Textual and Visual Representations of Power and Justice in Medieval France

Manuscripts and Early Printed Books

Rosalind Brown-Grant, Anne D. Hedeman, Bernard Ribémont, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Anne D. Hedeman, Bernard Ribémont

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351895453
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Histoire
• Categoria: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

Thoroughly interdisciplinary in approach, this volume examines how concepts such as the exercising of power, the distribution of justice, and transgression against the law were treated in both textual and pictorial terms in works produced and circulated in medieval French manuscripts and early printed books. Analysing texts ranging from romances, political allegories, chivalric biographies, and catalogues of famous men and women, through saints' lives, mystery plays and Books of Hours, to works of Roman, canon and customary law, these studies offer new insights into the diverse ways in which the language and imagery of politics and justice permeated French culture, particularly in the later Middle Ages. Organized around three closely related themes - the prince as a just ruler, the figure of the judge, and the role of the queen in relation to matters of justice - the issues addressed in these studies, such as what constitutes a just war, what treatment should be meted out to prisoners, what personal qualities are needed for the role of lawgiver, and what limits are placed on women's participation in judicial processes, are ones that are still the subject of debate today. What the contributors show above all is the degree of political engagement on the part of writers and artists responsible for cultural production in this period. With their textual strategies of exemplification, allegorization, and satirical deprecation, and their visual strategies of hierarchical ordering, spatial organization and symbolic allusion, these figures aimed to show that the pen and paintbrush could aspire to being as mighty as the sword wielded by Lady Justice herself.

1
Translating Power for the Princes of the Blood: Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes

Anne D. Hedeman

Résumé français: Le Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes de Boccace, traduit par Laurent de Premierfait, offre un aperçu des attitudes à l’endroit du pouvoir et de la justice qu’expriment visuellement les enluminures des manuscrits jumeaux fabriqués vers 1410–1411 pour Jean, duc de Berry, et Jean sans Peur, duc de Bourgogne, qui, à cette date, sont en conflit. Réalisés simultanément sous la direction de Laurent, les manuscrits ducaux sont richement enluminés. Ils contiennent des enluminures accouplées qui sont uniques et qui mettent en avant des portions du texte de Boccace que Laurent a développées dans sa traduction. Certaines de ces enluminures rappellent des changements de gouvernement dans les moments de tension, en réponse aux ambitions des tyrans. L’analyse de ces enluminuresàla lumière du récit du passé antique qu’elles illustrent et du contexte de leur réalisation montre comment les images de pouvoir étaient récupérées par les adversaires des deux camps pendant la guerre civile française.

The Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Laurent de Premierfait’s translation ca. 1409 of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1358), offers a rare window into attitudes towards power in early fifteenth-century Paris, particularly in the densely illuminated copies of the second version. Laurent had first translated Boccaccio in 1400 for Jean de Chanteprime, but revised and amplified it in a second version completed in 1409.¹ Boccaccio’s De casibus described Fortune’s effects on famous men and women from Adam and Eve to King John the Good of France. Because the stories it contains are classic tales from biblical, ancient, and medieval history, manuscripts containing the Des cas present an opportunity to examine the role that visualized tales of the past played in reinforcing fifteenth-century French viewers’ concerns about power and justice in their present. I will consider how these concerns were expressed visually in the “twinned” copies made around 1410–11 for Duke John of Berry and Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy (Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, Mss. fr. 190/1 and 190/2 and Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 5193) by examining the resonances between visual representation of the past and political polemic from the civil conflicts that broke out in France just as these books were being made.

These two manuscripts were created simultaneously and almost certainly under Laurent de Premierfait’s direction, as I have suggested elsewhere.² They are densely illustrated with 147 and 150 miniatures respectively, all but one of which are a single column wide, and they were painted in at least three artistic styles. As Millard Meiss first observed, the images done in Bibliothèque de Genève, Mss. fr. 190/1 and 190/2 by the Luçon illuminators and in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 5193 by the Cité des Dames illuminators share many iconographical features. In contrast, the handful of illuminations painted in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 5193 by Adelphi, Bedford, and Boucicaut illuminators are different, suggesting that the Cité des Dames and Luçon illuminators had access to each other’s work or worked in close association on the production of these manuscripts. Apparently certain folios were farmed out to artists at a different location for completion.³

Images were an essential component of French translations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Laurent de Premierfait learned how to exploit them in order to reach the noble audience for whom he worked. Laurent had been celebrated in Avignon in the late Middle Ages as a Latin poet and, once he moved to Paris ca. 1398, was in demand as a translator of Cicero, Aristotle, and Boccaccio. Scholars have worked on his translations, but his interactions with book producers in Paris, which are just coming to light, are less well known.⁴ His collaboration with members of the book trade is of particular interest, however, because through it he became more and more skilled in using sophisticated visual rhetoric to visually translate texts originating in a culture removed in time or geography for fifteenth-century French readers. One of the most notable visual rhetorical practices employed in Laurent’s illuminated translations was amplification, which he outlined in the prologue to his second translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus in 1409:

[I]l convient se me samble que les livres latin en leur translation soient muez et convertiz en tel langaige que les liseurs et escouteurs d’iceulx puissent comprendre l’effect de la sentence sanz trop grant ou trop long traveil d’entendement … Et par ainsi ce livre moult estroit et brief en paroles est entre tous aultres livres le plus ample et le plus long a le droit expliquer par sentences ramenables aux histoires.

En faisant doncques ceste besoingne longue et espendue et recueillie de divers historians, par le moyen de la grace divine, je vueil principalment moy ficher en deux choses, c’est assavoir mettre en cler langaige les sentences du livre et les histoires qui par l’auteur sont si briévement touchees que il n’en met fors seulement les noms. Je les assommerai selon la verité des vieils historians qui au long les escrivirent.⁵

[It is necessary, it seems to me, that Latin books should be changed and converted in their translation into such language that their readers and listeners can understand the effect of the sentence without enormous or long efforts of understanding … and thus this book, which is very concise and brief in words, is the most ample and long among all other books so as to explain correctly through sentences that restore stories.

Thus in making this long and diffuse work gathered from diverse historians by means of divine grace, I want principally to accomplish two things: that is to say to put into clear language the sentences of the book and the stories that the author touches on so briefly that he scarcely puts anything but the names. I will summarize them according to the truth of old historians who wrote about them at length.]⁶

Laurent claims that he will do this with minimal deviation from Boccaccio’s original text:

Et si ne vueil pas dire que Jehan Boccace acteur de ce livre, qui en son temps fut tresgrant et renommé historian, ait delessié les dictes histoires par ignorance de les non avoir sceues ou par orgueil de les non deigner escrire, mais car il les avoit si promptes a la main et si fichees en memoire il les reputa communes et cogneues aux aultres comme a soy. Afin doncques que le livre ait toutes ses parties et soit complet en soy, je les mettrai briéfment senz delesser que trespou le texte de l’auteur.

[This is not to say that Jean Boccaccio, author of this book, who in his time was a very great and famous historian, abandoned the said histories because of ignorance, not knowing them, or because of pride that he did not deign to write them, because he had them so promptly in hand and so firmly in memory, he assumed they were as common and well-known to others as to himself. Thus in order that the book have all its parts and be complete in itself, I will put them down briefly without deviating much from the text of the author.]⁷

As this part of his prologue explains, in order to make Boccaccio understandable to his French audience Laurent decided to amplify, while remaining faithful to Boccaccio’s meaning.

Laurent’s textual amplification offers insight into the visual amplifications (see the Appendix) that appear in the densely illuminated manuscripts of the Des cas that he supervised for John of Berry and John the Fearless. The dukes’ manuscripts share seven unique paired pictures, visual amplifications that stretch a story through pictures to create a pause that draws special attention to portions of Boccaccio’s text. John the Fearless’s manuscript contains three additional unique visual amplifications, and both manuscripts share an additional eight that are not unique, but only appear in a limited number of contemporary illuminated manuscripts of the Des cas. Several of these visual amplifications are of interest for the study of power and justice, because of their contemporary fifteenth-century resonances. They offer examples of justice in cases where there is governmental change, usually in response to the overweening ambition of tyrants.

I would like to consider three of these important visual amplifications and analyse them in relation to John of Berry and John the Fearless, the owners of the two earliest manuscripts in which they appear. These men were powerful princes of the blood who were opponents in the political strife surrounding the mad king, Charles VI, at the time these manuscripts were made. Reading the images against both the narrative of the antique past that they illustrate and the history and visual culture of the fifteenth-century present in which the dukes lived, suggests how opponents in the French civil conflict may have interpreted past images of power and politics as statements about their present.

The second decade of the fifteenth century when these books were made was a time of growing conflict amongst the princes of the blood.⁸ Charles VI’s madness first began to show in the late fourteenth century; by the early fifteenth century a system of governing councils was devised to ensure that the government ran smoothly whether the king were incapacitated or not. The structure of the councils varied, but usually included the queen, the princes of the blood, and one in a series of underage dauphins. By the early fifteenth century, two opposing factions had formed. One coalesced around Duke Louis of Orléans, the brother of King Charles VI and John of Berry, the king’s uncle, among others. John the Fearless, the king’s cousin, who became duke of Burgundy in 1404, headed the opposing Burgundian faction. The relationship between the cousins Louis of Orléans and John the Fearless deteriorated, and was so toxic by 1407 that the Burgundian duke arranged Louis’s assassination. In 1408, an official justification of John the Fearless’s actions was written by Jean Petit, read aloud at court, and circulated in parchment and paper versions.⁹ The Orléans family rebutted it publicly in both 1408 and 1411.¹⁰ Relations went from bad to worse, attempts at negotiation failed, and the League of Gien in April 1410 effectively created an Armagnac party opposed to the Burgundian party, thus marking the beginning of the civil war.

The Destruction of Jerusalem and the French Civil War

The most striking double image visual amplification in the dukes’ manuscripts (Figures 1.1–1.2) relates to the civil war. Shared by four contemporary manuscripts of the Des cas during its brief period of popularit...