

was based on those elements, it most decidedly possessed in the 

eyes of contemporaries a greatly elevated style. Strong sensitivity to 

the stylish festive air of the ceremonial procedure frequently comes 

naturally to modern man, independent of all the awe with which all 

matters aristocratic or monarchic are seen. How much more soit 

must have been for those who were still captivated by the delusion 

of that chivalric ideal whenever they encountered the pompous 

display of costumes with their long trains and glittering colors! 

But court festivals aspired to more. They wanted to present the 

dream of the heroic life in its extreme form. This is where the style 

failed. The entire apparatus of knightly fancy and splendor was no 

longer filled with real life. Everything had become much too 

literary, a sickly renaissance, an empty convention. The inner decay 

of the form of life remained hidden under the overload of glamour 

and etiquette. The chivalric idea of the fifteenth century revels in a 

romanticism that is hollow and worn throughout. And that was the 

source from which the court festival was supposed to derive the 

inspiration for its performances and presentations. How could it 

create a style from such a styleless, undisciplined, and stale 

literature as that of chivalric romanticism in its decay? 

The aesthetic value of the entremets should be seen in this light: 

They were applied literature. Actually, this was the only way this 

literature could be made bearable, since in the entremets the 

fleeting, superficial shapes of all the colorful literary dream figures 

had to make room for the necessity of the material representation. 

The heavy barbarian seriousness evident in all this fits well into 

the Burgundian court, which seemed to have lost the lighter and 

more harmonious French spirit through its contact with the North. 

All the tremendous display is taken solemnly and seriously. The 

great festivity of the duke at Lille was both the end and the climax 

of a number of banquets given by the court nobility in competition 

with each other. All this had started quite simply and with little 

expense; the number of guests and the luxury of the menus and 

entremets were gradually increased. By being offered a wreath by his 

host, a guest was designated to take his turn as successor; in this 

manner the knights were followed by the great lords and the great 

lords by the princes, all this with steadily increasing expense and 

stateliness, until it was finally the turn of the duke himself. But 

Philip intended to hold more than a splendid feast; he intended to 

collect vows for the crusade against the Turks for the reconquest of 

Constantinople, which had fallen a year earlier. This was the 

officially proclaimed goal of the duke’s life. To prepare for the feast, 

he appointed a commission with the knight of the Fleece, Jean de 

Lannoy, as its leader. Olivier de la Marche, too, was a member. 

Whenever he comes to this issue in his memoirs he becomes very 

solemn: “Pour ce que grandes et honnorables oeuvres désirent 

loingtaine renomée et perpétuelle mémoire.”*° These are the words 

with which he begins to reminisce about those great events.18 The 

first councillors, who were closest to the duke, regularly attended 

the deliberations: even Chancellor Rolin and Antoine de Croy, the 

First Chamberlain, were consulted before agreement was reached 

where “les cérémonies et les mistères” should be held. 

All these beautiful events have been described so often that there 

is no need to do so here. Some had even crossed the channel to 

witness the spectacle. Joining the guests were innumerable noble 

onlookers, the majority of whom were masked. First the guests took 

a stroll to admire the splendid stationary displays; then came the 

performances with living persons and tableaux vivants. Olivier 

himself played the leading role of Sainte Eglise when she entered 

during the most important scene inside a tower placed on the back 

of an elephant led by a giant Turk. The tables were given the most 

marvelous decorations: a manned carrack19 with full sails, a 

meadow with trees, a spring, rocks, and a picture of St. Andreas, 

Lusignan Castle with the fairy Melusine, a windmill and a bird- 

shooting scene, a forest with moving wild animals, and, finally, the 

church with an organ and singers that, alternating with the twenty- 

eight-man orchestra that was sitting in a pie, offered musical 

performances. 

What matters here is the degree of taste or tastelessness that is 

found in all this. The subject matter itself is nothing but a loose 

mixture of mythological, allegorical, and moralizing images, but 

what about the execution? There is no doubt that the effect was 

largely sought through extravagance. The Tower of Gorkum that 

served as ostentatious table decoration during a 1468 wedding 

celebration was forty-six feet tall.20 La Marche reports about a 

whale fashioned for the same occasion: “Et certes ce fut un moult 

bel entremectz, car il y avoit dedans plus de quarante 

personnes.”21*6 As to the miracles of mechanical gadgetry, such as 

the living birds that fly out of the mouth of the dragon with whom 

Hercules does battle and other such astonishing contraptions, it is 

difficult to associate them with any notion of art. The comic 

element is only poorly represented in them. From inside the 

Gorkum tower, wild boars play trumpets, goats perform a motet, 

wolves play the flute, four large asses perform as singers—and do so 

before Charles the Bold, who was a connoisseur of music of some 

stature. 

I do not wish to cast doubt that, in spite of everything, there were 

found among all the displays of the festival, particularly among the 

sculptural pieces, a good many genuine works of art alongside the 

predominantly silly ostentation. We should remember that the 

people who delighted in this gargantuan splendor and wasted 

serious thought on it were the same people who commissioned the 

works of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. The duke 

himself was their patron, as was Rolin, the donor of the altars of 

Beaune (plate 14) and Autun (plates 15, 16), and Jean Chevrot, who 

was the patron of Rogier’s Seven Sacraments (plate 17), and many 

others, such as Lannoy. It is even more significant that the creators 

of these and similar ostentations were these very same painters. 

Though it happens that we have no definite information about Jan 

van Eyck or Rogier, we do know it to be a fact that others, Colard 

Marmion, Simon Marmion, and Jacques Daret, for example, often 

had a hand in such festivals. For the festival in 1468, the date of 

which was unexpectedly moved up, the entire guild of painters was 

mobilized to assure completion; in great haste journeymen from 

Ghent, Brussels, Louvain, Thirlemont, Bergen, Quesnoy, 

Valenciennes, Douai, Cambrai, Arras, Lille, Ypres, Courtray, and 

Oudenarde were dispatched to Bruges.22 What was produced by 

their hands cannot have been completely ugly. One would readily 

exchange many a mediocre altarpiece for the thirty fully equipped 

ships, complete with the coats of arms of the ducal lords, of the 

banquet of 1468, the sixty women in different regional costumes23 

holding fruit baskets and bird cages, and the windmills and bird 

catchers. 

Even at the risk of sacrilege, it is tempting to go one step further 

and assert that on occasion we have to keep in mind this lost art of 

table decoration, now completely vanished, in order to better 

understand Claus Sluter24 and others like him. 

Among the other arts, that of funeral sculpture served a clearly 

practical function. The task facing the sculptors charged with 

creating the tomb monuments for the Burgundian dukes was not 

one of imaginative beauty, but was rather concerned with glorifying 

princely grandeur. Their task was much more strictly limited and 

more precisely prescribed than that of the painters, who in 

commissioned works were allowed to give much freer reign to their 

creative urges and who could paint whatever they wanted when not 

working on a commission. The sculptor of that age probably did 

little work outside of his commissions and the motifs of his work 

were limited in number and tied to a strong tradition. Sculptors 

were then much more tightly dependent on the dukes than the 

painters. The two great Dutch artists who were enticed out of their 

country by the magnet of French artistic life were totally 

monopolized by the duke of Burgundy. Sluter lived in a house in 

Dijon assigned and furnished for him by the duke.25 He lived there 

like a great lord, but at the same time like an employee of the court. 

The court rank “varlet de chambre de monsegneur le ducde 

Bourgogne,”*7 which Sluter shared with his cousin Claes van de 

Werve and Jan van Eyck, had an authoritative meaning for the 

sculptors. Claes van de Werve, who continued Sluter’s work, became 

one of the tragic victims of art in the service of the court: kept in 

Dijon year in and out in order to complete the tomb monument of 

John the Fearless (plate 18), a task for which there were never 

funds available, his splendidly promising career wasted away in 

futile waiting and he died having never been able to finish his task. 

This relationship of servitude, however, runs contrary to the fact 

that it is in the nature of the art of sculpture always to approach a 

certain peak of simplicity and freedom, primarily because of the 

limited nature of its means, its material, and its subject matter. We 

call this peak of simplicity and freedom classicism. It is reached as 

soon as one of the great masters, even be it only one, regardless of 

time and place, guides the chisel. No matter what the task the age 

intends to force upon the art of sculpture, the human figure and its 

clothing allow for only a few variations in their depiction in wood 

and stone. The differences between the Roman portrait sculpture of 

the Imperial period, Goujon and Colombe in the sixteenth century, 

and Houdon and Pajou in the eighteenth are much smaller than in 

any other field of art. 

The art of Sluter, and those like him, shares in the eternal nature 

of the art of sculpture. And yet . .. we don’t perceive Sluter’s works 

as they really were and were intended to be. As soon as one 

visualizes the Moses Fountain, just in the manner it delighted its 

contemporaries at the time when the papal legate (1418) granted 

absolution to anyone who visited it with pious intentions—one 

realizes why we dared to mention Sluter’s art and that of the entre- 

mets in one breath. 

The Moses Fountain is known only as a fragment (plate 20). The 

first duke of Burgundy wished to see the fountain, surmounted by 

an image of the Mount of Calvary, put into the yard of the 

Carthusians in his beloved Champmol. The main part of the work is 

comprised of the figure of the crucified Christ with Mary, John, and 

the Magdalen placed at the foot of the cross. The work had already 

vanished, for the most part, prior to the Revolution, which so 

irretrievably disfigured the Champmol. Below the central part, and 

surrounding the base that is held up around the edge by angels, 

stand the six figures from the Old Testament who prophesied the 

death of the Messiah: Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and 

Zachariah, each with an attached banderole on which the prophetic 

texts can be read. The entire depiction has to the highest degree the 

character of a performance. This is not so much because of the fact 

that the tableaux vivants or “personnages,” which during processions 

and banquets usually had figures with such banderoles attached to 

them, or that the Messiah prophecies from the Old Testament were 

the most important subjects of such representations, as because of 

the fact that this depiction has an unusually strong verbal effect 

about it. The words of the inscriptions have an emphasized place of 

importance. We only reach a full understanding of the work if we 

completely absorb the sacred import of those texts.26 “Immolabit 

enum universa multitudo filiorum Israel ad vesperam,” reads 

Moses’s dictum. “Foderunt manus meas et pedes meos, 

dinumeraverunt omnia ossa mea,” is the citation from the Psalms of 

David. “Sicut ovis ad occisionem ducetur et quasi agnus coram 

tondente se obmutescet et non aperiet os suum,” from Isaiah. “O vos 

omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est dolor sicut 

dolor meus,” Jeremiah. “Post hebdomades sexaginta duas occidetur 

Christus,” Daniel. “Appenderunt mercedem meam triginta 

argenteos,” Zachariah. So reads the lament, rising in six voices 

around the base of the cross. This is the essential feature of the 

work. And the connection between the figures and the text is 

stressed with such emphasis, there is something so compelling in 

the gesture of one figure and the face of another, that the entire 

group is almost in danger of losing the ataraxia that is the privilege 

of all great sculpture. The viewer is addressed almost too directly. 

Sluter knew, as few artists have, how to express the sanctity of his 

subject matter. But, from the point of view of pure art, this weight 

of sanctity constitutes something overdone. Compared with 

Michelangelo’s tomb figures, Sluter’s prophets are too expressive, 

too personal. We would perhaps consider this criticism to be doubly 

meritorious if more than only the head and torso of the main figure 

of Christ in his rigid majesty had been preserved. All we can see is 

how the angels, those wondrously poetic angels who in their naive 

grace are so infinitely more angelic than the angels of Van Eyck, 

direct the devotion of the prophets to the scene above them. 

The strongly representative character of the Calvary of Champmol 

is based, however, on something other than its purely sculptural 

qualities; that is, on the splendor in which the entire work was cast. 

It should be imagined as if it were painted in polychrome by Jean 

Maelweel and gilded by Hermann of Cologne.27 Not a single 

colorful or dramatic effect had been left out. The prophets in their 

golden coats were standing on green pedestals; Moses and 

Zachariah in red robes, their coats lined in blue; David entirely in 

blue with golden stars; Jeremiah in dark blue; Jessiah, the saddest 

of them all, in brocade. Golden suns and initials filled the empty 

areas. Add to all this the coats of arms! The proud coats of arms of 

the ducal region gleamed not only on the shaft of the base below 

the prophets, but even on the crosspiece of the great, entirely gilded 

cross—on its extensions shaped like capitals had been placed the 

coats of arms of Burgundy and Flanders! This, perhaps more than 

the gilded copper pair of glasses, supplied by Hannequin de Hacht 

for the nose of Jeremiah, testifies to the spirit that gave rise to this 

grand ducal work of art. 

The dependence of this work on its princely sponsors contributes 

to a somewhat tragic and elevated element because of the greatness 

by means of which the artist manages to evade the restrictions of 

his commission. The representation of the “Plourants” around the 

sarcophagus had become obligatory in Burgundian funeral art long 

ago.28 Its aim was not a creative expression of pain in all its depths, 

but rather only a very realistic depiction of a part of the actual 

procession that had accompanied the body to the grave and with all 

the dignitaries readily recognizable. How skillfully Sluter and his 

assistants managed to turn this motif into a profound and dignified 

depiction of grief, into a funeral march in stone! 

But this may perhaps be overstating the assumption of 

disharmony between sponsor and artist. It is not entirely certain 

that it was not Sluter himself who found the pair of glasses on 

Jeremiah to be a great idea. Taste and tastelessness were, so to 

speak, not separated in the minds of that age; the genuine 

appreciation of art and the infatuation with pomp and curiosities 

had not yet parted company. The naive imagination was still able to 

enjoy without embarrassment that which was bizarre as if it were 

beautiful. A collection such as that in the Green Vault in Dresden 

displays the separated caput mortuum that had once been a whole 

with the princely art collections. In Hesdin Castle, which was both a 

treasure house of art and a pleasure garden filled with those 

mechanical amusements, engins d’esbatement, Caxton came across a 

room decorated with paintings depicting the story of Jason, the 

hero of the Golden Fleece. For the sake of greater effect, lightning, 

thunder, snow, and rain making implements were attached in 

imitation of Medea’s magic tricks.29 

Imagination was also freely indulged in creating the 

performances, the personnages, which were placed on street corners 

during princely entry processions. During the 1389 entry into Paris 

of Isabella of Bavaria as wife of Charles VI, a white stag with gilded 

antlers and a crown around its neck30 was placed among the holy 

scenes. The stag rested on a lit de justice and moved his eyes, antlers, 

feet, and, to conclude, raised a sword. During the same procession 

an angel “par engins bien faits”*8 descended from the tower of 

Notre Dame, entered through a gap in the blue taffeta canopy 

covering the entire bridge just at the moment the queen passed by, 

placed a crown on her head and disappeared in the same way it had 

arrived “comme s’il s’en fust retourné de soy mesmes au ciel.”31+9 

Philip the Good is presented with a similarly descending maiden32 

during an entry into Ghent, as is Charles VII in Reims in 1484.33 We 

are hard put to imagine anything more silly than a so-called 

pantomime horse moved by a man inside, but during the fifteenth 

century this was apparently not the case. In any event, Le Févre de 

Saint Remy reports, without a trace of ridicule, about a performance 

by four trumpeters and twelve noblemen “sur chevaulx de artifice,” 

“saillans et poursaillians tellement que belle chose estoit a 

veoir.”34410 

The separation of all that bizarre decoration, which has vanished 

without a trace, from the individual works of art that have been 

preserved, a separation that our appreciation of art demands and 

that has been aided by the all destroying passage of time, hardly 

existed for contemporaries. The artistic life of the Burgundian age 

was still entirely determined by the forms of social life. Art served. 

It had primarily a social function; this was primarily to display 

splendor and to emphasize the importance of the individual, not the 

artist but rather the donor. This is not contradicted by the fact that 

in church art, pompous splendor serves to direct pious thoughts 

upward and that the donor, out of a pious impulse, puts his own 

figure in the foreground. On the other hand, the art of secular 

painting is not always as luxuriant and arrogant as would be 

suitable for bloated courtly life. Too much is missing of the entire 

environment in which art existed for a clear understanding of the 

manner in which art and life touched and dissolved in each other. 

Moreover, our knowledge of this art itself is much too fragmentary 

for that purpose. It is not court and church alone that comprise the 

life of that age. 

This is the reason for the special importance of the few works of 

art in which something of the life outside those two spheres finds its 

expression. One of these works radiates in its own peerless delight: 

the portrait of the Arnolfini Marriage (plate 21). It represents the art 

of the fifteenth century in its purest form and allows us to come 

closest to the enigmatic personality of the painter Jan van Eyck. 

Painting the portrait did not require that he reproduce the splendid 

majesty of God nor sense the haughtiness of the nobleman: he 

painted his friends on the occasion of their wedding. Was the 

subject of the painting really Jean Arnoulphin, as he was called in 

Flanders, the merchant from Lucca? This face, which Jan van Eyck 

painted twice,35 is not at all Italian. But the title of the painting as 

Hernoul le fin avec sa femme dedens une chambre, in the 151636 

inventory of paintings belonging to Margaret of Austria, provides 

strong support for the assumption that he is Arnolfini. In that case, 

the painting should not actually be called a “bourgeois portrait,” 

since Arnolfini was a highly placed individual who repeatedly 

served as adviser to the ducal government in important matters. Be 

that as it may, the man depicted here was a friend of Jan van Eyck. 

This is shown by the delicately phrased inscription above the mirror 

with which the painter has signed his work: “Johannes de Eyck fuit 

his, 1434.” Jan van Eyck was here. Just a short time ago. The deep 

silence of the chamber still reverberates with the sound of his voice. 

The intimate tenderness and the calm peace, which we are to meet 

again only in Rembrandt, are encased in this work as if it were, so 

to speak, Jan’s own heart. All of a sudden, that evening during the 

Middle Ages is brought back to us, an evening we know of, but so 

often seek in vain in literature, in history, and in the life of faith of 

that age: the happy, noble, pure, and simple medieval age of folk 

song and church music. How far they are, that loud laughter and 

unrestrained passion! 

At this moment perhaps we can see in our imagination Jan van 

Eyck, who stood outside the tension-filled, vibrant life of his time, a 

simple man, a dreamer who went through life with his head bowed, 

looking inside himself. Caution!—or this will turn out like an art- 

historical novel about how the duke’s “varlet de chambre” served 

his high lord reluctantly, how his companions, full of pain, had to 

deny their high art so that they could join the work of staging 

courtly festivities and equipping fleets! 

There is nothing in our possession that could justify any such 

notion. The art of the Van Eycks’, which we so admire, stood right 

in the middle of the courtly life that is so repugnant to us. The little 

we know of the life of those painters makes them appear to be men 

of the great world. The duke of Berry is on the best of terms with 

his painters. Froissart met him in intimate conversation with André 

Beauneveu in his marvelous castle at Mehun sur Yevre.37 The three 

brothers from Limburg, the great illustrators, delight the duke at 

New Year with a surprise: a newly illustrated manuscript, “un livre 

contrefait” consisting “d’un piéce de bois blanc paincte en 

semblance d’un livre, où il n’a nulz feuillets ne riens escript.”38*11 

There is no doubt that Jan van Eyck moved in courtly circles. The 

secret diplomatic missions entrusted to him by Philip the Good 

required knowledge of the world. He was regarded in his century as 

a literary man who read the classics and studied geometry. His 

modest motto has a touch of the bizarre: “Als ik kan”—“As I can”— 

disguised in Greek letters. 

If not warned by these and similar facts, we may be easily 

inclined to see the art of the Van Eycks as occupying a different 

place than it does in the life of the fifteenth century. In our view, 

there were in that time two spheres of life that were strictly 

separated. On the one side, the culture of the court, the nobility, 

and the wealthy burghers: boastful, craving honor and wealth, 

riotously colored, glowing with passion; on the other side, the quiet, 

uniformly gray sphere of the devotio moderna: the serious men and 

the submissive wives of the middle class who sought spiritual 

support in the Fraterhouses and from the Windesheimers. This is 

also the sphere of Ruusbroec and of St. Colette. This is the sphere to 

which, according to our sentiments, the art of the Van Eycks with 

its pious quiet mysticism belongs. Yet it is more likely to be at home 

in the other sphere. The modern dévotés rejected the great art that 

unfolded during their age. They resisted polyphonic music and even 

organs,39 while the splendor-loving Burgundians Bishop David of 

Utrecht and Charles the Bold himself had the foremost composers as 

their masters of music, such men as Obrecht in Utrecht, Busnois for 

the duke, who even took him with him to his camp near Neuss. The 

Ordinarius of Windesheim prohibited any embellished songs, and 

Thomas a Kempis states: “If you cannot sing like the lark and the 

nightingale, sing like the raven and the frogs in the pond. They sing 

as God has given them to sing.”40 It is only natural that they 

commented less on painting, but they desired their books to be 

simple and not to be illustrated.41 It is very likely that they would 

have regarded even a work like the Adoration of the Lamb (plates 8, 

9) as an expression of unmitigated pride. 

But was the separation of the two spheres really drawn as sharply 

as it appears to us? We have already spoken of that earlier. There 

are numerous points where the court circles and the circles of the 

strict God-fearing men and women contact one another. St. Colette 

and Denis the Carthusian have dealings with the dukes; Margaret of 

York, the second wife of Charles the Bold, takes a lively interest in 

the “reformed” monasteries of Belgium. Beatrix of Ravenstein, one 

of the most prominent individuals at the Burgundian court, wears 

the hair shirt under her robes of state. “Vestue de drap d’or et de 

royaux atournemens a luy duisans, et feignant estre la plus 

mondaine des autres, livrant ascout a toutes paroles perdues, 

comme maintes font, et monstrant de dehors de pareil usages 

avecques les lascives et huiseuses, portoit journellement la haire sur 

sa chair nue, jeunoit en pain et en eau mainte journée par fiction 

couverte, et son mary absent couchoit en la paille de on lit mainte 

nuyt.”42*12 The act of turning inwardly, which had become the 

permanent mode of life for the modern devotees, is also known to 

the haughty, even if only as a sporadic and faint echo of the 

sumptuous style of life. When Philip the Good departed for 

Regensburg after the great feast at Lille in order to negotiate with 

the emperor, several noblemen and women of the court joined the 

order “qui menérent moult belle et saincte vie.”43*!3—The 

chroniclers who describe with such broad detail all the pomp and 

stateliness cannot help but repeat time and again a turning away 

from “pompes et beubans.”t!4 Even Olivier de la Marche ponders 

after the feast at Lille about “les oultraigeux excés et la grant 

despense qui pour la cause de ces banquetz ont esté faictz.” +15 He 

saw no “entendement de vertu” in it, with the exception of the 

estremets in which the church appeared, but another sage at the 

court made it clear to him why things had to be as they were. 44 

Louis XI retained his hatred of everything that smacked of luxury, a 

hatred he had acquired during his stay at the court of Burgundy.45 

The artists worked in and for circles quite different than those of 

the Modern Devotion. Even though the roots of the flourishing of 

painting as well as those of the renewal of faith can be found in 

urban communal life, the art of the Van Eycks and their successors 

cannot be called bourgeois. The court and the nobility had taken 

possession of art. We actually owe the advance of the art of 

miniatures to that full artistic refinement that is characteristic of the 

work of the Limburg brothers and the Hours of Turin primarily to 

princely sponsorship. The fact of the matter is that the wealthy 

bourgeoisie of the large Belgian cities aspired to a noble form of 

life. The difference between the art of the southern Netherlands and 

France, on the one hand, and the little that we can call art in the 

northern Netherlands of the fifteenth century, on the other, is best 

understood as a difference in milieu: there the sumptuous mature 

life of Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels, in constant contact with the 

court; here a remote country town such as Haarlem, in every respect 

much more like the quiet towns of the Yssel that were home to the 

devotio moderna. If we may call the works of Dirk Bouts 

“Haarlemism” (what works of his we possess were created in the 

south, which had attracted him also), it is the simple, astringent, 

reserved qualities of his art that are genuinely bourgeois in contrast 

to the aristocratic conceits, the pompous elegance, pride, and glitter 

of the southern masters. The Haarlem school does indeed approach 

bourgeois seriousness. 

The sponsors of the great paintings, as far as we know them, were 

nearly exclusively representatives of the great capitals of the age. 

They were the princes themselves, the high officials of the courts, 

and the great parvenus, so numerous during the Burgundian period 

and who took the court as their guiding model to the same degree 

as did the other sponsors of art. Burgundian power rests in 

particular on the ability to put the power of money into service and 

to create new powers of capital for the nobility through donations 

and favoritism. Those circles indulging in the displays of the Golden 

Fleece and in the ostentation of festivities and tournaments move in 

the form of life of the chivalric ideal. On that movingly pious 

painting of the Seven Sacraments (plate 17) in the museum at 

Antwerp, the coat of arms of the bishop of Tournay, Jean Chevrot, 

points to him as the most likely donor of the painting. He, next to 

Rolin, was the closest adviser of the duke, 46 an eager servant in 

matters concerning the Golden Fleece and the grand project for the 

crusade. The type of the great capitalist of the time is Pieter 

Bladelyn, whose pious figure is known to us from the triptych that 

graces the altar of the church in his town of Middelburg in Flanders 

(plate 22). He had climbed from the position of tax collector in his 

native Bruges to that of general ducal treasurer. Through frugality 

and strict control, he had improved governmental finances. He 

became treasurer of the Golden Fleece and was admitted to the 

order; in 1440 he was employed on the important mission to 

ransom Charles of Orléans from English captivity; he was scheduled 

to participate in the campaign against the Turks as financial 

administrator. His contemporaries were amazed over his wealth. He 

used it for the construction of dikes, and the founding of the new 

town of Middelburg. 47 

Jodocus Vydt, who is shown on the Ghent altar as donor, and the 

prelate Van de Paele also were among the great capitalists of their 

time. The De Croys and the Lannoys are noble nouveaux riches. 

Contemporaries were shocked over the rise of Nicolas Rolin, the 

chancellor who, “venu de petit lieu,” *16 as jurist, became a 

financier and diplomat employed in the positions of highest service. 

The great Burgundian treaties between 1419 and 1435 were his 

work. “Soloit tout gouverner tout seul et a part uy manier et porter 

tout, fust de guerre, fust de paix, fust en fait de finances.”48}1!7 He 

managed, by methods not entirely above reproach, to accumulate 

incredible wealth, which he used for numerous donations. In spite 

of this, his greed and arrogance were spoken of with the greatest 

hatred. The spirit of piety that drove him to make his donations was 

widely mistrusted. Rolin, kneeling so piously in the painting (now 

in the Louvre) by Jan van Eyck that he commissioned to be painted 

for his hometown of Autun (plate 15) and, yet again, just as piously, 

in the painting by Rogier van der Weyden, donated to the hospital 

in Beaune (plate 14), was known for his exclusive concern with 

earthly matters. “He harvested the earth,” says Chastellain, “as if 

life on earth was eternal. This led his mind astray because he was 

unwilling to impose barriers or limitations even though his 

advanced age held his approaching end up to his eyes.” Jacques du 

Clercq comments, “Le dit chancellier fust reputé ung des sages 

hommes du royaume a parler temporellement: car au regard de 

Vespirituel je men tais.”49%:18 

Are we to suspect the presence of a hypocritical nature behind the 

countenance of the donor of La vierge, Chancellor Rolin? We have 

already spokenso of the puzzling congruence of secular sins such as 

pride, greed, and unchastity with serious piety and strong faith 

present in such characters as Philip of Burgundy and Louis 

d’Orléans. Rolin should perhaps also be counted among these 

ethical types of his time. The nature of such individuals from 

centuries past is not easily fathomed. 

The painting of the fifteenth century is located in the sphere 

where the extremes of the mystical and the crudely earthy easily 

touch one another. The faith that speaks here is so overt that no 

earthly depiction is too sensuous or too extreme for it. Van Eyck is 

capable of draping his angels and divine figures in the heavy 

ponderousness of stiff robes dripping with gold and precious stones; 

to point upwards he does not yet need the fluttering tips of 

garments and fidgety legs of the Baroque. 

Though that faith is entirely direct and stark, it is by no means 

primitive on account of this. To label the painters of the fifteenth 

century primitive means running the risk of a misunderstanding. In 

this context, primitive can only mean coming first, in as far as an 

older painting is known to us; primitive is therefore only a purely 

chronological label. But there is a general inclination to tie to this 

label the notion that the mind of these artists was primitive. This is 

quite incorrect. The spirit of that art is that of faith itself, just as 

already has been described: the utmost in the use of the creative 

imagination to work through and elaborate all that which belongs 

to faith. 

At one time the divine figures had been seen, stiff and rigid, in 

the infinite distance. This was followed by the pathos of inner 

emotions and had bloomed, accompanied by songs and a flood of 

tears, in the mysticism of the twelfth century, most of all with St. 

Bernard. The Deity had been beseeched with sobbing emotion. To 

better empathize with divine suffering, all the forms and colors that 

the imagination drew from earthly life had been forced on Christ 

and the saints. A stream of rich human images had poured through 

heaven and divided into innumerable small branches. Gradually 

everything holy was depicted in ever more refined elaboration 

down to the most minute detail. With his ardent arms, man had 

pulled heaven to earth. 

Initially, and for a long time, the word had been superior in its 

formative powers to sculpted and painted creations. At a time when 

sculpture still retained much of the mechanical quality of the older 

images and was limited both by its materials and its compass, 

literature was already beginning to describe all the positions of the 

body and all the emotions of the drama at the cross down to the 

smallest fact. The Meditationes vitae Christi, already credited to 

Bonaventura by 1400,51 became the model of this pathetic 

naturalism that presented such life-like details of the scenes of the 

nativity and childhood, of the deposition from the cross and the 

lament over the body, that there was precise information about how 

Joseph of Arimathea had climbed the ladder and how he had to 

press down on the hand of the Lord in order to pull out the nail. 

But in the meantime, pictorial technique had also advanced: fine 

art not only caught up, but went ahead. In the art of the Van Eycks 

the representation of the sacred objects in painting had reached a 

degree of detail and naturalism that, taken strictly in an 

arthistorical sense, could perhaps be called a beginning, but that, in 

terms of cultural history, represents a conclusion. The utmost 

tension in the earthly depiction of the divine had thus been reached; 

the mystic content of the conception was ready to evaporate from 

the pictures and leave behind only the infatuation with the colorful 

forms. 

Accordingly, the naturalism of the Van Eycks, which is usually 

regarded in art history as an element announcing the arrival of the 

Renaissance, should rather be regarded as the complete unfolding of 

the medieval spirit. It contains the same natural presentation of the 

saints that we could observe in respect to all matters relating to the 

veneration of saints in the sermons of John Brugman, in the 

elaborated contemplations of Gerson, and in the descriptions of the 

pains of hell by Denis the Carthusian. 

Time and again, the form threatens to overgrow the content and 

keep it from rejuvenating itself. The art of Van Eyck is, in content, 

still entirely medieval. No new ideas are expressed by it. This art 

constitutes an ultimate, a terminal point. The medieval system of 

concepts had been built to heaven. All that was left was to paint 

and decorate it. 

The contemporaries of the Van Eycks were clearly aware of two 

things in their admiration of the great paintings: first, of the proper 

representation of the subject matter, and second, of the incredible 

skill, the fabulous perfection of the details and the absolute 

faithfulness to nature. On the one hand there is an appreciation that 

is located more in the sphere of piety than in the arena of aesthetic 

sensitivity; on the other hand there is a naive astonishment that, in 

our opinion, does not rise to the level of aesthetic sensitivity. A 

Genoese writer around 1450, Bartolomeo Fazio, is the first whose 

art-historical contemplations of the works of Jan van Eyck, some of 

which are now lost, are known to us. He praises the beauty and 

dignity of a Mary figure, the hair of the angel Gabriel, “which even 

surpassed genuine hair,” the sacred strictness of the asceticism 

radiating from the face of John the Baptist, the manner in which a 

Jerome really “lives.” He also admires the perspective in St. Jerome 

in his Study (plate 23): the sunbeam entering through a gap; the 

mirror image of a bathing woman; the drops of sweat on the body 

of another; the burning lamp; the landscape with wanderers and 

mountains, forests, villages, and castles; the endless distances of the 

horizon; and, once more, the mirror.52 His manner of expression 

reveals only astonishment. He drifts comfortably on with the flow of 

unrestrained imagination; he does not raise questions about the 

degree of beauty found in the entire picture. This is still an entirely 

medieval evaluation of a medieval work. 

After Renaissance conceptions of beauty had asserted themselves 

a century later, this overly detailed execution of the independent 

details is held to be the fundamental error of Flemish art. If 

Francesceo de Holanda, the Portuguese painter who claims that his 

meditations on art are conversations with Michelangelo, is really 

reproducing the opinions of the powerful master, Michelangelo said 

that: 

Flemish painting is more pleasing to all the pious than Italian painting. 

The latter never evokes tears while the former makes them weep 

copiously. This is by no means a result of the power and merits of that 

art, but has to be credited entirely to the great sensitivity of pious 

Flemish painting that exactly agrees with the taste of women, particularly 

the elderly and the very young ones, and also with that of monks, nuns 

and all refined people who are not sensitive to true harmony. Painting in 

Flanders is done primarily to reproduce deceptively the external 

appearance of things, mostly objects that arouse our enthusiastic 

approval or are beyond reproach such as saints or prophets. But as a rule, 

they paint a landscape with many figures in it. And though the eye is 

pleased by all this, there is in reality, neither art nor reason in it, no 

“symmetria,” no proportions, no choice, no greatness. Put simply, this 

painting is without power or splendor; it intends to perfectly reproduce 

many things simultaneously when a single one of these things would 

merit enough importance for the painter to devote all his powers to it. 

The label “pious” here means all those of medieval spirit. In the 

eyes of the grand master, the old beauty became a concern of the 

little and the weak. But not all agreed. To Diirer and Quinten 

Metsys and to Jan van Scorel, who is reputed to have kissed The 

Lamb of God (plate 9), this old art is by no means dead. But in this 

instance Michelangelo precisely represents the Renaissance. His 

charges against Flemish art are exactly against the essential features 

of the late medieval mind: the vehement sentimentality, the 

inclination to regard every detail as an independent entity, to be 

totally absorbed by the variety and color of the seen object. The 

new Renaissance perception of art and life resists this. This new 

perception is, as always, only accessible to us at the expense of 

temporarily turning a blind eye on past beauty or truth. 

An awareness of a conscious aesthetic appreciation and a verbal 

expression for it developed rather late. Admirers of art during the 

fifteenth century have at their disposal only the manner of 

expression we could expect of a burgher, caught in the instance of 

astonishment, for whom the very idea of artistic beauty has not yet 

dawned. Whenever the beauty of art penetrates his mind with its 

radiance and thrills him, he immediately converts the emotion 

either into a sense of being filled with God or into an awareness of 

the joy of life. 

Denis the Carthusian wrote a treatise De venustate mundi 

etpulchritudine Dei.53 The title already tells us that true beauty is 

only for God to know; the world can only be venustus: pretty, lovely. 

The beauties of created things, he says, are only the outpouring of 

the highest beauty; a creation is deemed beautiful only insofar as it 

shares in the beauty of divinity and, by virtue of this fact, comes 

somewhat to resemble the highest.54 On the basis of this farranging 

and elevated aesthetic theory, for which Denis relies on the Pseudo- 

Areopagite, Augustine, Hugo of St. Victor, and Alexander of 

Hales,55 a pure analysis of all beauty could have been built. But the 

mind of the fifteenth century fails completely to meet the challenge. 

Denis even borrows his examples of earthly beauty, a leaf, the sea 

and its changing colors, the restless sea, from the fine minds of his 

twelfth-century predecessors, Richard and Hugo, members of the 

monastery of St. Victor. Whenever he is intent on an analysis of 

beauty itself, he remains entirely on the surface. Herbs are beautiful 

because they are green, stones because they sparkle, the human 

body, as well as the dromedary and the camel, because it is suited 

to its purpose. The world is beautiful because it is long and wide, 

the heavenly bodies because they are round and bright. In 

mountains we admire size; in rivers, length; in fields and forests, 

expanse; and in the earth itself, its unmeasurable quantity. 

Medieval thought always traces the idea of beauty back to the 

concepts of perfection, proportion, and splendor. “Nam ad 

pulchritudinem,” says Thomas Aquinas, “tria requiruntur. Primo 

quidem integritas sive perfectio: quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso 

turpis sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas: 

unde quae habent colorem nitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur.”56*19 

Denis attempts to apply a similar yardstick. The results are 

somewhat clumsy; applied aesthetics are always a miserable matter. 

No wonder that the mind is incapable of dwelling on earthly beauty 

when tackling such an abstraction as the notion of beauty itself. 

Denis always veers to unseen beauty whenever he undertakes to 

describe the beautiful: to the beauty of the angels and the 

empyrean; or he seeks to find it in abstract things: the beauty of life 

is the conduct of life under the guidance and command of divine 

law, freed from the ugliness of sin. He does not speak of the beauty 

of art, not to mention that of music, which he could be most likely 

expected to have become aware of as having an aesthetic value in 

its own right. 

Once, the same Denis had entered the Church of St. John in 

‘sHertogenbosch while the organ was playing and the sweet melody 

had immediately transported him and his melting heart into a 

sustained ecstasy.57 The sensation of beauty was instantly turned to 

religion. It is likely that it did not occur to him that in the beauty of 

music or of the fine arts there was something else to be admired 

than the holy per se. 

Denis was one of those who opposed the introduction of modern 

polyphonic music into the church. The breaking of the voice into 

parts (fractio vocis) seems like the sign of a broken soul, he says, 

repeating an older authority; it is comparable to curled hair on a 

man or to pleated garments on a woman, sheer vanity. Some who 

had practiced such polyphonic song had confided to him that it 

involved arrogance and a certain lasciviousness of mind (lascivia 

anima). He admits that there are pious individuals who are inspired 

by melodies to the most intensive contemplation and devotion. This 

explains why the church went so far as to permit organs. But when 

the artful music serves to please the ear and delight those who are 

present, particularly the women, it is decidedly objectionable.58 

This makes it evident that the medieval mind, whenever it 

intends to convey the nature of musical emotions, still has no other 

means of expression at its disposal than the vocabulary used for the 

sinful stirrings of the emotions, of pride, and a certain degree of 

lasciviousness. 

Much was being written about musical aesthetics. As a rule, these 

tracts were based on the musical theories of antiquity, which were 

no longer understood; in the final analysis they tell us little about 

how the beauty of music was really enjoyed. Whenever they come 

to the point of expressing what it was that was actually found to be 

beautiful about music, the texts become vague and strongly 

resemble those dealing with the admiration of painting. In one place 

it is the heavenly joy that is appreciated in music, in another it is 

the text painting.59 All this helped to make musical emotions 

appear to be related in essence to heavenly enjoyment; a depiction 

of sacred entities was not at stake as it was in painting, but only a 

shadow of the joys of heaven themselves. When good old Molinet, 

who apparently loved music himself, tells us that Charles the Bold, 

who was known as a great lover of music, passed the time in his 

camp near Neuss with literature and especially with music, it is not 

only his rhetorical bent that causes him to jubilate: “Car musique 

est la résonnance des cieux, la voix des anges, la joie de paradis, 

l’espoir de l’air, ’organe de l’église, le chant des oyselets, la 

récréacion de tous cueurs tristes et désolés, la persécution et 

enchassement des diables.”60*29 The ecstatic element in the 

enjoyment of music was, of course, well known: “The power of 

harmonies,” Pierre d’Ailly tells us, “raptures the human soul so 

much to itself that it is not only elevated above other passions and 

cares, but even above itself.”61 

As in painting, the striking imitation of things was greatly 

admired, but the danger of seeking beauty through imitation was 

much greater for music. Music had already made most eager use of 

this means of expression for a long time. The caccia (from which the 

English word “catch” used for a canon comes), originally 

representing a hunt, is the best-known example. Olivier de la 

Marche says that he had heard in such a piece the yelping of dogs, 

the baying of hounds, and the blaring of trumpets as if one were in 

the forest.62 At the beginning of the sixteenth century the 

inventions of Jannequin, a student of Josquin de Prés, present 

hunts, the tumult of the battle of Marigiano, the market cries of 

Paris, “le caquet des femmes,”*2! and the singing of birds in musical 

form. 

The theoretical analysis of beauty is deficient, the means of 

expressing admiration superficial. Analysis does not go much 

further than to substitute for an explanation of beauty the terms of 

measure, gracefulness, order, greatness, and utility; above all, the 

terms splendor and light are used. For an explanation of spiritual 

beauty, Denis traces all these terms back to the notion of light: 

reason is a light; wisdom, science, and skill are nothing but light- 

like rays that illuminate the mind with their clarity.63 

If we were to study the sense of beauty of that age, not in its 

definition of the idea of beauty or in what is said in a state of 

emotions about a painting or about music, but rather in its 

spontaneous expressions of gay enthusiasm for beauty, we would 

notice that these expressions are almost always drawn to sensations 

of light and splendor and to the sense of a lively movement. 

Froissart was rarely under the influence of the beauty of things, 

he was much too busy with his endless tales, but there is one 

spectacle that never fails to inspire him to utter words of joyful 

rapture: ships on water with fluttering flags and pennants on which 

colorful coats of arms glisten in the sun. Or the play of the rays of 

the sun on helmets, armor, lance tips, the flags, and banners of an 

approaching troop of mounted knights.64 Eustache Deschamps 

admired the beauty of turning windmills and of the sun in a 

dewdrop; La Marche remarked how beautifully the sunlight 

glittered on the blond hair of a group of German and Bohemian 

knights.65—Linked to this admiration for everything that glitters is 

the decoration of costumes, which during the fifteenth century still 

depended primarily on the application of an overabundant number 

of precious stones. It is only later that these are replaced by ties and 

bows. To further enhance the splendor by their tinkling, small bells 

or coins were worn. La Hire wears a red coat covered in its entirety 

with large silver cowbells. Captain Salazar appears in an entry 

procession in 1465 accompanied by twenty armored riders whose 

horses are all hung with large silver bells; on the saddlecloth of his 

own horse, attached to each of the figures with which it is 

decorated, is a large gilded silver bell. During the entry of Louis XI 

into Paris in 1461, the horses of Charolais, Croy, St. Pol, and many 

others, have numerous large bells attached to their saddle-cloths; 

the mount of Charolais carried on its back a large bell suspended 

between four posts. Charles the Bold appeared for a tournament in a 

festive robe covered with an abundance of tinkling Rhenish 

guilders; English noblemen wore robes with golden nobles on 

them.66 During the wedding of the count of Geneva at Chambéry in 

1434, gentlemen and ladies all dressed in white covered with or 

clinquant perform a dance. The gentlemen also wore broad belts 

with many little bells attached to them.67 

The same naive enjoyment of anything that attracted great 

attention is again noticeable in the sense of colors that prevailed at 

the time. To determine this sense exactly would require an 

extensive statistical investigation that would have to include the 

color scale of the fine arts as well as the art of costume and 

ornament. As far as clothing is concerned, this investigation would 

have to be based on the numerous descriptions rather than on the 

few preserved remnants of actual material. I only present a few 

preliminary impressions gathered from descriptions of tournaments 

and entry processions. We have to deal here with ceremonial and 

official dress that display, of course, an entirely different style than 

that which dominates daily attire. Ordinary clothing employs quite 

a lot of gray, black, and purple.6s In festive and official dress we 

notice, first of all, how red dominates. No one would expect 

anything different from that age. Entry processions were frequently 

mounted entirely in red.69 Along with red, white has a significant 

place as a uniform color for festivities. In the coordination of colors 

any combination was tolerated: red-blue and blue-purple do occur. 

In a festive performance described by La Marche, a girl appeared in 

violet silk on a palfrey70 with a blue-silk saddle blanket, 

accompanied by three men in cinnabar red and pages in green 

silk.71 A preference for darkly glowing and muted combinations is 

unmistakable. 

It is remarkable that black and violet are more popular for 

clothing than green and blue, while yellow and brown are almost 

entirely missing. Black, above all black velvet, undoubtedly 

represents the proud, somber splendor that the time loved, with its 

arrogant distance from the gay wealth of color found everywhere. 

Philip the Good, after having passed the days of his youth, always 

wore black and had his entourage and horses in the same color.72 

The favorite colors of King René, even more eager for distinction 

and refinement, were gray-white-black.73 

The rare presence of blue and green should not, incidentally, be 

entirely regarded as a direct expression of the sense of color. More 

than the other colors, blue and green held symbolic significance and 

these meanings were so specific that they nearly rendered both 

colors unsuitable for regular clothing. Both were the colors of love: 

green symbolized the state of being in love, blue faithfulness.74 Or, 

better put, these two were in a very special way the colors of love, 

but the other colors could also serve in the symbolism of love. 

Deschamps says of a group of suitors: 

Li uns se vest pour li de vert, 

L’autre de bleu, l’autre de blanc, 

L’autre s’en vest vermeil com sane, 

Et cilz qui plus la veult avoir 

Pour son grant dueil s’en vest de noir.75*22 

But green was especially the color of young, hopeful Minne: 

17 tefauldra de vert vestir, 

C’est la livrée aux amoureulx.7623 

It was therefore especially appropriate that knight-errants be 

dressed in green.77 A lover showed his faithfulness by wearing blue; 

for this reason, Christine de Pisan has the lady answer her suitor 

when he indicates his blue garment: 

Au bleu vestir ne tient mie le fait, 

N'a devises porter, d’amer sa dame, 

Mais au servir de loyal cuer parfait 

Elle sans plus, et la garder, de blasme 

. . . Là gist Pamour, non pas au bleu porter, 

Mais puet estre que plusieurs le meffait 

De faulseté cuident couvrir soubz lame 

Par bleu porter. . . . 78*24 

This may perhaps explain why the color blue, if used with 

hypocritical intent, could also signify infidelity and why it, ina 

reverse leap of logic, signified not only the unfaithful individual but 

also the victim of unfaithfulness. In Holland, the blue Huik79 

signified the adulteress, and the cété bleue is the dress of the 

cuckold: 

Que cils qui m’a de cote vleue armé 

Et fait monstrer au doy, soit occis. 80}2° 

Again, the above may be what lies behind the general use of blue 

as the color of folly—the blue boat is the vehicle of fools.81 

The fact that yellow and brown remained in the background may 

be explained by an aversion to their quality; that is, the unreflected 

sense of color gave them a negative symbolic meaning. In other 

words, yellow and brown were disliked because they were held to 

be ugly and, for that reason, were given an inauspicious meaning. A 

man trapped in an unhappy marriage would say: 

Sur toute couleur j’ayme la tennée 

Pour ce que je l’ayme m’en suys habillée, 

Et touts les aultres ay mis en obly. 

Hellas! mes amours ne sont ycy.*26 

Or in another ditty: 

Gris et tannée puis bien porter 

Car ennuyé suis d’espérance.82*27 

Incidentally, gray, in contrast to brown, appears frequently in 

festive dress; as a color of sadness it possessed perhaps a more 

elegiac nuance than brown. 

By this time, yellow already signified enmity. Henry of 

Wiirttemberg and his entourage, all dressed in yellow, passed before 

the duke of Burgundy “et fut le duc adverty que c’estoit contre 

luy.”83}28 

From the middle of the century on, the use of black and white 

seems temporarily to be in decline while that of blue and green is 

on the rise (but this is only a preliminary impression that is in need 

of further supporting evidence). During the sixteenth century, it will 

be noticed that the most daring combinations of color in dress, 

already mentioned above, have for the largest part disappeared, just 

at the same time as art is attempting to circumvent the naive 

contrast of primary colors. For the artists of the Burgundian regions 

the sense of the harmony of colors does not come from Italy. Gerard 

David, who stiffly continues to work precisely in the style of the 

older school, does display, in comparison to his predecessors, a 

refinement of his sense of color that demonstrates that this sense is 

related in its development to the general shaping of the mind. Here 

we encounter a field where investigations into the history of art and 

culture still have much to expect of each other. 

Chapter Thirteen 

IMAGE AND WORD 

EACH ATTEMPT MADE TO DATE TO CLEARLY SEPARATE the 

Middle Ages and the Renaissance has resulted in an apparent 

pushing of the boundaries ever further back. People saw in the 

distant Middle Ages forms and movements that already appeared to 

bear the stamp of the age to come, and the term “Renaissance,” to 

make it include all these phenomena, has been stretched to the 

point that it has lost all its dynamic powers.1 All this holds true on 

the opposite side. Those who take in the spirit of the Renaissance 

without preconceived notions find more “medieval” elements in it 

than theory would seem to permit. Ariosto, Rabelais, Margarete of 

Navarre, Castiglione, just as are all of the fine arts with respect to 

form and content, are full of medieval elements. And yet to us, the 

contrast continues to exist: Middle Ages and Renaissance are 

expressions in which we sense the basic differences in the nature of 

an age just as clearly as the difference between apple and 

strawberry, while at the same time it remains virtually impossible to 

describe this difference in greater detail. 

But it is necessary to retrace the term Renaissance (which, in 

contrast to the term Middle Ages, does not, a priori, have a 

restricted reference to a period of time) as much as possible to its 

original meaning. It is clearly objectionable to count, as Fierens 

Gevaert2 and others do, Sluter and the Van Eycks among 

Renaissance painters. These artists have an entirely medieval taste 

about them. They are also medieval in matters of form and content. 

In content, because their art has shed nothing of the old and 

embraced nothing of the new as far as subject matter, ideas, and 

meaning are concerned. In form, because their conscientious realism 

and their desire to depict everything as corporeally as possible is, 

above all, the perfect product of a genuinely medieval spirit. Then, 

this is how we observed this spirit working in religious thought and 

creativity, in the thought forms of everyday life and everywhere 

else. The tendency towards this elaborate realism is abandoned by 

the Renaissance during the period of its full development in the 

Cinquecento, while the Quattrocento still shares it with the North. 

For all practical purposes, this new spirit does not find its 

expression in the fine arts and in the literature of the fifteenth 

century in France and Burgundy, whatever else of the new beauty 

may appear there. Art and literature still serve a spirit that was on 

the verge of losing its bloom; they belong to the system of medieval 

thought and its ultimate perfection. They have no other task than 

that of providing perfect depictions and embellishments of concepts 

that have been long thought through. The mind seems to be 

exhausted, the spirit awaits new inspiration. 

Now, in periods where the depictions of beauty are limited to 

nothing other than exact descriptions and the pure expression of 

intellectual material that is already clarified and worked through, 

the pictorial arts are of more profound value than literature. This, of 

course, is not the judgment of contemporaries. To them, the idea, 

even if no longer flourishing, still retains so much of its convincing 

and significant qualities that it is loved and admired particularly in 

its embellished literary form. All those poems echoing the melody of 

the fifteenth century, which appear to our sensitivities to be so 

hopelessly monotonous and superficial, were praised much more 

enthusiastically than any painting was ever praised. The profound 

emotional value of the pictorial arts had not yet dawned on the 

contemporaries, or at least not to the degree that they were able to 

express it. 

The fact that to us by far the largest part of that literature has lost 

any fragrance and luster while we are moved, possibly more 

profoundly than were contemporaries, by the fine arts, may be 

explained by the profound difference in the effect of art and word. 

But it would be all too convenient and, at the same time, all too 

incomprehensible if we were to look for the difference in the quality 

of the talents and to assume that the poets, excepting Villon and 

Charles d’Orléans, had been nothing but conventional empty heads, 

in contrast to the painters, who were all geniuses. 

Where two do the same thing, it is not necessarily the same. If the 

painter limits himself to the simple reproduction in line and color of 

an external reality, there is always found behind all that purely 

formal imitation an ultimate remainder that is left unsaid and that 

cannot be spoken of. However, if the poet aspires to nothing higher 

than a mere linguistic expression of a visible or already 

comprehended reality, he exhausts with his words the treasure of 

the unspoken. Granted, there is the possibility of adding a new 

unexpressed beauty by virtue of rhythm and sound, but if these 

elements, too, are weak, the effect of the poem only lasts as long as 

the idea itself captivates the listener. Contemporaries still react to 

an idea with a number of living associations because the idea is 

interwoven with their lives and they regard it as new and blooming 

in the splendor of the new words found for it. 

But if the idea does not any longer captivate us for its own sake, 

the poem can remain effective only through its form. The form is 

incomparably important and may even be so new and alive that 

questions concerning the content of the idea are rarely raised. In the 

literature of the fifteenth century a new beauty of forms is already 

beginning to blossom. But by far the most poetry is still in old 

forms. Rhythm and sound are of weak quality. Under these 

circumstances literature, devoid of new ideas and new forms, 

remains an endless series of postludes on worn-out themes. Those 

poets have no future. 

For the painter of such a period of intellectual history, the day 

comes later, because he lives on the treasure of the unspoken and it 

is the wealth of this treasure that determines the most profound and 

most lasting effect of all art. Look at the portraits by Van Eyck. Here 

we have the sharply cut, distant face of his wife (plate 24). There 

the rigid, morose, aristocratic head of Baudouin de Lannoy (plate 

25). And there, again, the frightening, mysterious facial expression 

of the Canon van de Paele, the sickly, relaxed pose of the Berlin 

Arnolfini (plate 27), the Egyptian-mysterious quality of Leal 

Souvenier (plate 28). Hidden deep in all these is the miracle of the 

personality explored to its innermost reaches. In this we encounter 

the most profound characterization possible: we are allowed to see 

it, but it cannot be put into words. Even if Van Eyck had 

simultaneously also been the greatest poet of his century, the secret 

that reveals itself in the pictures would not have opened itself to 

him in words. 

The lack of congruence in the attitude and spirit of art and 

literature of the fifteenth century rests most profoundly on this fact. 

But once the difference is correctly understood, a comparison of 

literary and pictorial expression in certain examples and in 

particular details nonetheless reveals again much greater 

congruence than one initially may have assumed. If the work of the 

Van Eycks and their successors is selected as the most representative 

expression in art, what literary works would have to be juxtaposed 

with them for a proper comparison? Those dealing with the same 

subject matter do not come first, but rather those that rise from the 

same sources, are the products of the same sphere of life. This 

sphere, as we have earlier indicated, is that of the extravagant 

princely court and the wealthy, ostentatious bourgeoisie. The 

literature that is at the same level as the art of Jan Van Eyck is 

courtly, or at least aristocratic, is written in French, and is read and 

admired by the same circles that place their orders with the great 

painters. 

On the surface it appears as if we are faced with a great contrast 

that makes any comparison nearly meaningless: the subject matter 

of painting is overwhelmingly religious, that of French-Burgundian 

literature overwhelmingly secular. But our view does not extend far 

enough in both directions: in the fine arts, the secular element at 

one time occupied a much larger place than the remnants lead us to 

assume; and in literature worldly genres tend to attract much too 

much of our attention. The forms of expression of major concern in 

literary history are the Minnelied, the sequels of the Roman de la 

rose, the later versions of the chivalric novel, the rising novella, 

satire, and historiography. In painting, the profound seriousness of 

the altar pictures and the portrait come first to mind. In literature 

we are first reminded of the lustful leer of the erotic satires and the 

monotonous terrors of the chronicles. It almost seems as if the 

fifteenth century painted its virtues but described its sins. But even 

on the literary side such a view is too limited: not only did pious 

books still occupy the larger amount of space in the well-stocked 

libraries of the Burgundian dukes, but the pious, edifying, and 

moralizing element continued to make its claims even in secular 

literature and even among the displays of the greatest frivolity. 

Let us return once more to the premise that the effects produced 

by the art and literature of the fifteenth century are strongly 

mismatched. The literature, with the exception of only a few poets, 

fatigues and bores us. It is all endlessly elaborated allegories in 

which not a single figure offers anything new or individually its 

own and which, in content, present nothing other than the long- 

established ethical thought of past centuries, which has often gone 

stale. Over and again the same themes: the sleeping hero in an 

orchard has a vision of a symbolic lady, the morning stroll early in 

the month of May, the quarrel between the lady and her lover or 

between two female friends or any other combination about a point 

of the casuistry of love. Hopeless superficiality, a style ornamented 

with fool’s gold, sugar-sweet romanticism, worn-out fantasy, sober 

moralizing: we sigh and ask ourselves over and over again, Are 

these really the contemporaries of Jan van Eyck? Could he really 

have admired all this?—Most likely, yes. This is not any stranger 

than seeing Bach making do with the work of a petit bourgeoisie 

rhyme-smith inspired by a rheumatic parochial dogmatism. 

Contemporaries who see the works of art being born accept them 

without distinction into their life dream. They do not appreciate 

them on the basis of objective aesthetic perfection, but on the basis 

of the resounding reverberation within them of the sacredness or 

passionate vitality of their subject matter. Only when the old life 

dream is dreamed out with the passing of time, and sacredness and 

passion have vanished like the scent of a rose, only then, by virtue 

of its means of expression, that is, its style, structure, and its 

harmony, does the purely artistic effect of a work of art begin. 

These elements may actually be the same in both the fine arts and 

literature, but they may, nonetheless, generate an entirely different 

artistic evaluation. 

Literature and art of the fifteenth century possess both parts of 

that general characteristic that we have already spoken of as being 

essential for the medieval mind: the full elaboration of all details, 

the tendency not to leave any thought unexpressed, no matter what 

idea urges itself on the mind, so that eventually everything could be 

turned into images as distinctly visible and conceptualized as 

possible. Erasmus tells us that he had once listened, in Paris, to a 

clergyman preach about the prodigal son for forty days running and 

had, in this way, filled the entire Lenten period. The preacher 

described the son’s journey away from home and back again, how 

he had once in a lodge eaten tongue pâté for lunch, at another time 

had passed a water mill, had gambled and had stopped at a 

vegetarian kitchen. The preacher labored to squeeze the words of 

the prophets and evangelists for all they were worth to make them 

fit all his freely invented chatter. “Because of this, he seemed God- 

like to the inexperienced crowd and the important fat notables 

alike.”3 

We propose now to demonstrate this characteristically 

unrestrained elaboration by an analysis of two paintings by Jan van 

Eyck. First, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, now in the Louvre 

(plates 15, 16). 

The scrupulous exactness with which the material of the dresses, 

the marble of the floor tiles and of the columns, the sparkle of the 

windowpane and the mass book of the chancellor are treated would 

be called pedantic in any artist other than Van Eyck. In one detail, 

the exaggerated execution has a truly irritating effect, that is, in the 

adornment of the capitals on which, in a corner, as if put into 

brackets, are depicted the expulsion from paradise, the sacrifice of 

Cain and Abel, the exit from the Ark of Noah, and Ham’s sin. But 

this ardor for elaborating detail only reaches its climax outside of 

the open hall that encloses the main figures. Here we find opening, 

as a wide vista through the colonnades, the most marvelous 

perspective Van Eyck ever painted. We quote Durand-Gréville’s 

description:4 

If one, tempted by curiosity, is careless enough to get too close, one is 

lost; one is captured for the entire time the effort of a sustained attention 

may last; as in a dream one sees ornament after ornament, the crown of 

the Virgin, the art of the goldsmith; one sees, figure by figure, the groups 

that, without rendering them overweight, fill the capitals of the columns; 

blossom by blossom, leaf by leaf in the profusion of the ground; the 

surprised eye discovers, between the head of the divine child and the 

Virgin, a city replete with gables and beautiful church steeples, a large 

church with numerous buttresses, a spacious square cut into two parts in 

its whole width by a staircase, and on the square come, walk, run, 

innumerable brush stokes that signify an equal number of living figures; 

our eye is attracted to a bridge formed like the back of a donkey 

(dropping off on both ends) that is crowded with groups of peoples 

thronging and crossing each other’s paths; our eye follows the bends of a 

river where microscopically small barks travel; in the middle of the river 

is an island, smaller than the finger nail of a child, on which rises a 

stately castle complete with numerous bell towers and surrounded by 

trees; to the left, our eye scans a river embankment lined by trees and 

crowded with people on a stroll; moving still farther, it transcends one by 

one the round peaks of green hills, comes to rest for a moment on the 

distant line of snow-capped mountains and then loses itself in the infinity 

of a faintly blue sky where surging clouds are fading into oblivion. 

And O, Wonder!: in all this, contrary to the claims of 

Michelangelo’s pupil, unity and harmony are not lost. “Et quand le 

jour tombe, une minute avant que la voix des gardiens ne vienne 

mettre fin a votre contemplation, voyez comme le chef d’oeuvre se 

transfigure dans la douceur du crépuscule; comme son ciel devient 

encore plus profond; comme la scéne principale, dont les couleurs se 

sont évanouies, se plonge dans l’infini mystère de Harmonie et de 

l'Unité ...”5*1 

Another painting particularly suited for the study of the technique 

of infinite detailing is the Annunciation, now in the Hermitage in St. 

Petersburg (plate 29). At the time the triptych, of which this work 

constitutes the right wing, actually existed as a whole, what a 

miraculous creation it must have been. It seems as if Van Eyck 

intended to demonstrate the complete virtuosity, shrinking away 

from nothing, of a master who can do anything, and dares 

everything. None of his works are simultaneously more primitive, 

more hieratic, and more contrived. The angel does not enter with 

his message into the intimacy of a dwelling chamber (the scene that 

the entire genre of domestic painting took as its point of departure), 

but, as was prescribed by the code of forms of the older art, into a 

church. Both figures lack in pose and facial expression the gentle 

sensitivity displayed in the depiction of the Annunciation on the 

outer side of the altar in Ghent. The angel greets Mary with a 

formal nod, not, as in Ghent, with a lily; he does not wear a small 

diadem, but is depicted with scepter and a splendid crown; and he 

has a rigid Aegean-smile on his face. In the glowing splendor of the 

colors of his garments, the luster of the pearls, the gold and precious 

stones, he excels all the other angelic figures painted by Van Eyck. 

The dress is green and gold, the brocade coat dark red and gold, 

and his wings are decked with peacock feathers. Mary’s book, the 

pillow on the chair, everything is again detailed with the greatest of 

care. In the church building the details are fitted with anecdotal 

elaborations. The tiles show the signs of the zodiac, of which five 

are visible, and in addition three scenes from the story of Samson 

and one from the life of David. The back of the church, between its 

vaults, is decorated with images of Isaac and Jacob in the form of 

medallions; Christ on a globe accompanied by two Seraphim can be 

seen in the uppermost part of a glass window; and, next to it, in 

wall paintings, are the scenes of the finding of Moses and the 

reception of the tablets of the law. All is explained by clearly 

readable inscriptions. Only in the compartments of the ceiling do 

the decorations, still hinted at even there, become unclear to the 

eye. 

And again the miracle that in such an amassing of elaborate 

details, just as in the case of the Madonna of Rolin, the unity of key 

and mood is not lost! In that case there is the gaiety of bright 

daylight that pulls the eye across the main scene into the great 

distance; in this case the most mysterious darkness of the high 

vaulted church veils the entire scene in such a mist of sobriety and 

mysterium that it is difficult for the eye to detect all the anecdotal 

details. 

This is the effect of the “unbridled elaboration”6 in painting! The 

painter, this painter, was able to vent his most unbounded lust for 

detail (or, should we say, to meet the annoying orders of an 

ignorant, but pious donor?) in an area less than half a square meter 

in size without tiring us any more than a glance at the lively 

throngs of reality would do. Because one glance is all we are given; 

the dimension alone already exercises a limiting force and entering 

into the beauty and the distinct qualities of everything depicted 

takes place without the expense of much intellectual effort; many 

perfections are not even noticed, or if they are, immediately vanish 

from consciousness and are totally immersed in the effect of color or 

perspective. 

If we postulate that the literature of the fifteenth century (that is, 

of belle littérature, since folk art does not enter into this context) 

shared the general quality of the “endless expression of detail,” this 

happens in an entirely different sense. Not in the sense of a 

minutely detailed, spider web-like realism that delights in the 

surface appearance of things. This is not yet the way this quality 

expresses itself in literature. Descriptions of nature and persons still 

rely on the simple means of medieval poetry; the individual objects 

participating in generating the mood of the poet are mentioned but 

not described: the substantive dominates the adjective. Only the 

main qualities of objects, as, for example, their colors (their 

sounds), are given. The unrestrained elaboration of details in the 

literary imagination is more quantitative than qualitative in nature; 

it consists in piling up very many individual objects rather than in 

analyzing their qualities in detail. The poet does not understand the 

art of omission. He does not know the empty spot; he lacks the 

sense for appreciating the effect of that which is left unexpressed. 

This applies to the thoughts expressed by him as well as to the 

images he conjures up. Even the thoughts evoked by the object are 

linked as completely as possible. All of poetry is just as overcrowded 

with details as is painting. But why is it that in literature such 

overabundance of details leaves a so much less harmonious 

impression? 

This may be explained up to a point by the fact that the 

relationship between primary and secondary concerns is exactly the 

reverse in poetry of what it is in painting. In painting, the difference 

between the main concern, that is, the adequate expression of the 

object, and secondary concerns is small. In painting everything is 

essential. To us the perfect harmony of painting can lie in a single 

detail. 

In the paintings of the fifteenth century is it, above all, the 

profound piety and thus the competent expression of the subject 

matter that we admire first? Take the example of the Ghent 

Altarpiece! (Plates 8, 9.) How little is our attention drawn to the 

large figures of God, Mary, and John the Baptist! In the main scene, 

our eye shifts time and again away from the lamb, the center of the 

picture, to the throng of worshipers on the sides and the nature 

scene in the background. The eye continues to be drawn to the 

margin: to Adam and Eve and to the portraits of the donors. And if, 

at least in the Annunciation scene, the most moving magic charm 

rests in the figure of the angel and the Virgin, that is, in the 

expressive pious element, we delight, even in this instance, almost 

more intensively in the copper kettle and the view of the sunny 

street. In these details, which were only a secondary concern for the 

artist, the mystery of everyday things blossoms in its quiet glow. 

Here we sense the direct emotional stirring about the miraculous 

quality of all things. There is—other than that we approach The 

Lamb of God with a preconceived religious conception—no 

difference between the art-emotion in viewing the sacred depiction 

of the worship of the Eucharist and the emotion we feel seeing the 

Fishmonger’s Stall (plate 30) by Emmanuel de Witte in the 

Rotterdam Museum. 

It is exactly in the details that the artist has complete freedom. 

Strict conventions are imposed in matters of the depiction of the 

main concern of the painting, the depiction of the sacred subject 

matter. Every church painting has its iconographic code from which 

no deviation is tolerated. But the artist has an unlimited field left to 

him where he can freely unfold his creative urges. In the garments, 

the props, and the background he is able to do, without 

encumbrances and outside guidance, what is the essential task of a 

painter: to paint. Here he can reproduce, unrestrained by any 

convention, what he sees and how he sees it. The solid, rigid edifice 

of the holy picture carries the wealth of his details like a shining 

treasure, just like a woman with a flower on her dress. 

In the poetry of the fifteenth century, this relationship is, in a 

certain sense, precisely reversed. The poet has a free hand with 

respect to the main issue: he may, if he is able, find a new idea, but 

detail and background are to the highest degree subject to the force 

of convention. There exists for nearly every detail a normed form of 

expression, a stencil, which they were reluctant to abandon. 

Everything, flowers, the enjoyment of nature, sadness and joy, has 

its fixed form of expression that the poet can somewhat polish and 

color, without creating it anew. 

He polishes and colors his subject matter endlessly because the 

wholesome restriction imposed on the painter by the surface he has 

to fill is lacking; the surface confronting the poet is always infinite. 

The limitation of subject matter is unknown to him. Because of this 

very freedom, he has to be a greater mind than the painter if he 

wants to accomplish something exceptional. Even the average 

painter will give joy to later generations; the average poet, 

however, sinks into oblivion. 

To demonstrate the effect of “unbridled elaboration” using a work 

of the fifteenth century, it would be necessary to go straight to such 

a work in its entirety (and they are long!). But since this is not 

possible, a few samples will have to do. 

Alain Chartier was regarded as the greatest poet of his time. He 

was compared to Petrarch, and Clément Marot still counts him 

among the best. The brief anecdote I mentioned earlier may be 

taken as proof of his popularity.7 By the standards of his time he 

could be put at the level of one of the greatest painters. The 

beginning of his poem Le livre des quatre dames, a conversation 

among four noble women whose lovers had fought at Agincourt, 

provides for us, as the rules required, the landscape that is the 

background of the picture.8 This landscape should be compared to 

the well-known landscape of the Ghent Altarpiece: the wondrous 

flowery meadow with scrupulously executed vegetation, with the 

church steeples rising behind shady hilltops, an example of the most 

unbridled elaboration. 

The poet ventures out into the spring morning to dispel his 

prolonged melancholy. 

Pour oblier melencolie, 

Et pour faire chiere plus lie, 

Ung doulx matin aux champs issy, 

Au premier jour qu’amours ralie 

Les cueurs en la saison jolie .. . *2 

All this is purely conventional and no rhythmic or formal beauty 

lifts it above the most ordinary mediocrity. Now follows the 

description of the spring morning: 

Tout autour oiseaulx voletoient, 

Et si trés-doulcement chantoient, 

Qu'il n’est cueur qui n’en fust joyeulx. 

Et en chantant en l’air montoient, 

Et puis l’un l’autre surmontoient 

A Vestrivée à qui mieulx mieulx. 

Le temps n’estoit mie nueux, 

De bleu estoient vestuz les cieux, 

Et le beau soleil cler luisoit. t3 

The simple acknowledgment of the glories of the season and the 

location would have had a very good effect, if only the poet had 

known how to restrain himself. There is a real charm in the very 

simplicity of this nature poem, but it lacks any strong form. The 

narrative continues in its measured clip; after a closer description of 

the songs of the birds there follows: 

Les arbres regarday flourir, 

Et lièvres et connins courir. 

Du printempts tout s’esjouyssoit. 

Là sembloit amour seignourir. 

Nul n’y peult vieillir ne mourir, 

Ce me semble, tant qu'il y soit. 

Des erbes ung flair doulx issoit, 

Que l’air sery adoulcissoit, 

Et en bruiant par la valee 

Ung petit ruisselet passoit, 

Qui les pays amoitissoit, 

Dont l’eau ne e’estoit pas salee. 

Là buvoient les oysillons, 

Après ce que des grisillons, 

Des mouschettes et papillons 

Ilz avoient pris leur pasture. 

Lasniers, aoutours, esmerillons 

Vy, et mouches, aux aguillons, 

Qui de beau miel paveillons 

Firent aux arbres par mesure. 

De l’autre part fut la closture 

D’ung pré gracieux, où nature 

Sema les fleurs sur la verdure, 

blanches, jaunes, rouges et perses. 

D’arbres flouriz fut la ceinture, 

Aussi blancs que se neige pure 

Les couvroit ce sembloit paincture, 

Tant y eut de couleurs diverses. *{ 

A brook rushes over pebbles; fish are swimming in it; a small 

forest spreads its branches like green curtains above the banks. 

There is another list of birds: ducks, doves, egrets, and pheasants 

are nesting yonder. 

What, compared to the painting, constitutes in the poem the 

different effect of the detailed elaboration of the natural scenery? 

What, in other words, is the effect of one and the same inspiration 

merely expressed by different means? It is that the painter is 

compelled by the character of his art to adhere to simple 

faithfulness to nature while the poem loses itself in formless 

superficiality and the listing of conventional motifs. 

In this instance, poetry is not as close to painting as is prose. The 

latter is less tied to particular motifs. It intends, at times, to put 

greater emphasis on the conscientious depiction of perceived reality 

and executes this with the help of freer means. In this way, perhaps, 

prose, better than poetry, demonstrates the more profound 

relationships between literature and the fine arts. 

The basic characteristic of the late medieval mind is its 

predominantly visual nature. This characteristic is closely related to 

the atrophy of the mind. Thought takes place exclusively through 

visual conceptions. Everything that is expressed is couched in visual 

terms. The absolute lack of intellectual content in the allegorical 

recitations and poems was bearable because satisfaction was 

attained through the visual realization alone. The tendency to 

express directly the external aspects of things found a stronger and 

more perfect means of expression through pictorial rather than 

literary means. In the same way, it was able to express itself more 

forcefully in prose than in poetry. This is the reason why the prose 

of the fifteenth century constitutes in several respects the middle 

term between painting and poetry. All three have the unrestrained 

elaboration of details in common, but in painting and prose this 

leads to a direct realism unknown in poetry, which is left without 

anything better at its disposal to replace it. 

There is one author above all in whose work we notice the same 

crystal-clear view of the external manifestations as in Van Eyck: 

Georges Chastellain. He was Flemish, from the Aalst region. Though 

he calls himself “léal Francois,” “François de naissance,” *® it 

appears that Flemish was his mother tongue. La Marche calls him, 

“natif flameng, toutesfois mettant par escript en langaige 

franchois.” 6 He himself pointed with modest pride to his Flemish 

characteristics of unrefined rusticity; he speaks of “sa brute langue,” 

calls himself, “homme flandrin, homme de palus bestiaux, ygnorant, 

bloisant de langue, gras de bouche et de palat et tout enfangié 

d’autres povretés corporelles à la nature de la terre.”9*7 He owes 

the all too heavy cothurnism10 of his stilted prose to that people’s 

manner as well as the grave “grandiloquence” that makes him more 

or less unpalatable to French readers. His ornate style has 

something of an elephantine clumsiness about it; a contemporary 

rightly calls him “cette grosse cloche si hault sonnant.”1188 But we 

may perhaps credit his Flemish nature for the keen observations of 

his style and his vivid colorfulness. Both remind us repeatedly of 

modern Belgian authors. 

An unmistakable kinship exists between Chastellain and Jan van 

Eyck—and at the same time a difference of artistic level. The less 

valued qualities of Van Eyck correspond, under the most favorable 

circumstances, to the best in Chastellain and it means a lot to be the 

equal of Jan van Eyck at his least. I am thinking, for example, of the 

singing angels on the Ghent Altarpiece. The heavy garments, all 

dark red and gold with sparkling gems, the overly emphasized, 

distorted face, the somewhat pedantic ornaments of the music stand 

all are the painterly equivalent of the dazzling bombast of the 

literary Burgundian court style. But while in painting this rhetorical 

element occupies a subordinate position, it becomes the major 

concern in Chastellain’s prose. His keen observations and his lively 

realism drown, in most instances, in a flood of overly beautifully 

elaborated phrases and in a clamor of decorative words. 

But whenever Chastellain describes an event that particularly 

captivates his Flemish spirit, an entirely direct, plastic earthiness 

enters into his narrative, all ceremonial elements notwithstanding, 

which makes it extraordinarily suitable for its task. His repertoire of 

ideas is no larger than that of his contemporaries; the counterfeit 

coin of religious, ethical, and knightly convictions that had been 

passed around for some time function with him for ideas. The 

conception is entirely superficial, but its depiction is crisp and 

lively. 

His portrayal of Philip the Good nearly approaches the directness 

of a Van Eyck.12 With the deliberateness of a chronicler who is a 

novelist at heart, he tells in particular detail of a quarrel between 

the duke and his son Charles early in the year 1457. Nowhere else 

does his strongly visual perception of things come so sharply into 

focus. All the external circumstances surrounding the event are 

presented with perfect clarity. It is mandatory that a few lengthy 

passages of this narrative be presented now. 

At issue is a position at the court of the young count of Charolais. 

The duke, in spite of an earlier promise, intended to give the 

position to one of the Croys who enjoyed great favor with him; 

Charles, who disliked seeing these favors go their way, opposed 

them. 

Le duc donques par un lundy qui estoit le jour Saint-Anthoine, 13 après sa 

messe, aiant bien désir que sa maison demorast paisible et sans 

discention entre ses serviteurs, et que son fils aussi fist par son conseil et 

plaisir, aprés que ja avoit dit une grant part de ses heurs et que la 

cappelle estoit vuide de gens, il appela son fils 4 venir vers luy et lui dist 

doucement: “Charles, de l’estrif qui est entre les sires de Sempy et de 

Hémeries pour le lieu de chambrelen, je vueil que vous y mettez cés et 

que le sire de Sempy obtiengne le lieu vacant.” Adont dist le conte: 

“Monseigneur, vous m’avez baillié une fois vostre ordonnance en laquelle 

le sire de Sempy n’est point, et monseigneur, s’il vous plaist, je vous prie 

que ceste-la je la puisse garder.”—“Déa, ce dit le duc lors, ne vous 

chailliez des ordonnances, c’est à moy à croistre et à diminuer, je vueil 

que le sire de Sempy y soit mis.”—“Hahan! ce dist le conte (car ainsi 

jurait tousjours), monseigneur, je vous prie, pardonnez-moy, car je ne le 

pourroye faire, je me tiens a ce que vous m’avez ordonné. Ce a fait le 

seigneur de Croy qui m’a brassé cecy, je le vois bien.”—“Comment, ce 

dist le duc, me désobéyrez-vous? ne ferez-vous pas ce que je 

vueil?”—“Monseigneur, je vous obéyray volentiers, mais je ne feray point 

cela.” Et le duc, a ces mots, enfelly de ire, respondit: Ha! garsson, 

désobéyras-tu a ma volenté? va hoys de mes yeux,” et le sang, avecques 

les paroles, lui tira à coeur, et devint pâle et puis à coup enflambé et si 

espoentable en son vis, comme je Toys recorder au clerc de la chappelle 

qui seul estoit emprès luy, qui hideur estoit à le regarder . . . *9 

Is this not filled with vigor? The soft opening phrases, the rising 

rage during the brief exchange of words, the hesitating speech of 

the son in which one can already hear the speech of the Charles the 

Bold he is to be. 

The way the duke looks at his son so terrifies the duchess (whose 

presence has not been mentioned until this point) that she, pushing 

her son in front of her, hastily tries to flee the wrath of her husband, 

silently making her way from the oratory14 through the chapel. But 

she has to turn various corners before she reaches the door and the 

scribe has the key: “Caron, ouvrenous,”*!° says the duchess, but the 

scribe falls down at her feet and pleads that her son first ask for 

forgiveness before they leave the chapel. She turns to Charles to 

plead in all earnesty, but he answers arrogantly and loudly: “Déa, 

madame, monseigneur m’a deffendu ses yeux et est indigné sur 

moy, par quoy, après avoir eu celle deffense, je ne m’y retourneray 

point si tost ains m’en yray a la garde de Dieu, je ne scray ot.”+!1 

Suddenly the voice of the duke, who had remained seated on his 

prie-Dieu,15 exhausted with rage, was heard . . . and the duchess 

cries out in mortal fear to the scribe: “Mon amy, tost tost 

ouvreznous, il nous convient partir ou nous sommes morts,” +12 

Philip is now under the spell of the hot blood of the Valois: 

having returned to his chambers, the old duke falls into a kind of 

youthful frenzy. Towards evening he secretly rides out of Brussels, 

alone and insufficiently protected. “Les jours pour celle heurre 

d’alors estoient courts, et estoit ja basse vesprée quant ce prince 

droit-cy monta a cheval, et ne demandoit riens autre fors estre 

emmy les champs seul et à par luy. Sy porta ainsy l’anventure que 

ce propre jour-là, après un long et âpre gel, il faisoit un releng, et 

par une longue épaisse bruyne, qui a voit couru tout ce jour 1a, 

vesprée tourna en pluie bien menue, mais trés-mouillant et laquelle 

destrempoit les terres et romoit glasces avecques vent qui s’y 

entrebouta.”813 Doesn’t this sound like a Camille Lemonnier? 16 

Then follows the description of the nocturnal wanderings through 

fields and forests in which the most lively naturalism and a 

moralizing rhetoric filled with a strange sense of its own importance 

enter into a peculiar mixture. The duke wanders about tired and 

hungry. His cries are unanswered. He is lured by a river that looks 

to him like a path, but his horse shys away just in time. He falls off 

his horse and injures himself. He listens in vain for the crowing of a 

rooster or the barking of a dog that could lead him back to human 

habitations. Finally he sees a light shining and tries to get near it; 

he loses sight of it, finds it again, and finally is able to reach it. 

“Mais plus l’approchoit, plus sambloit hideuse chose et espoentable, 

car feu partoit d’une mote d’en plus de mille lieux, avecques grosse 

fumiére, dont nul ne pensast a celle heure fors que ce fust ou 

purgatoire d’aucune âme ou autre illusion de l’ennemy .. . “ *!4 He 

abruptly halts his horse. But then he recalls that charcoal makers 

burn their coal deep in the woods. This was indeed such a charcoal 

fire. But there was no house or cottage anywhere near. Only after 

having wandered for a while more is he led by the barking of a dog 

to the hut of a poor man where he finds rest and food. 

Similarly characteristic passages from the work of Chastellain are 

the descriptions of a duel between two burghers at Valenciennes, of 

the nocturnal fight between the Frisian delegation in Haag and the 

Burgundian noblemen whom they disturb in their nightly rest by 

playing catch in an upper room in their wooden shoes, of the riot in 

1467 in Ghent when Charles’s first visit as duke coincides with the 

fair in Houthen from which the people return with the shrine of St. 

Lieven.17 

Time and again we see, by virtue of unintended trifling details, 

how clearly the author really perceives all these external things. The 

duke, confronted with the riot, faces “multitude de faces en bacinets 

enrouillés et dont les dedans estoient grignans barbes de vilain, 

mordans lèvres.” t15 The rogue who forces his way to the side of the 

duke at the window wears an iron glove with a black finish. He 

bangs it on the windowsill to compel silence.18 

This ability to narrate in crisp, simple words that which is 

perceived, precisely and directly, corresponds in literature to that 

which in painting is accomplished, with a perfect power of 

expression, by the tremendous visual sharpness of a Van Eyck. In 

literature that realism is usually interfered with by conventional 

forms. It is retarded in its expression and remains an exception in 

the midst of a mountain of dry rhetoric while shining in painting 

like the blossoms on an apple tree. 

In this regard, painting is far ahead of literature in its means of 

expression. In reproducing the effects of light painting already has 

an astonishing virtuosity. Above all, the miniaturist strove to 

capture the glow of a moment. In painting, this talent is seen to 

have first come to its full development in the Nativity (plate 31) by 

Geertgen tot Sint Jans. The illuminators had already tried to capture 

the play of the light of the torches on the armor of the soldiers 

during the capture of Christ. The strange master who illuminated 

King Rene’s Cuer d’amours espris succeeded in depicting a radiant 

sunrise and the most mysterious effects of dusk. The master of the 

Heures d’ Ailly already dares to try his hand on the sun breaking 

through the clouds after a storm.19 

Literature had only primitive means at its disposal for the specific 

reproduction of light effects. There is, to be sure, a high sensitivity 

to the play of bright light, as mentioned above. There is even an 

awareness of beauty as being first of all, a matter of shining 

elegance. All the writers and poets of the fifteenth century like to 

mention the glow of sunlight, candles, and weapons. But they do 

not go beyond simple acknowledgment; there is as yet no literary 

procedure for the description of such things. 

We have to look elsewhere if we desire to find a literary 

equivalent for the effect of light in painting. In literature, the 

momentary expression is primarily achieved by a lively application 

of direct speech. There is hardly another literature that so 

consistently reproduces speech directly. This practice leads to 

tiresome abuse. Froissart and his fellow spirits even dress 

explanations of political conditions in the form of questions and 

answers. The endless dialogues, in their ceremonial key and with 

their hollow sound, occasionally heighten rather than interrupt 

monotony. But the writers do frequently succeed in creating the 

illusion of directness and spontaneity completely convincingly by 

the use of this technique. Froissart, above all, is a master of lively 

dialogue. 

“Lors il entendi les nouvelles que leur ville estoit prise.” (The 

whole speech is shouted.) “Et de quel gens?’ demande-il. 

Respondirent ceulx qui à luy parloient: ‘Ce sont Bretons!’—’Ha,’ 

dist-il, ‘Bretons sont mal gent, ils pilleront et ardront la ville et puis 

partiront.’ [The shouting continues] ‘Et quel cry crient-ils?’ dist le 

chevalier.— Certes, sire, ils crient La Trimouille!””*16 

Froissart employs the device of always having the partner in the 

dialogue repeat in amazement the last word of the speaker so that a 

certain element of haste is created.—‘“Monseigneur, Gaston est 

mort.’—’Mort?’ dist le conte.—’Certes, mort est-il pour vray 

monseigneur.” t17 And elsewhere: “Si luy demanda, en cause 

d’amours et de lignaige, conseil.—’Conseil, respondi l’archevesque, 

‘certes, beaux nieps, c’est trop tard. Vous voulés clore l’estable 

quant le cheval est perdu.””20#:18 

Poetry too, makes generous use of this stylistic device. In a short 

rhyme sequence the question and answer may alternate twice: 

Mort, je me plaing.—De qui?—De toy. 

—Que t’ay je fait? —Ma dame as pris. 

—C’est vérité.—Dy moy pour quoy. 

Il me plaisoit.—Tu as mespris.2181? 

In this example the technique of repeated breaks in the dialogue 

is no longer a means, but rather an end: it is a virtuosity. The poet 

Jean Meschinot knew how to take this artistic device to its extreme. 

In a ballade in which poor France remonstrates with her king (Louis 

XI) about his guilt, the speaker changes in each of the thirty lines 

three or four times. We have to admit that the effect of the poem as 

political satire does not suffer from this peculiar form. The first 

segment reads as follows: 

Sire . . .—Que veux?—Entendez . . .—Quoy?—Mon cas. 

—Or dy.—Je suys . . .—Qui?—La destruicte France! 

—Par qui?—Par vous.—Comment?—En tous estats. 

—Tu mens.—Non fais.—Que le dit? —Ma souffrance. 

—Que souffres tu?—Meschief—Quel?—A oultrance. 

—Je n’en croy rien.—Bien y pert.—N’en dy plus! 

—Las! siferay.—Tu perds temps.—Quelz abus! 

—Qu’ay-je mal fait? —Contre paix.—Et comment? 

—Guerroyant . . .—Qui?—Vos amys et congnus. 

—Parle plus beau.—Je ne puis, bonnement.22 *20 

There is another example of superficial naturalism in the 

literature of the time. Though Froissart is concerned with the 

description of heroic knightly deeds, what he describes almost 

against his will, one is tempted to say, is the prosaic reality of war. 

Just as Cornmines, who had his fill of chivalry, Froissart well 

describes the atmosphere of fatigue, the futile pursuits, the random 

movements, and the restlessness of a camp at night. He is a master 

at describing hesitation and waiting.23 

In his simple and precise reproduction of the external conditions 

of an event, he does on occasion even attain an almost tragic power, 

as, for example, in the report of the death of young Gaston Phébus, 

who had been stabbed by his father in a rage.24—The work is so 

photographically exact that in his words the quality of the narrator 

to whom he owed his endless faits divers can be detected. 

Everything he tells us about his traveling companion, the knight 

Espaing, for example, is told very well, indeed. 

Whenever literature is at work, simply observing and without the 

encumbrance of convention, it is comparable to painting, even if it 

does not attain its level. 

We should not look for the literary descriptions that come closest 

to painting among the descriptions of nature precisely because we 

are concerned with the unself-conscious observation of an 

individual event about which we are told. Nature descriptions in the 

fifteenth century are not as yet based on direct unself-conscious 

observation. Events are related because they appear to be 

important. Their external circumstances are reported just as a film 

sensitive to light makes a record. A conscious literary procedure 

does not yet exist. A description of nature, however, which in 

painting is merely a secondary appendage, that is, presents itself 

totally unself-consciously, appears in literature to be a conscious 

artistic device. Being of a purely secondary character, descriptions 

of nature in painting could, by virtue of this fact, retain their purity 

and simplicity. Since the background was not important to the 

subject matter of the painting itself and played no part in its hieratic 

style, the painters of the fifteenth century were able to put into their 

landscapes a degree of harmonious naturalness that was still 

prohibited in the strict disposition of the subject matter constituting 

the main concern. An exact parallel to this phenomenon is offered 

by Egyptian art: it abandons the code of forms when modeling the 

miniature figure of a slave because the figure of a slave is of no 

significance. The formal code usually requires that the human figure 

be distorted, but figures created outside the code of forms may, 

therefore, on occasion share in the simple natural faithfulness of 

animal figures. 

The weaker the relationship between the landscape and the main 

subject matter to be depicted, the stronger the harmonious and 

natural qualities of the painting as a whole. Behind the reckless, 

bizarre, and pompous veneration of the kings in the Très-riches 

heures de Chantilly25 appears the view of Bourges in all the 

atmospheric and rhythmic perfection of its dreamlike softness. 

In literature, nature descriptions are still entirely dressed in the 

garb of the pastorale. We have already drawn attention to the 

argument at court over the pros and cons of the simple rustic life. 

Just as in those days when Rousseau had his way, it was in good 

taste to declare that one was tired of the vanity of courtly life and to 

affect a wise flight from court replete with dark bread and the 

carefree love of Robin and Marion. This was a sentimental reaction 

to the full-blooded splendor and proud egotism of reality, not totally 

lacking in genuine sentiment, yet in its major components merely a 

literary attitude. 

The love of nature belonged to this attitude. Its poetic expression 

is conventional. Nature was a necessary element in the grand social 

game of courtly-erotic culture. The terms for the beauty of flowers 

and the songs of birds were intentionally cultivated in the 

customary forms that every player understood. The description of 

nature in literature is thus at an entirely different level than that in 

painting. 

Disregarding for a moment pastorales and the opening stanzas of 

poems with their obligatory motif of spring mornings, one rarely 

senses a desire for descriptions of nature. Though occasionally a few 

such descriptions may appear in literature, as for example, in the 

work of Chastellain when he describes the beginning of spring thaw 

(and it is precisely this sort of unintentional description that is by 

far the most suggestive), it is pastorale poetry that remains the most 

likely place to locate the rising literary feeling for nature. Next to 

the pages from Alain Chartier, which we quoted above, to illustrate 

the effects of elaborate details in general, we could place the poem 

“Regnault et Jehanneton,” in which the kingly shepherd René 

dresses his love for Jeanne de Laval. Here too, we find no coherent 

vision of a piece of nature, no unity such as the painter could 

bestow on his landscape through color and light, but only an 

unhurried enumeration of details. First the singing of birds, one 

after the other, the insects, the frogs, followed by the ploughing 

peasants: 

Et d’autre part, les paisans au labour 

Si chantent hault, voire sans nul séjour, Resjoyssant 

Leurs beufs, lesquelx vont tout-bel charmant 

La terre grasse, qui le bon froment rent; 

Et en ce point ilz les vont rescriant, Selon leur nom: 

A l’un fauveau et l’autre Grison, 

Brunet, Blanchet, Blondeau ou Compaignon; 

Puis les touchent tel foiz de Vaiguillon pour avancer.26 *21 

Admittedly, there is a certain freshness in all this and a happy 

tone, but it should be compared with the calendar depictions of the 

breviaries. King René presents us with all the ingredients for a good 

description of nature, a palette of colors, so to speak, but nothing 

else. Moreover, in describing the coming of dusk, his effort to 

express a certain mood is unmistakable. The other birds are silent, 

but the quail still cries, partridges scurry to their nests, deer and 

rabbits emerge. The sun just a moment ago was still brightening the 

top of a tower, then the air turns cold, owls and bats begin to make 

their fluttering sounds, and the bell of the chapel sounds the Ave. 

The calendar leaves of the Très-riches heures provide an 

opportunity to compare the same motif in the fine arts and in 

literature. The splendid castles that fill in the background in the 

works of the Limburg brothers are well known. The poetic works of 

Eustace Deschamps may be cited as their literary counterparts. In a 

number of seven short poems he sings the praises of different 

northern French castles: Beauté, which was later to provide shelter 

for Agnes Sorel, Biévre, Cachan, Clermont, Nieppe, Noroy, and 

Coucy.27 Deschamps would have to be a poet with much more 

powerful wings if he were to achieve the same effect as the Limburg 

brothers managed to convey in these most tender and delicate 

expressions of the art of miniatures. On the September leaf (plate 

32), the castle of Saumur rises behind the grape harvesting scene as 

in a dream: the tops of towers with their high wind vanes, the 

finials, the lily ornaments of the spires, the twenty slender 

chimneys, all that blossoms like a bed of wild white flowers in the 

dark blue air. Or take the majestic broad somberness of the princely 

Lusignan on the March leaf (plate 33), the gloomy towers of 

Vincennes rising threateningly above the dried foliage of the 

December forest (plate 34).28 

Did the poet, or at least this poet, possess equivalent means of 

expression for evoking such images? Of course not. The description 

of the architectural forms of a castle, such as in the poem on Biévre 

castle could not have any effect. As a matter of fact, all he has to 

offer is a listing of the enjoyments offered by the castle. Naturally, 

the painter, being outside the castle, looks at it, while the poet, 

being inside, looks out: 

Son filz ainsné, daulphin de Viennois, 

Donna le nom à ce lieu de Beauté. 

Et c’est bien drois, car moult est delectables: 

L’en y oit bien le rossignol chanter; 

Marne l’ensaint, les haulz bois profitables 

Du noble parc puet l’en veoir branler . . . 

Les prez sont pres, les jardins deduisables, 

Les beaus preaulx, fontenis bel et cler, 

Vignes aussi et les terres arables. 

Moulins tournans, beaus plains à regarder*22 

How different this effect from that of the miniatures! Yet in spite 

of everything, painting and poem share both procedure and subject 

matter: they list what is visible (and in the poem what is audible). 

The view of the painter, however, is firmly focused on a particular 

and limited complex: in his listing he has to present unity, 

limitation, and coherence. Paul van Limburg may put all the details 

of winter in his February picture (plate 35): the peasants warming 

themselves over a fire in the foreground, the laundry hung for 

drying, the crows on a snowy ground, the sheepfold, the beehives, 

the barrel, and the cart; all this and the entire country background 

with the quiet village and the lonely house on the hill. Yet the calm 

unity of the painting remains perfect. But the poet’s view keeps 

moving aimlessly; it finds no point of rest. He does not know how to 

limit himself and does not convey a unified vision. 

The form is overrun by the content. In literature, form and 

content are both old; in painting, however, content is old while the 

form is new. In painting, there is much more expression in form 

than in content. The painter is able to put his entire unarticulated 

wisdom into the form: the idea, the mood, the psychology can be 

reproduced without the trouble of putting all this into words. The 

period is predominantly visually oriented. This explains why the 

pictorial expression is so superior to the literary: a literature whose 

perception is primarily visual fails. 

The poetry of the fifteenth century seems to live on almost no 

new ideas. A general impotence to invent new forms prevails; all 

that is left is to rework or modernize the old subject matter. There is 

a pause in all thought; the mind, having completed the medieval 

edifice, is tired and hesitates. Emptiness and barrenness 

everywhere. One despairs of the world; everything regresses; a 

strong depression of the soul alone predominates. Deschamps sighs: 

Helas! on dit que je ne fais més rien, 

Qui jadis fis mainte chose nouvelle; 

La raison est que je n’ay pas merrien 

Dont je fisse chose bonne ne belle.29*23 

To us, nothing seems to provide stronger proof of stagnation and 

decay than the fact that the old rhymed chivalric novels and other 

poems were rendered in overly long equivalent prose. Yet in spite of 

everything, this “de-rhyming” of the fifteenth century augurs a 

transition to a new spirit. As late as the thirteenth century 

everything could be put into rhymes, including matters concerning 

medicine, and natural history, just as ancient Indian literature 

applied the verse form to all academic pursuits. The fixed form 

signified that the oral presentation is the intended form of 

communication. This is not a personal, emotional, expressive 

presentation, but a mechanical recitation since in more primitive 

literary epochs verses are virtually sung to a fixed and monotonous 

melody. The new need for prose reveals a drive for expression, an 

ascendancy of the more modern practice of reading over the old 

form of oral presentation. This is also linked to the division of the 

subject matter into smaller chapters with summarizing titles that 

becomes generally accepted during the fifteenth century while 

earlier books were less structured. Prose was confronted with 

relatively higher demands than poetry; in the old rhymed forms 

everything is still accepted as before; prose, in contrast, is the art 

form. 

But the higher quality of prose in general is found in its formal 

elements. It is just as little filled with new ideas as poetry. Froissart 

is the perfect type of a mind that does not think in words but simply 

depicts. He rarely has ideas, but only images of facts. He knows 

only a few ethical motifs and emotions: fidelity, honor, greed, 

courage, and all these only in their simplest form. He applies no 

theology, no allegory, no mythology; if hard-pressed, some 

morality; he only narrates, correctly, effortlessly, totally matter-of- 

factly, but is lacking in content and he never grips our emotions 

except with the mechanical superficiality of the way reality is 

reproduced in the cinema. His contemplations are of an 

unparalleled banality; everything is boring, nothing is more certain 

than death, sometimes, though, one may win or lose. Particular 

notions are accompanied with automatic certainty by the same set 

judgments: for example, whenever he speaks of the Germans he 

maintains that they treat their prisoners badly and that they are 

particularly greedy.30 

Even Froissart’s frequently cited clever bons mots lose, if read in 

context, much of their impact. For example, it is frequently 

considered to be an astute characterization of the first duke of 

Burgundy, calculating and persistent Philip the Bold, when Froissart 

calls him “sage, froid et imaginatif, et qui sur ses besognes veoit au 

loin.”*24 But Froissart applies this label to everyone!31 Even the 

well-known “Ainsi ot messire Jehan de Blois femme et guerre qui 

trop luy cousta,”32/2°5 if taken in context, does not actually make 

the point one reads into it. 

One element is totally missing in Froissart: rhetoric. And, it is 

precisely rhetoric that hid from his contemporaries the lack of new 

ideas. They may be said to have reveled in the splendor of an 

artfully embellished style: Ideas are regarded as new because of 

their stately appearance. All terms wear brocaded garments. Terms 

of honor and duty wear the colorful costume of the chivalric 

illusion. The sense of nature is clothed in the costume of the 

pastorale, and love is mostly restricted by the allegory of the Roman 

de la rose. Not a single thought is allowed to stand naked and free. 

Thoughts are rarely allowed to move other than in the measured 

steps of endless processions. 

The rhetorical-ornamental element is also not lacking in the fine 

arts. There are innumerable parts in particular paintings that can be 

called painted rhetoric. As, for example, St. George on Van Eyck’s 

Madonna of the Canon Van de Paele, who recommends the donor to 

the Virgin. How clearly the artist tried to make the golden armor 

and splendid helmet of St. George antique. How weakly rhetorical is 

his gesture. The work of Paul van Limburg also displays this 

consciously rhetorical element in the overloaded bizarre splendor, 

an unmistakable effort at an exotic, theatrical expression, with 

which the three kings make their appearance. 

The poetry of the fifteenth century puts forth its most 

advantageous side as long as it does not attempt to express 

profound ideas and is freed also from the task of doing this 

beautifully. It is at its best when it evokes, only for a moment, an 

image, a mood. Its effect depends on its formal elements: the image, 

the tone, the rhythm. This is why this poetry fails in large-scale, 

long-winded artful works where rhythmic and tonal qualities are 

subordinate. However, this poetry is fresh in those genres where 

form is the main concern: the rondeau, the ballade, which build on 

a simple light idea and derive their power from image, tone, and 

rhythm. These are the simple and directly creative qualities of the 

folk song; whenever the art song gets closest to the folk song it 

exudes its greatest charm. 

During the fourteenth century a reversal occurs in the 

relationship between lyrical poetry and music. During the older 

periods poems, even nonlyrical ones, were inseparably tied to 

musical presentations. It is even assumed that the chansons de geste, 

those sequences often or twelve syllables (just as the Indian sloka), 

were also sung in the same manner. The normal type of the 

medieval poet is the one who has written the poem and composed 

its accompanying music as well. This holds true in the fourteenth 

century for a figure such as Guillaume de Machaut. It is he who 

establishes both the most common lyrical forms of his times, 

ballade, rondel, etc., and the form of the débat. Machaut’s rondels 

and ballades are characterized by great simplicity, little color, and 

light intellectual content. These are advantageous features because 

in this instance the poem comprises only half of the work of art. The 

song with music is the better the less colorful and expressive it is, 

as, for example the simple rondel: 

Au departir de vous mon cuer vous lais 

Et je m’en vois dolans et esplourés. 

Pour vous servir, sans retraire jamais, 

Au departir de vous mon cuer vous lais. 

Et par m’ame, je n’arai bien ne pais 

Jusqu'au retour, einsi desconfortés. 

Au departir de vous mon cuer vous lais. 

Et je n’en vois dolans et esplourés.33*26 

Deschamps is no longer the composer of the music for his 

ballades. He is therefore much more colorful and restless than 

Machaut, and for the same reason frequently more interesting 

though of lesser poetic style. It goes without saying that the fleeting, 

light poem that almost lacks any content and is meant to be 

accompanied by a certain tune does not die out even though the 

poets are no longer the composers of the melodies. The rondel 

retains its style, as is shown by the following by Jean Meschinot: 

M’aimerez-vous bien, 

Dictes, par vostre ame? 

Mais que je vous ame 

Plus que nulle rien, 

M’aimerez-vous bien? 

Dieu mit tant de bien 

En vous, que c’est basme; 

Pour ce je me clame 

Vostre. Mais combien 

M’aimerez-vous bien?34ÿ27 

The clean, simple talent of Christine de Pisan is particularly 

suited for these fleeting effects. She had the same facility in 

composing verses as all her contemporaries: with little variation in 

form and idea, smooth and colorless, calm and quiet, accompanied 

by a soft jesting melancholy. These are truly literary poems. They 

are entirely courtly in thought and tone. They remind us of the 

ivory plaques of the fourteenth century that repeat, over and over, 

in purely conventional depictions the same motifs: a hunting scene, 

an event from Tristan and Isolde or from the Roman de la rose, 

graceful, cool, and charming. Where Christine in her gentle 

refinement finds also the tone of the folk song, the result is 

sometimes something totally pure. A reunion, for example: 

Tu soies le trés bien venu, 

M’amour, or m’embrace et me baise 

Et comment t’es tu maintenu 

Puis ton depart? Sain et bien aise 

As tu esté tousjours? Ca vien 

Costé moy, te sié et me conte 

Comment t’a esté, mal ou bien, 

Car de ce vueil savoir le compte. 

—Ma dame, a qui je suis tenu 

Plus que aultre, a nul n’en desplaise, 

Sachés que desir m’a tenu 

Si court qu’oncques n’oz tel mesaise, 

Ne plaisir ne prenoie en rien 

Loings de vous. Amours, qui cuers dompte, 

Me disoit: “Loyauté me tien, 

Car de ce vueil savoir le compte.” 

—Dont m'as tu ton serment tenu, 

Bon gré t’en sçray par saint Nicaise; 

Et puis que sain es revenu 

Joye arons assez; or t’apaise 

Et me dis se scez de combien 

Le mal qu’en as eu a plus monte 

Que cil qu’a souffert le cuer mien, 

Car de ce vueil savoir le compte. 

—Plus mal que vous, si com retien, 

Ay eu, mais dites sanz mesconte, 

Quarts baisiers en aray je bien? 

Car de ce vueil savoir le compte. 35 *28 

Or a lover’s longing: 

Il a au jour d’ui un mois 

Que mon ami s’en ala. 

Mon cuer remaint morne et cois, 

Il a au jour d’ui un mois. 

“A Dieu, me dit, je m’en vois”; 

Ne puis a moy ne parla, 

Il a au jour d’ui un mois.36+29 

A surrender: 

“Mon ami, ne plourez plus; 

Car tant me faittes pitié 

Que mon cuer se rent conclus 

A vostre doulce amistié. 

Reprenez autre maniere; 

Pour Dieu, plus ne vous douiez, 

Et me faittes bonne chiere: 

Je vueil quanque vous voulez.” 30 

The tender, spontaneous femininity of these songs, lacking the 

masculine-weighty fantastic reflections and the colorful dress of the 

figures from the Roman de la rose, makes them palatable to us. All 

they offer to us is a single, just felt emotion; the theme has just 

touched the heart and is then immediately turned into an image 

without requiring any help from an idea to accomplish this. This 

poetry has that quality that is characteristic of music and poetry of 

all periods in which the inspiration is based exclusively on the 

simple vision of a moment: the theme is pure and strong, the song 

opens with clear and firm notes, like the song of a blackbird, but the 

poet or composer has already spent himself after the stanza; the 

mood vanishes, the execution is trapped in the quagmire of weak 

rhetoric. We meet with the same disappointment that almost all 

poets of the fifteenth century have for us. 

Here is an example from Christine’s ballades: 

Quant chacun s’en revient de l’ost 

Pou quoy demeures tu derriere? 

Et si scez que m’amour entiere 

T’ay baillée en garde et depost.37 *31 

We would now expect an accomplished medieval-French Leonore 

ballade. But the poetess has nothing else to say but this opening. 

Another two short unimportant stanzas put an end to the matter. 

But how fresh is the opening of Froissart’s “Le debat dou cheval et 

dou levrier”: 

Froissart d’Escoce revenoit 

Sus un cheval cui gris estoit, 

Un blanc levrier menoit en lasse. 

“Las,” dist le levrier, “Je me lasse, 

Grisel, quant nous reposerons? 

Il est heure que nous mongons. "387 

This tone is, however, not carried through; the poem collapses 

immediately. The theme is only sensed, not thought. The themes 

are, however, at times splendidly suggestive. In Pierre Michault’s 

“Danse aux aveugles” we see mankind engaged in the eternal dance 

around the throne of love, good fortune, and death.39 But the 

execution is below standard from the very beginning. An 

“Exclamacion des os Sainct Innocent,” by an unknown poet, opens 

with the shout of the bones in the bone houses of the famous 

cemetery: 

Les os sommes de povres trepassez. 

Cy amassez par monceaulx compassez. 

Rompus, cassez, sans reigle ne compas . . . 40*33 

As the opening of the most somber lament of death, these lines 

are well suited; but all of this leads to nothing other than a memento 

mori of the most ordinary kind. 

These are all preliminary sketches suitable for pictorial works. For 

the painter, such a single vision already contains the subject matter 

for a fully elaborated picture, but for the poet, it remains 

insufficient. 

Does all this mean that the power of painting in the fifteenth 

century excels that of literature in every respect? No. There are 

always areas in which literature has richer and more immediate 

means of expression at its disposal than do the fine arts. Ridicule, 

above all, is one such area. The fine arts, whenever they lower 

themselves to the level of caricature, are able to express the comic 

sentiment only to a small degree. Visually expressed, the comic 

element tends to become serious. Only in cases where the admixture 

of the comic element in the complexity of life is very small, where it 

is only seasoning and not the dominant taste, are works of fine art 

able to keep pace with the spoken or written word. Genre painting 

contains the comic element at its weakest. 

Here the fine arts are still completely on their own ground. The 

unbridled elaboration of detail that we already ascribed to the 

painting of the fifteenth century shades imperceptibly into the 

leisurely narration of trivia until it becomes genre. With the Master 

of Flémalle detail becomes “genre.” His carpenter Joseph sits and 

makes mousetraps (plate 36); the character of genre is present in all 

the details. The step from the purely painterly vision to that of 

genre is taken when Van Eyck leaves a window shade open or 

paints a sideboard or a fireplace in the manner of the Master of 

Flémalle. 

But even in the case of genre, words have a dimension in which 

they surpass depiction; they are capable of explicitly expressing 

states of mind. In our discussion of Deschamps’s descriptions of the 

beauty of castles, we stated that they had actually failed and were 

infinitely far behind that of which miniature art was capable. But 

we should compare the ballade in which Deschamps describes, as in 

a genre picture, how he lay ill in his shabby castle of Fismes.41 The 

owls, crows, starlings, and sparrows who nest in the tower keep him 

awake: 

C’est une estrange melodie 

Qui ne semble pas grant deduit 

A gens qui sont en maladie. 

Premiers les corbes font sçavoir 

Pour certain si tost qu’il est jour: 

De fort crier font loeur pouoir 

Le gros, le gresle, sanz sejour; 

Mieulx vauldroit le son d’un tabour 

Que telz cris de divers oyseaulx, 

Puis vient la proie; vaches, veaulx, 

Crians, muyans, et trop vuit, 

Joint du moustier la sonnerie. 

Qui tout l’entendement destruit 

A gens qui sont en maladie. *34 

Towards evening the owls come and scare the patient with their 

lamenting cries that make him think of death: 

C’est froit hostel et mal reduit 

A gens qui sont en maladie. *35 

As soon as even a glimmer of a comic element or even only a 

more leisurely way of narrating begins to appear, the method of 

stringing lists of things together is no longer so tiring. Lively lists of 

bourgeoisie customs, long, leisurely descriptions of the female toilet 

break the monotony. In his long allegorical poem Le espinette 

amoureuse, Froissart suddenly enchants us with a listing of about 

sixty children’s games that he used to play as a little boy in 

Valenciennes.42 The literary service of the devil of gluttony has 

already begun. The abundant feasts of Zola, Huysmans, and Anatole 

France have their prototypes in medieval times. How appetizingly 

Froissart describes the bon vivants from Brussels who crowd around 

fat Duke Wenzel at the battle of Basweiler; they have their servants 

with them, each with a large wine flask tied to the saddle, bread 

and cheese, smoked salmon, trouts and eel paste, all neatly wrapped 

in small napkins; they considerably confuse the order of battle.43 

As a result of its proclivity for genre-like qualities, the literature 

of that time is capable of turning even the most sober subject into 

verse. Deschamps is able to plead for money in verse without 

lowering his accustomed poetic standards; in a series of ballades he 

begs for an official robe that had been promised to him, for 

firewood, a horse, and back pay that is due him.44 

From this it is only a small step from genre types to the bizarre 

and burlesque or, if you want, to the art of Breughel. In this form of 

the comic, painting is still the equal of literature. The Breughel-like 

element is already completely present in the art of the fourteenth 

century. It is there in Melchior Broedelam’s Flight into Egypt (plate 

5), in Dijon; in the three sleeping soldiers in the Marys at the 

Sepulchre that is ascribed to Hubert van Eyck (plate 37). No one is 

as forceful with intentionally bizarre elements as is Paul van 

Limburg. A spectator in The Purification of the Virgin wears a 

crooked magician’s hat a meter high with fathom-long sleeves (plate 

38). There is the burlesque in the baptismal fount, which is 

decorated with three grotesque masks with their tongues out. In the 

background of the Visitation a hero in a tower does battle with a 

snail and another man pushes a wheelbarrow holding a pig playing 

a bagpipe (plate 39).45 

The literature of the fifteenth century is bizarre on almost every 

one of its pages; its artificial style and the strangely fantastic 

costumes of its allegories testify to this fact. Motifs, through which 

Breughel’s unleashed fantasy was later to vent its fury, as for 

example the quarrel between Lent and Carnival, the struggle 

between meat and fish, were already popular in the literature of the 

fifteenth century (plate 40). Breughelish to a high degree is 

Deschamps’s keen vision in which he has the troops, gathering in 

Sluis for a campaign against England, appear to the guard as an 

army of rats and mice. 

“Avant, avant! tirez-vous ça. 

Je voy merveille, ce me semble.” 

—“Et quoy, guette, que vois-tu là?” 

“Je voy dix mille rats ensemble 

Et mainte souris qui s’assemble 

Dessus la rive de la mer . . . ”*36 

In another instance he is sitting at a table at court, mournful and 

unfocused, when suddenly he notices how the courtiers are eating: 

one chews like a pig, that one nibbles like a mouse, this uses his 

teeth like a saw, that one distorts his face, the beard of the other 

whips up and down. “While they ate, they looked like devils.” 46 

Whenever literature describes the life of ordinary people, it 

automatically resorts to that deft realism mixed with humor that 

was so to blossom in the fine arts. Chastellain’s description of the 

poor peasant who gives shelter to the lost duke of Burgundy is like a 

work by Breughel.47 Pastorales, in their description of eating, 

dancing, and wooing shepherds, are time and again drawn from 

their basic sentimental and romantic theme towards a fresh 

naturalism of slightly comic effect. We count among this an interest 

in worn-out clothing that had already begun to stir in both the 

literature and art of the fifteenth century. The calendar miniatures 

emphasize with great enjoyment the threadbare knees of the 

mowers in the wheat or paint the rags of beggars receiving alms. In 

all this we have the point of origin of that line that, via Rembrandt’s 

sketches (plate 41) and Murillo’s begging youths (plate 42), leads to 

the street people of Steinlen (plate 43). 

But at the same time, one is struck by the great difference 

between the pictorial and the literary. While the fine arts already 

perceive the picturesque qualities of a beggar, that is, are sensitive 

to the magic of form, literature, for the time being, is only 

concerned with the beggar’s significance, whether it laments, 

praises, or condemns him. In the condemnations, in particular, are 

the archetypes of the realistic literary depictions of poverty. Beggars 

had become terribly troublesome towards the end of the medieval 

period. Their pitiful hordes took shelter in the churches and 

disrupted church services with their cries and noisy carryings on. 

Among them were to be found many evil people, validi mendicantes. 

In 1428 the cathedral chapter of Notre Dame in Paris attempted in 

vain to restrict them to the church doors; only later were they at 

least pushed from the choir into the nave of the church.48 

Deschamps never tires of making his hatred of these miserable 

people known; he regards them all as hypocrites and cheaters. Beat 

and drive them from the churches, he shouts, hang or burn them! 49 

The road traveled from here to the modern literary description of 

misery seems to be much longer than that which the fine arts had to 

traverse. In painting, a new element entered all on its own; in 

literature, in contrast, a newly matured social sensitivity had first to 

create entirely new forms of expression. 

Wherever the comic element, be it either weaker or stronger, 

coarser or more subtle, was already provided by the appearance of 

the subject matter itself, as in the case of genre or burlesque, the 

fine arts were able to keep pace with the word. But there were 

spheres of humor that were quite inaccessible to pictorial 

expression, where neither color nor line were able to express 

anything. In all places where the comic element is intended to 

provoke healthy laughter: in the comedy, farce, burlesque, the joke, 

in short, in all the forms of the crudely comic, literature rules 

unchallenged. A very particular spirit is heard in that rich treasure 

of late medieval culture. 

Even where ridicule sounds its most exquisite notes and waxes 

about the most serious things in life, about love and one’s own 

suffering, in the realm of the faint smile literature is master. The 

affected, smoothed-over, and worn forms of eroticism undergo 

refinement and purification by the admixture of irony. 

Outside eroticism, irony is still awkward and naive. French 

authors around 1400 occasionally were careful to warn their 

readers when they spoke ironically. Deschamps praises the good 

times; everything is going perfectly, everywhere peace and justice 

reign: 

L’en me demande chascun jour 

Qu’il me semble du temps que voy, 

Et je respons: c’est tout honour, 

Loyauté, verité et Joy, 

Largesce, prouesce et arroy, 

Charité et biens qui s’advance 

Pour le commun; mais, par ma loy, 

Je ne di pas quanque je pense. *37 

In another place at the end of a ballade with the same tendency 

he says: “Tous ces poins a rebours retien.”50;3° Yet another has the 

refrain: “C’est grant pechiez d’anisy blasmer le monde”:::39 

Prince, s’il est par tout generalment 

comme je say, toute vertu habonde; 

Mais tel m’orroit qui diroit: “Il se ment” . . . 51849 

A bel esprit from the second half of the fifteenth century entitles 

his epigram: “Soubz une meschante paincture faicte de mauvaises 

couleurs et du plus meschant peinctre du monde, par manière 

d’yronnie par maitre Jehan Robertet.”52**41 

But how subtle irony becomes as soon as it deals with love. In 

these instances irony blends with gentle melancholy, with the 

subdued tenderness with which the eroticism of the fifteenth 

century puts something new into the old forms. The hard heart 

melts with a sob. A note sounds that had not before been heard in 

earthly love: de profundis. *42 

This is self-mockery, the figure of the “amant remis et renié” t43 

that Villon embraces; these are the muted small songs of 

disillusionment sung by Charles d’Orléans, the smile through tears: 

“Je riz en pleurs,”+44 which was not only of Villon’s invention. An 

old biblical adage, “risus dolore miscebitur et extrema gaudii luctus 

occupat,”53§45 revived in a new application, acquired a bitter and 

refined emotional meaning. Alain Chartier, the slick court poet, 

knows this motif as well as Villon, the vagabond. Earlier than both, 

it is already found in Othe de Granson.54 The following examples 

are from Alain Chartier. 

Je n’ay bouche qui puisse rire, 

Que les yeulx ne la desmentissent: 

Car le cueur l’en vouldroit desdire 

Par les lermes qui des yeulx issent. **46 

Or of a disconsolate lover: 

De faire chiere s’efforcoit 

Et menoit une joye fainte, 

Et à chanter con cueur forçoit 

Non pas pour plaisir, mais pour crainte, 

Car tousjours ung relaiz de plainte 

S’enlassoit au ton de sa voix, 

Et revenoit à son attainte 

Comme l’oysel au chant du bois.55++47 

At the end of a poem, the poet, in the style of a vagabond song, 

denies his suffering: 

C’est livret voult dicter et faire escripre 

Pour passer temps sans courage villain 

Ung simple clerc que l’en appelle Alain, 

Qui parle ainsi d’amours pour oyr dire.56 “48 

Or, in a detailed imaginative scene at the end of King Rene’s 

endless Cuer d’amours espris, the chamberlain, holding a candle, 

checks to see if the king has lost his heart, but cannot discover any 

hole in his side: 

Sy me dist tout en soubzriant 

Que je dormisse seulement 

Et que n’avoye nullement 

Pour ce mal garde de morir.5714? 

The old conventional forms had acquired a new freshness by the 

new sentiment. No one has taken the customary personification of 

sentiments as far as Charles d’Orléans. He views his own heart as a 

separate being: 

Je suys celluy au cueur vestu de noir . . . 58450 

The older lyric, even the dolce stil nuova, had taken 

personification with sacred seriousness, but in the poems of Charles 

d’Orléans the line between seriousness and mockery can no longer 

be drawn; he exaggerates personification without losing the subtle 

feeling in the process: 

Un jour à mon cueur devisoye 

Qui en secret à moy parloit, 

Et en parlant lui demandoye 

Se point d’espargne fait avoit 

D’aucuns biens quant Amours servoit: 

Il me dist que trés voulentiers 

La vérité m’en compteroit, 

Mais qu’eust visité ses papiers. 

Quant ce m’eut dit, It print sa voye 

Et d’avecques moy se partoit. 

Après entrer je le véoye 

En ung comptouer qu’il avoit: 

La, de ça et de là queroit, 

En cherchant plusieurs vieulx caiers 

Car le vray monstrer me vouloit, 

Mais qu’eust visitez ses papiers . . .59*51 

In the above passage, the comic element predominates, in that 

which follows, it is seriousness: 

Ne hurtez plus à luis de ma pensée, 

Soing et Soucy, sans tant vous travailler; 

Car elle dort et ne veult s’esveiller, 

Toute la nuit en peine a despensée. 

En dangier est, se s’elle n’est bien pansée; 

Cessez, cessez, laissez la sommeiller; 

Ne hurtez plus à l’uis de ma pensée, 

Soing et Soucy, sans tant vous travailler . . .60°2 

Disguising the lovers in churchly forms not only serves obscenely 

graphic language and crude irreverence as in the Cent nouvelles 

nouvelles, it also provides the most tender, nearly elegiac, love poem 

produced by the fifteenth century with its form: “L'amant rendu 

cordelier à l’observance d’amours.” By the mixture with the 

seasoning of blasphemy, so favored by the mind of the fifteenth 

century, softly sad eroticism acquired an even more pronounced 

taste. 

The motif of the lovers as members of a spiritual order had 

already given rise, in the circle of Charles d’Orléans, to a poetic 

brotherhood that called itself les amoureux de l’observance. But was it 

really Martial d’Auvergne who elaborated this motif into this 

moving poem that towers so much above his other work? 

The wretched and disappointed lover renounces the world in the 

strange monastery where only distressed lovers, les amoureux 

martyrs, are accepted. In a calm dialogue with the prior he tells the 

gentle story of his unrequited love and is admonished to forget it. 

Beneath the medieval-satirical dress here is fully formed the mood 

of a Watteau and of the Pierrot cult, only without moonlight.61 Did 

she not have the habit, asks the prior, of casting a loving glance in 

your direction or saying in passing a “Dieu gart?”*°3 It never went 

that far, answers the lover; but at night I stood for three hours at 

her door and looked up at the eaves: 

Et puis, quant je oyoye les verriéres 

De la maison qui cliquetoient, 

Lors me sembloit que mes priéres 

Exaussées d’elle sy estoient.}°* 

“Were you sure that she noticed you?” asks the prior. 

Se m’aist Dieu, j’estoye tant ravis, 

Que ne savoye mon sens ne estre, 

Car, sans parler, m’estoit advis 

Que le vent ventoit sa fenestre 

Et que m’avoit bien peu congnoistre, 

En disant bas: “Doint bonne nuyt,” 

Et Dieu scet se j’estoye grant maistre 

Après cela toute la nuyt.62*55 

He slept wonderfully in this bliss: 

Tellement estoie restauré 

Que, sans tourner ne travailler, 

Ja faisoie un somme doré, 

Sans point la nuyt me resveiller, 

Et puis, avant que m’abilier, 

Pour en rendre à Amours louanges, 

Baisoie troys fois mon orillier, 

En riant à par moy aux anges. 

During his solemn acceptance into the order, his lady, who had 

scorned him, faints, and a small golden heart enameled with tears, 

which he had given her as a gift, falls out of her dress: 

Les aultres, pour leur mal couvrir 

A force leurs cueurs retenoient, 

Passans temps a clone et rouvrir 

Les heures qu’en leurs mains tenoient, 

Dont souvent les feuilles tournoient 

En signe de devocion; 

Mais les deulz et pleurs que menoient 

Monstroient bien leur affection.+57 

When the prior finally gets around to enumerating his new duties 

and warns him never to listen to the nightingale, never to slumber 

under “eglantiers et aubespines,” and, above all, never to look into 

the eyes of women, then the poem laments on the theme of doux 

yeux in an endless melody with ever varying stanzas: 

Doux yeulx qui tousjours vont et viennent; 

Doulx yeulx eschauffans le plisson, 

De ceulx qui amoureux deviennent . . . 

Doux yeulx a cler esperlissans, 

Qui dient: C’est fait quant tu vouldras, 

A ceulx qu'ils sentent bien puissans . . . 63*°8 

During the fifteenth century all the conventional forms of 

eroticism are, imperceptibly, permeated with this gentle, subdued 

note of relaxed melancholy. The old satire of cynical derision of 

women is thus suddenly pierced by an entirely different mood: in 

the Quinze joyes de manage the earlier imbecile reviling of women is 

tempered by a note of quiet disillusionment and depression. This 

imparts to it the sadness of a modern novel about marriage; the 

ideas are shallow and hastily expressed; the conversations, in their 

tenderness, do not reflect malicious intent. 

In matters of the means of expression for love, literature had the 

schooling of centuries behind it. Its masters were such diverse 

spirits as Plato and Ovid, the troubadours and the minstrels, Dante 

and Jean de Meun. The fine arts, in contrast, were still unusually 

primitive in this arena and remained so for a long time. Only during 

the eighteenth century does the artistic representation of love catch 

up with the literary description in matters of refinement and wealth 

of expression. The painting of the fifteenth century is still incapable 

of being frivolous and sentimental. It is still denied the expression of 

the roguish element. The picture of the maiden Lysbet van 

Durenvoode, by an unknown master before 1430 (plate 44), shows 

a figure of such strict dignity that she was once described as the 

figure of the donor of a devotional picture, but the text on the 

banderole she holds in her hand reads: “Mi verdriet lange te hopen, 

Wie is hi die syn hert hout open?”*°? This art knows both chaste 

and obscene elements. It does not yet possess the means to express 

the intermediate stages. It says little about the life of love and does 

so in naive and innocent forms. We do have, of course, to remind 

ourselves anew that most art of this sort that existed has been lost. 

It would be of extraordinary interest to us if we could compare the 

sort of nudity painted by Van Eyck in his Bath of Women or that by 

Rogier where two young men peep laughingly through a chink 

(both pictures are described by Fazio) with that of Van Eyck’s Adam 

and Eve in the Ghent Altarpiece. Incidentally, the erotic element is 

not altogether lacking in Adam and Eve; the artist undoubtedly 

followed the conventional code of female beauty with respect to the 

small breasts that are placed too high, the long slender arms, the 

protruding belly. But how naively all this is done; he has neither the 

ability nor the slightest desire to titillate the senses.—Charm, 

however, is said to be the essential element of the Little Love Magic 

that is labeled “from the school of Jan van Eyck,”64 a room in 

which a girl, naked as is proper for magic, attempts to force the 

appearance of her beloved by sorcery (plate 45). Nudity is 

presented in this instance in that same unpretentious concupiscence 

that we encounter in the nude pictures by Cranach. 

It was not prudishness that so limited the role of depiction in 

eroticism. The late Middle Ages display a peculiar contrast between 

a strongly developed sense of modesty and a surprising lack of 

restraint. For the latter we need not cite any examples; it shows 

itself everywhere. The sense of modesty, on the other hand, can be 

seen, for example, in the fact that the victims in the worst scenes of 

murder or pillage are shown in their shirts or underwear. The 

Burgher of Paris is never so disgusted as when this rule is violated: 

“Et ne volut pas convoitise que on leur laissast neis leurs brayes, 

pour tant qu’ilz vaulsissent 4 deniers, qui estoit un des plus grans 

cruaultés et inhumanité chrestienne a aultre de quoy on peut 

parler.”65/©° In the report of the cruelty of the Bastard of Vauru66 

to a poor woman he is disgusted that the knavish villain cut her 

dress off slightly below the waist far more than he is about the 

cruelties inflicted upon the other victims.67—-Given the prevailing 

sense of modesty, it is even more remarkable that the female nude, 

still little used in art, was given such free reign in the tableau vivant. 

No entry procession lacked the presentation, personnages, of naked 

goddesses or nymphs, as those Dürer saw during Charles V’s entry 

into Antwerp in 152068 and who prompted Hans Makart’s 

erroneous assumption that the women had been part of the 

procession. The presentations were performed on small stages at 

certain locations, sometimes even in water, as for example, the 

sirens who swam by the bridge over the river Leie “toutes nues et 

échevelées ainsi comme on les peint,”*©! during the entry of Philip 

the Good into Ghent in 1457.69 The Judgment of Paris was the most 

popular subject of such performances.—They should be understood 

as nothing more than manifestations of a naive popular sensuality 

rather than of a Greek sense of beauty or of a trivial lack of 

modesty. Jean de Roye describes the sirens, placed not too far from 

the figure of the crucified one between the thieves, with the 

following words: “Et sy avoit encores trois bien belles filles, faisans 

personnages de seraines toutes nues, et leur veoit on le beau tetin 

droit, separé, rond et dur, qui estoit chose bien plaisant, et disoient 

de petiz motetz et bergeretes; et prés d’eulx jouoient plusieurs bas 

instrumens qui rendoient de grandes melodies.”70;2 Molinet 

reports with what delight the people viewed the Judgement of Paris 

during the 1494 entry of Philip the Beautiful into Antwerp: “mais le 

hourd ou les gens donnoient le plus affectueux regard fut sur 

l’histoire des trois déesses, qui l’on véoit au nud et de femmes 

vives.”71;63 Just consider how great is the distance from any pure 

sense of beauty that is shown in Lille in 1468 when the performance 

of that scene during the entry of Charles the Bold was parodied by a 

fat Venus, an emaciated Juno, a hunchbacked Minerva, all wearing 

golden crowns on their heads.72 The presentation of nudity 

remained the fashion until late in the sixteenth century. During the 

entry of the duke of Brittany into Reims in 1532, a naked Ceres with 

a Bacchus73 could be seen, and even William of Orange, on his 

entry into Brussels on September 18, 1578, was still treated to the 

sight of an Andromeda, “a maiden in chains, as naked as she was 

born from her Mother’s womb; she seemed a marble statue.” So 

comments Johan Baptista Houwaert, who had arranged the 

tableaux.74 

The backwardness of pictorial expression compared to literature 

is, incidentally, not limited to the comic, the sentimental, and the 

erotic. Pictorial expression reaches a limit whenever it is no longer 

supported by the predominantly visual orientation that we had been 

inclined to regard as the reason for the superiority of painting over 

literature in general. Whenever something more than a directly 

clear image of the natural world was needed, painting fails step by 

step and it becomes suddenly very evident how well founded 

Michelangelo’s charge was: this art seeks to depict many things 

simultaneously in perfection, while a single one of them would be 

important enough to devote all energies to it. 

Let us return to a painting by Jan van Eyck. His art is unsurpassed 

as long as it works close-up, microscopically, so to say: in the facial 

features, for example, or the material of the garments and the 

jewels. The absolutely keen observation suffices in these cases. But 

as soon as the perceived reality has to be made part of a different 

equation, so to speak, as is the case in the presentation of buildings 

and landscapes, one becomes aware of some weaknesses, in spite of 

the intrinsic charm exuded by the early perspective. For example, 

there can be a certain lack of cohesion, a somewhat deficient 

disposition. The more the depiction is conditioned by intentional 

composition, and the more a pictorial form has to be created in 

order to do justice to the particular subject matter of a painting, the 

more evident the failure becomes. 

No one will deny the claim that in the illustrated breviaries, the 

calendar pages are superior to those with depictions of stories from 

the Holy Scriptures. In the case of the former, direct perception and 

its narrative reproduction sufficed. But for the composition of an 

important action, or of a presentation with movement and many 

persons, a feeling for rhythmic construction and cohesion is 

required above all. Giotto had once possessed it and Michelangelo 

was to correctly handle it again. But the characteristic of the art of 

the fifteenth century was its many-faceted quality. Only where this 

many-faceted quality itself becomes cohesiveness is that effect of a 

high degree of harmony attained as in the Adoration of the Lamb. 

There we actually find rhythm, an incomparably strong rhythm, the 

triumphant rhythm of all those groups converging on the center. 

But this rhythm is, so to speak, derived from purely mathematical 

coordination, from the multifacetedness itself. Van Eyck avoids the 

difficulties of composition by depicting only scenes of strict 

quietude; he achieves a static but not a dynamic harmony. 

This, above all, marks the great distance between Rogier van der 

Weyden and Van Eyck. Rogier limits himself so that he may find 

rhythm; he does not always attain it, but he is always aspiring to it. 

There was an old, strict tradition of depiction with respect to the 

most important themes of the Holy Scripture. The painter was no 

longer required to find for himself the arrangement of his 

painting.75 Some of these sujets came close to a rhythmic structure 

of their own. In scenes like that of a pieta, a deposition, the 

adoration of the shepherds, rhythm comes naturally. Just recall 

such works as the Pietà by Rogier van der Weyden in Madrid, those 

of the Avignon school in the Louvre and in Brussels, those of Petrus 

Christus, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, the Belles heures d’Ailly.76 

But wherever the scene becomes livelier, such as the mockery of 

Christ, the carrying of the cross, the adoration of the Kings, 

difficulties of composition mount and a certain unrest, an 

insufficient cohesion of visual conception, results. In cases where 

the iconographic norms of the church leave the artist to his own 

devices, he finds himself in a rather helpless position. The judicial 

scenes to which Dirk Bouts and Gerard David still gave a certain 

ceremonial arrangement were already rather weak as far as 

composition is concerned. Composition becomes awkward and 

clumsy in the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus in Louvan, and in that of St. 

Hippolytus, who is quartered by horses, in Bruges, the flawed 

structure is positively repugnant. 

Whenever never before seen fantasies are to be depicted, the art 

of the fifteenth century veers into the ridiculous. Great painting was 

protected against this by its strict sujets; but the art of book 

illustration did not have the luxury of avoiding the depiction of all 

the mythological and allegorical fantasies made available by 

literature. The illustration of the Epitre d’Othéa à Hector,77 a detailed 

mythological fantasy probably by Christine de Pisan, provides a 

good example. Here we have the most awkward cases. The Greek 

gods have large wings attached to the backs of their ermine coats or 

Burgundian robes of state; the entire design as expression misses the 

mark: Minos; Saturn, who devours his children; Midas, who 

distributes the prizes, all are fashioned equally naively, yet 

whenever the illustrator was allowed to delight in the background 

with a small shepherd and his sheep, or a little hill with a gallows 

and a wheel, he displays his usual skill.78 But this is where the 

positive power of these artists has its limits. In the final analysis, 

they are just about as limited as the poets in their freely creative 

formative work. 

The imagination had been led into a dead-end street by 

allegorical presentation. An image cannot be freely fashioned 

because it has to completely comprise the thought, and the thought 

is restrained in its flight by the image. Imagination had become 

accustomed to transposing thought as soberly as possible, and 

without a sense of style, to the picture. Temperantia wears a 

clockwork on her head to indicate her nature. The illustrator of the 

Epitre d’Othéa simply uses a small wall clock for this purpose, which 

he also places on the wall of Philip the Good.79 If a keen and 

naturally observant mind like Chastellain paints allegorical figures 

from his own experience they turn out to be extraordinarily 

affected. For example, he envisions four ladies who accuse him in 

his Exposition sur vérité mal prise, which he wrote to justify himself 

in the wake of his daring political poem Le dit de Vérité.80 These 

ladies are called Indignation, Reprobation, Accusation, and 

Vindication. We cite his description of the second:81 

Ceste dame droit-cy se monstroit avoir les conditions seures, raisons 

moult agués et mordantes; grignoit les dens et machoit ses lévres: niquoit 

de la teste souvent; et monstrant signe d’estre arguéresse, sauteloit sur ses 

pieds et tournoit l’un costé puis çà l’autre costé puis là; portoit manière 

d’impatience et de contradiction: le droit oeil avoit clos et l’autre ouvert; 

avoit un sacq plein de livres devant lui, dont les uns mit en son escours 

comme chéris, les autres jetta au loin par despit; deschira papiers et 

feuilles; quayers jetta au loin par despit; deschira papiers et feuilles; 

quayers jetta au feu félonnement; rioit sur les uns et les baisoit, sur les 

autres cracha par vilennie et les foula des pieds; avoit une plume en sa 

main, pleine d’encre, de laquelle roioit maintes ecritures notables... 

d’une esponge aussy noircissoit aucunes ymages, autres esgratinoit aux 

ongles ... et les tierces rasoit toutes au net et les planoit comme pour les 

mettres hors de mémoire; et se monstroit dure et felle ennemie à 

beaucoup de gens de bien, plus volontairement que par raison. *64 

But in another passage he observes how Lady Paix spreads her coat, 

raises it into the air, and how the coat then divides into four other 

ladies: Paix de coeur, Paix de bouche, Paix de semblant, Paix de vrax 

effet.82t65 In yet another of his allegories, female figures appear 

called “Pesanteur de tes Pays, Diverse condition et qualité de tes 

divers peuples, L’envie et haine des Francois et des voisines 

nations,”+©° as if political editorials could be allegorized.s3 That all 

these figures were not envisioned, but invented, is demonstrated, on 

top of all this, by the fact that they display their names on 

banderoles; he does not fashion these figures directly from his living 

imagination, but presents them as in painting or a performance. 

In La mort du duc Philippe, mystére par maniére de lamentation he 

sees his duke as a flask filled with precious ointment that is 

suspended on a thread from the sky; the earth has nourished the 

flask on its breast.s4 Molinet sees how Christ as the pelican (a 

customary image) not only feeds his young with his blood but also 

washes the mirror of death with it.85 

The inspiration of beauty is lost here: a playful and false joke, an 

exhausted spirit awaits new fertilization. In the dream motif, 

consistently used as the framework of an action, we rarely sense 

genuine dream elements such as occur so movingly in Dante and 

Shakespeare. Not even the illusion that the poet has really 

experienced his conception as a vision is always maintained: 

Chastellain calls himself “l’inventeur ou le fantasieur de ceste 

vision. ”86*67 

On the barren field of allegorical depiction only mockery can 

grow new blossoms. As soon as an allegory is seasoned with humor, 

it still manages to produce a certain effect. Deschamps asks the 

physician how Virtues and Law are faring: 

Phisicien, comment fait Droit? 

—Sur m’ame, il est en petit point . . . 

—Que fait Raison? ... 

Perdu a son entendement, 

Elle parle mais faiblement, 

Et Justice est toute ydiote . . . 87168 

The different types of fantasy are scrambled together without any 

sense of style. There is no more bizarre product than a political 

pamphlet in the garb of the pastorale. The unknown poet, who calls 

himself Burarius, has in “Le pastoralet” described all the slander 

heaped by the Burgundians on the party of Orléans and has done it 

in the tone of a pastorale. He makes Orléans, John the Fearless, and 

their entire proud and grim entourage into gentle shepherds. The 

coats of the shepherds have either fleur-de-lis or lions rampant on 

them. There are “bergiers à long jupel.” These are the clergy.88 The 

shepherd, Tristifer-Orléans, takes bread and cheese away from the 

others, also their apples, nuts, and flutes; he takes the bells from the 

sheep. He threatens those who resist with his big shepherd’s staff 

until he himself is slain with one. Occasionally the poet almost 

forgets his somber theme and indulges in the sweetest pastorale 

only to interrupt this fantasy in a strange way with bitter political 

slander.89 

Molinet mixes all the motifs of faith, war, coats of arms, and love 

in a proclamation from the Creator to all true lovers: 

Nous Dieu d’amours, créateur, roy de gloire 

Salut à tous vrays amans d’humble affaire 

Comme il soit vray depuis la victoire 

De nostre filz sur le mont de Calvaire 

Plusieurs souldars par peu de congnoissance 

De noz armes, font au dyable allyance . . . “6° 

Then the proper coat of arms is described for them: a shield of 

silver, the upper part of gold with five wounds; the Church Militant 

is granted the right to recruit and take into service all those who 

want to rally to the arms: 

Mais qu’en pleurs et en larmes, 

De cueur contrict etfoy sans abuser.90170 

The devices employed by Molinet to gain the praise of his 

contemporaries as an inspired rhetorician and poet appear to us like 

the last degenerative stage of a form of expression shortly before its 

demise. He engages in the most tasteless wordplay: “Et ainsi 

demoura l’escluse en paix qui lui fut incluse, car la guerre fut d’elle 

excluse plus solitaire que rencluse. ”91::7! In the introduction to his 

moralized prose version of the Roman de la rose, he plays with his 

name Molinet: “Et affin que je ne perde le froment de ma labeur, et 

que la farine que en sera molue puisse avoir fleur salutaire, j’ay 

intencion, se Dieu m’en donne la grace, de tourner et convertir 

soubz mes rudes meulles le vicieux au vertueux, le corporel en 

Vespirituel, la mondanité en divinité, et souverainement de la 

moraliser. Et par ainsi nous tirerons le miel hors de la dure pierre, 

et las rose vermeille hors des poignans espines, où nous trouverons 

grain et graine, fruict, fleur et feuille, trés souefve odeur, odorant 

verdure, verdoyant fioriture, florissant norriture, nourrissant fruict 

et fructifiant pasture.”92*72 How much this looks like the end of an 

age—how threadbare and spent! But this is precisely what the 

contemporary admired as something new; medieval poetry actually 

didn’t know the play on words, it played more with images, as does 

Olivier de la Marche, who was Molinet’s kindred spirit and admirer: 

La prins fiévre de souvenance 

Et catherre de desplaisir, 

Une migraine de souffrance, 

Colicque d’une impascience, 

Mal de dens non a soustenir, 

Mon cueur ne porroit plus souffrir 

Les regretz de ma destinee 

Par douleur non accoustumée.9373 

Meschinot is just as much a slave to the feeble allegory as La 

Marche; the eyeglasses of his “Lunettes des princes” are Prudence 

and Justice; Force is the frame, Temperance the nail that holds 

everything together. Raison hands the poet the pair of glasses 

together with directions for their use. Sent by heaven, Raison enters 

his mind in order to hold a feast there, but finds everything spoiled 

by Despair, which leaves nothing there “pour disner bonne- 

ment.”944:74 

Everything seems degenerated and decayed. And yet, we have 

already entered an age when the new spirit of the Renaissance is at 

large in the land. Its great new inspiration, the pure new form— 

where do we find it? 

Chapter Fourteen 

THE COMING OF THE NEW FORM 

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RISING HUMANISM AND the dying 

spirit of the Middle Ages is much more complicated than we are 

inclined to imagine. To us, who see the two cultural complexes very 

sharply separated, it appears as if the receptiveness to the eternal 

youth of antiquity and the denial of the entire worn-out apparatus 

of the medieval expression of thought had come, like a sudden 

revelation, to everyone at once. As if the spirit, mortally tired of 

allegory and the flamboyant style, had suddenly understood: not 

this, but that! As if the golden harmony of classical antiquity had 

suddenly stood before their eyes like a long-awaited liberation, and 

as if they had embraced antiquity with the joy of someone who had 

finally found his salvation. 

But this was not the case. In the middle of the garden of medieval 

thought, between the luxuriantly growing old seeds, classicism grew 

gradually. At the beginning it is only a formal element of the 

imagination. Only later does it become a great new inspiration of 

the soul. And even then, the spirit and forms of expression that we 

are accustomed to regard as the old, medieval ones do not die on 

the vine. 

In order to recognize this more clearly, it would be useful to 

observe the approach of the Renaissance in greater detail than can 

be done here. This scrutiny should focus, not on Italy but on France, 

the country that had provided the most fertile soil for everything 

that comprised the splendid wealth of genuinely medieval culture. 

Viewing the Italian Quattrocento in its glorious contrast to late 

medieval life anywhere else, we gain an overall impression of 

balance, gaiety, and freedom, pure and sonorous. Taken together, 

these qualities are regarded to be the Renaissance, and perhaps 

taken for the signature of the new spirit. In the meantime, thanks to 

the unavoidable one-sidedness without which no historical 

judgment can be reached, it is forgotten that in the Italy of the 

Quattrocento, too, the firm foundation of cultural life still remained 

genuinely medieval, that in the minds of the Renaissance itself 

medieval features are much more deeply impressed than is 

generally realized. But in the general perception it is the tone of the 

Renaissance that dominates. 

However, a general look at the French-Burgundian world of the 

fifteenth century gives the primary impression of a fundamentally 

somber mood, a barbarian splendor, bizarre and overloaded forms, 

an imagination that had become threadbare—all the signs of the 

medieval spirit in its last gasps. In this instance it is easily forgotten 

that, here too, the Renaissance was approaching from all sides; but 

here it had not yet become dominant, and had not yet transformed 

the underlying groundtone. 

The remarkable thing in all this is that the new arrives as form 

before it really becomes a new spirit. 

The new classical forms arise in the middle of the old notions and 

relationships of life. Humanism got its start by nothing more 

dramatic than that a learned circle took more care than usual to 

observe a pure Latin and classical sentence structure. Such a circle 

flourished around 1400 in France; it was comprised of a few clerics 

and magistrates: Jean de Montreuil, canon of Lille and royal 

secretary; Nicolas de Clémanges, the famous literary leader; the 

reform-minded cleric Gontier Col; Ambrosius Miliis, princely private 

secretary (as was the first named).1 They write beautiful and proud 

humanist letters to one another, which are in no way inferior to 

later products of the genre, neither in the hollow generality of the 

thought, in the deliberate importance, in the forced structure of the 

sentences and the unclear expression, nor in the delight in learned 

play. Jean de Montreuil gets excited over the question whether 

“orreolum” and “schedula” were to be written with or without an 

“h” and over the use of “k” in Latin words. “If you do not come to 

my assistance, worthy teacher and brother,” he writes to 

Clémanges,2 “I will lose my good name and deserve death now that 

I have noticed that in my last letter to my Lord and Father, the 

Bishop of Cambray, overly hasty and casual as the pen is wont to 

be, I put in the place of the comparative case ‘proprior,’ the word 

‘proximore.’ Do correct it or our critics will write denunciatory 

tracts about it.”3 It is clear that these letters are designed to be 

learned literary exercises for the public. Also genuinely humanistic 

are his attacks on his friend Ambrosius, who had charged Cicero 

with self-contradiction and who had ranked Ovid above Virgil.4 

In one of his letters Montreuil provides a leisurely description of 

the cloister of Charlieu near Senlis. It is very noticeable how he 

suddenly becomes more readable as soon as he simply narrates, in 

medieval style, what can be seen there. How the sparrows in the 

refectory share the meal, so that one may entertain doubts whether 

the king had instituted the benefice for the monks or for the birds; 

how a little wren acts as if he were the abbot, how the donkey of 

the gardener asks the letter writer to keep him in mind in his 

epistle. All this sounds fresh and attractive, but not specifically 

humanist.5 But let us not forget that we had already met the same 

Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col as passionate defenders of the 

Roman de la rose and as members of the Cours d’amours of 1401. 

Does this not demonstrate how external an element of life this early 

humanism was? It is only a reinforced effect of medieval school 

erudition and is little different from the revival of the classical Latin 

tradition that can be observed in Alcuin and his fellow spirits during 

the time of Charlemagne and later in the French schools of the 

twelfth century. 

Though this first French humanism spends its force in the small 

circle of men who had nourished it without finding a direct 

successor, it is nonetheless already linked to the large international 

intellectual movement. Jean de Montreuil and his kindred spirits 

already see in Petrarch their shining model. They repeatedly 

mention Coluccio Salutati, the Florentine Chancellor who in the 

middle of the fourteenth century had introduced the new Latin 

rhetoric into the language of state documents.6 However, in France, 

Petrarch, if we may say so, is still embraced with the medieval 

spirit. He had been a personal friend of some of the leading minds 

of an earlier generation, the poet Philippe de Vitri; the philosopher 

and politician Nicolas Oresme, who had educated the dauphin 

(Charles V). Philippe de Méziéres also seems to have known 

Petrarch. These men are no humanists even though the ideas of 

Oresme contained much that is new. If it is true, as Paulin Paris7 

assumed, that Machaut’s Peronne d’Armentiéres was influenced in 

her desire for a poetic conduct of courtship not only by the example 

of Heloise, but also by Laura, Le voir-dit would constitute a 

remarkable testimony to the fact that a work in which we are prone 

to sense above all the arrival of modern ideas could, nonetheless, 

inspire a medieval work. 

But are we not, as a rule, already predisposed to see Petrarch and 

Boccaccio too exclusively from their modern side? We regard them 

as the first innovators and do so with justification. But it would be 

wrong to assume that, being the first humanists, they would 

actually no longer properly fit into the fourteenth century. Their 

entire work, no matter how much of a new breath may permeate it, 

stands on the culture of their age. Beyond that, it should be noted 

that Petrarch and Boccaccio were known outside of Italy during the 

waning Middle Ages not because of their vernacular writings, which 

were to make them immortal, but through their Latin works. 

Petrarch was, to his contemporaries, primarily an Erasmus avant la 

lettre, a many-talented and tasteful author of treatises about ethics 

and life, a great writer of letters, the romanticist of antiquity with 

his “Liber de viris illustribus” and “Rerum memorandum libri IV.” 

The subjects he dealt with, De contemptu mundiy De otio religiosorum, 

De vita solitaria, are completely in the tradition of medieval thought. 

His glorification of the heroes of antiquity is much closer to the 

veneration of the neuf preuxs than one might assume. It is far from 

peculiar that there were contacts between Petrarch and Geert 

Groote or that Jean de Varennes, the fanatic of Saint-Lié,9 invokes 

Petrarch’s authority to defend himself against suspicions of heresy10 

and that he borrows from Petrarch the text for a new prayer: “tota 

caeca christianitas.” How much Petrarch meant to his century is 

expressed by Jean de Montreuil in the following words: 

“devotissimus, catholicus ac celeberrimus philosophus moralis.”11 

Denis the Carthusian was still in a position to borrow from Petrarch 

a lament over that truly medieval idea, the loss of the Holy 

Sepulchre; “but since the style of Franciscus is rhetorical and 

difficult, I will cite the meaning of his words rather than their 

form.”12 

Petrarch had given particular impetus to those classic literary 

expressions of the first French humanists by his derisive statement 

that there were no rhetoricians and poets outside Italy. The bels 

esprits in France would not take this lying down. Nicolas de 

Clémanges and Jean de Montreuil raise a lively protest against such 

a claim.13 

Boccaccio’s influence was similar to that of Petrarch albeit in a 

more limited field. He was not venerated as the author of the 

Decameron but as “le docteur de patience en adversité,” the author 

of Libri de casibus virorum illustrium and De claris mulieribus. 

Boccaccio had staked out for himself the role of a kind of impresario 

of Fortuna with these strange collections of works about the 

vagrancies of human fate. Chastellain sees him in this light.14 He 

entitles a rather bizarre treatise about all sorts of tragic individual 

fates of his time Le Temple de Bocace, in which the spirit of the 

“noble historien” is evoked to console Margaret of England over her 

misfortune. The claim that Boccaccio was insufficiently or 

mistakenly seen by the still too medieval Burgundians is without 

merit. They grasped his strongly medieval side, which we run the 

risk of forgetting entirely. 

It is not so much a difference in effort or mood that distinguishes 

rising humanism in France from that in Italy, but rather a nuance in 

taste and erudition. The imitation of antiquity does not come as 

easily to the French as it does to those born under the skies of 

Tuscany or in the shadow of the Colosseum even though the learned 

authors early acquired a facile command of the classical-Latin style 

of letters. The secular authors are, however, still inexperienced in 

the fine points of mythology and history. Machaut, who was no 

scholar and has to be regarded as secular poet in spite of all his 

spiritual dignity, hopelessly confuses the names of the seven sages. 

Chastellain mistakes Pelleus with Pelias; La Marche, Proteus with 

Pirithous. The poet of the “Pastoralet” speaks of “le bon roy scypion 

d’afrique.”*! The authors of Le Jouvencel derive “politique” from 

rmOAUC and an allegedly Greek “icos, gardien,” “qui est a dire 

gardien de pluralité.”15}2 

Nonetheless, the classical vision does, time and again, break 

through their medieval allegorical form. A poet such as that of the 

ragged pastorale “Le pastoralet” suddenly bestows a hint of the 

splendor of the Quattrocento on his description of the god Silvanus 

and in a prayer to Pan only to return abruptly to the well traveled 

paths of the old ways.16 Just as Van Eyck sometimes presents the 

forms of classical architecture within his purely medieval 

compositions, authors attempt to incorporate still purely formal and 

ornamental classical features. The chroniclers test their strength 

with speeches on matters of state and war, contiones, in the style of 

Livy, or they mention wondrous signs, prodigia, because Livy did the 

same.17 The clumsier this application of classical forms, the more 

instructive the material for studying the transition from the Middle 

Ages to the Renaissance. The bishop of Châlons, Jean Germain, 

attempts to describe the peace conference at Arras in 1435 in the 

forceful marked style of the Romans. His intent is to attain a Livian 

effect by using short sentences and descriptions of vivid clarity. But 

the result is a caricature of ancient prose, just as bloated as it is 

naive, drawn like the little figures of a calendar page from a 

breviary, but failing in style.18 Antiquity is still seen in 

extraordinarily alien terms. On the occasion of the funeral services 

for Charles the Bold in Nancy, the young duke of Lorraine, who 

defeated him, appears dressed in mourning, “à l’antique,” to pay his 

last respects to the body of his enemy; that is, he wears a long 

golden beard stretching down to his belt. In this way he represents 

one of the nine preux and celebrates his own triumph. In this 

masquerade he prays for a quarter of an hour.19 

In the minds of the French around 1400, the terms rhétorique, 

orateur, poésie were congruous with the idea of antiquity. To them 

they meant the enviable perfection of antiquity, above all a form 

artfully elaborated. All these poets of the fifteenth century (a few 

even earlier), whenever they follow their feelings and actually have 

something to say, compose flowing, simple, frequently powerful, 

and occasionally tender poems. But if they intend these poems to be 

particularly beautiful, they draw on mythology, use pretentious 

Latinizing expressions and call themselves “Rhetoricien.” Christine 

de Pisan expressedly distinguishes a mythological poem from her 

usual work as “balade pouétique.”20 When Eustache Deschamps 

sends his works to his fellow artist and admirer Chaucer, he resorts 

to the most unpalatable, quasi-classical mishmash: 

O Socrates plains de philosophie, 

Seneque en meurs et Anglux en pratique, 

Ovides grans en ta poeterie, 

Bries en parler, saiges en rethorique 

Aigles tres haulz, qui par ta théorique 

Enlumines le regne d’Eneas. 

L'Isle aux Geans, ceuls de Bruth, et qui as 

Semé les fleurs et panté le rosier, 

Aux ignorans de la langue pandras, 

Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier! 

A toy pour ce de la fontaine Helye 

Requier avoir un buvraige autentique, 

Dont la doys est du tout en ta baillie. 

Pour rafrener d’elle ma soif ethique, 

Qui en Gaule seray paralitique 

Jusques a ce que tu m’abuveras.21*3 

Here we have the beginning of that maniére that was soon to 

evolve into the ridiculous Latinization of the noble French language 

on which Villon and Rabelais were to heap their scorn.22 This style 

is found over and over in poetic correspondence, in dedications and 

speeches, in short, whenever something is expected to be 

particularly beautiful. Chastellain speaks of “Vostre trés-humble et 

obéissante serve et ancelle, la ville de Gand,” “la viscéral intime 

douleur et tribulation”;}4 La Marche of “nostre francigéne locution 

et langue vernacule”;#° Molinet of “abreuvé de la doulce et 

melliflue liqueur procedant de la fontaine caballine,” “ce vertueux 

duc scipionique,” “gens de muliébre courage.”2386 

These ideals of a refined rhetorique are not only the ideals of a 

pure literary expression, they are at the same time the ideals of the 

highest literary communication. All of humanism, just as the poetry 

of the troubadours had been, is a social game, a kind of 

conversation, a striving for a higher form of life. Even the 

conversation of the learned men of the sixteenth and seventeenth 

centuries by no means denies this fact. In this respect, France 

occupies the middle ground between Italy and the Netherlands. In 

Italy, where language and thought still had the least distance 

between themselves and genuine, authentic antiquity, humanistic 

forms could readily be accepted into the highest life of the people. 

The Italian language can hardly be said to have been violated by a 

somewhat stronger Latinized form of expression. The humanist club 

spirit readily matched the customs of society. The Italian humanists 

represented the gradual development of Italian folk culture and, 

because of that, the first type of modern man. In the Burgundian 

regions, however, the spirit and form of society were still so 

medieval that the effort towards a renewed and purified expression 

could initially be embodied in perfectly old-fashioned form in the 

“Chambers of Rhetoricians.” As cooperatives they are but a 

continuation of the medieval brotherhood, and the spirit they 

emanate is, for the time being, new only with respect to the entirely 

external formal aspect. Modern culture is first inaugurated in them 

by the biblical humanism of Erasmus. 

France, with the exception of the northern provinces, does not 

know the old-fashioned apparatus of the “Chambers of 

Rhetoricians,” but its noble rhetoriciens do not yet resemble the 

Italian humanists either. They, too, still retain much of the spirit 

and form of the medieval age. It may be claimed without 

exaggeration, that the French authors and poets of the fifteenth 

century who best manage to steer clear of classicism are closer to 

the modern development of literature than those who pay homage 

to Latinism and oratorical form. The modern authors, such as 

Villon, Coquillart, Henri Baude, as well as Charles d'Orléans and the 

author of “L’amant rendu cordelier,” are those whose minds are 

unencumbered by all this, even if still dressed in medieval form. In 

poetry and prose, at least, the classicistic aspiration proves to have a 

retarding influence. The pompous spokesmen of the heavily draped 

Burgundian ideal, such as Chastellain, La Marche, Molinet, are the 

old-fashioned minds of French literature. But even they, once they 

manage to free themselves here and there from their artfully 

embellished ideal and compose or write as it comes from the heart 

and goes straight to the heart, without much ado, they become 

readable and, at the same time, appear to be more modern. 

A second-rate poet, Jean Robertet (1420-90), secretary to three 

dukes of Bourbon and three French kings, regarded Georges 

Chastellain, the Flemish Burgundian, as the peak of the most noble 

poetic art. This admiration gave rise to a literary correspondence 

that is offered here as an illustration of the above comments. To 

make the acquaintance of Chastellain, Robertet relied on the 

services of a certain Montferrant who lived in Bruges as governor of 

a young Bourbon who had been raised at the court of his uncle the 

duke of Burgundy. He sent to Montferrant, in addition to a 

bombastic hymn of praise for the aging court chronicler and poet, 

two letters addressed to Chastellain: one in French and one in Latin. 

When Chastellain did not immediately accept the proposal for a 

literary correspondence, Montferrant fashioned a laborious 

encouragement according to the old recipe: les Douze Dames de 

Rhétorique had appeared to him. They were called Science, 

Eloquence, Gravité de Sens, Profondité, etc. Chastellain succumbed to 

this temptation. The letters of the three are arranged around the 

Douze Dames de Rhétorique. 24 It was, however, not long before 

Chastellain had his fill and discontinued the exchange of letters. 

Robertet uses quasi-modern Latinism in its silliest form. He 

describes a cold: “J’ay esté en aucun temps en la case nostre en 

repos, durant une partie de la brumale froidure.”25*7 The 

hyperbolic expressions in which Robertet couches his admiration 

are just as simpleminded. After he had finally received his poetic 

letter from Chastellain (which, in fact, was much better than his 

own poetry), he wrote to Montferrant: 

Frappé en Voeil d’une clarté terrible 

Attaint au coeur d’éloquence incrédible, 

A humain sens difficile à produire, 

Tout offusquié de lumiére incendible 

Outre percant de ray presqu’impossible 

Sur obscur corps qui jamais ne peut luire, 

Ravi, abstrait me trouve en mon déduire, 

En extase corps gisant à la terre, 

Foible esperit perplex a voye enquerre 

Pour trouver lieu et oportune yssue 

Du pas estroit ott je suis mis en serre, 

Pris à la rets qu’amour vraye a tissue.+® 

And continues in prose: “Où est l’oeil capable de tel objet visible, 

Voreille pour ouyr le haut son argentin et tintinabule d’or?”*? And 

what, he asks of Montferrant, “amy des dieux immortels et chéri des 

hommes, haut pis Ulixien, plein de melliflue faconde,” about that? 

“N’est-ce resplendeur équale au curre Phoebus?”;!° “Is it not more 

than Orpheus’s lyre, la tube d’Amphion, la Mercuriale fleute qui 

endormyt Argus?”*+!! etc.26 

With this extreme display of bloated authorial humility, these 

three poets, adhering faithfully to the medieval prescription, keep 

step. But not these three alone; all their contemporaries still honor 

this form. La Marche hopes that there may be some use for his 

memoirs as modest flowers in a wreath, and compares his work to 

the ruminations of a stag. Molinet invites all “orateurs” to trim all 

that is superfluous from his work. Even Commines expresses the 

hope that the archbishop of Vienna to whom he sends his efforts 

may perhaps have occasion to include them in a Latin work.27 

The poetic correspondence between Robertet, Chastellain, and 

Montferrat demonstrates that the golden luster of the new classicism 

is only attached to a picture that is really medieval. And this 

Robertet, we should remind ourselves, has spent some time in Italy, 

“en Ytalie, sur qui les respections du ciel influent aorné parler, et 

vers qui tyrent toutes douceurs élémentaires pour la fondre 

harmonie.”28812 But he apparently did not bring home much of the 

harmony of the Quattrocento. To his mind, the excellence of Italy 

consisted only in the “aorné parler,” in the purely external 

cultivation of an artificial style. 

The only thing that renders this impression of delicately 

embellished antiquating dubious for a moment is a touch of irony 

that occasionally surfaces unmistakably amid the affected 

outpourings of the heart. Your Robertet, the ladies of rhetoric tell 

Montferrant,29—“il est exemple de Tullian art, et forme de subtilité 

Térencienne . . . qui succié a de nos seins notre plus intériore 

substance par faveur; qui, outre la grâce donnée en propre terroir, 

se est allé rendre en pays gourmant pour réfection nouvelle (that is, 

Italian), là ou enfans parlent en aubes à leurs mères, frians d’escole 

en doctrine sur permission de eage.”*!3 Chastellain terminated the 

correspondence because he was tired of it; the gate had long been 

open for Dame Vanité, he was now locking it. “Robertet m’a 

surfondu de sa nuée, et dont les perles, qui en celle se congréent 

comme grésil, me font resplendir mes vestements; mais qu’en est 

mieux au corps obscur dessoubs, lorsque ma robe decoit les 

voyans?”t14 If Robertet were to continue in this manner, 

Chastellain would throw them into the fire unread. In the event that 

he wants to speak unaffectedly, as is proper among friends, George 

would not withdraw his affection. 

The fact that under the classical gown still dwells a medieval 

mind is less obvious in cases where the humanist uses only Latin. In 

those cases the imperfect notion of the spirit of antiquity does not 

betray itself by a clumsy treatment; then the scholar can imitate 

without encumbrance and imitate quite effectively. A humanist such 

as Robert Gaguin (1433-1501) appears to us in his letters and 

speeches to be already almost as modern as Erasmus, who owed his 

early fame to him; it was Gaguin who published in his compendium 

of French history the first academic work of history in France 

(1495),30 a letter by Erasmus who thus came to see some of his 

writing in print for the first time. Even if Gaguin knew as little 

Greek as Petrarch,31 he is, for this reason, no less a genuine 

humanist. We see at the same time, however, how the old spirit still 

lives in him. He still uses his rhetorical skills in Latin for the old 

medieval subjects such as a diatribe against marriage32 or 

disapproval of life at court, by retranslating Alain Chartier’s Curial 

back into Latin. Or, in this instance in a French poem, he treats the 

social value of the estates in the frequently used form of a debate, 

“Le debat du laboureur, du prestre et du gendarme.” In his French 

poems, Gaguin, who had a perfect command of the Latin style, did 

not indulge in any of the rhetorical embellishments; there were no 

Latinized forms, no hyperbolic phrases, no mythology. As a French 

poet he stands squarely on the side of those who preserve in their 

medieval form their naturalness and, with it, their readability. For 

him, the humanist form is hardly anything other than a gown that 

he can casually don; it may fit him well, but he moves more freely 

without that splendiferousness. The Renaissance is only loosely tied 

to the French spirit of the fifteenth century. 

We are accustomed to regard the appearance of pagan-sounding 

expression as an unmistakable criterion for the beginning of the 

Renaissance. But every student of medieval literature knows that 

this literary paganism was by no means limited to the sphere of the 

Renaissance. When humanists call God “princips superum” and 

Mary “genetrix tonantis,” they do not commit a sacrilege. This 

purely external transposing of the persons of the Christian faith into 

the names of pagan mythology is very old33 and means little or 

nothing for the content of religious sentiment. The arch-poet of the 

twelfth century unconcernably rhymes in his confession: 

Vita vetus displicet, mores placent novi; 

Homo videt faciem, sed cor patet Iovi. *15 

When Deschamps speaks of “Jupiter venu de Paradis, “34716 he 

does not intend any godlessness; as little as does Villon in the 

touching ballade he made for his mother when, in order to pray, he 

calls Our Dear Lady “haulte Déesse.” 35417 

A certain heathen coloration also belongs to the pastorale; there it 

was safe to have the pagan deities appear. In “Le pastoralet,” the 

Celestine monastery in Paris is called “temple au haulz bois pour le 

diex prier.”36§18 But nobody was led astray by such innocent 

paganism. On top of all this, the poet also declared “se pour 

estrangier ma muse je parle des dieux des paiens, sy sont les 

pastours crestiens et moy.”37*!9 Molinet, too, shifts responsibility 

for having Mars and Minerva appear in a dream poem to “Raison et 

entendement,” who say to him: “Tu le dois faire non pas pour 

adjouter foy aux dieux et déesses, mais pour ce que Nostre Seigneur 

seul inspire les gens ainsi qu’il lui plaist, et souventes fois par divers 

inspirations.” 3820 

Much of the literary paganism of the fully developed Renaissance 

should not be taken more seriously than these expressions. 

However, if a feel for recognizing pagan faith as such, particularly 

pagan sacrifices, announces itself, it is of deeper significance for the 

advance of the new spirit. This sentiment may surface even among 

those as deeply rooted in the Middle Ages as Chastellain: 

Des dieux jadis les nations gentiles 

Quirent l’amour par humbles sacrifices, 

Lesquels, posé que ne fussent utiles. 

Furent nientmoins rendables et fertiles 

De maint grant fruit et de haulx bénéfices, 

Monstrans par fait que d’amour les offices 

Et d’honneur humble, impartis ou qu’ils soient 

Pour percer ciel et enfer suffisoient.39%21 

The sound of the Renaissance may suddenly ring out in the midst 

of medieval life. During a pas d’armes in Arras in 1446, Philippe de 

Ternant, contrary to the then prevailing custom, appears without a 

“bannerole de devocion,” a banner with a pious saying or figure. 

“Laquelle chose je ne prise point,”§22 comments La Marche on this 

infamy. But still more infamous is the motto worn by Ternant: “Je 

souhaite que avoir puisse de mes desirs assouvissance et jamais 

aultre bien n’eusse.”40*23 This could well have been the motto of 

the most free-thinking libertines of the sixteenth century. 

Individuals did not have to go to classic literature for a source for 

this real paganism. They could find it in their own medieval 

treasury, the Roman de la rose. The paganism was found in the 

erotic cultural forms. Here Venus and the God of Love had, for a 

long time, their hiding place where they received something more 

than purely rhetorical veneration. Jean de Meun embodies the great 

pagan. For innumerable readers since the thirteenth century, the 

school of paganism had not been his merging of the names of the 

gods of antiquity with those of Jesus and Mary, but the fact that he 

offered in a most daring fashion earthly lust permeated with the 

Christian notion of bliss. It is difficult to imagine a greater 

blasphemy than the words from Genesis: “Then the Lord regretted 

that he had made man on the earth,” put, with a reversed meaning, 

into the mouth of Mother Nature, who, in his poem, functions 

perfectly as a demiurge: Nature regretted having created human 

beings because they do not pay attention to the commandment to 

procreate: 

Si maist Diex li crucefis, 

Moult me repens dont homme fis41+2+ 

It is amazing that the church that was overzealously on guard 

against small dogmatic deviations of a speculative nature, and 

reacted to them with such vehemence, allowed the teaching of this 

breviary for the aristocracy to continue to grow luxuriously in the 

mind without putting any impediments in its way. 

The new form and the new spirit do not correspond to each other. 

Just as the thoughts of the coming age were expressed in a medieval 

garb, the most medieval ideas were presented in sapphic meters 

with a whole train of mythological figures. Classicism and the 

modern spirit are two entirely different entities. Literary classicism 

is a child born aged. Antiquity hardly held more significance for the 

renewal of la belle littérature than the arrows of Philotectes. The case 

is entirely different in the fine arts and scientific thinking: for both, 

antique purity of presentation and expression, antique multifaceted 

interests, antique control of one’s own life and insight into man, 

meant much more than a mere crutch on which to lean. In the fine 

arts, the overcoming of superfluity, exaggeration, twistedness, of the 

grimace and of the flamboyantly curved, was all the work of 

antiquity. In the domain of thought, it was still more indispensable 

and fertile. But in the literary domain classicism was more an 

impediment than a prerequsite to an unfolding simplicity and 

harmony. 

Those few in the France of the fifteenth century who adopt 

humanistic forms do not yet ring in the Renaissance because their 

sentiments and orientation are still medieval. The Renaissance only 

arrives when the “tone of life” is changing, when the ebb tide of the 

deadly denial of life has given way to a new flood and a stiff, fresh 

breeze is blowing; it arrives only when the joyful insight (or was it 

an illusion?) has ripened that all the glories of the ancient world, of 

which for so long men had seen themselves the reflection, could be 

reclaimed.