It is customary to date ‘Burgundian court literature’ from the creation of the Valois dukedom for his fourth son, Philippe le Hardi, by Jean le Bon of France in 1363, to the death of the last great duke, Charles le Téméraire, in 1477. The dukedom comprised two distinct geographical entities, united by marriage: Burgundy proper, centring on Dijon, and from 1384 the northern provinces of Flanders. As marriage and conquest expanded the latter territories, Brussels came to displace Dijon as the capital.
The Valois dukes (Philippe le Hardi, duke from 1363 to 1404; Jean sans Peur, 1404-19; Philippe le Bon, 1419-67; Charles le Téméraire, 1467-77) were among the wealthiest magnates of the age, and their court was royal in all but name, universally admired as a centre of refined opulence: the dukes retained an astonishing array of architects, artists, musicians, tapissiers, and jewellers. They entertained lavishly, with great feasts, tournaments, and court pageantry. In this artistic hothouse, literature played a major part. The dukes—and their family and entourage—assembled one of medieval Europe's outstanding libraries, catalogued in a series of inventories from 1404 to 1504 and consisting ultimately of over 1, 000 volumes, the product of a veritable stable of the finest copyists, calligraphers, miniaturists, and book-binders. The dukes themselves had pronounced literary leanings; Philippe le Bon in particular had anciennes histoires read before him every day; he collected so effectively that he was said to be ‘le prince le mieux garni de autenticque et riche librairie’. The dukes' tastes differed. Philippe le Hardi's interest in hunting is reflected in his commissioning of Gace de la Buigne's Deduit des chiens, and he was also the dedicatee of Gaston Phébus's Livre de la chasse, whilst Charles le Téméraire's classical interests were reflected in his commissioning of translations, for example, of Julius Caesar, Xenophon, and Cicero.
Certain procedures are characteristic of the ducal libraries. The dukes' interest in history was extensive, fed by the acquisition and copying of Latin histories, and by commissions to re-compile and translate them, often in luxurious and lavishly illuminated manuscripts; thus in 1448 Wauquelin compiled a great history of Alexander the Great, and in 1454 Jean Mansel anthologized Livy and Sallust among others to produce Les Histoires romaines. They had a particular predilection for history with local relevance; Philippe le Bon commissioned a series of chroniques, of France, Flanders, Holland, characterized by genealogical preoccupations designed to ground the history of the dukedom in the remotest antiquity. Similar preoccupations also underlie commissions such as David Aubert's huge four-volume compilation, Histoire de Charles Martel et de ses successeurs (1448), and his three-volume Conquestes de Charlemagne (1458), a compilation of
This last procedure—dérimage—is a permanent preoccupation of Burgundian literary industry. The princes admired the chivalrous deeds described in epic and romance, but preferred prose to the strait-jacket of verse, ‘pour le langaige quy est plus entier et n'est mie constraint’. The dukes' library contained mises en prose of epics and romances: the Chastelain de Coucy, Cleomades, Gilles de Chin, and many more. The mises en prose of Chrétien's Cligés and Erec et Enide are typical, but typically disappointing: we lose not only the rhythm and tension of the rhymed couplets, but also much lively description and subtle monologue, since the compilers aimed, says Wauquelin ominously, to ‘retranchier et sincoper prolongacions et mots inutiles’. At the same time, however, the Arthurian prose romances were acquired and copied: the later inventories note multiple copies of the prose Tristan and the Vulgate cycle [see Romance, 2]. The dukes' tastes were conservative; the fiction they commissioned built on existing popularity and they encouraged the production, or at least the propagation, of more recent Arthurian romances: all the manuscripts of the Perceforest emanate from Burgundian circles.
The two fields where the Burgundian contribution was most original are historiography and lyric poetry. Unsurprisingly, the dukes' interest in history was carried forward into a concern for the proper presentation to posterity of their own achievements. On the one hand, they encouraged the frankly partisan: the Geste des ducs Philippe et Jehan de Bourgogne, for instance, running from 1384 to 1412. More interestingly, however, they also retained as indiciaires, or official historians of their courts, Chastellain (‘perle et estoile de tous les historiographes’) until his death in 1474, followed by Molinet until 1506, retained for 120 livres in 1485 as ‘bon et leal historiographe et chronicqueur’. Both historians pride themselves on impartiality, but are sincerely convinced of Burgundian superiority; their works are, of course, panegyrics, couched in sonorous prose, theatricalizing contemporary events. They and their fellow Burgundian Olivier de La Marche accord central importance to the Burgundian court as the locus of haute noble chevalerie, and pay particular attention to the festivities whose etiquette and choreography La Marche in particular documents. Like virtually all their contemporaries, the writers view history anachronistically, through the prism of chivalry, with a didactic note inviting readers to draw moral lessons from contemporary events.
Chastellain and Molinet are also court poets, as indeed was La Marche—and it is in this capacity that they illustrate the second strand of Burgundian originality, a type of lyric verse commonly attached to the so-called Rhétoriqueurs. This poetry is didactic and politically involved; over half of Molinet's Faits et dits is devoted to court matters. It sets store by the writer's technical skill, his erudition, his linguistic ingenuity, even the physical disposition of the words on the page.
Brilliant propagandists, the dukes made the most of their patronage; what is typical of Burgundian court literature, finally, is the imbrication of politics and literature: the
— Jane Taylor
Bibliography
- G. Doutrepont, La Littérature française à la cour des ducs de Bourgogne (repr., 1970)
