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JOHAN HUIZINGA
Translated by
RODNEY J. PAYTON AND ULRICH MAMMITZSCH
JOHAN HUIZINGA, born in 1872, became professor of history at the
University of Leiden in 1915 and taught there until 1942, when the Nazis
closed the university and held him hostage until shortly before his death in
1945. His other books include Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, Homo
Ludens: À Study of the Play Element in Culture, and Men and Ideas: History, the
Middle Ages, the Renaissance.
RODNEY PAYTON is professor of Liberal Studies at Western Washington
University. He is the author of A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s Inferno.
ULRICH MAMMITZSCH (d. 1990) was professor of Liberal Studies at
Western Washington University. He is the author of Evolution of the
Garbhadhatu Mandala and the translator of Dietrich Seckel’s The Buddhist
Art of East Asia.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
© 1996 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1996
Paperback edition 1996.
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 0 3 02 34567
ISBN 0-226-35992-1 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-226-35994-8
ISBN 978-0-226-76768-0 (ebook)
This translation is based on the 1921 edition of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huizinga, Johan, 1872-1945.
[Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. English]
The autumn of the Middle Ages /Johan Huizinga ; translated by
Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. France—Civilization—1328-1600. 2. Netherlands—Civilization. 3.
Civilization, Medieval. I. Title.
DC33.2.H83 1996
944’025—dc20
95-613
CIP
& The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
JOHAN HUIZINGA
THE AUTUMN OF THE MIDDLE
AGES
Translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
PLÆ VXORIS ANIMÆ
M. V. H. - S.
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
PREFACE TO THE DUTCH EDITION
PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION
Chapter One: THE PASSIONATE INTENSITY OF LIFE
Chapter Two: THE CRAVING FOR A MORE BEAUTIFUL LIFE
Chapter Three: THE HEROIC DREAM
Chapter Four: THE FORMS OF LOVE
Chapter Five: THE VISION OF DEATH
Chapter Six: THE DEPICTION OF THE SACRED
Chapter Seven: THE PIOUS PERSONALITY
Chapter Eight: RELIGIOUS EXCITATION AND RELIGIOUS FANTASY
Chapter Nine: THE DECLINE OF SYMBOLISM
Chapter Ten: THE FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
Chapter Eleven: THE FORMS OF THOUGHT IN PRACTICE
Chapter Twelve: ART IN LIFE
Chapter Thirteen: IMAGE AND WORD
Chapter Fourteen: THE COMING OF THE NEW FORM
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
THE IDEA OF THIS TRANSLATION HAD ITS MOMENT of
conception in Karl J. Weintraub’s class in History of Culture at the
University of Chicago (now more than twenty years ago) when
Weintraub commented, with some heat, on the deficiencies of the
English translation of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen that we students
were using when it was compared to the elegance of the Dutch
edition he had on the lectern. The tiny margins of my crumbling
paperback are filled with all my efforts to get down the corrections.
When I began my own teaching of Huizinga’s text, which I had
come to treasure, those illegible notes suggested that what I was
professing fell far short and an examination of the original showed
me that Weintraub’s observations were justified. Yet, in spite of the
shortcomings of the translation, my students always responded well
to Huizinga. Later Professor Weintraub commented to me that it
was an indication of the power of its subject and style that
Huizinga’s book commonly captivated readers in spite of the “very
inferior, crippled version”1 in which it appeared in English.
Therefore when my colleague Ulrich Mammitzsch, now deceased,
and I agreed to attempt a new translation there was a certain feeling
of being the rescuers of something fine that had been corrupted and
undervalued. However, this feeling was somewhat challenged by
the fact that Huizinga not only authorized the English translation,
but also apparently collaborated with Fritz Hopman in producing it
as a variant version of the book. He specifically approved the results
in the preface he wrote for the translation.
This English edition is not a simple translation of the original Dutch
(second edition 1921, first 1919), but the result of a work of adaptation,
reduction and consolidation under the author’s direction. The references,
here left out, may be found in full in the original... .
The author wishes to express his sincere thanks to. . . Mr. F. Hopman,
of Leiden, whose clear insight into the exigencies of translation rendered
the recasting possible, and whose endless patience with the wishes of an
exacting author made the difficult task a work of friendly cooperation. 2
Even given this endorsement by the author, I think that any
studious reader of both the Dutch (or the very accurate German
translation) and the English would conclude that the original is a
much better book. The original is nearly one-third longer and has
many more citations of original material. In the Hopman
translation, blocks of text are inexplicably moved around, and
sometimes Hopman’s usually good English fails him as when he
translates “mystiek en détail” as “mysticism by retail.” It seems that
Huizinga ultimately must have thought the original better, as none
of the “adaptation, reduction and consolidation” found its way into
subsequent Dutch printings or foreign translations of the book with
the exception of the revised arrangement of chapters.
The route by which Huizinga arrived at the Hopman translation
can be traced in the Briefwisseling (Correspondence), if not, entirely,
his motivation for taking it.3 Huizinga had begun negotiations with
the French publisher Edouard Champion of Paris, who preferred a
shortened version of the book and without the references. This
project fell through, owing to disagreements over the rights of
publication of the French edition in Holland in 1923 (letter 457),
and Huizinga was left with the condensed, but unpublished, French
manuscript. (An accurate French edition was eventually published
by the firm of Payot in 1932, in a translation by Julia Bastin [letter
559].) In 1923, Huizinga was also negotiating with Edward Arnold
and Company about an English edition, and, owing to the fact that
Arnold had no one in their office who could read Dutch, they
reviewed it in the condensed French version. Sir Rennell Rodd, a
diplomat, poet, and historian, and Arnold’s reviewer, thought the
original form of the book would sell only to scholars and preferred
it in its French form, which he thought might have a popular
audience (letter 462) and, although Huizinga protested, he did not
do so very strongly (letter 466). An abridgment on the lines of the
French manuscript was ultimately ageed upon (letters 472 and 477)
and the Hopman version, called The Waning of the Middle Ages, is
the result.
All this was taking place while the final arrangements for the
German edition were being set. The German edition is precise in all
particulars, but the fourteen original Dutch chapters are broken up
into twenty-three, which are more even in length. This was
Huizinga’s own idea, evidently incorporated in the unpublished
French translation and eventually carried forward in the English as
well (letter 470).
Thus Huizinga clearly preferred a complete translation of Herfsttij,
although he did think the chapter divisions could be improved. His
quarrel with Champion over distribution rights, however, suggests
that remuneration was an important issue, as he raised practically
no objections to the condensation ultimately produced by Hopman
for Arnold and Company. It is possible, too, given that the prospect
of a wide market for the book might have had something to do with
his thinking, that in obtaining an English edition Huizinga was also
looking forward to the American market. Huizinga wrote two books
about America, both gently critical.4 Like his contemporary Freud,
Huizinga thought American life suffered from its lack of social
forms; he considered Americans to be materialistic and far, far too
hasty in the pursuit of their affairs. He invented a motto for
America, “This Here, and Soon,” to characterize this haste, which,
he thought, all too often, led to superficiality. Perhaps this
perception caused him to believe that a simplified and less allusive
Autumn might succeed best in the American market. The fourteen
uneven Dutch chapters became the twenty-three short chapters as in
the German edition, much more suitable for daily classroom
assignments and for a people with a short attention span. The work
of preparing the English translation was given to Fritz Hopman, a
student of English literature and journalist, who at one time was
chairman of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (Dutch
Literature Society). He was in financial difficulties in 1924, and
Huizinga was probably glad to be able to provide him with work.5
F. W. N. Hugenholtz’s study of the history of the text, The Fame of
a Masterwork,6 shows that the first recognition of the book’s
importance came, not from Huizinga’s Dutch colleagues, but in
German reviews. The Dutch were inclined to consider The Autumn of
the Middle Ages7 far too literary for serious history and mistakenly
thought its approach to be old-fashioned rather than realizing that it
was truly a revolutionary innovation. Autumn was Huizinga’s first
major work published after he became professor of history at
Leiden, and Leiden was not at that time Holland’s “first” university,
nor was Huizinga the most famous professor of history. Defensive,
in the face of native criticism of the work he might, indeed, have
considered the English translation a step to a further revision (the
second Dutch edition had appeared in 1921, the Hopman
translation came out in 1924). It seems to me, that much of what is
left out of the Hopman version are elements which contribute to the
“literary,” that is to say aesthetic character of the book and this
might be a direct response to his Dutch critics.
There is another possible reason for the truncated English version.
Probably anyone who reads Autumn will notice that it reveals a
great deal of the private side of Huizinga himself. In it, the reader
sees not only Huizinga’s opinions and strong convictions, but
glimpses his passions and, I think, his spiritual side as well. Perhaps
he realized this and the drawing back so apparent in the original
English is an instinctive reaction that he also exhibited in other
circumstances.
In his brief autobiography written at the very end of his lifes
Huizinga reveals that he consistently hid his true self even from his
colleagues and students. “It is not false modesty when I say that,
though I have been known as an early riser since childhood, I never
rose quite as early as people believed.” The relationship of his work
to his private self was frequently misjudged by others. Huizinga
almost seems pleased at their confusion.
Regarding my biography of Erasmus, many people have expressed the
view that here was a man after my own heart. As far as I can tell, nothing
could be farther from the truth for, much though I admire Erasmus, he
inspires me with little sympathy and, as soon as the work was done, I did
my best to put him out of my mind. I remember a conversation in
January 1932 with a German colleague who contended that Erasmus was
much more my line of country than the Waning of the Middle Ages with
which, he claimed, I must have struggled manfully. I thought about the
matter for a moment and then I had to smile. In fact, my historical and
literary studies never struck me as partaking of the nature of struggle in
any way, nor any of my work as a great challenge. Indeed, the whole
idea of having to overcome enormous obstacles was as alien to me as
having to compete in a race, as alien as the spirit of competition whose
importance in cultural life I myself have emphasized in my Homo Ludens.
When he finds himself on the edge of a deep personal revelation,
Huizinga goes so far, and no further.
. . . In September 1899, I was granted two weeks’ extra leave,
immediately after beginning of term, to attend the Congress of
Orientalists in Rome. I went there with J. P. Vogel, who intended to go
on to India, and with André Jolles with whom I had started a close
friendship in the autumn of 1896. This friendship was to play a large part
in my life for more than 35 years, until 9th October 1933 when it was
abruptly cut short—and not by me. I could write a whole book on my
relation with Jolles, so full is my mind of him and despite all that has
happened—my heart as well.
Huizinga’s later works do not reveal the personality of the author
as much as Autumn does. A prominent sense of the author only
again becomes apparent in his great moral essay of the thirties, In
the Shadow of Tomorrow.9
Given Huizinga’s importance to historiography, the fact that the
English translation is a variant text has not been given enough
attention. With the single exception of Weintraub, no one, to my
knowledge, has pointed out the critical importance of that fact, even
though the introduction might have served as a warning to a
professionally critical discipline. Is it possible that English-speaking
historians have been discussing this book with their foreign
colleagues without realizing that they were reading a significantly
different text? If this is so, it is a primary justification for the
present translation.
Hopman’s work does have the virtue of being graceful. He did
have an excellent grasp of English vocabulary, and his rendition is
sometimes lovely, but it is not literal and sometimes something
more than a literal quality is missing. It is not proper for a
translator in the second place to judge too harshly the work of a
predecessor, but a reader deserves some indication why one
translation should be preferred over another. The most glaring
changes in the Hopman from the Dutch second edition are the many
omissions of examples drawn from the (in most instances) medieval
French sources that Huizinga cites in the original language
(although there are a few instances where Hopman includes
examples not in the Dutch edition). The present translators felt that
the original divisions of the text much more clearly reflected the
organization of Huizinga’s argument in spite of their rather uneven
lengths and Huizinga’s second thoughts about the matter. Finally,
the Hopman translation omits, as its introduction points out, the
documentation. These alterations are restored in this translation.
Much more serious issues are those alterations by Hopman that
tend to distort Huizinga’s meaning. Hopman is sometimes prone to
pull Huizinga’s punches. For instance, one of the most significant
elements in Autumn is its assertions about the proper use of sources,
an issue addressed several times. Here is a representative passage in
this translation:
Daily life offered unlimited range for acts of flaming passion and childish
imagination. Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as
possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable fall
thereby victim to an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us
little about the difference in tone that separates us from those times; they
let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life. Of all the passions
permeating medieval life with their color, only two are mentioned, as a
rule by legal documents: greed and quarrelsomeness. Who has not
frequently wondered about the nearly incredible violence and
stubbornness with which greed, pugnacity, or vindictiveness rise to
prominence in the court documents of that period! It is only in the
general context of the passions which inflame every sphere of life that
these tensions become acceptable and intelligible to us. This is why the
authors of the chronicles, no matter how superficial they may be with
respect to the actual facts and no matter how often they may err in
reporting them, are indispensable if we want to understand that age
correctly.
And here is the same passage in Hopman:
A scientific historian of the Middle Ages, relying first and foremost on
official documents, which rarely refer to the passions, except violence
and cupidity, occasionally runs the risk of neglecting the difference of
tone between the life of the expiring Middle Ages and that of our own
days. Such documents would sometimes make us forget the vehement
pathos of medieval life, of which the chroniclers, however defective as to
material facts, always keep us in mind.
Not only has Hopman made a strong statement weak, his version
misses the nuance of just how passionate Huizinga was about the
passions of the Middle Ages.
Similar distortions frequently occur. Here is Hopman’s translation
of a passage about the profane interest in such things as Mary’s
marital relationship with Joseph:
This familiarity with sacred things is, on the one hand, a sign of deep and
ingenuous faith; on the other, it entails irreverence whenever mental
contact with the infinite fails. Curiosity, ingenuous though it be, leads to
profanation.
Here is this translation:
This fatuous familiarity with God in daily life has to be seen in two ways.
On the one hand it testifies to the absolute stability and immediacy of
faith, but where this familiarity becomes habitual, it increases the danger
that the godless (who are always with us), but also the pious, in moments
of insufficient religious tension, continuously profane faith more or less
consciously and intentionally.
For the student interested in historiography itself, perhaps the
omissions of theoretical statements are the most serious. In the
famous discussion of the three routes to the beautiful life in the
second chapter, Hopman omits this statement of serious interest to
anyone concerned with Huizinga’s definitions of culture and
civilization and with the movement of his thinking towards the
theoretical statement of Homo Ludens,10 which defines the role of
play in culture.
The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes much more
between the Renaissance and the Modern Period than between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout occurs at the point
where art and life begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be
no longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life itself, but
outside of life as something to be highly venerated, as something to turn
to in moments of edification or rest. The old dualism separating God and
world has thus returned in another form, that of the separation of art and
life. Now a line has been drawn right through the enjoyments offered by
life. Henceforth they are separated into two halves—one lower, one
higher. For medieval man they were all sinful without exception; now
they are all considered permissible, but their ethical evaluation differs
according to their greater or lesser degree of spirituality.
The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are,
now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature,
sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices,
gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses. For the majority, the
border between the higher and lower levels seems now to be located
between the enjoyment of nature and sports. But this border is not firm.
Most likely sport will sooner or later again be counted among the higher
enjoyments—at least insofar as it is the art of physical strength and
courage. For medieval man the border lay, in the best of cases, right after
reading; the enjoyment of reading could only be sanctified through
striving for virtue or wisdom. For music and the fine arts, it was their
service to faith alone which was recognized as being good. Enjoyment per
se was sinful. The Renaissance had managed to free itself from the
rejection of all the joy of life as something sinful, but had not yet found a
new way of separating the higher and lower enjoyments of life; the
Renaissance wanted an unencumbered enjoyment of all of life. The new
distinction is the result of the compromise between the Renaissance and
Puritanism that is at the base of modern spiritual attitudes. It amounted
to a mutual capitulation in which the one side insisted on saving beauty
while the other insisted on the condemnation of sin. Strict Puritanism,
just as did the Middle Ages, still condemned as basically sinful and
worldly the entire sphere of the beautification of life with an exception
being made in cases where such efforts assumed expressly religious forms
and sanctified themselves through their use in the service of faith. Only
after the Puritan worldview lost its intensity did the Renaissance
receptiveness to all the joys of life gain ground again; perhaps even more
ground than before because, beginning with the eighteenth century there
is a tendency to regard the natural per se an element of the ethically
good. Anyone attempting to draw the dividing line between the higher
and lower enjoyment of life according to the dictates of ethical
consciousness would no longer separate art from sensuous enjoyment, the
enjoyment of nature from the cult of the body, the elevated from the
natural, but would only separate egotism, lies, and vanity from purity.
There are many such issues to which we could point, not in the
spirit of demeaning a translation that has served Huizinga well, but
in the sense that having done its work and brought the importance
of the mind of Huizinga to the attention of the English-speaking
world, it is now obsolete and a more critical and deeper look at
Huizinga requires access to a version of the work closer to that
known by the rest of the world.
This translation was made from the second Dutch edition of 1921.
Seen from the vantage point of the second edition, the first has a
tentative character that Huizinga eliminated in his revision.
Huizinga made further minor revisions in later editions, but the
second represents his thinking at its most seminal stage. We
compared our work carefully with the German translation of 1924,
which, Huizinga notes, follows the second Dutch edition exactly.
We have included not only the preface to the Dutch edition, but also
the preface that Huizinga wrote for the German translation, for the
insight it gives into the title and its comment on the question of
translation itself. We have restored the documentation and added a
few translators’ notes to clarify Huizinga’s references to things that
might be common knowledge or self-evident to a Dutch reader but
not necessarily so to others. This version also includes translations
of the citations that Huizinga makes in the original languages. Such
translations have become customary in later editions, although they
do not appear in the Dutch original we followed. Our translations
follow Hopman, but we have made several alterations according to
our own judgment.
Ulrich Mammitzsch, my colleague and co-translator, was a noted
specialist in Buddhist art and literature, but his formidable erudition
extended to great works of all cultures and he was as pleased to
discuss Schiller as he was his beloved mandalas. He felt a special
affinity for Huizinga, who began his academic life as a student of
Eastern culture, and who had a love of literature much like Ulrich’s.
Mostly, however, Ulrich’s dedication to Huizinga was because they
were alike in their high-mindedness. As Ulrich Mammitzsch fled the
East Zone, not because of political theory, but because he found the
Communists to be unethical, so Johan Huizinga was brought to
denounce the Nazis from the first principles of civilized behavior.
The two minds spoke to one another directly and I will never forget
Ulrich’s excitement as we read Huizinga’s description of the tension
in the life of medieval common people, strung between the church
and the nobility—a tension which, Ulrich exclaimed, he had seen
the last of as a child in rural Germany before the war. He read the
book from the inside, so to speak, and I would like to attribute
whatever virtues this translation has to his insightful sensitivity.
RODNEY J. PAYTON
PREFACE TO THE FIRST AND SECOND DUTCH
EDITIONS
IN MOST INSTANCES IT IS THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW that attracts
the attention of the mind to the past. We want to know how the
new ideas and the forms of life that shine in their fullness during
later times came to be. We view past ages primarily in terms of the
promise they hold for those that follow. How eagerly the Middle
Ages have been scrutinized for evidence of the first sprouts of
modern culture, so eagerly that it sometimes must appear as if the
intellectual history of the Middle Ages was nothing but the advent
of the Renaissance. Did we not see everywhere in this age, which
was once regarded as rigid and dead, new growths that all seemed
to point to future perfection? Yet in our search for newly arising life
it is easily forgotten that in history, as in nature, the processes of
death and birth are eternally in step with one another. Old forms of
thought die out while, at the same time and on the same soil, a new
crop begins to bloom.
This book is an attempt to view the time around the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, not as announcing the Renaissance, but as
the end of the Middle Ages, as the age of medieval thought in its
last phase of life, as a tree with overripe fruits, fully unfolded and
developed. The luxuriant growth of old compelling forms over the
living core of thought, the drying and rigidifying of a previously
valid store of thought: this is the main content of the following
pages. In writing this text, my eye was trained on the depth of the
evening sky, a sky steeped blood red, desolate with threatening
leaden clouds, full of the false glow of copper. Looking back at what
I have written, the question arises whether, if my eye had dwelt still
longer on the evening sky, the turbid colors may yet have dissolved
into utter clarity. It also seems quite possible that the image, now
that I have given it contours and colors, may yet have become more
gloomy and less serene than I had perceived it when I started my
labors. It can easily happen to one who has his vision trained
downward that what he perceives becomes too decrepit and wilted,
that too much of the shadow of death has been allowed to fall upon
his work.
The point of departure for this work was the attempt to better
understand the work of the van Eycks and that of their successors
and to understand it within the context of the entire life of that age.
The Burgundian community was the frame of reference that I had in
mind: it seemed possible to view this community as a civilization in
its own right, just like the Italian community of the fourteenth
century; the title of the work was first set as The Century of
Burgundy. But as the scope of this civilization was viewed in a wider
perspective, certain limitations had to be abandoned. Just to retain
the notion of a postulated unity of Burgundian culture meant that
non-Burgundian France had to be given at least as much attention.
Thus the place of Burgundy was taken by the dual entities of France
and the Netherlands and that in a very different way. While in
viewing the dying medieval culture the Dutch element lags behind
the French, there are areas where that element has its own
significance: in the life of piety and that of art. These are given the
opportunity to speak in greater detail.
There is no need to defend the crossing of the fixed geographic
boundaries in the tenth chapter so as to call on, next to Ruusbroec
and Denis the Carthusian, on Eckhardt, Suso, and Tauler as
witnesses. How little my story is justified by the writings I have
studied from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries compared to all
those I wanted to read. How much I would have liked to place, next
to the evolution of the main types of the different intellectual
traditions on which some of the notions of these figures are often
based, yet still others. But if I relied among the historiographers on
Froissart and Chastellain more than on others, among the poets on
Eustache Deschamps, among the theologians on Jean de Gerson and
Denis the Carthusian, among the painters on Jan van Eyck—-so is
this not only the result of the limitation of my material, but even
more so the result of the richness of their works and the singularly
keen way in which their expressions are the preeminent mirror of
the spirit of their age.
It is the forms of life and thought that are used as evidence here.
To capture the essential content that rests in the form: is this not the
proper task of historical study?
PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION
THE NEED TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE ART OF THE van Eyck
brothers and that of their successors and to view these artists in the
context of the life of their time provided the first impetus for this
book. But a different, in many respects more comprehensive image
emerged during the course of the investigation. It became evident
that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France and in the
Netherlands in particular are much more suited to give us a sense of
the end of the Middle Ages and of the last manifestation of medieval
culture than they are to demonstrate to us the awakening
Renaissance.
Our minds prefer to concern themselves with “origins” and
“beginnings.” In most instances the promise that ties one age to its
successor appears to be more important than the memories that link
it to its predecessor. As a result, the search to find the first sprouts
of modern culture in medieval culture was carried out so eagerly
and to the point that the term medieval period itself came to be
questioned and it appeared as if this epoch was barely something
other than the age that ushered in the Renaissance. But dying and
becoming keep just as much pace with each other in history as in
nature. To trace the vanishing of overripe cultural forms is not less
significant—and by no means less fascinating—than to trace the
arising of new forms. We do more justice, not only to artists like the
van Eycks, but also to [poets such as] Eustache Deschamps,
historiographers such as Froissart and Chastellain, theologians such
as Jean de Gerson and Denis the Carthusian, and to all
representatives of the spirit of this age if we view them not as
initiating and heralding what is to come, but rather as completing
the forms of an age in its final stage.
The author was, at the time he wrote this book, less aware than
now of the danger of comparing historical periods to the seasons of
the year; he asks therefore that the title of the book be taken only as
a figure of speech that is intended to capture the general mood of
the whole.
The translation follows exactly the second revised Dutch edition
of 1921 (the first appeared in 1919). If the German tongue still
tastes in places the flavor of the Dutch original, we should remind
ourselves that a translation in the strict sense of the word is an
impossibility even in so closely related languages such as German
and Dutch. Why should we be so eager to obliterate fearfully the
traces of what is foreign in that which is of foreign origin?
Many have supported this work of translation in a valuable way.
We owe a debt of gratitude, next to the translator, primarily to our
friends Prof. André Jolles (Leipzig), Prof. W. Vogelsang (Utrecht),
and Paul Lehman (Munich). My sincere expression of thanks for his
valuable contribution to this work go to Prof. Eugene Lerch, who
took it upon himself to translate the French quotations found in the
appended section.
Leiden
November 1923
Chapter One
THE PASSIONATE INTENSITY OF LIFE1
WHEN THE WORLD WAS HALF A THOUSAND YEARS younger all
events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between
sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much
greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness
and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a
child. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive
forms and was in accord with the solemnity of a tight, invariable
life style. The great events of human life—birth, marriage, death—
by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine
mystery. But even the lesser events—a journey, labor, a visit—were
accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and
conventions.
There was less relief available for misfortune and for sickness;
they came in a more fearful and more painful way. Sickness
contrasted more strongly with health. The cutting cold and the
dreaded darkness of winter were more concrete evils. Honor and
wealth were enjoyed more fervently and greedily because they
contrasted still more than now with lamentable poverty. A fur-lined
robe of office, a bright fire in the oven, drink and jest, and a soft
bed still possessed that high value for enjoyment that perhaps the
English novel, in describing the joy of life, has affirmed over the
longest period of time. In short, all things in life had about them
something glitteringly and cruelly public. The lepers, shaking their
rattles and holding processions, put their deformities openly on
display. Every estate, order, and craft could be recognized by its
dress. The notables, never appearing without the ostentatious
display of their weapons and liveried servants, inspired awe and
envy. The administration of justice, the sales of goods, weddings
and funerals—all announced themselves through processions,
shouts, lamentations and music. The lover carried the emblem of his
lady, the member the insignia of his fraternity, the party the colors
and coat of arms of its lord.
In their external appearance, too, town and countryside displayed
the same contrast and color. The city did not dissipate, as do our
cities, into carelessly fashioned, ugly factories and monotonous
country homes, but, enclosed by its walls, presented a completely
rounded picture that included its innumerable protruding towers.
No matter how high and weighty the stone houses of the noblemen
or merchants may have been, churches with their proudly rising
masses of stone, dominated the city silhouettes.
Just as the contrast between summer and winter was stronger
then than in our present lives, so was the difference between light
and dark, quiet and noise. The modern city hardly knows pure
darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a
single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.
From the continuing contrast, from the colorful forms with which
every phenomenon forced itself on the mind, daily life received the
kind of impulses and passionate suggestions that is revealed in the
vacillating moods of unrefined exuberance, sudden cruelty, and
tender emotions between which the life of the medieval city was
suspended.
But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no
matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused with
other noises, and, for a moment, lifted everything into an ordered
sphere: that of the bells. The bells acted in daily life like concerned
good spirits who, with their familiar voices, proclaimed sadness or
joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation. People knew them by
familiar names: Fat Jacqueline, Bell Roelant; everyone knew their
individual tones and instantly recognized their meaning. People
never became indifferent to these sounds, no matter how overused
they were. During the notorious duel between two burghers of
Valenciennes in 1455 that kept the city and the entire court of
Burgundy in extraordinary suspense, the great bell sounded as long
as the fight lasted, “laquelle fait hideux a oyr”*11 says Chastellain, 2
“Sonner l’effroy,” “faire l’effroy “was what the ringing of the alarm
bell was called.3 How deafening the sound must have been when
the bells of all the churches and cloisters of Paris pealed all day, or
even all night, because a pope had been elected who was to end the
schism or because peace had been arranged between Burgundy and
Armagnac.4
Processions must have also been deeply moving. During sad times
—and these came often—they could occasionally take place day
after day even for weeks on end. In 1412, when the fatal conflict
between the houses of Orléans and Burgundy had finally led to open
civil war, King Charles VI seized the oriflamme so that he and John
the Fearless could fight against the Armagnacs, who, by virtue of
their alliance with England, had become traitors to their country.
Daily processions were ordered to be held in Paris as long as the
king was on foreign soil. They continued from the end of May into
July and involved ever different groups, orders or guilds, ever
different routes and ever different relics: “les plus piteuses
processions qui oncques eussent été veues de aage de homme.” *2
All were barefoot with empty stomachs, members of parliament and
poor burghers alike; every one who was able carried a candle or a
torch. There were always many small children with them. Even the
poor country folk from the villages around Paris came running on
bare feet. Processions were joined or watched, “en grant pleur, en
grant lermes, en grant devocion.” t3 And heavy rain fell almost
constantly during the entire period.5
Then there were the princely entry processions prepared with all
the varied formal skills at the disposal of the main actors. And, with
uninterrupted frequency, there were executions. The gruesome
fascination and coarse compassion stirred at the place of execution
became an important element in the spiritual nourishment of the
people. For dealing with vicious robbers and murderers the courts
invented terrible punishments: in Brussels a young arsonist and
murderer was tied with a chain so that he could move in a circle
about a stake surrounded by burning bundles of fagots. He
introduced himself to the people in moving words as a warning
example: “et tellement fit attendrir les coeurs que tout le monde
fondoit en larmes de compassion.” “Et fut sa fin reccommandée la
plus belle que l’on avait oncques vue.”6:4 During the Burgundian
reign of terror in Paris, Messire Nansart du Bois, an Armagnac, was
beheaded. Not only did he grant forgiveness to the executioner,
who, as was customary, requested it, but he even asked to be kissed
by him. “Foison de peuple y avoit, qui quasi tous ploroient a
chaudes larmes.”7*° Frequently the sacrificial victims were great
lords; in those cases the people had the even greater satisfaction of
witnessing stern justice and a more forceful warning about the
insecurity of high position than would be conveyed by a painting or
a danse macabre. The authorities took pains that nothing was
lacking in the impression the spectacle made. The nobles took their
last walk bedecked in the symbols of their greatness. Jean de
Montaigu, grand maitre d’hotel of the king and a victim of the
hatred of John the Fearless, travels to the gallows seated high on
top of a cart. Two trumpeters precede him. He is dressed in his
robes of state, cap, vest, and pants—half white, half red—with
golden spurs on his feet. The beheaded body was left hanging on
the gallows still wearing those golden spurs. The wealthy canon
Nicholas d’Orgemont—who fell victim to the vendetta of the
Armagnacs in 1416—was carried through Paris on a garbage cart,
clad in a wide purple cloak and cap of the same color to witness the
execution of two of his comrades before he was led away to lifelong
captivity: “au pain de doleur et à eaue d’angoisse.” t6 The head of
Maitre Oudart de Bussy, who had turned down a place in
parliament, was exhumed by special order of Louis XI and, dressed
with a crimson, fur-lined hood, “selon la mode des conseillers de
parlement,”*7 was put on display with an attached explanatory
poem in the town square of Hesdin. The king himself writes about
this case with grim humor.9
Rarer than the processions and executions were the sermons
given by itinerant preachers who came, from time to time, to stir
the people with their words. We, readers of newspapers, can hardly
imagine anymore the tremendous impact of the spoken word on
naive and ignorant minds. The popular preacher Brother Richard,
who may have served Jeanne d’Arc as father confessor, preached in
Paris in 1429 for ten days running. He spoke from five until ten or
eleven o’clock in the morning in the Cemetery of the Innocents—
where the famous danse macabre had been painted—with his back
to the bone chambers where skulls were piled up above the vaulted
walkways to be viewed by the visitors. When he informed his
audience after his tenth sermon that it would have to be his last
since he had not received permission for any more, “les gens grans
et petiz plouroient si piteusement et si fondement, comme s’ilz
veissent porter en terre leurs meilleurs amis, et lui aussi.”*® When
he finally leaves Paris, the people believe that the next Sunday he
will still preach at St. Denis; a large number, perhaps as many as six
thousand, according to the Burgher of Paris, leave the city on
Saturday evening and spend the night out in the fields in order to
secure good places.10
Antoine Fradin, a Franciscan, was also prohibited from preaching
in Paris, because he railed against evil government. But this is
precisely what made him so beloved by the people. They guarded
him day and night in the monastery of the Cordeliers; the women
stood watch with their ammunition of ashes and stones ready.
People laughed at the proclamation prohibiting the watch: the king
knows nothing about it! When Fradin is finally banned and has to
leave the city, the people give him an escort, “crians et soupirans
moult fort son departement.”11+?
In all cities where the saintly Dominican Vincent Ferrer comes to
preach, the people, the magistrates, the clergy—including bishops
and prelates—go out to welcome him, singing his praises. He travels
with a large numbers of supporters, who, every evening after
sunset, go on processions with flagellations and songs. In every
town he is joined by new followers. He has carefully arranged for
the food and lodging of all his companions by employing men of
spotless reputation as his quartermasters. Numerous priests from
different orders travel with him so that they can assist him in taking
confessions and celebrating mass. A few notaries accompany him to
record the legal reconciliations that the holy preacher manages to
arrange wherever he goes. When he preaches, a wooden frame has
to protect him and his entourage against the throngs who want to
kiss his hand or his gown. Work comes to a standstill as long as he
speaks. It was a rare occasion when he failed to move his audience
to tears, and when he spoke of Judgment Day and the pains of hell
or of the sufferings of the Lord, he, just as his audience, broke into
such great tears that he had to remain silent, for a time, until the
weeping had stopped. The penitents fell to their knees before all the
onlookers to tearfully confess their great sins.12 When the famous
Olivier Maillard gave the Lenten sermon at Orléans in 1485, so
many people climbed on the roofs of the houses that the roofers
submitted claims for sixty-four days of repair work.13
All this has the atmosphere of the English-American revivals or of
the Salvation Army, but boundlessly extended and much more
publicly exposed. There is no reason to suspect that the descriptions
of Ferrer’s impact are pious exaggerations by his biographers. The
sober and dry Monstrelet describes in almost the same manner the
impact of the sermons of a certain Brother Thomas—claiming to be
a Carmelite, but later found to be an imposter—in northern France
and Flanders in 1498. He, too, was escorted into the city by the
magistrate while nobles held the reins of his mules; and for his sake
many, among them notables whom Monstrelet identifies by name,
left home and servants to follow him wherever he went. The
prominent burghers erected high pulpits for him and draped them
with the most expensive tapestries they could find.
Next to the popular preacher’s accounts of the Passion and the
Last Things, his attacks on luxury and vanity deeply moved his
listeners. The people, Monstrelet writes, were particularly grateful
to and fond of Brother Thomas because he attacked ostentation and
displays of vanity and especially because he heaped criticism on
nobility and clergy. He liked to set small boys (with the promise of
indulgences, claims Monstrelet) on those noble ladies who ventured
among the congregation wearing their high coiffures, crying “au
hennin! au hennin!”14 so that women during the entire period no
longer dared to wear hennins and began to wear hoods like the
Beguines.15 “Mais à l’exemple du lymecon,” says the faithful
chronicler, “lequel quand on passe près de luy retrait ses cornes par
dedens et quand il ne ot plus riens les reboute dehors, ainsy firent
ycelles. Car en assez brief terme après que ledit prescheur se fust
départy du pays, elles mesmes recommencèrent comme devant et
oublièrent sa doctrine, et reprinrent petit à petit leur viel estat, tel
ou plus grant qu’elles avoient accoustumé de porter.”16*10
Brother Richard, as well as Brother Thomas, lit funeral pyres of
the vanities, just as Florence was to do in 1497 to such an
unprecedented extent, and with such irreplaceable losses for art, at
the will of Savonarola. In Paris and Artois, in 1428 and 1429, such
actions remained confined to the destruction of playing cards, game
boards, dice, hair ornaments, and various baubles that were
willingly handed over by men and women. In fifteenth-century
France and Italy, these funeral pyres were a frequently repeated
expression of the deep piety aroused by the preachers.17 The
turning away from vanity and lust on the part of the remorseful had
become embodied in ceremonial form; passionate piety was stylized
into solemn communal acts, just as those times tended to turn
everything into stylized forms.
We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of
mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, into this
susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life
was then.
Scenes of public mourning appeared to be responses to genuine
calamities. During the funeral of Charles VII, the people lost their
composure when the funeral procession came into view: all court
officials “vestus de dueil angoisseux, lesquelz il faisoit moult piteux
veoir; et de la grant tristesse et courroux qu’on leur veoit porter
pour la mort de leur dit maistre, furent grant pleurs et lamentacions
faictes parmy tout ladicte ville.” 11 There were six page boys of the
king riding six horses draped entirely in black velvet: “Et Dieu scet
le doloreux et piteux dueil qu’ilz faisoient pour leur dit maistre.”
One of the lads was so saddened that he did not eat nor drink for
four days, said the people with great emotion.18*12
But a surplus of tears came not only from great mourning, a
vigorous sermon, or the mysteries of faith. Each secular festival also
unleashed a flood of tears. An envoy from the King of France to
Philip the Good repeatedly breaks into tears during his address.
When young John of Coimbra is given his farewell at the
Burgundian court, everyone weeps loudly, just as happened on the
occasion when the Dauphin was welcomed or during the meeting of
the Kings of England and France at Ardres. King Louis XI was
observed to shed tears while making his entry into Arras; during his
time as Crown Prince at the court of Burgundy, he is described by
Chastellain as sobbing or crying on several occasions. 19
Understandably, these accounts are exaggerated: compare them to
the “there wasn’t a dry eye in the house” of a newspaper report. In
his description of the peace congress at Arras in 1435, Jean
Germain makes the audience fall to the ground filled with emotions,
speechless, sighing, sobbing and crying during the moving addresses
by the delegates.20 This, most likely, did not happen in this manner,
but the bishop of Chalons found that it had to be that way. In the
exaggeration, one can detect the underlying truth. The same holds
true for the floods of tears ascribed to the sensitive minds of the
eighteenth century; weeping was both edifying and beautiful.
Furthermore, who does not know, even today, the strong emotions,
even goose flesh and tears, solemn entry processions can arouse
even if the prince who is at the center of all this pomp leaves us
indifferent? During those times, such an unmediated emotional state
was filled with a half-religious veneration of pomp and greatness
and vented itself in genuine tears.
Those who do not comprehend this difference in susceptibility
between the fifteenth century and our time may be able to come to
appreciate it through a small example from a sphere divorced from
that of tears; that is, the sphere of sudden rage. To us, there is
hardly a game more peaceful and quiet than chess. La Marche says
that during chess games fights break out “et que le plus saige y pert
patience.”21*!3 A conflict between royal princes over a chessboard
was still as plausible as a motive in the fifteenth century as in
Carolingian romance.
Daily life offered unlimited range for acts of flaming passion and
childish imagination. Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as
much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are
unreliable fall thereby victim to an occasionally dangerous error.
The documents tell us little about the difference in tone that
separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos
of medieval life. Of all the passions permeating medieval life with
their color, only two are mentioned, as a rule by legal documents:
greed and quarrelsomeness. Who has not frequently wondered
about the nearly incredible violence and stubbornness with which
greed, pugnacity, or vindictiveness rise to prominence in the court
documents of that period! It is only in the general context of the
passions that inflame every sphere of life that these tensions become
acceptable and intelligible to us. This is why the authors of the
chronicles, no matter how superficial they may be with respect to
the actual facts and no matter how often they may err in reporting
them, are indispensable if we want to understand that age correctly.
In many respects life still wore the color of fairy tales. If the court
chroniclers, learned and respected men who knew their princes
intimately, were unable to see and describe these distinguished
persons other than in terms of archaic and hieratic figures, how
great the magic splendor of royalty must have been in the naive
imagination of the people. Here is an example of that fairy-tale
quality from the historical writings of Chastellain: The young
Charles the Bold, still the count of Charolais, has arrived from Sluis
of Gorkum, and learns there that his father, the duke, has canceled
his pension and all of his benefices. Chastellain now proceeds to
describe how the count assembles all his retainers, down to the
kitchen boys, and informs them of his misfortunes in a moving
address in which he proclaims his respect for his father, his concern
for the wellbeing of his people, and his love for them all. Those who
have means of their own he asks to await his fate along with him;
those who are poor he sets free to go and, if they should happen to
learn that the count’s fortune had taken a turn for the better,
“return then and you shall find your positions waiting, and you
shall be welcomed by me, and I shall reward the patience you have
shown for my sake.” “Lors oyt-l’on voix lever et larmes espandre et
clameur ruer par commun accord: Nous tous, nous tous,
monseigneur, vivrons avecques vous et mourrons.”*!4 Deeply
moved, Charles accepts their offer of fidelity: “Or vivez doncques et
souffrez; et moy je souffreray pour vous, premier que vous ayez
faute.”*15 Thereupon the noblemen approach and offer him all their
possessions, “disant l’un: j’ay mille, l’autre: dix mille, l’autre: j’ay
cecy, j'ay cela pour mettre pour vous et pour attendre tout vostre
advenir.” t16 And everything went on as usual and there was not a
single chicken lacking in the kitchen because of all this.22
The embellishments of this picture are, of course, Chastellain’s.
We do not know how far his report stylized what had actually
happened. But what really matters is that he sees the prince in the
simple forms of the folk ballads. To him, the entire situation is
totally dominated by the most primitive emotions of mutual loyalty,
which express themselves with epic simplicity.
While the mechanism of the administration of the state and the
state budget had in reality already assumed complicated forms,
politics were embodied in the minds of the people in particular,
invariable, simple figures. The political references with which the
people live are those of the folk song and chivalric romances.
Similarly, the kings of the period are reduced to a few types, each of
which more or less correspond to a motif from song or adventure
story: the noble, just prince, the prince betrayed by evil counselors,
the prince as avenger of his family’s honor, the prince supported by
his followers during reverses in his fortune. The subjects of a late
medieval state, carrying a heavy burden and being without any
voice in the administration of the taxes, lived in constant
apprehension that their pennies would be wasted, suspecting that
they were not actually spent for the benefit and welfare of the
country. This suspicion directed towards the administration of the
state was transposed into the simplified notion that the king is
surrounded by greedy, tricky advisers or that the ostentation and
wastefulness of the royal court was to blame for the poor state of
the country. Thus political questions were reduced, in the popular
mind, to the typical events of a fairy tale. Philip the Good
understood what sort of language would be intelligible to the
people. During his festivities in The Hague in 1456 he had displayed
in a room adjacent to the Knight’s Hall precious utensils worth
thirty thousand marks in order to impress the Dutch and Frisians
who believed that he lacked the funds to take over the Bishopric of
Utrecht. Everyone could come there to see the display. Moreover,
two boxes containing one hundred thousand golden lions each had
been brought from Lille. People were allowed to try to lift them, but
tried in vain.23 Can anyone imagine a more pedagogically skillful
mixture of state credit and county-fair amusement?
The lives and deeds of the princes occasionally display a fantastic
element that is reminiscent of the Caliph of Thousand and One
Nights. In the midst of coolly calculated political undertakings, the
heroes may occasionally display a daring bravado, or even risk their
lives and personal achievements on a whim. Edward III gambled
with his own life, that of the Prince of Wales, and the fate of his
country by attacking a fleet of Spanish merchant vessels in order to
exact vengeance for some acts of piracy.24 Philip the Good had
taken it into his head to marry one of his archers to the daughter of
a rich brewer in Lille. When the father resisted and involved the
parliament of Paris in the affair, the enraged duke suddenly broke
off the important affairs of state that had kept him in Holland and,
even though it was the holy season preceding Easter, undertook a
dangerous sea voyage from Rotterdam to Sluis to have his. own
way.25 Another time in a blinding rage over a quarrel with his son,
he ran away from Brussels and lost his way in the forest like a
truant schoolboy. When he finally returns, the delicate task of
getting him back to his normal routine falls to the knight Phillipe
Pot. This adroit courtier finds the right words: “Bonjour
monseigneur, bonjour qu’est cecy? Faites-vous du roy Artus
maintenant ou de messire Lancelot?”26*17
How caliph-like it seems to us when the same duke, being told by
his physician to have his head shaved, issues an order that all
noblemen are to follow his example and orders Peter von
Hagenbach to strip the hair from any who fail to comply.27 Or when
the young King Charles VI of France, riding on one horse with a
friend in order to witness the entry procession of his own bride,
Isabella of Bavaria, was, in the press of the crowd, thrashed by the
guards.28 A poet complains that princes promote their jesters or
musicians to the position of councilor or minister as indeed
happened to Coquinet the Fool of Burgundy.29
Politics are not yet completely in the grip of bureaucracy and
protocol; at any moment the prince may abandon them and look
elsewhere for guidelines for his administration. Fifteenth-century
princes repeatedly consulted visionary ascetics and renowned
popular preachers on matters of state. Denis the Carthusian and
Vincent Ferrer served as political advisers; the noisy popular
preacher Olivier Maillard was privy to the most secret negotiations
between princely courts.30 Because of this, an element of religious
tension31 exists in the highest realms of politics.
At the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth
centuries, the people, observing the higher realms of princely life
and fate, must have, more than ever, thought of it as a bloody
romantic sphere filled with dramas of unmitigated tragedy, and the
most moving falls from majesty and glory. During the same
September month of 1399 when the English Parliament, meeting in
Westminster, learned that King Richard II had been defeated and
imprisoned by his cousin Lancaster and had resigned the throne, the
German electors were gathered in Mainz to depose their king,
Wenzel of Luxemburg. The latter was just as vacillating in spirit,
incapable of ruling and as moody as his cousin in England, but did
not come to as tragic an end as Richard. Wenzel remained for many
years King of Bohemia, while Richard’s deposition was followed by
his mysterious death in prison, which recalled the murder of his
grand-father, Edward II, also in prison, seventy years before. Was
not the crown a tragic possession, fraught with danger? In a third
large kingdom of Christendom a madman, Charles VI, occupied the
throne and the country was soon to be ruined by unrestrained
factionalism. The jealousy between the houses of Orléans and
Burgundy erupted into open hostilities in 1407: Louis of Orléans,
the brother of the king, fell victim to vile murderers hired by his
cousin the duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless. Twelve years later,
vengeance: John the Fearless was treacherously murdered during
the solemn meeting on the bridge of Montereau. These two princely
murders with their never ending trail of revenge and strife left an
undertone of dark hatred in the history of France for a whole
century. The popular mind views the misfortunes such as befell
France in the light of the great dramatic motifs; it cannot
comprehend causes other than personalities and passions.
The Turks appear in the midst of all this and threaten more
ominously than before. A few years earlier, 1396, they had
destroyed the splendid French army of knights that had recklessly
ventured to face them under the same John the Fearless, then still
count of Nevers, near Nicopolis. And Christendom was torn apart by
the Great Schism, which by now had lasted a quarter of a century.
Two individuals called themselves pope, neither one recognized in
heartfelt conviction by a number of Western countries. As soon as
the Council of Pisa of 1409 had ignominiously failed in its attempt
to restore the unity of the church, there would be three who would
compete for the papal title. The stubborn Aragonese, Peter von
Luna, who hung on in Avignon as Benedict XIII, was known in
popular parlance as “The Pope of the Moon.” Did this title have the
ring of near insanity for simple folks?
In these centuries a good many dethroned kings made the rounds
of the princely courts—usually short of money and rich in plans,
bathed in the splendor of the mysterious East from which they
came: Armenia, Cyprus, and even Constantinople; every one of
them a figure from the picture of the Wheel of Fortune (plate 1)
from which kings with scepters and crowns came tumbling down.
René of Anjou was not one of this number. Though a king without a
crown, he lived very well on his wealthy estates in Anjou in
Provence. But nobody embodied more clearly the vagaries of
princely fortune than this prince from the House of France who had
missed the best opportunities time and again, who had reached for
the crowns of Hungary, Sicily, and Jerusalem and suffered nothing
but defeats, narrow escapes, and long periods of imprisonment. This
poet-king without a throne, who delighted in poems of hunting and
the art of miniatures, must have been of deep frivolity of mind or he
would have been cured by his fate. He had seen almost all of his
children die and the daughter who was left to him suffered a fate
that in its dark sadness was worse than his own. Margaret of Anjou,
full of intelligence, honor, and passion, had, at the age of sixteen
married King Henry VI of England, who was weak-minded. The
English court was a hell of hatred. Nowhere else had suspicions of
royal relatives, charges against powerful servants of the crown, and
secretive and judicial murders for the sake of security and
partisanship so permeated the political scene as in England.
Margaret lived for many years in this atmosphere of persecution
and fear before the great family feud between the Lancasters, the
house of her husband, and the Yorks, that of her numerous and
active cousins, broke out into open, bloody strife. Margaret lost
crown and possessions. The changing fortunes of the War of the
Roses meant most terrifying dangers and bitter poverty for her.
Finally, secure in asylum at the Burgundian court, she gave in her
own words to Chastellain, the court chronicler, the moving report of
her misfortunes and her aimless wanderings: how she and her
young son had been at the mercy of highwaymen, how she had had
to beg a Scottish archer for a penny as offering during a mass, “qui
demy à dur et à regret luy tira un gros d’Escosse de sa bourse et le
luy presta.”*!8 The good chronicler, moved by so much suffering,
dedicated for her consolation a tract, the Temple of Bocace32
—“Alcun petit traité de fortune, prenant pied sur son inconstance et
déceveuse nature.” t19 He believed, in accordance with the standard
recipe of those days, that he could not comfort the troubled princess
better than with this gloomy gallery of princely misfortunes. Neither
of them could know that the worst was yet to come. In 1471 near
Tewkesbury, the Lancasters were decisively beaten, Margaret’s only
son was killed in the battle or murdered shortly thereafter, her
husband was secretly killed; she herself spent five years in the
Tower, only to be sold by Edward IV to Louis XI, to whom she had
to cede the legacy of her father, King René, as a show of gratitude
for her liberation.
Hearing of genuine royal children suffering such fates, how could
the Burgher of Paris not believe the stories of lost crowns and
banishment that vagabonds occasionally told to evoke sympathy
and compassion? In 1427 a band of Gypsies appeared in Paris and
represented themselves as penitents, “ung duc et ung conte et dix
hommes tous à cheval,”+2° The rest, 120 people, had to remain
outside the city. They claimed to have come from Egypt and said
that the Pope had made them do penitence for having left the
Christian faith. As punishment they had to spend seven years
wandering without ever sleeping in a bed. They said that they had
originally numbered about 1,200, but that their king and queen and
all the others had died on the road. As the only mitigation, they
claimed, the Pope had ordered that each bishop and abbot should
give them ten pounds tournois. The inhabitants of Paris came in
huge throngs to see the strange little band and to have the Gypsy
women read their palms. These managed to move the money from
the purses of the people to their own, “par art magicque ou
autrement.”33*21
An aura of adventure and passion surrounded the life of princes,
but it was not only the popular imagination that saw it that way.
Modern man has, as a rule, no idea of the unrestrained
extravagance and inflammability of the medieval heart. Those who
only consult official documents, which are correctly held to contain
the most reliable information for our understanding of history,
could fashion for themselves from this piece of medieval history a
picture that would not be substantially different from a description
of ministerial and ambassadorial politics of the eighteenth century.
But such a picture would lack an important element: the crass colors
of the tremendous passions that inspired the people as well as the
princes. There is, no doubt, a passionate element remaining in
contemporary politics, but, with the exception of days of turmoil
and civil war, it encounters more checks and obstacles. It is led in
hundreds of ways into fixed channels by the complicated
mechanisms of communal life. During the fifteenth century the
immediate emotional affect is still directly expressed in ways that
frequently break through the veneer of utility and calculation. If
emotions go hand in hand with a sense of power, as in the case of
princes, the effect is doubled. Chastellain, in his stilted way,
expresses this quite bluntly: Small wonder, he says, that princes are
frequently locked in hostilities with one another, “puisque les
princes sont hommes, et leurs affaires sont haulx et agus, et leurs
natures sont subgettes a passions maintes comme a haine et envie,
et sont leurs coeurs vray habitacle d’icelles des passions a cause de
leur gloire en régner.”34}22 Does this not corne close to what
Burckhardt called “the pathos of rule?”
Whoever would write a history of the House of Burgundy would
have to let the motif of revenge sound through their narrative like a
pedal point, as black as a catafalque, advising each one at every
turn and in battle giving to each heart its bitter thirst and the taste
of broken pride. Certainly, it would be very naive to return to the
all too uncomplicated view of its history that the fifteenth century
itself had. It will not do, of course, to trace the power struggle from
which arose the centuries-long quarrel between France and the
Hapsburgs to the blood feud between Orléans and Burgundy, the
two branches of the House of Valois. But we should be aware, more
than is generally the rule in researching general political and
economic causes, that for contemporaries, be they observers or
participants in the great legal battles, blood revenge was the
essential element that dominated the actions and fates of princes
and countries. For them Philip the Good is the foremost of the
avengers, “celluy qui pour vengier l’outraige fait sur la personne du
duc Jehan soustint la gherre seize ans.”35*23 Philip took it upon
himself as a sacred duty, “en toute criminelle et mortelle aigreur, il
tireroit à la vengeance du mort, si avant que Dieu luy vouldroit
permettre; et y mettroit corps et âme, substance et pays tout en
l’adventure et en la disposition de fortune, plus réputant oeuvre
salutaire et agréable à Dieu de y entendre que de la laisser.” 24 The
Dominican who preached the funeral service for the murdered duke
caused considerable outrage because he dared to point out the
Christian duty of not taking revenge.36 La Marche spoke as if honor
and revenge were both political desires of the lands ruled by the
duke: all estates of his lands joined his cry for revenge, he said.37
The treaty of Arras in 1435, which was supposed to bring peace
between France and Burgundy, begins with penance for the murder
at Montereau: a chapel should be dedicated in the church of Noreau
where John had first been buried, a requiem should be sung there
everyday until the end of time, there should be in the same city a
Carthusian monastery, a cross on the bridge itself where the murder
happened, and a mass should be held in the Carthusian church at
Dijon where the Burgundian dukes are buried.38 But these were
only a part of all the public penances and debasements demanded
by Chancellor Rolin in the name of the duke: churches with
chapters not only at Montereau but also at Rome, Ghent, Paris,
Santiago de Compostella, and Jerusalem must carve the narrative in
stone.39
A thirst for revenge dressed in such belabored forms must have
dominated the intellect. And what could the people better
comprehend of the politics of their princes than these simple,
primitive motives of hatred and revenge? The attachment to the
prince was childish-impulsive in character; it was a direct feeling of
fidelity and community. It was an extension of the strong old
emotion that bound the oath-taker to the bailiff and the vassals to
their lord. This same emotion blazed into reckless passions during
feuds and strife. It was the feeling of party, not of statehood. The
later medieval period was the time of the great party conflicts. In
Italy, these parties consolidated as early as the thirteenth century, in
France and in the Netherlands they popped up everywhere during
the fourteenth century. Anyone who studies the history of that
period will at times be shocked at the inadequacy of the efforts of
modern historians to explain these parties in terms of economic-
political causes. Opposing economic interests, held to be basic, are
purely mechanical constructions. No one, even with the best of
intentions, can find them by reading the sources. This is not an
attempt to deny the presence of economic causes in the formation of
these party groups, but, dissatisfied with the efforts made to explain
them to date, one might well be justified in asking whether a
political-psychological view could not offer greater advantages than
the economic-political for an explanation of late medieval party
conflicts.
What the sources reveal about the rise of the parties is
approximately this: in purely feudal times, separate and isolated
feuds can be seen everywhere, in which one cannot find any other
economic motive than envy by one side of the wealth and
possessions of the other. But in addition to the question of material
wealth, there is not less importantly that of honor. Family pride and
the thirst for vengeance or the passionate loyalty on the part of
supporters are, in such cases, primary motivations. To the degree
that the power of the state is consolidating and spreading, all these
family feuds are polarizing themselves, so to speak, along the lines
of regional power and are coagulating into parties that perceive
even the cause of their divisions in no other terms than those based
on a foundation of solidarity and shared honor. Do we see any more
deeply into these causes if we postulate economic conflicts? When
an acute contemporary observer declares that no one could discover
valid reasons for the hatred between Hoecken and Kabeljauen in
Holland,40 we should not shrug our shoulders in contempt and
pretend to be smarter than he is. There is, in fact, no single
satisfactory explanation why the Edmonds were Kabeljauisch and
the Wassenaers, Hoeckish. The economic contrasts that typify these
families are only the products of their position vis-a-vis the prince
as followers of this or that party.41
How violent the emotions caused by the attachment to the prince
could become can be read on any page of medieval history. The
author of the miracle play Little Mary of Nymwegen shows us how
Little Mary’s evil aunt, after she and the neighbor ladies work
themselves up to the point of exhaustion over the conflict between
Arnold and Adolf of Geldern,42 finally hangs herself because she is
upset that the old duke has been freed from captivity. The intent of
the author is to warn of the dangers of such partisanship; for that
reason he picks an extreme example, a suicide out of partisanship—
doubtlessly overdone, but evidence for the party feeling about
which the sensitive poet spoke.
There are, however, more comforting examples. The Sheriffs of
Abbeville had the bells rung in the middle of the night because a
messenger had come from Charles of Charolais with the request to
pray for the recovery of his father. The frightened citizens crowded
the church, lit hundreds of candles, knelt or lay in tears throughout
the night while the bells kept on ringing. 43
When the people of Paris—in 1429 still favoring the English-
Burgundian side44—learned that Brother Richard, who had just a
short time before moved them with his sermons, was an Armagnac
who surreptitiously won over the towns he visited, they cursed him
in the name of God and all the saints; and in place of the tin penny
bearing the name of Jesus that he had given them, they took up the
cross of St. Andrew, the sign of the Burgundian party. People
resumed the practice of playing dice against which Brother Richard
had railed so much, “en despit de luy,”*2° comments the Burgher de
Paris.45
It would be natural to assume that the schism between Avignon
and Rome, since it had no basis in dogma, could not arouse the
passions of faith: in any case, not in places far from the centers of
those events, where both popes were only known by name, and
which were not directly affected by the split. But here too, the
schism immediately evoked keen and violent partisanship even to
the point of confrontations between believers and nonbelievers.
When Bruges changes from the Roman pope to that of Avignon,
numerous people leave home and city, profession or benefice, so
that they may live in Liege or in another area in conformity to the
obedience owed to Urban by their party.46 Before the battle of
Rosebeke in 1382, the leaders of the French troops are in doubt
whether the oriflamme, the sacred royal flag only to be used in holy
war, can be unfurled in a battle against the Flemish rebels. The
decision to do so is made because the Flemish are Urbanites and
thus infidels.47 The French political agent and writer Pierre Salmon,
on the occasion of his visit to Utrecht, is unable to find a priest who
will let him celebrate Easter, “pour ce qu’ils disoient que je estoie
scismatique et que je créoie en Benedic l’antipape,”+2° so that he,
alone in a chapel, has to offer confession as if he were before a
priest and heard mass in a Carthusian monastery.48
The highly emotional character of partisanship and princely
allegiance was still further enhanced by the powerfully suggestive
effect of all the party signs, colors, emblems, devices, mottoes,
which many times alternated in colorful succession, usually
pregnant with murder and mayhem, but occasionally also with
humor. In 1380 as many as two thousand persons came out to
welcome the young Charles VI to Paris, all dressed alike, half green,
half white. Three times between 1411 and 1413, all of Paris
suddenly displayed different insignia, purple caps with the cross of
St. Andrew, white caps, and then purple again. Even priests and
women and children wore them. During the Burgundian reign of
terror in Paris in 1411, the Armagnacs were excommunicated every
Sunday to the sound of the church bells. The figures of saints were
crowned with the cross of St. Andrew; it was even claimed that a
few priests did not want to make the sign of the cross in the straight
way the Lord was crucified, but made a slanted version. 49
The blind passion with which a man supported his party and his
lord and, at the same time, pursued his own interests was, in part,
an expression of an unmistakable, stone-hard sense of right that
medieval man thought proper. It demonstrated an unshakable
certainty that every deed justified ultimate retribution. The sense of
justice was still three quarters heathen and dominated by a need for
vengeance. Though the church sought to soften judicial usage, by
pressing for meekness, peace and reconciliation, it failed to change
the actual sense of justice. On the contrary, that sense was rendered
sterner still by adding to the need for retribution the hatred of sin.
All too often sin was, for these agitated minds, whatever their
enemy did. The sense of justice had gradually escalated to an
extreme tension between the two poles of a barbaric notion of an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and that of a religious abhorrence
of sin, while the role of the state, to punish severely, came to be
considered more and more an urgent necessity. The sense of
insecurity, which in any crisis looks to the power of the state to
implement a reign of terror, became chronic in the later Middle
Ages. The conception of atonement by transgressors gradually faded
into an almost idyllic vestige of an ancient naiveté while the notion
that transgressions were both threats to the community and attacks
on the majesty of God gained ground. The end of the Middle Ages
was an intoxicating time when painful justice and judicial cruelty
were in full bloom. People did not doubt for an instant that the
criminal deserved his punishment. Intense satisfaction was derived
from exemplary deeds of justice performed by the princes
themselves. From time to time the authorities waged campaigns of
stern justice, sometimes against robbers and petty thieves,
sometimes against witches and magicians, sometimes against
sodomy.
What strikes us about the judicial cruelty of the later Middle Ages
is not the perverse sickness of it, but the dull, animal-like
enjoyment, the country fair-like amusement, it provided for the
people. The people of Mons paid far too high a price for a robber
chief, merely for the pleasure of quartering him, “dont le peuple
fust plus joyeulx que si un nouveau corps sainct estoit
ressuscité.”50*27 During the imprisonment of Maximilian at Bruges
in 1488, the rack stands on a high platform in sight of the
imprisoned king. The people cannot get enough of the spectacle of
magistrates, suspected of treason, undergoing repeated torture. The
people delay executions, which the victims themselves request, for
the enjoyment of seeing them subjected to even more sufferings.51
The unchristian extreme to which this mixture of faith and thirst
for revenge led is shown by the prevailing custom in England and
France of refusing individuals under the sentence of death not only
extreme unction, but also confession. There was no intent to save
souls; rather, the intent was to intensify the fear of death by the
certainty of the punishments of hell. In vain, Pope Clement V
ordered, in 1311, that prisoners condemned to death at least be
given the sacrament of penance. The political idealist Philippe de
Mézières lobbied repeatedly that this be done, first with Charles V
of France, then with Charles VI. But the Chancellor Pierre
d’Orgemone, whose “forte cervelle,” says Méziéres, was more
difficult to move than a millstone, resisted, and the wise, peace-
loving Charles V declared that the custom was not to be changed in
his lifetime. Only after the voice of Jean de Gerson had joined that
of Méziéres in five considerations against this abuse did a royal
edict of February 12, 1397, order that the condemned be granted
confession. Pierre de Craon, to whose efforts the decision has to be
credited, had a stone cross erected at the gallows in Paris so that the
Minorites could assist the condemned there.52 However, even then
the old custom did not disappear from popular usage; as late as
shortly after 1500, the bishop of Paris, Etienne Ponchier, found it
necessary to reissue the edict of Clement V. In 1427 a robber baron
was hanged in Paris; during the execution a respected official, grand
treasurer in the service of the regent, vents his hatred of the
condemned by preventing the confession that the prisoner had
requested. Using abusive language, he follows the condemned up
the ladder, hits him with a stick, and attacks the executioner
because he has admonished the victim to think of the bliss of his
soul. The hangman, terrified, hurries his task; the rope breaks, the
poor victim falls to the ground, breaks his legs and ribs and must
move up the ladder once more.53
During medieval times, all those emotions were missing that have
made us cautious and tentative in matters of justice: the insight into
diminished capacity, the concept of judicial fallibility, the
awareness that society has to share in the blame for the guilt of
individuals, the question whether an individual ought not be
rehabilitated rather than made to suffer. Or, perhaps, better stated:
a vague sense of all this is not lacking, but rather concentrates itself,
unverbalized, in instant impulses of charity and forgiveness
(unconcerned with the issue of guilt) which could suddenly break
through the cruel satisfaction over the administration of justice.
While we administer a hesitant, toned-down justice, partially filled
with a guilty conscience, the Middle Ages knew only two extremes:
the full measure of cruel punishment or mercy. In granting mercy
the question whether the guilty person deserved mercy for any
particular reason was asked much less frequently than now: for any
transgression, even the most blatant, full pardon could be granted at
any time. In practice, it was not only pure mercy that tipped the
scale in favor of acquittal. It is surprising with what equanimity
contemporaries report how intervention by respected relatives had
secured for a convict “lettres de rémission.” Yet most of these letters
do not apply to prominent lawbreakers, but to poor common folk
who did not have highly placed advocates.54
The direct juxtaposition of hard-heartedness and mercy
characterizes customs outside the administration of justice. On the
one side, frightful harshness towards the wretched and
handicapped; on the other, unlimited compassion and the most
intimate empathy with the poor, sick, and irrational, which we, in
conjunction with cruelty, still know from Russian literature.
Satisfaction with an execution was accompanied, and, at least to a
certain degree justified, by a strong sense of right. The incredible
harshness, the lack of tender sentiment, the cruel mockery, the
secret joy behind the pleasure of watching others suffer lacked even
this element of justice satisfied. The chronicler Pierre de Fenin
closes his report on the end of a band of robbers with the words, “et
faisoit-on grant risée, pour ce que c’estoient tous gens de povre
estat.”55*28
In Paris in 1425 an “esbatement” was held in which four armored
blind men were made to fight for a pig. In the days before they
were seen in their battle dress throughout the city, a bagpiper and a
man with a huge banner on which the pig is depicted, preceded
them.56
Velazquez has shown us the touching facial expressions of the
female dwarfs who as fools occupied positions of honor at the
Spanish court of his time (plate 2). They were prized diversions at
the princely courts of the fifteenth century. During the artful
entremetss7 of the great courts they displayed their skills and their
deformities. Madame d’Or, the golden blonde female dwarf of Philip
of Burgundy, was well known. She was made to wrestle with the
acrobat Hans.58 To the wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of
York in 1468 came Madame de Beaugrant, “la naine de
Mademoiselle de Bourgogne,”*2? dressed as a shepherdess, riding
around on a golden lion larger than a horse. The Lion could open
and close his mouth and sang a song of welcome. The little
shepherd girl is given to the young duchess as a gift and is sat on
the table.59 We know of no laments over the lot of these little
women, but we do have items from expense accounts that tell us
more about them. These accounts report how a duchess had one
such little dwarf removed from the house of her parents, how the
father or mother came to deliver her, and how they came now and
then for a visit and were given a gratuity: “au pere de Belon la folle,
qui estoit venu veoir sa fille . . . “ 30 Did the father go home well
pleased and highly honored by the court position of his daughter?
During the same year a locksmith of Blois delivered two iron
necklaces, one “pour attacher Belon la folle et l’autre por mettre au
col de la cingesse de Madame la Duchesse.”60%3!
How the mentally ill were treated can be ascertained from a
report about the provisions made for Charles VI, who, as king,
enjoyed treatment that contrasted favorably with that afforded all
others. To bring a wretched mental case to his senses, no better
method was conceived than to have him frightened by twelve
blackened individuals as if devils had come to take him away.61
There is a degree of naiveté in the hard-heartedness of the time
that makes our condemnation die on our lips. In the middle of an
outbreak of plague that afflicted Paris, the dukes of Burgundy and
Orléans called for the installation of a “cour d'amour” to divert the
people.62 During a break in the cruel slaughter of the Armagnacs in
1418, the people of Paris founded the Brotherhood of St. Andrew in
the Church of St. Eustatius; every priest and layman carried a
wreath of red roses: the church is full of them and smells, “comme
s’il fust lavé d’eau rose.”63*32 When the witch trials that had
descended upon Arras in 1461 like a hellish plague were finally
canceled, the burghers celebrated the victory of law with a
competition of performances of “folies moralisées”; first prize was a
silver fleur-de-lis, fourth prize, two capons: the martyred victims
were by this time long dead.64
So intense and colorful was life that it could stand the mingling of
the smell of blood and roses. Between hellish fears and the most
childish jokes, between cruel harshness and sentimental sympathy
the people stagger—like a giant with the head of a child, hither and
thither. Between the absolute denial of all worldly joys and a frantic
yearning for wealth and pleasure, between dark hatred and merry
conviviality, they live in extremes.
From the brighter half of their lives little has come down to us: it
seems as if the gay mildness and serenity of soul of the fifteenth
century have been swallowed into paintings and crystalized in the
transparent purity of their lofty music. The laughter of that
generation is dead, their untroubled joy and natural zest for life
lives only in folk song and farce. This is enough to add to our
nostalgia for the lost beauty of other times, a longing for the
sunlight of the century of the Van Eycks. But those who really delve
into that time must frequently try very hard in order to capture its
brighter aspects since, outside the sphere of art, darkness rules. In
the dire warnings of the preachers, in the tired sighs of the greatest
literature, in the monotonous reports of the chronicles and sources,
we hear only the cries of motley sins and the lamentations of
misery.
Post-Reformation times no longer saw the cardinal sins of pride,
anger, and greed in the purple full-bloodedness and shameless
assertiveness with which they walked among the humanity of the
fifteenth century. The unlimited arrogance of Burgundy! The whole
history of that family, from the deeds of knightly bravado, in which
the fast-rising fortunes of the first Philip take root, to the bitter
jealousy of John the Fearless and the black lust for revenge in the
years after his death, through the long summer of that other
magnifico, Philip the Good, to the deranged stubbornness with
which the ambitious Charles the Bold met his ruin—is this not a
poem of heroic pride? Their lands were the scene of the most
intensive lives of the West: Burgundy, as dark with power as with
wine, “la colérique Picardie,”*3° greedy, rich Flanders. These are
the same lands in which the splendor of painting, sculpture, and
music flower, and where the most violent code of revenge ruled and
the most brutal barbarism spread among the aristocracy and
burghers.65
That age is more conscious of greed than of any other evil. Pride
and greed can be placed beside one another as the sins of the old
and the new times. Pride is the sin of the feudal and hierarchic
period during which possessions and wealth circulate very little. A
sense of power is not primarily tied to wealth, it is rather more
personal, and power, in order to make itself known, has to manifest
itself through imposing displays: a numerous following of faithful
retainers, precious adornments, and the impressive appearance of
the powerful. The feeling of being more than other men is
constantly nourished by feudal and hierarchic thought with living
forms: through kneeling obeisance and allegiance, solemn respect
and majestic splendor, which, all taken together, make superiority
appear as something substantial and sanctioned.
Pride is a symbolic and theological sin; it is rooted deeply in the
soil of every conception of life and the world. Superbia was the root
of all evil: Lucifer’s pride was the beginning and cause of all ruin. So
Augustine saw it, and it remained so in the minds of those who
came after: pride is the source of all sins, they come forth from it as
if from their root and stem.66
But next to the scripture from which this notion comes, A superbia
initium sumpsit omnis perdito,67;3* there is another, Radix omnium
malorum est cupiditas.68*%° Following this, one could regard greed as
the root of all evil. Because of this, cupiditas, which, as such, has no
place in the list of deadly sins, was understood as avaritia, as it in
fact appears in another reading of the text.69 And it appears that
since about the twelfth century, the conviction had gained credence
that it was unrestrained greed that ruined the world and thus
replaced pride in the minds of the people as the first and most fatal
of sins. The old primacy theology assigns to superbia is drowned out
by the steadily rising chorus that blames all the misery of the times
to ever-increasing greed. How Dante had cursed it: la cieca cupidigia!
But greed lacks the symbolic and theological character of pride; it
is the natural and material sin, the purely earthly passion. It is the
sin of that period of time in which the circulation of money has
changed and loosened the conditions for the deployment of power.
Judging human worth becomes an arithmetical process. Now there
is much greater leeway for the satisfaction of unrestrained desires
and for the accumulation of treasures. And these treasures have not
yet that ghostly intangibility that modern credit procedures have
bestowed on capital; it is still yellow gold itself that is in the
forefront of fantasy. And the utilization of wealth does not yet have
that automatic and mechanical character of the routine investment
of money: satisfaction still lies in the most drastic extremes of
avidity and prodigality. In this extravagance greed enters into
marriage with the older pride. Pride was still strong and alive:
hierarchic, feudal thought had lost none of its bloom, the lust for
pomp and splendor, finery and pageantry was still crimson.
It is precisely this affinity with a primitive pride that bestows on
the avidity or greed of the later medieval period its direct,
passionate, desperate quality that later times seem to have entirely
lost. Protestantism and the Renaissance have given greed an ethical
value; they have legalized it as useful to promote welfare. Its stigma
has given way to the degree that the denial of all earthly goods are
praised with less conviction. In late medieval times, by contrast, the
mind was still able to positively grasp the distinction, not yet lost,
between sinful greed versus charity or freely willed poverty.
Throughout the literature and chronicles of the time, from
proverb to pious tract, there echoes the bitter hatred of the rich, the
complaint over the greed of the great. Sometimes it sounds like a
dark anticipation of class struggle, expressed through moral out
rage. In this area, we can get a sense of the rich tone of life of this
time equally well from documents or narrative sources, but it is the
legal documents that reveal the most unabashed greed.
It was possible, in 1436, for the services in one of the best-
attended churches in Paris to be suspended for twenty-two days
because the bishop refused to reconsecrate the church until he had
received a certain number of pennies from two beggars, who had
desecrated the church with a bloody stain during a scuffle, and who,
being poor, did not have the money. The bishop, Jacques du
Chatelier, was considered, “ung homme très pompeux, convoicteux,
plus mondain que son estat ne requeroit.”*%6 However, in 1441,
under his successor, Denys des Moulins, it happened again. This
time, for four months, no funerals or processions could be held at
the Cemetery of the Innocents, the most famous and sought-after in
Paris, because the bishop demanded more for these services than
the church could raise. The bishop was called, “homme trés pou
piteux a quelque personne, s’il ne recevoit argent ou aucun don qui
le vaulsist, et pour vray on disoit qu’il avait plus de cinquante
procès en Parlement, car de lui n’avoit on rien sans procès.”7037
One would only have to trace in detail the history of one of the
“nouveaux riches” of that time, the d’Orgemont family, for example,
in all its base stinginess and legal wrangling, in order to understand
the tremendous hatred of the people and the scorn that the
preachers and poets alike were constantly pouring out against the
rich.71
The people could not perceive their own fates and the events of
their time other than as a continuous succession of economic
mishandling, exploitation, war and robbery, inflation, want, and
pestilence. The chronic form that war tended to take, the constant
threats to the town and the country from all kinds of dangerous
riffraff, the eternal threat from a harsh and unreliable
administration of justice, and on top of all this, the pressure of the
fear of hell and the anxiety about devils and witches, nourished a
feeling of general insecurity that tended to paint life’s background
in dark colors. It was not only the life of the poor and small that
was insecure. In the lives of the nobility and magistrates too,
dramatic turns of fate and constant dangers became almost the rule.
Mathieu d’Escouchy, a Picard, is one of those chroniclers of which
there were so many in the fifteenth century; his chronicle, simple,
exact and impartial, filled with the conventional veneration for the
knightly ideal and with the traditional moralizing tendency, lets us
assume himself to be an honorable writer who dedicated his talent
to accurate historical work. But what a picture of the life of the
author of this historical work is shown us by the editor of the
original sources!72 Mathieu d’Escouchy began his professional
career as counselor, alderman, juror, and bailiff [prévôt] of the city
of Péronne between 1440 and 1450. From the beginning, we find
him in a kind of feud with the family of the city attorney, Jean
Froment, a feud that is carried out in the courts. Soon the attorney
prosecutes d’Escouchy on charges of forgery and murder, then for
“excés et attemptaz.” The bailiff, on his side, threatens the widow of
his enemy with an investigation into the witchcraft of which she is
suspected. But the widow succeeds in getting an injunction that
forces d’Escouchy to put the investigation in the hands of the court.
The matter comes before the Parliament of Paris and d’Escouchy
ends up in prison for the first time. Six more times we find him
accused and under arrest, and once a prisoner of war. In every
instance these were serious criminal cases, and more than once he
was kept in heavy chains. The battle of mutual accusations between
the families of Froment and d’Escouchy is interrupted by a violent
clash during which the son of Froment injures d’Escouchy. Both hire
assassins to take their opponent’s life. After this long drawn out
feud drops out of our historical horizon, attacks from elsewhere
appear. This time the bailiff is wounded by a monk. New
complaints, then, in 1461: d’Escouchy’s move to Nesle apparently
under suspicion of wrongdoing. But this does not hinder him from
advancing his career. He becomes bailiff, alderman, of Ribemont,
procurator of the king in Saint Quentin, and is elevated to the
nobility. After new attacks, incarcerations and penances, we find
him again serving in a war. In 1465 he fights at Montlhéry for the
king against Charles the Bold and is taken prisoner. From a later
campaign he returns a cripple. He marries, but that does not mean
the beginning of a quiet life for him. We find him charged with
forging seals, being taken as a prisoner to Paris, “comme larron et
murdrier,”*3° again in a new feud with a magistrate of Compiégne,
made under torture to confess his guilt, prevented from appealing,
sentenced, rehabilitated, sentenced anew, until the traces of this life
of hatred and persecution finally disappear from the documents.
Such biographies, full of sudden turns, are found whenever we
study the lives of individuals identified in the sources of that period.
One reads, for instance, the examples collected by Pierre Champion
of all those whom Villon considered or named in his will,73 or in
the notes by Tutetey on the diary of the Burgher of Paris. It is
always litigations, crimes, conflicts, and persecutions without end
that we meet. And we are dealing here with the lives of people
randomly brought to light by court, church, or other documents.
Chronicles, like that of Jacques du Clercq, which are just a
collection of misdeeds may paint too dark a picture of those times.
Even the “lettres de rémission,” which put daily life before our eyes
in such lively precision, point only to the dark side of life, because
they deal with nothing but crime. Yet any other probe into
randomly chosen material, only confirms our dark vision.
It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely.
Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with his black
wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does
not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn
and lament in vain.
Chapter Two
THE CRAVING FOR A MORE BEAUTIFUL LIFE
EVERY AGE YEARNS FOR A MORE BEAUTIFUL WORLD. The
deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing
present, the more intense that yearning. Towards the end of the
Middle Ages the ground tone underlying life is one of bitter
despondency. The note of an assertive joy of life and of a strong
confidence in an individual’s powers, which permeates the history
of the Renaissance and that of the age of Enlightenment, is barely
audible in the French-Burgundian world of the fifteenth century.
Was life really more unhappy then than usual? It may, at times,
seem to be the case. Wherever one looks in the sources of that
period, in the chronicles, in poetry, in sermons and religious tracts
and even official documents—with few exceptions, only the traces
of strife, hatred and malevolence, greed and poverty seem to have
survived. One may well ask, was this age incapable of enjoying
nothing but cruelty, arrogant pride, and intemperance? Is joyfulness
and quiet happiness nowhere to be found? To be sure, the age left
in its records more traces of its suffering than of its happiness. Its
misfortunes became its history. But an instinctive conviction tells us
that the sum total of happiness, serene joy, and sweet rest given to
man cannot differ very much in one period from that in another.
The splendor of late medieval happiness has still not completely
vanished; it survives in folk song, in music, in the quiet horizons of
landscape paintings and in the sober faces seen in the portraits.
But in the fifteenth century, it is tempting to say, it was not yet
customary, it was not in good taste, to loudly praise life and the
world. Those given to the serious contemplation of the course of
daily events, and who subsequently pronounced judgment on life,
were accustomed to dwell on only suffering and despair. They saw
time coming to an end and everything earthly inclining to ruin. The
optimism that was to rise beginning with the Renaissance, and to
fully bloom during the eighteenth century, was still unknown to the
French mind of the fifteenth century. Which group is it who are the
first to speak, full of hope and satisfaction, about their own times?
Not poets, much less religious thinkers; not even statesmen, but
rather scholars, the humanists. It is the exultation over rediscovered
antique wisdom that first elicits jubilation about the present; this is
an intellectual triumph. Ulrich von Hutten’s well-known dictum “O
saeculum, O literae! Juvat Vivere!” (“O century, O literature! It is a
joy to live!”) is usually taken in much too wide a sense. It is the
enthusiastic man of letters rather than the whole man who is
jubilating here. One could easily cite, from the beginning of the
sixteenth century, a number of familiar shouts of joy about the
splendor of the times, but the facts would make one notice that they
are almost exclusively directed towards the regained intellectual
world and are by no means dithyrambic expressions of the joy of
life in all its fullness. Even the mood of the humanists is tempered
by the old, pious turning from the world. Better than from Hutten’s
too often cited dictum, this can be ascertained from the letters
Erasmus wrote around 1517—but no longer from those written only
a little later, because the optimism that had prompted this joyous
mood soon leaves him.
Erasmus writes, early in 1517, to Wolfgang Fabricius Capito:1 “I
am truly no longer so keen on life, perhaps because I have already
lived almost too long as far as I am concerned—I have already
begun my 51st year—perhaps because I see in this life nothing so
glorious or pleasant as to be worthy of pursuit for someone whom
the Christian faith has taught to truly believe that for those who
devote their strength to piety a much happier life awaits. Yet now, I
could almost fancy becoming young again for a short while if only
because I can almost sense that a golden age is about to arise in the
near future.” He then describes how all the princes of Europe are in
agreement and lean towards peace (so dear to him), and continues,
“T cannot but hold the firm expectation that there will be in part a
new revival and in part a new unfolding not only of law-abiding
customs and Christian piety but also of a cleansed and genuine2
literature and a very beautiful science.” Through protection by the
princes, needless to say. “We owe it to their pious minds that we
witness the awakening and arising of glorious minds—as if in
response to a given signal—all pledging to each other the
restoration of good literature [ad restituendas optimas litems].”
Here we have a pure expression of what the sixteenth century
knew of optimism. The basic sentiment of the Renaissance and
humanism is actually something entirely different from the
unrestrained lust for life that is usually held to be its basic tone. The
affirmation of life on the part of Erasmus is shy and a little stiff and,
above all, very intellectual. Nevertheless, it is a voice that could not
yet be heard, during the fifteenth century, outside of Italy.
Intellectuals in France and in the Burgundian provinces around
1400 still prefer to pile their scorn of life and the times on rather
thickly and, in a peculiar way (but not without parallel; consider
Byronism), the closer they are to secular life, the darker their mood.
Those who express that deep melancholy, so characteristic of that
time, most vigorously, are not primarily those who have
permanently retired from the world into monasteries or scholarship.
Mostly they are the chroniclers and the fashionable court poets,
given their lack of higher culture and their inability to gain from the
joys they perceive any expectations of a turn for the better, who
never tire of lamenting the debilities of an aged world and
despairing of peace and justice. No one has repeated the
lamentation, that all good things have left the world, more
interminably than Eustache Deschamps.
Temps de doleur et de temptacion,
Aages de plour, d’envie et de tourment,
Temps de langour et de dampnacion,
Aages meneur prés du definement,
Temps plains d’orreur qui tout fait faussement,
Aages menteur, plain d’orgueil et d’envie,
Temps sanz honeur et sanz vray jugement,
Aage en tristour qui abrege la vie.3*!
Dozens of his ballads were composed in this spirit—monotonous,
weak variations of the same dull theme. A pronounced melancholy
must have dominated the higher estates; why else would the
nobility have allowed its favorite poet to repeat these sentiments
with such frequency?
Toute léesse deffaut,
Tous cueurs ont prins par assaut
Tristesse et merencolie.4*2
Three quarters of a century after Deschamps, Jean Merchinot still
sings in the same key:
O miserable et très dolente vie! .. .
La guerre avons, mortalité, famine;
Le froid, le chaud, le jour, le nuit nous mine;
Puces, cirons et tant d’autre vermine
Nous guerroyent. Bref, miserere domine
Noz meschans corps, dont le vivre est très court.\3
He, too, endlessly repeats the bitter conviction that everything in
the world is going badly; justice is mislaid, the powerful plunder the
weak, and the weak, in turn, plunder each other. According to his
own confession, his hypochondria even takes him to the brink of
suicide. He describes himself:
Et je, le pouvre escrivain,
Au cueur triste, faible et vain,
Voyant de chascun le dueil,
Soucy me tient en sa main;
Toujours les larmes à l’oeil,
Rien fors mourir je ne vueil.5*4
All the examples of the nobility’s mood of life testify to a
sentimental need for a dark costume for the soul. Nearly everyone
declares that he had seen nothing but misery, that one had to be
prepared for something worse and that he would not want to repeat
the life he had lived so far. “Moi douloreux homme, né en eclipse de
ténèbres en espesses bruynes de lamentation,”*> so Chastellain
announces himself.6 “Tant a souffert La Marchent”;® the court poet
and chronicler of Charles the Bold selects as his motto; life has a
bitter taste for him and his portrait shows us those morose features
that attract our attention in so many pictures of that period.7
Is there a life—equally full of earthly arrogant pride and boastful
pleasure-seeking and at the same time crowned by so much success
—as that of Philip the Good? But even it reveals the despair of the
time lurking below its facade. When informed of the death of his
one-year-old infant boy he says, “If only God deigned to let me die
so young, I would have considered myself fortunate.”8
Isn’t it strange that during this time, in the word “melancholy,”
the meanings of depression, serious contemplation, and imagination
come together? This shows how any serious endeavor of the mind
would, of necessity, take it into somber moods. Froissart tells us
about Philip van Artevelde, who is musing over a message just
received, “quant il eut merancoliet une espasse, il s’avisa que il
rescriproit aus commissaires dou roi de France,” $7 etc. Deschamps
says about something so ugly that it is beyond all power of
imagination, “No painter is so ‘merencolieux’ that he would be able
to paint it.”9
In the pessimism of all these overburdened, disappointed, and
fatigued individuals there is a religious element, but only a very
weak one. Their world-weariness certainly echoes the expectation of
the approaching end of the world that was poured into minds
everywhere by the popular preaching of the revived mendicant
orders, with renewed threats and intensified imaginative power.
The dark and confusing times, the chronic misery of war were well
suited to reinforce these thoughts. There seems to have been, during
the last years of the fourteenth century, a popular belief that
nobody had been admitted to paradise since the Great Schism
began.10 Just turning away from the vain glitter of courtly life made
people ready to bid farewell to the world. For all that, the mood of
depression as expressed by nearly all princely liegemen and
courtiers had hardly any religious substance. At best, religious
notions slightly colored the general sense of life’s malaise. This
penchant for scorning life and the world is a far cry from an
essentially religious conviction. The world, says Deschamps, is like a
childlike old man; he was innocent in the beginning, then for a long
time wise, just, virtuous and brave:
Or est laches, chetis et molz,
Vieulx convoiteus et mal parlant;
Je ne voy que foies et folz ...
La fin s'approche, en verité . ..
Tout va mal . . . 11*8
There is not only weariness with the world, but also an actual
dread of life, a fearful shrinking away because of life’s inevitable
suffering; this is the mental attitude that underlies Buddhism: an
irresolute turning away from the effort of everyday life, fear and
disgust in anticipation of disease and old age. Blasé individuals
shared this dread of life with those who had never succumbed to
the temptations of the world because they had always shied away
from life.
The poems of Deschamps overflow with miserable aspersions
about life. He is fortunate who has no children because small
children are nothing but wails and stinks, trouble and worry. They
have to be clothed, given shoes, fed, and are always in danger of
falling or hurting themselves. They become sick and die, or else
they grow up and turn bad; they are put in jail. Nothing but trouble
and disappointment, there is no happiness to reward all the worries,
efforts, and expenses of their education. There is no greater
misfortune than to have deformed children. The poet has no loving
words for them; deformed people have black hearts, he has the
scripture say. He who is unmarried is fortunate because it is terrible
to live with a bad woman and one has to be constantly afraid of
losing a good one. As well as fleeing from misfortune one must shy
away from good fortune. In old age the poet sees nothing but evil
and disgust, a miserable physical and mental decay, laughable and
calamitous. Old age comes early, for woman at thirty, for men at
fifty, and sixty is the normal end of their life span.12 How far one is
here from the pure ideality with which Dante described the dignity
of the noble elder in his Convivio.13
A pious tendency, rarely found in Deschamps, may on occasion
elevate reflections on the dread of life, but the basic mood of
discouraged failure is always more strongly felt than genuine piety.
Serious admonitions to saintliness echo these negative elements
more than they reflect a genuine will for sanctification. The
irreproachable Jean de Gerson, the Chancellor of the University of
Paris, writing a treatise for his sister about the superiority of
virginity, cites among his arguments a long list of sufferings and
pains bound up with marriage. A husband may turn out to be a
drunkard, or be extravagant or miserly. But even if he is a solid and
good individual there may be a bad harvest, or epidemic, or
shipwrecks may rob him of his worldly possessions. How miserable
is pregnancy, how many women die in childbirth! Does a nursing
mother ever enjoy undisturbed sleep, what about merriment and
joy? Her children may turn out to be malformed or disobedient, her
husband may die and the widowed mother be left to face a life of
worry and poverty.14
Daily reality is viewed in terms of the deepest depression
whenever the childlike joy of life or blind hedonism gives way to
meditation. Where is that more beautiful world for which every age
is bound to yearn?
Those yearning for a better life, at all times, have seen three paths
to the distant goal before them. The first of these ordinarily leads
away from the world: the path of denial. The more beautiful life
seems to be attainable only in the world beyond; it will prove to be
a deliverance from all earthly concerns. All the attention wasted on
the world delays the promised bliss. This path has been followed in
every higher culture. Christianity had impressed this struggle on
consciousness, both as the purpose of an individual life and as the
basis of culture, to such a degree that it almost entirely prevented
people from following the second path for a long time.
The second path was that leading to the improvement and
perfection of the world itself. The Middle Ages hardly knew this
way. To them, the world was as good and as bad as it could be; that
is, all arrangements, since God had made them, were good: it was
man’s sinfulness that made the world miserable. For this age, a
conscious striving for the improvement or reform of social and
political institutions was not the mainspring of thought and deed.
To be virtuous in the practice of one’s own profession is the only
way to benefit the world, and even given this fact, the real goal is
still the other life. Moreover, wherever a new social form is actually
created, it is seen in principle as a restoration of good old tradition,
or as a fight against abuses by virtue of a deliberate delegation of
power from the proper authorities. The conscious creation of
structures, thought of as truly new, is rare even in the many-faceted
legislative work carried out by the French monarchy after Saint
Louis. This work was imitated by the dukes of Burgundy in their
hereditary territories, but that those labors actually constituted a
development of the organization of the state in the direction of
more functional forms is a fact of which they were not yet, or
barely, aware. They issued ordinances or created offices because
this was in tune with their immediate task of promoting the general
welfare, not out of a serious vision on their part of a political future.
Nothing contributed so much to the general mood of fearfulness
and pessimism about future times than this lack of a firm
determination on the part of all to make the world a better and
happier place. This world was not included in the promise of better
things to come. To those yearning for something better and yet
unwilling to bid farewell to the world and all its splendor, nothing
was left but despair; nowhere could they see hope or joy anymore.
The world would only endure for a short time and only misery
remained for those in it.
Once the path of the positive improvement of the world is taken,
a new era is born in which the dread of life can give way to courage
and hope. This insight waits until the eighteenth century to appear.
The Renaissance owes its energetic affirmation of life to different
sorts of satisfactions. It is only the eighteenth century that makes
the perfectibility of man and society its chief dogma, and the social
struggle of the following century lost only the naiveté of its
predecessor, not its courage and optimism.
The third path to a better world leads through a land of dreams.
It is the most comfortable, but one in which the goal remains at an
unchanging distance. If earthly reality is so hopelessly miserable
and the denial of the world so difficult, this leaves us to color life
with lustrous tones, to live in a dreamland of shining fantasies, and
to soften reality in the ecstasy of the ideal. It requires only a simple
theme, a single chord, to begin the heart-stirring fugue: a glance at
the dreamy bliss of a more beautiful past time suffices, one glimpse
of its heroism and its virtue, or just the gay sunshine of life in
nature and its enjoyment. All literary culture since antiquity was
based on two themes: the heroic and the bucolic. The Middle Ages,
the Renaissance, and both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
managed nothing more than new variations on the old song.
But is this third path to a better life, this fleeing from harsh
reality into a beautiful illusion, only a concern of literary culture?
Surely it is more than that. Just as the other two paths, it affects the
form and content of communal life; and it affects that life the more
strongly the more primitive the culture is.
The impact of the three above-mentioned intellectual attitudes on
real life itself differs considerably. The most intimate and consistent
contact between the labor of life and the ideal goal is found when
the idea points to the improvement and perfection of the world
itself. In these instances both man’s inspirational strength and his
confidence flow into material work. Immediate reality is charged
with energy. To follow one’s life’s calling means striving to attain
the ideal of a better world. If you wish, here too a blissful dream is
the motivating element. To a certain degree, every culture strives
towards the creation of a dream world in reality through the
transformation of social forms. But while in the other instances we
encounter only a mental transformation, the setting up of imaginary
perfections in place of the harsh reality one wants to forget, here
the object of the dream is reality itself. The idea is to transform
reality, to cleanse and improve it. The world appears to be on the
good path towards the ideal, if only people would go on working.
The ideal form of life seems to be only slightly distant from the life
of labor; there is only a minute tension between reality and the
dream. Wherever striving for the highest production and cheapest
distribution of goods suffices, where the ideal consists of welfare,
freedom, and culture, there are comparatively few demands placed
on the art of life. There is no longer any need for men to playact the
roles of nobleman or hero, wise man or refined courtier.
The first of these three intellectual attitudes, that of world denial,
exercises an entirely different influence on real life. Homesickness
for eternal bliss renders us indifferent towards the events and forms
of earthly existence, desiring only that virtue be generated and
maintained in them. The forms of life and society are left as they
are, but one strives to permeate them with transcendent morality.
This prevents the turning away from the world from having an
entirely negative effect on the earthly community as merely denial
and abstinence, but allows it to radiate back on society in the form
of godly work and practical charity.
But what is the impact of the third attitude on life? Does the
yearning for a better life correspond to a dreamed-of ideal? This
attitude changes the forms of life into forms of art. But this path
does not express its dream of beauty only in artworks as such: it
aims at ennobling life itself with beauty and fills communal life
with play and forms. Here are found the highest demands on the
personal art of living, demands that only an elite can try to meet
with an artful life of play.15 The imitation of heroes and sages is not
for everyone; painting life with either heroic or idyllic colors is an
expensive pastime and, as a rule, is only partially successful. The
struggle to realize the dream of beauty within the forms of society
itself has an aristocratic character in its vitium originis.
Now we have come to the point from which we intend to view
the culture of late medieval times: the point of the beautification of
aristocratic life with the forms of the ideal—the artistic light of
chivalric romanticism spread over life, with the world costumed in
the garb of the round table. The tension between the forms of life
and reality is extremely high; the light is false and overdone.
The desire for the beautiful life is generally held to be the most
characteristic feature of the Renaissance. Then we witness the
greatest harmony in satisfying the thirst for beauty, equally in
works of art and in life itself. Art served life and life served art as
never before. But here the line between the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance is too sharply drawn. The passionate desire to dress life
in beauty, the refinement of the art of living, the colorful products
of a life lived in imitation of an ideal are much older than the
Italian quattrocento. The very motifs of the beautification of life
that the Florentines expanded upon are nothing but old medieval
forms; Lorenzo de’Medici, even as did Charles the Bold, paid
homage to the old knightly ideal as the noble form of life. He even
saw in it a model of sorts, its barbarian splendor notwithstanding.
Italy discovered new aspects of the beauty of life and gave life a
new tone, but the attitude toward life that is usually seen as
characteristic of the Renaissance—the striving to transform or even
elevate one’s own life to a higher level of artistic form—was by no
means invented by the Renaissance.
The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes
much more between the Renaissance and the modern period than
between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout
occurs at the point where art and life begin to diverge. It is the
point where art begins to be no longer in the midst of life, as a
noble part of the joy of life itself, but outside of life as something to
be highly venerated, as something to turn to in moments of
edification or rest. The old dualism separating God and world has
thus returned in another form, that of the separation of art and life.
Now a line has been drawn right through the enjoyments offered by
life. Henceforth they are separated into two halves—one lower, one
higher. For medieval man they were all sinful without exception;
now they are all considered permissible, but their ethical evaluation
differs according to their greater or lesser degree of spirituality.
The things that can make life enjoyable remain the same. They
are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment
of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary
offices, gatherings), and the intoxication of the senses. For the
majority, the border between the higher and lower levels seems
now to be located between the enjoyment of nature and sports. But
this border is not firm. Most likely sport will sooner or later again
be counted among the higher enjoyments—at least insofar as it is
the art of physical strength and courage. For medieval man the
border lay, in the best of cases, right after reading; the enjoyment of
reading could only be sanctified through striving for virtue or
wisdom. For music and the fine arts, it was their service to faith
alone that was recognized as being good. Enjoyment per se was
sinful. The Renaissance had managed to free itself from the
rejection of all the joy of life as something sinful, but had not yet
found a new way of separating the higher and lower enjoyments of
life; the Renaissance wanted an unencumbered enjoyment of all of
life. The new distinction is the result of the compromise between
the Renaissance and Puritanism that is at the base of modern
spiritual attitudes. It amounted to a mutual capitulation in which
the one side insisted on saving beauty while the other insisted on
the condemnation of sin. Strict Puritanism, just as did the Middle
Ages, still condemned as basically sinful and worldly the entire
sphere of the beautification of life with an exception being made in
cases where such efforts assumed expressly religious forms and
sanctified themselves through their use in the service of faith. Only
after the Puritan worldview lost its intensity did the Renaissance
receptiveness to all the joys of life gain ground again; perhaps even
more ground than before, because beginning with the eighteenth
century there is a tendency to regard the natural per se as an
element of the ethically good. Anyone attempting to draw the
dividing line between the higher and lower enjoyment of life
according to the dictates of ethical consciousness would no longer
separate art from sensuous enjoyment, the enjoyment of nature
from the cult of the body, the elevated from the natural, but would
only separate egotism, lies, and vanity from purity.
Towards the end of the medieval period, even as a new spirit
began to stir, there was, in principle, still only the old choice
between God and the world: the total rejection of all the splendor
and beauty of earthly life or a daring acceptance of it that ran the
risk of harming the soul. The beauty of the world became twice as
tempting because its sinfulness was recognized; surrendering oneself
to it meant, therefore, to enjoy it with unbridled passion. But those
who could not do without beauty and yet were unwilling to
surrender to the world had no choice but to ennoble beauty. They
were able to sanctify the entire sector of art and literature—where
admiration constituted the essence of enjoyment—by putting it in
the service of faith. And if it was actually the enjoyment of color
and line that inspired the connoisseurs of painting and miniatures,
the stamp of sinfulness was removed from the enjoyment of these
objects because of their sacred subject matter. But what about
beauty with a high degree of sinfulness? How could all that, the cult
of the body of the knightly sports, courtly life, pride and the avidity
for office and honor, and the mesmerizing mystery of love, how
could these be made noble and elevated after faith had scorned and
condemned them? Here the middle path that led to the land of
dreams helped: one dressed everything in the beautiful light of the
old fantastic ideals.
The strict cultivation of the beautiful life in the form of a heroic
ideal is the characteristic that ties French knightly culture after the
twelfth century to the Renaissance. The worship of nature was still
too weak to take the beauty of the world in all its nakedness into its
service with full conviction as the Greek mind had done: the idea of
sin was too powerful for that. Only in so much as people could wrap
themselves in the garment of virtue could beauty be brought to
culture.
The whole aristocratic life of the later Middle Ages, whether one
thinks of France and Burgundy or of Florence, is an attempt to play
out a dream. It is always the same dream, that of the old heroes and
sages, of knight and maid, of simple and amusing shepherds. France
and Burgundy always play the piece in the old style; Florence
composes on the set theme a new and more beautiful variation.
Noble and princely life has reached up to its highest possible
expression; all the forms of life are equally elevated to the level of
mysteries, embellished with color and adornment, masked as virtue.
The events of life and the changes of emotion they trigger in us are
here framed in beautiful and elevating forms. I well understand that
all this is not specifically medieval; it had already arisen in the
primitive stages of culture, one can denominate it in chinoiserie and
Byzantianism, and it did not die with the Middle Ages, as the Sun
King proves.
The stateliness of the court is the arena wherein the aesthetic of
the form of life can unfold most fully. It is well known how much
importance the Burgundian princes attached to everything that bore
on the splendor and stateliness of their courts. Next to military
glory, says Chastellain, the courtly ritual is the most important thing
demanding attention and its regulation and maintenance are of
highest necessity.16 Olivier de la Marche, the Master of Ceremonies
of Charles the Bold, at the instigation of the English king Edward
IV, wrote a tract about ritual at the court of Charles, urging this
model of ceremony and etiquette as worthy of emulation.17 The
Hapsburgs inherited the beautifully elaborate court life of Burgundy
and later exported it to Spain and Austria, at which courts it
remained the bulwark of this high artificiality until recently. The
court of Burgundy was praised by all as the wealthiest and best
ordered.18 Charles the Bold, above all, known as a man of violent
disposition, given to discipline and order but leaving nothing but
disorder behind him, had a passion for the most formal forms of
life. The old illusion that the prince himself heard the grievances of
the poor and powerless and adjudicated them on the spot was
dressed by him in a beautiful form. Two or three times a week, after
lunch, he had a public audience during which anyone could
approach him with petitions. All the noblemen of his house had to
be present; none dared to be absent. Carefully ordered according to
rank, they were seated on both sides of the passage leading to the
high seat of the duke. Kneeling at his feet were the two maistres des
requestes, the audiencier, and a secretary. They read the petitions or
dealt with them as instructed by the prince. Behind balustrades
placed around the hall were the lower ranking members of the
court. On the surface, says Chastellain, it was “un chose magnifique
et de grand los,”*? but the involuntary spectators were thoroughly
bored and he doubted that this method of administering justice was
successful. It was, nonetheless, something that he had never seen
done by any other prince.19
Recreation, too, at the court of Charles the Bold had to take on
beautiful forms. “Tournoit toutes ses maniéres et ses moeurs a sens
une part du jour, et avecques jeux et ris entremeslés, se delitoit en
beau parler et en amonester ses nobles a vertu, comme un orateur.
Et en cestuy regart, plusieurs fois, s’est trouvé assis en un hautdos
paré et ses nobles devant luy, là où il leur fit diverses remonstrances
selon les divers temps et causes. Et toujours, comme prince et chef
sur tous, fut richement et magnifiquement habitué sur tous les
autres.”20;19 This conscious effort to make an art form of life is
actually a perfect realization of the Renaissance, its stiff and naive
forms notwithstanding. What Chastellain calls his “haute
magnificence de coeur pour estre vu et regardé en singuliéres
choses”::!! is the characteristic quality of Burckhardt’s Renaissance
man.
The hierarchical arrangements of the courtly household have a
Rabelaisian exuberance wherever they involve meals and the
kitchen. The courtly table of Charles the Bold, with all the panetiers
and carvers and wine pourers and chefs, whose services were
regulated with nearly liturgical dignity, resembled the performance
of a grand and solemn play. The entire court ate in groups of ten in
separate rooms, served and attended, as was the duke, with
scrupulous observance of rank and standing. Everything was so well
regulated that all these groups, after finishing their meal, still had
time to greet the duke who was still sitting at his table, “pour luy
donner gloire.”21
In the kitchen (one should try to imagine the heroic kitchen with
its seven giant hearths, now all that is left of the ducal palace in
Dijon) sits the on-duty chef in an armchair, located between hearth
and buffet, from which he is able to overlook the entire room. In his
hand he must hold a large wooden spoon “which serves him two
purposes: one, to taste soup and sauces; the other to spur the
kitchen boys to their duty and, if necessary, to spank them.” On rare
occasions, as for example, when the first truffles or the first herring
are served, the chef himself—holding a torch—may do the honors.
To the stilted courtier who describes all this for us, these are
sacred mysteries about which he speaks with respect and in a kind
of scholastic scientific manner. When I was a page boy, La Marche
says, I was still too young to understand questions of préséance and
ceremonial.22 He puts before his readers important questions of
precedence and court service in order to answer them on the basis
of his mature insights. Why must the cook and not the écuyer de
cuisine be present at the master’s meal? In what manner must the
cook come into employment at the court? Who should replace him
in case of his absence: the hateur or the potagier? Here I answer, says
the wise man: when a cook is to be employed at the court of a
prince, the maîtres d’héte, the écuyers de cuisine, and all those
employed in the kitchen speak up one by one and by solemn choice
made by everyone of them under his oath, the cook takes his
position. And to the second question: neither the hateur nor the
potagier may replace him but only an individual chosen by a similar
election may substitute for the cook. Why do the panetiers and
cupbearers hold the first and second ranks above the meat carvers
and cooks? Because their office concerns bread and wine—holy
objects glorified by virtue of the sacrament.23
One can see in this instance that there is an actual connection
between the sphere of faith and that of court etiquette. It does not
overstate the case to claim that every means of beautifying and
ennobling the forms of life contain a liturgical element that raises
the observance of these forms almost to a religious realm. Only this
can explain the extraordinary importance people give to all
questions of precedence and etiquette, and not only during late
medieval times.
Quarrels over royal precedence resulted in the establishment of a
regular department of state service in the pre-Romanov days of the
Russian empire. Though the western states of medieval times did
not create departments, envy about precedence played an important
role. It would be easy to gather examples to illustrate this, but here
we need only to show how the forms of life were elaborated into
beautiful and uplifting games and the wild growth of these games
into empty display. Here are just a few examples to demonstrate
this. Formal beauty may occasionally completely push practical
action aside. Immediately before the battle of Crécy, four French
knights reconnoitered the English order of battle. The king, quite
impatiently awaiting their report and slowly riding across the field,
halts his horse when he sees them returning. They manage to make
their way to the presence of the king through the throng of
warriors. “What news do you have, messiers?” asks the king. They
look at each other without speaking a word because none of them
wants to speak ahead of his comrades. And one says to the other,
“Sire, you tell it, you speak to the King, I will not speak ahead of
you.” So they debate a while, back and forth, because no one wants
to speak first, “par honneur.” Finally, the king orders one of them to
report.24 Practicality had to give way to beautiful form even more
so in the case of Messire Gaultier Rallart, Chevalier du guet in Paris
in 1418. This chief of police never went on his rounds unless he was
accompanied by three or four musicians who preceded him. They
played so lustily that people said he was practically warning the
crooks, “Flee, for Iam coming!”25 This is not an isolated case. There
is another case in 1465. The bishop of Evreux, Jean Balure, makes
his nightly round in Paris accompanied by clarinets, trumpets and
other musical instruments, “qui n’estoit pas acoustumé de faire a
gens faisans guet.”26*!2 The honors due rank and status were
strictly observed even at the scaffold: that of the connétable de Saint
Pol is richly decorated with embroidered lilies, the prayer pillow
and the blindfold are of crimson velvet, and the hangman is one
who has never hanged anyone before—a rather dubious privilege
for the condemned.27
Competition in courtliness and politeness—now characteristically
petit bourgeois—was extraordinarily strongly developed in the life of
the courts of the fifteenth century. It was regarded as a personal and
unbearable disgrace not to yield to the higher ranking their proper
place. Burgundian dukes gave painfully correct precedence to their
royal relations of France. John the Fearless treated his young
daughter-in-law, Michelle de France, at all times with exaggerated
respect; he called her madame, always knelt before her and offered
to serve her constantly—something she was, however, not prepared
to tolerate.28 When Duke Philip the Good learns that his cousin the
dauphin, heir to the throne of France, has escaped to Brabant
during a conflict with his father the king, he interrupts the siege of
Deventer, part of an expedition to bring Frisia under his control,
and hurries back to Brussels to welcome his noble guest. The closer
the time of their meeting comes, the greater the competition over
who will outdo the other in paying homage. Philip is in mortal fear
that the dauphin will come out to meet him. He travels posthaste
and sends messenger after messenger to make the dauphin wait in
place for him. If the dauphin comes to meet him in person, he vows,
he’ll turn around and travel so far that the dauphin will never find
him because the duke will be so ridiculed and shamed that the
whole world will never let him forget it. Philip enters Brussels
modestly departing from the usual pomp; he hastily dismounts in
front of the palace and enters it. He runs forward, then he sees the
dauphin who, with the duchess, has left his chamber and who
approaches Philip in the courtyard with open arms. Immediately the
old duke bares his head, kneels down for a short moment, and runs
forward in great haste. The duchess holds on to the dauphin to keep
him from taking another step while the dauphin tries in vain to hold
the duke on his feet and to keep him from kneeling down. Failing
this, he tries to get the duke to stand up. Both weep with emotion,
says Chastellain, and all the bystanders weep with them.
For the duration of the stay by this man who, as king, was soon to
become the worst enemy of his house, the duke outdoes himself in
displays of Chinese servility. He calls himself and his son “de si
meschans gens,”*1!3 he exposes his sixty-year-old head to the rain,
and offers the dauphin all his lands.29 “Celuy qui se humilie devant
son plus grand, celuy accroist et multiplie son honneur envers
soymesme, et de quoy la bonté mesme luy resplend et redonde en
face”:*14 with these words Chastellain ends his report about how
the Count of Charolais stubbornly refused before a meal to use the
same wash basin as Queen Margaret of England and her young son.
The noblemen talked about it all day: the case was brought before
the old duke, who had two noblemen argue the pros and cons of
Charles’s attitude. The feudal sense of honor was still alive to the
degree that such things were apparently still held to be meaningful,
beautiful, and edifying. How else are we to understand that refusals
to accept precedence could, as a rule, be continued for a quarter of
an hour?30 The longer the refusal, the more impressed the
bystanders. Someone entitled to have his hand kissed hides his hand
to avoid the honor. The queen of Spain hides her hand in this
manner to thwart the young archduke Philip the Beautiful, but the
latter, after having waited for a while, unexpectedly seizes her hand
and kisses it. The entire Spanish court broke out in laughter on this
occasion because the queen was no longer expecting this gesture. 31
All spontaneous displays of tenderness in social relations are
carefully turned into form. It is precisely prescribed which of the
ladies at court had to go about holding hands, and even which one
or the other had to take the initiative. The invitation, a wave or a
call, is a technical term (hucher) in the vocabulary of the old court
lady who describes Burgundian court etiquette.32 The formality of
preventing a departing guest from leaving is carried to the most
vexing extremes. The wife of Louis XI is for a few days the guest of
Philip of Burgundy; Louis has set a certain day for her return, but
the duke refuses to let her go, disregarding the fervent pleas of her
attendants and even the queen’s own fear of her husband’s rage.33
Goethe said: “There is no external sign of courtesy without a deep
ethical cause,” but Emerson called courtesy “virtue gone to seed.” It
is perhaps not justifiable to claim that this ethical cause was still
any longer felt during the fifteenth century, but surely the aesthetic
value was located somewhere between the honest display of
affection and barren social form.
It goes without saying that these overelaborated embellishments
of life took place above all at the princely courts, where sufficient
time and space were available. But that they also permeated the
lower spheres of society is proven by the fact that these forms are
preserved today precisely among the petite bourgeoisie (not to speak
of the courts themselves). The customs of urging guests repeatedly
to have still another helping of a particular dish, of encouraging
them to stay a little longer, of refusing to go ahead of someone,
have for the most part disappeared during the last half-century from
the etiquette of the higher bourgeoisie. But during the fifteenth
century these forms were still in full bloom. Yet while they are most
painfully observed, they are the target of biting satire. Above all, it
is at church where the stage for beautiful and lengthy displays of
civility is found. Most obviously during the offrande, because
nobody wants to be the first to put his alms on the altar.
“Passez. ”—“Non feray.”—“Or avant!
Certes si ferez, ma cousine.”
—“Non feray.”—“Huchez no voisine,
Qu'elle doit mieux devant offrir.”
—“Vous ne le devriez souffrir.”
Dist la voisine: “n’appartient
A moy: offrez, qu’à vous ne tient
Que li prestres ne se delivre.”34*15
Finally after the social superior among them had at last taken the
lead, all the time humbly protesting that he did so only to end the
stalemate, the quarrel starts over again about who will first kiss la
paix, the wooden, silver, or ivory plate that had found its way into
the mass, following the Agnus Dei, during late medieval times
replacing the kiss of peace that had been given mouth to mouth.35
Because the paix was passed from hand to hand among the
prominent members of the congregation, who most courteously
refused to kiss it first, it became a standard and protracted
disturbance of church services.
Respondre doit la jeune fame:
—Prenez, je ne prendray pas, dame.
—Si ferez, prenez, douce amie.
—Certes, je ne le prandray mie;
L’en me tendroit pour un sote
—Baillez, damoiselle Masrote.
—Non feray, Jhesucrist m’en gart!
Portez à ma dame Ermagart.
—Dame, prenez.—Saincte Marie,
Portez la paix a la baille.
—Non, mais à la gouverner esse.36*16
At last, she accepts it. Even a saintly, world-renouncing man like
Franz von Paula considers it his duty to participate in this
affectation, and his pious admirers credit this as a sign of true
humility, proving that the ethical content had not altogether
vanished from these formalities.37 The importance of these forms,
incidentally, is clearly evident in the fact that the precedence that
people so civilly forced upon one another in church, was, on the
other hand, the cause of volatile and stubborn quarrels.38 Yielding
precedence was a beautiful and praiseworthy denial of a lively
noble or bourgeois arrogance.
The entire church visit thus became a kind of minuet, since the
quarrel resumed upon leaving the church. Then came the
competition to get the higher ranking individuals to walk on the
right side, the question of who would cross a plank bridge or enter a
narrow alley. Arriving at home, one had to invite the entire
company to come inside for a drink—something that Spanish
custom still requires—while the invitees, in turn, were obliged to
refuse in a most polite manner; whereupon the would-be host had
to accompany them part of their way: all this again amidst displays
of polite refusal by those accompanied.39
There is something touching about these beautiful forms,
particularly if we remind ourselves that they are the blossoms that
arise from the serious struggle with its own arrogance and rage of a
race prone to violence and passion. The formal denial of pride
frequently fails and, time and again, crass rudeness breaks through
the ornate forms. John of Bavaria is a guest in Paris; the luminaries
of the city entertain him lavishly but the elector of Liege takes all
their money in a game of chance. One of the princes can stand it no
longer and cries out: “What the devil kind of a priest is this? How?
Shall he take all of our money?” Whereupon John replies, “I am no
priest and I don’t need your money.” And he took the money and
tossed it all over the room. “Dont y pluseurs orent grant mervelle de
sa grant liberaliteit.”40*!7 Hue de Lannoy hits someone with an iron
glove while the victim is kneeling in accusation before the duke; the
Cardinal of Bar calls a priest a liar and a low dog in the presence of
the king.41
The formal sense of honor is so strong that an affront against
etiquette, as is still the case among many Oriental people, wounds
like a mortal insult because it causes the beautiful illusion that one’s
own life is high and pure—something found at the bottom of any
unveiled reality—to collapse. To John the Fearless it is a matter of
unerasable shame that he has greeted Capeluche, the hangman of
Paris, who meets him dressed in full regalia, like a nobleman and
touched his hand; only the death of the hangman will redress this
outrage.42 During the state banquet at the coronation of Charles VI
in 1380, Philip of Burgundy forces his way to the seat between the
king and the duke of Anjou to which he is entitled as the senior of
the two; both their entourages approach with shouts and threats to
settle the dispute with force, but the king settles it by giving in to
the demands of the Burgundian.43 Amidst the serious life on the
campaigns, too, violations of forms are not tolerated. The King of
England resents that I’lsle Adam appears before him in a garb of
“blanc gris” and looks at him face to face.44 An English commander
sends a peace emissary from the besieged city of Sens to a barber
for a shave before receiving him.45
The splendid order of the court of Burgundy that was praised by
contemporaries46 reveals its true significance only if it is viewed
side by side with the confusion customary at the much older French
court. Deschamps in a number of ballads decries the misery of court
life. His laments mean something more than the usual disapproval
of the life of a courtier, about which we will talk later on. Poor food
and poor lodgings, constant clamor and confusion, curses and
quarrels, envy and mockery: it is a cesspool of sin, a gateway to
hell.47 In spite of the pious veneration of royalty and the proud
edifice of grand ceremonies, the decorum of the most significant of
events is pitifully lost on more than one occasion. During the
funeral of Charles VI at St. Denis in 1422, massive disputes arise
between the monks of the abbey and the guild of the salt-weighers
(henouars) over the state robe and other items of clothing covering
the royal corpse; each of the parties insist that it has a claim to
them and they engage in a tug-of-war and nearly come to blows.
But the duke of Bedford turned the case over to the courts, “et fut le
corps enterré!”48*18 The same quarrel is repeated in 1461 during
the funeral of Charles VII. Having arrived at the Croix aux Fiens on
their way to St. Denis, the salt-weighers, after an exchange of words
with the monks of the abbey, refuse to carry the royal corpse any
further unless they are paid ten Parisian pounds to which they claim
to be entitled. They leave the bier in the middle of the road and the
funeral procession is held up for considerable time. The burghers of
St. Denis are on the verge of assuming the duties themselves when
the grand écuyer promises payment out of his own pocket to the
henouars. Thereupon the procession continues and finally reaches
the church at nearly eight o’clock in the evening. Immediately
following the funeral a new dispute over the state robe ensues
between the monks and the royal grand écuyer himself.49 Similar
tumultuous confrontations over the ownership of the utensils of a
festive event were a regular part of the festivals, so to speak;
disrupting a form had itself become a form.50
The general public, which even during the seventeenth century
was still a mandatory participant in all the important events of
royal life, cause the largest festive occasions, in particular, to
frequently lack any semblance of order. During the 1380 coronation
banquet the throng of spectators, participants, and servants was so
great that the king’s waiters, especially hired for the purpose, the
connétable and the marshal of Sancerre had to serve the dishes from
horseback.51 When Henry VI of England is crowned king in Paris in
1431, the people crowd into the great hall of the palace at early
morning, some to watch, some to pilfer, and some to sneak a bite or
two. The lords of parliament, those of the university, the prévôt des
marchands, and the aldermen are barely able to push their way to
the banquet and, when they get there, find that the tables meant for
them have been taken by a number of craftsmen. Attempts are made
to remove them, “mais quant on en faisoit lever ung ou deux, il s’en
asseoit VI ou VIII d’autre costé.”52*19 At the coronation of Louis XI
in 1461 the Cathedral of Reims is closed early and carefully guarded
as a precaution that only as many people be admitted to the church
as the choir can safely hold. However, the place near the high altar
where the anointment takes place is so crowded that there is hardly
any room for the prelate assisting the bishop to move and the
princes of the blood on their seats of honor are in acute physical
danger.53
The church in Paris only reluctantly tolerated the fact that it was
(until 1622) the suffragan of the Archbishopric of Sens. The
archbishop was made to feel in every way that his authority was not
appreciated and there was constant reference to the exemption
granted by the pope. On February 2, 1492, the archbishop of Sens
celebrates a mass in Notre Dame in Paris in the presence of the
king. Before the king leaves the church, the archbishop, blessing the
crowd, retreats with the priest’s cross carried ahead of him. Two of
the canons advance with a large number of ecclesiastics, get their
hands on the cross and damage it, twist the hand of the man
carrying it, and start a tumultuous scene during which the servants
of the archbishop have some of their hair pulled out. When the
archbishop attempts to end the quarrel, “sans lui mot dire, vinrent
prés de lui; Lhuillier [Dean of the cathedral] lui baille du coude
dans l’estomac, les autres romprient le chapeau pontifical et les
cordons d’icelluy.”+2° The other canon chases the archbishop
“disant plusieurs injures en luy mectant le doigt au visage, et
prenant son bras tant que dessira son rochet, et n’eust esté que
n’eust mis sa main au devant, l’eust frappé au visage.”*2! This
resulted in a lawsuit that lasted thirteen years.54
The passionate and violent mind of the time, hardened and at the
same time prone to tears; on the one side despairing of the world,
yet on the other reveling in its colorful beauty, could not exist
without the strictest formalized behavior. It was essential that the
excitement be fixed in a firm frame of standardized forms. Only in
this way could life attain a regulated ordering. Thus one’s own
experiences and those of others were turned into a beautiful,
intellectually pleasing presentation; people enjoyed the exaggerated
spectacle of suffering and joy under stage lights. The means for a
purely spiritual expression was still lacking. Only the aesthetic
shaping of emotions allowed that high degree of expression
demanded by the times.
This does not mean, of course, that these life forms, above all
those relating to the great holy events of birth, marriage, and death,
were implemented with such meaning in mind. Customs and
ceremonies grow out of primitive beliefs and cults. But the original
meaning that constituted their essence has long been lost from
consciousness. In its place the forms have been filled with new
aesthetic value.
The dressing of sentiment in the garb of a suggestive form reaches
its highest development in mourning. There were unlimited
possibilities for a splendid exaggeration of sorrow, the counterpart
of the hyperbolic expressions of joy during the grandiose court
festivities. We do not intend to offer at this point a detailed
description of all that somber splendor of black dresses and the
lavish display of the funeral ceremonies that accompanied the death
of every prince. This is not a characteristic exclusively belonging to
the later Middle Ages; monarchies preserve it in our time, and the
bourgeois hearse is one of its products. The suggestiveness of the
black, used for the clothing not only of the court, but also of the
magistrates, the members of the guilds, and ordinary people on the
occasion of a princely death, must have been made much stronger
by the contrast to the ordinarily rich and varied colors of medieval
city life. The funeral pomp displayed over the murdered John the
Fearless was tailored with the most deliberate of intentions for
maximum (and in part political) effect. The retinue of warriors
accompanying Philip to greet the Kings of England and France
displays two thousand black pennons with black standards and
banners seven yards long, the fringes of black lace, all embroidered
or painted with golden escutcheons. The duke’s throne and coach of
state have been painted black for the occasion.55 At a splendid
meeting at Troyes, Philip accompanies the Queens of France and
England in a velvet mourning garb that trails across the back of his
horse and down to the ground.56 He and his entourage continued to
wear black for a considerable period after that.57
On occasion an exception in the midst of all that black could
enhance the impact: while the entire French court, including the
queen, wears black, the king mourns wearing red.58 And in 1393
the Parisians viewed with consternation the all-white funeral
procession for the King of Armenia, Leo of Lusignan, who had died
in exile.59
There is no doubt that black mourning dress frequently enclosed a
large measure of genuine and passionate grief. Given the medievals’
fear of death, strong family attachments, and intense loyalty to their
lord, the death of a prince was a truly depressing event. Add to this
an injury to the honor of a proud family that made revenge a sacred
duty, as was the case with respect to the murder of the duke of
Burgundy in 1419, and the expressions of pain and pomp in all their
exaggerated forms could well be appropriate to the intensity of the
mood. Chastellain deals profusely with the aesthetics of the way the
news of the duke’s death was transmitted; he invents the long
speech, and the weighty and halting style of its dignified rhetoric,
with which, at Ghent, the bishop of Tournay gradually prepares the
young duke for the terrible news, and he invents the dignified
expressions of lament by Philip and his wife, Michelle of France. But
we have no reason to doubt the heart of his report: that the news
leads to a nervous breakdown on the part of the young duke and
that his wife, too, fell into a swoon. The terrible confusion at court,
the loud laments in the city—in short, all the intense, unbridled
pain with which the news was received—is not to be doubted.60
Chastellain’s report about the expression of pain on the part of
Charles the Bold at the passing of Philip in 1467 has elements of
truth in it. In this instance the blow was less violent; the old and
nearly childish duke had deteriorated for a long time. Relations
between the duke and his son had been anything but cordial during
the last years. This prompted Chastellain himself to remark that he
was astonished to see Charles break down in tears, cry, wring his
hands and fall to the ground at the deathbed, “et ne tenoit règle, ne
mesure, et tellement qu’il fit chacun s’esmerveiller de sa démesurée
douleur.”*22 In the city of Bruges where the duke had died, there
too, “estoit pitié de oyr toutes maniéres de gens crier et plorer et
faire leurs diverses lamentaions et regrets.”61}25
It is difficult to tell, from this and similar reports, how far the
court style went and how much a noisy display of suffering was
considered appropriate and beautiful and how profound the really
intense emotions, characteristic of these times, were. There is
certainly still a primitive element in it: the loud lament over the
dead person that is formalized in the cries of the hired women
mourners, that becomes art in the plourants, and that bestows
something so deeply moving upon grave sculptures, particularly
during this period, is a very ancient cultural element.
The combination of primitivity, high sensitivity, and beautiful
form can also be sensed in the great fear of conveying the news of a
death to a great prince of the Middle Ages. The news of the death of
her father is kept from the duchess of Charolais as long as she is
pregnant with the future Mary of Burgundy; any news of a death
remotely of concern to him is kept from Philip the Good on his
sickbed, which means, among other things, that Adolf of Cleve is
not permitted to wear mourning dress after the death of his wife.
When the duke managed to “get wind” (Chastellain himself uses the
term “avoit esté en vent un peu de ceste mort”) of the death of his
chancellor, Nicolas Rolin, he asked the bishop of Tournay, who had
come to see him, whether it was true that the chancellor had died.
“Monseigneur,” says the bishop, “in truth he may be dead because
he is old and broken in body and spirit and will hardly live for
long.” “Déa!” says the duke, “I don’t ask that, I ask whether he is
‘mort de mort et trespassé.” +24 “Well, monseigneur,” the bishop
replies, “he has not died, but he is paralyzed on one side and is as
good as dead.” The duke gets angry, “Vechy merveilles! *25 Tell me
clearly now, whether he is dead.” Only then does the bishop admit:
“Yes, truly, monseigneur, he has really died.”62 Does not this
strange way of conveying the news of a death reveal more of an old
superstitious form than mere consideration for a sick person whom
all this hesitation could only irritate? All this is part of that sort of
thinking that prompted Louis XI never again to wear clothes he had
worn when he received any kind of bad news; nor to ride again a
horse on which he had been mounted on one of those occasions.
Indeed, he even had a section of the Forest of Loches cut down
because it was there that he had learned of the death of his
newborn son.63 “M. le chancellier,” he writes on May 25, 1483, “je
vous mercye des lettres etc. mais je vous pry que m’en envoyés plus
par celluy qui les m’a aportées, car je luy ay trouvé le visage
terriblement changé depuis que je ne le vitz, et vous prometz par
ma foy qu’il m’a fait grant peur; et adieu.” 6426
No matter what old taboo notions may be hidden in the mourning
customs, their living cultural value is that they bestow on sorrow a
form and turn it into something beautiful and lofty. They bestow a
rhythm on pain, transpose real life into the sphere of drama and
dress it in the cothurnus.65 In a primitive culture—I have, for
example, the Irish in mind—mourning customs and funeral poetry
are still an unbroken whole. Court mourning during Burgundian
times can only be understood if viewed in relation to elegy. The
displays of mourning demonstrated in beautiful form how totally
powerless the affected individual is in the face of suffering. The
higher the rank the more heroic the display of pain. The Queen of
France had to stay an entire year in the room where she was told of
the death of her husband. In the case of princesses, six weeks were
the norm. After Madame de Charolais, Isabella de Bourbon, had
been told of the death of her father, she did attend the funeral at
Couwenberg Castle but thereafter remained for six weeks in her
room—all the time lying on her bed, propped up by pillows, but
clothed in barbette, cap, and overcoat. The room is draped entirely
in black. On the floor is a large black sheet in place of a soft carpet,
and the antechamber is similarly draped in black. Noble women are
confined to bed solely for the death of their husband for six weeks,
only ten days for father or mother, but for the rest of the six weeks
they remain seated before the bed on a large sheet of black cloth.
The death of the eldest brother requires six weeks of confinement to
a room, but not to the bed.66 This makes it clear why, in a time that
held this kind of high ceremonial in such honor, one of the most
mentioned of the shocking circumstances surrounding the murder of
John the Fearless in 1419 was that he was buried dressed only in
vest, trousers, and shoes.67
The emotion of grief, dressed in beautiful forms and assimilated
in this manner, is easily dealt with; the urge to dramatize life leaves
room “behind the scene” where nobly embellished pathos can be
denied. There is a naïve separation between “state” and real life
that is revealed in the writings of the old court lady Alienor de
Poitiers, who still venerates all these external displays as if they
were high mysteries. Following the description of Isabella of
Bourbon’s magnificent mourning she declares, “Quand Madame
estoit en son particulier, elle n’estoit point toujours couchee, ni en
une chambre.”*27 The princess receives in this state, but only as a
beautiful formality. Alienor adds in a similar vein, “It is proper to
wear mourning clothes for two years in memory of a husband if you
can’t avoid remarriage.” Speedy remarriage was frequent,
particularly among the highest estates, the princes with the most
famous names. The duke of Bedford, Regent of France for the young
Henry VI, remarried after only five months.
Next to mourning, confinement during childbirth offered ample
opportunities for serious pomp and hierarchical distinctions of
ostentation. There, colors have meaning. Green, which was the
usual color for the middle-class crib and the vuurmand6s as late as
the nineteenth century, was in the fifteenth century the prerogative
of queens and princesses. The confinement room of the Queen of
France was of green silk (earlier on, it was entirely in white). Even
countesses were not permitted to have “la chambre verde.” Fabrics,
furs, and the colors of blankets and bedspreads were prescribed. On
the dressing table in the room of Isabella of Bourbon, two large
candles in silver holders burn continuously because the shutters of
the lying-in room are kept closed for fourteen days. Most
remarkable however are the stately beds that, like the carriages at
the burial of the King of Spain, remain empty. The young mother
lies on a couch in front of the fire and the child, Mary of Burgundy,
in a cradle in the nursery. In addition, in the confinement room
there are two large beds in an artistic ensemble with green drapes.
They are made, with covers turned, as if for someone to sleep in
them. In the nursery, there are in addition two large bedsteads in
green and violet and still another large bed in an antechamber, or
chambre de parement, that is entirely draped in crimson-colored satin
which was donated to John the Fearless by the city of Utrecht; the
room was therefore called “la chambre d’Utrecht.” During the
baptism ceremonies the beds served ceremonial functions.69
The aesthetics of formality revealed itself in the everyday look of
town and countryside: the strict hierarchy of fabrics, colors, and
furs placed the different estates in an eternal frame of reference that
both enhanced and protected a sense of their dignity. But the
aesthetic of emotional swings was not limited to festive rejoicing
and sorrowing on the occasions of birth, marriage, and death, where
processions were a function of the necessary ceremonies. Every
ethical action was preferably seen in terms of a beautifully
embellished form. There is such an element in the admiration for
the humility and self-flagellation of a saint, for the repentance of a
sinner such as the “moult belle contrition de ses Péchés” “28 of
Agnes Sorel.70 Every relationship in life is stylized. In contrast to
the modern preoccupation with hiding and obscuring intimate
relations, medieval man strove to express them as a form and as a
spectacle for others. Thus friendship had its elaborated form in the
life of the fifteenth century. Side by side with the older brotherhood
of blood and the brotherhood of arms, honored by commoners and
nobles alike, a form of sentimental friendship, known as “mignon,”
existed.71 The princely “mignon” is a formal institution that
survived during all of the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth
century. The term applies to the relationship between James I of
England and Robert Carr and George Villiers; William of Orange at
the time of the abdication of Charles V should be seen from this
vantage point. “Twelfth Night” can only be understood if we keep
this particular form of sentimental friendship in mind while
considering the behavior of the duke towards the pretender Cesario.
This relationship is a parallel to courtly love. “Sy n’as dame ne
mignon,” says Chastellain.72 But any signs that would place it in the
tradition of Greek friendship fail to appear. The openness with
which mignoncy is treated in an age that was horrified by the
crimen nefandum silences any suspicion. Bernardino of Siena holds
up as models to his Italian compatriots, among whom sodomy was
widely spread,73 France and Germany, where it was unknown. Only
princes who are very much hated are on occasion charged with
illicit relations with an official favorite, as in the case of Richard II
of England with Robert de Vere.74 Under these circumstances,
mignonism is a harmless relationship, which honors those so
favored and is freely admitted by them. Commines himself recounts
how he had enjoyed the honor of having the distinction of receiving
royal favors from Louis XI and how he went about dressed like
him.75 Because it is the clear mark of the relationship, the king
always has at his side a mignon en titre, wearing the same dress as
he, on whom he may lean for support during receptions.76
Frequently two friends of same age but different rank also dress
alike, sleep in the same room, and occasionally even in the same
bed.77 Such inseparable friendship exists between the young Gaston
de Foix and his bastard brother, which friendship came to such a
tragic end; between Louis of Orléans (then still of Touraine) and
Pierre de Craon,78 between the young duke of Cleve and Jacques de
Lalaing. In the same mode, princesses have a trusted female friend,
dressed like them and called mignonne.79
All these beautifully stylized life forms, serving the task of lifting
harsh reality into the sphere of noble harmonies, were part of the
great art of living without having any direct impact on art itself in
the narrow sense of the word. The forms of social etiquette with
their friendly appearance of unforced altruism and accommodating
recognition of others, the splendor of the court and court etiquette
with all its hieratic majesty and seriousness, the gay adornments of
marriage and confinement—all this passed in beauty without
leaving any traces in art and literature. The means of expression
joining them to each other is not art but fashion. Actually, fashion
generally is much closer to art than academic aesthetics are willing
to admit. As an artificial emphasis on physical beauty and
movement, it is intimately linked to one of the arts, i.e. dance, but
in other respects the realm of fashion, or better, that of ensemble
fitted to an occasion, borders in the fifteenth century much more
directly on art than we are inclined to assume. It does so not only
because the frequent use of jewels and the use of metals in the
fashioning of the garb of warriors added a direct craft element to
costumes; fashion shares essential qualities with art itself: style and
rhythm are just as indispensable to it as they are to art. During late
medieval times, fashion in costume constantly expressed a measure
of the style of life that finds only a pale reflection even in today’s
coronation festivities. In daily life the differences in fur and color,
cap and bonnet indicated the strict order of the estates, the splendid
dignities, states of joy and sadness, and tender relations between
friends and lovers.
The aesthetics of all of life’s circumstances and life’s conditions
were elaborated with the greatest possible emphasis. The higher the
substance of beauty and ethicality of these relationships, so much
the better could they be expressed as a true art. Courtliness and
etiquette could only express themselves in life itself, in clothing and
jewelry. Mourning, on the other hand, found still another emphatic
means of expression in a durable and powerful art form—the tomb
monument; the cultural value of mourning was enhanced by its
relation to liturgy. But still richer were the aesthetic flowers of the
three elements of life: courage, honor, and love.
Chapter Three
THE HEROIC DREAM
AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WHEN medieval
cultural forms were absorbed as new values of the eighteenth
century itself, in other words at the beginning of the Romantic era,
the medieval world was seen, first and foremost, as the world of
knighthood. The Romantics were inclined to think the term
“medieval” simply meant “when knighthood was in flower.” More
than anything else, they saw in the time the nodding of plumed
helmets. As paradoxical as this may sound today, they were in many
respects correct. By now, more thorough studies have taught us that
chivalry was only a part of the culture of the period and that
political and social development took place, for the most part,
outside of that form. The period of genuine feudality and the
flourishing of knighthood ended during the thirteenth century.
What follows is the urban-princely period of the medieval era,
during which the dominant factors in state and society are the
commercial power of the bourgeoisie and, based on it, the monetary
powers of the princes. With the advantage of our hindsight we are
accustomed, and justifiably so, to look much more to Ghent and
Augsburg, much more to emerging capitalism and the newly arising
forms of the state, than to the nobility, whose power, here more so,
there less so, was already “broken” everywhere. Historical research
itself has been democratized since the days of Romanticism. But
those who are accustomed to look at late medieval times under
their political-economic aspects cannot help but notice over and
over that the sources, particularly the narrative sources, give much
more attention to the nobility and their bustle than fits our
understanding. This is true not only for later medieval times, but
also for the seventeenth century.
The reason for this is the fact that the life form of the nobility still
retains its relevance over society long after the nobility as social
structure had lost its dominant meaning. The nobility undoubtedly
still occupied the first place as a social element in the mind of the
fifteenth century, but contemporaries are considered to have placed
its importance much too high and that of the bourgeoisie much too
low. They failed to realize that the real impetus for social
development was located somewhere else than in the life and
actions of a warring nobility. This kind of reasoning would blame
contemporaries for that mistake and the age of Romanticism for
uncritically adopting their view while claiming that modern
historical research has unearthed the true facts of late medieval life.
This is true as far as political and economic life is concerned. But if
we desire to understand cultural life, we have to be aware that the
illusion itself retained its value as truth for those who lived it. Even
if the noble life forms had been nothing more than the mere surface
veneer of life, the task of the historian would still be to understand
life in terms of the luster of that finish.
But it was much more than a mere veneer. During medieval times
the concept of the division of society into estates permeates all the
fibers of theological and political reflections. This concept was by
no means limited to the well-known three: clergy, nobility, and
third estate. The term estate has not only a greater value, but also a
more far-reaching meaning. Generally speaking, any group, any
function, any profession was regarded as an estate, which meant
that in addition to the division of society into three estates, another
such division into twelve estates was possible.1 Because estate is
“state,” or “ordo,” it contains the notion of an entity willed by God.
During the Middle Ages the word estate or “ordre” includes a large
number of human groupings that, to our understanding, are rather
unalike: the estates that we understand, the professions, stand next
to the married state as well as to that of virginity; of the state of sin,
estat de péchié; of the four estats de corps et de bouche*! at court
(panetiers, wine handlers, meat cutters, and kitchen chefs); of the
sacerdotal orders (priest, deacon, subdeacon, etc.); of the monastic
orders; and of the orders of knights. In medieval thought the term
“estate” or “order” is held together in all these cases by an
awareness that each of these groups represents a divine institution,
that it is an organ of the world edifice that is just as indispensable
and just as hierarchically dignified as the heavenly throne and the
powers of the angelic ranks.
In this beautiful image of state and society every estate was
assigned a function corresponding, not to its proven utility, but to
its degree of holiness or to its splendor. The degeneration of
spirituality, the decay of chivalric virtue, could thus be lamented
without abandoning even a small part of the ideal image; the sins of
men may prevent the realization of the ideal, but the ideal remains
the basis and the guide for social thought. The medieval image of
society is static, not dynamic.
Chastellain, the court historiographer of Philip the Good and
Charles the Bold, whose rich work is here again the best mirror of
the thought of the time, sees the society of his day in a wondrous
glow. In him we meet a man, born among the meadows of Flanders,
who had before his eyes the most splendid unfolding of bourgeois
power in the Netherlands, but who was nonetheless so blinded by
the external splendor of ostentatious Burgundian life that he
regarded knightly courage and knightly virtue as the sources of all
the strength within the state.
God created the common people to work, to till the soil, to
sustain life through commerce; he created the clergy for works of
faith; but he created the nobility to extol virtue, administer justice,
and so that the beautiful members of this estate may, through their
deeds and customs, be a model for others. Chastellain assigns to the
nobility the highest tasks of the state, the protection of the church,
the spreading of the faith, the defense of the people against
oppression, the supervision of the general welfare, the struggle
against violence and tyranny, the stabilization of peace. Their
qualities are truth, bravery, integrity, and kindness. The nobility of
France, says this pompous panegyrist, meet this ideal standard.2 We
sense in Chastellain’s entire work that he actually looked at the
events of his time through these rose-colored glasses.
This underestimation of the bourgeoisie resulted from the fact
that the stereotype usually associated with the third estate had not
been corrected by reality. This stereotype was still as simple and as
summary in nature as a calendar picture or a bas-relief depicting the
labors of the season: the toiling worker in the field, the industrious
craftsman, or the busy merchant. The figure of the powerful
patrician who was pushing the nobility from its place, the fact that
the nobility constantly renewed itself with the blood and the
strength of the bourgeoisie, had as little room in this lapidary type
as the figure of the combative guild brother and his ideal of
freedom. In the concept of the third estate, the bourgeoisie and the
workers remained undifferentiated up until the time of the French
Revolution. The figure of the poor farmer or of the indolent and
wealthy burghers take turns in dominating the foreground of the
picture of the third estate but they do not attain a depiction in
accord with their real economic and political functions. A reform
program conceived in 1412 by an Augustine monk put forth in all
seriousness that every person outside of the nobility should be
forced to do manual or field labor or be ordered to leave the
country.4
This alone explains why someone like Chastellain, whose
susceptibility to ethical illusions equals his political naiveté, would
assign, next to the lofty qualities of the nobility, only low and
slavish qualities to the third estate: “Pour venir au tiers membre qui
fait le royaume entier, c’est l’estat des bonnes villes, des marchans
et des gens de labeur, des quels ils ne convient faire si longue
exposition que des autres, pour cause que de soy il n’est gaires
capable de hautes attributions, parce qu’il est au degré servile. [O
kevels van Vlaanderen!]”*2 The virtues of this estate are humility
and industry, obedience to their king and a willingness to please
their lords.5
Is it possible that this total lack of insight into a future of
bourgeois liberties and power contributes to the pessimism of
Chastellain and kindred spirits whose expectations focused entirely
on the nobility?
Even wealthy burghers are still summarily called “villains” by
Chastellain.6 He has not the faintest notion of bourgeoisie honor.
Philip the Good habitually abused his powers in order to marry off
his “archers,” usually members of the lower nobility, or other
servants of his house, to wealthy bourgeois widows or daughters.
Parents had their daughters marry as early as possible to thwart
such advances. One widow is known to have married only two days
after her husband’s funeral for the same reason.7 The duke at one
time encountered the stubborn resistance of a Lille brewer who
refused to let his daughter submit to such a union. The duke had the
girl abducted to a safe place whereupon the enraged father moved,
lock, stock, and barrel, to Tournay, where, outside of the duke’s
territory, he was able, without impediment, to put the matter before
the parliament in Paris. He reaps only pain and sorrow for his
efforts and falls ill. The end of the story is highly characteristic of
Philip’s impulsive character and does not, according to our
standards, do him proud.s He returns the girl to her mother, who
had come to him as a supplicant, but grants her request only after
having mocked and humiliated her. Chastellain, usually not afraid
to criticize his lord, in this case throws his sympathies entirely on
the side of the duke. For the offended father he can only find words
such as “ce rebelle brasseur rustique”* and “et encore si meschant
vilain.”9+4
Chastellain admits the great financier Jacques Coeur to his Temple
de Bocace, a kind of hall of honor for the fame and the misfortunes
of the nobility, but not without a few words of explanation, in
contrast to Gilles de Raïs,10 who is admitted on account of his high
birth without much ado in spite of the horrible misdeeds he had
committed.11 Chastellain considers it superfluous to list the names
of the burghers who lost their lives in the bitter fighting in the
defense of Ghent.12
Despite this disdain of the third estate, there is in the ideal of
knighthood itself, and in the cultivation of virtue and duties held up
to the nobility, an ambiguous element revealing a less arrogant
aristocratic attitude towards the people. Side by side with the
mockery of peasants, full of hatred and contempt, as we encounter
it in the Flemish Kerelslied and the Proverbes del vilain there exists
during the Middle Ages a countercurrent of empathy with poor
people and their miserable lot.
Si fault de faim perir les innocens
Dont les grans loups font chacun jour ventrée.
Qui amassent a milliers et a cens
Les faulx tresors; c’est le grain, c’est la blée,
Le sang, les os qui ont la terre arée
Des povres gens, dont leur esperit crie
Vengence à Dieu, vé à seignourie . . . 1345
There is always this same note of sorrow: the poor people are
visited by wars and drained of their wealth by officialdom, they live
in scarcity and misery. Everyone feeds off the peasants while they
suffer patiently, “le prince n’en scait riens,”*® and, if they
occasionally grumble and denounce the authorities, “povres brebis,
povre fol peuple,”+7 with one word the lord will restore them to
calm and reason. In France where the entire country was gradually
dragged into the pitiful devastations and uncertainties of the
Hundred Years War, one theme of the lament rises to the surface:
the peasants are plundered, burned out of their homes, and
mistreated at the hands of their own and enemy war parties. They
are robbed of their draft animals and are chased from their homes
and their lands. The lament, couched in these terms, never ends. It
is echoed by the great reform-minded clerics around 1400: by
Nicolas de Clémanges in his Liber de lapsu et reparatione justitiae,14
by Gerson in the courageous and moving political sermon that he
gave on November 7, 1405, at the palace of the queen in Paris on
the theme “vivat rex”: “Le pauvre homme n’aura pain a manger,
sinon par advanture aucun peu de seigle ou d’orge; sa pauvre
femme gerra, et auront quatre au six petits enfans au fouyer, ou au
four, qui par advanture sera chauld; demanderont du pain, crieront
à la rage de faim. La pauvre mère si n’aura que bouter es dens que
un peu de pain ou il y ait du sel. Or, devroit bien suffire cette
misere:—viendront ces paillars que chergeront tout . . . tout sera
prins, et happé; et querez qui paye.”15*8 Jean Jouvenel, bishop of
Beauvaix, holds up the misery of the people to the estates in bitter
laments at Blois in 1433 and at Orléans in 1439.16 Together with
the laments of the other estates about their difficulties, presented in
form of a debate, the theme of the people’s misery reoccurs in Alain
Chartier’s Quadriloge invectif17 and in Robert Gaguin’s Debat du
laboureur, du prestre et du gendarme,18 which was inspired by
Chartier’s work. The chroniclers could not help resuming the topic
time and again; their subject matter demanded it.19 Molinet
composed a Resource du petit peuple.20 Meschinot, a serious-minded
man, repeats over and over again his warning about the growing
devastations of the people.
O Dieu voyez du commun l’indigence,
Pourvoyez-y à toute diligence:
Las! par faim, froid, paour et misere tremble.
S’il a peché ou commis négligence
Encontre vous, il demande indulgence.
N'est-ce pitieé des biens que l’on lui emble?
Il n’a plus bled pour porter au molin,
Ou lui oste draps de laine et de lin,
L’eaue, sans plus, lui demeure pour boire.21*?
In a volume of complaints handed to the king on the occasion of
the assembly of the estates at Tours in 1484, the lament even
assumes the character of a political treatise.22 However, everything
remains on the level of a completely stereotyped and negative pity
and never becomes a political program. There is still no indication
of any well-thought-out ideas of social reform in it, and therefore
the same theme will continue to be sung by La Bruyère and by
Fénelon until deep into the eighteenth century, and, because there
is no reform, the laments of the older Mirabeau, “lami des
hommes,” are little different even though they already sound the
note of future resistance.
It was to be expected that those glorifiers of the late medieval
ideal of knighthood chimed in with these confessions of pity for the
people; this was demanded by the knight’s duty to protect the weak.
The idea that true nobility is based only on virtue and that,
basically, all men are equal also was a part of the ideal of
knighthood and was equally stereotyped and theoretical. The
historical-cultural significance of both these sentiments may well be
overestimated on occasion. Recognition of the nobility of heart is
celebrated as a triumph of the Renaissance. There are plenty of
references to the fact that Poggio expresses this idea in his De
nobilitate. We used to find this old egalitarianism echoed in the
revolutionary tenor of John Ball’s “when Adam delved and Eve
span, where was then the gentleman?” and imagined that noblemen
would tremble when they heard this text.
Both ideas were long commonplaces of courtly literature itself
just as they were in the salons of the ancien régime. The idea of the
true nobility of the heart originated with the glorification of courtly
love in the poetry of the troubadours. It remains an ethical
reflection without any socially active reality.
Dont vient a tous souveraine noblesce?
Du gentil cuer, paré de nobles mours.
... Nulz n’est villains se du cuer ne lui muet.23*10
The idea of equality had been borrowed by the church fathers
from Cicero and Seneca. Gregory the Great had left for the
approaching medieval age the dictum that “Omnes namque homines
natura aequales sumus.” This adage had been repeated in the most
varied colors and shades without, however, diminishing true
inequality, since, to medieval man, the central point of this idea was
the imminent equality of death and not a hopelessly distant equality
in life. In Eustache Deschamps this idea is expressed in close linkage
with the notion of the danse macabre, which must have been a
source of solace for the injustice of the world during late medieval
times. Adam himself addresses his descendants as follows:
Enfans, enfans de moy, Adam, venuz,
Qui après Dieu suis peres premerain
Creé de lui, tous estes descenduz
Naturelment de ma coste et d’Evain;
Vo mere fut. Comment est l’un villain
Et l’autre prant le nom de gentillesce
De vous freres? dont vient tele noblesce?
Je ne le sçay, se ce n’est des vertus,
Et les villains de tout vice qui blesce;
Vous estes tous d’une pel revestus.
Quant Dieu me fist de la boe ou je fus,
Homme mortel, faible, pesant et vain,
Eve de moy, il nous crea tous nuz,
Mais lesperit nous inspira a plain
Perpetuel, puis eusmes soif et faim,
Labour, dolour, et enfans en tristesce;
Pour noz pechiez enfantent a destresce
Toutes femmes; vilment estes conçuz.
Dont vient ce nom: villain, qui les cuers blesce?
Vous estes tous d’une pel revestuz.
Les roys puissans, les contes et les dus,
Li gouverneur du peuple et souverain,
Quant ilz naissent, de quoi sont ilz vestuz?
D’une orde pel.
. . . Prince, pensez, sanz avoir en desdain
Les povres gens, que la mort tient le frain.24*11
In conformity with this idea, passionate defenders of the ideal of
knighthood at times intentionally list the deeds of peasant heroes in
order to point out to the nobility “that sometimes those whom they
regard as peasants possess the greatest courage.” 25
Here is the basis of all of these ideas: the nobility is called to
sustain and purify the world by fulfilling the ideal of knighthood.
The true life of nobility and the true virtue of nobility are the
remedy for evil times: the well-being and tranquility of church and
kingdom and the strength of justice depend on it.26 War entered the
world with Cain arid Abel and since then has proliferated between
the good and the bad. To start it is bad. The very noble and very
distinguished state of knighthood is therefore instituted in order to
protect, defend, and preserve tranquility for the people upon whom
the misery of war is usually visited most painfully.27 Two things are
put in the world by the will of God, we are told in the biography of
one of the purest representatives of the late medieval ideal of
knighthood, Boucicaut, like two pillars in order to support the order
of divine and human laws; without them the world would be
nothing but confusion. These two pillars are knighthood and
scholarship, “chevalerie et science, qui moult bien conviennent
ensemble.”28*!2 Science, Foy, et Chevalerie are the three lilies of Le
Chapel des fleurs de lis of Philippe de Vitri; they represent the three
estates. Knighthood is called to protect and guard the other two. 29
The equivalence of knighthood and scholarship, also revealed by the
tendency to attach to the doctor’s degree the same privileges as to
the title of knighthood, demonstrates the high ethical substance of
the ideal of knighthood. It places the veneration of higher
aspirations and daring next to a higher knowledge and ability.
There is a need to see in man a higher potentiality and a need to
express this in the fixed forms of two, mutually equal consecrations
for higher tasks in life. But of these two, the ideal of knighthood
was much more generally and strongly effective, because it
combined, together with the ethical element, many aesthetic
elements that were intelligible to everyone.
Medieval thought in general is permeated in all regards by
elements of faith: in a similar manner the thought of that more
limited group that moves in the spheres of the court and the
nobility is saturated by the ideal of knighthood. Even notions of
faith themselves are incorporated and succumb to the spell of the
idea of knighthood: the feat of arms of the Archangel Michael was
“la premiére milicie et prouesse chevaleureuse qui oncques fut mis
en exploict.”*!3 The Archangel is the ancestor of knighthood; the
“milicie terrienne et chevalerie humaine” {14 is an earthly
replication of the host of angels surrounding God’s throne.30
Does this high expectation respecting the fulfillment of duty by
the nobility lead to any more precise definition of the political ideas
concerning its duties? One thing is certain: the aspirations for
universal peace are based on harmony among the kings, the
conquest of Jerusalem, and the expulsion of the Turks. Philippe de
Mézières, never tiring of devising ever new schemes, dreamed of an
order of knights that would surpass the old power of the Templars
and Hospitaliers. In his Songe du vieil pélerin he worked out a plan
that seemed to guarantee the bliss of the entire world for the
foreseeable future. The young King of France—the tract was written
in 1388 when there were still high hopes attached to the hapless
Charles VI—will readily make peace with Richard of England, just
as young and as innocent of the current quarrels as he. They would
have to negotiate personally about this peace, and should tell each
other of the wondrous revelations that had foretold the peace to
them. They would have to discard all the petty concerns that would
raise obstacles if the negotiations were to be trusted to the clergy,
legal scholars, or military leaders. The King of France should
generously give up a few border towns and castles. Immediately
following the conclusion of peace, preparations for a crusade should
be made. All disputes and feuds should be ended everywhere and
the tyrannical administration of the territories be reformed; a
general council should arouse the princes of Christendom to go to
war in case sermons were not sufficient to convert the Tartars,
Turks, Jews, and Saracens.31 These far-reaching plans were possibly
the subject of conversations during the friendly meetings between
Méziéres and the young Louis of Orléans in the Celestine monastery
in Paris. Louis of Orléans himself also entertained such dreams of
peace and crusades, though they were tempered by concerns of
practical and self-serving politics.32
The image of a society sustained by the ideal of knighthood coats
the world with a peculiar color. This color peels off rather easily. If
one consults the familiar French chroniclers of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, such as the keen Froissart, the matter-of-fact
Monstrelet and d’Escouchy, the deliberate Chastellain, the courtly
Olivier de la Marche, the bombastic Molinet, they all—with the
exception of Commines and Thomas Basin—begin with high-
sounding declarations that they write for the glorification of
knightly virtue and glorious feats of arms.33 But none of them can
stick to it, although Chastellain manages to keep it up longest.
While Froissart, himself the author of a hyperromantic knightly
epic, Méliador, indulges his spirit in the ideal prouesse and grand
opertises d’armes, his journalistic pen continuously writes a record of
treason and cruelty, crafty greed and dominance, of a profession of
arms that had become entirely devoted to the making of profit.
Molinet, disregarding for the moment style and language, constantly
forgets his chivalrous intention and reports events clearly and
simply; he only occasionally recalls the noble, uplifting task he has
set for himself. The knightly tenor is even more superficial in the
writings of Monstrelet.
It is as if the spirit of these writers—a superficial spirit, one has to
admit—employed the fiction of knighthood as a corrective for the
incomprehensibility their own time had for them. It was the only
form that allowed for even an imperfect understanding of events. In
reality, wars and politics in those days were extremely formless and
seemed disconnected. War appeared in most instances as a chronic
process of isolated campaigns scattered over large areas, diplomacy
as a verbose and deficient instrument that was in one respect
dominated by very general traditional ideas and in another by a
hopelessly tangled complex of individual petty legal questions.
Incapable of discerning in all this a real social development,
historiography employed the fiction of the ideal of knighthood and
thus traced everything back to a beautiful image of princely honor
and knightly virtue, to a pretty game of noble rules that created the
illusion of order. If we compare this historical standard to the
insight of a historian like Thucydides, we find it to be a rather low
vantage point. History becomes a dry report of beautiful or
seemingly beautiful feats of arms and ceremonial state occasions.
Who, then, given this vantage point, are the proper witnesses of
history? The heralds and kings of arms,34 in Froissart’s opinion:
they are present at those noble events and are officially called upon
to judge them; they are experts in matters of fame and honor, and
fame and honor are the motifs of historiography.35 The statutes of
the Golden Fleece mandated the recording of knightly feats of arms;
Lefèvre de Saint Remy, called Toison d’or36 or the Herald Berry, is
the model for king of arms historiographers.
As the ideal of the beautiful life the idea of knighthood has a
particular form. In its essence, it is an aesthetic ideal, built out of
colorful fantasies and uplifting sentiments. But it aspires to be an
ethical ideal: medieval thought could only turn it into an ideal of
life by linking it with piety and virtue. Knighthood always fails in
that ethical function because it is dragged down by its sinful origin;
the core of the ideal is pride elevated into beauty. Chastellain
completely understands this when he says, “La gloire des princes
pend en orgueil et en haut péril emprendre; toutes principales
puissances conviengnent en un point estroit qui se dit orgueil.”37*15
Taine says that honor is born from pride—stylized and elevated—
the pole of the noble life. While the essential impetus for middle or
subordinate social relationships comes from advantage, pride is the
great motivating power of the aristocracy: “or parmi les sentiments
profonds de l’homme, il n’en est pas qui soit plus proper à se
transformer en probité, patriotisme et conscience, car l’homme fier
à besoin de son propre respect, et, pour l’obtenir il est tenté de le
mériter.”38;!© Taine undoubtedly tends to view the aristocracy in
too favorable a light. The real history of aristocracies reveals a
picture in which pride and unabashed self-aggrandizement go
together very well. In spite of all this, Taine’s words remain a valid
definition of the aristocratic ideal of life. They have a certain
kinship with Burckhardt’s definition of the Renaissance sense of
honor: “This is that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egotism
which still is left to modern man after he has lost, whether by his
own fault or not, everything else, faith, love, and hope. This sense
of honor is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and is
capable of incredible deceites; but likewise, nevertheless, everything
noble that has been left in a personality can take this feeling of
honor as a point of departure and gain new strength from this
source. ”39
The preoccupation with personal honor and fame—seemingly
arising from a high sense of honor at one time and from unrefined
pride at another—has been posited by Burckhardt to be the
characteristic quality of Renaissance man. 40 In contrast to the
particular honor and fame appropriate to a given estate, which still
inspired genuinely medieval societies outside Italy, he describes the
general-human honor and fame that the Italian mind, strongly
influenced by classical antiquity, had aspired to since Dante. It
seems to me that this is one of the points where Burckhardt has
judged the distance between medieval and Renaissance times and
between western Europe and Italy to be too great. That Renaissance
love of fame and the preoccupation with honor is at the core of the
knightly vision and is of French origin. The honor of a particular
estate has broadened into a more general application, has been
freed from the feudal sensibilities and fertilized by ideas from
classical antiquity. The passionate desire to be praised by posterity
is just as well known to the courtly knight of the twelfth century
and the unrefined French and German mercenaries of the fourteenth
century as it is to the beautiful minds of the Quattrocento. The
agreement for the Combat des Trente (March 27, 1351) between
Robert de Beaumanoir and the English captain Robert Bamborough
is concluded by the latter with the words, “and let us so act, that
people in times to come will speak of it in halls and palaces, in
markets and elsewhere throughout the world.”41 Chastellain, whose
esteem for the ideal of knighthood is entirely medieval, nonetheless
gives complete expression to the Renaissance spirit when he says,
Honneur semont toute noble nature
D’aimer tout ce qui noble est en son estre.
Noblesse aussi y adjoint sa droiture.42”*17
Elsewhere he states that honor was more precious to Jews and
heathens and was observed more carefully among them for its own
sake because of the expectation of earthly praise, while Christians,
through faith and the Light, are honored in the expectation of
heavenly rewards.43
Froissart is one of the earliest to recommend bravery, without any
religious or direct ethical motivation, for the sake of fame and
honor and—being the enfant terrible that he is—for the sake of one’s
career.44
The quest for knighthood and honor is inseparably tied to a hero
veneration in which medieval and Renaissance elements are
intertwined. Knightly life is a life without historical dimensions. It
makes little difference whether its heroes are those of the Round
Table or those of classical antiquity. Alexander had already been
fully incorporated into the ideal world of knighthood by the time
when chivalrous romances flourished. The phantasmagoric realm of
classical antiquity was not yet separated from that of the Round
Table. King René describes in a poem a colorful combination. How
he has seen the gravestones of Lancelot, Caesar, David, Hercules,
Paris, Troilus, among others, all marked with their particular coat of
arms.45 Knighthood itself was considered to be Roman. “Et bien
entretenoit,” it is said of Henry IV of England, “la discipline de
chevalerie, comme jadis faisoient les Rommains.”46*18 The rise of
classicism brings some clarity to the historical picture of antiquity.
The Portuguese nobleman Vasco de Lucena, who translated Quintus
Curtius for Charles the Bold, explains to Charles that he is
presenting an authentic Alexander, just as Maerlant had done a
century and a half earlier, an Alexander whose story had been
stripped of the lies with which all the ordinary histories had
disfigured it.47 But the intent to offer to the king a model worthy of
emulation is stronger than ever and few princes are as self-conscious
in their desire to equal the ancients through great and splendid
deeds as is Charles the Bold. From his youth he had the heroic
deeds of Gawain and Lancelot read to him; later, classical antiquity
gained the upper hand. There were regularly a few hours of reading
in “les haultes histories de Romme”;!° before going to sleep.48 Most
pleasing to him were the heroes of antiquity: Caesar, Hannibal, and
Alexander, “lesques il vouloit ensuyre et contrefaire.” 4920 All his
contemporaries place great emphasis on these deliberate emulations
as the impetus for his own deeds, “Il désiroit grand gloire”—says
Commines—“qui estoit ce qui plus le mettoit en ses guerres que
nulle autre chose; et eust bien voulu ressembler a ses anciens
princes dont il a esté tant parlé aprés leur mort.”50*2! Chastellain
saw him put to use for the first time that high feeling for great
deeds and beautiful gestures in the ancient style. This occasion was
provided when he made his first entry as duke into Mechelen in
1467. He went there to punish a rebellion. The matter was formally
investigated and handled by the court. One of the rebels was
sentenced to death while others were exiled forever. The scaffold is
erected on the town square; the duke takes his seat opposite; the
condemned man has already knelt down; the executioner bares his
sword; at that moment Charles, who has kept his intentions secret
up to this point, calls out: “Stop! Take off his blindfold and let him
stand up.”
“Et me parcus de lors”—says Chastellain—“que le coeur luy estoit
en haut singulier propos pour le temps a venir et pour acquérir
gloire et renommée en singulière oeuvre.”51}22
The example of Charles the Bold is quite suitable to convince us
that the spirit of the Renaissance and its yearning for the beautiful
life of antiquity has its direct roots in the ideal of knighthood. If
compared to the Italian virtuoso, there is merely a difference in
degrees of literacy and in taste. Charles still reads his classics in
translations, and his style of life is still flamboyantly Gothic.
The same inseparability of knightly and Renaissance elements can
be found in the cult of the Nine Worthies, “les neuf preux.” This
group of nine heroes—three pagans, three Jews, three Christians—
appears first in chivalric literature: the earliest account is found
around 1312 in the “Voeux du paon” by Jacques de Longuyon.52
The choice of heroes betrays the close linkage with knightly
romanticism: Hector, Caesar, Alexander; Joshua, David, Judas
Maccabaeus; Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon.
Eustache Deschamps adopts this idea from his teacher, Guillaume
de Machaut, and devotes numerous poems to it.53 It is likely that
the taste for symmetry that was so characteristic of the late
medieval mind accounts for the fact that he added nine brave
women to the list of brave men. For this purpose he chose a number
of classical figures, some rather peculiar, from Justin and other
literary sources. He included Penthesilea, Tomyris, Semiramis, and
mangled most of the names considerably. This did not hinder the
popularity of the idea and so preux and preuses can be found in later
works, such as Le Jouvencel. They are depicted on tapestries, coats
of arms are designed for them, and all eighteen lead the procession
when Henry VI of England makes his entry into Paris in 1431.54
What demonstrates how very much alive these notions remained
during the fifteenth century and later is the fact that they became
the object of parody. Molinet has fun with nine preux de
gourmandise;55 Francis I dresses occasionally à l’antique in order to
represent one of the preux.56
But Deschamps has expanded this notion in yet another way than
merely by adding female pendants. By adding to the nine a
contemporary Frenchman, Bertrand du Guesclin, as the tenth preux,
he tied the veneration of heroic virtue to the here and now, and
thus transposed the preux into the sphere of rising French military
patriotism.57 This idea, too, was successful: Louis of Orléans saw to
it that the image of the courageous connétable was included as the
tenth preux in the grand hall of Coucy.58 There were good reasons
for the special attention Louis devoted to the memory of du
Guesclin; the connétable had held him during his baptism and had at
that time placed a sword in his hand. The figure of this brave and
calculating Breton warrior came to be venerated as a national
military hero. It should be noted that during the fifteenth century
this veneration did not give first place to Jeanne d’Arc. Any number
of military leaders who had fought either side by side with her or
against her held a much larger and more honored place in the
imagination of their contemporaries than did the peasant girl from
Domrémy. People spoke of her without emotion or veneration, and
rather as a curiosity. Chastellain, who managed to shift from his
Burgundian sentiments to a pathetic French loyalty whenever the
occasion demanded, composed a mystére on the death of Charles VII
in which all the leaders who had fought for him against the English
—Dunois, Jean de Bueil, Xaintrailles, la Hire, and a large number of
less well known individuals—like a hall of fame for the brave, recite
a verse recalling their deeds.59 They remind one, for a moment at
least, of a gallery of Napoleonic generals. But the Maid is not among
them.
The Burgundian princes kept in their treasure rooms a number of
relics of a romantic sort that were linked to heroes: a sword of St.
George, decorated with his coat of arms; a sword that had belonged
to “messire Bertram de Claiquin” (du Guesclin); a tooth of the boar
of Garin le Loherain; the psalter from which St. Louis studied during
childhood.60 How much the fantastic aspects of knighthood and
religion are merging here! One more step, and we have arrived at
the collarbone of Livy that was received by Pope Leo X with all
solemnity as if it were a relic.61
The literary form of late medieval hero veneration is the
biography of the perfect knight. Some, like Gilles de Trazegnies, had
already become legendary figures; but the most important
biographies deal with contemporaries, as, for example, Boucicaut,
Jean de Bueil, and Jacques de Lalaing.
Jean le Meingre, usually called Maréchal Boucicaut, had served
his country during a serious crisis. He was with John the Fearless at
Nicopolis in 1396 when the French knightly nobility had carelessly
ventured forth to drive the Turks out of Europe and were
annihilated by Sultan Bayazid. He was captured again in 1415 at
Agincourt and died in captivity six years later. One of his admirers
recorded his deeds in 1409, while he was still alive. This account
was based on very good information and documentation;62
however, it is not like a piece of contemporary history, but rather
like the depiction of an ideal knight. The reality of a life of sudden
reversals disappears under the beautiful gloss of the knightly image.
The terrible catastrophe at Nicopolis appears only in muted colors
in this Livre des faicts. Boucicaut is presented as the type of the
simple and pious and yet courtly and well-read knight. The
contempt for wealth, mandatory for a true knight, is revealed in the
words of Boucicaut’s father, who did not intend either to enlarge or
to reduce the size of his inherited estate when he said: my children,
be honest and brave and you will therefore not lack anything; and if
you are worthless it would be a pity to leave you too much.63
Boucicaut’s piety is of a strictly puritan nature. He gets up early and
spends about three hours in prayer. No matter how much pressed
for time or how busy, he kneels to hear mass twice a day. On
Fridays he wears black, on Sundays and holy days he makes a
pilgrimage on foot or has someone read to him from the lives of the
saints or from the histories of “des vaillans trepassez, soit Romains
ou autres,”*25 or he engages in pious conversation. He is temperate
and frugal, speaks little, and if he does, mostly about God, the
saints, the virtues, or chivalry. He inspires all his servants to be
devout and above reproach and he makes them give up cursing.64
He is an active proponent of the noble and chaste service to women;
he honors all women for the sake of one and founds the Ordre de
l’écu verd à la dame blanche for the defense of women that earned
him the praise of Christine de Pisan.65 In Genoa, where he had gone
in 1401 to run the government for Charles VI, when at one time he
politely bowed to two ladies who had greeted him, his page boy
said, “Monseigneur, qui sont ces deux femmes à qui vous avez si
grans reverences faictes?’—’Huguenin,’ dit-il, ‘je ne scay.’ Lors luy
dist: Monseigneur, elles sont filles communes.’—’Filles communes,’
dist-il, ‘Huguenin, j’ayme trop mieulx faire reverence à dix filles
communes que avoir failly à une femme de bien.”’66}24 +25 His
motto read, “Ce que vous vouldrez”’66% deliberately kept
mysterious as befits a slogan. Does he have in mind the surrender of
his will to the lady to whom he is truly dedicated? Or should we
view it as a generally relaxed attitude towards life such as we would
expect to encounter only in much later times?
The beautiful portrait of the ideal knight was painted in these
colors of piety and restraint, simplicity and loyalty. It is only to be
expected that the real Boucicaut did not conform to this image in
every respect. Violence and greed for gold, the usual concerns for
his estate—these were no strangers even to this noble figure.67
But the model knight came also to be seen in an entirely different
hue. The biographic novel about Jean de Bueil, called Le Jouvencel,
was written about half a century later than the life of Boucicaut and
this explains in part the difference in perception. Jean de Bueil was
a captain who had fought under the flag of Jeanne d’Arc, later
participated in the Praguerie uprising (1440) and in the war “du
bien public,” and died in 1477. While out of favor with the king
(about 1465), he had suggested that three of his servants write the
story of his life, to be entitled Le Jouvencel.68 In contrast to the life
of Boucicaut, where the historical form has a romantic spirit, Le
Jouvencel reveals, in its invented form, real facts, at least in its first
part. It is probably the result of its multiple authorship that the
story continues to lose itself in a sugarcoated romanticism. There is
found the story of the terrifying campaign of the French marauders
in Swiss territory in 1444 and that of the battle of St. Jacob on the
Birs, where the peasants of the Basel region met their Thermopylae,
stories adorned with the phony embellishments of hackneyed
pastoral Minnelieder.69
In stark contrast, the first part of Le Jouvencel offers a simple and
genuine picture of the reality of war in those days such as is rarely
found anywhere else. Incidentally, these authors, too, do not
mention Jeanne d’Arc, who had been a comrade-in-arms of their
lord. It is his heroic deeds they glorify. How well he must have told
them his war stories. Here we find the announcement of the early
stirring of France’s military spirit that was later to bring forth the
figure of the musketeer, the grognuard, and the poilu. The attempt to
glorify knighthood only betrays itself in the opening passages,
where young people are exhorted to become acquainted through
this story with a life at arms and are warned against the follies of
pride, envy, and greed. Both the pious and the Minne elements, so
strong in Boucicaut, are absent in the first part of Le Jouvencel. What
we do encounter here is the misery of war, its deprivations and
monotony and the brash courage needed to endure those
deprivations and face its dangers. A castellan musters his garrison
and counts only fifteen horses, all emaciated nags; most are not
shoed. On each horse he puts two men, most of these one-eyed or
crippled. To mend the captain’s clothing, attempts are made to
capture the enemy’s laundry. A stolen cow is returned to the enemy
captain, upon his request, with all civilities. A description of a
nightly patrol across the fields lets us breathe the night air and
sense the mighty quiet.70 Le Jouvencel marks the transition from the
type of knight to the type of national military man. The hero of the
book releases his unfortunate prisoners on condition that they
become good Frenchmen. Having attained high honors, he yearns
back to that life of adventure and freedom.
Such a realistic knightly figure (which, as already mentioned, is
not consistently presented as such to the end of the story) could as
yet not be fashioned by Burgundian literature, which was too old-
fashioned, too solemn, and too much more a captive of feudal ideas
than pure French literature to be ready for such a task. Jacques de
Lalaing, compared to Le Jouvencel, is an old-fashioned curiosity,
described in terms of the clichés of earlier knight-errants such as
Gillon de Trazegnies. The book about the deeds of this venerated
Burgundian hero tells more of romantic tournaments than about
real war.71
The psychology of wartime bravery has perhaps never been
expressed, earlier or later, as simply and as truly as in the following
words from Le Jouvencel:72
C’est joyeuse chose que la guerre . .. On s’entr’ayme tant à la guerre.
Quant on voit sa querelle bonne et son sang bien combatre, la larme en
vient à l’ueil. Il vient une doulceur au cueur de loyaulté et de pitié de
veoir son amy, qui si vaillamment expose son corps pour faire et
accomplir le commandement de nostre createur. Et puis on se dispose
aller mourir ou vivre avec luy, et pour amour ne l’abandonner point. En
cela vient une délectation telle que, qui ne l’a essaiié, il n’est homme qui
sceust dire quel bien c’est. Pensez-vous que homme qui face cela craigne
la mort? Nennil; car il est tant reconforté il est si ravi, qu’il ne scet ot il
est. Vraiement il n’a paour de rien.*26
This could just as well have come from a modern soldier as from
a knight of the fifteenth century. It has nothing to do with the
knightly ideal per se, but reflects the emotions constituting the
background of pure fighting courage itself: the trembling stepping
away from narrow egoism into the excitement of facing mortal
danger, the deeply touching experience of the bravery of one’s
comrades, the enjoyment of loyalty and self-sacrifice. This primitive
ascetic excitement is the basis on which the ideal of knighthood was
built into a noble fantasy of male perfection, a close kin of the
Greek kalokagathia, a purposeful striving for the beautiful life that
energetically inspired a number of centuries—but also a mask
behind which a world of greed and violence could hide.
Wherever the ideal of knighthood is professed in its purest form,
emphasis is placed on the ascetic element. In its first flowering it
was paired naturally, or even necessarily, with the monkish ideal in
the spiritual orders of knighthood at the time of the Crusades. But
as reality time and again gave a cruel lie to the ideal, it sank more
and more back into the realm of imagination, where it was able to
preserve features of noble asceticism that were rarely evident in the
midst of social realities. The knight-errant, as well as the Templar, is
poor and free of earthly ties. That ideal of the noble propertyless
warrior, says William James, still dominates, “sentimentally if not
practically, the military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the
soldier as the man absolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but
his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the
cause commands him, he is the representative of unhampered
freedom in ideal directions.”73
Linking the knightly ideal with the higher elements of religious
consciousness, compassion, justice, and fidelity is therefore by no
means artificial or superficial. Yet, on the other hand, they are also
not that which turns knighthood into the beautiful form of life
kat’exochen [par excellence]. Neither could knighthood’s immediate
roots in the manly lust for combat have been elevated if love for
women had not been the burning passion that bestowed the warmth
of life on that complex of emotion and idea.
The profound ascetic element of courageous self-sacrifice that is
characteristic of the knightly ideal is most intimately tied to the
erotic base of this view of life and is perhaps merely the ethical
transformation of an unsatisfied desire. It is not only in literature
and the fine arts that the yearning for love receives its shaping and
its stylization. The desire to give love a noble style and noble form
finds also a broad arena for its unfolding in the forms of life
themselves; in courtly intimacy, social games, jokes and sport. Here,
too, love is continuously sublimated and romanticized: in this, life
imitates literature, but in the final analysis, it is literature that
learns everything from life. The knightly view of love is not based in
literature but rather in life. The motif of the knight and his beloved
is rooted in the real conditions of life.
The knight and his beloved, the hero for the sake of love,
constitute the most primary and unchanging romantic motif that
arises and must arise everywhere anew. It is the direct
transformation of sensual passion into an ethical or quasi-ethical
self-denial. It arises directly from the need, known to every sixteen-
year-old male, to display his courage before a woman, to expose
himself to dangers and to be strong, to suffer and to shed his blood.
The expression and fulfillment of this desire, which seem to be
unobtainable, are replaced and elevated74 to the dream of heroic
deeds for love. This immediately posits death as an alternative to
fulfillment, and satisfaction is, so to speak, thus guaranteed in either
direction.
But the dream of a heroic deed for love, a deed that now fills and
infatuates the heart, grows and grows like a luxuriant plant. The
initially simple theme has soon spent its force and the mind craves
new settings of the same theme. Passion itself imposes stronger
colors on the dream of suffering and renunciation. The heroic deed
has to consist of freeing or rescuing the woman from even the
gravest of danger. A stronger stimulus is thus added to the original
motif. At first it is the subject himself who wants to suffer for his
woman, but soon this motif is joined by that of the wish to rescue
the very object of his desires from suffering. I wonder if at base we
can always trace the rescue back to the act of preserving virginity,
of fending off another and securing the woman for the rescuer
himself? In any event, this is the highest knightly-erotic motif: the
young hero who liberates the virgin. Even if the enemy occasionally
is an unsuspecting dragon, the sexual element remains just beneath
the surface.
Liberating the virgin is the most original romantic motif, forever
young. How is it possible that a nowadays outdated explanation of
myth saw in this the image of a natural phenomenon while the
directness of the thought could be tested daily by everyone!75
Although in literature the motif may be avoided for a time because
of excessive repetition, it always comes back again in new forms, as,
for instance, in the romance of the cinematic cowboy. There is no
doubt that in the individual conception of love outside of literature
it has always remained strong.
It is difficult to ascertain to what extent the conception of the
hero-lover reveals the masculine or how far the feminine view of
love. Is it in the image of willful suffering that a male wishes to see
himself, or is it the will of the female that he show himself this
way? The former is more likely. In general, the depiction of love as
a cultural form expresses the male conception almost exclusively, at
least until most recent times. The view of love held by woman
always remains hidden and veiled. It is a tender and deep mystery.
And it does not even need the romantic elevation into the heroic.
Through its character of self-sacrifice and its unbreakable link to
motherhood, this view extols itself without heroic fantasy and
subservience to the egotistically erotic. Womanly expressions of
love are missing from literature not only because literature
originated primarily among men, but also because for women, as far
as love is concerned, the literary element is much less indispensable.
The figure of the noble savior who willingly suffers for the sake of
his beloved is primarily a product of the male imagination, showing
man as he wishes to see himself. The tension in his dream of the
liberator increases whenever he appears with his true identity
hidden and is only recognized after the heroic deed is done. The
romantic motif of the hidden identity of the hero is most certainly
rooted in the female conception of love. In the ultimate realization
of the image of manly strength and courage in the form of the
warrior on horseback, female yearning to worship strength and
masculine physical pride flow together.
Medieval society cultivated these primitive romantic motifs with
boyish insatiability. While the higher literary forms were refined
into more ethereal, reserved or spiritual and titillating expressions
of desire, the knightly novel repeated, time and again, examples of a
fascination that is not always intelligible to us. We frequently are of
the opinion that the age should have long outgrown these childish
imaginations and take Froissart’s Méliador or Perceforest to be late
flowers of the knightly adventure story and anachronisms in their
own time. But this is as little the case then as it is in the case of the
sensational novels of our own time; however, all this is not pure
literature, but, so to speak, applied art. It is the need for models for
the erotic imagination that keeps this literature alive and
continuously renews it. There is a revival in the middle of the
Renaissance in the Amadis novels. If La Noue can still assure us in
the latter part of the sixteenth century that the Amadis novels
caused an “esprit de vertige” among the same generation that had
undergone the tempering of the Renaissance and humanism, how
great the romantic receptiveness must have been among the entirely
unsophisticated generation of 1400!
The enchantment of the romance of love was not only to be
experienced in reading, but also in games and performances. There
are two forms in which the game may appear: dramatic
representations and sport. The latter form was by far the most
important during medieval times. Drama was still, to a great extent,
filled with other, pious, subject matter: romantic issues were only
exceptions. Medieval sport, on the other hand, and first of all the
tournament, was by itself dramatic to a high degree and possessed
at the same time a highly erotic ambiance. Sports retain at all times
such a dramatic and erotic element; today’s rowing or soccer
contests contain much more of the emotional qualities of a medieval
tournament than athletes and spectators themselves are perhaps
conscious of. But while modern sports have returned to a natural,
almost Greek simplicity and beauty, medieval, or at least late
medieval, tournaments were a sport overladen with embellishments
and heavily elaborated, in which the dramatic and romantic
element was so deliberately worked out that it virtually came to
serve the function of drama itself.
The late Middle Ages is one of the end periods in which the
cultural life of the higher circles has become, almost in its entirety,
social play. Reality is crass, hard, and cruel; one turns back to the
beautiful dream of the knightly ideal and builds the game of life on
this foundation. One plays masked as Lancelot. All this is a
tremendous self-deception, the glaring unreality of which is only
bearable because the lie is denied by faint mockery. The entire
knightly culture of the fifteenth century is dominated by a
precarious balance between sentimental seriousness and easy
derision. All those knightly terms of honor and fidelity and noble
Minne76 are handled with perfect seriousness, but the rigid face
occasionally relaxes for a moment into a smile. Where else but in
Italy could this mood first turn into deliberate parody: in Pulci’s
Morgante and Bonardo’s Orlando Innamorato. But even then and
there, the knightly-romantic sentiment emerges victorious again
because, in Ariosto, open mockery gives way to a wondrous
transcendence of pain and seriousness. The knightly fantasy has
found its most classical expression.
How can we doubt the seriousness of the knightly ideal in French
society around 1400? In the noble Boucicaut, the literary type of the
model knight, the romantic foundation of the knightly ideal of life is
still as strong as anywhere. It is love, he says, which is strongest in
making young hearts avid for noble knightly struggles. He himself
serves his lady in the old courtly forms: “Toutes servoit, toutes
honnoroit pour l’amour d’un. Son parler estoit gracieux, courtois et
craintif devant sa dame.”77*27
The contrast between the literary vision of the life of a man like
Boucicaut and the bitter reality of his career is almost
incomprehensible for us. As a participant and a leader, he was
constantly involved in the roughest politics of his time. In 1388 he
made his first political journey to the East. He passes the time
during that journey by engaging two or three of his comrades-in-
arms, Philippe d’Artois, his seneschal, and a certain Creseque, in a
poetic defense of the noble true Minne that is proper for the perfect
knight: Le livre des cents ballades.78 Well, why not? But seven years
later, when he served as mentor to the young Count of Nevers (the
later John the Fearless) in the ill-conceived knightly adventure of
the military campaign against Sultan Bayazid, when he witnessed
the terrible catastrophe of Nicopolis where his three fellow poets
lost their lives, when the noble youth of France, taken prisoner,
were butchered before his very eyes, would not one assume that a
serious warrior would have turned cool towards that courtly game
and that knightly fancy? It had to teach him, we are inclined to
believe, to no longer see the world through colored glasses. But no,
his mind remains dedicated to the cult of antique knighthood, as
evidenced by his founding of the Ordre de l’écu verd à la dame
blanche for the protection of oppressed women. This was his way of
taking his position in the artful literary quarrel between the strict
and the frivolous ideals of love that in the French court circles of
1400 was an exciting pastime.
The entire presentation of noble love in literature and social life
frequently strikes us as intolerably stale and ridiculous. That is the
fate of any romantic form that has lost its power as an instrument of
passion. In the works of many of the artful poets, passion has
vanished from the expensively arranged tournaments; it can only be
heard in very rare voices. But the importance of all this, given that
it was inferior as literature or art, as a beautification of life or as an
expression of sentiment can only be fathomed if one can again fill
the literature itself with living passion. What use is there in reading
Minne poetry and descriptions of tournaments for facts and
historical detail without seeing the gull-like arches of the brows, the
dark shining eyes and delicate foreheads, now dust for centuries,
but which once were more important than the whole of that
literature which remains piled up like rubble?
Only an occasional glimmer allows us to clearly realize exactly
the passionate importance of this cultural form. In the poem “Le
voeu du Heron,” Jean de Beaumont, urged to take his knightly vow
of combat, says:
Quant sommes és tavernes, de ces fors vins buvant,
Et ces dames delés qui nous vont regardant,
A ces gorgues polies, ces coliés triant,
Chil oeil vair resplendissent de biauté souriant,
Nature nous semont d’avoir coeur désirant,
. . . Adonc conquerons-nous Yaumont et Agoulant79
Et li autre conquierrent Olivier et Rollant.
Mais, quant sommes as camps sus nos destriers courants,
Nos escus à no col et nos lansses bais(s)ans,
Et le froidure grande nous va tout engelant,
Li membres nous effondrent, et derrière et devant,
Et nos ennemies sont envers nous approchant,
Adonc vorriémes estre en un chélier si grant
Que jamais ne fussions veu tant ne quanti.s0*28
“Helas,” Philippe de Croy writes from the headquarters of Charles
the Bold near Neuss, “où sont dames pour nous entretenir, pour
nous amonester de bien faire, ne pour nous enchargier emprinses,
devises, volets ne guimpes!”81*29
The erotic element of the knightly tournament is most directly
revealed in such customs as the wearing of the beloved’s veil or
other garment that carries the fragrance of her hair or of her body.
Caught up in the excitement of combat, women offer one piece of
jewelry after another; when the game is over, they sit there
bareheaded with their arms stripped of their sleeves.82 This
becomes a symbol of keen attraction in the poem from the second
half of the thirteenth century about the three knights and the
shirt.83 A lady whose husband is not fond of fighting but is
otherwise full of noble gentility sends her chemise to the three
knights, who serve her in Minne. They are to wear it, as battle dress,
in the tournament that her husband is about to hold, without any
armor or other protection than helmet and greaves. The first and
second knight shy away from this. The third, who is poor, holds the
shirt in his arms throughout the night and kisses it passionately. He
appears in the tournament wearing the shirt as his battle dress
without any armor underneath it; the shirt becomes torn and soiled
with his blood; he is seriously wounded. His extraordinary bravery
is noticed and the prize is awarded him; the lady gives her heart to
him. Now her beloved asks a favor in return. He sends the bloody
shirt back to her so that she can wear it, bloody and torn, over her
dress during the feast that concludes the tournament. She embraces
it tenderly and attends the feast in her bloodied piece of clothing;
most of those in attendance criticize her, her husband is
embarrassed, and the narrator asks: which of the lovers has done
more for the other?
This passionate sphere in which alone the tournament had
significance explains why the church fought the custom for such a
long time with such determination. That tournaments actually
became the cause of sensational cases of adultery is testified to, for
example, in 1389 by the monk of Saint Denis and, based on his
authority, Jean Juvenal des Ursins.84 Canon law had long before
prohibited tournaments; originally useful as training for combat, it
was said, they could no longer be tolerated because of numerous
abuses.85 They drew criticism from the moralists.s6 Petrarch asked
pedantically, where do we read that Cicero and Scipio held
tournaments? And the Burgher of Paris shrugged his shoulders.
“Prindrent par ne scay quelle folle entreprinse champ de
bataille,”*5° he says about a famous tournament.87
The world of the nobility, on the other hand, gives everything
related to tournaments and knightly contests an importance that is
not even granted to modern sports. It was a very old custom to have
a memorial stone placed on the site where a famous duel had been
fought. Adam of Bremen knew of one such stone at the border
between Holstein and Vargia where a German warrior had once
killed the leader of the Vends.ss During the fifteenth century such
memorials were still dedicated in commemoration of famous
knightly duels. Near Saint Orner La croix Pélerine remembered the
fight between Hautbourdin, the bastard of Saint Pol, with a Spanish
knight during the time of the famous Pas d’armes de la Pélerine.
Half a century later, Bayard takes time prior to a tournament for a
pilgrimage to that cross.89 The decor and garments that had been
used during the Pas d’armes de la Fontaine des Pleurs were
dedicated after the tournament to our Beloved Lady of Boulogne
and displayed in the church.90
Medieval swordplay differs, as already indicated above, from
Greek and from modern athletics by its much reduced degree of
naturalness. To increase its warlike tone it relies on the excitement
of aristocratic pride and aristocratic honor, on its romantic-erotic
and artistic splendor. It is overladen with splendor and
ornamentation, and overfilled with colorful fantasy. In addition to
being play and exercise it is also applied literature. The desires and
the dreams of poetic hearts seek a dramatic representation, a staged
fulfillment in life itself. Real life was not beautiful enough; it was
harsh, cruel, and treacherous. There was little room in courtly and
military careers for feelings of courage that arose out of love, but
the soul is filled with such sentiments, and people want to
experience them and to create a more beautiful life in precious play.
The element of genuine courage is most certainly of no less value in
a knightly tournament than in a pentathon competition. Its
explicitly erotic character was the cause of its bloody intensity. In
its motives the tournament is closest to the contests of the Indian
epics; in the Mahâbhärata, too, fighting over a woman is the central
idea.
The fantasy in which the tournament was dressed was that of the
Arthur novels, that is, the childish conceptions of the fairy tale: the
dream adventure with its shifting of dimensions into giants and
dwarfs is joined to the sentimentality of courtly love.
For a pas d’armes of the fifteenth century a freely invented
romantic circumstance was artificially constructed. It was centered
in a novel-like setting given a fitting name: la fontaine des pleurs,
l'arbre Charlemagne *?1 The fountain is especially constructed.91 For
an entire year an unknown knight on the first of each month will
pitch a tent in front of the fountain. Inside the tent a lady (only a
painting) sits and holds a unicorn that carries three shields. Any
knight touching one of the shields or having them touched by his
herald obligates himself to take part in a certain duel. The
conditions of this duel are precisely described in the detailed
“chapitres” that are at the same time invitations and rules for the
tournament.92 The shields have to be touched while on horseback
and for this reason horses are always available for the knights. In
another example: at the Emprise du dragon four knights wait at a
crossroads; no lady may pass this crossroads without having one
knight break two lances for her. Otherwise she has to leave a
keepsake.93 Actually, this childish game of forfeits is nothing but a
lower form of the usual age-old warrior and Minne plays. This
relationship is clearly shown by a provision such as the following
article from the Chapitres de la Fontaine des pleurs: Anyone thrown to
the ground during combat has to wear for a whole year a golden
bracelet with a lock attached until he finds the lady who has the
small key fitting the lock and can free him when he offers his
services to her. In another conceit the case is based on a giant who
has been captured by a dwarf, complete with a golden tree and a
dame de Visle celée,}32 or on a “noble chevalier esclave et serviteur à
la belle géande a la blonde perruque, la plus grande du
monde.”94#33 The anonymity of the knight is a standard feature. He
is called le blanc chevalier, le chevalier mesconnu, le chevalier a la
pélerine,§34 or he may even appear as a hero from a novel and be
called Swan Knight; or he may carry the arms of Lancelot, Tristan,
or Palamedes.95
In most instances an extra touch of melancholy is spread over the
scene: this is already seen in the name Fontaine des pleurs; the
shields are white, violet and black—all dotted with white tears; they
are touched out of compassion for the Dame de pleurs. King René
appears at the Emprise du dragon in the black of mourning—and not
without reason!—because he has just bid farewell to his daughter
Margaret, who has become Queen of England. The horse is black,
draped with a mourning saddlecloth; the lance is black; the shield
black and dotted with silver tears.96 In l’arbre Charlemagne the
shield is black and violet with gold and black tears. This somber key
does not always prevail; in another instance the insatiable lover of
beauty King René holds the Joyesse garde near Saumur. For forty
days he celebrates feasts in the wooden castle “de la joyesse garde”
with his wife and daughter and with Jeanne de Laral, who was to
become his second wife. The feast is secretly prepared for her. The
castle has been put up, painted, and hung with tapestry specifically
for that purpose. Everything is red and white. For his pas d’armes de
la bergère everything is kept in the style of shepherds, the knights
and ladies as shepherds and shepherdesses complete with staff and
bagpipe. All in gray with touches of gold and silver.97
The great game of the beautiful life played as the dream of noble
courage and fidelity had another form than that of the tournament.
The second form, equally important, was that of the knightly orders.
While it may not be easy to show a direct link, no one even casually
familiar with the customs of primitive people will have any doubt
that the roots of knightly orders, just as those of the tournaments
and the chivalric initiations themselves, go back to the sacred
customs of a distant past. The ceremony conferring knighthood is an
ethically and socially elaborated puberty ritual, granting arms to the
young warrior. The staged combat itself is of ancient origin and was
once full of sacred meaning. The chivalric orders cannot be
separated from the male bands of primitive peoples.
But this link can only be suggested here as an unproven thesis; we
are not concerned at this moment with confirming an ethnological
hypothesis, but rather with envisioning the ideal value of fully
developed knighthood. Who would deny that in all this some of the
primitive still survives?
To be sure, the Christian element in the idea is so strong that an
explanation founded on purely medieval ecclesiastical and political
conditions alone could also be convincing provided one did not
realize that universal primitive parallels furnish still more basic
explanations.
The first knightly orders, the three great orders of the Holy Land
and the three Spanish orders,98 arose as the purest embodiment of
the medieval spirit from a combination of the monastic and knightly
ideals at a time when the fight against Islam had become a
wondrous reality. They had grown into large political and economic
institutions, vast conglomerates of wealth and financial power.
Their political usefulness had pushed both their spiritual character
and the chivalric play element into the background while their
economic success, in turn, had eaten away their political usefulness.
As long as the Templars and Hospitalers flourished and were still
active in the Holy Land itself the knightly way of life had served a
real political function and the knightly orders really were practical
organizations serving functions of great significance.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, knightly
practice was only an elevated form of life and as a result the
element of noble play that was at its very heart had again come to
the foreground in the newer chivalric orders. Not that they had
become only play. As idea, the orders are still filled with ethical and
political aspiration. But this is now illusion and dream, vain
scheming. The peculiar idealist Philippe de Méziéres saw the
remedy for his age in a new knightly order that he called the Ordre
de la Passion.”99 He wanted all estates included in it. Incidentally, the
great chivalric orders of the Crusades had already made use of
warriors without noble status. The grand master and the knights
should come from the ranks of the nobility, the clergy should
provide the patriarch and his suffragans; burghers should become
brothers; and rural people and craftsmen servants. The order will
thus be a solid amalgamation of the estates for the great struggle
against the Turks. There should be four vows. Two are traditional,
shared by the monks and the spiritual knights: poverty and
obedience. But in place of absolute celibacy Philippe de Méziéres
put conjugal chastity. He wanted to permit marriage for the
practical reason that the oriental climate required it and that it
would make the order more desirable. The fourth vow, unknown to
earlier orders, is the summa perfectio, the highest personal ethical
perfection. Here is the colorful picture of a knightly order in which
all ideals come together in actions ranging from the making of
political plans all the way to the struggle for salvation.
The word Ordre mixed a number of meanings without
distinguishing among them, encompassing highest holiness as well
as the most pragmatic cooperatives. It could mean social status just
as well as priestly consecration, or refer to monastic or chivalric
orders. That the word “ordre” in the sense of knightly order still
retained some spiritual significance is shown by the fact that the
word “religion” was used in its place, a usage that normally would
perhaps be restricted only to the cloistered orders. Chastellain calls
the Golden Fleece une religion as if it were a cloistered order and
speaks of it with the kind of awe reserved for a holy mystery. 100
Olivier de la Marche speaks of a Portuguese as a “chevalier de la
religion de Avys.”101 But there is not only the reverential awe of
that pompous Polonius Chastellain to testify to the pious meaning of
the Golden Fleece; church attendance and the Mass occupy a
dominant position within the entire ritual of the order: the knights
sit on the seats of the lords of the cathedral, the memorial services
for members who have passed away are conducted in the strictest
ecclesiastical style.
Small wonder therefore that membership in a knightly order was
felt to be a strong, sacred bond. The knights of the Order of Stars of
King John II are obligated, if possible, to abandon membership in
all other orders.102 The duke of Bedford, intending to tie young
Philip of Burgundy closer to England, wants to foist the Order of the
Garter on him but the Burgundian, fully realizing that this would
bind him forever to the English king, finds a way to politely evade
the honor.103 When Charles the Bold accepted the garter and even
wore it, Louis XI regarded this as a breach of the treaty of Péronne,
which enjoined the duke not to enter into an alliance with England
without the king’s assent.104 The English custom of not accepting
foreign orders may be regarded as a traditional reminder of the
notion that the honor obligates the recipient to remain faithful to
the prince who awards it.
That touch of sanctity notwithstanding, we may assume that
among the princely circles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
there was a feeling that many regarded these artfully contrived new
knightly orders as empty pastimes. Why else the endlessly repeated,
insistent assurances that all this was in aid of higher, most
important purposes? Philip of Burgundy, the noble duke, founded
his Toison d’or, says the poet Michault:
Non point pour jeu ne pour esbatement,
Mais a la fin que soit attribuée
Loenge a Dieu trestout premiérement
Et aux bons gloire et haulte renommée.105 *35
Guillaume Fillastre, too, promises in the preface of his work about
the Golden Fleece to explain its importance so that one would
realize that the order was not a matter of vanity or a matter of
trifling importance. Your father, he addresses Charles the Bold, “n’a
pas comme dit est, en vain instituée ycelle ordre.” 106736
It became necessary to emphasize the high intentions of the order
if the Golden Fleece were to take the first place Philip’s pride craved
for it. Since the middle of the fourteenth century, the founding of
chivalric orders had become almost a fashion. Every prince simply
had to have an order of his own and even noble houses of high
status did not want to be left behind. There is Boucicaut with his
Ordre de l’écu verd à la dame blanche for the defense of courtly
Minne and oppressed women. There is King John with his Chevaliers
Nostre Dame de la Noble Maison (1351), usually called the Order of
the Stars after their insignia. In the noble house at Saint Ouen near
Saint Denis they had a table d’oneur at which the three bravest
princes, the three bravest bannerets,107 and the three bravest
knights had to sit during their festivities. There was further Pierre
de Lusignan with his Order of the Sword, which demanded of its
members a pure life and put around their necks as witty symbol a
golden chain with its links formed in the shape of the letter S,
which signified “silence.” Amadeus of Savoy founded the
Annouciade; Louis de Bourbon the Golden Shield and the Thistle;
Enguerrand de Coucy, who had hoped for an imperial crown, the
crown reversed; Louis of Orléans the Order of the Porcupine. The
Bavarian dukes of Holland-Henegowen had their Order of
Antonious, complete with the T-shaped cross and little bell that
attract our attention in numerous portraits.108
The founding of such orders was frequently used to celebrate
important events, such as happened in the case of Louis Bourbon’s
return from his term as an English prisoner of war, or, in other cases
to make a political point as, for example, with Orléans’s porc-epic,
which turned its quills towards Burgundy. Sometimes the pious
character, always significant, very strongly prevailed, as in the
founding of an order of St. George in the Franche-Comté when
Philibert de Miolans returned from the East with relics of that saint.
At times the orders are not much more than ordinary brotherhoods
of mutual protection, such as that of the Hazewind, founded by the
nobles of the dukedom of Bar in 1416.
The reason for the success of the Golden Fleece, surpassing that of
all other newer orders, is the wealth of the Burgundians. The special
splendor of the order may have contributed just as much as the
fortuitous choice of the symbol itself. Initially the name of the
Golden Fleece evoked only the legend of Colchis. The legend of
Jason was generally known; Froissart had it told by a shepherd ina
pastorale.109 But Jason as a hero of legend was suspect; he had
broken his vow of fidelity and this theme was bound to trigger
unwelcome insinuations concerning the policy of the Burgundians
towards France. Alain Charrier put it this way in a poem:
A Dieu et aux gens detestables
Est menterie et trahison.
Pour ce n’est point mis a la table
Des preux l’image de Jason,
Qui pour emporter la toison
De Colcos se veult parjurer.
Larrecin ne se peult celer.110*37
Jean Germain, the learned bishop of Chalons and chancellor of
the order, brought to Philip’s attention the fleece that Gideon had
spread on the ground and on which the heavenly dew fell. This was
an especially good idea because this Fleece of Gideon was one of
the most fitting symbols of the fertilization of Mary’s womb. The
biblical hero thus came to replace the heathen as patron of the
Golden Fleece. This enabled Jacques de Clercq to claim that Philip
had deliberately refrained from selecting Jason because he had
broken his vow of fidelity.111 A court poet of Charles the Bold
called the order “Gedeonis signa.”112 But others, such as the
chronicler Theodericus Pauli, continue to speak of the “Vellus
Jasonis.” Jean Germains’s successor as chancellor of the order,
Bishop Guillaume Fillastre, went further than his predecessor and
discovered four additional fleeces in the Holy Scripture: one of
Jacob, one of King Mesa of Moab, one of Job, and one of David.113
He said that each of these represented a virtue and that he intended
to devote a book to each of the six. This was obviously too much of
a good thing. Fillastre had the spotted sheep of Jacob serve as
symbol of justifia;114 he had simply taken all instances where the
Vulgate uses the word “Vellus”—a rather peculiar demonstration of
the flexibility of allegory. There is no indication that his idea met
with sustained applause.
The pomp and festivities of the Golden Fleece have been
described often enough; to mention them here would only add
further material to what has been said above in chapter 2 about the
pomp of courtly life. One single feature of the order’s customs
deserves to be cited here because it reveals so clearly the character
of a primitive and sacred play. The order counts among its members
next to its knights, its officers: the chancellor, the treasurer, the
secretary, and, further, the king of arms with his staff of heralds and
pursuivants. The latter group, specifically charged with the service
of the noble knightly game, are given symbolic names. The king of
arms himself has the name Toison d’or, as for example, Jean Lefévre
de Saint Remy and Nicolas of Hames, the latter known from the
union of Dutch nobles in 1565. The heralds are given territorial
names: Charolais, Zélande. The First of the Pursuivants is named
Fusil, after the flint stone in the insignia chain of the order, the
emblem of Philip the Good. Others have names with romantic
flavor, like Montreal, or of virtues, like Persévérance; or names
borrowed from the allegory of the Roman de la rose, for example,
Humble Requeste, Doulce Pensée, Léal Poursuite. During the great
festival such pursuivants were solemnly baptized with these names
by the grand master, who sprinkled wine over them. He also
changed their names on the occasion of their elevation to higher
rank.115
The vows imposed by the chivalric orders are merely a firm
collective form of the personal knightly vows to perform some kind
of heroic deed. This is perhaps the point where the foundations of
the knightly ideal can best be viewed in their interlocking
relationships. Those who might be inclined to regard the connection
between the act of being dubbed a knight, the tournament, knightly
orders, and primitive customs as a mere suggestion will find that
the barbaric character of the knightly vow lurks so close to the
surface that doubt is no longer possible. We are dealing with
genuine survivals, which have parallels in the ancient Indian
vratam, in the Nasorderschaft of the Jews, and, perhaps most
directly, in the practices of the Vikings during their legendary
period.
The ethnological problem is not at issue here, but rather the
question of what significance the vows had in late medieval
spiritual life. Three values are possible. The knightly vows may have
a religious-ethical meaning that places them at the same level as
clerical vows; their content and meaning can also be of a romantic-
erotic sort; and, finally, the vows may have degenerated into a
courtly game without any significance other than that of a pastime.
Actually, all these existed together at the same time; the idea of the
vow vacillates between the highest dedication of life in the service
of the most solemn ideal and the most conceited mockery of the
elaborate social game that found only amusement in courage, love,
and concerns of state. The play element predominates; the vows
became, for the most part, embellishments of court festivities. But
they always remained tied to the most serious military
undertakings: the invasion of France by Edward III, Philip the
Good’s envisioned crusade.
It is as in the case of the tournaments: as tasteless and as worn as
the ready-made romanticism of the pas d’armes may appear to us, so
too, the vow “of the pheasant,” “of the peacock,” and “of the egret”
seem to be equally vain and insincere, if we are not sensitive to the
passion that permeated all this. It is the dream of the more beautiful
life just as the festivities and forms of the Florentines of Cosimo,
Lorenzo, and Giuliana were this dream. In Italy it attained eternal
beauty, but here the dream’s magic vanished with those who
dreamed it.
The link between the ascetic and the erotic that is at the base of
the fantasy of the hero who frees the virgin or sheds his blood for
her, the central motif of tournament romanticism, reveals itself in
another and perhaps more striking aspect in the knightly vow. In his
instructions for his daughter, the knight De la Tour Landry tells us
of a peculiar order of noblemen and noblewomen given to the
practice of Minne that had existed during his days of youth in Poitou
and elsewhere. They called themselves “Galois et Galoises” and
observed “une ordonnance moult sauvaige,”*3° the most important
element of which was that they had to keep a fire burning in the
fireplace and dress themselves warmly in furs and padded hoods
during the summer while during the winter they were permitted to
wear nothing but a furless coat. They were not allowed any cloak or
other protection, hat, gloves or mittens, no matter how freezing the
temperature. During winter they scattered green leaves on the floor
and hid the chimney behind green branches, and on their bed they
had only a thin blanket. This wonderful aberration, so peculiar that
the writer is not likely to have invented it, can hardly be regarded
as anything but as an ascetic intensification of erotic attraction.
Though not perfectly clear in all details, and most likely strongly
exaggerated, only minds completely lacking in ethnological
knowledge would take all this to be the invention of a chatty old
man.116 The primitive character of the Galois and Galoises is further
emphasized by the rule of their order that the husband had to leave
his entire house and his wife to the Galois who was his guest in
order to go to the Galoise of his visitor; failure to do so meant total
disgrace. According to the knight De la Tour Landry, many members
of the order had died of cold: “Si doubte moult que ces Galois et
Galoises qui moururent en cest etat et en cestes amouretes furent
martirs d’amours.”117}2?
There are more examples that betray the primitive character of
the knightly vows. As, for example, the poem describing the vows
that Robert of Artois urged on the King of England, Edward III, and
his noblemen in order to start the war against France: “Le voeu de
héron.” It is a story of little historical value but the spirit of
barbarian crudeness that it reveals is well suited to acquaint us with
the nature of the knightly vows.
The duke of Salisbury is sitting at the feet of his lady during a
feast. When his turn to take a vow has arrived, he asks his beloved
to put a finger on his right eye. Even two, she answers and closes
the right eye of the knight with two fingers. “Belle, est-il bien clos?”
he asks. “Oyl, certainement.”*4° “Well, then,” says Salisbury, “then
I vow to God the Almighty and his sweet mother, not to open this
eye again, no matter what pain and suffering this may cause, until I
have lit the flame in France, the country of the enemy, and have
fought the men of King Philip”
Or aviegne qu’aviegne, car il n’est autrement.
—Adonc osta son doit la puchelle au cors gent,
Et li iex clos demeure, si que virent la gent.118}+1
In Froissart we can read of the reality reflected by this literary
motif, Froissart tells us that he actually saw English gentlemen who
had one eye covered with a piece of cloth so that they could fulfill
their vow of seeing with only one eye until they had performed
heroic deeds in France.119
This primitive crudeness of the “voeu du héron” is still more
evident in the vow of Jehan de Faukemont, who will not spare
monastery or altar, pregnant woman or child, friends or relatives, in
order to serve King Edward. At the end the queen, Philippa of
Hennegowen, asks her husband for permission to be also allowed to
take a vow.
Adonc, dist la roine, je sai bien, que piecha
Que sui grosse d’enfant, que mon corps senti l’a.
Encore n’a il gaires, qu’en mon corps se tourna.
Et je voue et prometh à Dieu qui me créa...
Qui la li fruis de moi de mon corps n’istera,
Si m’en arés menée au pais par de-là
Pour avanchier le veu que vo corps voué a;
Et s’il en voelh isir, quant besoins n’en sera,
D'un grant coutel d’achier li miens corps s’ochira;
Serai m’asme perdue et li fruis perira! *42
This blasphemous vow is met with a chilled silence. The poet only
says:
Et quant li rois l’entent, moult forment len pensa,
Et dist: certainement, nul plues ne vouera. {4
Hair and beard, everywhere bearers of magical power have a
special meaning in medieval vows. Benedict XIII, pope of Avignon
but actually a prisoner there, swore not to have his beard cut as a
sign of his travail until his freedom was restored.120 When Lumey
takes the same vow with respect to taking revenge for the count of
Egmont, we encounter one of the last remnants of a custom that had
sacred meaning in the distant past.
The meaning of a vow, as a rule, is that someone imposes on
himself an austerity as a stimulant to the completion of the vow. In
most cases the austerity is linked to food. The first to be taken as
knight into his Chevalerie de la Passion by Philippe de Mézières was
a Pole who had for nine years not eaten or drunk while sitting
down.121 Bertrand du Guesclin is very hasty with respect to such
vows. Once there was a challenge from an English warrior: Bertrand
declared that he would only have three wine soups in the name of
the Trinity until he had fought the challenger. In another instance
he had pledged not to eat meat or take off his clothes until he had
taken Montcontour, or even that he would not eat until he had
clashed with the English.122
Naturally, the nobleman of the fourteenth century was no longer
conscious of the magical significance of this fasting. To us, the
underlying motif is very evident from the manifold use of bonds as
emblems of a vow. On January 1, 1415, Duke Jean de Bourbon,
“désirant eschiver oisiveté, pensant y acquerir bonne renommée et
la grâce de la très-belle de qui nous sommes serviteurs,” *44 takes
the vow, together with sixteen other knights and page boys, to wear
every Sunday for two years a bond like that of a prisoner on his left
leg—the knights’ in gold, the pageboys’ in silver —until he had
found sixteen knights ready to fight the band in a battle on foot “à
outrance.”1234 Jacques de Lalaing in 1445 meets a Sicilian knight
in Antwerp, Jean de Boniface, who as “chevalier aventureux” has
come from the court of Aragon. On his left leg he has an iron, just
like slaves used to wear, and, hanging on a golden bracelet, an
“emprise” that signifies his readiness to fight.124 In the novel of the
Petit Jehan de Saintré the knight Loiselench wears two golden rings
on arm and leg, each on a golden chain, until he finds a knight who
“liberates” him from his enterprise.125 This is what is called
“délivrer”; thus the sign is touched when one goes “pour chevalier”;
it is torn off if mortal combat is intended. La Curne de Sainte Palaye
noticed that, according to Tacitus, the very same custom was found
among the ancient Chatten.126 The bonds worn by the penitent on
their pilgrimages or those that pious ascetics put on themselves are
related to these “enterprises” of the late medieval knights.
The most famous solemn vow of the fifteenth century, the Voeux
du Faisan, was taken in 1454 in Lille during a court festival given by
Philip the Good in preparation for the crusade. What it still reveals
of all this is not much more than a beautiful courtly form. Not that
the custom of taking a spontaneous vow during an emergency or
moment of strong emotion had lost any of its power. This custom
has such deep psychological roots that it is bound neither to
education nor faith. The knightly vow as cultural form, however, as
a custom elevated to an embellishment of life, reaches its last phase
in the splendid extravagances of the Burgundian court.
The theme of the action is still always the unmistakable old
theme. Vows are taken during feasts, an oath is made in the name of
a bird that is served and later eaten. The Vikings, too, knew the
competition in vows taken during drunken feasts; one of the forms
is to touch the wild boar as it is being served.127 The pheasant of
the famous feast at Lille seems to have been alive.128 The vow was
taken in the name of God and his Mother, of ladies and the bird.129
It is not too daring to assume that the Deity in this instance was not
the original recipient of the vow: actually many vows are taken only
in the name of the ladies or of birds. There is little variety in the
austerities the oath takers imposed upon themselves. Most are
related to sleep or food. This knight is not allowed to sleep in a bed
on Sundays until he has fought a Saracen, nor may he stay for
fourteen consecutive days in the same city. Another may not eat
meat on Friday until he has touched the banner of the great Turk;
yet another piles ascetic practice on top of ascetic practice: he is not
allowed to wear any armor at all, drink wine on Sundays, sleep in a
bed, sit at a table, and he has to wear a hair shirt. The manner in
which the heroic deed required by the vow is to be carried out is
described in precise detail.130
How serious is this all? When messire Philippe Pot takes the vow
to keep his right arm bare of any armor during the campaign
against the Turks, the duke has the following comment added below
the vow (which was registered in writing): “Ce n’est pas le plaisir de
mon trés redoubté seigneur, que messire Phelippe Pot voise en sa
compaignie ou saint voyage qu’il a voué, le bras désarmé; mais il est
content qu’il voist aveuc lui armé bien et soufisamment ainsi qu’il
appartient.”131*4© Obviously a vow was still regarded as serious and
dangerous. The vow by the duke himself stirs emotions
everywhere. 132
Others take cautiously conditioned vows that testify both to
serious intent and to self-satisfaction with a beautiful pretense. 133
On some occasions the vows are addressed to the “much beloved”
who is but a pale remnant of herself.134 A mocking element is not
lacking even in the grim Voeu du héron: Robert of Artois offers the
king, pictured here as not very belligerent, the heron as the most
timid of birds. After Edward has taken his vow, all break out in
laughter. Jean de Beaumont took the Voeu du héron in the words
already mentioned earlier,135 which reveal with faint mockery the
passionate nature of vows made under the influence of wine and
under the eyes of the ladies. According to another story, he loudly
took a cynical vow, in the name of the heron, that he would serve
that lord from whom he could expect to get the most. Whereupon
the English lords laughed.136 What mood, in spite of all the solemn
importance with which the Voeux du Faisan were received, must
have prevailed at the table when Jennet de Rebreviette took the
vow that he, in case he did not receive the favor of his lady before
the campaign started, would upon his return from the East marry
the first woman or maiden who had 20,000 crowns—“se elle
veult.”137*47 Yet the same Rebreviette as “pouvre escuier” +48
ventures forth and fights against the Moors at Ceuta and Granada.
So the exhausted aristocracy laughs at its own ideal. Having
dressed and painted their passionate dream of a beautiful life with
all their powers of imagination and artfulness and wealth and
molded it into a plastic form, they then pondered and realized that
life was really not so beautiful—and then laughed.
It was only a vain illusion, that knightly glory, only style and
ceremony, a beautiful and insincere play! The real history of the
late medieval period, we are told by the researcher who traces the
development of the state and of economics in the documents, has
little to do with the phony knightly renaissance; it was old varnish
that had begun to peel off. The men who made history were by no
means dreamers but were very calculating, sober politicians or
merchants, be they princes, noblemen, prelates or burghers.
This they certainly were. But the history of culture has just as
much to do with dreams of beauty and the illusions of a noble life
as with population figures and statistics. A more recent scholar,
having studied today’s society in terms of the growth of banks and
traffic, of political and military conflicts, would be able to state at
the end of his studies: “I have noticed very little about music, which
obviously had little meaning for this culture.”
It seems to be that way if the history of the Middle Ages is
described for us from political and economic documents. But it may
well be that the knightly ideal, artificial and worn-out as it may
have been, still continued to exert a more powerful influence on the
purely political history of the late Middle Ages than is usually
imagined.
The charm of the noble life form is so great that even burghers
succumb to it wherever they can. We imagine the Flemish heroes
Jacob and Philipp van Artevelde to be true men of the third estate—
proud of their bourgeois stature and simplicity. On the contrary:
Philipp van Artevelde lived in princely splendor, every day he had
musicians perform in front of his lodging, every meal he had served
on silver dishes as if he were the count of Flanders. He dressed in
purple, red, and “menu vair” like a duke of Brabant or count of
Hennegowen. He rode on horseback in the style of a prince, an
unfurled banner carried ahead of him to display his coat of arms, a
sable with three silver hats.138 Who appears to be more modern to
us than the leading financier of the fifteenth century, Jacques
Coeur, the outstanding banker of Charles VII? If we are to believe
his biographer, Jacques de Lalaing, this great banker took a lively
interest in the old-fashioned knight-errantry of the Hennegowen
hero Philipp van Artevelde.139
All higher forms of the bourgeois life of modern times are based
on imitations of noble life forms. Just as the bread served on a
“serviette” (napkin) and the word “serviette” itself have their origin
in medieval courtly stateliness,140 the most bourgeois of the
prenuptial pranks are offsprings of the grandiose “entremets” of
Lille. In order to fully understand the meaning of the knightly ideal
in cultural-historical terms one would have to trace it to
Shakespeare’s and Moliere’s time, or even to the modern gentleman.
But in this instance we are concerned with exploring the effect of
that ideal on real life during the waning Middle Agesi41 themselves.
Could politics and warfare actually be controlled by the knightly
idea? Undoubtedly yes, if not by its merits then by its weaknesses.
Just as the tragic blunders of today arise from the frenzy of
nationalism and cultural arrogance, those of the medieval period
arose more than once from chevaleresque notions. Did not the
motive for the creation of the new Burgundian state, the gravest
mistake France could have committed, rise from a knightly impulse?
King John, that knightly maniac, hands the dukedom in 1363 to his
young son who had stood with him at Poitiers when the elder son
fled. The same holds true for the conscious notion that was intended
to justify the later anti-French policy of the Burgundians to their
contemporaries: vengeance for Montereau, the defense of knightly
honor. I am well aware that all this could also be explained as the
results of calculating or even farsighted politics, but this does not
keep the contemporaries from regarding the value and lesson of the
facts of 1363 as a case of knightly courage that had received
princely rewards. The Burgundian state in its rapid unfolding is an
edifice of political insight and purposefully sober calculation. But
what one may call the Burgundian idea always takes on the forms of
the knightly ideal. The nicknames of the dukes—Sans Peur, Le Hardi,
Qui qu’en Hongue, which was replaced in the case of Philip with Le
Bon—are all deliberate inventions of court literature so that the
prince can be seen in the light of the knightly ideal.142
One great political quest was inseparably tied to the knightly
ideal: the crusade, Jerusalem! The thought of Jerusalem was
constantly before the eyes of all the princes of Europe as the most
noble political idea and continued to spur them into action. There
was here a peculiar contradiction between practical political
interest and political idea. Christendom of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries faced an Oriental question of the highest
urgency: defense against the Turks, who had already taken
Adrianopolis (1378) and destroyed the Serbian Empire (1389).
Danger loomed in the Balkans. But Europe’s first and most
imperative political task could not yet be separated from the idea of
a crusade. The Turkish question could only be viewed as part of the
great holy task that earlier times had failed to accomplish: the
liberation of Jerusalem.
This conception put the knightly ideal in the foreground. In this
context it could and was bound to have a particularly powerful
effect. The religious content of the knightly ideal found its highest
expression in this quest, and the liberation of Jerusalem could be
nothing but holy and noble knightly work. The limited success in
combating the Turks may be explained to a certain degree by the
very fact that the religious-knightly ideal was so prominent in
shaping the political response to the Orient. The expeditions that
required, above all, exact calculation and patient preparation were
conceived and implemented under a very high tension that led not
to a calm consideration of that which was attainable, but to a
romanticizing of the plan: a tension that was bound either to remain
fruitless or to become fatal. The catastrophe of Nicopolis in 1396
proved how dangerous it was to mount a serious expedition against
a very militant enemy in the old-fashioned style of those knightly
jaunts into Prussia or Lithuania where the objective was merely to
put to death a few poor heathens. Who was it who designed the
plans for the Crusades? Dreamers like Philippe de Méziéres, who
dedicated his life to them and political fantasizers, one of whom
was Philip the Good, all his clever calculations notwithstanding.
The liberation of Jerusalem remained a compelling and vital task
for all kings. In 1422, Henry V of England lay dying. The young
conqueror of Rouen and Paris was taken away right in the middle of
the work with which he had caused France so much misery. The
physicians told him that he had less than two hours to live; the
confessor and other clerics have come, the seven penitential psalms
are read. As the clergymen recite the words “Bénigne fac, Domine,
in bona voluntate tue Sion, ut aedificentur muri Jerusalem,” 143*49
the king makes them stop and, with a loud voice, says that it had
been his intention to conquer Jerusalem once peace had been
restored in France, “se ce eust été le plaisir de Dieu son createur de
la laisser vivre son aage.”{°0 Then he lets the reading of the
penitential psalms be concluded and dies shortly thereafter.144
The Crusades had also for a long time been a pretext for imposing
special levies: even Philip the Good had generously availed himself
of that opportunity. Yet this could hardly be said to have been only
a hypocritical use of the planned crusade for the sake of financial
gain.145 It seems to have been a mixture of serious concerns and of
the intent to secure for himself higher fame than that of the Kings of
France and England, whose rank was superior to his own, by
pursuing this particularly useful and, at the same time, especially
knightly plan, to be the savior of Christendom. “Le voyage de
Turquie” 51 remained his trump card that he did not play.
Chastellain takes pains to stress that the duke was serious about this
but that there were important considerations: the times were not
ripe, influential people were shaking their heads that the prince
intended to undertake such a dangerous campaign given his age;
territories and dynasty would both be in peril. While the pope sent
him the flag of the cross that was received by Philip in the Hague
with all humility and respect in a solemn procession, while vows to
take the journey were made during the festivities in Lille and
afterwards, while Joffrey de Toisy reconnoitered the Syrian ports
and Jean Chevrot, bishop of Tournay, supervised collections, and
Guillaume Fillastre held his entire train in readiness and had
already confiscated ships for the campaign, there prevailed, in the
midst of all this, a vague premonition that the campaign might not
take place in spite of everything.146 The duke’s own vow had a
somewhat qualified ring to it; he would venture out if the
territories, which God had entrusted to be governed by him, would
enjoy peace and security. 147
Announcing military campaigns, excepting the ideal of the
crusade, seemed to have been a popular technique in the clamor for
political prestige. These noisily proclaimed campaigns were
prepared in great detail, but failed to materialize or had very little
consequence, as, for example, the English expedition against
Flanders in 1383; or the campaign of Philip the Bold against
England in 1387, in which a splendid fleet was assembled and made
ready to sail from the port of Sluis; or the campaign of Charles VI
against Italy in 1391.
A very special form of knightly fiction used as political
propaganda was the repeatedly announced but never accomplished
princely duel. I have elsewhere detailed how the quarrels between
the states of the fifteenth century were still regarded as quarrels
between parties, as personal “querelles.”148 The cause one served
was called “la querelle des Bourguignons.” What was more natural
than that the princes themselves should fight it out just as still
proposed in casual political rhetoric? This solution that arose from
both a primitive sense of justice and from the knightly imagination
actually appeared time and again on the agenda. Reading about the
detailed preparations for the princely duels, one wonders if this was
only a beautiful game of conscious hypocrisy, again the search for a
beautiful life, or whether the knightly adversaries really expected to
do battle against each other. There is no doubt that the historians of
that period took such challenges just as seriously as the belligerent
princes themselves. In 1383 Richard II commissioned his uncle,
John of Lancaster, to negotiate peace with the King of France and,
as a proper means thereto, a duel between the two kings or between
Richard and his three uncles and Charles and his uncles. 149
Monstrelet devotes considerable space, right at the beginning of his
chronicle, to the challenge by Louis of Orléans to King Henry IV of
England.150 To the impetuous and brilliant mind of Orléans, which
had scope for fiery devotion, the appreciation of the arts, fantastic
ideals of knightly combat and courtly love, side by side with
debauchery, cynicism, and the magical arts, such a duel might also
have well been a passionate undertaking. The same holds true for
the pompous mind of Philip the Good. He, in his turn, provided the
most imposing elaboration of the theme backed by all the resources
of his wealth and his love of splendor. It was Humphrey of
Gloucester whom he challenged in the noble manner in 1425. In the
challenge there is clear reference to the motif of noblesse oblige:
“pour éviter effusion de sang chrestien et la destruction du peuple,
dont en mon cuer ay compacion . . . que par mon corps sans plus
ceste querelle soit menée a fin, sans y aler avant par voies de
guerres dont il convendroit mains gentilz hommes et aultres, tant de
vostre ost comme du mien, finer leurs jours piteusement.”151*°2 All
the props for the battle were ready: the costly armor and the
splendid garments to be worn by the duke were prepared; work was
in progress on the tents, the standards and banners, the coats for the
heralds and pursuivants, all displaying in profusion the court of
arms of the ducal realm, the tinderbox and the cross of St. Andrew.
Philip was in training: “tant en abstinence de sa bouche comme en
prenant painne pour luy mettre en alainne.”152 In his park at
Hesdin he practiced daily under experienced fencing masters. 153
The bills inform us of the cost of all of this. The expensive tent
fashioned for the purpose could be seen in Lille as late as 1460.154
But the duel never took place.
This did not stop Philip from later issuing a new challenge to the
duke of Saxony during their quarrel over Luxembourg. At the feast
at Lille when Philip was almost sixty years old, his vow to launch a
crusade stated that he would be only too willing to do battle with
the great Turk corps à corpsi®> if the latter wanted it that way.155
The stubborn combative spirit of Philip the Good still echoes in a
short story by Bandello about how Philip had once been kept by
great effort on the part of his noblemen from a duel of honor.156
This form still survived in the Italy of the high Renaissance.
Francesco Gonzaga challenged Cesare Borgia to a duel. With sword
and dagger he intended to free Italy from the feared and hated
enemy. The duel was averted through the mediation of King Louis
XII of France and the case ended with a moving reconciliation. 157
Even Charles V at least twice formally proposed that his quarrels
with Francis I be settled by a personal duel, the first time after
Francis had returned from captivity and, in the opinion of the
Emperor, had broken his word, and then again in 1536.158
Duels arranged to settle a point of law, judicial duels, and those
that were spontaneous all had a strong survival in custom and
thought particularly in Burgundy and in the quarrelsome north of
France. Both high and low hailed duels as producing truly decisive
results. These concepts, taken by themselves, had little to do with
the knightly ideal; they were much older. Knightly culture bestowed
on the duel a certain respectability, but duels were also favored
outside the circles of nobility. In cases not involving the nobility,
duels immediately reveal the full brutality of the age. The knights
themselves enjoyed the spectacle much more if their code of honor
was not involved in it.
Most remarkable, in this connection, is the concern displayed by
noblemen and historians for a judicial duel between two burghers at
Valenciennes in 1455.159 This was a great rarity, since nothing like
it had taken place for about a hundred years. The citizens of
Valenciennes wanted to see it happen at any cost because to them it
meant the maintenance of an old privilege; but the count of
Charolais who was in charge of the administration during Philip’s
absence (in Germany) felt differently and managed to have it
postponed month by month while the two litigants, Jacotin Plouvier
and Mahuot, were held back like two expensive fighting cocks. As
soon as the aging count had returned from his trip to see the
Emperor, the decision was made that the battle should take place.
Philip was anxious to witness it himself; it was only for this reason
that he chose to travel via Valenciennes on his trip from Bruges to
Louvain. While knightly spirits like Chastellain and La Marche
usually do not provide a realistic account of the festive pas d’armes
of knights and noblemen in spite of all their efforts to do so, in this
instance they record the most clearly seen picture. The crude
Fleming whom Chastellain was is revealed here under his
enveloping houpelande,160 which was splendid in gold with a
pattern of red squares. No detail of the “moult belle serimonie” *°4
escapes him; his description of the circles of the barriers and
benches at the scene is precise.
Each of the poor sacrificial victims has his fencing master at his
side. Jacotin as plaintiff appears first, bareheaded with his hair cut
short and looking very pale. His entire body has been sewn into a
dress of cordovan leather, all just one piece, and he wears nothing
underneath. After a few pious obeisances and the welcoming of the
duke, who is seated behind a latticed screen, the two combatants
are seated opposite one another on two chairs draped in black, and
wait until the preparations are completed. The notables in the circle
make their comments in subdued voices about the chances of the
opponents; nothing escapes them: Mahuot was pale as snow when
he kissed the New Testament! Two servants come in and cover the
warriors with fat from their necks down to their ankles. In the case
of Jacotin the fat is immediately absorbed into the leather, but not
in the case of Mahuot; for which of the two is this a favorable sign?
Their hands are covered with ashes, they put sugar into their
mouths. Then they are given clubs and shields on which there are
painted images of saints, which are kissed by the combatants. They
hold their shields with the points upward and have in their hands
“une bannerolle de devocion,” a ribbon with a pious motto.
Mahuot, who is short, opens the duel by scooping up sand with
the tip of his shield and flipping it into the eyes of Jacotin. This is
followed by intense club fighting that ends with Mahuot’s fall; his
opponent throws himself on top of Mahuot and rubs sand in his
mouth and eyes. But Mahuot manages to get his enemy’s finger
between his teeth. To free himself, Jacotin presses his thumb into
his tormentor’s eye and, in spite of Mahuot’s cries for mercy, twists
his arms behind him and turns Mahuot on his back and proceeds to
break his spine. Mahuot, in his death throes, pleads in vain to be
allowed to confess; then he cries out,”O monseigneur de Bourgogne,
je vou ay si bien servi en vostre guerre de Gand! O monsigneur,
pour Dieu, je vous prie mercy, sauvez-moy la vie!”+5° At this point
Chastellain’s report breaks off; some pages are missing. From other
sources we know how the half-dead Mahuot is hanged by the
executioner.
Did Chastellain, after his energetic description of these revolting
cruelties end his account with noble knightly contemplations? La
Marche did. He tells us about the shame felt by the noblemen after
the event for having seen such a thing. Thereupon, this incorrigible
court poet continues, God allowed a knightly duel to follow that
ended without injuries.
The conflict between the chivalric spirit and reality is most
clearly revealed when the knightly ideal attempts to establish its
validity in the midst of real war. No matter how much the knightly
ideal may have infused fighting courage with form and vigor, as a
rule it had a more retarding than promoting effect on the conduct of
war because it sacrificed the demands of strategy for those of the
beautiful life. Repeatedly the best leaders, on occasion even the
kings, exposed themselves to the dangers of a romantic war
adventure. Edward III risks his life in a questionable raid on some
Spanish naval transports.161 The knights of King John’s Order of
Stars have to take an oath that they will not retreat in battle more
than four “arpents”; failing that they must either die or surrender, a
peculiar rule of the game that, according to Froissart, immediately
cost about ninety knights their lives.162 When Henry V of England
in 1415 moved towards the enemy on the eve of the battle of
Agincourt, he mistakenly advanced one evening past the village that
his officials had designated as his quarters for the night. Now the
king, “comme celuy qui gardoit le plus les cérimonies d’honneur
très loable,” *56 had just issued the order that the knights sent out
on reconnaissance missions should take off their battle dress so as to
spare them the shame of retreating in armor on their way back to
camp. Since in this instance he himself had advanced too far in his
battle dress he could not turn back, he therefore spent the night at
the place he had reached and had his advanced troops move
forward accordingly.163
During the deliberations over the great French invasion of
Flanders in 1382 the knightly spirit continuously resisted the
requirements of strategy. “Se nous querons autres chemins que le
droit” it is argued against the advice given by Clisson and Coucy to
invade along unexpected detours, “nous ne monsterons pas que
soions droites gens d’armes.”164*°7 The same holds for a raid by the
French on the English coast near Dartmouth in 1404. The leader,
Guillaume du Châtel, plans to attack the English on their flank
because they have protected themselves on the beach by a trench.
But the Sire de Jaille calls the defenders a troop of peasants; it
would be shameful to avoid meeting such opponents head-on; he
urges the others not to be afraid. These words hit home with Du
Châtel: “It is unknown to the noble heart of a Breton that he be
afraid; now I shall challenge vagrant fortune even though I see
death rather than victory ahead.” He adds the vow that he will not
beg for mercy, then goes on the attack. He is killed and his troops
are completely defeated.165 During the campaign in Flanders there
is constant shuffling for positions in the advance guard; a knight put
in charge of the rear guard stubbornly resists such duties. 166
The actual application of the knightly ideal to warfare consisted
of agreed-upon aristies,167 be they of two combatants or of groups of
equal numbers. The best-known case is the famous Combat des
Trente that was fought in 1351 near Ploérnel in Brittany between
thirty Frenchmen led by Beaumanoir and a group of Englishmen,
Germans, and Bretons. Froissart found it to be extraordinarily
beautiful but comments at the end, “Li aucun le tenoient a proéce,
et li aucun à outrage et grant outrecuidance.”168}5° A duel between
Guy de la Tremoille and the English nobleman Pierre de Courtenay
in 1386 that was intended to prove the superiority of either the
English or the French was prohibited by the French regents
Burgundy and Berry and only stopped at the very last moment. 169
Le Jouvencel shares in this disapproval of such a useless form of
demonstrating bravery. We had already emphasized earlier how in
his case the knight gave way to the commander. When the duke of
Bedford proposes a fight of twelve against twelve, Le Jouvencel’s
chronicler has the French leader respond: “There is a general
dictum not to do anything proposed by your enemy. We are here to
drive you out of your positions and that is work enough.” And the
challenge is refused. Elsewhere Le Jouvencel had one of his officers
prohibit such a duel by explaining (he resumes this explanation at
the end) that he would never give permission for something like this
to happen. These are forbidden things. Those who demand such a
duel intend to take something away from their opponent; that is,
their honor, and to claim for themselves vainglory, which is of little
value, while in the meantime they are negligent in their service to
their king and the public good.170
This sounds like the voice of the new age. Yet the custom of
fighting duels between opposing forces survives until after the
Middle Ages. We know of the Sfida de Barletta, the fight between
Bayard and Sotomaya in 1501; during the Netherlands war we have
the fight between Bréauté and Lekkerbeetje on the heather near
Vught in 1600 and that of Lodewijk van de Kethulle against an
Albanesian knight at Deventer in 1591.
In most instances, knightly notions are pushed into the
background by considerations of warfare and tactics. But the idea
that even battles in open field are nothing but honestly arranged
duels for justice always comes to the fore, though it is seldom given
its due vis-à-vis the demands of the necessities of war. Heinrich of
Trastamara wants to fight it out with the enemy in open field at any
price. He voluntarily abandons his advantageous position and loses
the battle at Najera (or Navarete). An English contingent proposes
to the Scots in 1333 that they come down from their advantageous
position onto the plain so that they may fight each other there.
Failing to gain access to Calais in order to liberate the town, the
French king politely proposes to the English that they should
designate a site for battle somewhere else; Willem of Hennegowen
goes one step further. He proposes to the French king a three-day
armistice so that there would be time to build a bridge that would
allow the armies to get close to each other for battle.171 In all these
instances, the knightly offers were declined; strategic interests
retained the upper hand, as was the case with Philip the Good, who
faced a serious conflict with his knightly honor when he was offered
battle three times on the same day but declined to accept. 172
Yet there remained plenty of opportunities to beautify warfare
even in cases where the knightly ideal had to give way to reality.
What an aura of pride must have been exuded by the colorful and
boastful battle armor itself. On the eve of the battle of Agincourt the
armies, encamped opposite each other, stirred up their courage in
the darkness with the music of trumpets and trombones. There were
serious complaints that the French did not have enough of them
“pour eux resjouyr” and therefore remained in a subdued mood.173
Towards the end of the fifteenth century mercenaries with large
drums based on oriental models made their appearance.174 The
drum with its hypnotic, unmusical effect is a fitting sign of the
transition from the chivalric to the modern-military period; it is an
element in the mechanization of war. In 1400 the entire beautiful
and half-playful suggestion of personal competition for fame and
honor is still in full bloom. By means of individualized helmet
insignia, weapons, banners, and battle cries, combat retains its
individual character and an element of sport. Throughout the entire
day, a man could hear different individuals raise their cries in a
competitive game of arrogant pride.175 Prior to and after the battle
the creation of new knights and the raising of others in rank seal the
game: knights are promoted to the rank of banneret by having the
tails of their banner cut off.176 The famous camp of Charles the Bold
near Neuss had all the festive splendor of the stateliness of a court:
some had their tents “par plaisance” in the form of a castle
complete with surrounding galleries and gardens. 177
The feats of war had to be recorded within the frame of reference
provided by knightly notions. Attempts were made to distinguish
between battles and mere engagements on technical grounds
because each battle had to have its fixed location and name in the
annals of fame. Monstrelet says, “Si fut de ce jour en avant ceste
besongne appellée la recontre de Mons en Vimeu. Et ne fu declairée
à estre bataille, pour ce que les parties rencontrèrent l’un l’autre
aventureusement, et qu’il n’y avoit comme nulles bannières
desploiées.”178*°? Henry V of England solemnly christens his great
victory “pour tant que toutes batailles doivent porter le nom de la
prochaine forteresse où elles sont faictes,” t60 as the battle of
Agincourt.179 Remaining for the night on the battlefield was
regarded as the accepted sign of victory.180
The personal bravery of the prince in battle occasionally has a
rather artificial character. Froissart’s description of a fight between
Edward III and a French nobleman near Calais contains expressions
that allow us to assume that they were not bitterly serious, “La se
combati li rois à monsigneur Ustasse moult longuement et messires
Ustasse à lui, et tant que il les faisoit moult plaisant veoir.” *61 The
Frenchman finally surrenders and the fight is concluded with a
supper offered to his prisoner by the king.181 In the battle of Saint
Richier, Philip of Burgundy had somebody else wear his splendid
armor because of the danger it attracted, but it was explained that
this was done so that he could prove himself better as an ordinary
combatant.182 When the young dukes of Berry and Brittany follow
Charles the Bold in his “guerre du bien public” they wear, as
Commines was told, fake armor of satin with gilded nails.183
Everywhere lies shine through the holes in the stately knightly
dress. Reality continuously denies the ideal. Therefore it withdraws
further and further back into the sphere of literature, festival, and
play; only here the illusion of the beautiful knightly life remains.
Here one is with the caste among whom such feelings have their
only validity.
It is astonishing how instantly the knightly ideal fails whenever it
has to assert itself in confrontations with unequals. Whenever the
lower classes are confronted, any need for knightly loftiness
disappears. Noble Chastellain does not have the least understanding
of the stubborn bourgeois honor of the wealthy brewer who does
not want to give his daughter to a soldier of the duke and who risks
his life and wealth to resist the duke.184 Froissart reports, without
any respect, how Charles VI asks to see the body of Philipp van
Artevelde. “Quant on l’eust regardé un espasse on le osta de là et fu
pendus a un arbre. Vela le darraine fin de che Phillippe
d’Artevelle.”185;62 The king was not above kicking the body, “en le
traitant de vilain.”186*63 The most cruel atrocities of the nobility
were committed against the burghers of Ghent during the war of
1382. They sent to the city forty grain merchants with their limbs
cut off and their eyes gouged out. This did not for a moment lessen
Froissart’s passion for knighthood.187 Chastellain, who revels in the
heroic deeds of Jacques de Lalaing and the like, mentions without
showing any sympathy, that an unknown apprentice from Ghent
had dared to attack Lalaing all by himself.188 La Marche comments
somewhat naively about the heroic deeds of a commoner from
Ghent that would have been important if they had been
accomplished by “un homme de bien.”189*64
Reality pressed the mind in every which way to deny the knightly
ideal. Military strategy had long ago abandoned the tournament
element; the wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries resorted
to stealth and surprise. They were wars of raids and predatory
attacks. The English had first introduced the practice of having the
knights dismount during battle, and this was adopted by the
French.190 Eustache Deschamps comments mockingly that this was
done to keep them from fleeing.191 It is useful to fight at sea, says
Froissart, because there the men cannot run away and vanish. 192
The extraordinary naiveté of the knightly notions as military
principles manifests itself in the Débat des hérauts d’armes de France
et d’Angleterre, a tract from about 1455, in which the supremacy of
France or England is contested in the form of a debate. The English
herald asked his French counterpart why his king, in contrast to the
English king, does not maintain a great fleet. The French herald
answers that his king does not need to do that, and, moreover, that
the French nobility likes war on land more than that at sea for
various reasons, “car il y a danger et perdicion de vie, et Dieu scet
quelle pitié quant il fait une tourmente, et si est la malladie de la
mer forte a endurer a plusieurs gens. Item, et la dure vie dont il
fault vivre, qui n’est pas bien consonante à noblesse.”193}°> Though
still of only negligible effect, the use of cannons already
foreshadowed future changes in warfare. It is like an ironic
symbolism that the pride of knight-errantry, “a la mode de
bourgogne,” 66 Jacques de Lalaing, was killed by a fiery
cannonball.194
The noble-military career had a financial side to it that was often
openly admitted. Every page of the histories of late medieval
warfare gives us to understand how important prominent prisoners
were for the sake of exacting ransom. Froissart does not fail to
mention how much the originator of a successful surprise raid
gained financially as a result of it.195 But in addition to the
immediate advantages of war, pensions and rents and government
posts played a major role in the lives of the knights. Career
advancement is publicly acknowledged as a goal. “Je sui uns povres
horns qui desire mon avancement,” “67 says Eustache de
Ribeumont. Froissart endlessly explains his fait diverse of knightly
warfare among others as example of those brave men “qui se
désirent à avanchier par armes.”196168
Deschamps has a ballad in which the knights, pages, and
sergeants of the Burgundian court yearn with great anticipation for
payday with the refrain
Et quant venra le tresorier?19769
To Chastellain it is natural and fitting that someone striving for
earthly fame is stingy and calculating “fort veillant et entendant à
grand somme de deniers, soit en pensions, soits en rentes, soit en
governemens ou en pratiques.”198 As a matter of fact, the noble
Boucicaut himself, who was the model of all knights, seems not to
have been entirely free from a certain greed for money.199 The
sober Commines ranks a nobleman according to his stipend as “un
gentilhomme de vingt escuz.”200879
Among the loud voices glorifying knightly warfare there can be
heard occasional voices rejecting the knightly ideal. Sometimes they
are sober voices, sometimes they are derisive. Noblemen on
occasion recognize the dressed-up misery and falsity of such a life of
war and tournaments.201 It does not come as a surprise that Louis
XI and Philippe de Commines, two sarcastic minds who had nothing
but scorn and contempt for knighthood, found each other.
Commines’s description of the battle of Montlhéry is entirely
modern in its sober realism. There are no beautiful heroic deeds, no
invented dramatic events, but only the report of continual advance
and retreat, hesitation and fear, all told with light sarcasm. He
delights in reporting shameful flights with bravery restored when
the moment of danger had passed. He rarely uses the word
“honneur” and treats honor almost like a necessary evil. “Mon advis
est que s’il eust voulu s’en aller ceste nuyt, il eust bien faict....
Mais sans doubte là où il avoit de l’honneur, il n’eust point voulu
estre reprins de couardise.”*”7! Even where he reports bloody
encounters, one searches in vain for the vocabulary of knighthood;
he does not know the words bravery or chivalry.202
Does Commines inherit his sober mind from his Zealand mother,
Margretha of Arnemuiden? It appears that in Holland, the presence
of the vain adventurer William IV of Hennegouw notwithstanding,
the knightly spirit died away quite early, while the Hennegouw with
which it was united had always been the true land of knightly
nobility. During the Combat des Trente the best man on the English
side was a certain Crokart, formerly a servant of the Lords of Arkel.
He had acquired a large fortune during the war, estimated to be
worth about sixty thousand crowns, and a stable of thirty horses; he
had also acquired considerable fame for bravery, which had
prompted the King of France to offer him a knighthood and a
respectable marriage in the event that he would become French.
This Crokart returned to Holland with his fame and fortune and
held forth in grand style. But the Dutch notables knew well who he
was and ignored him. He finally returned to the country where
knightly fame was more favored.203
When Jean de Nevers204 prepared himself for his journey to
Turkey where he was to find Nicopolis, Froissart had the Duke
Albert of Bavaria, the duke of Holland, Zealand, and Hennegouw,
say to his son William, “Guillemme puisque tu as la voulenté de
voyagier et aler en Honguerie et en Turquie et quérir les armes sur
gents et pays qui onques riens ne nous foufirent, ne nul article de
raison tu n’y as d’y aler fors que pour la vayne gloire de ce monde,
laisse Jean de Bourgoigne et nos cousins de France faire leur
emprises, et fay la tienne à par toy, et t’en va en Frise et conquiers
nostre héritage.”205*72
Of all the lands under the Burgundian duke the nobility of
Holland had by far the weakest representation during the Vows of
the Cross taken at the festivities in Lille. When after the festivities
still more written vows were collected in all territories, twenty-
seven came from Artois, fifty-four from Flanders, twenty-seven from
Hennegouw, and four from Holland, and even those sound quite
conditional and cautious. 206
But knighthood could hardly have been the life ideal of centuries
if it had not contained high values for the development of society, if
it had not been socially, ethically, and aesthetically necessary. The
power of this ideal had once rested in its beautiful exaggeration. It
seems as if the medieval mind in all its bloody passions could only
be guided by an ideal that was fixed much too highly: this was done
by the church, and was done by the knightly spirit as well. “Without
this violence of direction, which men and women have, without a
spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim
above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of
exaggeration in it.” 207
But the more a cultural ideal is filled with the claims to the
highest virtues, the greater the disharmony between the life form
and reality. Only a time still able to close its eyes to gross reality
and receptive to the highest illusion could uphold the knightly ideal
with its still half-religious content. The unfolding new culture soon
forced the abandonment of the all too lofty aspirations of the old
life forms. The knight is transformed into the French gentilhomme of
the seventeenth century, who, though still maintaining a number of
concepts of state and honor, no longer claims to be a warrior for
matters of faith or a defender of the weak and oppressed. The place
of the type of French nobleman is taken—modified and refined—by
the “gentleman,” who is derived directly from the type of the old
knight. During the successive transformations of the ideal the
outermost shells, each having become a lie, are peeled away time
and again.
The knightly life form was overburdened with ideals of beauty,
virtue, and utility. If viewed with a sober sense of reality, as does
Commines, all this highly praised chivalry appeared to be as useless
and phony as a fabricated, ridiculously anachronistic comedy. The
true driving forces that prompted human action and determined the
fate of states and communities lay elsewhere. As the social
usefulness of the knightly ideal had already become extremely
weak, so it was that the ethical aspect, the practice of virtue, which
also had been claimed by the knightly ideal, was even weaker. Seen
from a truly spiritual point of view, all that noble life was nothing
but open sin and vanity. The ideal failed also from a purely
aesthetic point of view: even the beauty of that life form could be
denied in every respect. Though the knightly ideal may on occasion
appear to be desirable to some burghers, a great feeling of fatigue
and overindulgence arises among the nobility itself. The beautiful
play of courtly life was so colored, so false, so paralyzing. Away
from the painfully constructed art of life towards that of secure
simplicity and peace!
There were then two ways to preserve the knightly ideal: the one
to move towards real, active life and the modern spirit of inquiry,
the other that of denial of the world. But the latter, like the Y of
Pythagoras,208 split into two: the main line was that of the
genuinely spiritual life, the secondary line kept close to the edge of
the world and its pleasures. The yearning for the beautiful life was
so strong that even in places where the vanity and degeneration of
courtly and combative life were recognized, there still seemed to be
a path to a beautiful earthly life, to a sweeter and brighter dream.
The old illusion of the pastoral life still radiated its promise of
natural bliss with the full glow it had possessed since Theocritus. It
seemed to be possible to achieve the great liberation without a
struggle through a flight from the hate- and envy-filled scramble for
vain honors and vain rank, from oppressive, overburdened luxury
and splendor, and from cruel, dangerous war.
The praise of the simple life was a theme that medieval literature
had already adopted from antiquity. It is not identical with the
pastorale: the two forms are a positive and a negative expression of
one and the same emotion. The pastorale describes a positive
contrast to courtly life. The negative expression describes a flight
from the court, from the praise of the aurea mediocritas (the Golden
Mean); it denies the aristocratic life ideal, a denial expressed
through scholarship, solitary quietude, or work. The motifs are
continuously fusing. As early as the twelfth century John of
Salisbury and Walter Mapes had written their tracts “de nugis
curialium” on the theme of the shortcomings of courtly life. In
fourteenth-century France the classic expression of this theme is
found in a poem by Philippe de Vitri, bishop of Meaux, who was
both a composer and a poet and was praised by Petrarch. In this
poem, “Le dit de Franc Gontier,”209 the fusion with the pastorale is
perfect:
Soubz feuille vert, sur herbe delitable
Lez ru bruiant et prez clere fontaine
Trouvay fichee une borde portable,
Ilec mengeoit Gontier o dame Helayne
Fromage frais, laict, burre fromaigee,
Craime, matton, pomme, nois, prune, poire,
aulx et oignons, escaillogne froyee
Sur crouste bise, a gros sel, pour mieulx boire. *73
After the meal they kiss one another, “et bouche et nez, polie et
bien barbue”;}74 thereupon Gontier goes to the forest to chop down
a tree while Lady Helayne does the wash.
J’oy Gontier en abatant son arbe
Dieu mercier de sa vie seiire;
“Ne scay”—dit-il—“que sont pilliers de marbre,
Pommeaux lusisans, murs vestus de paincture;
Je n’ay paour de traison tissue
Soubz beau semblant, ne qu’empoisonné soye
En vaisseau d’or. Je n’ay la teste nue
Devant thirant, ne genoil qui s’i ploye.
Verge d’ussier jamais ne me deboute,
Car jusques la ne m’esprent convoitise,
Ambition, ne lescherie gloute.
Labour me paist en joieuse franchise;
Moult j’ame Helayne et elle moy sans faille,
Et c’est assez. De tombel n’avons cure.”
Lors je dy: “Las! serf de court ne vault maille,
Mais Franc Gontier vault en or jame pure.”*75
For coming generations this poem remained the classic expression
of the ideal of the simple life replete with security and
independence, its enjoyment of moderation, good health, work, and
natural, uncomplicated love in marriage.
Eustache Deschamps sang the praise of the simple life and
rejection of the court in a number of ballads. Among others he
presents a faithful imitation of Franc Gontier:
En retounant d’un court souveraine
Où j’avoie longuement sejourné,
En un bosquet, dessus une fontaine
Trouvay Robin le franc, enchapelé,
Chapeauls de flours avoit cilz ajublé
Dessus son chief et Marion sa drue . . . 210176
He expands the theme by ridiculing military life and knighthood.
In simple seriousness he bewails the misery and cruelty of war;
there is no estate worse than that of the warrior; the seven cardinal
sins are his daily work; greed and the vain quest for fame constitute
the essence of war:
. . . Je vueil mener d’or en avant
Estat moien, c’est mon oppinion,
Guerre laissier et vivre en labourant:
guerre mener n’est que dampnacion.211*77
Or he mockingly curses those who might want to challenge him,
or has a lady expressedly order him not to fight a duel that has been
forced on him for her sake.212
But mostly the poem is about the theme of the aurea mediocritas
itself.
Je ne requier à Dieu fors qu’il me doint
En ce monde lui server et loer,
Vivre pour moy, cote entiere ou pourpoint,
Aucun cheval pour mon labour porter,
Et qui je puisse mon estat gouverner
Moiennement, en grace, sanz envie,
Sanz trop avoir et sanz pain demander,
Car au jour d’ui est la plus seure vie.213+78
Seeking fame and fortune brings nothing but misery. The poor
man is satisfied and happy and lives an undisturbed and long life:
. .. Un ouvrier et uns povres chartons
Va mauvestuz, deschirez et deschaulz
Mais en ouvrant prant en gré ses travaulz
Et liement fait son euvre fenir.
Par nuit dort bien; pour ce uns telz cueurs loiaulx
Voit quatre roys et leur regne fenir.214*79
The poet liked the idea that the simple laborer outlived four kings
so much that he made repeated use of it.215
The editor of Deschamps’s poetry, Gaston Raynaud, argues that
all the poems with this tendency,216 usually among the best
Deschamps wrote, should be assigned to the late period when he,
removed from office, abandoned and disappointed, had gained
insight into the vanity of courtly life.217 This would mean that he
had also turned inward, but might it not also be a reaction, an
expression of general fatigue? It seems to me that the nobility itself
favored and demanded these productions, in the midst of their lives
of driving passion and splendor, from a court poet who at other
times prostituted his talents to satisfy their crudest need for
laughter.
Around 1400 the theme of the disapproval of courtly life is
further elaborated within the circle of the earliest French humanists,
who were in part identical with the reform party of the great church
councils. Pierre d’Ailly himself, a great theologian and church
politician, composed, as a companion piece to “Franc Gontier,” a
picture of the tyrant whose slavish life is filled with anxiety. His
brothers-in-spirit used for the purpose of their critiques of courtly
life the newly rediscovered form of letters, as in the case of Nicholas
de Clémanges218 and his correspondent Jean de Montreuil.219 The
Milanese Ambrosius de Millis, secretary to the duke of Orléans,
belonged to this circle and wrote a literary letter to a Gontier Col in
which he has a courtier warn his friend against entering court
service.220 This letter, itself long forgotten, was translated by Alain
Chartier, the famous court poet, or was at least published in its
translated version with the title Le Curial under his name.221 Le
Curial was later retranslated into Latin by the humanist Robert
Gaguin.222
A certain Charles de Rochefort handled the theme in the form of
an allegorical poem in the style of the Roman de la rose. His L’abuzé
was ascribed to King René.223 Jean Meschinot composed poems like
those of all his predecessors:
La cour est un mer, dort sourt
Vagues d’orgueil, d’envie orages
Ire esmeut debats et outrages,
que les nefs jettent souvent bas;
Traison y fait son personnage
nage aultre part pour tes ebats.224*80
The old theme had not lost its fascination as late as the sixteenth
century.225
Security, quietude, and independence are the good things of life
and for their sake people want to flee the court in order to lead a
simple life of work and moderation in the midst of nature. This is
the negative side of the ideal. But the positive side is not so much
the enjoyment of work and simplicity itself, but the comfort of
natural love. The pastoral ideal leads us directly to the forms of
erotic culture.
Chapter Four
THE FORMS OF LOVE
EVER SINCE THE PROVENÇAL TROUBADOURS OF THE twelfth
century first gave voice to the melody of unsatisfied desire, the
violins of love had sung ever higher until only Dante could play the
instrument purely.
The medieval mind took one of its most important turns when it
developed for the first time an ideal of love with a negative
groundtone. To be sure, antiquity had also sung of the yearning and
pain of love, but did that yearning not merely imply delay and the
titillation of the certainty of fulfillment? And in the love stories of
antiquity that did end sadly, the unavailability of the beloved was
not at issue, but rather a previously satisfied love that was
dramatically ended by death itself, as in the case of Cephalus and
Procris or Pyramus and Thisbe. The feeling of pain in those stories
lay not in erotic frustration, but in the sadness of fate. It is first in
the courtly Minne of the troubadours that frustration itself becomes
the vital concern. An intellectual form of erotic thought had been
created that was able to encompass a superabundance of ethical
content, without having, on account of it, to entirely abandon the
connection with the natural love of women. The courtly service of
women that idealized itself by never demanding fulfillment had
arisen from sensual love itself. In Minne, love became the field in
which all aesthetic and ethical perfection was allowed to blossom.
The noble lover, according to the theory of courtly Minne, was made
virtuous and pure by his love. In lyric poetry the spiritual element
more and more gained the upper hand until, finally, the effect of
love is a state of sacred insight and piety: La vita nuova.1
This had to be followed by a new turn of direction. In the dolce
stil nuovo, *! Dante and his contemporaries had reached a point
beyond which one cannot pass. Petrarch stands hesitatingly
between the ideal of spiritual love and the new inspiration of
antiquity. And from Petrarch to Lorenzo de’Medici the love song in
Italy returns to the path of natural sensuality that had permeated
the admired models of antiquity. The artificially elaborated system
of the courtly Minne was abandoned.
In France, and in those lands that were under the spell of the
French spirit, a different turn was taken. In those countries the
development of erotic thought after the high flowering of the
courtly lyric was not as simple. The forms of the old system remain,
but they are filled with a new spirit. There, even before the Vita
nuova had found the true harmonies of a spiritualized passion, the
Roman de la rose had partially filled the forms of courtly Minne with
new content. For about two centuries this work by Guillaume de
Lorris and Jean Clopinel (or Chopinel),2 begun before 1240 and
completed before 1280, not only completely dominated the forum
of aristocratic love, but, because of its wealth of encyclopedic
digressions into all sorts of other arenas, was also the treasure house
from which educated people drew the most lively elements of their
intellectual development. It is impossible to overestimate the
importance of the fact that the ruling class of an entire period
obtained, in this manner, its view of life and its erudition in the
form of an ars amandi. *2 During no other age did the ideal of
worldly erudition enter into such intimate union with the love of
women than from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. All
Christian and social virtues, the entire structure of the forms of life,
were fitted into the framework of true love by the system of Minne.
The erotic view of life, either in its older, purely courtly form or in
its embodiment in the Roman de la rose, can be placed on the same
level with its contemporary, scholasticism. Both represent a great
effort by the medieval mind to comprehend everything that pertains
to life from a single point of view.
The entire struggle to beautify life is concentrated in the colorful
presentation of the forms of love. Those who sought beauty in
honor and rank, or who endeavored to embellish their lives with
splendor and stateliness, in short, those who sought the beauty of
life in pride, were constantly reminded of the vanity of these things.
In love, however, there appeared to be a purpose and reality for all
those who had not entirely taken leave of that earthly bliss, which
was the enjoyment of beauty itself. In this there was no need to
create a beautiful life from noble forms or to emphasize high status.
Here dwelled the most profound beauty, the highest bliss itself,
which needed only to be given color and form. Every beautiful
object, every flower, and every sound could contribute something to
the building of love’s life form.
The effort to stylize love was more than a vain game. The power
of passion itself required that late medieval society transform the
life of love into a beautiful play with noble rules. Here above all, if
men were not to fall into crude barbarism, there was a need to
frame emotions within fixed forms. Among the lower estates it was
left to the church to tame unrestrained outbursts, and the church
met its task as well as could be managed under the circumstances.
The aristocracy, which felt itself to be somewhat independent of the
church since it possessed a modicum of culture from outside the
ecclesiastical realm, fashioned an obstacle to disorder out of refined
eroticism itself; literature, fashion, and the forms of etiquette
exercised in this way a normative influence on the life of love.
Or at least, these three created a beautiful illusion within which
people could imagine themselves to live, in spite of the fact that
even among the upper classes life remained extraordinarily crude.
Ordinary behavior had a character of free-spirited insolence that
later times have lost. The duke of Burgundy had the bathhouses of
Valenciennes put in order for the English envoys expected there
“pour eux et pour quiconque avoient de famille, voire bains estorés
de tout ce qu’il faut au mestier de Vénus, a prendre par choix et par
élection ce que on désiroit mieux, et tout aux frais du duc.”3*3 The
virtuous behavior of his son, Charles the Bold, was suspected by
many to be inappropriate for a prince.4 Among the mechanical
pranks of the pleasure house at Hesdin the bills mention “ung
engien pour moullier les dames en marchant par dessoubz.”5+4
Yet this crudity is not simply a failure of the ideal. Even as
ennobled love had a style of its own, so too did license itself, and a
much older one at that. It may be called the epithalamic style. In
matters of notions of love, a refined society, such as that of the
waning Middle Ages, inherits so many ancient motifs that the erotic
styles must compete or merge with one another. The style of courtly
Minne was confronted by the primitive form of eroticism, with much
older roots and an equally vital significance, which glorified the
sexual union itself. Although in Christian culture its value was
replaced by sacred mystery, eroticism remained as alive as Minne.
The entire epithalamic apparatus with its shameless laughter and
its phallic symbolism had once been a part of the sacred rites of the
wedding festivity itself. The consummation of marriage and the
wedding ceremony had once been inseparable: a great mystery that
focused on copulation. Then came the church and claimed sanctity
and mystery for itself by transposing both the marriage and its
consummation into the sacrament of a solemn union. The secondary
aspects of the mystery, such as the procession, the song, and the
shout of jubilation, were left to the wedding festivities. But, stripped
of their sacred power, they were expressed with even more
lascivious abandon and the church was never able to tame them. No
churchly ethic could repress the exuberant cry of life in the
“Hymen, O Hymenäe”! No puritanical mind could banish from
custom the shamelessly open character of the wedding night. Even
the seventeenth century still knew this open character in its full
bloom. Only modern individual sensitivity, which desires to hide in
stillness and darkness that which belongs to the two individuals
alone, has broken with these public displays.
If we remember that as late as 1641 at the wedding of the young
Prince of Orange with Mary of England, the practical jokes rendered
the bridegroom, a boy still, nearly incapable of consummating the
marriage, we will not be astonished at the frivolous abandon with
which princely and noble marriages used to be celebrated around
1400. The obscene grin with which Froissart describes the marriage
of Charles VI with Isabella of Bavaria,6 or the Epithalamium that
Deschamps dedicated to Anton of Burgundy are examples for us.7
The Cent nouvelles nouvelles tell us, as something quite ordinary, of a
couple who were married during early mass and, after a light meal,
immediately went to bed.s All the jokes concerning weddings or sex
in general were considered suitable for gatherings of ladies. The
Cent nouvelles nouvelles *> introduce themselves, even though with
some irony, as “glorieuse et édificant euvre,” t6 as stories “moult
plaisants à reconter en toute bonne compagnie,”*7 A noble
versesmith composed a lascivious ballade at the request of Madame
de Bourgogne and all of the ladies and maidens of her court.9
It is clear that things such as these were not regarded as
violations of the high and rigid ideals of honor and propriety. This
is a contradiction that should not be explained by imagining the
noble forms and the high degree of prudishness displayed by the
Middle Ages in other areas to be hypocritical. Just as little as we
can call their shamelessness a saturnalian throwing off of restraints.
Still further off the mark is the impression that the epithalamic
obscenities are a sign of decadence or aristocratic overrefinement.
The double meanings, the indecencies, the lascivious dissimulations
are at home in the epithalamic style because they originated there.
They become understandable if seen against their ethnological
background: as the weakened remnants of the phallic symbolism of
primitive culture, as debased mysteries. What once, at a time when
the borders between play and seriousness had not been drawn by
culture, joined the sacredness of ritual to the exuberance of the joy
of life could only be handled, in a Christian society, as titillating
mockery and stimulating jest. In direct contradiction to piety and
courteoisie sexual notions survived in nuptial customs with their
vitality intact.
One may, if so inclined, regard the whole comic-erotic genre as
wild sprouts from the stem of the epithalamium—the story, the
farce, the ditty. The link to the source, however, has long been lost:
the literary genre has become independent, the comic effect an end
in itself. The comic art remains the same as that of the
epithalamium; it depends throughout on a symbolic representation
of sexual matters or the depiction of the sexual act in the image of a
profession. Almost any craft, any occupation, yielded its form to
erotic metaphor, then just as well as now. It is obvious that during
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the tournament, the hunt,
and music provided the subject matter for this purpose.10 Both the
treatment of love stories in the form of legal disputes and the arrestz
d’amour are to be understood from the vantage point of this
category of parody. There was still another domain favored to
provide a garb for sexual matters; this was the church. The Middle
Ages were extraordinarily open in expressing sexual matters in
technical ecclesiastical terminology. In the Cent nouvelles nouvelles,
the use of words such as bénir or confesser in an indecent sense or
the play of words like saints or seins is untiringly repeated. In
refined examples, however, the ecclesiastical-erotic allegory
becomes a literary form in itself. The poetic circle around Charles
d'Orléans veils the lamentations of love in the forms of monastic
asceticism, liturgy, and martyrdom. Echoing the recently successful
reform of the Franciscan monastic life around 1400, these poets call
themselves Les amoureux de l’observance. This is like an ironic
byplay to the sacred seriousness of the dolce stil nuovo. The
desecrating tendency is halfway atoned for by the intensity of the
amorous sentiments.
Ce sont idi les dix commandemens,
Vray Dieu d'amours .. . *8
So the poet profanes the Ten Commandments, or here, the oath
taken on the New Testament:
Lors m’appella, et me fist les mains mettre
Sur ung livre, en me faisant promettre
Que feroye loyaument mon devoir
Des points d’amour.11+?
Of a dead lover, he says:
Et j’ay espoir que brief ou [au] paradis
Des amoureux sera moult hault assis,
Comme martir et très honnoré saint.*10
And of his own dead beloved:
J’ay fait l’obseque de ma dame
Dedens le moustier amoureux,
Et le service pour son ame
A chanté Penser doloreux.
Mains sierges de soupirs piteux
Ont esté en son luminaire,
Aussi j’ay fait la tombe faire
De regrets ...12*11
In the candid poem “L’amant rendu cordelier de l’observance
d'amour,” t12 which describes the admittance of a despairing lover
into the Monastery of the Martyrs of Love, the entire comic effect
promised by the ecclesiastical parody is worked out to the last
detail. Does this not indicate that the erotic, time and again and no
matter how perversely, is drawn towards reestablishing that contact
with the holy that it lost a long time ago?
Eroticism, in order to be culture, had to find at any price a style,
a form, which could hold it in bounds, an expression that could veil
it. And even where it rejected that form and lowered itself from
questionable allegory to realistic and unveiled treatment of sexual
activities, eroticism still remained, though unintentionally, stylized.
An unsophisticated mind may easily mistake the entire genre for
erotic naturalism. This genre, where men never tire and women are
always willing, is just as much a romantic fiction as the most noble
courtly Minne. What other than romanticism is the cowardly neglect
of all the natural and social complications of love, the beautiful
gloss of undisturbed pleasure as cover for all the false, self-seeking,
and tragic elements in sexual activities? Here again we encounter
that great cultural motive: the craving for a beautiful life, the need
to make life appear more beautiful than it is revealed by reality.
Here the life of love is forced into a form that conforms to a
fantastic desire but does it now by emphasizing the animal side of
humanity. Here is another life ideal: the ideal of chastelessness.
Reality is at any time more wretched and cruder than the refined
literary ideal of love sees it, but it is also purer and more ethical
than it is represented by that shallow eroticism which is usually
regarded as naturalistic. Eustache Deschamps, the professional poet,
lowers himself in many ballades, in which he has a speaking part, to
the most debased transgressions. But he is not the real hero of those
indecent scenes, and amongst them we suddenly find a tender poem
in which he points out to his daughter the virtues of her dead
mother.13
As a source of literature and culture the whole epithalamic genre,
with all its facets and ramifications, remains of secondary
importance. It has as its theme full and complete satisfaction. It is
overtly erotic. But that which can serve to shape and adorn life is
the covertly erotic, whose theme is the possibility of satisfaction,
the promise, the longing, the deprivation, anticipated happiness.
Here, the greatest satisfaction is found in that which is unexpressed,
disguised by the thin veils of expectation. Because of this, indirect
eroticism is much more viable and embraces a much wider sphere
of life. And it knows love not only in its major key, orinits
laughing mask, but is also capable of transforming the pain of love
into beauty and has, therefore, an infinitely higher value for life. It
can embrace the ethical elements of faithfulness, of courage, of
noble gentility, and being thus bonded with virtues in addition to
love, may strive for the ideal.
Completely in agreement with the the general spirit of the later
Middle Ages, which desired all thought to be captured in the most
detailed images and systems, the Roman de la rose succeeded in
bestowing on erotic culture in its entirety such a colorful, self-
contained, and rich form that it was like a treasury of profane
liturgy, doctrine, and legend. The hermaphroditism of the Roman de
la rose, a work of two authors of vastly different nature and
perception, rendered it even more usable as a bible of erotic culture.
Texts for the most diverse usages can be found in it.
Guillaume de Lorris, the first poet, paid homage to all the old
courtly ideals. The graceful plan and the gay, charming imagination
of the work have to be attributed to him. The theme of the dream
frequently reoccurs. Early on, the poet sees himself awake on a May
morning so that he might hear the nightingale and the lark. His
path leads him along a stream to the wall of the mysterious garden
of love. On the wall he sees the images of hatred, betrayal,
perfidity, rapaciousness, greed, melancholy, false piety, poverty,
envy, and age. The anti-courtly qualities. But Dame Oiseuse
(laziness), the friend of Déduit (amusement), opens the gate for
him. Inside, Liesse (gaiety) leads the dance. The God of Love dances
with Beauty in the round dance, and Wealth, Charity, Frankness
(Franchise), Courtly Manners (Courteoisie), and Youth take part.
While the poet is absorbed in admiration of the Rosebud that he has
noticed near the Narcissus Fountain, the God of Love shoots him
with his arrows: Beauté, Simplesse, Courteoisie, Compagnie, and
Beau-Semblant. The poet declares himself to be the liegeman
(homme lige) of Love. Amour locks his heart with a key and explains
the Commandments of Love, the pains of Love and its comforts
(biens); these last are Espérance, Doux-Penser, Doux-Parler, and
Doux-Regard.
Bel-Accueil, the son of Courteoisie, summons him to the Rose, but
at that momemt the guardians of the Rose appear, Danger, Male-
Bouche, Peur, and Honte, and drive him away. Now the
complications begin. Raison descends from his high tower to plead
with the lover; Ami consoles him, and Venus turns all her charms
against Chasteté. Franchise and Pitié bring him back to Bel-Accueil,
who permits him to kiss the Rose. However, Male-Bouche spreads
the alarm, Jalousie comes running, and a strong wall is built around
the Rose. Bel-Accueil is imprisoned in a tower. Danger and his
servants guard the gates. With the lament of the lover, the work of
Guillaume de Lorris comes to an end.
Then, most likely a good time later, Jean de Meun [also known as
Jean Clopinel] enters with a much more voluminous sequel. The
further course of events—the attack and conquest of the castle of
the Rose by Amour and all his allies, that is the courtly virtues
assisted by Bien Celer and Faux-Semblant—nearly drowns in a flood
of diversions, contemplations, and narrations by means of which the
second poet turns the work into a veritable encyclopedia. But most
importantly, here speaks a mind so unself-conscious, so coolly
skeptical and cynically hardened, such as the Middle Ages rarely
produced. And at the same time, a mind with a command of the
French language equaled by few. The naive and easy idealism of
Guillaume de Lorris is tarnished by the negating spirit of Jean de
Meun. De Meun did not believe in ghosts or magicians, in true love
or feminine honor, but he had a sense of pathological problems and
he put in the mouths of Venus, Nature, and Genius the most daring
defense of life’s sensual urges.
When Amour fears that he and his army may be defeated, he
dispatches Franchise and Doux-Regard to his mother, Venus, who
answers his call and comes to him riding her chariot drawn by
doves. Told by Amour how things stand, she vows that she will no
longer tolerate any woman remaining chaste and urges Amour to
take the same oath in respect to men. He does, and the entire army
takes the oath with him.
In the meantime, Nature is at her forge, busy with her task of
preserving the species in her eternal struggle with Death. She
bitterly complains that of all her creatures only humanity disobeys
her commandment and refrains from procreation. On her orders,
Genius, her priest, after a long confession during which she explains
her works to him, joins the army of Love to impose Nature’s curse
on all those who defy her commandments. Amour dresses Genius in
a sacramental gown, with a ring, a staff, and a miter; Venus,
laughing loudly, puts a burning candle in his hand
Qui ne fu pas de cire vierge*13
The excommunication begins with a rejection of virginity, the
audacious symbolism of which amounts to a wondrous mysticism.
Hell for those who fail to observe the laws of Nature and Love! For
the others, the flowering fields where the Son of the Virgin tends his
white sheep that graze in eternal bliss on the flowers and plants that
bloom there to all eternity.
After Genius has tossed the candle, whose flame sets all the world
on fire, into the fortress, the final battle for the tower begins. Venus
herself tosses her torch, Honte and Peur flee, and Bel-Accueil allows
the lover to pluck the Rose.
Here, anew, the sexual motive is with full consciousness placed in
the center of things and dressed in such artificial mystery, indeed,
with so much sanctity, that a more pronounced challenge to the
Christian ideal of life is not possible. In its perfectly pagan
tendency, the Roman de la rose may be regarded as a step towards
the Renaissance. In its external form, it is seemingly genuinely
medieval. What can be more medieval than the personification of
emotional reactions and the circumstances of love taken to their
extremes? The figures of the Roman de la rose, Bel-Accueil, Doux-
Regard, Faux-Semblant, Male-Bouche, Danger, Honte, Peur, are at
the same level as the truly medieval representations of the virtues
and sins in human form. They are allegories, or something more,
half believed in mythologems. Where is the division between these
representations and the nymphs, satyrs, and ghosts that awaken to
new life in the Renaissance? They are taken from another sphere,
but their value to the imagination is the same. The external
character of the figures of the Rose are occasionally reminiscent of
the fantastic flowery figures of Botticelli.
Here the dream of love was depicted in a form that was both
artificial and passionate. The detailed allegory satisfied all the needs
of the medieval imagination. Without the personifications, the mind
would not have been able either to express or to follow the shifts in
emotion. The whole colorful fabric and elegant lines of this
incomparable puppet show were necessary in order to form a
conceptual system of love that people could use to communicate
with one another. The figures of Danger, Nouvel Penser, Male-
Bouche were used like the handy terms of a scientific psychology.
The basic theme carried throughout the poem is in a passionate key
since in the place of the pale service to a married woman who was
elevated to the clouds by the troubadours as the unreachable object
of their longing, there now comes again the most natural erotic
motif: the potent attraction of the secret of virginity, symbolized as
the Rose, which can only be won by art and endurance.
In theory, love in the Roman de la rose remained courtly and
noble. The Garden of the Joy of Life is open only to the chosen and
only through Love. Whoever wishes to enter must be free of hate,
unfaithfulness, perfidy, rapaciousness, greed, envy, old age, and
hypocrisy. The positive virtues, however, which must be mustered
against all these prove the ideal is no longer ethical as it was in
courtly Minne, but rather is purely aristocratic. The virtues are:
carefreeness, receptability to enjoyment, gaiety of spirit, love,
beauty, wealth, gentleness, freedom of spirit (franchise), and
Courteoisie. These are no longer changes in the lover who is
ennobled by the reflected glory of the beloved, but are the
appropriate means used to win her. And it is no longer the
veneration of the woman, misguided as it may have been, which
inspires the work, but rather, at least in the case of the second poet,
Jean Clopinel, the mocking contempt of her weaknesses, a contempt
that has its sources in the sensual nature of this mode of love itself.
But in spite of its strong hold on the minds of the time, the Roman
de la rose was unable to completely replace the older conception of
love. Next to the glorification of flirtation, the idea of pure,
knightly, faithful, and self-denying love held its own because it was
an essential component of the knightly life ideal. It became a
subject of courtly debate, in that colorful circle of abundant,
aristocratic life around the French king and his uncles of Berry and
Burgundy, which idea of love should have priority in the life of the
true nobleman: that of genuine Courteoisie, with its yearning
faithfulness and service dedicated in honor of a lady, or that of the
Roman de la rose, where faithfulness was only a means in the service
of the hunt for a woman. The noble knight Boucicaut and his
comrades had made themselves the advocates of knightly
faithfulness during a journey to the East in 1388 and had passed the
time in the composition of the Livre des cent ballades. The decision
between flirtation and faithfulness they left to the beaux-esprits of
the courts.
The words with which Christine de Pisan entered the fray a few
years later sprang from a deeper seriousness. This courageous
defender of female honor and female rights turned to the God of
Love in a poetic letter that contained the complaint of womankind
against all the betrayal and dishonor by the world of men.14 She
rejected with outrage the lessons of the Roman de la rose. A few
agreed with her, but the work of Jean de Meun continued to have
its share of passionate admirers and defenders. In the ensuing
literary controversy a number of attackers and defenders had their
say. The champions who upheld the Rose were of no mean stature.
Many wise, scientific, highly learned men—we are assured by the
provost of Lille, Jean de Montreuil —held the Roman de la rose so
highly as to pay it almost divine reverence (paene ut colerent) and
would rather have rent their shirt than that book!
It is not easy for us to understand the intellectual and emotional
conditions that gave rise to this defense. It was not frivolous court
pages but earnest high-ranking officials, some even clerics such as
the above-mentioned provost of Lille, Jean de Montreuil, secretary
to the Dauphin (later duke of Burgundy), who corresponded about
this issue with his friends Gontier and Pierre Col in poetic letters
written in Latin and who urged others to take up the burden of
defending Jean de Meun. What is most peculiar is that this circle
that appointed itself defenders of that colorful, abundant medieval
work is the same in which the first growth of French humanism was
cultivated. Jean de Montreuil is the author of a large number of
Ciceronian letters full of humanist attitudes, humanist rhetoric, and
humanist vanity. He and his friends Gontier and Pierre Col carry on
a correspondence with that earnest, reform-minded theologian
Nicolas de Clémanges.
Jean de Montreuil was certainly serious about his literary point of
view. The more I study the mysteries of importance and the
importance of the mysteries of this deep and famous work of the
master Jean de Meun, he wrote to an unknown legal scholar who
had attacked the Rose, the more I am astonished by your
disapproval.—Until his last breath he will defend the book, and
there are many who will do the same with their pens, voices, and
hands.15
In order to prove that this controversy was more than only a part
of the great social game of courtly life, I avail myself, finally, of a
man who said that when he spoke he did so for the sake of the
highest morality and the purest doctrine: the famous theologian and
Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean de Gerson. From his
library, on the evening of May 18, 1402, he wrote a tract against
the Roman de la rose. The tract is an answer to the attack on an
earlier treatise by Gerson launched by Pierre Col,16 and even that
had not been the first writing of Gerson on the subject of the Rose.
The book seemed to him to be a dangerous plague, the source of all
immorality; he intended to attack it at every opportunity.
Repeatedly he mounted a campaign against the corrupting influence
“du vicieux romant de la rose.”17*!4 If he had a copy of the Rose—
he said—which was the only one in the world and worth a thousand
pounds, he would rather burn it than sell it and turn it over to the
public.
Gerson took the form of his argument from his opponent: an
allegorical vision. When he awakes one morning, he feels his heart
flee from him, “moyennant les plumes et les eles de diverses
pensees, d’un lieu en autre jusques à la court saincte de
crestienté.” {15 There he meets Justice, Conscience, and Knowledge
and hears how Chasteté accuses Fol amoureux (namely, Jean de
Meun) of having banished her and all her disciples from the earth.
Her “bonnes gardes” have been represented as the evil figures of the
Rose: “Honte, Paour, et Dangier le bon portier, qui ne oseroit ne
daigneroit ottroyer neïs (pas même) un vilain baisier ou dissolu
regart ou ris attraiant ou parole legiere.”*16 Chastity continues to
direct a number of charges against Fol amoureux: that he spreads,
with the help of the damnable Old Woman, 18 the doctrine
“comment toutes jeunes filles doivent vendre leurs corps tost et
chierement sans paour et sans vergoigne, et qu’elles ne tiengnent
compte de decevoir ou parjurer,” t17 He mocks marriage and the
monastic life; he turns all imaginations to carnal desire, and, worst
of all, has Venus, Nature, and even lady Raison mingle the notions
of Paradise and the Christian mysteries with those of sensual
enjoyment.
This is indeed where danger was lurking. The great work with its
linking of sensuality, derisive cynicism, and elegant symbolism
awakened in the mind a sensuous mysticism that was bound to
appear to the serious theologian as an abyss of sinfulness. How
daring Gerson’s adversary had been in his claims!19 Only the Fol
amoureux himself can judge the value of unrestrained passion.
Those who do not know it see it only in a mirror and as a dark
mystery. That is to say that he borrowed for earthly love the holy
word from the letter to the Corinthians so that he could speak of
earthly love as the mystic speaks of his ecstasy! He dared to claim
that Solomon’s high song had been composed to praise Pharaoh’s
daughter. Those who had denounced the book of the Rose had bent
their knee before Baal since Nature did not intend that one man
would be enough for a woman, and the genius of nature is God.
Verily, he even dares to misuse Luke 2:2320 to prove with the help
of the gospel itself that formerly the female sexual organ, the Rose
of the novel, had been sacred. And, fully confident in all these
blasphemies, he calls on the defenders of this work, on a number of
witnesses, and threatens that Gerson himself will fall victim to an
irrational love as had happened to other theologians before him.
The power of the Roman de la rose was not broken by Gerson’s
attack. In 1444 a canon of Liseux, Estienne Legris, offered Jean
Lebégue, secretary of the chamber of accounts in Paris, a Répertoire
du la roman de la Rose that he had written.21 As late as the end of
the fifteenth century Jean Molinet could claim that quotations from
the Rose were as familiar as common proverbs.22 He felt called to
offer a moralizing commentary on the entire work in which the well
at the beginning of the poem becomes the symbol of baptism, the
nightingale calling to love becomes the voice of the preacher and
theologian, and the Rose, Jesus himself. Clement Marot made a
modernized version of the Rose, and Ronsard himself still uses
allegorical figures such as Belacueil, Fausdanger, etc.23
While dignified scholars fought their literary battles, the
aristocrats took the controversy as a welcome occasion for staging
entertaining festivities and pompous amusements. Boucicaut, who
was praised by Christine de Pisan for his defense of the old idea of
knightly faithfulness, may have found in her work the inspiration
for the founding of his Ordre de l’écu verd à la dame blanche for the
defense of unfortunate women. But he could not compete with the
Duke of Burgundy, and his order immediately found itself
overshadowed by the grandiose inception of the Cour d’amours,
which was founded on Feburary 14, 1401, in the Hotel d’Artois in
Paris. The Cour d’amours was a splendidly furnished literary salon.
Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, that crafty old statesman, whom
one would not expect to have been interested in such matters, had
requested that the king found the Cour d’amours in order to distract
people from the epidemic of plague then visited upon Paris, “pour
passer partie du tempz plus gracieusement et affin de trouver esveil
de nouvelle joye.”24*18 The Cour d’amours was based upon the
virtues of humility and faithfulness, “à l’onneur, loenge et
recommandacion et service de toutes dames et damoiselles.” The
numerous members were graced with the most glorious titles: both
the founders and Charles VI were Grands conservateurs; among the
conservateurs were John the Fearless, his brother Anton of Brabant,
and his younger son Philip. There was a Prince d’amour, Pierre de
Hauteville from Hennegouw; then there were Ministres, Auditeurs,
Chevaliers d’honneur, Conseillers, Chevaliers trésoriers, Grands
Veneurs, Ecuyers d’amour, Maitres des requétes, Secrétaires; in
short, the entire apparatus of the court and the government was
imitated therein. Princes and prelates could be found in it, along
with burghers and the lower clergy. The functions and ceremonies
were minutely regulated. It was like a Toastmasters’ club. The
members were given the task of responding with refrains in all the
existing verse forms: “ballades couronnés ou chapelées,” chansons,
sirventois, complaintes, rondeaux, lais, virelais, etc. Debates were to
be carried out, “en forme d’amoureux procés, pour différentes
opinions soustenir.” *!9 Ladies would award the prizes, and it was
forbidden to compose verses that dishonored the female gender.
How truly Burgundian this pompous endeavor, solemn forms for
light amusement. It is striking, and yet understandable, that the
court preserves the strict ideal of noble fidelity. But if we were to
suppose that the nearly seven hundred members of which we know
during the fifteen years we hear of the existence of the society were
all like Boucicaut, honest followers of Christine de Pisan and
therefore enemies of the Roman de la rose, we would be in conflict
with the facts. Whatever is known of the behavior of Anton of
Brabant and other high officials of the order renders them
unsuitable to be defenders of female honor. One of the members, a
certain Regnault d’Azincourt, is the instigator of a failed attempt to
kidnap, in the grand style, a young merchant widow, using twenty
horses and bringing a priest with him.25 Another member, the count
of Tonnerre, is guilty of a similar offense. And, just to prove
conclusively that the order was nothing but a beautiful social game,
the adversaries of Christine de Pisan, in the literary battle over the
Roman de la rose, themselves were members: Jean de Montreuil and
Gontier and Pierre Col.26
The forms of love of that time can be learned from literature, but
we have to try to understand how the forms of love operated in life
itself. A complete system of prescribed forms was available to fill a
young life with aristocratic conventions. How many signs and
symbols of love have later centuries gradually surrendered! In place
of Amour alone there was the entire peculiar personal mythology of
the Roman de la rose. Doubtlessly, Bel-Accueil, Doux-Penser, Faux-
Semblant, and the others also lived in the imagination outside of
literary works. There were also the whole range of tender meanings
of colors in clothing, in flowers, and in decorations. Color
symbolism, which has not yet been entirely forgotten, had a very
important place in the life of love in the Middle Ages. Those who
could not understand it found a guide in Le blason des couleurs that
was written around 1458 by the Herald Sizilien, turned into verse in
the sixteenth century and ridiculed by Rabelais, not so much
because he despised the subject matter, but because he had given
some thought to writing about it himself.27
When Guillaume de Machaut sees his unknown beloved for the
first time, he is delighted that she is wearing a hood of a sky-blue
material, trimmed with green parrots, to go with her white dress,
because green is the color of new love and blue that of love which is
true. Later, when the beautiful time of his poetic love is over, he
dreams that her likeness which hangs over his bed has its head
turned away and is completely dressed in green, “qui nouvelleté
signifie.” “20 He composes a ballade of reproach:
En lieu de bleu, dame, vous vestez vert.28;21
Rings, veils, all the treasures and little gifts of love have their
special functions and their mysterious devices and emblems that
frequently degrade into artfully contrived rebuses. The Dauphin
went into battle in 1414 with a banner that had on it in gold a “K,”
a swan (cygne), and an “L,” which stood for the name of a lady-in-
waiting called Cassinelle who served his mother Isabeau. 29 Rabelais,
a century later, mocks the “glorieux de court de transporteurs de
noms,” 22 who in their mottoes represent espoir by a sphere, peine
by pennes d’oiseaux, and melancholie by a columbine (ancholie).30
Coquillart speaks of a
Mignonne de haulte entreprise
Qui porte des devises à tas.31823
Then there were for keenly infatuated minds games such as Le roi
qui ne ment, Le chastel d’amours, Ventes d’amour, and Jeux à
vendre. *24 The girl would call out the name of a flower or
something else. The boy had to respond with a rhyme that
contained a compliment:
Je vous vens la passerose,
—Belle, dire ne vous ose
Comment Amours vers vous me tire,
Si l’apercevez tout sanz dire.32}25
The chastel d’amours was such a question-and-answer game based
on the figures of the Roman de la rose:
Du chastel d’Amours vous demant:
Dites le premier fondement!
—Amer loyaument.
Or me nommez le mestre mur
Qui joli le font, fort et seur!
—Celer sagement.
Dites moy qui sont li crenel,
Les fenestres et li carrel!
—Regart atraiant.
Amis, nommez moy le portier!
—Dangier mauparlant.
Qui est la clef qui le puet deffermer?
—Prier courtoisement.33+26
A great part of courtly conversation had been taken up since the
time of the troubadours by questions of the casuistry of love. It may
be regarded as raising nosiness and slander to a literary form.
Mealtime at the court of Louis d'Orléans was enlivened by “beaulx
livres, dits, ballads” and “demandes gracieuses.”34 These last were
preferably put before poets for a decision. A company of ladies and
gentlemen came to Machaut with a number of “partures d’amour et
de ses aventures.”35*27 He had defended, in his Jugement d’amour,
the thesis that a lady who lost her lover to death should be less
pitied than the lover whose beloved is unfaithful. Every love affair
was judged in this way, according to strict norms.—“Beau sire, what
would you prefer, that evil things were said about your beloved and
you found her to be faithful, or that people praised her and you
found her to be unfaithful?”—Whereupon the highly formal concept
of honor and the strict duty of the lover to guard the public honor
of the beloved, required the answer: “Dame, j’aroie plus chier que
j'en oïsse bien dire et y trouvasse mal.” t28 If a lady is neglected by
her first lover, does she act unfaithfully if she takes a second, who is
more forthcoming? May a knight, who has abandoned all hope of
ever seeing his lady, who is kept under lock and key by a jealous
husband, finally seek a new love? If a knight turning from his
beloved to a lady of higher birth, and spurned by the latter, returns
to the former, may her honor permit her to forgive him? 36 It is only
a small step from this kind of casuistry to dealing with questions of
love entirely in a legal format as is done by Martial d’Auvergne in
the Arrestz d’amour.
All of these conventions of love are known only through the way
they are reflected in literature, but they were at home in real life.
The code of courtly terms, rules, and forms did not seek only to turn
conventions into poems, but also to apply them in aristocratic life
or, at least, in conversation. It is, however, difficult to sense the life
of that time behind the veil of poetry, because even where real love
is described as exactly as possible, the description is made under the
influence of the technical apparatus of the readymade illusion of the
conventions of love, and presented within the format of the literary
stylization. Such is the case in Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-
century story, overly long and tedious, of the poetic love of the aged
poet and a certain Bettina,37 called Le livre de voir-dit (“The Book of
the True Event”).38 He must have been nearly sixty years old when
Péronelle d’Armentiéres,39 about eighteen and of a noble family of
Champagne, sent him her first rondel. He was very famous and
knew nothing of her. Nevertheless, she offered him her heart and
requested that he begin a poetic correspondence about love with
her. The poor poet, sickly, blind in one eye and troubled by gout, is
immediately inflamed. He answers her rondel, and an exchange of
letters and poems begins. Péronelle is proud of this literary
connection; at first she makes no effort to keep it a secret. She
insists that the poems tell the whole truth about their love and that
her letters and poems be included in his account. He fulfills these
requests with pleasure: “je feray à vostre gloire et loenge, chose
dont il sera bon mémoire.” 40 “Et mon trés-dous cuer,” he writes to
her, “vous estes courrecié de ce nous avons si tart commencié?
[How could she have started earlier?] Par Dieu aussi suis-je (with
more justification); mais ves-cy le remède; menons si bonne vie que
nous porrons, en lieu et en temps, que nous recompensons le temps
que nous avons perdu; et qu’on parle de nos amours jusques à cent
ans cy après, en tout bien et en tout honneur; car s’il y avoit mal,
vous le celeriés à Dieu, se vous poviés.”41*29
But what was within the bounds of an honorable love in those
days we learn from the narrative passages inserted by Machaut to
string the letters and poems together. The poet receives her painted
portrait, which he has requested, and he venerates it like his god on
earth. He looks forward to their first encounter with great
trepidation because of his physical handicaps. His joy knows no
bounds when his young beloved is not horrified by his appearance.
She lies down under a cherry tree to sleep, or pretend to sleep, in
his lap. She grants him greater favors. A pilgrimage to St. Denis and
the Foire du Lendit offers the opportunity to spend a few days
together. By noon of one day, the party is dead tired because of the
throngs and the heat; it is the middle of June. They find shelter in
the overcrowded town with a man who offers them a room with
two beds. In the darkened room, Péronelle’s sister-in-law lies down
for a nap. Péronelle and her chambermaid lie down on the other
bed. She makes the shy poet lie down between them; he lies there
still as death for fear of disturbing them. When she awakes, she
orders him to embrace her. As the end of their short journey
approaches and she becomes aware of his sadness, she permits him
to come to her and make his farewells. Though he continues to
speak of “onneur” and “onnesté” on this occasion too, his rather
blunt account does not make it clear what else she could have
denied him. She gives him the small golden key of her honor, her
treasure, to guard carefully, but what was left to guard should
perhaps be understood as her reputation before her fellowmen. 42
The poet was not destined to have any more such luck and,
lacking any turns of fate, filled the second half of his book with
endless tales from mythology. Finally, Péronelle tells him that their
relationship must come to an end, probably because of her
impending marriage. He, however, decides to remain in love with
her and to venerate her. After their deaths, his spirit will ask God to
continue to call her beatified soul Toute-belle.
The Voir-Dit tells us more about the customs, and also about the
emotions, than most of the amorous literature of that time. There is,
first, the extraordinary liberties the young girl could take without
causing a scandal. Next, there is the naive imperturbability with
which everything down to the most intimate acts takes place in the
presence of others, be it sister-in-law, lady-in-waiting, or secretary.
During the tryst under the cherry tree, the secretary even devises a
charming trick: while Péronelle is asleep, he places a green leaf on
her mouth and tells Machaut that he should kiss the leaf. When the
poet finally dares to do so, the secretary pulls the leaf away so that
their lips meet.43 Equally remarkable is the congruence of amorous
and religious duties. The fact that Machaut, as canon of the
cathedral of Rheims, was a member of the clergy, should not be
taken too seriously. The lower orders of clergy, which sufficed for
canonical duties, did not at that time take the vows of celibacy very
seriously. Even Petrarch was a canon. That a pilgrimage was chosen
for a rendez-vous was also not unusual. Amorous adventures while
on pilgrimage were very popular. But that pilgrimage carried out by
Machaut and Péronelle was done with great seriousness, “trés
devotement.”44*%0 At an earlier get-together, they hear mass; he sits
behind her:
. .. Quant on dist: Agnus dei,
Foy que je doy a Saint Crepais,
Doucement me donna la pais,
entre deux pilers du moustier
Et j’en avoie bien mestier,
Car mes cuers amoureus estoit
Troublés, quant si tost se partoit.45*31
The “pais” was a small plate that was passed around to be kissed
in place of the “Kiss of Peace” that was given mouth to mouth.46 In
this case, the meaning is that Péronelle offered him her own lips. He
awaits her in the garden, reciting his breviary. Upon beginning a
novena (a nine-day sequence of certain prayers) he takes a silent
vow while entering the church that he will on each of the nine days
compose a new poem about love. This does not keep him from
speaking of the great devotion with which he prays. 47
We should not assume that there were frivolous or profane
intentions behind all of this. Guillaume de Machaut, all else being
said, is an earnest and high-minded poet. We are encountering here
the almost incomprehensible way in which, in pre-Tridentine days,
the exercise of faith was interwoven with daily life. Soon we will
have to say more about this.
The emotion revealed by the letters and the description of this
historic love affair is soft, sweetish, and a little sickly. The
expression of emotion remains veiled in the narrative flow of words,
rationalizing and deliberating, and in the garb of allegorical
phantasies and dreams. There is something touching about the deep
emotions with which the graying poet describes his own glorious
good fortune and the outstanding qualities of Toute-Belle while
failing to realize that she is only playing with him and with her own
heart.
At almost the same time as Machaut’s Voir-Dit there appears
another work that is in certain ways comparable: Le livre du
chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles.48 It is an
aristocratic work just as much as the romance of Machaut and
Péronelle d’Armentiéres, which was played out in Champagne and
in Paris. The Knight de la Tour Landry takes us to Anjou and Poitou.
Here, though, there is no aged poet in love, but a somewhat prosaic
father who offers reminiscences of his youth, anecdotes and stories
“pour mes filles aprandre à roumancier.” We would say, to teach
them the civilized forms of love. But the instructions are far from
being romantic. Rather the examples and admonishments that the
careful nobleman holds up to his daughters tend to be warnings
against romantic flirtations. Be on guard against silver-tongued
people who are always ready with “faux regars longs et pensifs et
petits soupirs et de merveilleuses contenances affectées et ont plus
de paroles à main que autres gens.” 49*32 Don’t be too
accommodating. As a youth he had once been taken by his father to
a castle to make the acquaintance of the daughter of the lord of the
manor with a view to a prospective engagement. The girl had
received him with particular kindness. To find out her true qualities
he had spoken with her about all kinds of things. The talk turned to
prisoners, and the youth paid the girl a dignified compliment, “Ma
demoiselle, il vaudroit mieulx cheoir a estre vostre prisonnier que a
tout plain d’autres, et pense que vostre prison ne seroit pas si dure
comme celle des Angloys.’-—Se me respondit, qu’elle avoyt vue
nagaires cel qu’elle vouldroit bien qu’il feust son prisonnier. Et lors
je luy demanday se elle luy feroit male prison, et elle ne dit que
nennil dt qu’elle le tandroit ainsi chier comme son propre corps, et
je lui dis que celui estoit bien eureux d’avoir si doulce et si noble
prison. Que vous dirai-je? Elle avoit assez de langaige et lui
sambloit bien, selon ses parolles, qu’elle savoit assez, et si avoit
l’ueil bien vif et legier.” Upon taking leave she asked him two or
three times to come again as if she had already known him for a
long time. “Et quant nous fumes partis, mon seigneur de père me
dist: Que te samble de celle que tu as veue. Dy m’en ton avis.” But
her all too ready encouragement had cooled any ardor for a closer
acquaintanceship. “Mon seigneur, elle me samble belle et bonne,
maiz je ne luy seray ja plus de près que je suis, si vous plaist.” 133 So
the engagement did not take place, and the knight later naturally
found out things that gave him no cause for regret.50 Similar little
bits taken directly from life that would inform us how customs
adapted themselves to the ideal are unfortunately exceedingly rare
for the centuries with which we are concerned. If only the Knight de
la Tour Landry had told us still more about his life! Most of his
reminiscences are of a general nature. He desires for his daughters
most of all a good marriage. And marriage had little to do with
love. He presents a detailed “debat” between himself and his wife
about what is permissible in matters of love, “le fait d’amer par
amours.”*34 He believes that in certain circumstances a girl may
well find honorable love, for example, “en esperance de
mariage.” ;3° His wife is opposed. It is better for a girl not to fall in
love at all, not even with her husband, as it keeps her from true
piety. “Car j’ay ouy dire a plusieurs, qui avoient esté amoureuses en
leur juenesce, que quant elles estoient à l’eglise, que la pensée et la
merencollies1 leur faisoit plus souvent penser a ces estrois pensiers
et dliz de leurs amours que ou (au) service de Dieu, 52 et est l’art
d’amours de telle nature que quant l’en (on) est plus au divin office,
c’est tant comme le prestre tient nostre seigneur sur l’autel, lors leur
venoit plus de menus pensiers.”53#3%6 With this deep psychological
observation, Machaut and Péronelle would be in agreement. But
aside from that, what a difference in perception between the poet
and the knight! But how do we reconcile the strictness of the father
with the fact that in order to instruct his daughters he repeatedly
uses stories that, given their salacious content, would not be
misplaced among those of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles?
This loose fit between the beautiful forms of the courtly ideal of
love and the reality of engagement and marriage means that the
element of play, of conversation, of literary conventions could
unfold with little restraint in anything having to do with the refined
art of love. There was no room for the ideal of love, for the fiction
of faithfulness and sacrifice, in the very material considerations that
enter into a marriage, above all an aristocratic marriage. They could
only be experienced in the form of beguiling or heart-thrilling play.
The tournament provided the game of romantic love its heroic form,
the pastoral, the idyllic.
The pastoral in its real significance is something more than a
mere literary genre. We are not dealing here with a description of
the real life of the shepherd and its simple and natural enjoyments,
but rather with its echoed life. The pastoral is an imitatio. There is a
fiction that in pastoral life the undisturbed naturalness of love finds
its essential expression. There is where one can escape, if not in
reality, then in dreams. Time and again the pastoral serves as the
means to liberate the spirit from the clutch of a highly pressured,
dogmatic, and formalized view of love. There is a yearning for
deliverance from the oppressive requirements of knightly
faithfulness and veneration and from the colorful apparatus of
allegory as well as from the crudity, the greed, the social sins, of the
life of love in reality. An easy, satisfied, and simple love amidst the
innocent enjoyments of nature seems most desirable. That is what
appeared to be the lot of Robin and Marion and of Gontier and
Helayne; they were the lucky ones, worthy of envy. The much
maligned peasant, in his turn, became the ideal.
But the late Middle Ages are still so genuinely aristocratic and
vulnerable to beautiful illusions that passion for the life of nature
could not yet lead to a vigorous realism except that it be linked in
practice to an artful ornamentation of courtly customs. When the
aristocracy of the fifteenth century played shepherd and
shepherdess the genuine veneration of nature and the admiration of
simplicity and work are still very weak. When, three centuries later,
Marie-Antoinette milks cows and makes butter in the Trianon, the
ideal is already filled with the seriousness of the physiocrats. Nature
and work have already become the great sleeping deities of the
time, yet aristocratic culture still managed to make a game of it all.
When the intellectual Russian youth around 1870 placed themselves
among the people, to live like peasants for the sake of the peasants,
at that point the ideal became bitterly serious. But then too, it
turned out that its realization was a delusion.
There is a poetic form that represents the middle ground between
the pastoral proper and reality. This is the pastorelle, the short
poem that sings of the opportune adventure between the knight and
the country girl. In these, the overtly erotic found a fresh and
elegant form, which raised it above the obscene and yet still
managed to retain all the charm of naturalism. They bring to mind
certain scenes from Guy de Maupassant.
The sentiment is truly pastoral only at the moment when the
lover begins to feel himself to be a shepherd. In this, any contact
with reality vanishes. All the elements of the courtly system of love
are merely transported into a rural setting; a sunny dreamland
engulfs yearning in a mist of flute tunes and bird twitters. It is a gay
sound; even the sorrows of love, yearning, and lamentation, even
the agony of those who are abandoned dissolve in the lovely sound.
In the pastoral, the erotic always finds that indispensable contact
with the joys of nature. Thus, the pastoral became the field wherein
the literary feeling for nature developed. In the beginning it was not
yet concerned with the description of the beauty of nature, but
rather with the immediate enjoyment of sun and summer, shade
and fresh water, flowers and birds. The observation of nature and
its description is only a secondary consideration, the main concern
is the dream of love. As a by-product, nature poetry offers quite a
bit of charming realism. The description of life on the land in a
poem such as “Le dit de la pastoure” by Christine de Pisan creates a
new genre.
Once it has taken its place as a courtly ideal, the simple life
becomes a mask. Everything can be put in a country costume. The
imaginative spheres of the pastoral and the knightly romance
merge. Tournaments were held in pastoral dress. King René calls his
the Pas d’armes de la bergère.
His contemporaries seem to have seen in this comedy something
really genuine; Chastellain gives René’s pastoral vision a place
among the wonders of the world:
J’ay un roi de Cécille
Vu devenir berger
Et sa femme gentille
De se mesme mestier,
Portant la pannetiére,
La houlette et chappeau,
Logeans sur la bruyére
Auprès le leur trouppeau.54*37
In another instance, the pastoral served to dress a slanderous
political satire. There is no stranger work of art than the long
shepherd poem “Le pastoralet,”55 in which a partisan of the
Burgundians tells in charming guise of the murder of Louis de
Orléans so that the misdeed of John the Fearless is excused and all
the Burgundian hatred of the Duke of Orléans is vented. Léonet is
John’s shepherd name, Tristifer that of Orléans; the fantasy of dance
and floral decoration is done in a strange manner. Even the battle of
Agincourt is done in pastoral guise.56
The pastoral element was never missing from court festivities. It
was exceptionally suited for the masquerades that as “entremets”
provided glamor for festive meals and that were especially suited
for political allegories. The picture of the prince as shepherd and
the people as his flock had already been presented from another
side: from the representation of the original form of the state by the
church fathers. The patriarchs had lived as herdsmen; the proper
role of authority, for the secular as well as the spiritual, was not to
rule, but to guard.
Seigneur, tu es de Dieu bergier;
garde ses bestes loyaument,
Mets les en champ ou en vergier,
Mais ne les perds aucunement,
Pour ta peine auras bon paiement
En bien le gardant, et se non,
A male heure reçus ce nom.57 38
In these verses from Jean Meschinot’s “Lunettes des princes” there
is no mention of a truly pastoral image. However, as soon as there is
an attempt to represent something like this visually, the two
notions, the prince as caretaker and the simple shepherd,
automatically merge. One entremet at a wedding fest in Bruges in
1468 glorified earlier princesses as the “nobles bergieres qui par cy
devant ont esté pastoures et gardes des brebis de pardeca.”58*39 A
play in Valenciennes in 1493 to celebrate the return of Marguerite
of Austria from France showed how the country had recovered from
its devastations “le tout en bergerie.”59+4° We all know the political
pastoral in De Leeuwendalers.60 The note of prince as shepherd is
also audible in the Wilhelmus:61
Oirlof myn arme schapen
Die syt in groter noot,
Uw herder sal niet slapen,
Al syt gy nu verstroyt.£41
Even in real war, people played with the notion of the pastoral.
Charles the Bold’s bombardment of Granson was called “le berger et
la bergére.”§42 When the French mocked the Flemings, calling them
shepherds unfit for war, Phillip of Ravenstein showed up on the
field with twenty-four nobles dressed as shepherds with crooks and
bread baskets.62
Even as true knightly devotion set against the ideas of the Roman
de la rose provided the material for an elegant literary war, so too
the pastoral ideal became the subject of such a struggle. Here too,
the falsity was too obvious and had to be masked. How little did the
hyperbolically contrived, wastefully colored life of the late Middle
Ages resemble the ideal of simplicity, freedom, and carefree true
love in the midst of nature! The theme of Philippe de Vitri’s “Franc
Gontier,” the type of the simplicity of the Golden Age, was given
endless variations. Everyone claimed to hunger for Franc Gontier’s
meal in the shade with Lady Helayne, for his menu of cheese,
butter, cream, apples, onions, and brown bread, for his lusty wood
chopping work, his sense of freedom and lack of care:
Mon pain est bon; ne faut que nulz me veste;
L’eaue est saine qu’à boire sui enclin,
je ne doubte ne tirant ne venin.63*43
Sometimes the poets temporarily misstep. The same Eustache
Deschamps who repeatedly sang the life of Robin and Marion and
the praise of natural simplicity and a life filled with work regrets
that the court dances to the music of the cornemuse, “cet
instrument des hommes bestiaulx.”64+44 But it took the much
deeper sensitivity and sharp skepticism of Francois Villon to see
through all the falsity of the beautiful dream. There is a merciless
mockery in the ballade “Les contrediz Franc Gontier.” Cynically,
Villon compares the lightheartedness of that ideal countryman with
his meal of onions “qui causent fort alaine”:45 and his love under
the roses with the comfortable life of the fat priest who has comfort
and joy in a well-furnished room with a fire in the fireplace, good
wine, and a soft bed. The brown bread and the water of Franc
Gontier? “Tous les oyseaulx d’ici en Babiloine”$* would not be able
to make Villon suffer such fare even one morning.65
Even as did the beautiful dream of the knightly ideal, the other
forms in which sex tried to become culture had to be recognized as
false and full of lies. Neither the infatuated ideal of noble, chaste,
knightly faithfulness, nor the refined lust of the Roman de la rose,
nor the sweet, comfortable fantasy of the pastoral could hold their
own against the storm of life itself. The storm blew from all sides.
From the spiritual side came the curse on everything, since sex is
the sin that ruins the world. At the bottom of the chalice of the
Roman de la rose, the moralist sees all the bitter sediment.
“Whence,” cries Gerson, “whence the bastards, whence the murder
of children, the abortions, whence the hatred and poisoning in
marriage?”66
From the side of woman, another charge rings out. All these
conventional forms of love are the work of men. Even when it is
enjoyed in idealized forms, erotic culture is through and through
the product of male self-seeking. What else is the constantly
repeated mocking of marriage and the weaknesses of women, their
unfaithfulness and conceit, but a cover for male self-centeredness?
To all this defamation I only respond, says Christine de Pisan, that it
is not women who wrote these books.67
Actually, in the entire erotic as well as the pious literature of the
Middle Ages there is hardly a trace of genuine pity for women, for
their weakness and the pain and danger that love causes them. Pity
had formalized itself into the fiction of the liberation of the virgin
that was really only sensual stimulation and self-satisfaction. After
the author of the Quinze joyes de manage had listed all the
weaknesses of women in a mutely toned and finely colored satire,
he offers to describe the neglect of women,68 but he does not do it.
For the expression of a tender womanly voice, one has to turn to the
poetry of Christine herself:
Dolce chose est que mariage,
Je le puis bien par moy prouver . . . 69*47
But how weak the voice of a single woman sounds against the
choir of ridicule in which the flat voices of licentiousness and pious
morality come together. There is only a small distance between the
homiletic contempt of women and the coarse denial of ideal love by
prosaic sensuality.
The beautiful play of love as a form of life continued to be played
in the knightly style, and in the pastoral, and in the artificial dress
of the rose allegory and even though, from all sides, there could be
heard the sound of the denial of all these conventions, they retained
their value for life and culture until long after the Middle Ages
because there are only a few forms in which the ideal of love can
dress itself in any age.
Chapter Five
THE VISION OF DEATH
NO OTHER AGE HAS SO FORCEFULLY AND CONTINUously
impressed the idea of death on the whole population as did the
fifteenth century, in which the call of the memento mori *! echoes
throughout the whole of life. Denis the Carthusian, in the book he
wrote for the guidance of the nobleman, makes the exhortation that
“when he goes to bed, he should imagine not that he is putting
himself to bed, but that others are laying him in his grave.”1 In
earlier times, too, religion had been very serious about reinforcing
the constant preoccupation with death, but the pious tracts of the
early medieval period had only reached those who had already
taken the path that put the world behind them. It was only after the
rise of the popular preachers of the mendicant orders that the
admonitions rose to a threatening chorus that echoed through the
world with the force of a fugue. Towards the end of the medieval
period, the voice of the preachers was joined by a new kind of
pictorial representation that, mostly in the form of woodcuts,
reached all levels of society. These two forceful means of
expression, the sermon and the picture, could only express the
concept of death in very simple, direct, and lively images, abrupt
and sharp. The contents of earlier monastic meditations about death
were now condensed into a superficial, primitive, popular, and
lapidary image and in this form held up to the multitudes in
sermons and representations. This image of death was able to
contain only one of the large number of conceptions related to
death, and that was perishability. It seems as if the late medieval
mind could see no other aspect of death than that of decay.
There were three themes that furnished the melody for the never
ending lament about the end of all earthly glory. First there was the
motif that asked, where have all those gone who once filled the
earth with their glory? Then there was the motif of the horrifying
sight of the decomposition of all that had once constituted earthly
beauty. The last was the motif of the danse macabre or Totentanz, the
dance of death, which whirls away people of any age or profession.
Compared to the two final motifs in their oppressive dreadfulness,
the first, where has all the former splendor gone?, is only a soft
elegiac sigh. It is of ancient vintage and is known throughout the
world of Christianity and Islam. It originated in Greek paganism,
the church fathers knew it, and Byron perpetuates it.2 In the later
Middle Ages it enjoyed a period of unusual popularity. It can be
found in the heavily rhymed hexameters of the Cluniac monk
Bernard of Morlay around 1140:
Est ubi gloria nunc Babylonia? nunc ubi dims
Nabugodonosor, et Darii vigor, illeque Cyrus?
Qualiter orbita viribus inscita (?) praeterierunt,
Fama relinquiter, iliaque figitur, hi putruerunt.
Nunc ubi curia, pompaque Julia? Caesar abisti!
Te truculentior, orbe potentior ipse fuisti.
Nunc ubi Marius atque fabricius inscius auri?
Mors ubi nobilis et memorabilis actio Pauli?
Diva philippica vox ubi coelica nunc Ciceronis?
Pax ubi civibus atque rebellibus ira Catonis?
Nunc ubi Regulus? aut ubi Romulus, aut ubi Remus?
stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus? 3 *2
It sounds again, this time less pedantically, in verses that retain the
sound of the rhymed hexameters in spite of their shorter structure,
in the Franciscan verses of the thirteenth century. Jacopone of Todi,
the jester of the Lord, is most likely the poet of the verses that
appeared under the title “Cur mundis militat sub vana gloria.” They
include the lines:
Die ubi Salomon, olim tant nobilis
Vel Sampson ubi est, dux invincibilis
Et pulcher Absalon, vultu mirabilis,
Aut dulcis Jonathas, multum amabilis?
Quo Cesar abiit, celsus imperio?
Quo Dives splendidus totus in prandio?
Dic ubi Tullius, clarus eloquio
Vel Aristoteles, summus ingenio?4*3
Deschamps sets the same theme in verse several times, Gerson
uses it in a sermon; Denis the Carthusian treats it in his tract about
the “Four Last Things.” Chastellain turns it into a long poem, Le pas
de la mort, not to mention his other efforts in the same vein.5 Villon
manages to add a new touch, that of gentle sorrow, in the “Ballade
des dames du temps jadis” with the refrain:
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?6}*+
And soon he garnishes it with irony in the ballade about noblemen
where, while thinking about the kings, poets, and princes of his
time, it occurs to him:
Hélas! et le bon roy d’Espaigne
Duquel je ne scray pas le nom?7+>
The brave courtier Olivier de la Marche would not have dared to
make such a joke in his “Parement et triumphe des dames,” in
which he thinks about all the dead princesses of his own time in the
context of this same theme.
What is left of all human glory and splendor? Memories, a name.
But the sadness of this thought was not satisfying enough given the
need for a sharp shudder in the face of death. Consequently, the age
looks in the mirror of visible terror, and finds there, in the image of
the rotting corpse, perishability condensed into a shorter frame of
time.
The mind of world-denying medieval man had always liked to
dwell amidst dust and worms; in the ecclesiastical tracts about the
decay of the world, all the horrifying ideas about decomposition
had already been evoked. But the elaboration of details only comes
later; it is only towards the end of the fourteenth century that the
visual arts take up the motif.s A certain degree of skill in realistic
expression is required for dealing properly with this motif in
sculpture or painting. This power was attained around 1400. At the
same time, the motif spread from ecclesiastical to popular literature.
Until late in the sixteenth century, gravestones depict the
disgustingly varied notion of the naked corpse, with cramped hands
and feet, gaping mouth, with worms writhing in the intestines. The
mind is over and again invited to dwell on this frightful image. Is it
not strange that they dare not take the further step of seeing that
decay itself will perish and turn into earth and flowers?
Is it truly pious thinking that entangles itself in this loathing of
the purely earthly side of death? Or is it the reaction of an all too
intense sensuality that can only awaken itself from its intoxication
with life in this manner? Or is it the dread of life that so strongly
permeates the age the mood of disappointment and discouragement
of one who has fought and won and now would prefer a complete
surrender to that which is transcendent, but somehow is still too
close to earthly passion to be able to make that surrender? All these
elements of feeling are united in these expressions of the concept of
death.
The fear of life: the denial of beauty and joy because suffering
and pain are bound up with them. There is an astonishing similarity
between the ancient Indian, that is the Buddhist, and the medieval
Christian expressions of this sentiment. There, too, is found the
incessant preoccupation with disgusting age, sickness, and death,
there too, the exaggerated depiction of putrefaction. The naive
Indian ascetics even had their own poetic genre, bibhatsa-rasa, or
the sentiment of abhorrence, which was divided into three
subdivisions depending on whether the sentiment was caused by
disgust, terror, or lust.9 The Christian monk thought he had put it so
well when he pointed to the superficiality of physical beauty. “The
beauty of the body is that of skin alone. If people could see what is
underneath the skin, as it is said in Boethia that the lynx can do,
they would find the sight of woman abhorrent. Her charm consists
of slime and blood, of wetness and gall. If anyone considers what is
hidden in the nostrils and in the throat and in the belly, he will
always think of filth. And if we cannot bring ourselves to touch
slime and filth with our fingertips, how can we bring ourselves to
embrace the dirt bag itself? 10
The discouraged refrain of contempt for the world was codified
for the later Middle Ages in many tracts, but above all in that of
Pope Innocent III, De contemptu mundi. It is strange that this
powerful statesman, favored by good fortune, holder of the throne
of St. Peter, concerned about so many earthly things and interests
and actively involved in them, could in his earlier years have been
the author of such a scornful view of life. “Concipit mulier cum
immunditia et fetore, park cum tristitia et dolore, nutrit cum
angustia et labore, custodit cum instantia et timore.”11 (“Woman
conceives in impurity and stench. She gives birth in sorrow and
pain. She suckles with strain and effort. She wakes full of dread and
fear.”) O, those laughing joys of motherhood!—“quis unquam vel
unicam diem totam duxit in sua delectatione jucundam . . . quern
denique visus vel auditus vel aliquis ictus non offenderit?” (“Who
has ever spent a single day totally immersed in pleasure . . . without
being hurt by the sight of something, the sound of something or the
impact of something?”)12 Is this Christian wisdom or the pouting of
a spoiled child?
There is, undoubtedly, in all of this a spirit of tremendous
materialism that could not bear the thought of the passing of beauty
without despairing of beauty itself. And one should note how
(especially in literature, less in the fine arts) female beauty in
particular was deplored. Here there is hardly any difference
between the religious admonition to think on death and the fleeting
nature of earthly things and the regret of an aging courtesan over
the decay of beauty that she can no longer offer.
We have first an example in which the edifying admonition is still
in the foreground. In the Celestine monastery in Avignon there
existed, before the Revolution, a wall painting that tradition
ascribed to the artistic founder of the cloister, King René himself. It
showed a female corpse, standing upright, wearing an elegant
headdress, wrapped in her shroud; worms were devouring her body.
The first lines of the inscription read:
Une fois sur toute femme belle
Mais par la mort suis devenue telle.
Ma chair estoit très belle, fraische et tendre
Or est-elle toute tournée en cendre.
Mon corps estoit très plaisant et très gent,
Je me souloye souvent vestrir de soye,
Or en droict fault que toute nue je soye.
Forrée estoit de gris et de menu vair,
En grand palais me logeois à mon vueil,
Or suis logiée en ce petit cercueil.
Ma chambre estoit de beaux tapis ornée
Or est d’aragnes ma fosse environée.13*°
That these admonitions had their desired effect is proven by the
legend that arose later that the royal artist himself, the lover of life
and beauty par excellence, had looked at his beloved three days after
her burial and had then painted her.
The sentiment moves slightly in the direction of sensuality once
the warning about perishability is not illustrated by the gruesome
corpse of someone else, but when the issue is the bodies of the
living, now still beautiful but soon food for the worms. Olivier de la
Marche ends his didactic allegorical poem about female clothing,
“Le parement et triumphe des dames,” t7 with death who holds the
mirror up to all beauty and conceit:
Ces doulx regards, ces yeulz faiz pour plaisance,
Pensez y bien, ilz perdront leur clarté
Nez et sourcilz, la bouche d’eloquence
Se pourrione . . . 14*8
So far this is still an honest memento mori, but it edges
imperceptibly into a dispirited, worldly and self-seeking complaint
about the disadvantages of old age:
Se vous vivez le droit cours de nature
Dont LX ans est pour ung bien grant nombre,
Vostre beaulté changera en laydure,
Vostre santé en maladie obscure,
Et ne ferez en ce monde que encombre.
Se fille avez, vous luy serez ung umbre,
Celle sera requise et demandée
Et la chascun la mère habandonnée.15+9
Any pious elevated meaning is very remote when Villon composes
his ballades in which “la belle heaulmiére,” once a famous Parisian
courtesan, compares her formerly irresistible charms with the sad
decay of her aging body:
Qu'est devenu ce front poly,
Ces cheveulx blons sourcils voultiz,
Grant entroeil le regard joly,
Dont prenoie les plus soubtilz;
Ce beau nez droit, grant ne petiz,
Ces petites joinctes oreilles,
Menton fourchu, cler viz traictiz
Et ces belles levres vermeilles?
Le front ridé, les cheveux gris
Les sourcils cheuz, les yeux estains . . .16*10
In one of the poetic books of the southern Buddhists there is a
song of an old pious nun, Ambapali, who has the same past as “la
belle heaulmiére.” She, too, compares her earlier beauty with
disgusting old age, but she is full of gratitude for the demise of
useless beauty.17 But is the distance between this feeling and the
preceding as great as it might seem to us?
The vehement disgust over the decomposition of the body
explains the great significance that people put on the bodies of some
saints, such as that of St. Rosa of Viterbo, which did not decompose.
It is one of the most precious glories of Mary that her body was
spared earthly decomposition by virtue of its Ascension to heaven.18
What is speaking in all this is basically a materialistic spirit that
cannot shake its preoccupation with the body. The same spirit
occasionally reveals itself in the special care with which some
bodies were handled. There was a custom of painting the facial
features on the corpse of a prominent person immediately after
death so that no changes would be noticeable prior to the funeral.19
The body of a preacher of the apostate sect of the Turlupins who
had died in prison prior to the announcement of the verdict upon
him, was kept for fourteen days sealed in chalk so that it could be
burned along with a living apostate.20 The practice of taking the
bodies of prominent persons, cutting them up, and boiling them
until the bones separated from the flesh was widespread. The bones
were cleaned and then sent off in a casket for final burial while the
flesh and intestines were buried on the spot. In the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, this was quite customary in the case of bishops
as well as with a number of kings.21 In 1299 and again in 1300 the
practice was most strictly forbidden by Pope Boniface VIII as a
“detestandae feritatis abusus, quern ex quodam more horribili
nonnuli fideles improvide prosequuntur.” t11 Nevertheless, in the
fourteenth century there were many papal dispensations that lifted
the prohibition and in the fifteenth century the custom was still
prized by the English in France. The bodies of Edward of York and
Michael de la Pole, count of Suffolk, the most famous Englishmen to
die at Agincourt, were handled in this manner.22 It happened to
Henry V himself, and to William Glasdale, who drowned during
Joan of Arc’s liberation of Orléans, and to a nephew of Sir John
Falstaff who fell in the siege of St. Denis in 1435.23
In the fourteenth century, the strange word “macabre” appeared,
or, as it was originally spelled, “Macabré.” “Je fis Macabré la
dance,”*!2 says the poet Jean Le Fèvre in 1376. It is a personal
name and this might be the much disputed etymology of the
word.24 It is only much later that the adjective is abstracted from
“la danse macabre” that has acquired for us such a crisp and
particular nuance of meaning that with it we can label the entire
late medieval vision of death. The motif of death in the form of the
“macabre” is primarily found in our times in village cemeteries
where one can still sense its echo in verses and figures. By the end
of the Middle Ages, this notion had become an important cultural
conception. There entered into the realm surrounding the idea of
death a new, grippingly fantastic element, a shiver that arose from
the gruesomely conscious realm of ghostly fear and cold terror. The
all-encompassing religious mechanism immediately turned it into
morality by linking it back to the memento mori, but also made use
of the entirely gruesome suggestion that the ghostly character of the
image brought with it.
Around the danse macabre are grouped some related images,
which, along with death, are very well suited to frighten and to
warn. The depiction of the three dead men and the three living
precedes the image of the danse macabre.25 It had already appeared
in French literature in the thirteenth century. Three young
noblemen suddenly meet three ghastly dead men who point to their
own former earthly glory and to the imminent end that awaits the
living. The touching figures in the Campo Santo in Pisa are the
earliest representation of this theme in formal art; the sculptures on
the portal of the Church of the Innocents in Paris where the Duke of
Berry had the topic depicted in 1408 are lost. But miniatures and
woodcuts make this subject a common possession during the
fifteenth century and it is also widespread as wall paintings.
The depiction of the three dead men and the three living provides
the connection between the repugnant image of decay and the
thought, made into an image in the danse macabre, that all are equal
in death. The development of this subject in the history of art can
only be mentioned here in passing. France appears to be the country
where the danse macabre originates, but how did it come about?
Was it actually acted out or was it an image? It is known that the
thesis of Emile Mâle that the motifs of the pictorial art of the
fifteenth century have their origin in dramatic performances, as a
general principle, cannot withstand its critics. But in respect to the
danse macabre, there might be an exception to the rejection of the
thesis, that here the depiction was actually preceded by a
performance. In any case, be it earlier or later, the danse macabre
was actually performed as well as painted and depicted in
woodcuts. The duke of Burgundy had it performed in 1449 at his
residence in Bruges.26 If we had any idea of the nature of sucha
performance, of the colors, the movements, the play of light and
shade over the dancers, we would be much better able to
understand the strong sense of shock in the minds of the onlookers
than we are from the woodcuts of Guyot Marchant and Holbein.
The woodcuts (plate 3) with which the Parisian printer Guyot
Marchant illustrated the first edition of the Danse Macabre in 1485
were almost certainly borrowed from the most famous of the danses
macabres, the 1424 wall painting done in the Hall of Columns in the
Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris. The inscriptions beneath the
paintings that are preserved in the 1485 edition may perhaps be
traced back to the lost poem of Jean Le Fèvre that in turn may have
followed a Latin original. Be that as it may, the danse macabre in the
Cemetery of the Innocents disappeared during the seventeenth
century when the hall was torn down. It was the most popular
depiction of decay known to the Middle Ages. Day by day,
thousands viewed the simple figures at the Cemetery of the
Innocents, which served as a strange and macabre meeting place,
and read the easily comprehended verses. Each strophe concluded
with a well-known proverb. The people found solace in the equality
of all in decay and shivered at the prospect of their own end.
Nowhere else was ape-like death so much in his own place. Grimly,
with the gait of an old, stiff dancing master, he led the pope, the
emperor, the nobleman, the day laborer, the monk, the small child,
the fool, and all the other professions and estates away. Do the
woodcuts of 1485 come anywhere close to the impact of the famous
wall paintings? Probably not; the dress of the figures shows that
they are not true copies of the painting of 1424. To get a true
impression of the danse macabre of the Cemetery of the Innocents,
one should see those from the church of La Chaise-Dieu,27 where
the ghostly element is further enhanced by the half-finished state of
the painting.
The corpse, who recurs forty times leading away the living, is
actually not Death, but rather a dead man. The verses call the figure
Le Mort (in the danse macabre of women, La Morte); it is a dance of
the dead, not of Death.28 Furthermore, there is no skeleton, but a
body not yet entirely stripped of its flesh, with its abdomen slit
open. Only around 1500 does the figure of the great dancer become
the skeleton we know from Holbein. In the meantime, the notion
evolves of an unknown deadly dubbelganger29 who personally ends
life. “Yo so la Muerte cierta a todas criaturas,” *13 begins an
impressive Spanish danse macabre from the end of the fifteenth
century.30 In the older danse macabre the untiring dancer is still the
living person himself as he will be in the near future, a frightening
duplication of his own person, the image that he sees in the mirror.
Not, as some would have it, an earlier person of the same rank and
status who had died. Here is the point: you, yourself, are in the
danse macabre, and this is what bestows on it its gruesome powers.
On the fresco that graced the vault of the tomb monument of King
René and his Queen Isabella in the Cathedral of Angers, it was
actually the king himself who was depicted. One could see a
skeleton there (had this earlier been a corpse too?) in a long coat,
sitting on a golden throne and kicking away with his feet mitre,
crown, orb, and books. The head was resting on a shriveled hand
that tried to support a sagging crown.31
The original danse macabre depicted only men. The intent to tie
the admonition of the perishability and conceit of earthly matters to
the lesson of social equality naturally moves men, as the holders of
social professions and dignities, to the forefront. The danse macabre
was not only a pious admonition, it was also social satire and the
verses that accompanied it have a faint irony. The same Guyot
Marchant published as a continuation of his earlier edition a danse
macabre of women with verses by Martial d’Auvergne. The unknown
engraver of the woodcuts was not up to the standard of the earlier
edition; his only contribution was the gruesome figure of a skeleton
around whose head a few sparse strands of woman’s hair still
flutter. In this female version, the sensual theme of beauty that
turns into corruption is immediately struck. How could it be
otherwise? There were not forty occupations and estates for women.
Along with the most noble estates, such as queen, noblewoman, and
so forth, there are a few of the spiritual functions or estates such as
abbess and nun, and with a few professions such as merchant,
baker, etc., the list exhausts itself. Otherwise the list has to view
women in the temporary stages of their womanly lives as maiden,
beloved, bride, newlywed, and expectant. And so here again, the
theme of past or never-achieved joy or beauty sounds yet more
shrilly.
One picture was still lacking in the terrifying depiction of the act
of dying, and that was of the hour of death itself. The horror of this
hour could not be brought to the mind in a more dreadful image
than that of the raising of Lazarus. After his resurrection he had
known nothing but a sorrowful dread of the death that he had
suffered once before. If the righteous must feel such fear, what of
the sinner?32 The vision of the death struggle was the first of the
Four Last Things, the “quattour hominum novissima,” upon which it
behooved man to think: death, final judgment, hell, and heaven.
They were, as such, also part of the vision of the beyond. In this
instance, in a preliminary way, only the issue of the death of the
body itself is raised. Closely related to the theme of the Four Last
Things was the Ars moriendi, a creation of the fifteenth century that
also gained a wide circulation as part of pious thought through
printing and the woodcut. It dealt with the five temptations with
which the devil snared the dying: doubt of faith, desperation over
one’s sins, attachment to earthly goods, desperation about one’s
own sufferings, and finally conceit about one’s own virtue. Always
an angel appears to fend off Satan’s snares with his consolation. The
description of the death struggle is an old subject of spiritual
literature. One sees the same images recur in it over and over
again.33
In a detailed poem entitled “Le pas de la Mort,”34 Chastellain has
brought all of these motifs together. He begins with a moving
narrative that, even given the solemn verbosity characteristic of this
author, does not fail to have its effect. His dying beloved calls him
to herself and in a broken voice says:
Mon amy, regardez ma face.
Voyez que fait dolante mort
Et ne l’oubliez désormais;
C’est celle qu’aimiez si fort;
Et ce corps vostre, vil et ort,
Vous perderez pour un jamais;
Ce sera puant entremais
A la terre et a la vermine;
Dure mort toute beauté fine. *14
This induces the poet to compose a Mirror of Death. First, he
works out the theme “Where are all the great ones of the earth
now?” at far too great a length, his style a little schoolmasterish
without any of the easy sadness of Villon. This is followed by
something like a first attempt at a danse macabre, but without vigor
or imagination. At the end he puts in the Ars moriendi in verse form.
Here is his description of the death struggle:
Il n’a membre ne facture
Qui ne sente sa pourreture.
Avant que l’esperit soit hors,
Le coeur qui veult crevier au corps
Haulce et souliève la poitrine
Qui se veult joindre à son eschine.
—La face est tainte et apalie,
Et les yeux treilliés en la teste.
La parolle luy est faillie,
Car la langue au palais se lie.
Le poulx tressault et sy halette.
Les os desjoindent à tous lez;
Il n’a nerf qu’au rompre ne tende.35*15
Villon puts all that in half a verse that is much more moving, but
one recognizes the common model.36
La mort le fait fremir, pallir,
Le nez courber, les vaines tendre.
Le col enfler, la chair mollir,
Joinctes et nerfs croistre et estendre.;1©
And then again the sensual element that runs through all these
terrifying notions:
Corps femenin, qui tant est tendre,
Poly, souef, si precieux,
Te fauldra il ces maulx attendre?
Oy, ou tout vif aller es cieulx.:17
Nowhere else was everything concerning death more completely
brought together before the eyes than in the Cemetery of the
Innocents in Paris. There one experienced the macabre to the
fullest; everything worked together to provide the somber holiness
and colorful forms that the late Middle Ages craved so much. The
saints to whom the church and churchyard were dedicated, the
innocent children who were butchered in place of Christ, evoked
with their lamentable martyrdom, the bloody pity in which the age
indulged. It is precisely in this century that the veneration of the
Holy Children became very popular. But there was more than one
relique of the boys of Bethlehem there. Louis XI had given to the
church that he had dedicated “un Innocent entier”37 in a great
crystal shrine. People were fond of coming to the churchyard to
take their ease. A bishop of Paris had some earth from the
Churchyard of the Innocents placed in his grave when it happened
that he could not be buried there.38 The rich and the poor rested
there side by side, but not for long, as the burial ground, which
twenty churches had the right to use, was in so much demand that
after a few years the bodies were exhumed and the tombstones sold.
It was said that there a corpse would decompose down to the bare
bones in about nine days.39 The skulls and bones were then piled up
in the bone chambers above the Hall of Columns that surrounded
the cemetery on three sides. They lay there in their thousands, open
and exposed, preaching the lesson of the equality of all. Beneath the
arcade, the same lesson could be seen and read in the paintings and
verses of the danse macabre. For the construction of the “beaux
charniers” “18 the noble Boucicaut, among others, had made
contributions.40 On the portal of the church, the duke of Berry, who
wished to be buried there, had the figures of the three living and
the three dead men sculpted. During the sixteenth century the large
statue of Death was still standing in the cemetery. In the Louvre
now, it is the sole surviving remnant of all that was assembled there
(plate 4).
For the people of the fifteenth century, this place was what the
melancholy palais royal was to the people of 1789. There amid the
continuous burials and exhumations was a promenade and a
meeting place. Small shops were found near the bare bones and
easy women under the arcades. There was even an aged female
recluse who lived in the side of the church. Sometimes a mendicant
monk preached in that place that was itself a sermon in the
medieval style. Many times processions of children assembled there;
12,500 says the Burgher of Paris, all with candles. They marched
from the Innocents to Notre Dame and back. Even festivities were
held there.41 So much had the dreadful become the familiar.
In the drive to create an unmitigated depiction of death, in which
everything intangible had to be abandoned, only the coarser aspects
of death made it into consciousness. The macabre vision of death
lacked everything elegiac as well as everything tender. And at root,
it is a very earthly, self-preoccupied attitude towards death. It does
not deal with sadness over the loss of those beloved, but rather with
regret about one’s own approaching death, which can be seen only
as misfortune and terror. There is no thought given to death as
consolation, to the end of suffering, eternal rest, the task completed
or broken off, no tender memories, no surrender. Nothing of the
“divine depth of sorrow.” Only once can there be heard a softer
sound. In the danse macabre, Death addresses the day laborer as
follows:
Laboureur qui en soing et painne
Avez vescu tout vostre temps,
Morir fault, e’est chose certainne,
Reculler n’y vault ne contens
De mort devez estre contens
Car de grant soussy vous delivre . . . “19
But the laborer mourns the life that he had often wished would
come to an end.
Martial d'Auvergne in his danse macabre of women has the little
girl call out to her mother, take care of my doll, my dice, and my
beautiful dress! The touching accents of childhood are
extraordinarily rare in the literature of the late Middle Ages. There
was no room for them in the weighty rigidity of the grand style.
Neither churchly or worldly literature really knew the child. When
Antoine de la Salle in “Le Reconfort”42 seeks to comfort a
noblewoman over the loss of her little son, he knows no better way
to do so than to tell the story of a boy who lost his young life in an
even more cruel way; he died as a hostage. He has nothing to offer
her to allay her pain other than the lesson of not attaching oneself
to anything earthly, but then continues with that story that we
know as the fairy tale of the death shroud. The tale of the dead
child who comes to its mother and begs her not to cry anymore in
order that its shroud might dry. And here is suddenly a much more
tender single note than is heard in the memento mori that is sung
with a thousand notes. Is it possible that folktale and folk song
during all those centuries knew all kinds of emotions well that
literature hardly knew at all?
Ecclesiastical thought of the late Middle Ages knew only the two
extremes: the lament over perishability, over the end of power,
glory, and joy, over the decay of beauty, and, on the other hand,
jubilation over the saved soul in its state of bliss. Everything in
between was unexpressed. In the fixed representation of the danse
macabre and the gruesome skeleton, the living emotions are ossified.
Chapter Six
THE DEPICTION OF THE SACRED
THE DEPICTION OF DEATH MAY SERVE AS AN EXAMple of late
medieval thought in general, which frequently moves living thought
from the abstract in the direction of the pictorial as if the whole of
intellectual life sought concrete expression, as if the notion of gold
were immediately minted into coin. There is an unlimited desire to
bestow form on everything that is sacred, to give any religious idea
a material shape so that it exists in the mind like a crisply printed
picture. This tendency towards pictorial expression is constantly in
jeopardy of becoming petrified.
The development of external folk piety in late medieval times
cannot be put more succinctly than it is by Jacob Burckhardt in his
Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen.
A powerful religion permeates all the affairs of life and lends color to
every movement of the spirit, to every element of culture.
In time, of course, those things come to react upon religion, and indeed
its living core may be stifled by the ideas and images it once took into its
sphere. The “sanctification of all the concerns of life” has its fateful
aspect.
And further:
Now, no religion has ever been quite independent of the culture of its
people and its time. It is just when religion exercises sovereign sway
through the agency of literally written scriptures, when all life seems to
revolve round that centre, “when it is interwoven with life as a whole,”
that life will most infallibly react upon it. Later, these intimate
connections with culture are no longer useful to it, but simply a source of
danger; nevertheless, a religion will always act in this way as long as it is
alive.1
The life of medieval Christendom is permeated in all aspects by
religious images. There is nothing and no action that is not put in its
relationship to Christ and faith. Indeed, everything is tuned to a
religious understanding of all things in a tremendous outpouring of
faith. But in this supernaturalized atmosphere, the religious tension2
of true transcendence, the stepping away from the material, cannot
always occur. If this tension is missing, then everything intended to
awaken a consciousness of God rigidifies into terrible banality,
being an astonishing this-worldliness in other-worldly terms.3 Even
in a true saint such as Henry Suso,4 in whom transcendence was
probably never absent for a moment, the distance from the sublime
to the ridiculous is very short to our no longer medieval
sensibilities. He is sublime when, as the knight Boucicaut honored
all women for the sake of his earthly mistress, Suso does so for the
sake of Mary, or steps aside into the mud for a poor woman. He
follows the customs of chivalry and celebrates his bride, Wisdom,
on festivals with a wreath and a song. When he hears a Minnesong
he immediately allegorizes it in terms of Wisdom. But what are we
to make of the following? At table Suso cuts his apple into four
parts: three parts he eats in the name of the Trinity, the fourth he
eats in memory of “the love with which the Heavenly Mother gave
the infant Jesus a little apple to eat.” And for this reason, he eats
that fourth part with its peel, since little boys do not like their
apples peeled. A few days after Christmas—at a time when the
infant was too young to eat apples—he does not eat the fourth part,
but offers it to Mary so that she will give it to her son. Whatever he
drinks he takes in five swallows for the sake of the five wounds of
the Lord, but since blood and water flowed from Christ’s side, he
takes the second swallow twice.5 Here is the “sanctification of all
aspects of life” in the most extreme form.
Disregarding for the moment the degree of devotion, and
speaking of the liturgical forms within which medieval piety
existed, we can see them as examples of the excesses of religious
life, provided that this is not done from a dogmatic Protestant
position. There had evolved within the church a growth in the
number of usages, concepts, and observances that, leaving aside the
quality of the ideas that motivated them, terrified the serious
theologians. The reforming spirit of the fifteenth century did not
turn against these new practices so much because they were unholy
or superstitious, but because they overloaded belief itself. The signs
of God’s ever-ready mercy had steadily increased in number: next to
the sacraments could be found benedictions; relics had become
charms; the power of prayer was formalized in the rosary. The
colorful6 gallery of saints had acquired even more color and life.
And even though theology clamored for a precise distinction
between sacrament and sacramentalia, what means were there to
keep the masses from basing their faith and hope on the magical
and the gaudy? Gerson7 met someone in Auxerre who claimed that
All Fool’s Day, on which the winter months were commemorated in
churches and monasteries, was just as sacred as the Feast of Mary’s
Conception.s Nicholas de Clémanges wrote a treatise against
establishing any new festivals. He declared that many of the new
ones were of an entirely apocryphal nature, and he approved of the
action of the Bishop of Auxerre which had abolished most of them.9
Pierre d’Ailly in De Reformatione10 opposes the increase in numbers
of churches, festivals, saints, and days of rest. He deplores the
plethora of pictures and painted objects and the overly tedious
minutiae of the liturgies. He objects to the inclusion of apocryphal
writings in the liturgy of the festivals, the introduction of new
hymns and prayers or other arbitrary innovations and to the all too
rigid intensification of vigils, prayers, fasts, and abstentions. There
was a tendency to link every detail of the veneration of the Holy
Mother to a special service. There were special masses, later
abolished by the church, of Mary’s piety, of her seven pains, of all
festivals of Mary together, of her sisters Mary Jacoby and Mary
Salome, of the Angel Gabriel, and of all the saints who formed the
family tree of the Lord Jesus.11 Furthermore, there are too many
monastic orders, says d’Ailly, and this leads to differences of
custom, to divisiveness and to arrogance, to the prideful elevation
of one spiritual order above another. First of all he wants to restrict
the mendicant orders. Their existence is detrimental to the homes
for lepers and to hospitals and to the miserable poor and truly
needy who have the right and are entitled to beg.12 He wants to ban
the indulgence preachers from the church who soil it with their lies
and expose it to ridicule.13 Where will the continual founding of
new convents without sufficient funds for their maintenance lead?
It is obvious that Pierre d’Ailly campaigned more against
quantitative than against any qualitative evil. In his sermons he
does not specifically question the piety and sanctity of all these
things, excepting his criticism of the indulgence sellers, but is more
worried about their unrestrained growth as such. He sees the church
suffocating under the burden of trivial details. When Adamus de
Ruper propagated his new Rosicrucian Brotherhood, it, too, met
resistance more because of its novelty than its content. His
opponents warned that the people, trusting in the efficacy of such a
grand society given to prayer, would neglect their prescribed
penances and the clergy their breviaries. The parish churches would
become empty if the brotherhood met only in the churches of the
Franciscans and the Dominicans, and these meetings would lead to
partisanship and conspiracies. Finally, the accusation was made that
what the brotherhood offered as grand and miraculous revelations
were mere phantasmagoria, a conglomeration of imagination and
old wives’ tales.14
A characteristic example of the mechanical way in which sacred
observances tended to multiply in the absence of intervention by
strict authority was the weeklong veneration of the Innocent
Children. During the remembrances of the slaying of the children in
Bethlehem on December 28, various semi-pagan solstice practices
merged with mushy sentimentality. The day was thought to be
unlucky. There were many who regarded the day of the week on
which the last Day of Innocents fell to be inauspicious throughout
the year. No work should begin on that day, nor a journey started.
That day of the week was simply called Innocents’ Day like the
festival itself. Louis XI observed this custom conscientiously. The
coronation of Edward IV was repeated because it was found to have
taken place the first time on that inauspicious day and René of
Lorraine had to forgo a battle because his mercenaries refused to
fight on the week-anniversary of the day of the children.15
Jean de Gerson was prompted by the practice to author a treatise
against superstition in general and this one in particular.16 He was
one of those who clearly saw the danger to the church posed by this
wild growth of religious ideas. With his keen and somewhat sober
mind he realizes also something of the psychological ground from
which all these things arose. They arise “ex sola hominum
phantasiatione et melancholica imaginatione”; *! their corrupt
imagination results from damage to the brain that can be traced to
the devil’s deceit. Thus the devil comes in for his share of the
blame.
The process is one of ongoing reduction of the infinite to the
finite; the miracle is reduced to atoms. To every holy mystery, there
attaches itself like a barnacle to a ship, a growth of external
elements of faith that desecrate it. The miracle of the Eucharist is
permeated with the most sober and material superstitions: that one
cannot go blind or suffer a stroke on the day one hears a mass or
that one does not age during the time one spends at the service. 17
The church has to be constantly on guard so that God is not brought
all too close to earth. It declares heretical the claim that Peter,
John, and James had seen the Heavenly Being during the
transfiguration just as clearly as they do now in heaven. 1s It is
blasphemy for one of the successors of Jeanne d’Arc to claim to
have seen God dressed in a long robe and a red overcoat.19 But can
the people be blamed for not being able to make the fine
distinctions of theology when the church offers so many colorful
images?
Gerson himself did not stay completely away from the evil he
fought. He raised his voice against conceited curiosity; that is, that
spirit of inquiry that wants to penetrate nature to its last mystery,
but he himself dug with immodest zeal into the smallest details of
sacred matters. His particular veneration of St. Joseph, for whose
festival he assiduously labored, made him eager to know everything
about the saint. He dwelled on every detail of the marriage to Mary,
their life together, Joseph’s abstention, how he came to know about
her pregnancy, how old he was. Gerson wanted no part of the
caricature that art had made of Joseph: of the old overworked
figure depicted by Deschamps and painted by Broederlam (plate 5).
He said that Joseph was not yet fifty years old.20 Elsewhere he
permitted himself an observation about the physical constitution of
John the Baptist: “semen igiture materiale ex quo corpus
compaginandum erat nec durum nimis nec rursus fluidum
abundantius fuit.”21*2 The famous popular preacher Olivier
Maillard used to present to his audience, after his initial remarks, as
“une belle question théologale” t3 inquiries such as whether or not
the Virgin must have actively participated in the conception of
Christ in order to be called truly the Mother of God or whether
Christ’s body would have turned to ashes had the Resurrection not
interfered.22 The controversy about Mary’s Immaculate Conception
was met by the Dominicans, contrary to the growing popular view
that felt the need of absolving the Virgin from the beginning from
original sin, by a mixture of biological and embryonic speculations
that, today, seem little edifying. Yet, the most zealous theologians
were so stubbornly convinced of the importance of their arguments
that they stooped so low as to take the controversy before the larger
public in their sermons.23 If this was the direction of the highest
churchmen, how could it be other than that everything holy would
dissolve into the mundane and the detailed from which one could
only occasionally rise to a consciousness of the miraculous?
This fatuous familiarity with God in daily life has to be seen in
two ways. On the one hand, it testifies to the absolute stability and
immediacy of faith, but where this familiarity becomes habitual it
increases the danger that the godless (who are always with us), but
also the pious, in moments of insufficient religious tension, will
continuously profane faith more or less consciously and
intentionally. In particular, the most tender of all mysteries, the
Eucharist, is threatened in this way. There is certainly no stronger
and more fervent emotion of the Catholic faith than the belief in the
direct and essential presence of God in the consecrated host. It is an
essential element of the religion both in medieval times and now,
but in medieval times, given the naive unself-consciousness of
unrestrained speech, it brought about a use of language that, on
occasion, seems profane. A traveler dismounts for a moment and
enters a church “pour veoir Dieu en passant.” *4 Of a priest on a
donkey proceeding on his way with a host it is said, “un Dieu sur un
asne.”24+5 Of a woman on her sickbed it is said, “Sy cuidoit transir
de la mort et se fist apporter beau sire Dieux.”25%:° Veoir Dieu was
the common expression if one saw the Host elevated.26 In all these
cases it is not the use of language itself that is profane, but it
becomes profane if the mind is impious or if words are uttered
thoughtlessly. In such cases what desecration such customary
language brings in its wake! From common usage it is only a small
step to mindless familiarities such as the saying “Laissez faire a
Dieu, qui est homme d’aage. *7 “27 Or Froissart’s “et li prie à mains
jointes, pour si hault homme que Dieu est.”28t8 A case that clearly
shows how the word “Dieu” used for the host could contaminate the
belief in God itself is the following. The bishop of Coutances
celebrates a mass in the church of St. Denis. When he elevates the
body of the Lord, Hugues Aubriot, the provost of Paris who is
walking around the chapel where the mass is being held, is
admonished to pray. But Hugues, known as an esprit fortt? answers
with a curse that he does not believe in the God of a bishop who
lives at the court.29
There was not the least intention to mock the sacred in this
familiarity, yet the addiction to turning everything holy into
pictorial images seems shameless to us. People owned miniatures of
Mary similar to the sets of cups called “Hansje in den Kelder.”30
They were small golden figures, highly decorated with precious
stones, whose belly could be opened to reveal the Trinity. Such
miniatures could be found in the treasury of the dukes of
Burgundy.31 Gerson saw one in the monastery of the Carmelites in
Paris. He disapproved, not because of the lack of piety shown by
such a crude depiction of the miracle, but because of the heresy of
depicting the entire Trinity as the fruit of Mary’s womb.32
Life was permeated by religion to the degree that the distance
between the earthly and the spiritual was in danger of being
obliterated at any moment. While on the one hand all of ordinary
life was raised to the sphere of the divine, on the other the divine
was bound to the mundane in an indissoluble mixture with daily
life. Earlier we spoke of the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris
where bones were piled up and exhibited all around the yard. Can
one imagine anything more terrible than the life of the nuns walled
in the back of the churchyard in this place of horrors? But let us
read what contemporaries said about it: “The hermits lived there in
a cute little house, walled in to the accompanyment of a beautiful
sermon. They received from the king an annual salary of eight
pounds in eight installments.”33 This as if we were dealing with
ordinary nuns! Where is the religious pathos? Where is it when an
indulgence is granted for the most ordinary domestic chores such as
firing the oven, milking a cow, or scrubbing a pot?34 At a raffle in
Bergen op Zoom in 1518, either “precious prizes” or indulgences
could be won.35 During princely processions into the cities, the
precious reliquary shrines, placed on altars, served by prelates and
offered to the princes to be kissed in veneration, competed at street
corners with sensuous performances, frequently performed in pagan
nudity.36
The apparent lack of distinction between the religious and
worldly spheres is most vividly expressed in the well-known fact
that secular melodies may be used—always unchanged—for sacred
songs and vice versa. Guillaume Dufay composed his masses to the
themes of popular songs such as “Tant je me déduis,” “Se la face ay
pale,” “L’omme armé.” *10 There is a constant interchange between
religious and secular terminology. Without objection, expressions
for earthly things are borrowed from liturgy and the other way
around, too. Above the door to the auditor office in Lille was a verse
that reminded everyone that he would eventually have to give
account of his gifts to God:
Lors ouvrira, au son de buysine
Sa générale et grant chambre des comptes.37+11
On the other hand, the solemn announcement of a tournament
sounds as if it were a festival where indulgences were sold:
Oez, oez, l’oneur et la louenge
Et des armes grantdisime pardon.38*12
By coincidence in the word “mistère” the concepts contained in
both “mysterium” and “ministerium” were blended. This weakened
the idea of mystery in everyday language in which everything was
called “mistère”: the unicorn, the shields, and the doll used in the
“Pas d’ames de la Fontaine des pleurs.”39
As a counterpart to religious symbolism, that is, the interpretation
of all earthly things and earthly events as symbols and
prefigurations of the divine, the praise of princes is transposed into
liturgical metaphor. Whenever the awe of worldly authority seizes
medieval man, the language of piety serves as the means of
expressing his feelings. The liegemen of the princes of the fifteenth
century did not stop short of any profanation. In the court case
about the murder of Louis of Orléans the advocate has the ghost of
the murdered prince speak to his son, Look at my wounds of which
five are particularly cruel and mortal.40 That is, he makes Christ the
image of the murder victim. The bishop of Chalons, in turn, does
not shy away from comparing John the Fearless, who was the
victim of the avenger of the prince of Orléans, to the lamb of God.41
Molinet compares Emperor Frederick III, who sent his son
Maximillian to marry Mary of Burgundy, to God the Father who had
sent his Son to earth, and he spares no pious words to embellish the
event. Later when Frederick and Maximillian enter the city of
Brussels with the young Philip le Beau, Molinet has the burghers cry
with tears in their eyes, “Veez-ci figure de la Trinité, le Pére, le Fils
et Sainct Esprit.” “13 He offers a wreath of flowers to Mary of
Burgundy, a worthy image of our beloved Lady, “except for her
virginity.”42
“Not that I want to deify princes,”43 says this creature of the
courts. Perhaps these are merely hollow phrases rather than deeply
felt devotion, but they prove nevertheless the devaluation of holy
things by everyday use. How can we blame a poet hired by the
court when Gerson himself grants to the princely auditors of his
sermons special guardian angels of higher hierarchy and office than
those of other men?44
In the transfer of religious expressions to the erotic, which we
have already mentioned, we are dealing, of course, with something
entirely different. In these cases there is an element of deliberate
impiety and genuine mockery that is absent in the examples just
described. They are related only in that they both arise from fatuous
familiarity with the sacred. The authors of the Cent nouvelles nou
velles engage in endless plays on words such as “saint” and “seins,”
and use “dévotion, confesser, bénir” *14 with obscene meanings.
The author of the Quinze joyes de mariage chose his title in reference
to the joys of Mary.45 There has already been mention of the idea of
love as a pious observance. It is more serious when the defender of
the Roman de la rose uses sacred terms to refer to “partes corporis
inhonesta et pecatta immunda atque turpia.”46}!5 Here is well
demonstrated something of the dangerous contact between the
religious and the erotic that the church, with good reason, so
feared. There is no more striking example of that contact than the
Melun Madonna (plate 6), ascribed to Foucquet, which used to be a
diptych and was united with the panel, now in Berlin, which shows
the donor, Etienne Chevalier, with St. Stephen (plate 7). Earlier the
united work hung in the choir of the Church of Our Lady in Melun.
An old tradition, noted in the seventeenth century by Denis
Godefroy, a man knowledgeable about medieval times, has it that
the features of the Madonna are those of Agnes Sorel, 47 the King’s
mistress. Chevalier did not hide his passion for her. Even
considering all the great qualities of the painting, it is a fashionable
doll that we encounter here with a rounded, clean-shaven forehead,
widely separated spherical breasts, a high narrow waist, a bizarre
and inscrutable facial expression, and surrounded by stiff red and
blue angels. All this bestows on the panel a touch of decadent
godlessness that is in marked contrast to the vigorous and simple
depiction of the donor and his saint on the other side panel.
Godefroy saw, on the large blue velvet frame, a series of E’s in
pearls joined by love knots of gold and silver threads.48 Does this
not reveal a blasphemous nonchalance towards the sacred that
could not be outdone by any Renaissance spirit?
The profanation of daily religious practice was almost without
bounds. It is said that choristers sang the profane words of the song
to whose melodies the service had been set: such songs as “Baisez
moi” 16 and “Rouge nez.”49817 David of Burgundy, the bastard of
Philip the Good, made his entry as bishop of Utrecht in the
company of a war party consisting only of noblemen along with his
brother, the Bastard of Burgundy, who had accompanied him from
Amersfoort. The new bishop was clad in armor “comme seroit un
conquéeur de pais, prince séculier,” *18 says Chastellain with
obvious disapproval. In this way he rode to the cathedral and
entered it with a procession complete with flags and crosses to pray
before the high altar.50 Let us put this Burgundian arrogance beside
the gentle frivolity of Rudolf Agricola’s father, the pastor of Baflo,
who, on the day he was selected Abbot of Selwert, received the
news that his concubine had born him a son, and said, “Today I
have twice become a father. May God’s blessing be upon it.”51
Contemporary people regarded the growing disrespect for the
church as a recent evil:
On souloit estre ou temps passé
En L’église béneignement
A genoux en humilité
Delez l’autel moult closement,
Tout nu le chief piteusement,
Maiz au jour d’uy, si comme beste,
On vient à l’autel bien souvent
Chaperon et chapel en teste.52}19
On festive days, laments Nicolas of Clémanges, only a few attend
mass. They don’t stay until it is over and are satisfied with touching
the holy water, saluting our Lady by bending their knees once, or
kissing the image of a saint. If they happen to see the host elevated,
they take pride in this act as if they had done a great deed for
Christ. Matins and vespers are read by the priest and his assistants
alone.53 The squire of the village makes the priest wait with his
mass until he and his wife have gotten up and dressed.54
The most sacred festivals, even Christmas Eve itself, are spent in
debauchery with card games, cursing, and blasphemy; if the people
are admonished, they point to the example of the nobility and the
higher and lower priesthood who behave with impunity.55 During
vigils there is dancing in the churches themselves to the
accompaniment of lascivious songs. Priests set the example by
dicing and cursing during their nightly wakes.56 These are the
practices documented by the moralists, who are perhaps always
given to taking the darkest view, but the sources more than once
confirm this dark image. The city council of Strasbourg every year
dispensed eleven hundred liters of wine to those who spent the
night of St. Adolf in the cathedral “holding a wake and in prayer.”57
A city councillor complained to Denis the Carthusian that the
annual procession of the holy relics provided the occasion for
drinking and numerous improprieties. How could this be stopped?
The magistrate himself would not be easily persuaded because the
procession made money for the city; it attracted people who needed
lodging, food, and drink. Above all, it was customary. Denis knew
the problem. He knew how shamelessly people acted during
processions, by gossiping, laughing, flirting, drinking, and indulging
in other uncouth pleasures.58 His melancholy sigh perfectly fits the
procession of the delegation from Ghent carrying the shrine of St.
Liéin to the fair at Houthen. In the old days, says Chastellain, the
notables were in the habit of carrying the holy body “en grande et
haute solempnité et révérence,”*2° but now it is “une multitude de
respaille et de garconnaille mauvaise,” t21 They carry it screaming
and howling, singing and dancing, mocking everything in sight, and
they are all drunk. Moreover, they are armed and indulge
themselves in whatever they wish. Everything is at their mercy
given the excuse of their holy burden.59
Going to church was an important element of social life. People
went there to enjoy dressing up, to show off their rank and
prominence and to compete in courtly manners and deportment. As
already mentioned,60 the paten, the “paix,” was a constant source of
the most irritating competitive courtesy. If a young nobleman
enters, the gracious lady stands up and kisses him on the mouth
even while the priest elevates the host and the people are on their
knees praying.61 Walking about and talking during mass must have
been quite customary.62 The use of the church as trysting place for
young lads and girls was so common that only the moralists were
still upset about it. Young men rarely come to church, complains
Nicolas of Clémanges, other than to watch the women who put their
elaborate hairstyles and generous décolletés on display there. The
virtuous Christine de Pisan rhymes in all innocence:
Se souvent vais ou moustier,
C’est tout pour veoir la belle
Fresche comme rose nouvelle.63“*22
It was not only small trysts for which church afforded the
occasion, not merely for handing the beloved the consecrated water,
giving her the “paix,” lighting a candle for her and kneeling beside
her; it did not stop at a few signs and furtive glances.64 In the
churches themselves, even on holy days, prostitutes looked for
customers65 and immoral pictures that corrupted the youth could be
bought. No preaching was effective against such evils.66 Time and
again the church and the altar were desecrated by immoral acts.67
Pilgrimages, like church services, provided the occasion for
pleasure, especially of an amorous nature. Pilgrimages are
frequently spoken of as pleasure trips. The Knight de la Tour
Landry, who took seriously the instruction of his daughters in good
manners, speaks of ladies of leisure who liked to go to tournaments
and on pilgrimages. As a warning he cites the example of a woman
who went on pilgrimage as an excuse to meet her paramour. “Et
pour ce a cy bon exemple comment l’on ne doit pas aler aux sains
voiaiges pour nulle folle plaisance.”68}23 Nicolas de Clémanges
agrees. People go on pilgrimages to distant shrines not so much to
fulfill a vow, but to find freedom for straying from the straight and
narrow. Pilgrimages are the occasion for all sorts of transgressions.
Procuresses are always there to seduce young girls.69 À common
incident in the Quinze joyes de manage: the young wife wishes a little
diversion and convinces her husband that the child is ill because she
has not completed the pilgrimage she vowed to take during her
confinement.70 The preparations for the wedding of Charles VI with
Isabella of Bavaria are launched with a pilgrimage.71 Small wonder
that the serious men of the devotio moderna have little use for
pilgrimages. Those who go on many pilgrimages rarely become
saints, says Thomas à Kempis, and Frederick van Heilo wrote a
special work about the matter, the Contra peregrinantes.72
In all these sacrileges of the holy through the unabashed
intermingling with sinful life there is more naive familiarity with
liturgy than open godlessness. Only a culture that is thoroughly
permeated with religiosity and that takes faith for granted knows
these excesses and degenerations. These people, following the
sloppy course of a religious practice half gone to seed, were the
same who could suddenly rise to extremes of religious fervor when
prodded by the ardent words of one of the mendicant preachers.
Even such a stupid sin as blasphemy only arises from strong faith.
Originally a conscious invocation, blasphemy is only the sign of an
immediate consciousness, extending to the most trivial things, of the
omnipresence of the divine. Only the feeling of truly challenging
heaven gives blasphemy its sinful attraction. Only when the oath
becomes mechanical and any fear of the fulfillment of the curse has
gone does blasphemy slide into the monotonous crudeness of later
times. In the late Middle Ages it still had that attraction of daring
and arrogance that made it the sport of the nobility. “What?” says
the nobleman to the peasant, “You give your soul to the devil and
deny God, yet you are not a nobleman?”73 Deschamps reports that
the habit of swearing had descended to people of low estate.
Si chétif n’y a qui ne die:
Je renie Dieu et sa mére.74*24
People compete in the composition of new and drastic oaths; the
most profane man is honored as a master.75 Deschamps says that
originally people everywhere in France swore in Gascon and English
and later in Breton and now in Burgundian. He composed two
ballads by stringing the most popular curses together, but he gave
them a pious meaning in the end. The Burgundian oath was the
worst of all, “Je renie Dieu,”76;2° but it was toned down to “Je
renie de bottes.” *2© Burgundians had the reputation of being
master swearers. For the rest, said Gerson, all of France, in spite of
her Christianity, suffered more than other countries from this
disgusting sin, the cause of pestilence, war, and famine.77 Even
monks swore.78 Gerson wanted the authorities and estates to help
eradicate the evil through strict laws, but light penalties, which
could then be rigorously carried out. In 1397 a royal order was
actually issued that renewed the old ordinances of 1269 and 1347
against swearing, however not with light and practical penalties,
but with such time-honored threats as splitting the lips or cutting
out the tongue, penalties that expressed a holy horror of blasphemy.
In the register containing the ordinance, there is a note on the
margin, “All these oaths are today, 1411, in common use
throughout the kingdom without any penalty.”79 Pierre d’Ailly
strongly urged the Council of Constances0 to forcefully combat this
evil.
Gerson knows the two extremes between which the sin of
blasphemy fluctuates. He has learned from his experience as a
confessor that uncorrupted young people, simple and chaste, are
tortured by the sharp temptation to deny God and blaspheme. He
recommends that they avoid overarduous contemplation of God,
since they are not strong enough for that.81 On the other hand,
there are habitual blasphemers like the Burgundians whose deed,
abhorrent as it is, does not include perjury since they do not have
the intent of taking an oath.82
The point where the habit of treating matters of faith lightly
becomes irreligiousness cannot be determined with exactitude.
Certainly there was in late medieval times a strong tendency to
mock piety and the pious. Some prefer to be esprits forts and speak
jokingly against faith.s3 The popular writers are frivolous and
indifferent, as in the story from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles where
the priest buries his dog in consecrated ground and addresses him
as “mon bon chien, a qui Dieu pardoint.” t27 The dog, thereupon,
goes “tout droit au paradis des chiens.”84;28 There is a great
resentment of false or mocking piety. Every other word is
“papelard.”§29 The frequently invoked saying “De jeune angelot
vieux diable” or, in solemn Latin meter, “Angelicus juvenis senibus
sathanizat in annis”*30 is for Gerson a thorn in his side. Thus youth
is corrupted, he says. A brazen face, scurrilous language and curses,
immodest looks and gestures are praised in children. So, he says,
What is to be expected of children who play the devil when they get
old?85
As to the clerics and theologians themselves, Gerson distinguishes
between types. One group is composed of ignorant troublemakers,
to whom any serious discussion is a burden and religion a fairy tale.
Everything they are told about appearances and revelations they
reject with loud laughter and great disgust. Another group goes to
the opposite extreme and accepts every product of the imagination
of deranged people, their dreams and strange ideas as revelation.86
The populace does not know how to maintain a middle position
between two such extremes. They believe prophecies by seers and
soothsayers, but if a genuine divine who has frequently had true
revelations makes a single error, then the worldly people scorn all
those who belong to the clergy, call them imposters and “papelards”
and henceforth will no longer listen to any clergyman, considering
them all to be malevolent hypocrites.87
In most instances of the loudly bemoaned lack of piety we are
dealing with the sudden ending of religious tension in a mental life
oversaturated with liturgical content and forms. Throughout the
entire Middle Ages there are numerous instances of spontaneous
unbeliefss that are not deviations from church teaching based on
theological reflection, but merely direct reactions against it. Even
though it does not mean much that poets and chroniclers—
encountering the enormous sinfulness of their time—exclaimed that
no one any longer believed in heaven or hell,89 in more than one
case the latent lack of faith had become conscious and had
hardened; it had hardened to the degree that this fact was well
known by all and admitted by the unbelievers themselves. “Beaux
seigneurs,” says Captain Bétisac to his comrades,90 “je ay regardé à
mes besongnes et en ma conscience je tiens grandement Dieu avoir
courrouchié, car ja de long temps j’ay erré contre la foy, et ne puis
croire qu’il soit riens de la Trinité, ne que le Fils de Dieu se daignast
tant abassier que il venist des chieux descendre en corps humain de
femme, et croy et dy que, quant nous morons, que il n’est riens de
âme ...J’ay tenu celle oppinion depuis que j’eus congnoissance, et
la tenray jusques à la fin.” *31 Hugues Aubriot, provost of Paris, is a
fiery enemy of the clergy. He does not believe in the Eucharist and
mocks it. He does not celebrate Easter nor go to confession. 91
Jacques du Clercq tells of several noblemen who, in full possession
of their senses, refused Extreme Unction.92 Jean de Montreuil,
provost of Lille, writes to one of his learned friends, more in the
easy style of an enlightened humanist than as one of the truly pious:
“You know our friend Ambrosius de Miliis; you have frequently
heard what he thought about religion, faith, Holy Scripture, and all
ecclesiastical prescriptions, so that Epicurus would have to be called
Catholic in comparison. Well, he is now completely converted. Prior
to his conversion he was nonetheless tolerated in the circles of early
humanists who were of a fully pious disposition.”93
On one side of these spontaneous instances of unbelief is the
literary paganism of the Renaissance and the educated, a cautious
form of Epicureanism, named after Averroés, which flourished in
such wide circles as early as the thirteenth century. On the other
side are the passionate negations of the ignorant heretics who,
whether they be called Turlupins or Brothers of the Free Spirit,
crossed the line separating mysticism and pantheism. But these
phenomena will be dealt with in a different context later on. For the
time being, we have to remain in the sphere of external images of
faith and external forms and customs.
For the daily understanding of the mass of people, the existence
of a visible image made intellectual proof of faith entirely
superfluous. There was no room between what was depicted, and
which one met in color and form—that is, depictions of the Trinity,
the flames of hell, the catalog of saints—and faith in all this. There
was no room for the question, Is this true? All these representations
went directly from picture to belief. They existed in the mind fully
defined and garbed in all the reality that the church could demand
of faith and then some.
But where faith rests on tangible images, it is hardly possible to
make qualitative distinctions between the nature and degree of
sanctity of the different elements of faith. One picture is as real and
commands as much awe as another. That God is to be worshiped
and the saints merely venerated is not taught by the picture itself
and the difference is lost unless the church constantly warns about
the necessary distinction. Nowhere else were pious notions so
seriously threatened by the overgrowth of colorful images than in
the field of the veneration of saints.
The strict position of the church was simple and elevated enough.
Given the belief in the continued existence of personalities after
death, the veneration of saints was natural and unquestioned. It was
permissible to honor them “per imitationem et reductionem ad
Deum.”*32 In the same sense, it was permissible to venerate
pictures, relics, holy places, and consecrated objects since,
ultimately, all this led to the worship of God himself.94 The
technical distinction between the saints and ordinary people who
achieved salvation was established by official canonization. This
distinction, although a troublesome formalization, contained
nothing that contradicted the spirit of Christianity. The church
remained aware that sanctity and bliss were originally of equal
value, just as it was aware that canonization was somehow flawed.
“It may be assumed,” said Gerson, “that infinitely more saints have
died, and die everyday, than have been canonized.”95 That pictures
were permitted, even though their existence violated the prohibition
of such in the second commandment, was justified by the teaching
that this prohibition had been necessary prior to the Incarnation
because God had been only spirit at that time, but that Christ’s
coming had canceled that old commandment. Yet, the church
desired unconditionally to obey the rest of the second
commandment, “Non adorabis ea neque coles,” t33 “We do not
adore the images, but honor and adore he who is depicted, God or
His saint in whose image it is.”96 Images were only intended to
show the simpleminded, who did not know the scriptures, what to
believe in.97
They were the books of the simpleminded,98 as we see from this
prayer that Villon composed for his mother:
Femme je suis pourette et ancienne,
Qui riens ne scai; oncques lettre ne leuz;
Au moustier voy dont suis paroissienne
Paradis paint, ou sont harpes et luz,
Et ung enfer où dampnez sont boulluz:
Uung me fait paour, l’autre joye et liesse . . .99*34
The church was mindful of the fact that to the simple mind just as
much opportunity to stray was offered by colorful pictures as by any
personal interpretation of scripture. It always treated those gently
who lapsed into the worship of images out of ignorance or
simplemindedness. “It is enough,” says Gerson, “if they intend to do
as the church requires.”100
The question, purely one of history of dogma, whether the church
always managed to keep its injunction against direct veneration or
even worship of saints, not as intercessors but as the granters of
requests, we can leave as it is. We are dealing here, as a question of
cultural history, with how far it succeeded in keeping the people
from error; that is, what reality, what value for understanding did
the saints have in the popular consciousness of the late Middle
Ages? To this question only one answer is possible: the saints were
such essential, material, and familiar figures of the everyday life of
faith that all the common and sensual religious impulses were tied
up with them. While the most fervent emotions turned towards
Christ and Mary, an entire store of naive and everyday religious
feeling crystalized around the veneration of saints. All this helped to
keep popular saints in the middle of ordinary life. Popular
imagination took hold of them: their figures are as familiar as their
attributes. Their gruesome tortures are known as well as their
astonishing miracles. They are dressed and endowed like the people
themselves. One could meet, everyday, “Messires” St. Roch or St.
James in the persons of living plague victims or pilgrims. It would
be interesting to study how long the dress of saints accorded with
the fashions of the day; certainly for the entire fifteenth century.
But where is the point at which church art removed them from
living popular imagination by dressing them in rhetorical robes?
This was not just a case of Renaissance sensitivity to historical
costume; as an added element, the popular imagination itself began
to abandon them so that they were no longer able to hold their own
in popular church art. During the Counter-Reformation, the saints,
quite in line with the intent of the church, climbed up several steps
and moved out of touch with popular life.
The physical presence that the saints possessed by virtue of their
depictions was unusually intensified by the fact that the church
permitted and even favored the veneration of their relics. It could
not be other than that this clinging to the material had a
materializing effect on faith that occasionally led to astonishing
extremes. The vigorous faith of the Middle Ages, whenever directed
towards relics, was not deterred by fear of secularization or
desecration. The people of the mountains of Umbria around the
year 1000 tried to kill St. Romuald in order to secure his bones. The
monks of Fossanuova where Thomas Aquinas died were so fearful of
losing the precious relic that they did not shrink from decapitating,
boiling, and preserving the corpse.101 Before St. Elizabeth of
Thuringia was buried, a crowd of devotees cut or tore strips from
the winding-sheets of her face and cut off her hair and nails, pieces
of her ears and even her nipples.102 At a solemn feast, Charles VI
gave ribs of his ancestor St. Louis to Pierre d’Ailly and to his uncles
Berry and Burgundy. He gave a leg to the prelates, who divided it
after the meal.103
No matter how real and alive the saints seemed to be, only
relatively few appear in supernatural experiences. The entire realm
of visions, appearances, signs, and ghosts remains separate from the
popular imagination about saints, but there are, of course,
exceptions. The figures of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St.
Margaret, who appeared to Joan of Arc, come to mind. We could
also cite a number of examples from the visionary literature, but as
a rule the examples we encounter in these stories were embellished
and interpreted, so to speak. When the fourteen holy martyrs, who
were so clearly identified by iconography,104 appear to a young
shepherd of Frankenthal near Bamberg in 1446, he does not see
them with their proper attributes, but as fourteen identical
cherubim. They tell him they are the holy martyrs. The popular
phantasmagoria is filled with angels and devils, ghosts and white-
clad women, but not with saints. Only in exceptional cases do saints
play a role in genuine, that is not literary or theologically
embellished, superstition. St. Bertulph does at Ghent. Anytime
something important is about to happen, he knocks on his coffin in
the abby of St. Peter “moult dru et moult fort.”*35 Sometimes the
knocking is accompanied by a light earthquake so that the
frightened city tries to ward off the unknown danger by large
processions.105 But generally, cold fear attaches itself to vaguely
imagined figures rather than to the sharply chiseled images in the
church. Just like ghosts, the imagined move about aimlessly, show
an indeterminate expression of the horrible in a nebulous gown, or
rising from the remote recesses of the brain, show themselves in
pure heavenly radiances or in terrifying illusionary forms.
We should not be surprised by all this. It is precisely because the
saints had assumed such definite forms and material character that
they lacked horror and mystery. Supernatural fear results from
unbridled imagination, from the possibility that something new and
dreadful could suddenly appear. As soon as the image becomes
clearly drawn and defined it arouses a feeling of security and
familiarity. The well-known figures of the saints had the reassuring
quality of the sight of a policeman in a foreign city. Their
veneration, and particularly their depiction, created a neutral zone
of comfortably calm faith between the ecstasy of the vision of God
and the sweet shudder of the love of Christ on the one hand and the
terrifying phantasmagoria, born of the fear of the devil and the
frenzy of witchcraft, on the other.
One could even posit that the veneration of saints was a very
healthy tempering of the exuberance of the medieval mind, since it
was able to deflect many visions of bliss and many fears and reduce
them to familiar notions.
By virtue of its perfectly pictorial quality, the veneration of saints
belongs to the outward manifestations of religion. It moves along
with the stream of everyday thought and occasionally loses its
dignity in this stream. The medieval veneration of Joseph is a case
in point. It might be looked upon as both a consequence of the
passionate veneration of Mary and a backlash against it. This
disrespectful interest in the stepfather is the other side of the coin to
all the love and glorification showered on the Virgin Mother. The
higher Mary rose, the more Joseph became a mere caricature. Fine
art had already given him a form dangerously close to that of an
uncouth peasant; thus is he depicted on Melchoir Broederlam’s
diptych at Dijon. But in the fine arts the most profane aspects
remain unexpressed. Rather than hold that no mortal could be more
highly favored than Joseph, privileged to serve the mother of God
and raise her Son, Eustace Deschamps prefers, with naive sobriety,
but not godless mockery, to see him as the type of drudging pitiful
husband.
Vous qui servez à femme et à enfans,
Aiez Joseph toudis en remembrance;
Femme servit toujours tristes, dolans,
Et Jhesu Crist garda en son enfance;
A piè trotoit, son fardel sur sa lance;
En plusieurs lieux est figuré ainsi,
Lez un mulet, pour leur faire plaisance,
Et si n’ot oncq feste en ce monde ci.106*36
We could accept this if it were intended to console troubled
husbands by holding up for them a noble example, though the
presentation is lacking dignity. But Deschamps uses Joseph as a
virtual warning against taking up the burdens of a family.
Qu’ot Joseph de povreté
De dureté
De maleurté
Quant Dieux nasquil!
Maintefois Va comporté
Et monté
Par bonté
Avec sa mère autressi,
Sur sa mule les ravi:
je le vi
paint ainsi;
en Egipte en est alé.
Le bonhomme est painturé
tout lassé
Et troussé
D'un cote et d’un barry.
Un baston au coul posé
Vieil usé
Et rusé.
Feste n’a en ce monde cy,
Mais de lui
Va le cri
C’est Joseph le rassoté.107 *37
This shows how from the familiar image arose an all too familiar
conception that threatened any sense of sanctity. Joseph remained a
semi-comic figure. Dr. Johannes Eck still had to insist that he not
appear in Christmas plays if not in a proper depiction or at least
that he not be made to cook the porridge “ne ecclesia Dei
irredeatur.”108 Gerson’s effort for a proper veneration of Joseph that
eventually led to the saint’s inclusion in the liturgy in preference to
all others was motivated by these undignified excesses.109 We have
already seen, however, how Gerson’s seriousmindedness did not
keep him from immodest curiosity about things that seem to be
inevitably linked to Joseph’s marriage. Sober minds (and Gerson,
despite his predilection for mysticism, was in many respects a sober
mind) were often led by contemplations of Mary’s marriage to
considerations of an earthly sort. The Knight de la Tour Landry, also
a typically sober and correct fellow, sees it in this light: “Dieux
voulst que elle espousast le saint homme Joseph, qui estoit vieulx et
preudomme; car Dieu voust naistre soubz umbre de mariage pour
obéir a la loy qui lors couroit, pour exchever les paroles du
monde.”110*3%8 An unpublished work of the fifteenth century
presents the mystic marriage of the soul with the heavenly
bridegroom in the customary terms of a bourgeois courtship. Jesus,
the Bridegroom, tells God the Father: “S’il te plaist, jeme mariray et
auray grant foueson d’enfants et de famille,” t39 The Father objects
to his son’s choice, a black Ethiopian. Here the passage from the
Song of Songs is echoed: “Nigra sum sed formosa.” #40 Such a union
would be a misalliance and dishonor the family. The angel serving
as intermediary puts in a good word for the bride: “Combien que
ceste fille soit noire, neanmoins elle est gracieuse, et a belle
composicion de corps et de membres et est bien habille pour porter
fouezon d’enfans.”§*! The father responds: “Mon cher fils wa dit
qu’elle est noir et brunete. Certes je vueil que son espouse soit
jeune, courtoise, joyle, gracieuse et belle et qu’elle ait beaux
membres.”**42 The angel then praises her face and all her limbs,
which are the virtues of her soul. The father declares himself bested
and tells his son:
Prens la, car elle est plaisant
Pour bien amer son doulx amant;
Or prens de nois biens largement
Et luy en donne habondamment.1111143
There is no doubt of the seriously devout intent of this work. It is
only one example of how unbridled imagination leads to triviality.
Every saint, by the possession of a distinct and vivid outward
shape, had his own marked personality,112 quite different from the
angels, who, with the exception of the three great archangels, were
never given personalized images. The personality of each saint was
strongly accentuated by the special function that each one had.
People turned to one saint for a certain emergency and to another
for recovery from a certain disease. Frequently a detail of the saint’s
legend or an attribute of a depiction was the source of the
specialization, as in the case of St. Apollonia, who had her teeth
pulled during her martyrdom and was thus appealed to in case of
toothache. Once the functions of saints became so specialized, it
was inevitable that their veneration became somewhat mechanical.
When the cure of plague was attributed to St. Roch, it was
inevitable that too much stress was laïd on his part in the healing
and that the chain of thought required by sound doctrine, namely
that the saint worked his healing by interceding with God, was in
danger of being left out altogether. This was notably the case in
regard to the fourteen holy martyrs (sometimes five, eight, ten, or
fifteen) whose veneration was especially important towards the end
of the medieval period. St. Barbara and St. Christopher are the most
frequently depicted of this group. According to popular tradition,
God had granted to the fourteen the power of warding off any
imminent danger through the mere invocation of their name.
Ilz sont cinq sains, en la genealogie,
Et cing sainctes, à qui Dieu octria
Benignement a la fin de leur vie,
Que quiconques de cuer les requerra,
En tous perilz, que Dieu essaucera
Leur prieres, pour quelconque mesaise.
Saiges est doc qui ces cing servira,
Jorges, Denis, Christofle, Giles et Blaise.113*44
In the popular imagination, any notion of the purely interceding
function was bound to be entirely lost by virtue of this delegation of
omnipotent and spontaneous effect. The holy martyrs had become
prefects of the Deity. Various missals of the late medieval period
that contain the office of the fourteen holy martyrs clearly express
the binding character of their intercession: “Deus qui electos sanctos
tuos Georgium etc. etc. specialibus privilegiis prae cunctis aliis
decorasti, ut omnes, qui in necessitatibus suis eorum implorant
auxilium, secundum promissionem tuae gratiae petitionis suae
salutarem consequantur effectum.”114*45 After the Council of Trent,
the church abolished the mass of the Holy Martyrs because of the
danger that faith would attach itself to them as to a talisman. In
fact, it was already the case that a daily viewing of the image of St.
Christopher was considered sufficient for protection against any
fatality.115
As to the reason that these fourteen were turned into a welfare
company, it should be noted that their depictions all had
sensational attributes that stimulated the imagination. St. Achatius
had a crown of thorns, St. Giles was accompanied by a hind, St.
George by a dragon, St. Blaise was in a den with wild beasts, St.
Christopher was a giant, St. Cyriac had the devil in chains. St. Denis
was carrying his own head under his arm, St. Erasmus was in his
gruesome torture being disemboweled on the rack, St. Eustace was
with a stag carrying a cross between his antlers, St. Pantaleon was
depicted as a physician with a lion, St. Vitus in a cauldron, St.
Barbara in her tower, St. Catherine with her wheel and sword, St.
Margaret with a dragon.116 It cannot be ruled out that the special
attention given these fourteen arose from the characteristics of their
images.
A number of different saints were linked with specific diseases,
such as St. Anthony with various festering skin diseases, St. Maur
with gout, St. Sebastian, St. Roch, St. Giles, St. Christopher, St.
Valentine, St. Adrian with plague. Here we find yet another cause of
the degeneration of popular religion: the disease was named after
the saint, St. Anthony’s fire, “mal de St. Maur,” and many others.
The saint was therefore from the very beginning in the forefront of
the mind of those who thought about the disease. Those thoughts
were charged with violent swings of emotion, with fear and disgust.
This is particularly true with respect to the plague. The saints linked
to the plague were most eagerly venerated during the fifteenth
century: with services in the churches, through processions,
brotherhoods, as virtual spiritual health insurance. How easily the
strong awareness of God’s wrath, rekindled by each epidemic, could
be deflected against the saint who took over as cause. The disease
was not caused by God’s unfathomable justice, but by the wrath of
the saint who sent the illness and demanded propitiation. If he
cured the disease, why should he have not caused it in the first
place? This constituted a heathen transposition of faith from the
religious-ethical to the magical sphere. The church could have been
held responsible for this only to the extent that it did not take
sufficiently into account that its pure teaching would become
clouded in ignorant minds.
The testimony for the presence of this notion among the people is
so large that it rules out any doubt that among the circles of the
ignorant the saints were occasionally really regarded as having
caused the disease. “Que Saint Antoine me arde”*4° is a common
curse. “Saint Antoine arde le tripot,” “Saint Antoine arde la
monture!”117}47 are curses in which the saint functions entirely as
an evil fire-demon.
Saint Anthoine me vent trop chier Son mal,
le feu ou corps me boute.+:48
Deschamps has a beggar say about his skin disease. And he barks at
a sufferer from gout: if you cannot walk, you at least save the road
fee.
Saint Mor ne te fera fremir.118§49
Robert Gaguin, who did not attack the veneration of saints per se
in a poem of ridicule, “De validorum per Francium mendicantium
varia astucia,” describes beggars as follows: “This one falls to earth
while spitting stinking saliva and he rants that this is a miracle
worked by St. John. Others are visited with pustules by St. Fiacrius.
And you, O Damianius, keep me from passing water. St. Anthony
makes their joints burn with miserable fire. St. Pius turns them into
cripples and paralyses their limbs.”119
Erasmus ridicules the same popular belief when he has Theotimus
respond to the question by Philecous whether saints are worse in
heaven or on earth: “Yes, the saints who reign in heaven should not
be insulted. When they were alive who was more gentle than
Cornelius, who more good natured than Anthony, more patient than
John the Baptist? But what terrible diseases they send now if they
are not, as you have heard, venerated properly.”120 Rabelais claims
that popular preachers themselves told the congregations that St.
Sebastian was the originator of the plague and St. Eutropius of
dropsy (because of the phonetic similarity with ydeopique).121
Henry Estienne also mentions such belief.122
The emotional and intellectual content of the veneration of saints
had been defined to such a large extent by the colors and forms of
the images that the direct aesthetic perception continuously
threatened to cancel out the religious notion. Between the sight of
the radiance of the gold, the scrupulously faithful description of the
material of their clothing, the pious look of the eyes, and the living
reality of the saints in the popular consciousness, there was hardly
any room left for considering what the church permitted and what
it prohibited as offerings of veneration and devotion to these
splendid beings. The saints lived in the minds of the people as gods.
It is not surprising that this danger to popular piety was feared in
the concerned circles of the Windesheimers, who were seeking to
maintain a proper faith; but it is also noticeable when the same idea
strikes the mind of a superficial and banal court poet such as
Eustace Deschamps, since he, in all his limitations, is such an
excellent mirror of the intellectual life of his times.
Ne faictes pas les dieux d’argent
D’or, de fust, de pierre ou d’arain.
Qui font ydolatrer la gent . ..
Car l’ouvrage est forme plaisant;
Leur painture dont je me plain
La beauté de lor reluisant.
Font croire a maint peuple incertain
que ce soient dieu pour certain,
Et servent par pensées foies
Telz ymages qui font caroles
Es moustiers où trop en mettons;
C’est tres mal fait: a brief paroles,
Telz simulacres n’aourons.
Prince, un Dieu croions seulement
Et aourons parfaictement
Aux champs, partout, car c’est raisons,
Non pas fautz dieux, fer n’ayment,
Pierres qui n’ont entendement:
Telz simulacres n’aourons.123*°0
Should we not regard the clamor for the veneration of angels as a
conscious reaction against the veneration of saints? Living faith had
crystalized too firmly in the veneration of saints; a need arose for a
more fluid understanding of veneration and ideas about protection.
These could attach themselves to the barely envisioned images of
angels and could thus again become unmediated religious
experience. It is again Gerson—this conscientious zealot for purity
of faith—who repeatedly recommends the veneration of guardian
angels.124 But there arises again the dangerous preoccupation with
details that could only damage the pious substance of this
veneration. The “studiositas theologorum,” says Gerson, raises a
number of questions with respect to angels: whether they ever leave
us, whether they know in advance if we will be elected or damned,
whether Christ or Mary had a guardian angel, and whether the
Antichrist will have one. Whether our good angel can speak to our
soul without the images of the imagination, whether they spur us to
do good just as the devil spurs us to do evil, whether they can see
our thoughts. How numerous the questions are. These studiositas,
Gerson concludes, belong to the theologians, but curiositas should be
far removed from all those who should attend more to devotion
than to subtle speculation. 125
The Reformation, a century later, found the veneration of saints
nearly defenseless at a time when it did not attack belief in witches
and devils as such. It did not even attempt to do so because it itself
was still caught up in that belief. Was not this caused by the fact
that the veneration of saints had become caput mortuum, that
everything in the veneration of saints had been expressed so
completely in image, legend, and prayer that it was no longer
sustained by gripping awe? The veneration of saints no longer had
any roots in something unformed or unexpressed—roots in which
demonic thought was strongly anchored. And when the Counter-
Reformation cultivated anew a purified veneration of saints, it had
to work on the mind with the gardener’s knife of a more strict
discipline so as to prune the all too luxuriant growth of the popular
imagination.
Chapter Seven
THE PIOUS PERSONALITY
THE PEOPLE USUALLY LIVED IN THE LACKADAISICAL corruption
of an entirely externalized religion. Their firm belief engendered
both fear and delight, but the ordinary religious form did not
involve the unsophisticated in any questions or spiritual struggles
such as Protestantism was destined to do. A comfortable lack of
religious awe and the complacencies of everyday life alternated
with periods of the most intense displays of the passionate piety
that spasmodically seized the people. The continuous contrast
between the strong and weak states of religious tension cannot be
explained by dividing the herd into two groups, the pious and
children of the world, as if a part of the people consistently led lives
of strict religiosity while others were only externally devout. Our
perception of late medieval northern Dutch and lower German
pietism could easily lead us to such mistaken conclusions. To be
sure, pietist circles separated themselves from secular life in the
devotio moderna of the Fraterhouses and the Windesheim convents
and among them sustained religious tension became normal, but as
pious people par excellence they formed a contrast to the large
majority. France and the southern Netherlands, on the other hand,
hardly experienced this phenomenon in the form of a movement at
all. Yet here too, the emotions that were the basis of the devotio
moderna had the same effect as in the calm lands along the Yssel. In
the south, such a formal separation from secular life never occurred;
passionate devotion remained a part of general religious life, but
peaked, from time to time, in more intense and shorter outbursts. In
our own time the same difference in temperament separates the
Latin peoples from their northern neighbors; those in the south
accept contradictions more readily. They feel less need to go the
whole way and find it easier to combine the easy skeptical attitude
of daily life with the high emotional stirrings of blessed moments.
The low esteem in which the clergy was held, which throughout
the Middle Ages parallels the high veneration of the priestly estate,
may be explained in part as the result of the worldly behavior of the
higher clergy and the considerable loss in status of the lower clergy,
or as the result of old pagan instincts. The mind of the people, only
incompletely Christianized, had never quite lost its disgust for men
who were not allowed to fight and had to be chaste. Knightly pride,
rooted in courage and love, just like the crude mind of the people,
rejected the spiritual. The corruption of the clergy contributed its
share. For centuries the higher and lower estates alike had reveled
in the figure of the unchaste monk and debauched fat clergyman. A
latent hatred of the clergy had always existed. The more a preacher
railed against the sins of his estate, the greater his appeal to the
people.1 As soon as a preacher attacks the clergy, we are told by
Bernardinus of Siena, the audience is prone to forget everything
else; there is no better way to keep the service lively at times when
the congregation tends to get sleepy or uncomfortable because they
are too warm or too cold. Instantly all those in attendance become
wide-awake and in good spirits.2 While, on the one hand, the
dramatic religious movement caused by the itinerant popular
preachers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries originated in the
revival of the mendicant orders, on the the other hand, these same
mendicants became the objects of ridicule because of their dissolute
lifestyle. The unworthy priest of popular literature who, like a lowly
servant, reads mass for three grooten or who serves as father
confessor on a regular retainer, “pour absoudre du tout,”*! is
usually a mendicant monk.3 Molinet, who is otherwise very pious in
every respect, expresses the facile mockery directed at the
mendicant orders in a New Year’s wish:
Prions Dieu que les Jacobins
Puissent manger les Augustins
Et les Carmes soient pendus
Des cordes des Frères Menus.4+2
The dogmatic conception of poverty that was incorporated in the
mendicant orders was no longer intellectually satisfying. The formal
symbolism of poverty as a spiritual idea had been replaced by the
issue of real social misery. The new insight occurs towards the end
of the fourteenth century in England, where, earlier than in other
countries, eyes were opened to an appreciation of the economic
factors in life. The author of that strangely dreamy and misty poem
The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman is the first to focus on the
troubles of the hardworking masses and, filled with hatred of the
mendicants, of the idle, the wasteful, the phony cripples, of the
validx rnendicantes, who were the bane of the Middle Ages, to praise
the sacred nature of ordinary labor. But even in the highest
theological circles, some, such as Pierre d’Ailly, do not shy away
from contrasting the vere pauperes, the truly poor, with the
mendicant orders. There is no doubt that the serious approach to
faith taken by the devotio moderna puts its adherents somewhat in
contrast to the mendicant orders.
All we hear of day-to-day religious life shows abrupt alternations
of nearly diametrically opposed extremes. The ridicule heaped on
priests and monks and the hatred felt for them are merely the
opposite side of a general and profound attachment and veneration.
A naive perception of religious duties gives way just as quickly to an
excess of devotion. In 1437, upon the return of the French king to
his capital, there was a solemn service for the repose of the soul of
the duke of Armagnac,5 whose murder had begun the sad period of
years just endured. The people flock to witness the occasion, but
there is disappointment because no alms are distributed. The
Burgher of Paris casually reports that nearly four thousand of those
in attendance would not have gone if they had known that nothing
was to be given out. “Et le maudirent qui avant priérent pour
lui.”6*3 But these are the same Parisians who shed floods of tears at
the numerous processions and squirm at the words of itinerant
preachers. Ghillebert de Lannoy, when in Rotterdam, saw a riot
calmed by a priest who held up the Corpus Domine.7
The great contradictions and the strong shifts in religious tension
are as well revealed in the lives of the educated as they are in the
lives of the ignorant masses. Religious illumination comes time and
again with the force of a sudden blow. It is always a watered-down
repetition of the experience of St. Francis when he took the words
of the gospels to be direct orders. A knight heard the reading of the
baptismal formula for perhaps the twentieth time, but suddenly
realized the full sanctity and wonderful utility of the words and
resolved to turn the Devil away, without making the sign of the
cross, merely by remembering his own baptism.s—Le Jouvencel
witnesses a duel. The parties stand ready to swear the justice of
their cause on the Host. Suddenly the knight realizes the absolute
necessity that one of the oaths must be false, that one of the two
must of necessity be damned, and says, Don’t swear. Fight for a
stake of five hundred schillings, but don’t take an oath.9
The piety of the upper crust, with their heavy load of excessive
ostentation and pleasure seeking, has, for that reason, something of
a forced quality, like that found in the piety of the people. Charles V
of France is wont to abandon a hunt just as it reaches its most
exciting moment in order to attend a mass.10 The young Anne of
Burgundy, the bride of Bedford, the English regent in conquered
France, angers the Burgher of Paris on one occasion by splashing
excrement on a procession during one of her wild outings on
horseback. On another occasion, however, she leaves the gay
festivities of the court at midnight in order to hear matins with
Celestine nuns. Her early death was caused by an illness she
contracted during a visit to the poor sick in the Hotel Dieu.11
The contrast between piety and sinfulness are found in their
puzzling extremes in the person of Louis d'Orléans, who, among the
prominent servants of luxury and indulgence, was the most
overindulged and passionate man in the world. He had even taken
up witchcraft and refused to recant.12 This same Orléans is,
nonetheless, so devout that he has a cell in the regular dormitory of
the Celestines where he participates in the cloistered life, hears
matins at midnight and, on occasion, mass five or six times a day.13
There is a cruel mixture of religion and crime in the life of Gilles de
Rais, who, in the middle of his murder of children at Machecoul,
sponsored a service in honor of the Blessed Innocents for the bliss of
his soul. He was astonished when his judges accused him of heresy.
Many join piety with less bloody sins; there are many examples of
devout worldliness: the barbaric Gaston Phébus, Count of Foix; the
frivolous King René; the refined Charles d’Orléans. John of Bavaria,
most feared and most ambitious, pays a visit in disguise to Lidwina
van Schiedam, to consult about the state of his soul.14 Jean
Coustain, the traitorous servant of Philip the Good, a godless man
who hardly ever attended mass and never gave alms, when in the
hands of his executioner gave himself to God in a passionate plea
voiced in his coarse Burgundian dialect.15
Philip the Good, himself, is one of the most striking examples of
the intertwining of piety and worldliness. This man of extravagant
festivities and numerous bastards, of political calculation, of
tremendous pride and rage, is an earnest pietist. He remains on his
knees long after mass is over. For four days a week, and during all
the vigils of Our Lady and the apostles, he fasts on bread and water.
Sometimes he does not eat anything until four in the afternoon. He
gives many alms, always secretly.16 After the surprise attack on
Luxembourg he remained so long after mass immersed in his
breviary and, after that, in special prayers of thanksgiving, that his
entourage, waiting on horseback because the battle was not over,
became impatient: the duke, they insisted, could easily make up
saying his Our Fathers at another time. Warned that delay was
dangerous, the duke responded merely, “Si Dieu m’a donné victoire,
il la me gardera.”17*4
We should not see hypocrisy or conceited bigotry in all this, but
rather a state of tension between two spiritual poles that is no
longer possible for the modern mind. For them, it is possible
because of the perfect dualism between the sinful world and the
Kingdom of God. In the medieval mind, all the higher, purer
feelings were absorbed by religion so that the natural and sensuous
drives were bound to be consciously rejected and allowed to sink to
the level of sinful worldliness. Two views of life took shape side by
side in the medieval mind: the piously ascetic view that pulled all
ethical conceptions into itself and the worldly mentality, completely
left to the devil, that took revenge with ever greater abandon. If one
of the two dominates, then one encounters either saints or dissolute
sinners. As a rule, they remain in balance, although the scales
oscillate violently. One sees passionate human beings come into
view whose fully blooming sinfulness makes their overflowing pity
break out all the more vehemently.
When we observe how medieval poets compose the most pious
songs of praise alongside all kinds of profane and obscene pieces, as
do so many poets, such as Deschamps, Antoine de la Salle, and Jean
Molinet, then we have even less cause to attribute these productions
to hypothetical periods of worldliness and introspection as we do in
the case of modern poets. The contradiction, no matter how
incomprehensible to us, must be accepted.
There occur bizarre blends of the love of ostentation and strong
devotion. The unrestrained desire to decorate and depict all aspects
of life and thought with colorful embellishments and forms is not
limited to the overburdening of religion with paintings, the work of
the goldsmith, and sculpture. Even spiritual life itself is occasionally
embellished because of the hunger for color and glamor. Brother
Thomas complains bitterly of all the luxury and ostentation, but the
platform from which he speaks has been draped by the people with
the most splendid tapestries that could be found.18 Philipe de
Mézières is the perfect type of the splendor-loving pietist. He
decided the most minute details of the clothing for the Order of the
Passion that he intended to found. The object of his dream
resembles a festival of color. The knights should wear red, green,
scarlet, or azure depending on their rank; the Grand Master, white.
White was also the color of the ceremonial dress. The cross should
be red, the belts of leather or silk with horn buckles and ornaments
of gilded brass. Boots were to be black and capes red. The dress of
the brothers, servants, priests, and women were also described. 19
Nothing came of the order; Philippe de Méziéres remained all his
life the great dreamer of crusades and maker of plans. But in the
cloister of the Celestines in Paris he found the place that could
satisfy him; as strict as the order was, so the church and cloister
sparkled with gold and precious stones, a mausoleum for princes
and princesses.20 Christine de Pisan regarded this church as beauty
perfected. Méziéres spent some time there as a lay brother, took
part in the strict life of the cloister, but remained at the same time
in contact with the great lords and artistic minds of his time; a
mundane artistic counterpart to Gerard Groote.21 His princely
friend Orléans was also attracted to this place, where he found the
moments of reflection that punctuated his debauched life, and there
too, he found his early grave. It is certainly no accident that those
two lovers of splendor Louis d'Orléans and his uncle Philip the Bold
of Burgundy chose as the places to indulge their love of art the
houses of the strictest cloistered orders, where the contrast between
the lives of the monks and the splendor of the decorations could be
felt most strongly: Orléans in those of the Celestines, Burgundy in
those of the Carthusians at Champmol near Dijon.
Old King René discovered a hermit while on a hunt near Angers:
a priest who had given up his sinecure and lived on black bread and
berries. The king was moved by his virtue and had a hut and small
chapel built for him. For himself, he made a garden and built a
modest garden house, which he decorated with paintings and
allegories. He frequently went to “son cher ermitage de Reculée”*5
to converse with his artists and scholars.22 Is this medieval, is it
Renaissance, or is it not eighteenth century?
A duke of Savoy becomes a hermit with a gilded belt, red cap,
golden cross, and good wine. 23
It is only a step from that devotional splendor to expressions of
hyperbolic humility, which in turn are themselves full-fledged
extravagance. Olivier de la Marche retained from his boyhood
memories the arrival of King Jacques de Bourbon of Naples, who,
under the influence of the saintly Colette, had renounced the world.
The king, shabbily dressed, was carried in a cart, “telle sans aultre
difference que les civières en quoy l’on porte les fiens et les ordures
communement.” Behind came an elegant courtly escort. “Et ouys
racompter et dire”—says La Marche, full of admiration—“que en
toutes les villes où il venoit, il faisoit semblables entrées par
humilité.” 2476
Such picturesque self-deprecation is not found in the
prescriptions, recommended by many holy examples, for funerals,
which are expected to be fitting representations of the deceased’s
unworthiness. The holy Pierre Thomas, bosom friend and spiritual
teacher of Philippe de Mézières, feeling his approaching death, had
himself put in a sack, a rope put around his neck and placed on the
ground. This was his imitation, much exaggerated, of St. Francis,
who had himself put on the ground as he lay dying. Bury me, said
Pierre Thomas, in the entrance to the choir, if possible, so that
everyone will have to step on my body, even goats and dogs.25
Mézières, his admiring disciple, takes his turn at outdoing his
master in fantastic humility. A heavy iron chain is to be put around
his neck during his last hours. As soon as he has given up the ghost,
he is to be dragged by his feet, naked, to the choir. There he is to be
left until his burial with his arms spread in the form of a cross, tied
with three ropes to a board that is to take the place of an
expensively ornamented coffin upon which someone might have
been tempted to paint his vain worldly motto, “se Dieu l’eust tant
hay qu'il fust mors és cours des princes de ce monde.” *7 The board,
covered with two ells of canvas or coarse black linen, is to be
dragged in the same manner to the burial pit into which the naked
body of the poor pilgrim is to be thrown as it is. A small grave
marker is to be erected. Only his good friend in God, Martin, and
the executors of his last will are to be notified of his death.
It is almost self-evident that a mind given so much to protocol
and ceremony and the ever fashioning of new plans with greater
and greater details would leave many testaments. There is no
mention, in the later documents, of the provisions of 1392 and
when he died in 1405 he was given an ordinary funeral, dressed in
the garb of his beloved Celestine order; there were two tomb
inscriptions, which most likely were composed by him. 26
To the ideal of holiness, one could almost say to the romanticism
of holiness, the fifteenth century did not yet contribute anything
that heralded the new age. Even the Renaissance did not change the
ideal of holiness. Unaffected by the strong currents guiding culture
into new paths, the ideal of holiness remained, both before and
after the great crisis of the Reformation, what it always was. The
saint is as timeless as the mystic. The types of saints in the Counter-
Reformation are the same as those of the later Middle Ages, and
these do not differ in any special way from those of the earlier
Middle Ages. There are, in the one or the other period, some who
are great activists, saints of the fiery word or the passionately
inspired deed: including, on the one hand, such as Ignatius Loyola,
Francis Xavier, and Karl Borromeus; on the other, Bernardine of
Sienna, Vincent Ferrer, and John of Capistrano. These are joined by
the mystics who find rapture in contemplation, similar to the types
of saints found in Islam and Buddhism, Aloysius Gonzaga in the
sixteenth century; Francis de Paola, Colette, and Peter of
Luxembourg in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Between
these two types are all those who share something of both extremes;
as a matter of fact, they may on occasion even combine these
extreme characteristics in their highest degree.
It might even be possible to place the romanticism of saintliness
on an equal footing with the romanticism of knighthood; both arise
from a need to realize certain aspects of an ideal life form in the life
of an individual or in literature. It is remarkable that the
romanticism of holiness has at all times taken much more delight in
the fantastically exciting extremes of abstinence and humility than
in great elevating deeds of religious culture. Holiness is not attained
by churchly social service, no matter how great, but rather through
wondrous piety. The great energetic figures only gain a holy
reputation when their deeds are bathed in the glow of the
supernatural. This rules out Nicholas of Cusa, but not his fellow
spirit, Denis the Carthusian.27
In this context, it is of greatest interest for us to observe how the
circles of refined splendor, those circles that venerated the knightly
ideal and continued to do so after the Middle Ages were over, dealt
with the ideal of holiness. Though their contacts with this ideal
form were not so numerous, they did occur. The princely circles
managed a few times to produce a saint. One of these is Charles de
Blois. On his mother’s side he sprang from the house of Valois and,
through his marriage with the heir of Brittany, Jeanne de
Penthiévre, became involved in a dispute about succession that took
the greater part of his life. Under the terms of his marriage contract,
he was obligated to adopt the coat of arms and battle cry of the
dukedom. He found himself confronted by another pretender, Jean
de Montfort, and the ensuing conflict over Brittany coincided with
the beginning of the Hundred Years War. The defense of Montfort’s
claim was one of the complications that prompted Edward III to
come to France. The count of Blois accepted battle like a true knight
and fought as well as the best leaders of his time. Taken prisoner in
1347, just prior to the siege of Calais, he was held in England until
1356. He resumed the fight for the dukedom in 1362 and was killed
in 1364 near Aurai while fighting bravely at the side of Bertrand du
Guesclin and Beaumanoir.
This war hero, whose life differed in none of its external features
from those of so many princely pretenders and leaders of his time,
had led a life of strict austerity since the days of his youth. When he
was a boy, his father had kept him away from edifying books
because such books would be inappropriate for someone of his
calling. He slept on straw on the ground next to the bed of his wife,
and a hair shirt was found under his armor at the time of his death
in battle. He took confession each evening before going to bed,
because, as he said, no Christian should go to sleep with his sins
unforgiven. During his captivity in London, he was wont to visit
cemeteries and, on his knees, recite the De profundis. The Breton
page whom he asked to recite the responses refused, arguing that
these locations were the burial grounds of those who had killed his
parents and friends and had burned their houses.
After his liberation, he intends to walk barefoot from La Roche-
Derrien, where he began his imprisonment, to Tréguier, the site of a
shrine of St. Ives, the patron of Brittany, whose biography he had
written while a captive. The people hear about his plans and strew
his path with straw and blankets. The count of Blois, however, takes
a different route and ends up with feet so sore that he cannot walk
for fifteen weeks.28 Immediately following his death, his princely
relatives, among them his brother-in-law, Louis of Anjou, attempt to
have him canonized. The proceedings, which resulted in
beatification, took place in Angers in the year 1371.
The strange thing, if we can rely on Froissart, is that this same
Charles de Blois had a bastard. “La fu occis en bon couvenant li dis
messires Charles de Blois, le viaire sus ses ennemis, et uns siens filz
bastars qui s’appeloit messires Jehans de Blois, et pluiseur aultre
chevalier et escuier de Bretagne.”29*® Are we to reject this as an
evident falsehood?30 Or should we assume that the combination of
piety and sensuality that was present in figures such as Louis
d’Orléans and Philip the Good was even more noticeably present in
the count de Blois?
Such a question does not arise about the life of another nobleman
of that time, Pierre of Luxembourg. This scion of the house of the
Dukes of Luxembourg, which during the fourteenth century held
such a respectable place in the German empire as well as in the
courts of France and Burgundy, is a fitting example of what William
James calls “the under-witted saint,”31 whose narrow mind can only
exist in a fearfully closed-in little world of pious thinking. He was
born in 1369, not long before his father was killed in the fighting
near Baesweiler (1371) between Brabant and Geldern. His spiritual
history takes us back again to the cloister of the Celestines in Paris,
where the eight-year-old boy came in contact with Philippe de
Méziéres. He was already overburdened with church offices as a
mere boy, first with different cathedral sinecures, and then, at the
age of fifteen, with the Bishopric of Metz and still later with a
cardinalship. He died in 1387, not yet eighteen, and Avignon
immediately went to work to secure his canonization. The most
important authorities were pressed into service for this task: The
King of France issued the petition and it was supported by the
cathedral chapter of Paris and by the University of Paris. During the
proceedings of 1389 the greatest notables of France appeared as
witnesses: Pierre’s brother André of Luxembourg, Louis of Bourbon,
and Enguerrand de Coucy. Owing to the negligence of the Avignon
pope, sainthood was not bestowed (beatitude was proclaimed in
1527), but the veneration justified by the petition had been
recognized long before this and developed without interference. At
the spot in Avignon where the body was buried and where daily the
most remarkable miracles were reported, the king founded a
Celestine monastery in imitation of the monastery in Paris that was
the preferred sanctuary of the princely circles in those days. The
dukes of Orléans, Berry and Burgundy, came to lay the first stones
for the king.32 Pierre Salmon tells us how he heard mass in the
chapel of the holy one a few years later.33
There is something pitiful about the image of the princely ascetic
who died so young, conveyed by the witnesses during the
proceedings about his canonization. Peter of Luxembourg was an
unusually tall boy, sickly, who even as a child knew nothing but the
seriousness of a fearful and strict faith. He reproached his little
brother who had laughed, because while it was written that Our
Lord had cried, it was not recorded that he ever laughed. “Douls,
courtois et debonnaire,” Froissart calls him, “vierge de son corps,
moult large aumosnier. Le plus du jour et de la nuit il estoit en
orisons. En toute sa vye il n’y ot fors humilité.”34*9 Initially his
aristocratic elders attempted to make him give up his world-
renouncing plans. When he spoke about his desire to become an
itinerant priest, he was told, you are much too tall; everyone would
instantly recognize you and you wouldn’t be able to stand the cold.
How could you preach in favor of a crusade? For a moment we hear
the groundtone of that small, rigid mind: “Je vous bien,” says Peter,
“qu’on me veut faire venir de bonne voye a la malvaise: certes,
certes, si je m’y mets, je feray tant que tout le monde parlera de
moy.”*10 Sire, responds Master Jean de Marche, his confessor, there
is no one who wants you to do evil, only good.
It is evident that the noble relatives begin to feel admiration and
pride about the case once the ascetic inclinations of the youngster
prove to be irrevocable. A saint, and such a young saint, of their
kind and dwelling among them! Try to imagine the poor sickly
youth weighed down by the burden of church offices, living in the
midst of the extravagant splendor and arrogance of the court life of
Berry and Burgundy, himself covered with dirt and parasites and
always concerned with his small miserable sins. Confession itself
became a bad habit with him. Every day he recorded his sins on a
piece of paper and, when prevented from doing so on a journey, he
made up for it by long hours spent recording sins after the travels
were completed. He was observed writing at night and checking his
list by candlelight. He would get up in darkness to take confession
from one of his chaplains. Sometimes he knocked in vain at the
door of their chambers; they pretended to be deaf. If admitted, he
would read his sins from his note sheets. These confessions
increased from two or three times a week to twice a day as he
approached the end. During his final days his confessor was not
allowed to leave his side. He finally died of consumption and having
asked to be buried like a pauper, a whole box full of pieces of paper
was found on which the sins of his little life had been recorded day
by day.35
There is yet another case that provides evidence illuminating the
relationship between court circles and saintliness: the stay of Saint
Francis of Paola at the court of Louis XI. The particular type of
piousness of the king is so well known that there is no need to
describe it in detail at this point. Louis, “qui achetoit la grace de
Dieu et de la Vierge Marie á plus grans deniers que oncques ne fist
roy,”36*!! shows all the qualities of the most overt and complacent
fetishism. His veneration for relics and passion for pilgrimages and
processions seems to lack any of the higher impulses and any
shadow of awed restraint. He treats sacred objects as if they were
expensive home remedies. The cross of St. Laud that was kept in
Angers had to be brought to Nantes for no other purpose than to
have an oath taken on it.37 An oath on the cross of St. Laud counted
more to Louis than any other oath. When the connétable of Saint Pol
is called into the presence of the king and asks the king to swear to
his safety on the cross of St Laud, the king responds, any oath but
that one.38 When his end, which he feared above all other things,
approaches, the most precious relics are sent to him from
everywhere. The pope sends him, among other things, the corporale
of St. Peter himself; even the Great Turk offers a collection of relics
that were still in Constantinople. On the buffet next to the king’s
sickbed is the sacred Ampoule itself, which had been brought from
Reims, from whence it had never been removed before. Some said
that the king wanted to test the efficacy of the container of
ointment by having his whole body salved.39 Such religious
impulses are usually found only in the history of the Merovingians.
It is hardly possible to draw a line between Louis’s passion for
collecting exotic animals such as reindeer and elands and his
passion for precious relics. He corresponds with Lorenzo de’Medici
about the ring of Saint Zanobi, a local Florentine saint, and about
an “agnus dei,” the plant-like growth also known as “agnus
scythicus,” which was regarded as an exotic rarity. 40 In the strange
household in the castle of Plessis lès Tours during Louis’s last days
one could find pious intercessors and musicians wandering about
together. “At this time the king had a large number of musicians
come with their strings and wood-winds. He provided quarters for
them in Saint-Cosme near Tours. Some 120 of them gathered there,
among them many shepherds from around Poitou. Sometimes they
played in front of the royal apartments, but without seeing the king.
The king was not only to enjoy the aforementioned instruments in
order to pass the time, they were also intended to keep him awake.
He also summoned a large number of bigots, both male and female,
and devotees, hermits and saintly people, to come and pray to God
without interruption that the king might not die, but go on
living.”41
Even Saint Francis of Paola, the Calabrian hermit, who managed
to outdo the humility of the Minorites by founding the Minims,
became, in a literal sense, the object of Louis’s collecting mania.
During his final illness, the king summoned the saint with the
expressed intent that the prayers of the saint might prolong his
life.42 After several messages to the King of Naples had not borne
fruit, the king, through diplomatically intervening with the pope,
managed to secure the arrival, very much against Francis’s will, of
the miracle man. A noble entourage accompanied the monk from
Italy.43—But when he arrived, Louis was not convinced of his
authenticity, “because he had been cheated by several persons
operating under the pretense of saintliness.” Following suggestions
from his personal physician, he had the holy man kept under
surveillance and had his virtue tested in a variety of ways.44 The
saint passed all tests with distinction. His asceticism was of the most
barbaric kind, reminiscent of the practices of his countrymen of the
tenth century, St. Niles and St. Romauld. He flees at the sight of a
woman. He has not touched a coin since he was a boy. He usually
sleeps standing up or leaning on something; he never has his hair
cut or his beard shaved. He never eats meat and is served only
roots.45 The king is still personally engaged during his last month in
writing to secure proper food for his strange holy man: “Monsieur
de Genas, je vous prie de m’envoyer des citrons et des oranges
douces et des poires muscadelles et des pastenargues, et c’est pour
le saint homme qui ne mange ny chair ny poisson: et vous me ferés
ung fort grant plaisir.”46*!2 He never refers to him other than as “le
saint homme,” so that Commines, who met the saint on several
occasions, does not seem to have known his name.47 But he was
also called “le saint homme” by those who ridiculed the arrival of
this weird guest or did not believe in his holiness, such as, for
instance, the king’s physician, Jacques Coitier.48 Commines couches
his reports in terms of sober reservations. “Il est encores vif,” he
concludes, “par quoy se pourrait bien changer ou en myeulx ou in
pis, par quoy me tays, pour se que plusieurs se mocquoient de la
venue de ce hermite, qu’ilz appelloient ‘sainct homme.””*15
However, Commines himself testifies that no one had seen “de si
saincte vie, ne où il semblast myeulx que le Sainct Esperit parlast
par sa bouche.”;14 And the learned theologians of Paris, Jan
Standonck and Jean Quintin, who had been dispatched to talk to
the saintly man about founding a convent of Minims in Paris, were
most profoundly moved and returned to Paris cured of their
prejudices. 49
The interest the dukes of Burgundy take in the saints of their time
is less self-seeking than that displayed by Louis XI in Saint Francis
of Paola. It is noticeable that more than one of the great visionaries
and ascetics regularly appears as intermediary or adviser in political
matters. This is the case with St. Colette, the blessed Denis of Ryckel
and the Carthusian. Colette was treated by the house of Burgundy
with particular distinction; Philip the Good and his mother,
Margarita of Bavaria, knew her personally and sought her advice.50
She negotiated complicated matters between the houses of France,
Savoy, and Burgundy. Charles the Bold, Mary and Maximilian, and
Margaret of Austria repeatedly pressed for her canonization. More
important yet is the role played by Denis the Carthusian in the
public life of his time. He, too, was in repeated contact with the
house of Burgundy and acted as adviser to Philip the Good. Along
with Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, whom he had accompanied on his
famous journey throughout the German empire, he was received, in
1451, by the duke in Brussels. Denis, who is constantly depressed by
the feeling that things are going badly for the church and
Christendom and that the great calamity is imminent, asks in a
vision, Lord, will the Turks reach Rome? He reminds the duke of the
crusade.51 The “inclytus devotus ac optimus princeps et dux,” 15 to
whom he dedicates his tract on the princely life, cannot be anyone
other than Philip. Charles the Bold joins Denis in his efforts to found
a Carthusian house at Hertogenbosch in honor of St. Sophia of
Constantinople, whom the duke understandably regards as a saint
whereas she is really the figure of eternal wisdom.52 Duke Arnold of
Geldern asks Denis for advice about his quarrel with his son
Adolf.53
Not only princes, but also numerous noblemen, clerics, and
burghers came for advice to his cell at Roermond; he was constantly
busy resolving innumerable difficulties, doubts and questions of
conscience.
Denis the Carthusian is the perfect type of the powerful religious
enthusiast produced by the waning Middle Ages. His life was
incredibly energetic; he combined the ecstasies of the great mystics,
the wildest asceticism, the continuous visions and revelations of a
spiritual seer with a vast activity as a theological writer and
practical spiritual adviser. He was as close to the great mystics as he
was to the practical Windesheimers such as Brugman, for whom he
writes his famous guide for the Christian life,54 or to Nicholas of
Cusa or even to the witch hunters or those who enthusiastically
labored for the abolition of clerical abuses.55 His energies must
have been inexhaustible. His writings fill forty-five quarto volumes.
It is as if through him the entire stream of medieval theology flows
once again. “Qui Dionysium legit, nihil non legit”*!© was said by
the theologians of the sixteenth century. Responding to a request
from an old lay brother, Willem, he writes about the mutual
recognition of souls in the hereafter with the same touch with
which he handles the most profound questions of a philosophical
nature. He promises Brother Willem that he will write as simply as
possible and says that Willem can translate it into Dutch.56
Everything his great predecessors had thought, he expresses in an
endless flood of simply expressed thoughts. It has all the
characteristics of a late work: summarizing, concluding, breaking no
new ground. The quotations from Bernard of Clairvaux or Hugo of
Saint Victor sparkle like jewels on the simple unicolor garment of
Denis’s prose. All of his works were written, proofread, improved,
indexed, and illuminated by himself until at the end of his life he
ended his writing with a well-chosen quotation: “Ad securae
taciturnitatis portum me transferre intendo,—I will go now to the
haven of secure taciturnity.”57
He knew no rest. Daily he recited nearly all the Psalms; at least
half are necessary, he declares. During every activity, dressing and
undressing, he prays. After midnight mass, when others go to rest,
he remains awake. He is strong and tall and his body can withstand
everything. I have an iron head and a copper stomach, he says.
Without disgust, indeed by preference, he enjoys spoiled food, such
as wormy butter, cherries partially consumed by snails; these kinds
of parasites have no deadly poisons, he says, one can eat them with
confidence. He hangs oversalted herrings out until they rot; I would
rather eat food that stinks than that which is too salty.58
He accomplishes the entire mental work of the deepest
philosophical speculation and definition, not in the context of an
even-tempered and undisturbed scholarly life, but with a mind
subject to the constant upheavals of receptiveness to every dramatic
stirring of the supernatural. As a boy he got up by the light of the
moon because he thought it was time to go to school.59 He stutters;
he is called “Taterbek” by a devil whom he tried to exorcise. He
sees that the room of the dying Lady of Vlodrop is full of devils;
they knock his stick out of his hand. No one has experienced the
dread of the “Four Last Things” to the extent he has. The violent
attacks of the devil upon the dying is a repeated subject of his
sermons. He constantly communicates with the deceased. Have
spirits often appeared to him? asks one of the brothers. O, hundreds
and hundreds of times, he answers. He sees his father in Purgatory
and resists the impulse to free him. He is constantly confronted by
apparitions, revelations, and visions, but is reluctant to speak about
them. He is ashamed of the ecstasies he experiences as a result of
external stimuli: above all music, which sometimes seizes him in the
midst of a noble gathering listening to his wisdom and exhortations.
Among the honorary names of the great theologians, his is Doctor
Ecstaticus.
We should not think that such a great figure as Denis the
Carthusian was spared the sort of suspicions and ridicule heaped on
the strange miracle man of Louis XI. He, too, had to wage a constant
battle against the denunciations and mockeries of the world. In the
mentality of the fifteenth century we already see the stirrings of
resentment and rejection of the highest expressions of medieval
faith; stirrings that exist side by side with unrestrained devotion and
enthusiasm.
