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French literature
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The Middle Ages
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"Song of
Roland"
Gottfried von Strassburg
Wace
Chretien
De Troyes
FOUR ARTHURIAN ROMANCES: "EREC ET ENIDE",
"CLIGES", "YVAIN", AND "LANCELOT"
Jean Froissart
Marie De France
Bernard de Ventadour
Jaufre Rudel
Bertran de Born
Arnaut Daniel
"Reynard The Fox"
Guillaume de Lorris
Jean de Meun
Christine de Pisan
Guillaume de Machaut
Eustache Deschamps
Alain Chartier
Francois
Villon
"Ballades"
Robert
de Boron
Antoine de la Sale
Geoffroy of Villehardouin
Jean, sire de Joinville
Philippe de Commynes
Jehan Bodel
Adam de la Halle
Peter Abelard
"The
Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise"
Alexander of Hales
Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides)
John of Jandun
John of Mirecourt
Peter Lombard
Nicholas of Autrecourt
William of Auvergne
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INTRODUCTION
The body of written works in the French language
produced within the geographic and political
boundaries of France. The French language was one of
the five major Romance languages to develop from
Vulgar Latin as a result of the Roman occupation of
western Europe.
Since the Middle Ages, France has enjoyed an
exceptional position in European intellectual life.
Though its literary culture has no single figure
whose influence can be compared to that of Italy’s
Dante or England’s
Shakespeare, successive periods
have seen its writers and their language exercise an
influence far beyond its borders. In medieval times,
because of the far-reaching and complex system of
feudal allegiances (not least the links of France
and England), the networks of the monastic orders,
the universality of Latin, and the similarities of
the languages derived from Latin, there was a
continual process of exchange, in form and content,
among the literatures of western Europe. The
evolution of the nation-states and the rise in
prestige of vernacular languages gradually eroded
the unifying force of these relationships. From the
early modern period onward, France developed its own
distinctive and many-stranded cultural tradition,
which, while never losing sight of the riches of the
medieval base and the Judeo-Christian biblical
tradition, has come chiefly to be thought of as
Mediterranean in its allegiance, rooted in the
imitation of Classical models as these were mediated
through the great writers and thinkers of
Renaissance Italy.
The version of French tradition that began in the
17th century and has established itself in the
cultural histories and the schoolbooks was given
fresh force in the early 20th century by the
philosopher-poet
Paul Valéry and, especially, his
English admirers in the context of the political and
cultural struggle with Germany. In this version,
French culture prizes reason, formal perfection, and
purity of language and is to be admired for its
thinkers as much as for its writers. By the end of
the ancien régime, the logic of
Descartes, the
restraint of Racine, and the wit of
Voltaire were
seen as the hallmarks of French culture and were
emulated throughout the courts and salons of the
Continent. Other aspects of this legacy—the
skepticism of
Descartes, calling into question
authoritarian axioms; the violent, self-seeking
intensity of
Racinian passion, fueled by repression
and guilt; and the abrasive irony that
Voltaire
turned against established bigotry, prejudice, and
injustice—were less well viewed in the circles of
established order. Frequently forced underground,
these and their inheritors nevertheless gave energy
to the revolutionary ethos that constituted another,
equally French, contribution to the radical
traditions of western Europe.
The political and philosophical revolutions
installed by the end of the 18th century, in the
name of science and reason, were accompanied by
transformations in the form and content of French
writing. Over the turn of the 19th century and
beyond, an emergent Romantic sensibility challenged
the Neoclassical ideal, which had become a pale and
timid imitation of its former self. The new
orthodoxy asserted the claims of imagination and
feeling against reason and of individual desire
against social and moral convention. The 12-syllable
alexandrine that had been used to such effect by
Jean Racine remained the standard line in verse, but
the form was relaxed and reinvigorated; and the
thematic domain of poetry was extended successively
by
Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny,
Charles Baudelaire,
and
Arthur Rimbaud. All poetic form was thrown into
the melting pot by the Modernist revolutions at the
turn of the 20th century.
As the novel overtook poetry and drama to become
the dominant literary form in the 19th century,
French writers explored the possibilities of the
genre and, in some cases, reinvented it. The novel
cycles of
Honoré de Balzac and
Émile Zola developed
a new mode of social realism to celebrate and
challenge the processes at work in a nation that was
being transformed by industrial and economic
revolution. In the work of other writers, such as
Stendhal,
Gustave Flaubert, and
Marcel Proust, each
following his own distinctive path, a different kind
of realism emerged, focused on a preoccupation with
the analysis of individual action, motivation, and
desire as well as a fascination with form. Between
them, the 19th-century French novelists traced the
fate of the individualistic sensibilities born of
aristocratic and high bourgeois culture as they
engaged with the collectivizing forms of a nation
moving toward mass culture and the threshold of
democracy.
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s aristocratic hero,
Des Esseintes, in À rebours (1884; Against Nature or
Against the Grain), offered a traditionalist,
pessimistic version of the final outcome. Halfway
through the next century,
Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy
Les Chemins de la liberté (1945; Roads to Freedom)
responded to a world in which the balance of the
argument had visibly shifted.
During the first half of the 20th century, Paris
remained the hub of European intellectual and
artistic life. Its position was challenged from the
1930s, and especially after World War II, by
Anglo-American writers, many of whom honed their own
skills within its culture and its borders; but it
still continued to generate modes of thinking and
writing that others followed. From the 1950s,
proponents of the nouveau roman, or New Novel,
mounted a radical attack on the conventions of the
genre. At the same time, boulevard drama felt on its
neck the breath of the avant-garde; and from the
1960s onward French writers began stimulating new
approaches to almost every field of rational
inquiry. The international status of the French
language has declined steadily since World War II,
with the rise of American market hegemony and,
especially, with the rapid spread of decolonization.
French is still, however, the preferred medium of
creative expression for many in Switzerland,
Belgium, Canada, France’s former colonies in Africa
and Asia, and its Caribbean dependencies. The
contribution of Francophone authors outside its
borders to the renewal of French literary traditions
has become increasingly significant.
Jennifer Birkett
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The Middle Ages
The origins of the French language
By 50 bc, when
the Roman occupation of Gaul under Julius Caesar was
complete, the region’s population had been speaking
Gaulish, a Celtic language, for some 500 years.
Gaulish, however, gave way to the conquerors’
speech, Vulgar Latin, which was the spoken form of
Latin as used by the soldiers and settlers
throughout the Roman Empire. In different regions,
local circumstances determined Vulgar Latin’s
evolution into the separate tongues that today
constitute the family of Romance languages, to which
French belongs. This linguistic development was
speeded by the empire’s collapse under the impact of
the 5th-century-ad barbarian invasions and isolation
from Rome. Gaul was overrun by Germanic tribes, in
the north principally by the Franks (who gave France
its name) and by the Visigoths and Merovingians in
the south. But the Latin speech survived: not only
was it the language of the majority of the
population, but it was also backed by its
associations with the old Roman culture and with the
new Christian religion, which used Low Latin, its
own form of the Roman tongue. While it retained
relatively few Celtic words, the developing language
had its vocabulary greatly enriched by Germanic
borrowings, and its phonetic development was
influenced by Germanic speech habits. The
9th-century Norse incursions and settlement of
Normandy, by contrast, left few traces in the
language.
The Romans had introduced written literature, and
until the 12th century almost all documents and
other texts were in Latin. The first text in the
vernacular is the Serment de Strasbourg, the Romance
version of the Oath of Strasbourg (842), an oath
sworn by Louis the German (Louis II) and Charles the
Bald (Charles II) against their brother Lothar in
the partitioning of the empire of their grandfather
Charlemagne. A German version also survives. Only a
few other texts, all religious in content, survive
from before about 1100.
Early texts show a broad division between the
speech of northern Gaul, which had suffered most
from the invasions, and that in the more stable,
cultured south, where the Latin spoken was less
subject to change. The tongue spoken to the north of
an imaginary line running roughly from the Gironde
River to the Alps was the langue d’oïl (the future
French), and to the south it was the langue d’oc
(Occitan), terms derived from the respective
expressions for “yes.”
Vulgar Latin’s development had not been uniform
throughout the area of the langue d’oïl; and, by the
time a recognizable Old French had developed,
various dialects had evolved, notably Francien (in
the Île-de-France, the region around Paris), Picard,
Champenois, and Norman. From the last one stemmed
Anglo-Norman, the French used alongside English in
Britain, especially among the upper classes, from
even before the Norman Conquest (1066) until well
into the 14th century. Each dialect had its own
literature. But, for various reasons, the status of
Francien increased until it achieved dominance in
the Middle French period (after 1300), and from it
Modern French developed. Old French was a fine
literary medium, enlarging its vocabulary from other
languages such as Arabic, Occitan, and Low Latin. It
had a wide phonetic range and, until the decay of
the two-case system it had inherited from Latin,
syntactic flexibility.
The context and nature of French medieval
literature
Whatever Classical literature survived the
upheavals of the early Middle Ages was preserved,
along with pious Latin works, in monastic libraries.
By encouraging scholars and writers, Charlemagne had
increased the Latin heritage available to educated
vernacular authors of later centuries. He also left
his image as a great warrior-emperor to stimulate
the legend-making process that generated the Old
French epic. There one finds exemplified the feudal
ideal, evolved by the Franks, that was the means of
establishing a hierarchy of dependency and, thereby,
a cohesiveness that would lead to a national
identity. The warrior’s code of morality, founded on
loyalty to the monarch and on the bond between
brother knights, bolstered the entire political
system. As stability increased under the Capetians,
windows opened onto other cultures and elements:
that of the Arabs in Spain and, with the Crusades,
the East; the advanced Occitan civilization; and the
legends of Celtic Britain. The Roman Catholic church
grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century
its schools were flourishing, training generations
of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became
less embattled, and the nobility became more
leisured and sophisticated. The machismo of the
epics was tempered by the social graces of
courtoisie: generosity, modesty, and consideration
for others, especially the weak and distressed, and
by a concept of love that did not view it as a
weakness in a knight but as an inspiration
consistent with chivalry.
By the 13th century an additional source of
patronage for writers and performers was the
bourgeoisie of the developing towns. New genres
emerged, and, as literacy increased, prose found
favour alongside verse. Much of the literature of
the time is enlivened by a rather irreverent spirit
and a sometimes cynical realism, yet it also
possesses a countercurrent of deep spirituality. In
the 14th and 15th centuries France was ravaged by
war, plague, and famine. Along with a preoccupation
in literature with death and damnation, there
appeared a contrasting refinement of expression and
sentiment bred of nostalgia for the courtly,
chivalric ideal. At the same time a new humanistic
learning anticipated the coming Renaissance.
Before 1200 almost all French “literature” had
been composed as verse and had been communicated
orally to its public. The jongleurs, professional
minstrels, traveled and performed their extensive
repertoires, which ranged from epics to the lives of
saints (the lengthy romances were not designed for
memorization), sometimes using mime and musical
accompaniment. Seeking an immediate impact, most
poets made their poems strikingly visual in
character, more dramatic than reflective, and
revealed psychology and motives through action and
gesture. Verbal formulas and clichés were used by
the better poets as an effective narrative
shorthand, especially in the epic. Such oral
techniques left their mark throughout the period.
The chansons de geste
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”)
are known, the earliest and
finest being the
Chanson de Roland
(c. 1100;
The
Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses
(strophes) based on assonance and, later, rhyme.
Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than
18,000 lines. The genre prospered from the late 11th
to the early 14th century, offering exemplary
stories of warfare, often pitting Franks against
Saracens, that fire the emotions with their
insistent rhythms. Under the influence of the genre
known as romance, however (see below The romance),
the chansons de geste lost some of their early
vigour. Their story lines became looser, their
adventures more exotic, and their tone often amatory
or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into
prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed
featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The
Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle
known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the King”), the
king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose
service he perished with the rear guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane
is Garin’s great-grandson, Guillaume d’Orange, whose
historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and
Charlemagne’s cousin. His dogged loyalty to an
unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the
subject of a group of poems that include the Chanson
de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious
vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a gripping
story of injustice and strained loyalties. The
fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux (Huon of the
Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon
(Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been placed here and in
the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with
legendary embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre
and its development and transmission. It is not
known how most of the poems came to contain
elements, somewhat garbled, from Carolingian history
some 300 years before their composition. Some
scholars believe in a continuous process of oral
transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the
historical facts were retrieved much later by poets
wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom
were associated with pilgrim routes that the
jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very
few texts belong to the period before 1150.
Chansons de geste
"Song of
Roland"

Roland pledges his fealty to
Charlemagne;
from a manuscript of a chanson de geste.
(French: “song of deeds”)
any of the Old French epic poems
forming the core of the Charlemagne
legends. More than 80 chansons, most of
them thousands of lines long, have
survived in manuscripts dating from the
12th to the 15th century. They deal
chiefly with events of the 8th and 9th
centuries during the reigns of
Charlemagne and his successors. In
general, the poems contain a core of
historical truth overlaid with legendary
accretions. Whether they were composed
under the inspiration of the events they
narrate and survived for generations in
oral tradition or were the independent
compositions of professional poets of a
later date is still disputed. A few
poems have authors’ names, but most are
anonymous.
Chansons de geste are composed in
lines of 10 or 12 syllables grouped into
laisses (irregular stanzas) based on
assonance or, later, rhyme. The poems’
lengths range from approximately 1,500
to more than 18,000 lines. The fictional
background of the chansons is the
struggle of Christian France against a
conventionalized polytheistic or
idolatrous “Muslim” enemy. The emperor
Charlemagne is portrayed as the champion
of Christendom. He is surrounded by his
court of Twelve Noble Peers, among whom
are Roland, Oliver (Olivier), Ogier the
Dane, and Archbishop Turpin.
Besides the stories grouped around
Charlemagne, there is a subordinate
cycle of 24 poems dealing with Guillaume
d’Orange, a loyal and long-suffering
supporter of Charlemagne’s weak son,
Louis the Pious. Another cycle deals
with the wars of such powerful barons as
Doon de Mayence, Girart de Roussillon,
Ogier the Dane, or Raoul de Cambrai
against the crown or against each other.
The earlier chansons are heroic in
spirit and theme. They focus on great
battles or feuds and on the legal and
moral niceties of feudal allegiances.
After the 13th century, elements of
romance and courtly love came to be
introduced, and the austere early poems
were supplemented by enfances (youthful
exploits) of the heroes and fictitious
adventures of their ancestors and
descendants. The masterpiece and
probably the earliest of the chansons de
geste is the 4,000-line La Chanson de
Roland. Appearing at the threshold of
French epic literature, Roland was the
formative influence on the rest of the
chansons de geste. The chansons, in
turn, spread throughout Europe. They
strongly influenced Spanish heroic
poetry; the mid-12th-century Spanish
epic Cantar de mío Cid (“Song of My
Cid”), in particular, is indebted to
them. In Italy stories about Orlando and
Rinaldo (Roland and Oliver) were very
popular and formed the basis for the
Renaissance epics Orlando innamorato by
Matteo Boiardo (1495) and Orlando
furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1532). In
the 13th century the German poet Wolfram
Von Eschenbach based his incomplete epic
Willehalm on the life of William of
Orange, and the chansons were recorded
in prose in the Icelandic Karlamagnús
saga. Charlemagne legends, referred to
as “the matter of France,” were long
staple subjects of romance. In the 20th
century the chansons continued to enjoy
a strange afterlife in folk ballads of
the Brazilian backlands, called
literatura de la corda (“literature on a
string”) because, in pamphlet form, they
were formerly hung from strings and sold
in marketplaces. Frequently in these
ballads, through a misunderstanding of a
Portuguese homonym, Charlemagne is
surrounded by a company of 24
knights—i.e., “Twelve Noble Pairs.”
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"Song of
Roland"

Old French epic poem that is probably
the earliest (c. 1100) chanson de geste
and is considered the masterpiece of the
genre. The poem’s probable author was a
Norman poet, Turold, whose name is
introduced in its last line.
The poem takes the historical Battle
of Roncesvalles (Roncevaux) in 778 as
its subject. Though this encounter was
actually an insignificant skirmish
between Charlemagne’s army and Basque
forces, the poem transforms Roncesvalles
into a battle against Saracens and
magnifies it to the heroic stature of
the Greek defense of Thermopylae against
the Persians in the 5th century bc.
The poem opens as Charlemagne, having
conquered all of Spain except Saragossa,
receives overtures from the Saracen king
and sends the knight Ganelon, Roland’s
stepfather, to negotiate peace terms.
Angry because Roland proposed him for
the dangerous task, Ganelon plots with
the Saracens to achieve his stepson’s
destruction and, on his return, ensures
that Roland will command the rear guard
of the army when it withdraws from
Spain. As the army crosses the Pyrenees,
the rear guard is surrounded at the pass
of Roncesvalles by an overwhelming
Saracen force. Trapped against crushing
odds, the headstrong hero Roland is the
paragon of the unyielding warrior
victorious in defeat.
The composition of the poem is firm
and coherent, the style direct, sober,
and, on occasion, stark. Placed in the
foreground is the personality clash
between the recklessly courageous Roland
and his more prudent friend Oliver
(Olivier), which is also a conflict
between divergent conceptions of feudal
loyalty. Roland, whose judgment is
clouded by his personal preoccupation
with renown, rejects Oliver’s advice to
blow his horn and summon help from
Charlemagne. On Roland’s refusal, the
hopeless battle is joined, and the
flower of Frankish knighthood is reduced
to a handful of men. The horn is finally
sounded, too late to save Oliver,
Turpin, or Roland, who has been struck
in error by the blinded Oliver, but in
time for Charlemagne to avenge his
heroic vassals. Returning to France, the
emperor breaks the news to Aude,
Roland’s betrothed and the sister of
Oliver, who falls dead at his feet. The
poem ends with the trial and execution
of Ganelon.
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The romance
The romance, which came into being in
the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a
creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity:
Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy were
all treated at length, and shorter contes were
derived from
Ovid. Other romances, such as Floire et
Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and
Blancheflur), exploited Greco-Byzantine sources; but
by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were
capturing the public’s imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is
octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual
rather than communal exploits and presenting them in
a more detached fashion. It offers fuller
descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are
replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the cult
of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”).
There is more interest in psychology, especially in
the love situations.
The universally popular legend of
Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish,
Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both
fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas (c.
1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and
possibly composite). The legend was reworked in
French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version
can be reconstructed from Gottfried von Strassburg’s
German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien
de Troyes’s treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has
been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur
was firmly established on the Continent by
Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38;
History of the Kings of Britain), translated and
romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de
Brut (1155; Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s
Roman de Brut and
Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons and
Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the
transmission of further Arthurian material to French
writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual
founder of Arthurian romance, who wrote between
about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec
et Enide (Erec and Enide), is a serious study of
marital and social responsibilities and contains
elements of Celtic enchantment. Cligès, a partly
Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous
relationship, uses the motif of feigned death best
known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou,
le chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The
Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou,
le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the Lion)
treats the converse of the situation depicted in
Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and ambiguities
invited divergent interpretations, of no work more
than the incomplete Perceval; ou, le conte du Graal,
which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems.
The grail, first introduced here, was to become, as
the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The
verse romance genre was diversely exploited well
into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a
ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age, and
prose was the principal form. On the genre’s periphery were short
courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de
France, treating Celtic themes and probably composed
in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette
(Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly comic idyll
told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung)
and prose (to be recited), pokes sly fun at the
conventions of epic and romance alike.
Arthurian legend
"Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight"
TENNYSON ALFRED
"Idylls of
the King"
(PART
I,
PART
II)
Illustrations by G. Dore
TENNYSON
ALFRED
"Lady of Shalott"
"Sir
Galahad"
KNOWLES
JAMES
"The Legends
of King Arthur"
(PART
I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV)
Illustrations by Lancelot Speed
MALORY THOMAS
"King
Arthur and of his Noble Knights"
(BOOKS
1,
2-3,
4-6,
7,
8-9,
10-11,
12-16,
17-21)
illustrations "Arturian Legend" (Pre-Raphaelite's and Beardsley's Vision):
The Holy Grail
-
Round Table
-
Tristan and
Iseult
-
Lancelot and Guinevere
-
The Death of
Arthur
The body of stories and medieval
romances, known as the matter of
Britain, centring on the legendary king
Arthur. Medieval writers, especially the
French, variously treated stories of
Arthur’s birth, the adventures of his
knights, and the adulterous love between
his knight Sir Lancelot and his queen,
Guinevere. This last situation and the
quest for the Holy Grail (the vessel
used by Christ at the Last Supper and
given to Joseph of Arimathea) brought
about the dissolution of the knightly
fellowship, the death of Arthur, and the
destruction of his kingdom.
Stories about Arthur and his court
had been popular in Wales before the
11th century; European fame came through
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum
Britanniae (1135–38), celebrating a
glorious and triumphant king who
defeated a Roman army in eastern France
but was mortally wounded in battle
during a rebellion at home led by his
nephew Mordred. Some features of
Geoffrey’s story were marvelous
fabrications, and certain features of
the Celtic stories were adapted to suit
feudal times. The concept of Arthur as a
world conqueror was clearly inspired by
legends surrounding great leaders such
as Alexander the Great and Charlemagne.
Later writers, notably Wace of Jersey
and Lawamon, filled out certain details,
especially in connection with Arthur’s
knightly fellowship (the Knights of the
Round Table).
Using Celtic sources, Chrétien de
Troyes in the late 12th century made
Arthur the ruler of a realm of marvels
in five romances of adventure. He also
introduced the themes of the Grail and
the love of Lancelot and Guinevere into
Arthurian legend. Prose romances of the
13th century explored these major themes
further. An early prose romance centring
on Lancelot seems to have become the
kernel of a cyclic work known as the
Prose Lancelot, or Vulgate cycle (c.
1225).
The Lancelot theme was connected with
the Grail story through Lancelot’s son,
the pure knight Sir Galahad, who
achieved the vision of God through the
Grail as fully as is possible in this
life, whereas Sir Lancelot was impeded
in his progress along the mystic way
because of his adultery with Guinevere.
Another branch of the Vulgate cycle was
based on a very early 13th-century verse
romance, the Merlin, by Robert de Boron,
that had told of Arthur’s birth and
childhood and his winning of the crown
by drawing a magic sword (see Excalibur)
from a stone. The writer of the Vulgate
cycle turned this into prose, adding a
pseudo-historical narrative dealing with
Arthur’s military exploits. A final
branch of the Vulgate cycle contained an
account of Arthur’s Roman campaign and
war with Mordred, to which was added a
story of Lancelot’s renewed adultery
with Guinevere and the disastrous war
between Lancelot and Sir Gawain that
ensued. A later prose romance, known as
the post-Vulgate Grail romance (c.
1240), combined Arthurian legend with
material from the Tristan romance.
The legend told in the Vulgate cycle
and post-Vulgate romance was transmitted
to English-speaking readers in Thomas
Malory’s late 15th-century prose Le
Morte Darthur. At the same time, there
was renewed interest in Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia, and the fictitious
kings of Britain became more or less
incorporated with official national
mythology. The legend remained alive
during the 17th century, though interest
in it was by then confined to England.
Of merely antiquarian interest during
the 18th century, it again figured in
literature during Victorian times,
notably in Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of
the King. In the 20th century an
American poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson,
wrote an Arthurian trilogy, and the
American novelist Thomas Berger wrote
Arthur Rex (1978). In England T.H. White
retold the stories in a series of novels
collected as The Once and Future King
(1958). His work was the basis for
Camelot (1960), a musical by Alan Lerner
and Frederick Loewe; a film, also called
Camelot (1967), was derived from the
musical. Numerous other films have been
based on the Arthurian legend, notably
John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and the
satirical Monty Python and the Holy
Grail (1975).
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Tristan and Isolde

“Tournament of the Knights of the Round
Table,”
from manuscript of Tristan romance
Tristan also
called Tristram or Tristrem, Isolde also
called Iseult, Isolt, or Yseult
principal characters of a famous
medieval love-romance, based on a Celtic
legend (itself based on an actual
Pictish king). Though the archetypal
poem from which all extant forms of the
legend are derived has not been
preserved, a comparison of the early
versions yields an idea of its content.
The central
plot of the archetype must have been
roughly as follows:
The young
Tristan ventures to Ireland to ask the
hand of the princess Isolde for his
uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, and,
having slain a dragon that is
devastating the country, succeeds in his
mission. On the homeward journey Tristan
and Isolde, by misadventure, drink the
love potion prepared by the queen for
her daughter and King Mark.
Henceforward, the two are bound to each
other by an imperishable love that dares
all dangers and makes light of hardships
but does not destroy their loyalty to
the king.
The greater
part of the romance is occupied by plot
and counterplot: Mark and the courtiers
seeking to entrap the lovers, who escape
the snares laid for them until finally
Mark gets what seems proof of their
guilt and resolves to punish them.
Tristan, on his way to the stake,
escapes by a miraculous leap from a
chapel on the cliffs and rescues Isolde,
whom Mark has given to a band of lepers.
The lovers flee into the forest of
Morrois and remain there until one day
Mark discovers them asleep with a naked
sword between them. Soon afterward they
make peace with Mark, and Tristan agrees
to restore Isolde to Mark and leave the
country. Coming to Brittany, Tristan
marries Isolde of the White Hands,
daughter of the duke, “for her name and
her beauty,” but makes her his wife only
in name. Wounded by a poisoned weapon,
he sends for the other Isolde, who alone
can heal him. If she agrees to come, the
ship on which she embarks is to have a
white sail; if she refuses, a black. His
jealous wife, who has discovered his
secret, seeing the ship approach on
which Isolde is hastening to her lover’s
aid, tells him that it carries a black
sail. Tristan, turning his face to the
wall, dies, and Isolde, arriving too
late to save her love, yields up her
life in a final embrace. A miracle
follows their deaths: two trees grow out
of their graves and intertwine their
branches so that they can not be parted
by any means.
The archetypal
poem, which has not survived, seems to
have been a grim and violent work
containing episodes of a coarse and even
farcical character. Two adaptations,
made in the late 12th century, preserved
something of its barbarity. About 1170,
however, the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas,
who was probably associated with the
court of Henry II of England, produced
an adaptation in which the harshness of
the archetype was considerably softened.
A mellifluous German version of Thomas’
adaptation, by Gottfried von Strassburg,
is considered the jewel of medieval
German poetry. Short episodic poems
telling of Tristan’s surreptitious
visits to Isolde at King Mark’s court
appeared in the late 12th century. Of
these, the most important are two
versions of the Folie Tristan, in which
Tristan is disguised as a fool, and the
Luite Tristan, in which he appears as a
minstrel. During the 13th century the
story—like Arthurian legend—was embodied
in a voluminous prose romance. In this,
Tristan figured as the noblest of
knights, and King Mark as a base
villain, the whole being grafted onto
Arthurian legend and bringing Tristan
and King Arthur’s knight Sir Lancelot
into rivalry. This version, which
recounts innumerable chivalric
adventures of a conventional type, had
superseded all other French versions by
the end of the European Middle Ages, and
it was in this form that Sir Thomas
Malory knew the legend in the late 15th
century, making it part of his Le Morte
Darthur. A popular romance in English,
Sir Tristrem, dates from approximately
1300 and is one of the first poems
written in the vernacular.
Renewed
interest in the legend during the 19th
century followed upon discovery of the
old poems. Richard Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde (first performed in
1865) was inspired by the German poem of
Gottfried von Strassburg.
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Gottfried von Strassburg

Portrait of Gottfried von Strassburg
from the Codex Manesse (Folio 364r).
died c. 1210
one of the greatest medieval German
poets, whose courtly epic Tristan und
Isolde is the classic version of this
famous love story.
The dates of his birth and death are
unknown, and the only information about
him consists of references to him in the
work of other poets and inferences from
his own work. The breadth of learning
displayed in Tristan und Isolde reveals
that he must have enjoyed the fullest
education offered by the cathedral and
monastery schools of the Middle Ages.
Together with the authoritative tone of
his writing, this background indicates
that, although not himself of noble
birth, he spent his life in the society
of the wellborn. Tristan was probably
written about 1210. Gottfried is thus a
literary contemporary of Hartmann von
Aue, Walther von der Vogelweide, and
Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The Celtic
legend of Tristan and Iseult (German:
Isolde) reached Germany through French
sources. The first German version is
that of Eilhart von Oberg (c. 1170), but
Gottfried, although he probably knew
Eilhart’s poem, based his own work on
the Anglo-Norman version of Thomas of
Brittany (1160–70).
Gottfried’s
moral purpose, as he states it in the
prologue, is to present to courtiers an
ideal of love. The core of this ideal,
which derives from the romantic cult of
woman in medieval courtly society, is
that love (minne) ennobles through the
suffering with which it is inseparably
linked. This ideal Gottfried enshrines
in a story in which actions are
motivated and justified not by a
standard ethic but by the conventions of
courtly love. Thus, the love potion,
instead of being the direct cause of the
tragedy as in primitive versions of the
Tristan story, is sophisticatedly
treated as a mere outward symbol of the
nature of the lovers’ passion—tragic
because adulterous but justified by the
“courts of love” because of its
spontaneity, its exclusiveness, and its
completeness.
Although
unfinished, Gottfried’s is the finest of
the medieval versions of the Tristan
legend and one of the most perfect
creations of the medieval courtly
spirit, distinguished alike by the
refinement and elevated tone of its
content and by the elaborate skill of
its poetic technique. It was the
inspiration for Richard Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde (1859).
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Wace

Jersey poet Wace
presenting his Roman de Rou to Henry II
of England
Illustration from Notice sur la vie et
les écrits de Robert Wace by Frédéric
Pluquet, 1824.
Engraving by C. E. Lambert.
born c. 1100, Jersey, Channel Islands
died after 1174
Anglo-Norman author of two verse
chronicles, the Roman de Brut
(1155) and the Roman de Rou (1160–74),
named respectively after the reputed
founders of the Britons and Normans.
The Rou was commissioned by Henry II
of England, who sometime before 1169
secured for Wace a canonry at Bayeux in
northwestern France. The Brut may have
been dedicated to Henry’s queen, Eleanor
of Aquitaine. Written in octosyllabic
verse, it is a romanticized paraphrase
of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum
Britanniae, tracing the history of
Britain from its founding by the
legendary Brutus the Trojan. Its many
fanciful additions (including the story
of King Arthur’s Round Table) helped
increase the popularity of the Arthurian
legends. The Rou, written in
octosyllabic couplets and monorhyme
stanzas of alexandrines, is a history of
the Norman dukes from the time of Rollo
the Viking (after 911) to that of Robert
II Curthose (1106). In 1174, however,
Henry II transferred his patronage to
one Beneeit, who was writing a rival
version, and Wace’s work remained
unfinished.
Wace’s artistry in the Brut exerted a
stylistic influence on later verse
romances (notably on a version of the
Tristan story by Thomas, the
Anglo-Norman writer), whereas the
English poem Brut (c. 1200) by Lawamon
was the most notable of many direct
imitations. Three devotional works by
Wace also survive.
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Chretien
De Troyes
FOUR ARTHURIAN ROMANCES: "EREC ET ENIDE",
"CLIGES", "YVAIN", AND "LANCELOT"

flourished 1165–80
French poet who is known as the
author of five Arthurian romances: Erec;
Cligès; Lancelot, ou Le Chevalier à la
charrette; Yvain, ou Le Chevalier au
lion; and Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal.
The non-Arthurian tale Guillaume
d’Angleterre, based on the legend of St.
Eustace, may also have been written by
Chrétien.
Little is known of Chrétien’s life.
He apparently frequented the court of
Marie, comtesse de Champagne, and he may
have visited England. His tales, written
in the vernacular, followed the
appearance in France of Wace’s Roman de
Brut (1155), a translation of Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,
which introduced Britain and the
Arthurian legend to continental Europe.
Chrétien’s romances were imitated almost
immediately by other French poets and
were translated and adapted frequently
during the next few centuries as the
romance continued to develop as a
narrative form. Erec, for example,
supplied some of the material for the
14th-century poem Sir Gawayne and the
Grene Knight.
Chrétien’s romances combine separate
adventures into a well-knit story. Erec
is the tale of the submissive wife who
proves her love for her husband by
disobeying his commands; Cligès, that of
the victim of a marriage made under
constraint who feigns death and wakens
to a new and happy life with her lover;
Lancelot, an exaggerated but perhaps
parodic treatment of the lover who is
servile to the god of love and to his
imperious mistress Guinevere, wife of
his overlord Arthur; Yvain, a brilliant
extravaganza, combining the theme of a
widow’s too hasty marriage to her
husband’s slayer with that of the new
husband’s fall from grace and final
restoration to favour. Perceval, which
Chrétien left unfinished, unites the
religious theme of the Holy Grail with
fantastic adventure.
Chrétien was the initiator of the
sophisticated courtly romance. Deeply
versed in contemporary rhetoric, he
treated love casuistically and in a
humorously detached fashion, bringing
folklore themes and love situations
together in an Arthurian world of
adventure. Interest in his works, at
first concentrated on their folklore
sources, was diverted during the 20th
century to their structure and narrative
technique.
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Jean Froissart

“Chronicles”: Charles VI receiving
English envoys
born 1333?, Valenciennes, Brabant
died c. 1400, Chimay, Hainaut
medieval poet and court historian whose
Chronicles of the 14th
century remain the most important and
detailed document of feudal times in
Europe and the best contemporary
exposition of chivalric and courtly
ideals.
As a scholar, Froissart lived among
the nobility of several European courts.
In England he served Queen Philippa of
Hainaut, King Edward III, and his sons
the Black Prince and the Duke of
Clarence. He became the chaplain of Guy
II de Chatillon, comte de Blois, under
whose auspices he was ordained canon of
Chimay. He travelled to Scotland, Italy,
France, and the Iberian Peninsula.
The main subject of Froissart’s
Chronicles was the “honourable
adventures and feats of arms” of the
Hundred Years’ War. He used his
privileged position to question central
figures and observe key events. The
firsthand narrative covers weddings,
funerals, and great battles from 1325 to
1400. Book I was based on the work of
the Flemish writer Jean le Bel and later
rewritten. Book II concerns the events
in Flanders and the Peace of Tournai.
Book III concerns Spain and Portugal.
Book IV is based on the Battle of
Poitiers and a final visit to England,
where he was shocked by the weakness of
the royal government.
Froissart cites exact dialogues and
all available facts, allowing readers to
draw their own conclusions. The
splendour and pageantry are emphasized,
however, according to the courtly
traditions of his patrons, while the
victims and causes of suffering are
overlooked. A didactic moral tone urges
readers to aspire to the ideals of
chivalry. While the Chronicles contain
historical errors and lapses of
judgment, they are the best information
available to modern readers interested
in the 14th century.
Froissart’s allegorical poetry
celebrates courtly love. L’Horloge
amoureux compares the heart to a clock,
and Méliador is a chivalrous
romance. His ballades and rondeaux
expose the poet’s personal feelings.
Despite his fame during his lifetime,
Froissart apparently died in obscurity.
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Marie De France

Marie de France presents
her book to Henry II of England.
From the first edition of Marie de
France's works.
Charles Chasselat (1782 - 1843)
flourished 12th century
earliest known French woman poet,
creator of verse narratives on romantic
and magical themes that perhaps inspired
the musical lais of the later trouvères,
and author of Aesopic and other fables,
called Ysopets. Her works, of
considerable charm and talent, were
probably written in England. What little
is known about her is taken or inferred
from her writings and from a possible
allusion or two in contemporary authors.
From a line in the epilogue to her
fables, Claude Fauchet (1581) drew the
name by which she has since been known.
The same epilogue states that her fables
were translated from, or based on, an
English source for a Count William,
usually identified as William Longsword,
Earl of Salisbury, or sometimes as
William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. Her
lais were dedicated to a “noble” king,
presumably Henry II of England, though
it is sometimes thought that this was
Henry’s son, the Young King. Her version
of L’Espurgatoire Seint Patriz (“St.
Patrick’s Purgatory”) was based on the
Latin text (c. 1185) of Henry of Saltrey.
Every conjecture about her has been
hotly debated.
Her lais varied in length from the
118 lines of Chevrefoil (“The
Honeysuckle”), an episode in the Tristan
story, to the 1,184 lines of Eliduc, a
story of the devotion of a first wife
whose husband brings a second wife from
overseas.
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Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century
saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come
to be known as amour courtois, or courtly love (the
original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first
exponents were the Occitan troubadours,
poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries,
writing in medieval Occitan, of whom some 460 are
known by name. Among them are clerics and both male
and female nobles. The troubadours no longer
considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was
a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all, only
after the suitor had served a period of amorous
vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service to his
lord and where spiritualization became an end in
itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the
troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been sought
in Arabic poetry, the writings of
Ovid, Latin
liturgical hymns, and other, less likely sources.
The canso (French chanson), made of five or six
stanzas with a summary envoi, was the favourite
vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various
other forms, from dawn songs to satiric, political,
or debating poems, all usually highly crafted.
Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine, the
first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed
obscenity with his courtly sentiments. Among the
finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de
Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel, who expressed an almost
mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and
poet Bertran de Born; and the master of the hermetic
tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and
spinning songs before the troubadours exerted by the
mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among
others, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s
granddaughter and queen of France and later England
(as the wife of Henry II). The troubadours’ verse
inspired a number of northern trouvères, including
Chrétien de Troyes (two of whose songs are extant),
Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and
king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard
I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois
poets, notably, in the 13th century, a group from
Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who
perhaps came originally from Champagne and is often
compared with
François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse
in personal, even autobiographical mode (though the
personal details are probably fictional) on a
variety of subjects: his own pitiful circumstances,
the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades,
his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Bernard de Ventadour

Bernart de Ventadorn (1130-1140 –
1190-1200), also known as Bernard de
Ventadour or Bernat del Ventadorn, was a
prominent troubador of the classical age
of troubadour poetry. Now thought of as
"the Master Singer" he developed the
cansos into a more formalized style
which allowed for sudden turns. He is
remembered for his mastery as well as
popularisation of the trobar leu style,
and for his prolific cansos, which
helped define the genre and establish
the "classical" form of courtly love
poetry, to be imitated and reproduced
throughout the remaining century and a
half of troubadour activity.
Bernart was known for being able to
portray his woman as a divine agent in
one moment and then in a sudden twist,
portraying her as Eve, the cause of
man's initial sin. This dichotomy in his
work is portrayed in a "graceful, witty,
and polished" medium.
According to the troubadour Uc de
Saint Circ, Bernart was possibly the son
of a baker at the castle of Ventadour (Ventadorn),
in today's Corrèze. Yet another source,
a satirical poem written by a younger
contemporary, Peire d'Alvernha,
indicates that he was the son of either
a servant, a soldier, or a baker, and
his mother was also either a servant or
a baker. From evidence given in
Bernart's early poem Lo temps vai e ven
e vire, he most likely learned the art
of singing and writing from his
protector, viscount Eble III of
Ventadorn. He composed his first poems
to his patron's wife, Marguerite de
Turenne.
Forced to leave Ventadour after
falling in love with Marguerite, he
traveled to Montluçon and Toulouse, and
eventually followed Eleanor of Aquitaine
to England and the Plantagenet
court;evidence for this association and
these travels comes mainly from his
poems themselves. Later Bernart returned
to Toulouse, where he was employed by
Raimon V, Count of Toulouse; later still
he went to Dordogne, where he entered a
monastery. Most likely he died there.
About 45 of his works survive.
Bernart is unique among secular
composers of the twelfth century in the
amount of music which has survived: of
his forty-five poems, eighteen have
music intact, an unusual circumstance
for a troubador composer (music of the
trouvères has a higher survival rate,
usually attributed to them surviving the
Albigensian Crusade, which scattered the
troubadours and destroyed many sources).
His work probably dates between 1147 and
1180. Bernart is often credited with
being the most important influence on
the development of the trouvère
tradition in northern France, since he
was well known there, his melodies were
widely circulated, and the early
composers of trouvère music seem to have
imitated him. Bernart's influence also
extended to Latin literature. In 1215
the Bolognese professor Boncompagno
wrote in his Antiqua rhetorica that "How
much fame attaches to the name of
Bernard de Ventadorn, and how gloriously
he made cansos and sweetly invented
melodies, the world of Provence very
much recognises."
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Jaufre Rudel

A Romantic portrayal of Jaufre
singing to his love
Jaufre Rudel (Jaufré in modern
Occitan) was the Prince of Blaye
(Princes de Blaia) and a troubadour of
the early–mid 12th century, who probably
died during the Second Crusade, in or
after 1147. He is noted for developing
the theme of "love from afar" (amor de
lonh or amour de loin) in his songs.
Very little is known about his life,
but a reference to him in a contemporary
song by Marcabru describes him as being
oltra mar—across the sea, probably on
the Second Crusade in 1147. Probably he
was the son of Girard, also castellan of
Blaye, and who was titled "prince" in an
1106 charter. Girard's father was the
first to carry the title, being called
princeps Blaviensis as early as 1090.
During his father's lifetime the
suzerainty of Blaye was disputed between
the Counts of Poitou and the Counts of
Angoulême. Shortly after the succession
of William VIII of Poitou, who had
inherited it from his father, Blaye was
taken by Wulgrin II of Angoulême, who
probably vested Jaufre with it.
According to one hypothesis, based on
flimsy evidence, Wulgrin was Jaufre's
father.
According to his legendary vida, or
fictionalised biography, he was inspired
to go on Crusade upon hearing from
returning pilgrims of the beauty of
Countess Hodierna of Tripoli, and that
she was his amor de lonh, his far-off
love. The legend claims that he fell
sick on the journey and was brought
ashore in Tripoli a dying man. Countess
Hodierna is said to have come down from
her castle on hearing the news, and
Rudel died in her arms. This romantic
but unlikely story seems to have been
derived from the enigmatic nature of
Rudel's verse and his presumed death on
the Crusade.
Seven of Rudel's poems have survived
to the present day, four of them with
music. His composition Lanquan li jorn
is thought to be the model for the
Minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide's
crusade song Allerest lebe ich mir werde
(Palästinalied).
Nineteenth-century Romanticism found his
legend irresistible. It was the subject
of poems by Ludwig Uhland, Heinrich
Heine, Robert Browning (Rudel to the
Lady of Tripoli) and Giosué Carducci (Jaufré
Rudel). Algernon Charles Swinburne
returned several times to the story in
his poetry, in The Triumph of Time, The
Death of Rudel and the now-lost Rudel in
Paradise (also titled The Golden House).
In The Triumph of Time, he summarises
the legend thus:
There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.
And finding life for her love’s sake
fail,
Being fain to see her, he bade set sail,
Touched land, and saw her as life grew
cold,
And praised God, seeing; and so died he.
Died, praising God for his gift and
grace:
For she bowed down to him weeping, and
said
“Live”; and her tears were shed on his
face
Or ever the life in his face was shed.
The sharp tears fell through her hair,
and stung
Once, and her close lips touched him and
clung
Once, and grew one with his lips for a
space;
And so drew back, and the man was dead.
Sir Nizamat Jung Bahadur, of Hyderabad,
also wrote an epic poem on the subject,
Rudel of Blaye, in 1926.
The French dramatist Edmond Rostand
took the legend of Rudel and Hodierna as
the basis for his 1895 verse drama La
Princesse lointaine, but reassigned the
female lead from Hodierna to her jilted
daughter Melisende, played by Sarah
Bernhardt.
More recently, Finnish composer Kaija
Saariaho has written an opera about
Rudel called L'amour de loin, with a
libretto by Amin Maalouf, which was
given its world premiere at the Salzburg
Festival in 2000 and its US premiere at
the Santa Fe Opera in 2002.
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Bertran de Born

Bertran de Born (1140s – by 1215)
was a baron from the Limousin in France,
and one of the major Occitan troubadours
of the twelfth century
Bertran de Born was the eldest
son of Bertran de Born, lord of Autafort
(Occitan: Autafòrt, French: Hautefort),
and his wife Ermengardis. He had two
younger brothers, Constantine and Itier.
His father died in 1178, and Bertran
succeeded him as lord of Autafort. By
this time, he was already married to his
first wife, Raimonda, and had two sons.
Autafort lies at the border between
the Limousin and Périgord. As a result,
Bertran became involved in the conflicts
of the sons of Henry II Plantagenet. He
was also fighting for control of
Autafort.
According to the feudal custom of his
region, he was not the only lord of
Autafort, but held it jointly with his
brothers. Other cases of co-seigneuries
were known among the troubadours, the
most famous being that of the "four
troubadours of Ussel", three brothers
and a cousin, and that of Raimon de
Miraval and his brothers. A typical
strategy employed by the major
territorial principalities (such as the
duchy of Aquitaine or the county of
Toulouse) to decrease the influence of
the local lords of the manor was to
encourage feudal conflicts within their
families. Bertran's struggle, especially
with his brother Constantine, is at the
heart of his poetry, which is dominated
by political topics.
His first datable work is a sirventes
(political or satirical song) of 1181,
but it is clear from this he already had
a reputation as a poet. In 1182, he was
present at his overlord Henry II of
England's court at Argentan. That same
year, he had joined in Henry the Young
King's revolt against his younger
brother, Richard, Count of Poitou and
Duke of Aquitaine. He wrote songs
encouraging Aimar V of Limoges and
others to rebel, and took the oath
against Richard at Limoges. His brother
Constantine took the opposing side, and
Bertran drove him out of the castle in
July.
Henry the Young King, whom Bertran
had praised and criticised in his poems,
died on campaign in June 1183 in Martel.
Bertran wrote a planh (lament), in his
memory, Mon chan fenisc ab dol et ab
maltraire. (Another planh for Henry, Si
tuit li dol e.l plor e.l marrimen,
formerly attributed to Bertran, is now
thought to be the work of Rigaut de
Berbezill). In his punitive campaign
against the rebels, Richard, aided by
Alfonso II of Aragon, besieged Autafort
and gave it to Constantine de Born.
Henry II, however, is reported to have
been moved by Bertran's lament for his
son, and returned the castle to the
poet. Constantine seems to have become a
mercenary.
Bertran was reconciled also with
Richard, whom he supported in turn
against Philip II of France. At various
times, he sought to exploit the
dissensions among the Angevins in order
to keep his independence. He gave them
senhals (nicknames): Henry the Young
King was Mariniers (Sailor), Geoffrey of
Brittany was Rassa, and Richard, Oc-e-Non
(Yes-and-No). He commemorated Geoffrey's
death in the planh, A totz dic que ja
mais non voil. He had contact with a
number of other troubadours and also
with the Northern French trouvère, Conon
de Béthune, whom he addressed as Mon
Ysombart.
Although he composed a few cansos
(love songs), Bertran de Born was
predominantly a master of the sirventes.
Be.m platz lo gais temps de pascor,
which revels in warfare, was translated
by Ezra Pound:
“ ...We shall see battle axes and
swords, a-battering colored haumes and
a-hacking through shields at entering
melee; and many vassals smiting
together, whence there run free the
horses of the dead and wrecked. And when
each man of prowess shall be come into
the fray he thinks no more of (merely)
breaking heads and arms, for a dead man
is worth more than one taken alive.
I tell you that I find no such savor in
eating butter and sleeping, as when I
hear cried "On them!" and from both
sides hear horses neighing through their
head-guards, and hear shouted "To aid!
To aid!" and see the dead with lance
truncheons, the pennants still on them,
piercing their sides.
Barons! put in pawn castles, and
towns, and cities before anyone makes
war on us.
Papiol, be glad to go speedily to
"Yea and Nay", and tell him there's too
much peace about.”
When Richard (by then King) and
Philip delayed setting out on the Third
Crusade, he chided them in songs
praising the heroic defence of Tyre by
Conrad of Montferrat (Folheta, vos mi
prejatz que eu chan and Ara sai eu de
pretz quals l'a plus gran). When Richard
was released from captivity after being
suspected of Conrad's murder, Bertran
welcomed his return with Ar ven la
coindeta sazos. Ironically, one of
Bertran's sources of income was from the
market of Châlus-Cabrol, where Richard
was fatally wounded in 1199.
Widowed for the second time c. 1196,
Bertran became a monk and entered the
Cistercian abbey of Dalon at Sainte-Trie
in the Dordogne region. He had made
numerous grants to the abbey over the
years. His last datable song was written
in 1198. He ceases to appear in charters
after 1202, and was certainly dead by
1215, when there is a record of a
payment for a candle for his tomb.
His œuvre consists of about
forty-seven works, thirty-six
unanimously attributed to him in the
manuscripts, and eleven uncertain
attributions. Several melodies survive,
and some of his songs have been recorded
by Sequentia, Gérard Zuchetto and his
Troubadours Art Ensemble, and the Martin
Best Mediæval Consort, who released an
album of songs by "Dante Troubadours".
Youth and Age
I love to see the previous order
turning,
when the old leave all their
property to youth:
it's this, not buzz of bee or
flowers returning,
that makes me feel the world has
found its truth;
and if a man produces sons enough,
the chances are at least one will
be tough;
and a younger loyalty in love or
war
will make the heart and sword arm
young once more.
A woman is old who sets no warrior
yearning;
she's old, if she keeps faithful
to her spouse;
old, if she uses black and
sorcerous learning,
or lets more than one lover in her
house.
She's old, if her hair's a mess of
ragged stuff,
or if she takes a lover who is
rough.
She's old, if she thinks that
music is a chore,
and she's old when all her talk
becomes a bore.
Women are young, whose hearts
remain discerning,
whose actions show the values they
espouse,
who do not look with scorn on
merit's earning,
whose virtues are a light no
scandals douse.
A woman is young, whose manner is
not gruff,
yet gives impetuous youths a wise
rebuff.
She's young, if her figure's
nothing to ignore,
and she doesn't pry and listen at
every door.
I call a man young who's
passionate concerning
jousts and courts, considering
thrift uncouth.
He's young, when he thinks that
money is for burning;
when, ruined, he smiles without a
trace of ruth.
He's young, when he stakes his
fortune on a bluff,
and feels that no extravagance is
enough.
He's young, if he is skilled in
lovers' lore,
and he's young, if he judges risk
what life is for.
Though a man be rich, I say that
he's old, if, spurning
pillage and war, he wastes away
his youth
piling up bread and beef and wine,
then turning
monkish, serves eggs, as if we'd
nary a tooth.
He's old, if he muffles himself in
woven stuff,
and can't command a horse and ride
him rough.
He's old, if he rests in peace
when battles roar;
old, if he shirks the field and
bars the door.
Poet Arnaut, go take this song of
youth
and age to Richard, that he may
feel its truth
and never wish to heap up worldly
store,
since youthful daring enriches
honor more.
Translated by Jon Corelis
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Arnaut Daniel

flourished 1180–1200
Provençal poet, troubadour, and
master of the trobar clus, a poetic
style composed of complex metrics,
intricate rhymes, and words chosen more
for their sound than for their meaning.
Thought to have been born in Ribérac
(now in France), Arnaut was a nobleman
and a highly regarded traveling
troubadour. He is credited with
inventing the sestina, a lyrical form of
six six-line stanzas, unrhymed, with an
elaborate scheme of word repetition. His
skill with language was admired by
Petrarch and in the 20th century by Ezra
Pound and T.S. Eliot. His greatest
influence, however, was on Dante, who
imitated him and gave him a prominent
place in Purgatory as a model for the
vernacular poet. Arnaut’s speech in
Provençal is the only passage in the
Divine Comedy not in Italian.
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Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular
is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of the
world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s
avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among lawyers,
doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of
women. It appears in pious and didactic literature
and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more
usually in general terms than as particular,
corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve
purely comic ends, as in the fabliaux. These fairly
short verse tales composed between the late 12th and
the 14th centuries—most of which are anonymous,
though some are by leading poets—generate laughter
from situations extending from the obscene to the
mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and
counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the
bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables.
Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures
of everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately
yielded in importance to the farces, bequeathing a
fund of anecdotes to later writers such as
Geoffrey
Chaucer and
Giovanni Boccaccio.
Inspired partly by the popular animal fable,
partly by the Latin satire of monastic life
Ysengrimus (1152; Eng. trans. Ysengrimus), the
collection of ribald comic tales known as the Roman
de Renart (Renard the Fox) began to circulate in the
late 12th century, chronicling the rivalry of Renart
the Fox and the wolf Isengrin, and the lively and
largely scandalous goings-on in the animal kingdom
ruled by Noble the Lion. By the 14th century about
30 branches existed, forming a veritable beast epic.
Full of close social observation, they exude the
earthy humour of the fabliaux; but, particularly in
some of the later branches, this is sharpened into
true satire directed against abuses in church and
state, with the friars and rapacious nobility as
prime targets.
Reynard The Fox

literary character
Main
hero of several medieval European cycles of versified animal tales that
satirize contemporary human society. Though Reynard is sly, amoral,
cowardly, and self-seeking, he is still a sympathetic hero, whose
cunning is a necessity for survival. He symbolizes the triumph of craft
over brute strength, usually personified by Isengrim, the greedy and
dull-witted wolf. Some of the cyclic stories collected around him, such
as the wolf or bear fishing with his tail through a hole in the ice, are
found all over the world; others, like the sick lion cured by the wolf’s
skin, derive by oral transmission from Greco-Roman sources. The cycle
arose in the area between Flanders and Germany in the 10th and 11th
centuries, when clerks began to forge Latin beast epics out of popular
tales. The name “Ysengrimus” was first used as the title of a poem in
Latin elegiac couplets by Nivard of Ghent in 1152, and some of the
stories were soon recounted in French octosyllabic couplets. The Middle
High German poem “Fuchs Reinhard” (c. 1180) by Heinrich (der
Glîchesaere?), a masterpiece of 2,000 lines, freely adapted from a lost
French original, is another early version of the cycle.
The main literary tradition of Reynard the Fox, however, descends
from the extant French “branches” of the Roman de Renart (about 30 in
number, totaling nearly 40,000 lines of verse). These French branches
are probably elaborations of the same kernel poem that was used by
Heinrich in the earlier German version. The facetious portrayal of
rustic life, the camel as a papal legate speaking broken French, the
animals riding on horses and recounting elaborate dreams, suggest the
atmosphere of 13th-century France and foreshadow the more sophisticated
“Nun’s Priest’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer. Because of the popularity of
these tales the nickname renard has replaced the old word goupil (“fox”)
throughout France. The Flemish adaptations of these French tales by
Aenout and Willem (c. 1250) were the sources of the Dutch and Low German
prose manuscripts and chapbooks, which in turn were used by the English
printer William Caxton and subsequent imitators down to J.W. von
Goethe’s Reineke Fuchs (1794).
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Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was
employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in
the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was used
widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the
long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The Pilgrimage
of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville,
Dante’s contemporary and a precursor of
John Bunyan.
But the most influential allegorical work in French
was the Roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose),
where courtly love is first celebrated, then
undermined. The first 4,058 lines were written about
1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant
poet who, through a play of allegorical figures,
analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in
which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the
lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem unfinished,
with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally
imprisoned. Forty or more years later, a poet of
very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it,
submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory with
debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden
with medieval and ancient learning. Courtly idealism
is shunned for a practical, often critical or
cynical view of the world. Love, only one of many
topics treated in the completed version, is
synonymous with procreation; and a misogynistic tone
pervades the writing. Embodying these two
characteristically medieval but diametrically
opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose
was immensely popular until well into the
Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and
most important instances of the Querelle des Femmes
(“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the
alleged inferiority or superiority of women.)
Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and
obscenity of The Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre
au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of
Love”), foreshadows her later extended allegory in
defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames
(composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of Ladies).
Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three
Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of
Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out
in detail the important social roles of women of all
classes.
Guillaume de Lorris

Miniature from a manuscript of the Roman
de la Rose
(Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 195),
folio 1r,
portrait of Guillaume de Lorris.
flourished 13th century
French author of the first and more
poetic part of the medieval verse
allegory the Roman de la rose,
started by him c. 1225–30 but continued
only some 40–50 years later by Jean
de Meun.
Little is known of Guillaume de
Lorris except that he was clearly an
aristocrat and that he was born in the
village of Lorris, just east of Orléans.
Guillaume’s section of the work—the
first 4,058 lines—reveals him as a
courtly poet of great perceptiveness who
has mastered the revelation of character
through allegorical symbols. It draws on
the conventions of courtly love
descended from the troubadours, although
that code of behaviour appears to have
been waning in popularity already in the
13th century
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Jean de Meun

Mirth and Gladness lead a Dance in
this miniature
from a manuscript of the Roman de la
Rose in the
Bodleian Library (MS Douce 364, folio
8r).
born c. 1240,
Meung-sur-Loire, France
died before 1305
French poet famous for his
continuation of the Roman de la
rose, an allegorical poem in the
courtly love tradition begun by
Guillaume de Lorris about 1225.
Jean de Meun’s original name was
Clopinel, or Chopinel, but he became
known by the name of his birthplace. He
probably owned a home in Paris and may
have been archdeacon of the Beauce, a
region between Paris and Orléans. Little
is known of his life.
His poems are satiric, coarse, at
times immoral, but fearless and
outspoken in attacking the abuses of the
age. His strong antifeminism and
censures on the vices of the church were
bitterly resented.
Jean used the plot of the Roman
de la rose (c. 1280) as a means
of conveying a mass of encyclopaedic
information and opinions on every topic
likely to interest his contemporaries,
especially the increasingly important
bourgeois class. At various times he
relates the history of classical heroes,
attacks the hoarding of money, and
theorizes about astronomy and about the
human duty to increase and multiply.
Many of his views were hotly contested,
but they held the attention of the age.
The allegory itself was of little
importance to him; the famous
“Confession” of Nature (one of the
characters in the poem) digressed from
the narrative for some 3,500 verses, yet
it was such digressions that secured the
poem’s reputation. Nearly a century
later Geoffrey Chaucer translated a
segment of the poem, and some scholars
hold that it influenced his work more
than any other vernacular French or
Italian poetry.
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Christine de Pisan

born 1364, Venice [Italy]
died c. 1430
prolific and versatile French poet and
author whose diverse writings include
numerous poems of courtly love, a
biography of Charles V of France, and
several works championing women.
Christine’s Italian father was
astrologer to Charles V, and she spent a
pleasant, studious childhood at the
French court. At 15 she married Estienne
de Castel, who became court secretary.
Widowed after 10 years of marriage, she
took up writing in order to support
herself and her three young children.
Her first poems were ballades of lost
love written to the memory of her
husband. These verses met with success,
and she continued writing ballads,
rondeaux, lays, and complaints in which
she expressed her feelings with grace
and sincerity. Among her patrons were
Louis I, duke d’Orléans, the Duke de
Berry, Philip II the Bold of Burgundy,
Queen Isabella of Bavaria, and, in
England, the 4th Earl of Salisbury. In
all, she wrote 10 volumes in verse,
including L’Épistre au Dieu d’amours
(1399; “Letter to the God of Loves”), in
which she defended women against the
satire of Jean de Meun in the Roman de
la rose.
Christine’s prose works include Le
Livre de la cité des dames (1405; The
Book of the City of Ladies), in which
she wrote of women known for their
heroism and virtue, and Le Livre des
trois vertus (1405; “Book of Three
Virtues”), a sequel comprising a
classification of women’s roles in
medieval society and a collection of
moral instructions for women in the
various social spheres. The story of her
life, L’Avision de Christine (1405),
told in an allegorical manner, was a
reply to her detractors. At the request
of the regent, Philip the Bold of
Burgundy, Christine wrote the life of
the deceased king, Charles—Le Livre des
fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles
V (1404; “Book of the Deeds and Good
Morals of the Wise King Charles V”), a
firsthand picture of Charles V and his
court. Her eight additional prose works
reveal her remarkable breadth of
knowledge.
After the disastrous Battle of
Agincourt in 1415, she retired to a
convent. Her last work, Le Ditié de
Jehanne d’Arc (written in 1429), is a
lyrical, joyous outburst inspired by the
early victories of Joan of Arc; it is
the only such French-language work
written during Joan’s lifetime.
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Lyric poetry in the 14th century
Allegory and
similar conceits abound in much late medieval
poetry, as with Guillaume de Machaut, the
outstanding musician of his day, who composed for
noble patronage a number of narrative dits amoureux
(short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity
of lyric verse. A talented technician, Machaut did
much to popularize and develop the relatively new
fixed forms: ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short
poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in
his own verse a more personal note than many of his
contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with
public and private affairs, sometimes satirically;
but he composed little love poetry, and his work was
not set to music. Jean Froissart, the chronicler,
also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms,
as did Christine de Pisan, whose poetry had a
greater individuality. Most court verse of this
period has an unreal air, as if, amid the political
and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the
poets were voicing a yearning for humane and
gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie.
Thus Alain Chartier, a political polemicist in both
French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La
Belle Dame sans mercy (1424; “The Beautiful Woman
Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover
rejected by his lady.
Guillaume de Machaut

Machaut (at right) receiving
Nature and three of her children,
from an illuminated Parisian manuscript
of the 1350s
born c. 1300, Machault, Fr.
died 1377, Reims
French poet and musician, greatly
admired by contemporaries as a master of
French versification and regarded as one
of the leading French composers of the
Ars Nova musical style of the 14th
century. It is on his shorter poems and
his musical compositions that his
reputation rests. He was the last great
poet in France to think of the lyric and
its musical setting as a single entity.
He took holy orders and in 1323
entered the service of John of
Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, whom he
accompanied on his wars as chaplain and
secretary. He was rewarded for this
service by his appointment in 1337 as
canon of Reims cathedral. After the
King’s death, he found another protector
in the King’s daughter, Bonne of
Luxembourg, wife of the future king John
II of France, and in 1349 in Charles II,
king of Navarre. Honours and patronage
continued to be lavished by kings and
princes on Machaut at Reims until his
death.
In his longer poems Machaut did not
go beyond the themes and genres already
widely employed in his time. Mostly
didactic and allegorical exercises in
the well-worked courtly love tradition,
they are of scant interest to the modern
reader. An exception among the longer
works is Voir-Dit, which relates how a
young girl of high rank falls in love
with the poet because of his fame and
creative accomplishments. The difference
in age is too great, however, and the
idyll ends in disappointment. Machaut’s
lyric poems also are based on the
courtly love theme but reworked into a
deft form with a verbal music that is
often perfectly achieved. His
influence—most significantly his
technical innovations—spread beyond the
borders of France. In England, Geoffrey
Chaucer drew heavily upon Machaut’s
poetry for elements of The Book of the
Duchesse.
All of Machaut’s music has been
preserved in 32 manuscripts,
representing a large part of the
surviving music from his period. He was
the first composer to write
single-handedly a polyphonic setting of
the mass ordinary, a work that has been
recorded in modern performance. In most
of this four-part setting he employs the
characteristic Ars Nova technique of
isorhythm (repeated overlapping of a
rhythmic pattern in varying melodic
forms).
Machaut’s secular compositions make
up the larger part of his music. His
three- and four-part motets (polyphonic
songs in which each voice has a
different text) number 23. Of these, 17
are in French, 2 are Latin mixed with
French, and 4, like the religious motets
of the early 13th century, are in Latin.
Love is often the subject of their
texts, and all but 3 employ isorhythm.
Machaut’s 19 lais (see lai) are usually
for unaccompanied voice, although two
are for three parts, and one is for two
parts. They employ a great variety of
musical material, frequently from the
popular song and dance. Of his 33
virelais (see virelai), 25 consist
solely of a melody, and they, along with
the bulk of his lais, represent the last
of such unaccompanied songs composed in
the tradition of the trouvères. The rest
of his virelais have one or two
additional parts for instrumental
accompaniment, and these are typical of
the accompanied solo song that became
popular in the 14th century. The
polyphonic songs he wrote, in addition
to his motets, consist of 21 rondeaux
and 41 of his 42 ballades. The wide
distribution of his music in
contemporary manuscripts reveals that he
was esteemed not only in France but also
in Italy, Spain, and much of the rest of
Europe.
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Eustache Deschamps

born c. 1346, Vertus, Fr.
died c. 1406
poet and author of L’Art de dictier
(1392), the first treatise on French
versification.
The son of middle-class parents,
Deschamps was educated in Reims by the
poet Guillaume de Machaut, who had a
lasting influence on him. After law
studies in Orléans, he held
administrative and diplomatic posts
under the kings Charles V and VI. His
leisure was devoted to poetry, and he
was immensely prolific, producing
farces, traditional love poetry, and
satires—notably a satire on women.
By his own description, Deschamps was
jovial and good-humoured. The Hundred
Years’ War embittered him, however, and
his later poetry is a realistic
reflection of his times, showing
sympathy for the sufferings of the
people and affection for his country. He
influenced the English poet Geoffrey
Chaucer, to whom he addressed a ballade.
Ballade
Sus! Alarme! Ce dist le Mardi
Gras
Au Charnage : nous serons assaillis!
Caresme vient. Que ferons nous, helas?
Ce mercredi sera sur le pays,
Dont je voy ja moult de gens esbahis
Et qui delaissent beufs, vaiches et
moutons,
Veaulx et aigneaulx, connins, perdriz,
chapons,
Cerfs et chevreaulx, pors, bieurre,
oeufs et frommaige,
Oes, malars, faisans, grues et paons.
Maudit soit il, et benoit soit Charnage.
Caresme met les povres gens au bas,
Jeuner les fait et estre mal servis,
Et les contraint par griefs labours de
bras.
Aux et oingnons, huile de chenevis,
Noix moysies, pommes et pain faitis,
Leur met devant, herbes, choulz et
porgons,
Tourteaulx en pot d'orge et de
secourgons,
Matin lever pour aler en l'ouvraige.
Merveille n'est se tel tirant doubtons.
Maudit soit il, et benoit soit Charnaige.
Artillerie a dedenz ses cabas,
Harens puanz, poissons de mer pourris,
Puree et poys et feves en un tas,
Pommes cuites, orge mondé et ris.
Dieux! Qu'il a fait de mal aux moines
gris,
Et aux Chartreux, maintes religions!
Toudis leur fait june et afflictions,
Et a pluseurs tenir povre mesnaige,
Le ventre emfler souvent par ses
poissons.
Maudit soit il, et benoit soit Charnaige.
Aux bien peuz fait avoir ventre plas,
Il vuide ceuls que j'avoie raemplis,
Souppe a huile leur donne et l'avenas,
Corde leur çaint, trop leur est ennemis.
VI sepmaines sera ses sieges mis.
Ainsis le fait : en Mars est sa saisons
Une foiz l'an. Contre lui nous tenons
Vigueureusement. May le mettra en caige,
Pasques aussi ; nous trois le
destruirons.
Maudiz soit il, et benoit soit Charnaige.
Dieux! Qu'il sera le grant sabmedi mas,
Povres, tristes, honteus et desconfis,
Huez com leux, car le dimenche es plas
Yert Charnaige avec ses bons amis.
Harens seront, figues et raisins, honnis.
Porree au lart, pastez, la ne faillons,
Connins, cabriz, oes, tartres et flaons.
Caresme prins tendrons en no servaige ;
Eschac et mat a ce jour lui dirons :
Maudis soit il, et benois soit Charnaige.
Envoy
Princes, ce temps paciamment souffrons ;
Prenons en gré pois, harens,
courtillaige.
Caresme est brief, nous le desconfirons.
Maudis soit il, et benoit soit Charnaige.
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Alain Chartier

Alain Chartier by Edmund Blair
Leighton
born c. 1385, Bayeux, Normandy,
France
died c. 1433, Avignon, Provence?
French poet and political writer
whose didactic, elegant, and Latinate
style was regarded as a model by
succeeding generations of poets and
prose writers.
Educated at the University of Paris,
Chartier entered the royal service,
acting as secretary and notary to both
Charles VI and the dauphin, later
Charles VII. He carried out various
diplomatic missions for Charles VII, and
in 1428 he was sent to Scotland to
negotiate the marriage of Margaret of
Scotland with the future Louis XI.
His work, written mainly from 1415 to
1430, is distinguished by its variety of
subject matter and form. Chartier was a
poet, orator, historian, moralist, and
pamphleteer who wrote in Latin and
French. His earliest-known poem, the
Livre des quatre dames (1415 or 1416;
“Book of the Four Ladies”), is a
discussion between four ladies who have
lost their lovers at the Battle of
Agincourt. The same technique is used in
the prose Quadrilogue invectif, written
in 1422, the dialogue being between
France and the three estates of the
realm (clergy, nobility, and commoners).
This work exposes the sufferings of the
peasantry, the misdeeds of the church,
and the abuses of the feudal army but
maintains that France could yet be saved
if the kingdom’s contending factions
would lay aside their differences in the
face of the common enemy.
Chartier’s poems are mostly
allegories in the courtly tradition but
show the influence of his classical
learning in their frequent Latinisms.
They include La Belle Dame
sans merci, Le Lay de paix
(“The Lay of Peace”), and Le Bréviaire
des nobles, the first of which, a tale
of unrequited love, is the best known
and was translated into English in the
15th century.
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Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished
victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc
d’Orléans, who was captured at Agincourt at the age
of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years.
There is an elegiac tone to much of his graceful
courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at
Blois became a literary centre, where he encouraged
the work of artists and poets such as
François
Villon.

Born in Paris about 1431 as François de
Montcorbier,
Villon adopted the name of his uncle, a
priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University
of Paris, where he became Master of Arts in 1452, he
acquired some learning but also became involved in
rioting, robbery, and manslaughter. His forced
departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le
Lais, or Le Petit Testament (1456; The Legacy: The
Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in
eight-line octosyllabic stanzas is conversational
and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to
people and events sometimes made cryptic by
Villon’s
taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six
years later after a spell in the bishop of Orléans’s
dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais
interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often
tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice,
Villon
disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern
French poet, he brings a personal note to the
familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and
mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a
keen command of rhythmic effects, and an economy of
expression that not only enhances his lively wit but
produces moments of intensely focused vision and, in
individual poems, moving statements of human
experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate
successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity,
extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus
heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair, however, to
judge them by their words alone, since music was,
for most, a vital ingredient of their art.
Francois
Villon
"Ballades"

born 1431, Paris
died after 1463
one of the greatest French lyric
poets. He was known for his life of
criminal excess, spending much time in
prison or in banishment from medieval
Paris. His chief works include Le Lais
(Le Petit Testament), Le Grand
Testament, and various ballades,
chansons, and rondeaux.
Life
Villon’s father died while he was
still a child, and he was brought up by
the canon Guillaume de Villon, chaplain
of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné. The
register of the faculty of arts of the
University of Paris records that in
March 1449 Villon received the degree of
bachelor, and in May–August 1452, that
of master. On June 5, 1455, a violent
quarrel broke out in the cloisters of
Saint-Benoît among himself, some
drinking companions, and a priest,
Philippe Sermoise, whom Villon killed
with a sword thrust. He was banished
from the city but, in January 1456, won
a royal pardon. Just before Christmas of
the same year, however, he was
implicated in a theft from the Collège
de Navarre and was again obliged to
leave Paris.
At about this time he composed the
poem his editors have called Le Petit
Testament, which he himself entitled Le
Lais (The Legacy). It takes the form of
a list of “bequests,” ironically
conceived, made to friends and
acquaintances before leaving them and
the city. To his barber he leaves the
clippings from his hair; to three
well-known local usurers, some small
change; to the clerk of criminal
justice, his sword (which was in pawn).
After leaving Paris, he probably went
for a while to Angers. He certainly went
to Blois and stayed on the estates of
Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was himself
a poet. Here, further excesses brought
him another prison sentence, this time
remitted because of a general amnesty
declared at the birth of Charles’s
daughter, Marie d’Orléans, on December
19, 1457. Villon entered his ballade “Je
meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine” (“I
die of thirst beside the fountain”) in a
poetry contest organized by the prince,
who is said to have had some of Villon’s
poems (including the “letter” dedicated
to the young child, “Épître à Marie
d’Orléans”) transcribed into a
manuscript of his own work.
At some later time, Villon is known
to have been in Bourges and in the
Bourbonnais, where he possibly stayed at
Moulins. But throughout the summer of
1461 he was once more in prison. He was
not released until October 2, when the
prisons were emptied because King Louis
XI was passing through.
Free once more, Villon wrote his
longest work, Le Testament (or Le Grand
Testament, as it has since been known).
It contains 2,023 octosyllabic lines in
185 huitains (eight-line stanzas). These
huitains are interspersed with a number
of fixed-form poems, chiefly ballades
(usually poems of three 10-line stanzas,
plus an envoi of between 4 and 7 lines)
and chansons (songs written in a variety
of metres and with varied verse
patterns), some of which he had composed
earlier.
In Le Testament Villon reviews his
life and expresses his horror of
sickness, prison, old age, and his fear
of death. It is from this work
especially that his poignant regret for
his wasted youth and squandered talent
is known. He re-creates the taverns and
brothels of the Paris underworld,
recalling many of his old friends in
drunkenness and dissipation, to whom he
had made various “bequests” in Le Lais.
But Villon’s tone is here much more
scathing than in his earlier work, and
he writes with greater ironic
detachment.
Shortly after his release from the
prison at Meung-sur-Loire he was
arrested, in 1462, for robbery and
detained at the Châtelet in Paris. He
was freed on November 7 but was in
prison the following year for his part
in a brawl in the rue de la
Parcheminerie. This time he was
condemned to be pendu et etranglé
(“hanged and strangled”). While under
the sentence of death he wrote his
superb “Ballade des pendus,” or
“L’Épitaphe Villon” , in which he
imagines himself hanging on the
scaffold, his body rotting, and he makes
a plea to God against the “justice” of
men. At this time, too, he wrote his
famous wry quatrain “Je suis Françoys,
dont il me poise” (“I am François, they
have caught me”). He also made an appeal
to the Parlement, however, and on
January 5, 1463, his sentence was
commuted to banishment from Paris for 10
years. He was never heard from again.
Poetry
The criminal history of Villon’s
life can all too easily obscure the
scholar, trained in the rigorous
intellectual disciplines of the medieval
schools. While it is true that his
poetry makes a direct unsentimental
appeal to our emotions, it is also true
that it displays a remarkable control of
rhyme and reveals a disciplined
composition that suggests a deep concern
with form, and not just random
inspiration. For example, the ballade
“Fausse beauté, qui tant me couste chier”
(“False beauty, for which I pay so dear
a price”), addressed to his friend, a
prostitute, not only supports a double
rhyme pattern but is also an acrostic,
with the first letter of each line of
the first two stanzas spelling out the
names Françoys and Marthe. Even the
arrangement of stanzas in the poem seems
to follow a determined order, difficult
to determine, but certainly not the
result of happy accident. An even higher
estimate of Villon’s technical ability
would probably be reached if more were
known about the manner and rules of
composition of the time.
A romantic notion of Villon’s life as
some sort of medieval vie de bohème—a
conception reinforced by the
19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur
Rimbaud, who saw him as the “accursed
poet”—has been challenged by modern
critical studies. David Kuhn has
examined the way most texts were made to
yield literal, allegorical, moral, and
spiritual meanings, following a type of
biblical exegesis prevalent in that
theocentric age. He has discovered in Le
Testament a numerical pattern according
to which Villon distributed the stanzas.
If his analysis is correct, then it
would seem Le Testament is a poem of
cosmic significance, to be interpreted
on many levels. Kuhn believes, for
example, that the stanza numbered 33—the
number of years Jesus Christ
lived—refers directly to Jesus, which,
if true, could hardly be regarded as the
random inspiration of a “lost child.”
The critic Pierre Guiraud sees the poems
as codes that, when broken, reveal the
satire of a Burgundian cleric against a
corps of judges and attorneys in Paris.
That Villon was a man of culture
familiar with the traditional forms of
poetry and possessing an acute sense of
the past is evident from the poems
themselves. There is the ballade
composed in Old French, parodying the
language of the 13th century; Le
Testament, which stands directly in the
tradition of Jehan Bodel’s Congés
(“Leave-takings”), poetry that poets
such as Adam de la Halle and Bodel
before him had composed when setting out
on a journey; best of all, perhaps,
there is his “Ballade des dames du temps
jadis” (“Ballade of the Ladies of Bygone
Times,” included in Le Testament), with
its famous, incantatory refrain “Mais où
sont les neiges d’antan?” (“But where
are the snows of yesteryear?”).
However farfetched some of these
insights into Villon may appear to be,
it is not surprising that the poet—given
the historical context of
learning—should inform his own work with
depth of thought, meaning, and
significance. But an “intellectual”
approach to Villon’s work should not
distract from its burning sincerity nor
contradict the accepted belief that
fidelity to genuine, often painful,
personal experience was the source of
the harsh inspiration whereby he
illuminated his largely traditional
subject matter—the cortège of shattered
illusions, the regrets for a lost past,
the bitterness of love betrayed, and,
above all, the hideous fear of death so
often found in literature and art at
that time of pestilence and plague,
massacre and war.
The little knowledge of Villon’s life
that has come down to the present is
chiefly the result of the patient
research of the 19th-century French
scholar Auguste Longnon, who brought to
light a number of historical
documents—most of them judicial
records—relating to the poet. But after
Villon’s banishment by the Parlement in
1463 all trace of him vanishes. Still,
it is a wonder that any of his poetry
should have survived, and there exist
about 3,000 lines, the greater part
published as early as 1489 by the
Parisian bookseller Pierre Levet, whose
edition served as the basis for some 20
more in the next century. Apart from the
works mentioned, there are also 12
single ballades and rondeaux (basically
13-line poems with a sophisticated
double rhyme pattern), another 4 of
doubtful authenticity, and 7 ballades in
jargon and jobelin—the slang of the day.
Two stories about the poet were later
recounted by François Rabelais: one told
of his being in England, the other of
his seeking refuge at the monastery of
Saint-Maixent in Poitou. Neither is
credible, nor is it known when or where
Villon died.
Assessment
Perhaps the most deeply moving of
French lyric poets, Villon ranges in his
verse from themes of drunkenness and
prostitution to the unsentimental
humility of a ballade-prayer to “Our
Lady,” “Pour prier Nostre-Dame,” written
at the request of his mother. He speaks,
with marvelous directness, of love and
death, reveals a deep compassion for all
suffering humanity, and tells
unforgettably of regret for the wasted
past.
His work marks the end of an epoch,
the waning of the Middle Ages, and it
has commonly been read as the
inspiration of a “lost child.” But as
more becomes known about the poetic
traditions and disciplines of his day,
this interpretation seems inadequate. It
is probably either too early or too late
fully to understand Villon’s work, as
one critic has suggested; but although
the scholar must still face a variety of
critical problems, enough is known about
Villon’s life and times to mark him as a
poet of genius, whose work is charged
with meaning and great emotional force.
Régine Pernoud
Ed.
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Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary
medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert
de Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie
(associating the Holy Grail with the Crucifixion)
and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into
prose. Other Arthurian romances adopted it, notably
the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and
1235, with its five branches by various hands. These
included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste
del Saint Graal (whose Cistercian author used
Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of
Christian truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi
Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully
describing the collapse of the Arthurian world. The
Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose.
To spin out their romances while maintaining their
public’s interest, authors wove in many characters
and adventures, producing complex interlacing
patterns, which
Sir Thomas Malory simplified when he
drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur ("King
Arthur and of his Noble Knights" ), c.
1470.
As well as traditional material, new fictions
appeared in prose, taking a very different view of
love, and often in the form of short comic tales.
Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled Les
Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or
The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony) continued the
tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du
petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little John of
Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred
relationship in which hero and heroine both sought
to exploit the social game of courtly love for their
own ends; the work’s realism and psychological
interest have made it for some the first French
novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent Nouvelles
Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales),
loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio,
are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though
written for the Burgundian court.
Pious and instructional works abound. More
interesting are the chronicles, which avoid the
romantic extravagances of their verse predecessors.
Geoffroy of Villehardouin’s Conquête de
Constantinople (“Conquest of Constantinople”) is a
sober, if biased, eyewitness account of the Fourth
Crusade (1199–1204). Jean, sire de Joinville, was 84
when, in 1309, he completed his Histoire de Saint
Louis, a flattering biographical portrait of his
intimate friend Louis IX, whom he had accompanied on
the Seventh Crusade. (Both Villehardouin’s account
and Joinville’s biography are to be found in a
20th-century English translation as Joinville and
Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades. Jean
Froissart, who traveled extensively in England and
Scotland and on the Continent, projected his
admiration of chivalry into his four books of
chronicles. Covering the years 1325 to 1400, they
contain much picturesque detail, largely from
personal observation. A far more cynical view of
people, politics, and feudal values is found in the
Mémoires of Philippe de Commynes, composed over the
period 1489 to 1498 and published posthumously in
1524–28; these are the texts with which modern
French historiography may be said to begin.
Robert
de Boron

Robert de Boron (also spelled in the
manuscripts "Bouron", "Beron") was a
French poet of the late 12th and early
13th centuries who is most notable as
the author of the poems Joseph
d'Arimathe and Merlin.
Robert de Boron was the author of two
surviving poems in octosyllabic verse,
the Grail story Joseph d'Arimathe and
Merlin. The latter work survives only in
fragments and in later versions rendered
in prose. The two poems are thought to
have formed either a trilogy - with a
verse Perceval forming the third part -
or a tetralogy - with Perceval a Mort
Artu (Death of Arthur). The "Didot
Perceval", a retelling of the Percival
story similar in style and content to
Robert's other works, may be a
prosification of the lost sections.
Robert de Boron is the first author
to give the Holy Grail myth an
explicitly Christian dimension.
According to him, Joseph of Arimathea
used the Grail (the Last Supper vessel)
to catch the last drops of blood from
Jesus's body as he hung on the cross.
Joseph's family brought the Grail to the
vaus d'Avaron, the valleys of Avaron in
the west, which later poets changed to
Avalon, identified with Glastonbury,
where they guarded it until the rise of
King Arthur and the coming of Perceval.
Robert also introduced a "Rich Fisher"
variation on the Fisher King.
Robert originated from the village of
Boron, now in the arrondissement of
Montbéliard. What is known of his life
come from brief mentions in his poems.
At one point in Joseph d'Arimathe, he
applies to himself the title of meisters
(medieval French for "clerk"); later he
uses the title messires (medieval French
for "knight"). At the end of the same
poem, he mentions being in the service
of Gautier of "Mont Belyal", whom Pierre
Le Gentil identifies with one Gautier de
Montbéliard (the Lord of Montfaucon),
who in 1202 left for the Fourth Crusade,
and died in the Holy Land in 1212. Le
Gentil also argues that the mention of
Avalon shows that he wrote Joseph
d'Arimathe after 1191, when the monks at
Glastonbury claimed to have discovered
the coffins of King Arthur and
Guinevere. His family is unknown, though
the second author of the Prose Tristan
claimed to be Robert's nephew, calling
himself "Helie de Boron". This is taken
more as an attempt to drop a famous name
than a genuine accreditation, however.
Although Le Gentil describes him as a
"poet endowed with boldness and piety
but with mediocre talent", his version
of the Grail myth was adopted by almost
all of the later writers of the Matter
of Britain.
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Antoine de la Sale

Frontispiece from 1830 edition of Le
Petit Jehan de Saintré
(1456) by Antoine de la Salle
born c. 1386, near Arles, Provence
[France]
died c. 1460
French writer chiefly remembered for
his Petit Jehan de Saintré, a romance
marked by a great gift for the
observation of court manners and a keen
sense of comic situation and dialogue.
From 1400 to 1448 La Sale served the
dukes of Anjou, Louis II, Louis III, and
René, as squire, soldier, administrator
and, ultimately, governor of René’s son
and heir, Jean (John of Calabria). The
Angevin claims to the kingdom of Sicily
brought him repeatedly into Italy, and
his didactic works contain several
accounts of his unusual and picturesque
experiences there. He was in Italy for
Louis II’s 1409–11 campaign against
Ladislas of Durazzo. In 1415 he took
part in a Portuguese expedition against
the Moors of Ceuta. La Sale visited the
Sibyl’s mountain near Norcia, seat of
the legend later transported to Germany
and attached to the name of Tannhäuser;
he relates the legend in great detail in
his Paradis de la reine Sibylle.
He became governor of the sons of
Louis of Luxembourg, count of St. Pol in
1448. There he wrote La Salle (1451), a
collection of moral anecdotes; Le Petit
Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little John of
Saintré, 1931); Du Réconfort à Madame de
Fresne (1457; “For the Consolation of
Madame de Fresne,” on the death of her
young son); and a Lettre sur les
tournois (1459; “A Letter on the
Tournaments”).
Jehan de Saintré is a
pseudobiographical romance of a knight
at the court of Anjou who, in real life,
achieved great fame in the mid-14th
century. Modern criticism ascribes an
important place to Saintré in the
development of French prose fiction and
also extols the grace, wit, sensibility,
and realism of the writer.
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Geoffroy of Villehardouin

Conquest of Constantinople by the
Fourth Crusade
born c. 1150, near Bar-sur-Aube,
Burgundy [France]
died c. 1213, Greece?
French soldier, chronicler, marshal of
Champagne, and one of the leaders of the
Fourth Crusade (1201–04), which he
described in his Conquest of
Constantinople. He was the first serious
writer of an original prose history in
Old French.
Although he was only one of the lesser
nobility, Villehardouin was from the
start accepted as one of the leaders of
the Fourth Crusade. In 1205 his
consummate generalship saved the
Frankish army from destruction at the
hands of the Bulgars outside Adrianople
(modern Edirne, Turkey) and led them
without loss through hostile country to
safety in Constantinople.
Villehardouin’s work, usually known as
the Conquête de Constantinople (Conquest
of Constantinople), initiated the great
series of histories that so
distinguishes medieval French
literature. His achievement is
remarkable because neither in style nor
form did he have any models on which to
base his work; his Latin predecessors
were probably unknown to him firsthand.
He probably started writing his
chronicle about 1209. In it, he
describes the “crusade,” a war in which
French knights and their Venetian allies
invaded the Byzantine Empire and
captured its capital Constantinople
(1204). It was after the city’s fall
that Villehardouin distinguished himself
in the conflict with the Bulgars.
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Jean, sire de Joinville

born c. 1224, Joinville, Champagne
died Dec. 24, 1317, Joinville
author of the famous Histoire de
Saint-Louis, a chronicle in French
prose, providing a supreme account of
the Seventh Crusade (1248–54).
A member of the lesser nobility of
Champagne, Joinville first attended the
court of Louis IX at Saumur (1241),
probably as a squire. The young
Joinville took the crusader’s cross at
the same time as the King (1244) and set
out with him (August 1248) on his
expedition to Egypt, from where the
crusaders planned to attack Syria.
Captured with the entire army, Louis and
Joinville were ransomed, and Joinville
became friends with Louis during the
King’s subsequent stay at Acre. They
returned to France in 1254. While in
Syria, Joinville wrote the first draft
of a minor work, his Credo, a rather
naive statement of belief that was
probably revised later. Made seneschal
of Champagne on his return, he became an
expert in court procedures and seems to
have divided his time between the royal
court and his fief of Joinville. He
refused to accompany the King on his
fatal crusade to Tunis (1270), having
previously told him that it was folly.
Joinville lived to testify for the
canonization of the King (1282) and to
see it enacted (1298); he controlled his
domain until his death at 93.
Preliminary drafts of Joinville’s major
work, the Histoire de Saint-Louis (The
History of St. Louis, or The Life of St.
Louis), may have been begun as early as
the 1270s, but the final form was
commissioned by Jeanne of Champagne and
Navarre, wife of King Philip IV the
Fair. It was not completed at the time
of her death (1305) and so was presented
in 1309 to her son Louis X. The Histoire
is a personal account, which, in the
course of setting forth the exploits of
his idol, King Louis IX, reveals
Joinville himself as a deeply moving
man: simple, honest, straightforward,
affectionate. He makes no attempt to
conceal his occasional cowardice, his
lack of piety, his tactlessness, or his
garrulity. Although the short narratives
of Louis’s early life and of his later
reign, death, and canonization are
valuable because of the author’s
proximity to them, the heart of the book
lies in its lengthy central section, the
account of the Crusade. Besides telling
the financial hardships, the dangers of
sea voyages, and the ravages of disease,
he vividly describes the confusion and
lack of discipline in the crusading
army. A blunt adviser, Joinville paints
his king’s sublime unworldliness against
his own frank humanity. In addition, the
book describes Muslim customs.
The original manuscript of the work
disappeared from all records shortly
after its composition. The Histoire was
first printed and modernized from an
inferior manuscript in 1547.
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Philippe de Commynes

born c. 1447, Comines, Flanders [now on
the Belgian-French border]
died October 18, 1511, Argenton-Château,
France
statesman and chronicler whose Mémoires
establish him as one of the greatest
historians of the Middle Ages.
Commynes was the son of a knight of the
Order of the Golden Fleece and was the
godson of Philip the Good, duke of
Burgundy. He was brought up at the
Burgundian court and in 1464 became
squire to Philip’s son Charles of
Charolais (Charles the Bold). He took
part in a war against Louis XI of France
in 1465 and accompanied Charles the Bold
on his first expedition against Liège
(1466–67). When Charles succeeded to the
duchy of Burgundy in 1467, he appointed
Commynes his counselor and sent him as
ambassador on missions to England,
Brittany, and Spain. In 1468 he was
present at the famous meeting at Péronne,
when Charles virtually held Louis XI as
prisoner, and was able to negotiate an
agreement between them.
Recognizing Commynes’s abilities as a
diplomat, Louis persuaded him in 1472 to
desert Charles the Bold and enter his
service as a chamberlain and
confidential adviser; Commynes was
rewarded handsomely for his move. After
Louis’s death in 1483, Commynes was at
first one of the counselors of the
regent, Anne of Beaujeu, but he
intrigued against the government with
the duke d’Orléans (the future Louis XII
of France) and was implicated in the
“Mad War” between the two. As a
consequence, he was imprisoned for
several months but was eventually
restored to favour at the end of 1489 by
Charles VIII, who used him as a
negotiator and later as ambassador to
Venice at the beginning of the
expedition to Italy (1494–95). He was
not in the government during the early
years of Louis XII’s reign but later
helped formulate Louis’s Italian policy.
Commynes’s Mémoires, composed 1489–98,
were posthumously published in three
segments (1524–28). The memoirs reveal
him as a writer of considerable talent,
remarkable for his psychological
perceptiveness, his sense of the
picturesque, and his vivid narrative.
Despite his sympathy for Louis XI, he
succeeded in achieving impartiality, but
his work contains many errors of fact
and omission.
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Religious drama
Serious drama in Europe was
reborn in the Middle Ages within the Roman Catholic
church. There, from early times, musical and
dramatic elements (tropes) were introduced into
certain offices, particularly at Easter and
Christmas. From this practice sprang liturgical
drama. Performances took place inside churches, with
the cast of clergy moving from place to place in the
sanctuary. At first only Latin was used, though
occasionally snatches of vernacular verse were
included, as in the early 12th-century Sponsus (“The
Bridegroom”; Eng. trans. Sponsus), which uses the
Poitevin dialect. Stories from the Bible and lives
of the saints were dramatized; and, as the scope of
the dramas broadened, more plays were performed
outside the church and used only the vernacular. The
all-male casts employed multiple settings (décor
simultané) and moved from one setting, or mansion,
to another as the action demanded.
The first extant mystère, or mystery play, with
entirely French dialogue (but elaborate stage
directions in Latin) is the Jeu d’Adam (Adam: A
Play). It is known from a copy in an Anglo-Norman
manuscript, and it may have originated in England in
the mid-12th century. With lively dialogue and the
varied metres characteristic of the later mystères
(all of which were based on biblical stories), it
presents the Creation and Fall, the story of Cain
and Abel, and an incomplete procession of prophets.
Neither it nor the Seinte Resurreccion (c. 1200;
“Resurrection of the Saviour”), certainly
Anglo-Norman, shows the events preceding the
Crucifixion, the matter of the Passion plays; these
first appeared in the early 14th century in the
Passion du Palatinus (“Passion of Palatinus”). Of
relatively modest proportions, this contains
diversified dialogue with excellent dramatic
potential and probably drew on earlier plays now
lost.
The oldest extant miracle, or miracle play (a
real or fictitious account of the life, miracles,
and martyrdom of a saint), is the remarkable
13th-century Jeu de Saint Nicolas (“Play of Saint
Nicholas”), by Jehan Bodel of Arras, in which exotic
Crusading and boisterous tavern scenes alternate.
Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Théophile is an early version
of the Faust theme, in which the Virgin Mary secures
Théophile’s salvation. From the 14th century comes
the Miracles de Notre-Dame par personnages
(“Miracles of Our Lady with Dramatic Characters”), a
collection of 40 miracles, partly based on a
nondramatic compilation by Gautier de Coincy. These
miracles probably were performed by the Paris
goldsmiths’ guild.
By the 15th century, societies had been formed in
various towns for the performance of the
increasingly elaborate mystery plays. In Paris the
Confraternity of the Passion survived until 1676,
though its production of sacred plays was banned in
1548. Notable authors of mystères are Eustache
Marcadé; Arnoul Gréban, organist and choirmaster at
Notre-Dame, and his brother Simon; and Jehan Michel.
Arnoul Gréban’s monumental Mystère de la Passion (c.
1450, reworked by Michel in 1486; The True Mistery
of the Passion) took four days to perform. Other
plays took up to eight days. Biblical material was
supplemented with legend, theology, and elements of
lyricism and slapstick, and spectacular stage
effects were employed.
Jehan Bodel

born c. 1167, Arras, Artois [France]
died 1210, Arras
jongleur, epic poet, author of fabliaux,
and dramatist, whose Le Jeu de Saint
Nicolas (“Play of St. Nicholas”) is the
first miracle play in French.
Bodel probably held public office in
Arras and certainly belonged to one of
its puys, or literary confraternities.
He planned to go on the Fourth Crusade
but, stricken with leprosy, was admitted
to a lazar house, where he died. He
wrote five pastourelles (four in
1190–94; one in 1199), nine fabliaux
(1190–97), La Chanson des Saisnes
(before 1200; “Song of the Saxons”), Le
Jeu de Saint Nicolas (performed c.
1200), and Les Congés (1202;
“Leave-Takings”), his poignant farewell
to his friends, a lyrical poem of 42
stanzas.
Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas treats a theme
presented in Latin, notably by Hilarius
(flourished 1125), giving it new form
and dimensions by relating it to the
Crusades. In Bodel’s play the saint’s
image, to which the sole survivor of a
Christian army is found praying, becomes
the agent of a miracle. The image is
found by the victorious Saracens, but
when placed upon the Saracen king’s
treasure it does not prevent the
treasure’s removal by thieves, who
interrupt their dicing, drinking, and
brawling (in tavern scenes given local
colour by their portrayal of the people
and manners of Arras) to carry it away.
The saint himself appears, however, and
compels the rogues to return the
treasure, and as a result the Saracen
king and his people are converted to
Christianity.
In its crusading fervour, piety, and
satirical wit, Bodel’s Le Jeu is
outstanding. It is also of importance
because of the introduction of comic
scenes based on contemporary life and
for being possibly the first of the
Latin college plays to be translated
into vernacular verse. La Chanson des
Saisnes, a successful late epic, adds
roman d’aventure episodes to a
historical narrative of Charlemagne’s
Saxon wars.
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Secular drama
A crucial factor in the emergence of
the comic theatre was the oral presentation of much
medieval literature. A natural consequence was
complete dramatization and collaborative
performances by jongleurs and later by guilds or
confréries (confraternities) formed for the purpose.
The earliest comic plays extant date from the
second half of the 13th century. Le Garçon et
l’aveugle (“The Boy and the Blind Man”), a simple
tale of trickster tricked, could have been played by
a jongleur and his boy and ranks for some scholars
as the first farce. At the end of the century, the
Arras poet Adam de la Halle composed two unique
pieces: Le Jeu de la feuillée (“The Play of the
Bower”), a kind of topical revue for his friends,
and Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion (The Play of Robin
and Marion), a dramatized pastourelle (a knight’s
encounter with a shepherdess and her friends) spiced
with song and dance. The first serious nonreligious
play was L’Estoire de Griseldis (1395), the story of
a constant wife.
The profane theatre eventually had its own
societies of actors, such as the Basoches
(associations of lawyers and clerks) and the Enfants
sans Souci (probably a special group of Basochiens)
in Paris. The societies frequently presented plays
in triple bills: first a sotie, a slight, sometimes
satiric, sketch; next a moralité (morality play), a
didactic and often allegorical piece; and finally a
farce. Some 150 farces have survived from the 15th
and 16th centuries. Most are of fewer than 500 lines
and involve a handful of characters acting out plots
similar to those of the fabliaux. They use the
octosyllabic rhyming couplet and may include songs,
commonly in rondeau form. By far the best is the
unusually long La Farce de maistre Pierre Pathelin
(c. 1465; Master Peter Patelan, a Fifteenth-Century
French Farce), a tale of trickery involving a sly
lawyer, a dull-witted draper, and a crafty shepherd.
D.D.R. Owen
Jennifer Birkett
Adam de la Halle

born c. 1250, Arras, France
died c. 1306, Naples [now in Italy]
Adam de la Halle, also known as Adam le
Bossu was a French-born trouvère,
poet and musician, whose literary and
musical works include chansons and
jeux-partis (poetic debates)in the style
of the trouveres, polyphonic rondel and
motets in the style of early liturgical
polyphony, and a musical play, "The Play
of Robin and Marion", which is
considered the earliest surviving
secular French play with music. He was a
member of the Confrérie des jongleurs et
bourgeois d'Arras.
Adam's other nicknames, "le Bossu
d'Arras" and "Adam d'Arras", suggest
that he came from Arras, France. The
sobriquet "the Hunchback" was probably a
family name; Adam himself points out
that he was not one. His father, Henri
de le Hale, was a well-known Citizen of
Arras, and Adam studied grammar,
theology, and music at the Cistercian
abbey of Vaucelles, near Cambrai. Father
and son had their share in the civil
discords in Arras, and for a short time
took refuge in Douai. Adam had been
destined for the church, but renounced
this intention, and married a certain
Marie, who figures in many of his songs,
rondeaux, motets and jeux-partis.
Afterwards he joined the household of
Robert II, Count of Artois; and then was
attached to Charles of Anjou, brother of
Charles IX, whose fortunes he followed
in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Italy.
At the court of Charles, after Charles
became king of Naples, Adam wrote his
Jeu de Robin et Marion, the most famous
of his works. Adam's shorter pieces are
accompanied by music, of which a
transcript in modern notation, with the
original score, is given in
Coussemaker's edition. His Jeu de Robin
et Marion is cited as the earliest
French play with music on a secular
subject. The pastoral, which tells how
Marion resisted the knight, and remained
faithful to Robert the shepherd, is
based on an old chanson, Robin m'aime,
Robin m'a. It consists of dialogue
varied by refrains already current in
popular song. The melodies to which
these are set have the character of folk
music, and are more spontaneous and
melodious than the more elaborate music
of his songs and motets. Fétis
considered Le Jeu de Robin et Marion and
Le Jeu de la feuillée forerunners of the
comic opera. An adaptation of Le Jeu
Robin et Marion, by Julien Tiersot, was
played at Arras by a company from the
Paris Opéra-Comique on the occasion of a
festival in 1896 in honour of Adam de le
Hale.
His other play, Le jeu Adan or Le jeu de
la Feuillee (ca. 1262), is a satirical
drama in which he introduces himself,
his father and the citizens of Arras
with their peculiarities. His works
include a conge, or satirical farewell
to the city of Arras, and an unfinished
chanson de geste in honour of Charles of
Anjou, Le roi de Sicile, begun in 1282;
another short piece, Le jeu du pelerin,
is sometimes attributed to him.
His known works include thirty-six
chansons (literally, "songs"), forty-six
rondets de carole, eighteen jeux-partis,
fourteen rondeaux, five motets, one
rondeau-virelai, one ballette, one dit
d'amour, and one congé.
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APPENDIX
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Peter Abelard
"The
Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise"

French theologian and poet
French Pierre Abélard, or Abailard, Latin Petrus Abaelardus,
or Abeilardus
born 1079, Le Pallet, near Nantes, Brittany [now in
France]
died April 21, 1142, Priory of Saint-Marcel, near
Chalon-sur-Saône, Burgundy [now in France]
Main
French theologian and philosopher best known for his
solution of the problem of universals and for his original
use of dialectics. He is also known for his poetry and for
his celebrated love affair with Héloïse.
Early life
The outline of Abelard’s career is well known, largely
because he described so much of it in his famous Historia
calamitatum (“History of My Troubles”). He was born the son
of a knight in Brittany south of the Loire River. He
sacrificed his inheritance and the prospect of a military
career in order to study philosophy, particularly logic, in
France. He provoked bitter quarrels with two of his masters,
Roscelin of Compiègne and Guillaume de Champeaux, who
represented opposite poles of philosophy in regard to the
question of the existence of universals. (A universal is a
quality or property that each individual member of a class
of things must possess if the same general word is to apply
to all the things in that class. Redness, for example, is a
universal possessed by all red objects.) Roscelin was a
nominalist who asserted that universals are nothing more
than mere words; Guillaume in Paris upheld a form of
Platonic realism according to which universals exist.
Abelard in his own logical writings brilliantly elaborated
an independent philosophy of language. While showing how
words could be used significantly, he stressed that language
itself is not able to demonstrate the truth of things (res)
that lie in the domain of physics.
Abelard was a peripatetic both in the manner in which he
wandered from school to school at Paris, Melun, Corbeil, and
elsewhere and as one of the exponents of Aristotelian logic
who were called the Peripatetics. In 1113 or 1114 he went
north to Laon to study theology under Anselm of Laon, the
leading biblical scholar of the day. He quickly developed a
strong contempt for Anselm’s teaching, which he found
vacuous, and returned to Paris. There he taught openly but
was also given as a private pupil the young Héloïse, niece
of one of the clergy of the cathedral of Paris, Canon
Fulbert. Abelard and Héloïse fell in love and had a son whom
they called Astrolabe. They then married secretly. To escape
her uncle’s wrath Héloïse withdrew into the convent of
Argenteuil outside Paris. Abelard suffered castration at
Fulbert’s instigation. In shame he embraced the monastic
life at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris and made
the unwilling Héloïse become a nun at Argenteuil.
Career as a monk
At Saint-Denis Abelard extended his reading in theology and
tirelessly criticized the way of life followed by his fellow
monks. His reading of the Bible and of the Fathers of the
Church led him to make a collection of quotations that
seemed to represent inconsistencies of teaching by the
Christian church. He arranged his findings in a compilation
entitled Sic et non (“Yes and No”); and for it he wrote a
preface in which, as a logician and as a keen student of
language, he formulated basic rules with which students
might reconcile apparent contradictions of meaning and
distinguish the various senses in which words had been used
over the course of many centuries. He also wrote the first
version of his book called Theologia, which was formally
condemned as heretical and burned by a council held at
Soissons in 1121. Abelard’s dialectical analysis of the
mystery of God and the Trinity was held to be erroneous, and
he himself was placed for a while in the abbey of
Saint-Médard under house arrest. When he returned to
Saint-Denis he applied his dialectical methods to the
subject of the abbey’s patron saint; he argued that St.
Denis of Paris, the martyred apostle of Gaul, was not
identical with Denis of Athens (also known as Dionysius the
Areopagite), the convert of St. Paul. The monastic community
of Saint-Denis regarded this criticism of their traditional
claims as derogatory to the kingdom; and, in order to avoid
being brought for trial before the king of France, Abelard
fled from the abbey and sought asylum in the territory of
Count Theobald of Champagne. There he sought the solitude of
a hermit’s life but was pursued by students who pressed him
to resume his teaching in philosophy. His combination of the
teaching of secular arts with his profession as a monk was
heavily criticized by other men of religion, and Abelard
contemplated flight outside Christendom altogether. In 1125,
however, he accepted election as abbot of the remote Breton
monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys. There, too, his
relations with the community deteriorated, and, after
attempts had been made upon his life, he returned to France.
Héloïse had meanwhile become the head of a new foundation
of nuns called the Paraclete. Abelard became the abbot of
the new community and provided it with a rule and with a
justification of the nun’s way of life; in this he
emphasized the virtue of literary study. He also provided
books of hymns he had composed, and in the early 1130s he
and Héloïse composed a collection of their own love letters
and religious correspondence.
Final years
About 1135 Abelard went to the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève outside
Paris to teach, and he wrote in a blaze of energy and of
celebrity. He produced further drafts of his Theologia in
which he analyzed the sources of belief in the Trinity and
praised the pagan philosophers of classical antiquity for
their virtues and for their discovery by the use of reason
of many fundamental aspects of Christian revelation. He also
wrote a book called Ethica or Scito te ipsum (“Know
Thyself”), a short masterpiece in which he analyzed the
notion of sin and reached the drastic conclusion that human
actions do not make a man better or worse in the sight of
God, for deeds are in themselves neither good nor bad. What
counts with God is a man’s intention; sin is not something
done (it is not res); it is uniquely the consent of a human
mind to what it knows to be wrong. Abelard also wrote
Dialogus inter philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum
(“Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian”)
and a commentary on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, the
Expositio in Epistolam ad Romanos, in which he outlined an
explanation of the purpose of Christ’s life, which was to
inspire men to love him by example alone.
On the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève Abelard drew crowds of
pupils, many of them men of future fame, such as the English
humanist John of Salisbury. He also, however, aroused deep
hostility in many by his criticism of other masters and by
his apparent revisions of the traditional teachings of
Christian theology. Within Paris the influential abbey of
Saint-Victor was studiously critical of his doctrines, while
elsewhere William of Saint-Thierry, a former admirer of
Abelard, recruited the support of Bernard of Clairvaux,
perhaps the most influential figure in Western Christendom
at that time. At a council held at Sens in 1140, Abelard
underwent a resounding condemnation, which was soon
confirmed by Pope Innocent II. He withdrew to the great
monastery of Cluny in Burgundy. There, under the skillful
mediation of the abbot, Peter the Venerable, he made peace
with Bernard of Clairvaux and retired from teaching. Now
both sick and old, he lived the life of a Cluniac monk.
After his death, his body was first sent to the Paraclete;
it now lies alongside that of Héloïse in the cemetery of
Père-Lachaise in Paris. Epitaphs composed in his honour
suggest that Abelard impressed some of his contemporaries as
one of the greatest thinkers and teachers of all time.
David Edward Luscombe
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Alexander of Hales
French theologian and philosopher
born c. 1170/85, Hales, Gloucestershire, Eng.
died 1245, Paris
Main
theologian and philosopher whose doctrines influenced the
teachings of such thinkers as St. Bonaventure and John of La
Rochelle. The Summa theologica, for centuries ascribed to
him, is largely the work of followers.
Alexander studied and taught in Paris, receiving the
degrees of master of arts (before 1210) and theology (1220).
He was archdeacon of Coventry in 1235 and became a
Franciscan (c. 1236). In Paris he founded the Schola Fratrum
Minorum, where he was the first holder, possibly until his
death, of the Franciscan chair.
Only the most general features of Alexander’s theology
and philosophy have been made clear: basically an
Augustinian, he had to some extent taken into account the
psychological, physical, and metaphysical doctrines of
Aristotle, while discarding popular Avicennian tenets of
emanations from a Godhead. The “Franciscan” theories of
matter and form in spiritual creatures, of the multiplicity
of forms, and of illumination combined with experience are
probably Alexander’s adaptations of similar theories of the
Augustinian and other traditions. His original works, apart
from sections of the Summa and of an Expositio regulae
(“Exposition of the Rule”), include a commentary on the
Sentences of Peter Lombard—the first to treat the Sentences,
rather than the Bible, as the basic text in theology;
Quaestiones disputatae antequam esset frater (“Questions
Before Becoming a Brother . . .”); Quodlibeta; sermons; and
a treatise on difficult words entitled Exoticon. Alexander
was known to the Scholastics by the title Doctor
Irrefragabilis (Impossible to Refute).
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Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides)
also called Gersonides, Leo De
Bagnols, Leo Hebraeus, or (by acronym) Ralbag
born 1288, Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Fr.
died 1344
French Jewish mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and
Talmudic scholar.
In 1321 Levi wrote his first work, Sefer ha-mispar (“Book
of the Number”), dealing with arithmetical operations,
including extraction of roots. In De sinibus, chordis et
arcubus (1342; “On Sines, Chords, and Arcs”) he presented an
original derivation of the sine theorem for plane triangles
and tables of sines calculated to five decimal places. On
the request of Philip of Vitry, bishop of Meaux, he composed
a book on geometry, preserved only in Latin translation, De
numeris harmonicis (1343; “The Harmony of Numbers”),
containing commentaries on the first five books of Euclid
and original axioms.
Influenced by the works of Aristotle and the 12th-century
Islāmic philosopher Averroës, Levi wrote Sefer ha-hekkesh
ha-yashar (1319; Latin Liber syllogismi recti; “Book of
Proper Analogy”), criticizing several arguments of
Aristotle; he also wrote commentaries on the works of both
philosophers.
Although Levi’s biblical commentaries are complex, he
presupposed an audience familiar with these commentaries,
medieval astronomical literature, and the works of Averroës
when he wrote (1317–29) his major work, Sefer milḥamot
Adonai (“The Book of the Wars of the Lord”; partial trans.
Die Kämpfe Gottes, 2 vol.). Divided into six parts, the work
treats exhaustively of the immortality of the soul; dreams,
divination, and prophecy; divine knowledge; providence;
celestial spheres and separate intellects and their
relationship with God; and the creation of the world,
miracles, and the criteria by which one recognizes the true
prophet. In the fifth part, he describes “Jacob’s staff,” an
instrument that he used to measure the angular distance
between celestial bodies.
Levi’s work has often been criticized because of his bold
expression and the unconventionality of his thought, which
continued to exercise wide influence into the 19th century.
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John of Jandun
French philosopher
French Jean De Jandun
born c. 1286, Jandun, Champagne, Fr.
died 1328, Todi, Papal States
Main
foremost 14th-century interpreter of Averroës’ rendering of
Aristotle.
After study at the University of Paris, John became
master of arts at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, where he
lectured on Aristotle. He associated with Marsilius of
Padua, writer of the Defensor Pacis, which asserted the
superiority of civil authority over that of the pope.
Because of controversy over this work, John and Marsilius
sought the protection of Louis IV of Bavaria. After a series
of condemnatory papal bulls, they were excommunicated as
heretics by Pope John XXII in 1327.
John of Jandun’s most influential writings are
commentaries on Aristotle; his major concern was the
division between faith and reason. Some critics think that
he held a “double-truth” theory, believing that
contradictory statements of faith and reason may be
simultaneously true; others call him anti-Christian, and
still others judge him to be a thinker of the Augustinian
tradition.
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John of Mirecourt
French philosopher
French Jean De Méricour, Latin Johannes De Mercuria
flourished 14th century
Main
French Cistercian monk, philosopher, and theologian whose
skepticism about certitude in human knowledge and whose
limitation of the use of reason in theological statements
established him as a leading exponent of medieval Christian
nominalism (the doctrine that universals are only names with
no basis in reality) and voluntarism (the doctrine that will
and not reason is the dominant factor in experience and in
the constitution of the world).
Originally from the Vosges Mountains in Lorraine, John,
also called “the White Monk” because of his religious
clothing, obtained his bachelor’s degree in theology at
Paris in 1345 and wrote a commentary on the Sentences, or
theological theses, of Peter Lombard. In 1347 the university
faculty censured 63 propositions from this commentary for
their divergence from Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Later that
year, however, following the counsel of Pope Clement VI that
church authority should not involve itself in philosophical
matters not immediately related to matters of faith, the
faculty granted John’s request to submit an accompanying
“apology,” or clarification, with his theological commentary
and then reduced the censure to 41 propositions. John’s
basic proposals were that rational certitude is largely
unattainable because of the fallibility of the senses, and,
even granting the possibility of the human mind’s forming
correct ideas, truth escapes it because God, in his absolute
power, can alter reality. Accordingly, John denied the
possibility of rationally proving the existence of God as
the most perfect of all beings or as the first cause of all
that exists, indeed, even that any created thing requires a
cause. He submitted that it is more meritorious for man to
believe in God’s existence by faith informed with love than
to reach certainty by deductive reasoning.
John, however, admitted the certainty of self-existence,
the doubting of which served only to prove the existence of
a doubting self. His difficulties with church authorities
arose principally from his attributing to God a role in the
existence of evil and suffering, citing that, even if God is
said only to permit evil, he in effect causes it. John’s
extreme views derived from his concern to safeguard at least
a limited area of cognitional certitude, while acknowledging
God’s absolute freedom to effect anything, even the
possibility that man might hate him.
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Peter Lombard

French Pierre Lombard, Latin Petrus Lombardus
born c. 1100, Novara, Lombardy
died Aug. 21/22, 1160, Paris
bishop of Paris whose Four Books of Sentences (Sententiarum
libri IV) was the standard theological text of the Middle Ages.
After early schooling at Bologna, he went to France to study
at Reims and then at Paris. From 1136 to 1150 he taught theology
in the school of Notre Dame, Paris, where in 1144–45 he became a
canon—i.e., staff clergyman. Lombard was present at the Council
of Reims (1148) that assembled to examine the writings of the
French theologian Gilbert de La Porrée. In June 1159 he was
consecrated bishop of Paris and died the following year.
Although he wrote sermons, letters, and commentaries on Holy
Scripture, Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences (1148–51)
established his reputation and subsequent fame, earning him the
title of magister sententiarum (“master of the sentences”). The
Sentences, a collection of teachings of the Church Fathers and
opinions of medieval masters arranged as a systematic treatise,
marked the culmination of a long tradition of theological
pedagogy, and until the 16th century it was the official
textbook in the universities. Hundreds of scholars wrote
commentaries on it, including the celebrated philosopher St.
Thomas Aquinas.
Book I of the Sentences discusses God, the Trinity, divine
guidance, evil, predestination; Book II, angels, demons, the
Fall of man, grace, sin; Book III, the Incarnation of Jesus
Christ, the redemption of sins, virtues, the Ten Commandments;
Book IV, the sacraments and the four last things—death,
judgment, hell, and heaven. While Lombard showed originality in
choosing and arranging his texts, in utilizing different
currents of thought, and in avoiding extremes, of special
importance to medieval theologians was his clarification of the
theology of the sacraments. He asserted that there are seven
sacraments and that a sacrament is not merely a “visible sign of
invisible grace” (after Augustine of Hippo) but also the “cause
of the grace it signifies.” In ethical matters, he decreed that
a man’s actions are judged good or bad according to their cause
and intention, except those acts that are evil by nature.
Lombard’s teachings were opposed during his lifetime and
after his death. Later theologians rejected a number of his
views, but he was never regarded as unorthodox, and efforts to
have his works condemned were unsuccessful. The fourth Lateran
Council (1215) approved his teaching on the Trinity and prefaced
a profession of faith with the words “We believe with Peter
Lombard.” His collected works are in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina, vol. 191–192. The best edition of the Four Books of
Sentences (no English translation) is considered to be that of
the Franciscans of the College of St. Bonaventura (near
Florence), Libri quattuor sententiarum (2 vol., 1916).
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Nicholas of Autrecourt
French philosopher and theologian
French Nicolas D’autrecourt
born c. 1300, Autrecourt, near Verdun, Fr.
died after 1350, Metz, Lorrain
Main
French philosopher and theologian known principally for
developing medieval Skepticism to its extreme logical
conclusions, which were condemned as heretical.
Nicholas was an advanced student in liberal arts and
philosophy at the Sorbonne faculty of the University of
Paris from 1320 to 1327. He became one of the most notable
adherents of nominalism, a school of thought holding that
only individual objects are real and that universal concepts
simply express things as names. Nicholas’ chief writings are
commentaries on the 12th-century Sentences of Peter Lombard,
the basic medieval compendium of philosophical theology, and
on the Politics of Aristotle; nine letters to the Franciscan
monk-philosopher Bernard of Arezzo; and an important
treatise usually designated by the opening words Exigit ordo
executionis (“The order of completion requires”). This last
contains the 60 theses controverted at Nicholas’ heresy
trial, convened by Pope Benedict XII at Avignon, in 1340.
Nicholas rejected the traditional Aristotelian
objectivism, with its allusions to a single intellect for
all men, and proposed that there are only two bases for
intellectual certitude: the logical principle of identity,
with its correlative principle of contradiction, which
states that a thing cannot simultaneously be itself and
another; and the immediate evidence of sense data.
Consistent with his nominalist doctrine, he denied that any
causal relation could be known experientially and taught
that the very principle of causality could be reduced to the
empirical declaration of the succession of two facts. The
consequence of such a concept of causality, he averred, was
to reject the possibility of any rational proof for the
existence of God and to deny any divine cause in creation.
Indeed, he held as more probable that the world had existed
from eternity.
Nicholas’ nominalism precluded the possibility of knowing
anything as a permanent concept and allowed only the
conscious experience of an object’s sensible qualities.
Rejecting Scholastic–Aristotelian philosophy and physics,
Nicholas believed that the physical and mental universe is
ultimately composed of simple, indivisible particles or
atoms. He maintained, however, that his innovative thought
did not affect his fidelity to Christian religious
tradition, including the moral commandments and belief in a
future life. Faith and reason, he taught, operate
independently from each other, and one could assent to a
religious doctrine that reason might contradict. Because of
the fallibility of the senses and the human inclination—even
in Aristotle—toward erroneous judgment, evidence and truth
are not always identical, and philosophy at best is simply
the prevalence of the more probable over the less probable.
The ecclesiastical judges at Nicholas’ heresy trial
labeled his avowals of Christian belief as mere subterfuge
and denounced him. Condemned in 1346 by Pope Clement VI,
Nicholas finally was ordered in 1347 to resign his
professorship, recant his error, and publicly burn his
writings. That he took refuge with Emperor Louis IV the
Bavarian is a legend created to form a parallel with the
life of William of Ockham, his nominalist precursor.
Nicholas became dean of the cathedral at Metz in 1350, after
which nothing more is heard of him. His Exigit manuscript
was discovered by A. Birkenmayer at the Bodleian Library,
Oxford, and was published in 1939 by J.R. O’Donnell in
Medieval Studies.
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William of Auvergne
French philosopher
born after 1180, Aurillac, Aquitaine
died 1249, Paris
Main
also called William Of Paris, or William Of Alvernia, French
Guillaume D’auvergne, or De Paris the most prominent French
philosopher-theologian of the early 13th century and one of
the first Western scholars to attempt to integrate classical
Greek and Arabic philosophy with Christian doctrine.
William became a master of theology at the University of
Paris in 1223 and a professor by 1225. He was named bishop
of the city in 1228. As such he defended the rising
mendicant orders against attacks by the secular clergy,
which impugned the mendicants’ orthodoxy and reason for
existence. As a reformer he limited the clergy to one
benefice (church office) at a time if it provided them
sufficient means.
William’s principal work, written between 1223 and 1240,
is the monumental Magisterium divinale (“The Divine
Teaching”), a seven-part compendium of philosophy and
theology: De primo principio, or De Trinitate (“On the First
Principle,” or “On the Trinity”); De universo creaturarum
(“On the Universe of Created Things”); De anima (“On the
Soul”); Cur Deus homo (“Why God Became Man”); De sacramentis
(“On the Sacraments”); De fide et legibus (“On Faith and
Laws”); De virtutibus et moribus (“On Virtues and Customs”).
After the condemnation of Aristotle’s Physics and
Metaphysics in 1210 by church authorities fearful of their
negative effect on the Christian faith, William initiated
the attempt to delete those Aristotelian theses that he saw
as incompatible with Christian beliefs. On the other hand,
he strove to assimilate into Christianity whatever in
Aristotle’s thought is consistent with it.
Influenced by the Aristotelianism of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā),
an 11th-century Islāmic philosopher, and by the Neoplatonism
of Augustine and the school of Chartres, William,
nevertheless, was sharply critical of those elements in
classical Greek philosophy that contradicted Christian
theology, specifically on the questions of human freedom,
Divine Providence, and the individuality of the soul.
Against Avicenna’s determinism, he held that God
“voluntarily” created the world, and he opposed those
proponents of Aristotelianism who taught that man’s
conceptual powers are one with the single, universal
intellect. William argued that the soul is an
individualized, immortal “form,” or principle, of
intelligent activity; man’s sentient life, however, requires
another activating “form.”
The complete works of William of Auvergne, edited in 1674
by B. Leferon, were reprinted in 1963. A critical text of De
bono et malo by J.R. O’Donnell appeared in 1954.
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