Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines, Madness, Metaphor 1843845121, 9781843845126

Table of contents :
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Oxidation Before Oxygen 1
1. Of Metal and Men 39
2. 'Une enroullure de sapience': Instituting Princely Virtues at the Court of Charles V 79
3. Metaphors of the Body Politic 121
4. 'Le fer en la playe' 173
5. Alain Chartier’s 'rooil de oubliance' 245
Epilogue: Men Without Machines 291
Bibliography 313
Index

Citation preview

Gallica Volume 43

REPRESENTING MENTAL ILLNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRANCE

Gallica ISSN 1749–091X Founding Editor: Sarah Kay Series Editors: Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken

Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval and early modern French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Simon Gaunt ([email protected]) Professor Peggy McCracken ([email protected]) The Editorial Director, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

REPRESENTING MENTAL ILLNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRANCE MACHINES, MADNESS, METAPHOR

JULIE SINGER

D. S. BREWER

© Julie Singer 2018 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Julie Singer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2018 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978-1-84384-512-6 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

For Althea and Edmund, my most welcome distractions and for my mentor and friend: Smooth move, Solterer.

Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements ix List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: Oxidation Before Oxygen

1

1 Of Metal and Men

39

2 Une enroullure de sapience: Instituting Princely Virtues at the Court of Charles V

79

3 Metaphors of the Body Politic

121

4 Le fer en la playe

173

5 Alain Chartier’s rooil de oubliance 245 Epilogue: Men Without Machines

291

Bibliography 313 Index

355

Illustrations Figure 1 Fortune Turning a Crank, Guillaume de Machaut, Remède 67 de Fortune (Paris, BnF MS fr. 1586, fol. 30v), c.1350–55. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France Figure 2 The New Iconography of the Cardinal Virtues, 75 Jean Courtecuisse, Seneque des .IIII. Vertus (Paris, BnF MS fr. 9186, fol. 304r), c.1470. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France Figure 3 The Body Politic, Avis aus roys (New York, Morgan M. 456, 133 fol. 5r), c.1347–50. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York Figure 4 The Two Statues, Guillaume de Deguileville, Pèlerinage 145 de l’âme (Paris, BnF MS fr. 377, fol. 154), c.1395. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France Figure 5 Salmon arrested; Salmon saves Charles VI from drowning, Pierre Salmon, Dialogues (Paris, BnF MS fr. 23279, fol. 64v), c.1409. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France

209

Figure 6 The Acteur in his Chamber, Alain Chartier, Le Livre de l’Espérance (Paris, BnF fr 24441, fol. 34r.), c.1440–61. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France

275

Figure 7 The “Cambridge Diagram” of the Internal Senses, after 276 Avicenna, De anima (Cambridge Univ. Lib. MS G.g.I.i, fol. 490v), c.1310. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the making, and I have accrued a great many debts along the way. I wish, first of all, to thank my colleagues at Washington University who have enabled me to complete this work to the best of my abilities. I must express my appreciation for the Faculty Research Grant that enabled me to travel to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Summer 2012, and for the subsequent efforts and support of my department chair, Michael Sherberg. Special thanks go to Jessica Rosenfeld and Wendy Love Anderson, my not-so-secret writing group collaborators, and to the other members of the Medieval Studies community at Washington University in St. Louis. Thank you to my colleagues in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, who graciously allowed me to present some of this work in a Spring 2016 Faculty Colloquium, and to the Medieval Reading Group, to whom I presented some of my early ideas on this topic in Fall 2010 and Fall 2012. I am grateful to my students, Robin Girard and Cassidy Thompson, whose hard work has inspired and motivated me; I remain humbled by the trust they have placed in me and fervent in my desire to live up to it. My research assistants, the incomparable Andia Augustin-Billy and Nicole Hohman, helped me launch this project and prepare it for public consumption, respectively. For this I am truly grateful. It has felt, at times, that the Interlibrary Loan staff at Olin Library must have transferred the contents of an entire university library to my office: I have especially appreciated the kind assistance of Paula Albers, Chris Brady, and all of the library staff who have done the grueling and, I fear, usually thankless work of hauling so many books up to Ridgley Hall. My insights, such as they are, have emerged primarily through conversations and complaints shared with generous colleagues. First among these I recognize my mentor, friend, and fellow jokester, Helen Solterer, whose shining example reminds me that brilliance never means self-seriousness. I am also grateful to Wendy Turner, Peggy McCracken, Deborah McGrady, Irina Metzler, Ashby Kinch, Sasha Pfau, Anne Koenig, Anna Zayaruznaya, and many more whom I fear I have forgotten to mention. I have appreciated the opportunity to share parts of this project at the Ohio State University in Spring 2012, thanks to the kind invitation of Sarah-Grace Heller and Richard Firth Green; at the first biennial meeting of the BABEL Working Group in November 2010; and at

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in Spring 2012. I am also grateful for the meetings and conferences I did not attend: so thank you, Doctor Baumann, for discouraging me from flying to England and New York weeks before the birth of my daughter. I wish to offer special thanks to Marina Scordilis Brownlee, who probably has no idea what an important role she has played in my scholarly itinerary, but whose kind words at a crucial moment encouraged me to finish this project when I had all but abandoned it. With that long working delay in mind, I must also thank Sarah Kay and Caroline Palmer at D. S. Brewer for their infinite patience. I can only hope that the result will prove to have been worth the wait. Lastly, and above all, thank you to my husband Michael and my children Althea and Edmund, who have kept me sharp and kept me going.

Abbreviations ACMRS

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

BnF

Bibliothèque nationale de France

CNRS

Centre national de la recherche scientifique

DMF

Dictionnaire du Moyen Français

EHESS

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

FEW

Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch

LCL

Loeb Classical Library

ÖNB

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

PA PIMS PJC PUF PUPS PVH PVH1 PVH2

Pèlerinage de l’âme Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Pèlerinage de Jésus-Christ Presses universitaires de France Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne Pèlerinage de vie humaine Pèlerinage de vie humaine, first recension Pèlerinage de vie humaine, second recension

SATF SVP

Société des anciens textes français Songe du vieil pèlerin

Introduction: Oxidation Before Oxygen At the turn of the fifteenth century it must have seemed to many French people that the world was going mad. King Charles VI suffered his first bout of mental illness in 1392, and he underwent intermittent periods of frenzy, melancholy, and ever-scarcer lucidity until his death in 1422. The king’s malady was mirrored at every level of social experience, from the irrational civil war through which the body politic tore itself apart, to reports of elevated suicide rates among the common people. In this political environment, where affairs of state were closely linked to the ruler’s mental state, French writers sought new ways of representing the psychological dynamics of the body politic. The delicacy of the king’s condition demanded tact, a constraint that gave rise to unexpected literary representations of moments of mental and political breakdown. In this book I expose the innovative mix of organic and inorganic metaphors through which late medieval French writers explored the relationship between mind, body, and government: as a key example of this confrontation of the organic and the inorganic, I consider texts describing mental illness or intellectual impairments as a form of “rust.” While medieval writers frequently allegorize the state itself as a body, with the ruler at its head, they construct the mind within that head of state as a machine. From the characterization of the intellect as engin to the designation of four of the chief virtues as “cardinal” (from cardo, “hinge”), both cognitive function and moral decision-making carry with them notions of the mechanistic movement of metallic parts. Breakdowns of these processes vital to good government of self and of state result in the mind’s metaphoric immobilization with rust. Such language becomes increasingly common over the course of the fourteenth century. In the context of Charles VI’s reign and the crises that stemmed in part from his mental incapacity, inorganic metaphors, and more particularly the language of rust, offer an innovative and politically neutral instrument with which to represent the imbalanced mind and rewrite its ethical and political impact. In this book I propose a culturally contextualized reading of metaphor, one that sheds light on the uses of scientific language in non-scientific discourses. Just as today’s common metaphors of mental structures or processes as “hard wiring” or “computing” reflect contemporary technologies and values, the various late medieval deployments of machine metaphors allow for a new

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REPRESENTING MENTAL ILLNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRANCE

understanding of the many ways in which popular mentalities and poetic sensibilities were shaped by scientific discourses and by the unprecedented technological boom of the late medieval West. When we theorize metaphor as an interactive phenomenon that can “create or generate new significances,” as Carl R. Hausman puts it,1 the late medieval rust metaphor becomes an entry point into the history of mentalities, offering powerful insights into how the technological environment shapes the way we think about the way we think. Situated at the intersection of literary, technical, and medical discourses, the rust metaphor offers a poetic model of the mind that complements contemporaneous proto-psychological models. Literary metaphors of the psyche – and especially of the psyche as its components break down – suggest a new way to question what “mental illness” was in late medieval France. More generally, though, these innovative medieval texts invite reflection on a changing, culturally specific Western conception of the human mind: what it is, how it works, how it absorbs and produces knowledge, how it deteriorates and whether it can be restored. What becomes of the “life of the mind” when the intellect is described as an inorganic, non-living set of interlocking processes? Reading these turnof-the-fifteenth-century texts in the light of an interactionist view of metaphor, we shall see that inorganic metaphors of cognition can effect profound changes in a reader’s own cognitive framework. Understanding Mental (Dys)Function The study of disability in the Middle Ages has made great strides in the last two decades: increasingly resisting stereotypical visions of the marginalized person with disabilities, as one whose condition is interpreted as a divine punishment for sin, and progressively recognizing a more diverse range of social roles.2 While recent and ongoing studies have elaborated ever more 1

18.

Carl R. Hausman, Metaphor and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),

2 Breakthrough works include Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–c. 1400 (London: Routledge, 2005); Joshua Eyler, ed., Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). Irina Metzler has supplemented the former work’s theoretical framework with an exploration of the lived experience of medieval people with disabilities in A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment (New York: Routledge, 2013). For an overview of the state of medieval disability studies, see Richard Godden and Jonathan Hsy, “Analytical Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages,” New Medieval Literatures 15 (2013): 313–39. Several recent works have brought together studies of disability in the ancient and medieval world, notably Jenni Kuuliala, Katariina Mustakallio, and Christian Krötzl, eds., Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Social and Cultural Approaches to Health, Weakness, and Care (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015).

Introduction

3

nuanced and multifarious understandings of bodily disability in the Middle Ages, mental dysfunction and illness have proven a far more elusive object.3 Past and ongoing studies have offered fine analyses of medieval “madness,”4 especially from the point of view of medical/philosophical/intellectual history, legal documents, and, to a lesser degree, literary representations. Still, significant lacunae remain. The first of these is chronological: the vast majority of previous scholarship on mental illness and intellectual disability in the Middle Ages extends only as far as the thirteenth century. The second is a question of disciplinary approach: most have tackled the subject through the lens of medieval medical/philosophical texts, judicial records (including letters of remission), or, less frequently, modern literary theory. Therefore, while we possess a relatively comprehensive picture of the intellectual history of mental illness in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century West, the cultural history of mental illness in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has remained largely in the shadows. The most complete, foundational studies of medieval mental illness tend to deal primarily with materials drawn from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: these include Philippe Ménard’s “Les fous dans la société médiévale: Le témoignage de la littérature au XIIe et au XIIIe siècle,”5 Simon Kemp’s Medieval Psychology,6 Jean-Marie Fritz’s Le discours du fou au Moyen Âge,7 Sylvia Huot’s Madness in Medieval Literature: Identities

3 Patricia A. Clark and M. Lynn Rose point out that physical disability has received far more scholarly attention than mental disorders have, and that “the absence of intellectual and psychiatric disability as a category of historical analysis among historians of the GraecoRoman world reflects its invisibility at large, even among groups of advocates and activists for disability rights;” the same largely holds true for studies of medieval disability. Patricia A. Clark and M. Lynn Rose, “Psychiatric Disability and the Galenic Medical Matrix,” in Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies, a Capite Ad Calcem, ed. Martha L. Rose, C. F. Goodey, and Christian Laes (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 51–52. 4 I use the term “madness,” following Aleksandra Pfau, for, as she puts it, this terminology “avoids enforcing modern anachronistic understandings that were not present in the vast array of terms used in medieval texts to describe this condition.” “Madness in the Realm: Narratives of Mental Illness in Late Medieval France” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 6–7. For an alternate approach grounded in lexical variety, see Clark and Rose, “Psychiatric Disability,” 47. 5 Philippe Ménard, “Les fous dans la société médiévale: Le témoignage de la littérature au XIIe et au XIIIe siècle,” Romania 98 (1977): 433–59. 6 Simon Kemp, Medieval Psychology (New York: Greenwood, 1990). 7 Jean-Marie Fritz, Le discours du fou au Moyen Âge (Paris: PUF, 1992).

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REPRESENTING MENTAL ILLNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRANCE

Found and Lost.8 Additionally, a substantial number of purportedly comprehensive histories of mental illness and its representations – such as Lillian Feder’s Madness in Literature,9 Sander L. Gilman’s Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS,10 and Allen Thiher’s Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature11 – treat early modern materials (such as Shakespearean plays) under the “medieval” rubric, to the exclusion of any texts composed between the late thirteenth and late fifteenth centuries. Along similar lines, in Thomas F. Graham’s Medieval Minds: Mental Health in the Middle Ages, the chapter “Abelard to Aquinas” is followed by “Kramer to Luther.”12 Moreover, scholars adopting a Foucauldian approach tend to situate the emergence of the mentally ill subject in the early modern period, justifying a benign neglect of medieval sources.13 These examples, though they evidently do not represent the totality of scholarship on medieval madness, nonetheless underscore the tacit exclusion of the later Middle Ages from studies of the history of psychology and of mental illness, and its representation.14 The chronological cleavage between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, 8 Sylvia Huot, Madness in Medieval Literature: Identities Found and Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Other studies focusing primarily on pre-fourteenth-century materials include Philippe Ménard, “Les emblèmes de la folie dans la littérature et dans l’art (XIIe–XIIIe s.),” in Hommage à Jean-Charles Payen, Farai chansoneta novele: Essais sur la liberté créatrice au Moyen Âge (Caen: Université de Caen, 1989), 253–65; Muriel Laharie, La folie au Moyen Âge (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1991); Muriel Laharie, “Le malade mental dans la société médiévale (XIe–XIIIe siècle),” in Nouvelle histoire de la psychiatrie, ed. Jacques Postel and Claude Quetel (Paris: Dunod, 2004), 57–75. 9 Lillian Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 10 Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), especially Chapter Two, “Madness and Representation: Toward a History of Visualizing Madness.” 11 Allen Thiher, Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 12 Thomas F. Graham, Medieval Minds: Mental Health in the Middle Ages (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967). 13 See, for example, Tim Stainton, “Reason’s Other: The Emergence of the Disabled Subject in the Northern Renaissance,” Disability & Society 19:3 (2004): 225–43. 14 The most important exceptions have been in the work of Aleksandra Pfau and in Wendy Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) and Wendy Turner, ed., Madness in Medieval Law and Custom (Leiden: Brill, 2010). For a helpful overview of scholarship on the history of madness, see Turner, Care and Custody, 7–10 and Turner, Madness, 2–11. The chronological gap in studies of medieval mental disorders has since grown smaller thanks to the publication of Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Susanna Niiranen’s Mental (Dis)order in later Medieval Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2014). The essays in that volume, however, are primarily focused on “shortterm dispositions of disorder” rather than on more entrenched conditions (5). A number of forthcoming essays by Anne Koenig shed light on the social history of mental illness in late medieval Germany; I thank her for sharing some of this work with me.

Introduction

5

and the concomitant neglect of the two hundred intervening years, maps onto a set of received ideas about late medieval attitudes toward the mentally disabled against which more recent scholars have positioned their work: the demonological myth (i.e., the idea that medieval people attributed most mental illness to demonic possession),15 a focus on witch-crazes as evidence of the medieval persecution of the mentally ill (despite the fact that witch-crazes are more an early modern phenomenon than a medieval one),16 and the “ship of fools” narrative with which Michel Foucault opens his Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique.17 Additionally, scholars’ attempts at retrospective “diagnoses” of historical personages or literary characters with disorders recognized by modern Western psychiatrists have perpetuated the fallacy of mental illnesses as transhistorical phenomena rooted in nature and not in culture.18 In the relative absence of rigorous studies of late medieval representations of the mind and its (dys)functions, such received ideas and half-truths have maintained an undeserved currency.19 Studies of medieval discourses of the mind and its illnesses have likewise been dominated by only a handful of approaches: history (social and medical), 15 The 1970s marked a turning point in this line of inquiry, as a number of historians of medicine set out to debunk the demonological myth. See Jerome Kroll, “A Reappraisal of Psychiatry in the Middle Ages,” Archives of General Psychiatry 29 (1973): 276–83; Richard Neugebauer, “Medieval and Early Modern Theories of Mental Illness,” Archives of General Psychiatry 36 (1979): 477–83. Catherine Rider revisits the question with insight and nuance in “Demons and Mental Disorder in Late Medieval Medicine,” in Katajala-Peltomaa and Niiranen, Mental (Dis)order in later Medieval Europe, 47–69. 16 See, for example, Graham, Medieval Minds. 17 Indeed, of the rarer studies devoted to later medieval representations of mental illness, a great many tend to accept Foucault’s account of medieval attitudes toward the mentally ill. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). See, for example, Monique Santucci, “Le fou dans les lettres françaises médiévales,” Les lettres romanes 36 (1982): 195–211; Michèle Ristich de Groote, La folie à travers les siècles (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1967). Foucault’s broad analogy between leprosy and mental illness and his generalizations based on literary and social practices largely restricted to the fifteenthcentury Rhineland are attractive, but by no means authoritative. Anne Koenig provides a comprehensive account of critiques of Foucault’s “ship of fools” narrative and revisits the question, finding evidence for the itinerancy of the mad in late medieval German municipal records: “Shipping Fools: Foucault’s Wandering Madman and Civic Responsibility in Late Medieval Germany” (unpublished manuscript, personal communication 14 June 2017). 18 For a recent example of the persistence of this tendency, see Carlos Espí Forcén and Fernando Espí Forcén, “Demonic Possessions and Mental Illness: Discussion of Selected Cases in Late Medieval Hagiographic Literature,” Early Science in Medicine 19 (2014): 258–79. 19 William Southwell-Wright offers a sharp critique of these and related oversimplifications in previous work on premodern disability: “Past Perspectives: What Can Archaeology Offer Disability Studies?” in Emerging Perspectives on Disability Studies, ed. Matthew Wappett and Katrina Arndt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 67–95.

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philosophy, and literature. Social historians have focused on the treatment of mentally ill people, especially in judicial systems, while in the fields of literature and (more rarely) art history, the emphasis has been on representations (and occasionally self-representations) of the mentally ill. Historians of philosophy and of medicine have clarified the theoretical models, and practical treatments, through which learned people approached the mind and its impairments. These threads come together to create a picture of medieval mental illness that, while growing ever more complete, has largely failed to work across the disciplines and to integrate other fields, especially the intersections of literature, history, and political thought. For while some inquiries into medieval political theory have touched upon questions of mental function and dysfunction – studies of the role of the virtues in the “mirror of princes” genre, discussions of Christine de Pizan’s political thought, and of course, biographies of Charles VI – the degree to which political context informs the language with which late medieval writers evoke mental illness has gone largely overlooked. With that unfulfilled need in mind, I propose to introduce political considerations into a broader discourse of balance and breakdown. As Laure Murat has recently done in her brilliant study of the archives of Parisian mental hospitals from the Revolution to the Commune, I will aim to explore uncharted relationships between political history and discourses of mental illness;20 but rather than asking how historical contexts feed delirium (comment délire-t-on l’histoire?, as Murat puts it), I will expose how everyday language accounts for the imbalanced mind (comment métaphorise-t-on le délire?) and how these forms of figurative discourse allow for bold discussions of the effects of cognitive impairment on governance. During the era of Charles VI, political critique often relies on an implicit discourse of mental pathology; in order to appreciate this rhetorical strategy, we must know how fourteenth-and fifteenth-century authors conceive of the healthy mind. The body of modern scholarship dedicated to medieval psychology and mental illness provides us with a solid understanding of medieval constructs of the human mind, and its relationship to the brain and its diseases (despite the gaps we have just noted). This framework of knowledge will serve as

20 Here I will cite some of the questions with which Murat opens her study, as they overlap with several of the aims of this book. “Quel impact les événements historiques ont-ils sur la folie? Dans quelle mesure et sous quelles formes le politique est-il matière à délire? Peut-on évaluer le rôle d’une révolution ou d’un changement de régime dans l’évolution du discours de la déraison? Quelles inquiétudes politiques et sociales les délires portent-ils en eux?” (What impact do historical events have on madness? To what degree and in what ways can the political stoke delirium? Is it possible to evaluate the role of a revolution or regime change in the evolution of discourses on madness? What political and social anxieties do deliria bear within them?) Laure Murat, L’homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon: Pour une histoire politique de la folie (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 14–15.

Introduction

7

essential background for the study of the metaphors through which late medieval French authors write about the brain and its breakdowns. Medieval theories of the mind, the brain, and their functions are largely derived from the ancient Greeks, notably Aristotle and Galen,21 via Arabic and (later) Latin and vernacular commentators.22 According to the most commonly accepted model, the mind, the rational faculty, is not housed in any bodily organ.23 By means of the spirit, the soul and the mind communicate with the body, where cognitive processes such as perception, memory, and control of motor functions take place. The exact physiological site of these processes remains an unresolved question, though, as medieval thinkers are torn between conflicting accounts from Aristotle, according to whom the heart is source of movement and sensation, and Galen, according to whom these faculties are housed in the brain. Heather Webb very rightly points out that inconsistencies are not always resolved, nor must they be; these contradictions are indicative of “the beautiful complexity of medieval constructions of the body and its cohabitation with the soul.”24 Evrart de Conty signals this coexistence of brain-centered and heart-centered models in his late fourteenth-century translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata

21 Clark and Rose note that Galen “does not present a coherent and systematic discussion of mental disorders per se” but that “Galen’s schematisation of mental disorders according to physiological principles was sophisticated and complex and had an enormous influence on medical classifications for centuries to come.” “Psychiatric Disability,” 53, 55. Joel Kaye argues for the fundamental importance of Galenic theory to later medieval notions of balance in A History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and its Impact on Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 22 The account that follows is heavily indebted to Kemp, Medieval Psychology. For a complementary study, one focusing on sense perception not as psychological phenomena but as components of a philosophy of mind, see Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 23 E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Warburg Institute Surveys VI (London: Warburg Institute, 1975), 35. 24 Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 15. According to Webb, “Many late medieval philosophers, theologians, and physicians found ways to insist that the heart ruled the brain, even if they accepted the idea that the brain governed the nervous system. Scholars have often sought to reconcile this tenacious ‘inconsistency’ by suggesting that notions of the heart’s dominion were limited to the metaphorical realms while medicine held to a more strictly delimited sense of the heart’s physical powers. This is, however, an overly simplistic distinction for a time when natural philosophy, theology, poetry, and medicine worked within the same frames of terminology and asked many of the same questions. If, at times, we find a debate on physiology that divides along the lines of the physicians’ adherence to Galen and the philosophers’ adherence to Aristotle, it does not mean that the philosophers meant to speak metaphorically. They simply had different authorities and different procedures for arriving at what was understood to be a literal, physical truth of bodily function” (14–15).

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REPRESENTING MENTAL ILLNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRANCE

when he writes of the “parties où la vertus intellective ha son siege principalment, c’est a dire en la cervele ou bien li coer selon Aristote” (parts where the intellective faculty has its primary seat, namely in the brain, or in the heart according to Aristotle).25 Still, due in no small part to Avicenna’s adoption of it, the Galenic model had gained the upper hand by the later medieval period in France.26 Thus, adapting Galenic principles, medical writers demonstrate an increasing tendency toward “reading the body as a system in dynamic equalization,”27 a system in which the brain is the site of the intellect. Even an admirer of Aristotle such as Evrart de Conty opts to assign cognitive functions to the brain, as is seen in the above-cited passage, wherein Evrart includes the heart only as a qualified and parenthetical aside (“ou bien li coer selon Aristote”). The heart does continue to enjoy a privileged relationship with the soul, however, and so its activities are intimately linked to the brain’s cognitive processes. According to Avicenna’s widely accepted formulation, the natural spirit is distilled in the liver, whence it travels to the heart and is refined to form the vital spirit; some of this vital spirit is further refined in the brain’s rete mirabile28 to form the animal spirit, which fills the nerves and the three ventricles29 of the brain, and which enables communication with the rational soul. The ventricles or cells – chambretes, as Jean Corbechon terms them in his late fourteenth-century French translation of the encyclopedic Livre des

25 Problem XXX.1, BnF MS fr. 24282, fol. 179r. For further discussion of the autograph manuscript, see infra, Chapter Five. 26 Simon Kemp posits that “virtually all medieval scholars seem to have subscribed” to the idea that cognitive processes are sited in the brain: Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 32. On the particular case of the fourteenth-century commentator Pietro Torrigiano, see Danielle Jacquart, “Cœur ou cerveau? Les hésitations médiévales sur l’origine de la sensation et le choix de Turisanus,” Il cuore. Micrologus 11 (2003): 73–95. 27 Kaye, A History of Balance, 150. 28 The rete mirabile is now understood to be a network of arteries at the base of the brain present in birds, fish, and some mammals, but not humans. 29 Ynez Violé O’Neill argues that some medieval medical drawings suggest a meningeal localization of the ventricles, between the dura mater and the pia mater, rather than a “ventricular system” within the cerebrum. “Diagrams of the Medieval Brain: A Study in Cerebral Localization,” in Iconography at the Crossroads. Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March 1990, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993), 91–105.

Introduction

9

propriétés des choses30 – house the brain’s three to five cognitive faculties.31 The terminology used to designate these cerebral structures, each of which houses a localized mental function, can vary. The name “ventricles” (little stomachs) points to a “nutritive process,” as Ynez Violé O’Neill has pointed out,32 evoking a set of metaphors still current today (ruminating on an idea, food for thought). With “cells” or “chambretes,” the faculties are housed in an architectural space, perhaps an intimate domestic space.33 According to the most widely accepted faculty psychology schema, largely derived from Avicenna, the “common sense” and imagination are located in the brain’s front ventricle, cogitation and estimation in the middle, and memory in the rear.34 Proper mental function is dependent on movement of thoughts, images, and impressions from one ventricle to the next.35 Jean Corbechon underlines the importance of movement in his Livre des propriétés des choses: the brain “a moult d’esperit pour avoir grant mouvement” (contains many spirits in order to accommodate great movement, fol. 43ra). The qualities and composition of the brain also matter: heat and moisture, humoral balance. In a healthy person, the front ventricle is warm and dry, the middle warm and moist, the rear cold and dry. Imbalances in each area give rise to specific disorders.36 Thus mental illnesses Jean Corbechon, Livre des propriétés des choses, BnF MS fr. 16993, fol. 42vb. Throughout this book I cite Corbechon’s text from this manuscript, dated around 1400. The manuscript is described in Heinz Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus. Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte von “De proprietatibus rerum” (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000), 352. Delisle identifies it (“pas sans faire des réserves,” not without some reservations) as Charles V’s manuscript, but Byrne counters that it is “neither early enough nor good enough to be so identified.” Léopold Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V (Paris: Champion, 1907), 230. Donal Byrne, “Two hitherto unidentified copies of the Livre des propriétés des choses, from the Royal Library of the Louvre and the Library of Jean de Berry,” Scriptorium 31 (1977): 97. Still, MS fr. 16993 is one of earliest surviving copies of Corbechon’s book, and serves as the base manuscript for the ongoing edition: Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, ed. Baudouin Van den Abeele, Vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 11. 31 For an overview of these variants, see Kemp, Cognitive Psychology, 51–52; Simon Kemp and Garth J. O. Fletcher, “The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses,” The American Journal of Psychology 106 (1993): 562. 32 O’Neill, “Diagrams of the Medieval Brain,” 91. 33 The extent to which this figurative language permeates other modes of representation is apparent in illustrations accompanying manuscripts of Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance, which, as I will argue in Chapter Five, depict mental space as a domestic interior. 34 See Harvey, “The Inward Wits” and Kemp and Fletcher, “The Medieval Theory.” 35 Webb discusses the brain’s “transmissive function” in The Medieval Heart, 16. 36 These relationships are most explicitly outlined in Arnau de Vilanova’s fully schematized, though incomplete, account of the localizations of mental disorders: see Michael McVaugh, “Arnau de Vilanova and the Pathology of Cognition,” in Corpo e anima, sensi interni e intelletto dai secoli XII–XIV ai post-cartesiani e spinoziani, ed. Graziella Federici Vescovini, Valeria Sorge, and Carlo Vinti (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 119–38. 30

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are seen, in learned accounts at least, to have organic causes.37 The mind is not to be identified with the brain, but the family of disorders we would today classify as mental illness is understood as brain disease. The illnesses most frequently discussed by medieval medical writers are melancholia, mania, phrenitis, and epilepsy.38 These mental illnesses are classified by their cause and their location, rather than their symptoms. Melancholia, for example – the medieval mental illness that was most associated with artistic creation, and has thus received the most extensive treatment in modern scholarship – results from an excess of the pathogenic form of the cold and dry melancholic humor, and affects the middle ventricle.39 As conditions stemming from an organic, bodily imbalance, mental illnesses could be treated with the usual therapeutic measures available to medieval physicians: diet and exercise, herbal remedies, phlebotomy, behavioral therapies (such as baths, music, conversation), pilgrimage or prayer, and, occasionally, referral for surgical intervention.40 Brain health is vital to proper bodily function: in the words of Jean Corbechon, “Quant le cervel est empeschié tout le corps est empeschié et quant il est bien disposé toutes les choses qui sont ou corps si en sont mieulx ordonnees” (When the brain is impaired the entire body is impaired, and when it is well disposed everything in the body is thereby better ordered, fol. 43va). 37 Simon Kemp notes that “almost all kinds of mental disorder were attributed to, or at least believed to be mediated by, the breakdown of some physiological process” (Medieval Psychology, 114). Danielle Jacquart also underscores the fundamentally somatic frame of reference in “La réflexion médicale médiévale et l’apport arabe,” in Postel and Quetel, Nouvelle histoire de la psychiatrie, 37–47. 38 Others include stupor, catalepsy, and amor hereos. See McVaugh, “Arnau de Vilanova.” 39 Selected ancient and medieval texts on melancholy are collected in Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Much medieval discourse on melancholy, especially from the thirteenth century onward, shows the influence of Problemata XXX.1. Modern studies of medieval melancholy include: Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964); Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Amy Hollywood, “Acute Melancholia,” Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006): 381–406; Jennifer Radden, Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholia and Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also the considerable bibliography on lovesickness, which overlaps significantly with melancholy. Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 40 See Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 121–25 for an account of these and other medical and surgical treatments for madness. On the sham removal of “stones of madness” depicted in Dutch and Flemish art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see the brief note by James M. Grabman, “The Witch of Mallegem,” Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences 30 (1975): 385; William Schupbach, “A New Look at ‘The Cure of Folly,’” Medical History 22 (1978): 267–81.

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The medicalization of mental illness (i.e., its assignment to physiological rather than moral causes) might be expected to translate to an even and non-judgmental treatment of the mentally ill. The reality of artistic and legal representations of the mentally ill is, of course, more complex. Studies of judicial records, notably letters of remission, have revealed that the mentally ill were often quite well integrated into community and family life.41 Based on community consensus rather than expert testimony, the notion of madness in legal practice was “socially constructed,” as Aleksandra Pfau has shown.42 In literary studies, however, and particularly those focusing on works composed prior to the fourteenth century, more emphasis has been placed on the social isolation and abjection of the madman.43 Foundational studies of mentally ill characters in medieval French literature have catalogued types (popular or knightly, carnivalesque or realistic) and attributes (a club, cheese, a poorly executed tonsure, a pig’s bladder).44 Medieval visual representations of “fools” and madmen remain highly conventional, while literary texts offer a diverse array of mentally ill characters who typically flee from society even as their “otherness” ultimately reinforces societal norms. Philippe Ménard has highlighted the contradictions inherent in this “double mouvement, à la fois d’expulsion et d’intégration sociale, de rejet et d’accueil” (double movement of simultaneous 41 Annie Saunier, “‘Hors de sens et de mémoire:’ Une approche de la folie au travers de quelques actes judiciaires de la fin du XIIIe à la fin du XIVe siècle,” in Commerce, Finances et Société (XIe–XVIe siècles). Recueil de travaux d’Histoire médiévale offert à M. le Professeur Henri Dubois, ed. Philippe Contamine, Thierry Dutour, and Bertrand Schnerb (Paris: PUPS, 1993), 489–99; Pfau, “Madness in the Realm”; Claude Gauvard, “De grace especial”: Crime, état et société à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991), 436–38; Elma Brenner, “Marginal Bodies and Minds: Responses to Leprosy and Mental Disorders in Late Medieval Normandy,” in The Place of the Social Margins, 1350–1750, ed. Andrew Spicer and Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw (New York: Routledge, 2017), 21–38. George Rosen has posited “a principle of limited community responsibility” whereby the public would intervene in the care of a mentally ill person only when that patient lacked relatives or posed a threat to the common safety: “The mentally ill and the community in Western and Central Europe during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Medicine 19 (1964): 381. 42 Aleksandra Pfau, “Protecting or Restraining? Madness as a Disability in Late Medieval France,” in Eyler, Disability in the Middle Ages, 93–104. 43 Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); Feder, Madness in Literature; Huot, Madness in Medieval Literature. 44 Cesare Segre, “Quattro tipi di follia medievale,” in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Aurelio Roncaglia a cinquant’anni dalla sua laurea, vol. 4, ed. Roberto Antonelli (Modena: Mucchi, 1989), 275–83; Ménard, “Les emblèmes de la folie dans la littérature et dans l’art (XIIe-XIIIe s.)”; François Garnier, “La conception de la folie d’après l’iconographie médiévale du psaume Dixit insipiens,” in Études sur la sensibilité au Moyen Âge, Actes du 102e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1979), 215–22.

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expulsion and social integration, rejection and welcome) manifest in high medieval representations of the mentally ill.45 Just as literary depictions of madmen tend to favor conventionalized types over individualized portraits, the literary (and everyday) language used to designate the mentally ill is imprecise and highly ambivalent: the catch-all fol, for instance, refers to the insane, but also to the unreasonable, the immoral, the discourteous, the debauched. Indeed, as Irina Metzler has pointed out, in the Middle Ages “folly” is more often a behavioral phenomenon than a medical one.46 As Aleksandra Pfau has expertly demonstrated in her analysis of the vocabulary used in French letters of remission, “language can help shed some light on the ways medieval people understood mental illness.”47 In the case of umbrella terms like fol or even more specific ones like melancolieus,48 explicit and literal designations cannot tell the whole story. In order to capture the nuances that increasingly color later medieval literary portrayals of mental illness, we must complement the standard, medicallyand legally-based account of the medieval mentally ill with an investigation grounded more squarely in the figurative language that is employed to describe mental function and dysfunction. In the Middle Ages, as now, “the diagnostic history of mental illness is entangled with the history of madness as a social convention,” as Sander L. Gilman puts it:49 and in late medieval France, this social convention is frequently enmeshed with the imagery of machines, metals, and especially rust. A closer look at these metaphors for mental function and dysfunction, within their cultural context, will offer a fresh view of not just

Ménard, “Les fous dans la société médiévale,” 434. “Fools were not invariably mentally disabled people in the Middle Ages. The modern notion of calling someone a fool, in the sense of being an idiot, as an insult to their mental capacities, real or alleged, was not a feature of the medieval mindset. Medieval fools were called fools because of their behaviour and not because of their lack of cognitive and other mental skills.” Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages, 86. 47 Pfau, “Madness in the Realm,” 9; for further discussion, see the section “Vocabularies of Madness” in “Madness in the Realm,” 7–27. Wendy Turner demonstrates that in English administrative documents, too, lexical choices show “an understanding of a continuum of mental disabilities, even if these were not discretely defined.” “Defining Mental Afflictions in Medieval English Administrative Records,” in Disability and Medieval Law: History, Literature, Society, ed. Cory J. Rushton (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 134–56, 134. Bernard Guenée shows that the lexical choices of authors discussing madness become even more delicate during the reign of Charles VI: Guenée, “La folie de Charles VI. Étude de mots,” Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de France 1995: 4–10. 48 Some writers, like Evrart de Conty, maintain a distinction between melancolieus (showing the psychological symptoms of an excess of black bile) and mélancolique (having a melancholic complexion); others use the terms more or less interchangeably. 49 Sander L. Gilman, “Madness as Disability,” History of Psychiatry 25 (2014): 441. 45 46

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mental illness in the Middle Ages, but also the medieval mind more generally, including the “normal” mind and its embodiment.50 Oxidation Before Oxygen The precise mechanism of rust is unknown even to the most educated writers and readers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but it does not remain entirely untheorized. Medieval Europeans inherited from their classical forebears a lively debate over the nature of rust, and proposed a number of interpretations of that process. In late medieval metaphors rust most often evokes impurity, but it is sometimes constructive; figurative rusting is often (but not always) presented as a reversible process, with the removal of corrosion allowing a return to an earlier, less corrupted state; metaphoric rust is most damaging not when it degrades an iron object, but when it impedes that object’s movement. In order to understand these peculiarities, and the way they inflect metaphors of cognition and behavior, we must elucidate medieval conceptions of the process we now call oxidation – what actually happens to an object when it rusts? In the following pages I will endeavor to summarize late medieval received knowledge about rust, offering, in Umberto Eco’s terms, a partial uncovering of the “encyclopedic” definitions of rust available to late medieval writers and readers;51 it is on this semantic network that the rust metaphor relies in order to make meaning. Once we have begun to understand the scientific underpinnings of the rust metaphor, we may turn our attention to the ways in which this imagery interacts with the language of mental illness not just to expose underlying similarities between the two processes or conditions, but also to create new similarities between them. Ultimately we will not only explore what the rust metaphor tells us about medieval writers’ conception of madness, but also interrogate how knowledge of rust is (re)constructed when rust is used to evoke a pathological mental state. Oxygen and oxidation were discovered and named in the late eighteenth century.52 Prior to these findings, rust was most often discussed in terms of 50 I have placed the term “normal” within quotation marks in recognition of its anachronism. On the emergence of this concept in the nineteenth century, see Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), especially Chapter Two, “Constructing Normalcy.” 51 On “encyclopedic” definitions, see Umberto Eco, Lector in fabula: La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (Milan: Bompiani, 1979), especially section 2.5, “La definizione come enciclopedia e precetto operativo,” 37–40. Intriguingly, Eco uses a metallic example to illustrate this concept, citing Charles Sanders Peirce’s discussion of lithium (37). 52 For a popular account of the discovery of oxygen, see Joe Jackson, A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen (New York: Viking, 2005).

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its external and physical attributes rather than its chemical properties: we find the most obvious evidence of this approach in the names rust, robigo, rouille, which refer to the substance’s reddish color as its defining attribute. In the Middle Ages, as well, natural scientific discussions of rust tend to focus primarily on its physical properties rather than on its precise origins. Educated medieval non-specialists in science and metallurgy had access to multiple ways of understanding rust. While iron and rust are discussed in some practical manuals of metalwork and metallurgy,53 more widely disseminated discussions of the phenomenon appear in encyclopedic and natural scientific writings. However, the usual go-to source for late medieval natural history, Aristotle, is largely silent on the topic of metals and minerals, including rust, its causes and its mechanisms; this major lacuna left room for competing models of metals, their origins, and their potential for transformation or corrosion. The gap is filled, in the majority of Latin manuscripts of the translatio vetus of Aristotle’s Meteorologica, with Avicenna’s De Mineralibus, which is typically appended to the end of Book IV and presented as the Stagirite’s work. Scholastic encyclopedists, most notably Albert the Great (in his Mineralia), offer alternate and less influential accounts of iron and rust. But the most widely transmitted account of iron and its corrosion comes from the classical knowledge summarized in Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis – not typically through direct contact with Pliny’s text, but in its later avatars. Pliny’s chapters on iron and rust are cited extensively in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae; in turn, Isidore’s Book XVI (on stones, minerals and metals) is extensively quoted in later medieval encyclopedias, especially Bartholomew the Englishman’s widely diffused De proprietatibus rerum (1242–47), which was vulgarized by Jean Corbechon as Livre des propriétés des choses at the behest of Charles V. Each of these accounts is richly allusive but also spotty, ambiguous, and riddled with uncertainty; taken as a whole, they create a conceptual field that is remarkably porous. Operating within a worldview that accords “recognizable potential agency” to stones and minerals,54 late medieval writers exploit this conceptual flexibility, drawing upon it as a source of resonant and varied metaphoric imagery.

53 The most notable example is the early twelfth-century De diversis artibus: Theophilus, The Various Arts, trans. Charles Reginald Dodwell (London: Nelson, 1961). Agricola discusses the topic at greater length in the mid-sixteenth century. Georg Agricola, De re metallica, trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950). 54 Kellie Robertson, “Exemplary Rocks,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 93–123, 96.

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Aristotle, often known simply as The Philosopher to late medieval writers, created a summation of knowledge of the natural world that largely lacked a systematic treatment of stones and minerals. The presocratic Diogenes of Apollonia (fl. 425 BC) had hypothesized that metals such as iron contain a moist humor that sweats and rises to surface in the form of rust, and that rust is therefore something that leaches out of the metal.55 Likewise, Aristotle focused his rare allusions to rust on that material’s humoral makeup. Aristotle posits that earth preponderates in iron (Meteorologica IV.x), which, like other metals, is a product of “vaporous exhalation” (III.vi); his successors, including Olympiodorus and Plutarch, attribute iron’s propensity to rust to its earthy humor.56 These explanations lack the authoritative imprimatur of The Philosopher, who left the question of iron and rust suspended when he failed to produce the book on stones and minerals that he promised in Meteorologica III.57 It was left to Aristotle’s commentators and continuators to fill in the blanks. Robert Boyle would later note in his Experiments and Notes About the Mechanical Origine or Production of Corrosiveness and Corrosibility (1675) that he had “not found among the Aristotelians […] so much as an Offer at an Intelligible account” of rust.58 The closest the Middle Ages get to an Aristotelian theory of metals is Avicenna’s De Congelatione et Conglutinatione Lapidum (De Mineralibus), which is appended to end Book IV in the translatio vetus of Aristotle’s Meteorology, though not in William of Moerbeke’s translation.59 Typically attributed to Aristotle until the early fourteenth century, even though its true authorship was widely known, Avicenna’s De Mineralibus was translated from Arabic into Latin by Alfred of Sareshel (Alfredus Anglicus), who probably

55 Robert Halleux, Le problème des métaux dans la science antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974), 71, 73. 56 On Olympiodorus (In Aristotelis Meteora), see Halleux, Le problème des métaux, 101; on Plutarch (De pyth. orac.), ibid., 141–43. 57 “In a note at the end of Book III, Aristotle promises to continue in the next book with stones and minerals. The current Book IV, however, deals with different matters, which has given rise to the supposition that it is a later addition.” Pieter L. Schoonheim, ed., Aristotle’s Meteorology in the Arabico-Latin Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2000), xii. On this question see also Hans Strohm, Untersuchungen sur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Aristotelischen Meteorologie, Phililogus Suppl. 28, Heft 1 (Leipzig, 1935), 216–18. 58 Robert Boyle, Experiments and Notes About the Mechanical Origine or Production of Corrosiveness and Corrosibility (London: printed by E. Flesher for R. Davis, 1675), 44. 59 James K. Otte notes “over a hundred translatio vetus MSS of the Metheora, all of which contain Alfred [of Sareshel]’s addition of De mineralibus” in the introduction to his edition of Alfred of Sareshel’s Commentary on the Metheora of Aristotle (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 18n13.

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belonged to the inner circle of Gerard of Cremona.60 In this text Avicenna fuses Aristotle’s notion of vaporous exhalations with the mercury-sulphur theory of metals popularized by the alchemist Geber (Jābir ibn Ḥayyān).61 Metals, he writes, are composed of varying proportions and qualities of sulphur and mercury; “If the mercury is corrupt, unclean, lacking in cohesion and earthy, and the sulphur is also impure, the product will be iron” (39–40; “si fuerit maculatum non mundum terreum porosum et sulfur non mundum fiet ex eo ferrum,” 53).62 In Avicenna’s taxonomy of metals, iron is itself tainted: this declaration of the “impurity” of iron is a major and, it appears, an influential addition. Moreover, Avicenna offers no accounting for the origins or makeup of rust, and his famous concluding passage on the falseness of alchemy bears serious implications for the feasibility of any such accounting. He affirms that any substance’s chemical composition is, in essence, unknowable. in talibus non est quod complexio convertatur quia ista sensibilia non sunt de quibus mutantur species sed sunt accidentalia et proprietatis. Differencie metallorum enim non sunt cognite et cum differencia non sit cognita quomodo poterit sciri utrum tollatur (54) There is no way of splitting up one combination into another. Those properties which are perceived by the senses are probably not the differences which separate the metals into species, but rather accidents or consequences, the

60 Steven J. Williams points out that Vincent of Beauvais expresses doubts as to the authorship of De Mineralibus, and Alfred the Great states outright that it is the work of Avicenna; Petrus Bonus defended the attribution to Aristotle in a commentary composed around 1330, but according to Williams, “it is certain that few if any people now shared this opinion.” “Defining the Corpus Aristotelicum: Scholastic Awareness of Aristotelian Spuria in the High Middle Ages,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 38–40. See also Craig Martin, “Scientific Terminology and the Effects of Humanism: Renaissance Translations of Meteorologica IV and the Commentary Tradition,” in Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe, ed. Michèle Goyens, Pieter De Leemans, and An Smets (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), 155–80, 162–63. 61 For an overview of Geber and the mercury-sulphur theory see William R. Newman, “Medieval Alchemy,” in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2:385–403; Paul Kraus, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, 2 vols (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1942–43). Outside of the circle of historians of science, the name Geber is best remembered by contemporary English-speakers as the putative source of the word gibberish. 62 Avicenna, Avicennae De Congelatione et Conglutione Lapidum, Being Sections of the Kitâb al’Shifâ,’ ed. and trans. E. J. Holmyard and D. C. Mandeville (Paris: Geuthner, 1927).

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specific differences being unknown. And if a thing is unknown, how is it possible for anyone to endeavour to produce it or to destroy it? (41–42)

Avicenna contends that one cannot (re)produce a substance when one’s knowledge of it is derived solely from examination of its superficial characteristics. According to his model, then, rust can be perceived, but observation alone does not allow one to determine its chemical composition; indeed, one cannot even be sure whether rusting iron looks different from unrusted iron due to an “accident,” a phase change, or a complete alteration of the iron’s makeup. Rust can be perceived – and judging by the frequency of rust imagery in both popular and literary language, it is perceived by just about everyone – but its fundamental nature cannot be scientifically demonstrated. This unbridgeable knowledge gap leaves room for creative metaphorical invention: that is, inventive metaphors can themselves contribute to the creation of a fuller conceptualization of rust. Where the Aristotelian corpus remains largely silent on the topic of rust, other natural philosophical traditions offer abundant descriptions of rust and its attributes, although the precise mechanism by which iron rusts remains largely unexplained. Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, notably, presents a powerful image of rust. Pliny’s premise is that iron is, paradoxically, the most constructive and the most destructive material in human use (XXXIV.xxxix).63 Serving as the raw material for both agricultural implements and weapons and war machines, iron gives form to “the most criminal artifice of man’s genius” (“sceleratissimam humani ingenii fraudem,” 228–29). Iron brings death but is itself vulnerable: obstitit eadem naturae benignitas exigentis ab ferro ipso poenas robigine eademque providentia nihil in rebus mortalius facientis quam quod esset infestissimum mortalitati. (XXXIV.xl, 230) The same benevolence of nature has limited the power of iron itself by inflicting on it the penalty of rust, and the same foresight by making nothing in the world more mortal than that which is most hostile to mortality. (231)

63 Pliny, Natural History, vol. 9, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).

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Rust, like iron, is seen as serving a practical function even as it bears a stain of shame.64 In a retributive system of natural justice, iron’s weaponization brings about its own destruction: “a ferro sanguis humanus se ulciscitur, contactum namque eo celerius robiginem trahit” (Human blood takes its revenge from iron, as if iron has come into contact with it, it becomes the more quickly liable to rust, XXXIV.xli, 234–35). Arising at the site of violent clashes between human flesh and inorganic arms, rust participates in an anthropomorphizing metaphor of vengeance, one in which the lines between emotion, agency, and chemical change are blurred.65 Pliny’s Historia survives and circulates in the Middle Ages, both in its own right and as a source for influential and widely diffused medieval encyclopedias. Birger Munk Olsen has identified a number of Carolingian manuscripts of the Historia, concluding that the text was used as a reference rather than as a schoolbook.66 Lilian Armstrong has also argued that the Historia naturalis remained “important for the history of the later Middle Ages” on the basis of three illustrated manuscripts, including one that was probably commissioned by the duke of Berry and illustrated by the Boucicaut Master in the first decade of the fifteenth century.67 Still, despite its “substantial medieval diffusion north of the Alps,” the “abstruse and highly technical Latin” of the Historia naturalis was for the most part transmitted as a “tangle of mutilations, transpositions and corruptions.”68 Indeed, the Historia’s greatest legacy to the Middle Ages was 64 These value judgments converge with discourses on mental illness in Pliny’s description of Aristonidas’s statue of the madness of Athamas, in which rust is used to represent “the blush of shame” (“verecundiae rubor,” XXXIV.xl, 230/231). The legend of the madness of Athamas remains known in medieval France through its inclusion in the Metamorphoses and the Ovide moralisé in Ovide moralisé: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, Tome II (Livres IV–VI), ed. Cornelis De Boer (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1920), 94–95, vv. 3922–63. I have not yet found any medieval mentions of the statue to which Pliny alludes. I am tempted to speculate, without any supporting evidence as yet, that Froissart’s pseudoOvidian tale of Pynoteüs and Nephistelé may present a distant echo of this tale, as it includes both a blushing statue and a character whose name closely echoes that of Athamas’s first wife, Nephele (called Neyphilé in the Ovide moralisé). For a recent review of blushing statues, and Froissart’s in particular, see Miranda Griffin, Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 173–75. 65 The Greeks, Pliny says, characterize rust’s relationship to iron as one of “antipathy” or opposition (“est ferro a Graecis antipathia dicta,” XXXIV.xliii, 236). 66 Birger Munk Olsen, “La réutilisation des classiques dans les écoles,” in Ideologie e pratiche del reimpiego nell’Alto Medioevo (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1999), 227–52. 67 Lilian Armstrong, “The Illustration of Pliny’s Historia naturalis: Manuscripts before 1430,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 19–39. 68 Martin Davies, “Making sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento,” Renaissance Studies 9 (1995): 240.

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its status as a major source for Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae,69 especially in Book XVI, which includes the description of iron.70 Isidore’s Etymologiae, composed in the first quarter of the seventh century, presents a vulgarization of late antique knowledge of the world, from the liberal arts and other professional domains to theology, geography, natural history, and daily life; it famously evokes fanciful etymological derivations as a means of introducing its varied subjects. The Etymologiae were widely diffused71 and became the “prototype,” as Bernard Ribémont puts it, of the medieval encyclopedia.72 Isidore offers vivid narrative accounts of scientific phenomena, and the liveliness of these accounts, along with the author’s careful attention to language and etymology (specious though the latter may often be), arguably lends the encyclopedia a distinctly literary flavor. According to Jacques Fontaine, it is precisely this literariness of the Etymologiae’s scientific discussions that makes it so accessible and contributes to its popularity.73 Isidore’s chapters on 69 Bernard Ribémont, Les origines des encyclopédies médiévales. D’Isidore de Séville aux Carolingiens (Paris: Champion, 2001), 187. See also José Oroz Reta, “Présence de Pline dans les Etymologies de saint Isidore de Seville,” in Pline l’ancien: Témoin de son temps, ed. Jackie Pigeaud and José Oroz (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca Ediciones, 1987), 611–22. For a broader view of Isidore’s sources, see Manuel Adolfo Baloira Bértolo, “Composición y fuentes de las etimologías de Isidoro de Sevilla,” Archivos leoneses 33, no. 65 (1979): 173–95. 70 Oroz Reta documents Isidore’s very heavy use of Pliny in Book 16 in “Présence de Pline,” 613. With specific reference to his use of Pliny’s description of iron, see also Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, “Metales y minería en la época visigótica, a través de Isidoro de Sevilla,” in La Mineria Hispana e Iberoamericana. VI Congreso Internacional de Mineria, Madrid, Junio de 1970, vol. 1 (León: Catedra de San Isidoro, 1970), 266. 71 Baudouin Van Den Abeele signals the existence of more than a thousand complete or partial manuscripts of the Etymologiae, and even though production declines somewhat after the twelfth century, he notes that about half of all surviving manuscripts date from the late Middle Ages. Baudouin Van Den Abeele, “La tradition manuscrite des Étymologies d’Isidore de Séville: pour une reprise en main du dossier,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales 16 (2008): 195–205. However, the works of Isidore of Seville were rarely translated into French: Frédéric Duval cites only a few medieval French translations of the Synonyms and one of the Chronicles, none of which has survived in more than one manuscript. The lack of vernacular translations does not indicate a lack of interest in the Etymologiae; rather, as Duval notes, the Etymologiae’s dependence on Latin vocabulary for its derivations makes it difficult to translate. Frédéric Duval, “Les traductions françaises d’Isidore de Séville au Moyen Âge,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales 16 (2008): 93–105. 72 Ribémont, Les origines des encyclopédies médiévales, 187. Isabelle Draelants has documented its profound influence on encyclopedic and lapidary traditions in “Encyclopédies et lapidaires médiévaux: La durable autorité d’Isidore de Séville,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales 16 (2008): 39–91. 73 Jacques Fontaine, “Isidore de Séville et la mutation de l’encyclopédisme antique,” in La pensée encyclopédique au Moyen Âge, ed. Maurice de Gandillac (Neuchatel: La Baconnière, 1966), 57.

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metals, consistent with this overarching tendency, condense their source material (Pliny) in highly readable fashion.74 Yet it should be noted that Book XVI of the Etymologiae is remarkably heterogeneous, bringing together the associated but distinct topics of stones, metals, and weights and measures.75 The book’s somewhat disparate scope results in a lack of focus and depth in the discussion of metals, indicative of an undertheorization of metals and their precipitates similar to that which we have already observed in the Aristotelian–Avicennian corpus. De metallis (Etymologiae Book XVI, Chapter xvii) opens with a list of the seven metals, ending with “quod domat omnia ferrum” (iron, which conquers them all).76 De ferro comes a few chapters later (XVI.xxi), following gold, silver, and bronze, but preceding lead, tin, and electrum.77 It opens with a fanciful etymology linking iron (ferrum) to seeds (farra) due to its use in agricultural implements: “Iron (ferrum) is so named because it buries the grain (far) of the earth, that is, the seeds of crops.”78 The chapter begins to echo Pliny immediately thereafter: “Later this kind of metal was turned into a symbol of opprobrium, for long ago by iron the earth was plowed, but now by iron blood is shed” (331).79 Next comes a discussion of the hardness of iron, followed by a catalog of the varieties of iron, some of which are characterized as being more vulnerable to rust than others: “aliud brevitate sola placet clavisque caligariis; aliud rubiginem celerius sentit” (Another type is good in short lengths only and for the nails in soldiers’ boots, and another is quickly vulnerable to rust, 331). Isidore then introduces his fuller discussion of rust with another paraphrase of Pliny: “A ferro sanguis humanus sese ulciscitur; contactum namque celerius rubiginem 74 Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz characterizes Isidore’s relation to Pliny, with particular reference to the chapters on metals and minerals, as “una reducción de carácter formal y libresco”: Los capitulos sobre los metales de las Etimologias de Isidoro de Sevilla (León: Catedra de San Isidoro, 1970), 33. Isidore rarely strays from the substance of Pliny’s text and his most substantial differences from Pliny concern the geography of mining: Díaz y Díaz, “Metales y Mineria,” 267. 75 Díaz y Díaz highlights this heterogeneity of Book XVI in Capitulos, 31. 76 Díaz y Díaz notes that Isidore’s particular sequence of metals is partially, but not entirely, derived from Jerome’s commentary on Haggai: see Capitulos, 38 and “Metales y Mineria,” 262. 77 Isidore has a noted tendency to discuss animals, vegetables, and minerals primarily according to their value to mankind; this holds true in the ordering of his chapters on stones, which are ranked by value, and on metals. See Ribémont, Les origines des encyclopédies médiévales, 178. 78 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof with Muriel Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 331. The Latin text reads “Ferrum dictum quod farra, id est semina frugum, terrae condeat;” I cite the Latin from Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum Sive Originum, Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911). 79 “Cuius postea versa in opprobrium species. Nam unde pridem tellus tractabatur, inde modo cruor effunditur.”

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trahit” (Human blood avenges itself on iron, for it very quickly forms rust on contact, 331). The remainder of the chapter is devoted to magnetism, rust, and slag, and it concludes with ways of preventing rust, some of which (smearing with deer marrow, for example) are not present in Pliny. Rust itself is characterized as an eating away, through an association of robigo (rust) with rodere (to gnaw, to corrode). “Robigo est vitium rodens ferrum, vel segetes, quasi rodigo mutata una littera” (Rust [robigo] is a corroding [rodere] flaw of iron, or of crops, as if the word were rodigo, with one letter changed, 331). Here Isidore uses a coincidental similarity between words to justify a certain theorization of rust (i.e., that rust eats away at iron, rather than accreting on it). Furthermore, in changing robigo to rodigo Isidore departs from the littera, creating figurative meaning. Isidore’s lexical transformation of robigo and rodere into the novel rodigo presents a striking parallel to the interactionist model whereby the two terms of a metaphor transform each other to create new meaning. Although Isidore’s account of rust illustrates the creative potential of the language of corrosion, it does not detail the mechanism by which rust (robigo) comes to eat away at (rodere) iron. One might expect fuller explanations to appear in the thirteenth century, that period constituting, as so many have noted, the apogee of encyclopedic, lapidary, and natural history traditions in Western Europe.80 Françoise Fery-Hue has even called the thirteenth century a time of “mineralogical explosion.”81 This tendency is exemplified by Albert the Great’s Mineralia, dating from the middle of the thirteenth century.82 The Mineralia offers an innovative approach to metals, as it seeks to fill in the mineralogical gap in the Aristotelian corpus through observational, more than just textual,

80 For a fine summary of thirteenth-century encyclopedism see Isabelle Draelants, “La science naturelle et ses sources chez Barthélemy l’Anglais et les encyclopédistes contemporains,” in Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “De proprietatibus rerum.” Texte latin et réception vernaculaire. Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 43–99. I also refer the reader to Isabelle Draelants, “La science encyclopédique des pierres au XIIIe siècle, l’apogée d’une veine minéralogique,” in Aux origines de la géologie de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque international 10–12 mars 2005, Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), ed. Claude Thomasset, Joëlle Ducos, and Jean-Pierre Chambon (Paris: Champion, 2010), 91–139. 81 Françoise Fery-Hue, “La minéralogie selon Jean Corbechon,” in La traduction vers le moyen français. Actes du IIe colloque de l’AIEMF, Poitiers, 27–29 avril 2006, ed. Claudio Galderisi and Cinzia Pignatelli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 89. 82 The text’s date is uncertain. In the introduction to her translation, Dorothy Wyckoff argues that it was composed circa 1262; more recently, John Riddle and James Mulholland have argued for an earlier date, circa 1250. Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). John M. Riddle and James A. Mulholland, “Albert on stones and minerals,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences. Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. James A. Weishepl (Toronto: PIMS, 1980), 203–34.

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methods.83 Albert subscribes to Geber’s mercury–sulfur theory, based on Aristotelian principles, whereby all metals are made up of those two elements in varying proportions.84 He uses this theoretical framework to elucidate his own observations. If iron is subject to rust, according to Albert, it is because its constituent sulfur contains burnt earth.85 Rust is a drying phenomenon, according to this theory – a notion Albert bolsters through experience: “Evidence of this is that iron is especially affected by rust if something burning is thrown upon it – such as salt, sulphur, orpiment, or the like.”86 Later assurie, a red iron oxide, is itself described as an “intermediate between stones and metals”87 in a chapter on atramentum. The process of oxidation is explained only figuratively, though: “what putrefaction is to moist [things], rust is to iron.”88 As rust “affects” iron, it dries and effectively decays it.89 Albert’s language implies that the damage done to iron by rust must be irremediable and irreversible. Albert’s Mineralia does circulate in manuscript and in many early print editions.90 Its influence on popular understandings of mineralogy apparently 83 “To some extent Albert was aware that he was venturing in a new branch of scientia, one without a previous tradition, because he could cite no authorities who combined the theory of mineral formations and their properties together with the practical knowledge of the lapidarists, alchemists, pharmacists, miners and other practitioners in stone and metals lore,” Riddle and Mulholland, “Albert,” 203. On Albert’s observational technique, see Albert Zimmermann, “Albert le Grand et l’étude scientifique de la nature,” Archives de philosophie 43 (1980): 695–711. Joëlle Ducos also underlines Albert’s importance as an innovator: “Albert le Grand et la connaissance des sols,” Thomasset, Ducos, and Chambon, Aux origines de la géologie, 141–60. 84 On uses of the sulphur–mercury theory in Albert and Agricola, see Heribert M. Nobis, “Der Ursprung der Steine: Zur Beziehung zwischen Alchemie und Mineralogie im Mittelalter,” in Toward a History of Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry. Proceedings of the International Symposium on the History of Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry, Munich, March 8–9, 1996, ed. Bernhard Fritscher and Fergus Henderson (Munich: Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1998), 29–52. 85 III.3, 192; IV.8, 234. 86 III.3, 192. 87 V.3, 244. 88 III.3, 192. This turn of phrase offers a tantalizing but indirect echo of ancient conceptions of mental illness: as Donatella Puliga notes, in ancient Rome “depression was visualized as a ‘rotting of the soul.’” “Towards a Glossary of Depression and Psychological Distress in Ancient Roman Culture,” in Kuuliala, Mustakiallo, and Krötzl, Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 85. 89 Wyckoff notes that in Meteor. IV.i.379a17 Aristotle describes decay as a sort of drying (192). 90 On the manuscripts see Dominique Stutzmann, “Albert le Grand (Albertus Magnus): Mineralia sive De mineralibus,” Paléographie médiévale (blog) (December 18, 2008). Online. https://ephepaleographie.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/albert-le-grand-de-mineralibus–2/, accessed June 13, 2017. Early print editions are listed in Curtis P. Schuh, “The Library: Curtis Schuh’s Biobibliography of Mineralogy,” published on the website of The Mineralogical Record, https://mineralogicalrecord.com/library.asp, accessed June 25, 2018.

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remains limited, however, as Albert’s explanations do not filter down to the encyclopedic tradition. Nor do lapidaries tend to include metals, let alone rust.91 Thirteenth-century encyclopedias shed little more light on the nature, origins, or composition of rust. Vincent of Beauvais (in Speculum naturale livre VII) is exemplary of the encyclopedists’ approach to iron and rust in the thirteenth century.92 He hews very closely to classical and early medieval sources. Vincent’s account of iron is drawn largely from Isidore,93 and he rehearses Pliny’s condemnation of iron as a tool of “sceleratissimam ingenii humani;”94 he does not cite Albert’s Mineralia. Vincent couples his mineralogical account with a pharmacological one, ultimately derived from Dioscorides’s De materia medica V.80: he expounds at length on the medical applications of rust, which can treat conditions from watery eyes to hemorrhoids thanks to its binding and drying properties.95 What he does not give, though, is an explanation of what rust is or whence, precisely, it comes. Vincent’s contemporary, Thomas of Cantimpré, offers even less: his Liber de natura rerum imputes drying powers to iron but makes no explicit mention of rust.96 In the encyclopedic tradition, rust remains a cipher. Pliny and Isidore represent the chief natural history sources for the thirteenthcentury encyclopedia that appears to have had the broadest readership in late medieval France, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum.97 This encyclopedia was diffused throughout Europe, and while it was not composed in France, nor was it geared specifically toward a French readership, the manuscript tradition indicates that De proprietatibus rerum enjoyed particular success there. The full Latin text has survived in some 200 manuscripts, and 91 The Cambridge lapidary twice mentions rust, but only to identify a color (v. 10 and v. 490). Lapidaires français des XIIe, XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Léonard Pannier (Paris: Vieweg, 1882), 145–88. 92 On the background, development, and reception of the Speculum maius, see Monique Paulmier-Foucart with Marie-Christine Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais et le Grand miroir du monde (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). 93 On Isidore as source for Vincent, see Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Les Étymologies d’Isidore de Séville dans le Speculum Maius de Vincent de Beauvais,” in L’Europe héritière de l’Espagne wisigothique, ed. Jacques Fontaine and Christine Pellistrandi (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 1992), 269–83. 94 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale livre VII, facsimile of Speculum quadruplex (Douai: Baltazar Beller, 1624; Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1964), vol. 1, 456. 95 Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarbus, De materia medica, trans. Lily Y. Beck (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2005), 366–67. 96 Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum vol. I, ed. H. Boese (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), 377. 97 On Bartholomaeus’s chief sources for natural history, see Baudoin Van den Abeele’s introduction to Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 1, 7.

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another 117 contain fragments, excerpts, or remaniements; about a third of the manuscripts are from France.98 Michael Seymour points out that “Many more of the extant manuscripts of De Proprietatibus Rerum were written in France than elsewhere.”99 When we add in manuscripts and incunables of the late fourteenth-century French translation by Jean Corbechon,100 it becomes apparent that this encyclopedia had an enormously wide reach, especially in Charles VI’s France.101 Christine de Pizan lists Corbechon’s 1372 Proprietaire des choses among Charles V’s program of French translations, which the king commissioned “pour la grant amour qu’il avoit à ses successeurs” (out of great love for his successors) because “au temps à venir, les voult pourveoir d’enseignemens et sciences introduisables à toutes vertus” (in the future, he wanted to provide them with teachings and knowledge leading them to all virtues).102 The royal family played an important role in the early transmission of Corbechon’s text,103 but the sheer number of manuscripts and early print editions shows that the encyclopedia was read beyond elite circles. De Proprietatibus rerum defies or belies the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century decline in “encyclopedic spirit” posited by Jacques Le Goff;104 rather, as Donal Byrne has argued, the multiple fourteenth-century vernacular translations “take the encyclopedia from its clerical and Franciscan milieu and place it in the hands of laymen.”105 If we consider, following Bernard Ribémont, that encyclopedias are already

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 1, 21. Michael Seymour, “Some medieval French readers of De proprietatibus rerum,” Scriptorium 28 (1974): 100. 100 Nine incunable editions of Corbechon’s translation were printed in France. See descriptions of the manuscripts of Corbechon’s translation in Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus, 328–61. There exists a medieval Occitan translation, as well, which Meyer does not discuss: see Peter T. Ricketts, “La traduction du De proprietatibus rerum de Bartolomé l’Anglais en occitan,” in Froissart à la cour de Béarn: L’écrivain, les arts et le pouvoir, ed. Valérie Fasseur (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 215–21. 101 Because Corbechon’s version was so frequently copied in the place and the period I am studying in this book, I shall quote the encyclopedia from the Middle French, bringing in Bartholomaeus’s Latin where needed. 102 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, ed. Suzanne Solente (Paris: Champion, 1936–40), II.43–44. 103 “As with other texts, the Royal Family and its circle were the chief instruments of the spread of the translation.” Byrne, “Two hitherto unidentified copies,” 97. 104 Le Goff writes of “une certaine éclipse de l’esprit encyclopédique au XIVe et au XVe siècle” in “Pourquoi le XIIIe siècle a-t-il été plus particulièrement un siècle d’encyclopédisme?” in L’enciclopedismo medievale, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 1994), 23–24. 105 Donal Byrne, “Rex imago Dei: Charles V of France and the Livre des propriétés des choses,” Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981): 99. 98 99

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“vulgarizations” of specialized knowledge,106 translations like Corbechon’s constitute double vulgarizations, offering highly dilute scientific content to a new readership.107 The scientific explanations in Bartholomaeus’s and Corbechon’s work are typically vague, leaving ample room for the non-expert reader’s imagination.108 De proprietatibus rerum and its vernacular translations consist of nineteen books, of which the sixteenth treats rocks, minerals, and metals. Book XVI of the Latin text is unusual in that, unlike most of the other books, it features no glosses, even in early manuscripts that typically gloss other parts of the text.109 It is also unusual in ordering metals and precious stones alphabetically, intermingling specimens of the two categories – a schema that is largely without precedent. Tucked among the other metals and stones, the encyclopedia boasts chapters on both iron and rust. As Joëlle Ducos points out, Corbechon’s translation of Bartholomaeus is far from literal.110 Still, Corbechon does not modify the basic (quasi-)scientific underpinnings of the Latin encyclopedia’s articles on iron and its byproducts. The French version even replicates some

106 Ribémont, Les origines des encyclopédies médiévales, 8. 107 While a more theoretical exploration of the mechanisms

of scientific translation is beyond the scope of the current project, I refer the reader to Scott L. Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge Through Cultures and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) and to Mark Shuttleworth, Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation: An Inquiry into Cross-Lingual Translation Practices (New York: Routledge, 2017). 108 Joëlle Ducos would seem to disagree that Corbechon’s translation might have served as a source of new scientific knowledge for his readers, interpreting it as a “somme culturelle” (cultural summa) rather than a scientific vulgarization. Joëlle Ducos, “Goût des sciences et écriture du savoir à la cour de Charles V,” 225–43 in Le goût du lecteur à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Danielle Bohler (Paris: Éditions du Léopard d’or, 2006), 231. For Ribémont, however, Corbechon’s likely reader is a not very learned person who wishes to acquire a superficial level of scientific knowledge (“acquérir au moins une coloration scientifique”). Bernard Ribémont, “Jean Corbechon, un traducteur encyclopédiste au XIVe siècle,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales VI (1999): 92. Donal Byrne has concluded that “For the most part it is, or was used as, a handy compendium of ‘physical’ lore”: “Two hitherto unidentified copies,” 91. 109 Juris G. Lidaka, “Bartholomaeus Anglicus in the Thirteenth Century,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts. Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 393–406. See also Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 1, 11. 110 Ducos underlines “la parfaite lisibilité du texte, lisibilité qui n’implique pas une reproduction littérale du latin” (the perfect readability of the text, which does not imply a literal reproduction of the Latin). Joëlle Ducos, “Le lexique de Jean Corbechon: Quelques remarques à propos des livres IV et XI,” in Van den Abeele and Meyer, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 102. Françoise Fery-Hue speculates that the translator might have been using vernacular lapidaries alongside Bartholomaeus’s Latin text in “La minéralogie selon Jean Corbechon,” 108.

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of the Latin text’s features, as when Corbechon “translates” Isidore and Bartholomaeus with a novel French pseudo-etymology.111 Fer est nommé de ferir sicomme dit Ysidore car le fer per sa durté fiert et debrise tous metauls et combien qu’il soit trait de la terre qui est mole toutevoie est il moult dur et moult ferme et selon la nature de la terre selon ce est il dur ou plus ou moins. (BnF fr 16993, fol. 232rb) Iron (fer) is derived from “to strike” (ferir), as Isidore says, for iron, with its hardness, strikes and shatters all metals. Even though it is drawn from the earth, which is soft, it is very hard and very firm; it is more or less hard depending on the nature of the earth.

It was not actually Isidore who said this – he fancifully derived ferrum from farra – but Bartholomaeus, who linked ferro with feriendo.112 Other parts of the iron entry do remain more faithful to Isidore. Indeed, most of the chapter on iron is derived from the Etymologiae, though the identification of the metal’s sulfur–quicksilver composition is not.113 Like the Etymologiae, De proprietatibus rerum attributes rust to impurity or contamination with blood. Le fer est enrouillié ou pour ce qu’il nest pas pur ou pour ce qu’il est pres de la terre ou pour ce qu’il a touché du sanc et c’est la plus mauvaise enrouilleure qui soit et qui plus mangne le fer et par le sanc se venge du fer sicomme dit Ysidore quant le fer espant le sanc et le sanc mangne le fer. (232rb) Iron is rusted either because it is not pure, because it is close to the earth, or because it has touched blood. That is the worst rust there is, which eats away the most at iron: blood avenges itself on iron, as Isidore says, when iron sheds blood and the blood eats the iron.

The following chapter, De la ferruge, focuses first (like Vincent of Beauvais) on rust’s medical applications: preventing blockage of the spleen and eliminating 111 On etymological wordplay in medieval French writing – without specific reference to Jean Corbechon – see Robert Guiette, “L’invention étymologique dans les lettres françaises du Moyen Âge,” Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises 11 (1959): 273–85. 112 “Ferrum à feriendo est dictum, ut dicit Isidorus,” 738. Bartholomaeus later cites Isidore’s etymology, but its placement late in the chapter indicates clearly that this is offered as an alternative etymology and not a definitive one. “Et ideo, secundum Isid. est dictum ferrum eo quod farra,” 739. 113 Bartholomaeus’s other references include Aristotle’s Meteorologica IV, possibly filtered through the commentary by Richard Ruphus. Michael C. Seymour, Bartholomaeus Anglicus and his Encyclopedia (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), 177.

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hemorrhoids. The latter half considers rust not as materia medica but as an agent of degradation. The chapter is short, so we may consider it in its entirety. Ferruge est la limeur du fer qui a vertu de sechier et d’agrellir et pour ce vault elle contre l’estoupement de la rate mais elle esmuet la personne a vomir tellement que la mort s’ensuit aucune foiz se sa violence n’est restrainte par pouldre d’aymant ou par eaue où l’aymant ait geu par une nuit. La limeure de fer est tresbonne contre les emoroïdes qui viennent par dessoubz ou fondement et restraint le flux du ventre sicomme dit le plateaire. Ferruge aussi est appellee enrouilleure du fer pour ce qu’il runge le fer et le mangne et tant comme le fer est plus fourbi et plus pur tant est il plus enroillié et est plus fort a oster et le fault oster ou par feu ou par la lime ou par froter de dur sablon. Le rouil a ceste proprieté que quant il a esté une foiz en un fer il retourne de legier ou lieu où il a autre foiz esté enraciné. (232rb) Ferruge is iron filings that have a drying and shrinking effect. Therefore it works against blockage of the spleen, but it moves the person to vomit so much that death sometimes results if its violence is not tempered by powdered magnetite or by water in which a lodestone has soaked overnight. Iron filings are very effective against hemorrhoids down at the anus and they stop diarrhea, as Platearius says.114 Ferruge is also called iron rust because it chews iron and eats it. The more polished and pure the iron is, the more it gets rusted and the harder it is to remove the rust; it has to be removed by fire or by file or by rubbing with coarse sand. Rust has this property: when it has been on a piece of iron once, it easily comes back to the place where it was previously rooted.

Once again, the reader is not offered an explanation of what rust is or how it works. Corbechon’s particular lexical choices, though, create an intriguing complex of meaning, at times introducing subtle but significant modifications to the Latin text. Some of these modifications initially appear to stem from the

114 Bartholomaeus’s source for the pharmacological properties of rust is Matthaeus Platearius’s Circa instans, a text derived from Dioscorides’s De materia medica. Later Circa instans is absorbed into the herbal Tractatus de Herbis, which at the end of the fourteenth century is translated into French and known as the Livre des simples medecines. For the French text see Platearius. Le livre des simples médecines d’après le manuscrit français 12322 de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, trans. Ghislaine Malandin (Paris: Éditions Ozalid et Textes Cardinaux, 1986). On the text’s transmission and translation, see Carmélia Opsomer’s introduction to Livre des Simples Medecines. Codex Bruxellensis IV.1024. A 15th-century French Herbal, trans. Enid Roberts and William T. Stearn (Antwerp: De Schutter, 1984), vol. 1, 10–13.

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difficulty of translating etymologies.115 Let us consider, for example, the passage in which Bartholomaeus explicates ferrugo’s other names. Ferrugo etiam dicitur ferri rubigo, & corrosio, dicta à corrodendo. Dicitur tamen proprie aerugo ab erodendo, non ab aeramento, vt dicit Isidor. Ferrugo is also called iron rust, and corrosion, from corrodendo [to gnaw]. Yet it is also called aerugo [verdigris] from erodendo [gnawed] and not from aeramento [bronze], as Isidore says.

For Bartholomaeus, ferrugo has three alternate designations, each in some way linked to the metaphor of gnawing or eating. First there is rubigo: while Bartholomaeus does not discuss the etymology of the word, we may recall Isidore’s fanciful derivation of robigo from rodere, a derivation that Bartholomaeus echoes even as he apparently rejects it. Isidore’s inventive “Robigo est vitium rodens ferrum, vel segetes, quasi rodigo mutata una littera” is condensed by Bartholomaeus to “Rubigo est vitium rodens ferrum” (738), an incomplete citation that still juxtaposes the terms rubigo and rodens. The effect of this juxtaposition is strengthened through the addition of corrosio, with its clear conceptual link to gnawing, and aerugo, which Bartholomaeus derives from the same semantic field. For Bartholomaeus, the various names for rust are variations on a theme: rodere, corrodere, erodere. A single, consistent metaphor of chewing is embedded in the very language with which the encyclopedist speaks about rust. Corbechon’s rendering of this passage condenses it in a way that fundamentally transforms its logic. The larger Latin lexicon is flattened into just two Middle French terms, ferruge and enrouilleure. At first blush, this choice would seem to comport with Corbechon’s tendency, noted by Joëlle Ducos, to choose plain language over more obscure technical terms:116 ferruge and enrouilleure remain, while corrosio and aerugo disappear. But in fact the terms Corbechon chooses are both, in Corbechon’s era, neologisms. The calque ferruge does not appear to be attested in French before Corbechon’s text;117 likewise enrouilleure, despite its evident resemblance to the older form rouil, is actually a novel word, first appearing in the works of Corbechon and of other translators working for

115 This is particularly the case with Isidore’s etymologies, which rely both on homophony and on “dead metaphor.” On the relationship of etymology to dead metaphor, see Michael A. Arbib, How the Brain Got Language: The Mirror System Hypothesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 275–78. 116 Ducos, “Le lexique de Jean Corbechon,” 110. Ribémont likewise notes his preference for layman’s terms, “Jean Corbechon,” 92. 117 The FEW identifies it as a fifteenth-century form, s.v. “ferrugo.”

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Charles V.118 The terms coroison, corosion, corrosif, and corrosé, on the other hand, are all well established in French by the earlier part of the fourteenth century,119 and while I am not aware of any direct Middle French rendering of the noun aerugo, its derivative adjectival form erugineux is attested: Corbechon himself employs it earlier in the Livre des propriétés des choses.120 In short, another French vocabulary of rust is already available to Corbechon. The existing word corosion, in particular, facilitates a clear image of rust as “gnawing.” Corbechon could have used it to transfer Bartholomaeus’s etymology into a Middle French context, as he did with fer and ferir – and yet the translator suppresses it. In its place, he offers an elliptical abridgement that announces this imagery without providing its etymological justification: “Ferruge aussi est appellee enrouilleure du fer pour ce qu’il runge le fer et le mangne” (Ferruge is also called iron rust because it chews iron and eats it). Corbechon implies an etymological connection between enrouilleure and chewing, but he does not, he cannot, prove it. Instead the reader is left to fill in the blanks and create his own understanding of the connection between the two concepts. Here, as it does throughout Corbechon’s De la ferruge, rust has a mind (or at least an appetite) of its own. Beyond the personifying will to vengeance that has appeared in the encyclopedists’ sources all the way back to Pliny, Corbechon’s use of the verb rungier hints at a more reflective process. While the verb’s pairing with manger in the binomial statement il runge le fer et le mangne indicates that runge refers here to mastication, it is worth noting that the Middle French rungier is a multivalent word with a complicated past: formed from the convergence of the Latin rūmigare and rōdicare, the verb can evoke either munching or mental activity.121 Taken together with the vegetal metaphor enraciné (which also appears in Bartholomaeus’s Latin), the use of the verb rungier signals that rust can straddle the line between organic and inorganic language, that it enjoys a figurative agency – and the translation of rodere as rungier demonstrates that rust’s particular form of “rumination” may be assimilated either to physical or mental processes. And yet Corbechon’s translation also resists the pathologization of these processes. Bartholomaeus warns of aeruginis infectio (corruption or infection with rust):

118 See the FEW s.v. “rōbigo.” The term is also used figuratively in Daudin’s translation of De eruditione filiorum nobilium and in Foulechat’s translation of the Policraticus. See Chapters Two and Three below. 119 FEW s.v. “cŏrrōdĕre.” 120 “La quarte espece de la cole si est appellee erugineuse ou roulleuse” (The fourth type of bile is called eruginous or rusty, BnF MS fr. 16993, fol. 38v). The same word is already attested in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century medical texts such as Aldobrandino da Siena’s Régime du corps and in Martin de Saint-Gilles’s Commentaires sur les Amphorismes Ypocras. 121 See the Trésor de la langue française s.v. “ronger.”

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Hoc autem habet proprium aeruginis infectio, quod occasione leui reuertitur ad locum, in quo semel radicatur. (740) Moreover, infection with rust also has this property, that on a slight pretext it recurs in the place it once took root.

Corbechon, however, simply renders his subject as le rouil. Le rouil a ceste proprieté que quant il a esté une foiz en un fer il retourne de legier ou lieu ou il a autre foiz esté enraciné. Rust has this property, that when it has once been in a piece of iron it easily returns to the place where it was previously rooted.

Once again, Corbechon’s strategic editing of his source material has the effect of leaving the French account of rust more open-ended and thus, I argue, available for metaphorization and for literary appropriation.122 To summarize and synthesize the scientific constructs of rust available to late medieval readers, then, we may note, above all, a lack of detail and an absence of consensus. The various textual and intellectual traditions differ in their fundamental explanation of rust. According to the encyclopedists extending from Pliny through Isidore to Bartholomaeus Anglaeus and his vulgarizers, an iron object is eaten, or destroyed, when it rusts – and while rust can be prevented, controlled, or scraped away, an object once rusted can never again be exactly the same as it was before. Albert the Great, on the other hand, postulates that a rusting object somehow decomposes into its constituent parts: it seems at least plausible, then, that one might be able to reconstitute the broken-down metal. Some elements of both points of view are apparent in medieval literary metaphors of rust, wherein rust is destructive but does not necessarily preclude the restoration of a corroded object to a functional state. Across these textual traditions, rust is typically associated with dryness. This characteristic, in conjunction with rust’s purported effects on the spleen – the organ that produces black bile and is thus implicated in the etiology of melancholia – has serious significance for rust’s metaphoric interaction with notions of mental illness. If mental illness is truly assimilable to a sort of “rust on the brain,” though, one 122 Joëlle Ducos has similarly noted the availability of Corbechon’s text as the raw material for poetic and narrative transformation: “Goût des sciences,” 243. She also remarks on the literary qualities of Corbechon’s translation, concluding that the Propriétaire was written for “un lecteur dont le goût du savoir passe par le goût de la construction et de la narration” (a reader whose taste for knowledge is mediated by a taste for [literary] construction and narration, “Goût des sciences,” 242).

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must conclude from the scientific and encyclopedic accounts of rust that the best outcome a mentally ill person can hope for is a “scraping away” (and likely a short-term one at that, since, as De proprietatibus rerum warns, even rust that is filed away is ever more likely to come back). A mentally ill person’s rosiest prognosis may be a temporary able-bodiedness, a new normal. The concept of rust, as inherited (largely intact) from Pliny, is mainly negative – iron as instrument of death, rust as instrument of iron’s destruction – but rust and iron scales do have medicinal applications as well. In what is tantamount to a living system, iron brings forth blood but blood avenges itself on iron by causing rust. The exact nature of rust is unknown and largely uninterrogated, the means of preventing or removing rust are largely folkloric or even talismanic. Rust causes and heralds breakdown; it communicates shame; but it brings about its own variety of redemption, justice, and revenge. Metaphors as Mental Models Metaphors of the mind as a rusted machine are undoubtedly compelling, but what do they actually reveal? If we were to regard metaphor simply as a wordlevel substitution, or an analogy, we might conclude that such figures evoke little more than an individual author’s web of conceptual associations. Medieval rhetoricians often do frame their discussion of metaphor in such a way – for instance, in his early thirteenth-century Poetria nova, Geoffroi de Vinsauf refers to metaphor as a figure based in word-level translatio or transposition – but they also underscore that an effective metaphor must resonate with its audience if it is to be understood, and certainly if it is to be adopted by other writers.123 Metaphor offers a legitimate entry point into the history of mentalities when we bear in mind, following Paul Ricoeur, that “rhetoric is not produced in a knowledge vacuum, but in the thick of opinion, so metaphors and proverbs also dip into the treasury of popular wisdom.”124 The late medieval language of rust seems perfectly situated to create new metaphoric meaning, for rust is a phenomenon nearly everyone has observed, and its scientific underpinnings

123 Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria nova, in Edmond Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion 1924, repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), with the primary discussion of metaphor occurring on 221–27, vv 765–956. See also Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: PIMS, 1967), wherein the discussion of metaphor appears on 43–50. 124 “La rhétorique ne se produit pas dans un vide de savoir, mais dans le plein de l’opinion. C’est donc aussi dans le trésor de la sagesse populaire que puisent métaphores et proverbes…” Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 44.

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are at once rich and evocative, yet empty enough to be available for reinterpretation. It is, in Geoffroi de Vinsauf’s terms, serious but not opaque.125 The interaction between the two terms of a metaphor can prove especially interesting when one of the terms is organic or animate, and the other inorganic, inanimate, or abstract.126 Indeed, a number of medieval rhetorical treatises, from Donatus onward, establish the animacy or inanimacy of a metaphor’s terms as fundamental to the definition of metaphor itself.127 Geoffroi de Vinsauf reserves his highest praise for metaphors that “translate” inanimate or abstract objects into human terms: Quando tuum proprium transsumis, plus iput istud Quod venit ex proprio. Talis transsumptio verbi Est tibi pro speculo: quia te specularis in illo Et proprias cognoscis oves in rure alieno. (222, vv. 796–99) When you transpose a word whose literal meaning is proper to man, it affords greater pleasure, since it comes from what is your own. Such a metaphor serves you as mirror, for you see yourself in it and recognize your own sheep in another’s field. (trans. Nims, 44)

For Ricoeur, too, such figures embody, more than any other type, the metaphor’s potential as an instrument for visualizing relationships and rendering difficultto-grasp concepts more tangible.128 Such a scenario is commonplace in the personification so beloved to later medieval literature, wherein a living being represents an abstraction.129 The rust metaphor, however, posits an inverse 125 Later writers working in the vernacular are sometimes less enthusiastic about the value of metaphor: see Alice Planche, “Naissance et sens du mot métaphore dans le Roman de la Rose,” in Miscellanea Mediaevalia. Mélanges offerts à Philippe Ménard, ed. J. Claude Faucon, Alain Labbé and Danielle Quéruel (Paris: Champion, 1998), 1037–38. Philippe de Mézières, on the other hand, holds up metaphor as a safe form of veiled political speech: see below, Chapter Four. 126 On this point I differ somewhat from Rosemond Tuve, who posits that “it simply does not matter where the parallels are fetched from in allegory.” Allegorical Imagery. Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 13. 127 In his Ars maior, Donatus classifies metaphor in four groups: those which transfer from animate to animate, from inanimate to inanimate, from animate to inanimate, and from inanimate to animate. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 29, 97. Isidore repeats the schema in Etymologiae I.37, as does Matthew of Vendôme: see Copeland and Sluiter, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 569n55. 128 Ricoeur, La métaphore vive, 50. Here Ricoeur explicitly picks up on Max Black’s idea of metaphors as aids to perception, as discussed below. 129 On the relationship between personification and metaphors that link the animate and the inanimate, see Ricoeur, La métaphore vive, 81.

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relationship between the organic and the inorganic: in this case it is an embodied process that is difficult to understand, and an inanimate object that is used so that the reader might visualize the mysterious mechanism of cognition. We might term such a procedure “depersonification.” The inorganic metaphor is, like most metaphors, an instrument that renders mental processes more tangible – a complementary procedure to the medieval notion of mental illnesses as rooted in bodily structures, and a highly concrete way of thinking about mental illness that is perhaps not to be rivaled until the Prozac age. Inorganic metaphor does not “deaden” the physiological process or render it more obtuse; rather, it offers a complement to faculty psychology, grounding localized mental functions and their interrelationship in a different sort of physical construct. In keeping with the medieval characterization of metaphor as translatio, the rust metaphor simultaneously effects multiple modes of translation: from the natural scientific to the political or poetic realm, from the literal to the allegorical, and, in many of the examples I will cite, from Latin to the vernacular.130 What makes the rust metaphor so special is that, as I shall show, it recurs without becoming reduced to a commonplace.131 It remains fresh, continually revealing new ways of seeing the brain and its function – new ways of seeing that redescribe and reshape reality.132 The metaphor of the mind as a rusty machine offers a truly novel way of conceptualizing mental function, while also refocusing conventional descriptions of rust: placing greater emphasis on the emotional or anthropomorphic dimensions of Pliny’s account and its derivatives (shame, revenge, appetite), rather than attempting a scientific explanation of the phenomenon. The late medieval language of rust is best understood through the lens of the interactionist view of metaphor developed by Max Black, whereby the figure’s two terms affect each other, even creating similarities between them rather than merely picking up on already existing parallels. Like other effective and innovative metaphors, the rust metaphor offers a new way of understanding both of the concepts that it brings together. As Black puts it: A memorable metaphor has the power to bring two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation by using language directly appropriate to the one as a lens for seeing the other; the implications, suggestions, and 130 Suzanne Conklin Akbari discusses allegory, allegoresis, and metaphor as translatio in Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 9–15. 131 For Richard Boyd, this is a hallmark of the theory-constitutive scientific metaphor. “Metaphor and Theory Change: What is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor for?” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 361–63. 132 Ricoeur, La métaphore vive, 11.

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supporting values entwined with the literal use of the metaphorical expression enable us to see a new subject matter in a new way. The extended meanings that result, the relations between initially disparate realms created, can neither be antecedently predicted nor subsequently paraphrased in prose. We can comment upon the metaphor, but the metaphor itself neither needs nor invites explanation and paraphrase. Metaphorical thought is a distinctive mode of achieving insight, not to be construed as an ornamental substitute for plain thought.133

Metaphor’s apparent substitution is illusory. One term does not replace another. Rather, metaphor juxtaposes its two terms in, as Ricoeur puts it, a tension between identity and difference: one that cannot be resolved, but remains central to the new reality that the metaphor creates as it “integrates rather than synthesizes” its two terms.134 This tension is peculiarly poetic, arising as it does from a productive fiction: using a contrafactual, or that which something is not, to create new meaning. As Carl Hausman states, A metaphor does not say, “See this as that’” but, rather, “See that this is what it is not.” In the relationship among terms in their standard meanings, the anchor term is not what is said of it. Yet because the relationship does not present sheer nonsense, the relationship is at once nonstandard and standard. Consequently, it articulates “this is that which is not that and is this which is new.”135

To put it a bit more simply, metaphor creates new meaning by enabling the reader to see that it makes sense despite the apparent clash between the literal meanings of its two terms. Or, to borrow one of Jacques Derrida’s metaphors about metaphors, metaphorization is an “abstraction empirique sans extraction hors du sol natal” (empirical abstraction without extraction from [its] native soil).136 Which is to say that a metaphoric name or image does not replace a literal one; the two coexist, they interact, they articulate. From apparent conflict they forge a new reality. When rust is metaphorically linked to mental illness, the apparent clash between inorganic metallic byproducts and organic “gray matter” is compounded 133 Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 236–37. 134 Hausman, Metaphor and Art, 72. 135 Ibid. 136 Jacques Derrida, “La mythologie blanche,” Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 256. I cite from the 1972 edition, though a first version was published in Poétique 5 (1971): 1–52. It must also be pointed out that Derrida’s metaphor itself borrows from earlier commonplaces, as when Geoffroi de Vinsauf advocates for metaphor as a means of liberating the word from its native soil. See Poetria nova, trans. Nims, 43, vv. 758–63.

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by another clash, namely the contrast between “normal” and “abnormal” bodies that gives rise to social constructs of disability or disorder. Playing off of Joseph N. Straus’s concept of the “disabled organic,” or the often-unarticulated idea of deformity that implicitly underlies theoretical notions of works of art as organic wholes,137 I propose that the new meaning produced by the medieval rust metaphor is revelatory of a “disabled inorganic:” a dysfunction, described in nonliving terms, that constitutes a negative image of the healthy, functioning, living brain. Thinking more specifically about how the “disabled inorganic” constructs a framework for the theorization of healthy cognitive function, we may postulate that the late medieval language of rust, like metaphor itself, constitutes what Paul Ricoeur terms a mental model: in this case one that maps human psychology not just linguistically or even spatially, but also mechanically. Inspired by Max Black’s comparison of metaphoric language to the use of conceptual models in modern scientific inquiry,138 we can see how the late medieval rust metaphor offers a theoretical model, a discourse through which writers are able to work through the physiology of mental dysfunction. Indeed, this is a mental model in more than one sense: a model existing only in the mind, the rust metaphor also offers a model of the mind. The rust metaphor (like the other theoretical models Black discusses) applies concepts from one domain to another; however, it is fundamentally unlike the modern scientific use of theoretical models as Black understands them. Theoretical models, Black posits, are especially useful when “their properties are better known than those of their intended field of application”;139 such is evidently not the case in our body of texts, which apply one scientific unknown (rust) to another equally mysterious, but more fully theorized one (mental illness). In this regard the late medieval rust metaphor operates as a “theory-constitutive scientific metaphor,” as elaborated by Richard Boyd in his influential article “Metaphor and Theory Change: What is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor for?”. Countering Black’s contention that scientific metaphor functions largely “in the pretheoretical (prescientific?) stages of the development of a discipline” – and, by extension, his view that theoretical models function best when concepts from a betterknown field are applied to a lesser-known one – Boyd argues for “an important class of metaphors which play a role in the development and articulation of

137 “Just as the concept of the normal body depends on an often-unarticulated concept of the abnormal, the concept of the praiseworthy organic (i.e., the harmonious, symmetrical body) depends on the concept of the disabled organic (i.e., the deformed, disabled body). Disability is the dark and largely unexplored underside of organicism.” Joseph N. Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 103. 138 See Black, Models and Metaphors, and especially the chapter “Models and Archetypes,” 219–43. 139 Models and Metaphors, 232.

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theories in relatively mature sciences.”140 The prime examples Boyd cites are computer metaphors of human cognitive function: although contemporary psychology is a “relatively mature science,” metaphors drawn from other domains have offered that field a productive theoretical vocabulary leading to new insights.141 The field of psychology is especially ripe for this sort of metaphorical intervention, Boyd explains, as metaphor is well suited to the characterization of “complex relational properties” such as those involved in mental and psychological processes and states.142 As we have seen, medieval explanations of rust remain thinly sketched. This imprecision is no hindrance to rust’s efficacy as a metaphorical model of human cognition. For Boyd, neither the principal nor the secondary subject in the metaphor need be thoroughly understood. Theory-constitutive scientific metaphor is dynamic, evolving as new discoveries are made, and it is open-ended enough to accommodate those discoveries. Although the intelligibility of theory-constitutive metaphors rests on the reader’s being able to apply to his current understanding of the primary subject some of the associated implications appropriate to his current conception of the secondary subject, the function of the metaphor is much broader. The reader is invited to explore the similarities and analogies between features of the primary and secondary subjects, including features not yet discovered, or not yet fully understood.143

The late medieval metaphor of rust aligns itself with Boyd’s paradigm in several key ways. It integrates imagery from the less developed field of mineralogy with the more fully theorized (though far from fully understood) field of psychology, and in so doing it “encourages the discovery of new features of the primary and secondary subjects, and new understanding of theoretically relevant respects of similarity, or analogy, between them.”144 The metaphor of a rusted mechanism thus becomes a dynamic model of the human mind that 140 Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change,” 357. 141 For a fascinating review of the metaphors used

by American psychologists between 1894 and 1975 to describe mental phenomena, see Dedre Gentner and Jonathan Grudin, “The Evolution of Mental Metaphors in Psychology: A 90-Year Retrospective,” American Psychologist 40:2 (1985): 181–92. Remarking a shift from spatial and animate-being metaphors to computer systems metaphors, the authors lament the loss of “the sense of richness that is possible with metaphors that are not fully specified, that retain a degree of vagueness” (191). Mark Shuttleworth provides broader-based evidence for the power of metaphor to influence scientific thinking in Studying Scientific Metaphor, 11–14. 142 Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change,” 358, 368. 143 Ibid., 363, emphasis added. 144 Ibid., 363.

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creates new knowledge about both corrosion and cognition, offers a new way of conceptualizing mental illness, and situates cognitive function in a concrete physical world that also becomes an experimental space. The writer who wields it can adjust the moving parts, examining and addressing their failures and their breakdowns. In the chapters to come, I will demonstrate how, from the early fourteenth century through its culmination in the specific context of Charles VI’s madness, the “rusty” mental model created through the rhetorical strategy of depersonification enables broadened psychological and political expression. First, in Chapter One, I argue that the rust model’s interactive, productive tension between organic and inorganic elements is particularly efficaceous as it resonates with a similar tension already inherent in the language with which late medieval French writers style the intellect. In Old and Middle French the human mind is often designated by the term engin, a word that also refers to machines, siege engines, and other mechanical devices. The mechanistic resonance of this polyvalent term (ingenuity as “engine”) indicates a notion of the human mind as a system of articulated components. I argue that the interplay of organic and inorganic elements implicit in the polyvalent term engin echoes a strong medieval French literary tradition of man-made mechanical wonders and automata, as well as the New Iconography of the Cardinal Virtues and Fortune’s wheel; these diverse images come together to form a complex mechanical system signifying mental and moral balance. The remaining chapters of the book explore specific uses of rust as a metaphor for cognitive impairment in pedagogical, historiographic, and poetic texts. Chapter Two is devoted to mirrors for princes, with particular attention to Jean Daudin’s De la erudition ou enseignement des enfans nobles (early 1370s). In Chapter Three I will discuss two metaphorical political bodies: the organic metaphor of government derived from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, according to which a society constitutes a body with its king as the head, and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a humanoid statue made up of four metals, which Daniel interprets as referring to four successive kingdoms. I will show that in the fourteenth century the metallic parts of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue merged with the notion of king as “head” of state, creating fertile literary ground for the subsequent characterization of royal breakdowns as a manifestation of mental rust. In Chapter Four I consider chronicles, sermons, and political poems that treat king Charles VI’s maladie through a blend of euphemism and metaphor, both organic and inorganic. The final chapter explores how Alain Chartier deploys the rust metaphor as a mechanism of political disengagement in response to the chaos of post-Agincourt France. What emerges from these readings is a new understanding of late medieval perspectives on the interplay of mind, body, and society, one that rewrites the boundaries between man and machine, and between individual

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mind and collective society. The metaphor of a rusted engin is revelatory of premodern scientific theories but also, and perhaps more importantly, of a well-articulated model of the human intellectual experience.

1

Of Metal and Men I’m getting a little rusty; he’s not too sharp. Certain metallic metaphors for cognitive lapses or impediments are commonplace today. Similar language serves in late medieval French texts as a figure for disrupted cognitive function, and yet, there is much about these figures of speech that is not as similar to modern idiom as it initially seems. Late medieval French writers use the metaphor of rust in a surprising variety of contexts: rusting is treated in Middle French expressions and idioms as an evocative, usually destructive, but sometimes useful or even protective process. The figure of rust appears in a wide range of medieval French texts, from romances and moralizing allegories to religious plays, political treatises, bawdy tales, and lyric poetry. In these, rust can refer metonymically to a color (as it often does today) and rusted arms to an unskilled, unpracticed or cowardly warrior.1 While the metonymic valences of rust are often not distant from modern usage, medieval rust metaphors are both widespread enough and complex enough to bear closer examination. Many Middle French metaphoric uses of rust are closely tied to the notion that skills or qualities may be “dulled” through disuse. Military activity, political engagement, even female genitalia can be characterized as “rusty” when they slow to an unacceptably sluggish pace or fall into regrettable disuse.2 The more creative rust metaphors that will constitute the primary focus of this study use rust as a tool for understanding

1 Rusted arms appear as a figure for cowardice or military incompetence in texts ranging from Renaut de Montauban and the Lion de Bourges to branch XII of the Roman de Renart, Jean d’Outremeuse’s Myreur des histors, Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Mélusine, Antoine de la Sale’s La Salade, and André de la Vigne’s Mystère de saint Martin. 2 Military and political uses of the metaphor appear notably in Oresme’s translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Politics: see Chapter Three. The stories of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles include several risqué rust metaphors, such as “elle avoit toujours ung homme qui gardoit la place du bon homme et entretenoit son ouvrouer de paour que le rouil ne s’i prenist” (she always had a man who held the good man’s place and maintained her workshop lest it become rusty). Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Franklin P. Sweetser (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 507.

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mental processes. Rust often indicates a state of intellectual idleness or incapacity, as when Jean Daudin writes that “l’engien blechié par longue roullure s’endort” (the intellect injured by long rusting falls asleep),3 or when Martin Le Franc justifies his own literary undertaking by pointing out that “exerciter et limer l’entendement en euvre gracieux et honneste est chose plus loable que le laissier esroullier par oyseuse” (exercising and sharpening the intellect with gracious and honest work is more admirable than letting it rust through idleness),4 or when Jean Juvénal des Ursins admonishes that “Il n’est ni sage ne si vaillant que par oysiveté et non soy excercer ne enroulle ou arudisse son intendement ou vaillance” (He is neither wise nor valiant who, through idleness and failure to exercise, rusts or dulls his intellect or his valiance).5 Similarly, rust can signify sin or vice (that is, allowing one’s innate virtue to fall into disuse).6 This impurity can be counteracted by the exercise of the virtues or by the endurance of tribulation, as Frère Laurent writes in his Somme le roi (1279): “Aprés, les tribulacions purgent l’ame, ausi comme la fournese l’or, comme li flaiaus le grain, comme la lime le fer, si comme dit sainz Gregoires” (Then, tribulations purge the soul, as the furnace purges gold, as the flail purges grain, as the file purges iron, as saint Gregory says).7 In a similar vein, Philippe de Mézières writes in the Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage (c.1385–89) that acts of charity can polish away the corrosion (representative of “la passion colique”) that accretes on metals (riches) when covetous people try to hoard them.8 These metaphors indicate that figurative, mental or spiritual rust is not just preventable but also reversible and able to be scraped or polished away. 3 Jean Daudin, De la erudition ou enseignement des enfans nobles, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 9683, fol. 18v. 4 Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, ed. Robert Deschaux (Paris: Champion, 1999), vol. 1, 2. 5 Jean Juvénal des Ursins, “Verba mea auribus percipe, domine,” in Écrits politiques, ed. P. S. Lewis (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985), vol. 2, 264. 6 Godefroy cites examples of such usage from the homilies of Gregory the Great, the Miroir du monde, and Jean Daudin’s translation of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae. Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, s.v. “Rouil.” For an overview of the use of this metaphor in Old Norse sermons, with a helpful overview of Biblical, Classical and Christian Latin antecedents, see David M. McDougall, “Studies in the Prose Style of the Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian Homily Books” (PhD diss., University College London, 1983), 536–71, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1381762/2/388805_Vol2.pdf, accessed May 23, 2018. 7 Frère Laurent, La Somme le roi, ed. Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie (Paris: Paillart, 2008), 312. On medieval texts’ various attributions of this comparison to different authorities, see McDougall, “Studies,” 544–45. 8 To the covetous woman “est presenté laiton, cuivre et arrain enruillié, lesquelx metaulx, quant il sont bien frotés de loings, il samblent de fin or, mais a la touche de jour et non pas de nuit il n’est pas or quanque il reluist, et que pis est, le cuivre, s’il n’est pas souvent frotés et maniés, de sa propre nature il engendre vert de gris, qui est tres fort corrosif” (are presented rusted brass, copper, and bronze, metals which look like fine gold from afar when they have



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Common in homilies and in other moralizing works, the metaphor of sin as rust is deployed to great effect in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine, a dream-vision first composed between 1330 and 1331 and revised substantially in 1355. The first-person narrator’s reading of the Roman de la Rose prompts the vision of a pilgrim who wants to take the “easy way” in life; assaulted by the sins and instructed by the virtues, he eventually makes his way to Cîteaux, awakening from his dream when Death comes for him.9 The bulk of the Pèlerinage consists of dialogues between the pilgrim and a personified virtue or vice. In one of these set pieces, Occupant (Diligence), interrogating the pilgrim about the ease with which he has allowed himself to fall prey to Huiseuse (Idleness), likens the wayward pilgrim to a rusted iron blade: Pour quel cause et pour quel raison Est ce que fer cler et fourby Et acier luisant et burny Enröoullie et lait devient Et sa biaute touz jours ne tient? (207, vv. 6634–38)10 For what cause and for what reason do clear, buffed iron and shining, polished steel become rusty and ugly, and not keep their beauty forever?

The pilgrim does not understand the metaphor, so Occupant must convert it into a simile, rendering the connection between the two terms of the comparison more explicit. Quar tout aussi comm en peril Est le fer dont rien on ne fait Quë assez tost röoul n’i ait, Aussi li hons qui huiseus est been well polished, but by daylight rather than nighttime light it does not shine like gold, and what’s worse, copper, if it isn’t often polished and handled, naturally engenders verdigris, which is extremely corrosive); therefore riches should be “souvent frotees et maniees de l’une main en l’autre, du riche au povre, de celui qui habonde a celui qui a defaulte” (often polished and handled from one hand to another, from the rich to the poor, from him who enjoys abundance to him who lacks). Philippe de Mézières, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Joan B. Williamson (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 282. 9 For a more sustained reading of Deguileville’s Pèlerinages, and especially the Pèlerinage de l’âme, see Chapter Three. 10 I cite the first recension (PVH1) from Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. J. J. Stürzinger (London: Roxburghe Club, 1893). This passage remains nearly identical in the second recension (PVH2), except that Occupant has become Labeur. See the recent edition of PVH2: Guillaume de Deguileville, Le Livre du pèlerin de vie humaine, ed. and trans. Graham Robert Edwards and Philippe Maupeu (Paris: Poche, 2015), 578, vv. 7574–78.

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Et rien ne fait, en peril est Quë assez tost enröoullie Ne soit par vice et par pechie; Mais quant il se veut ocuper Et en labour exerciter, Ce cy le garde de pechie Et d’estre de röoul tachie. Ce cy lui vaut un fourbisseur Et une lime et un limeur. (207, vv. 6644–56)11 For just as iron that no one maintains is at risk of soon having rust, the idle man who does nothing is in danger of soon being rusted by vice and sin; but when he wants to occupy himself and work hard, this protects him from being stained with rust. This does him as much good as an armorer, a file, and an artisan [to use the file].

The pilgrim’s initial failure to understand the figure proves Occupant’s case: his mind, incapable of picking up on the subtler metaphor, needs its rust scraped off through more overt rhetorical means. Even when Deguileville stakes his arguments in terms of a comparison (tout aussi comm... aussi), he in fact deploys rust imagery as a metaphor within a simile: iron can rust, but so, too, can man. The vice Ire (Anger) later confirms Occupant’s teachings, taking up the same metaphor. Dame Justice, (la) favresse De vertus et (la) forgerresse A une lime qui par non Apellee est Correction. C’est la lime qui hors lime Pechie jusqu’en la racine Ne puet souffrir rooul n’ordure Que tout ne lime (et tout) ne cure; Et pour ce que jadis limmer Elle me vout et hors oster Mon röoul, je li oppose Le mauves fer dont ai parle. Elle, quant limer me cuidoit, Mon fer limoit et endentoit. Scie en a fait, tu le vois bien. (276–77, vv. 8905–19)12

11 12

The passage corresponds to PVH2 578–80, vv. 7584–94, with only minor revisions. Cf. PVH2 768–70, vv. 10587–10601.



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Lady Justice, the smith, she who forges virtues, has a file called Correction. It is the file that files away sin down to the root. She cannot tolerate rust or filth, but files and scrubs it all away; and because in the past she tried to file me and take away my rust, I parry with the bad blade [fer] of which I have told you. She, when she thought she was filing me, filed my blade and nicked it. She turned it into a saw, as you see.

The saw is Haine (Hate), with which Ire has separated Jacob from Esau, and herself from God. Justice has, with her attempted remediation, inadvertently scraped away too much material and created a new vice. The file appears for a third time in the Pèlerinage de vie humaine as an instrument of Discipline. In PVH1 this virtue is described in the third person and her lime merely “corrige,” “escure,” and “fourbisse” (corrects, scrubs, and buffs) everything with which it comes into contact (398, vv. 12751–64). In PVH2, however, she presents herself in the first person – speaking articulately despite the file she holds in her mouth – and she specifies that she uses her file to remove rust. La lime qui en ma bouche est Reprehension de mal est. Tout je fourbis et escure Ou a rououl ou ordure, Rien n’i a que hors ne lime Du tout jusqu’en la racine. Et afin quë a point face Et qu’en rien ne m’i mefface, De la targe de Prudence, Qui necessairë est a ce, Armee sui, si com vois bien, Si en est plus bel mon maintien, Car certes si (je) ne l’avoie, Pas souffisant ne seroie De corrigier ne de limer Ne le rououl d’autrui oster. (1106–8, vv. 15499–15514) The file in my mouth is the condemnation of evil. I buff and scrub everything where there is rust or filth; there is nothing I don’t file away completely, all the way to the root. And so that I do just enough and don’t make any mistake, I am armed with the shield of Prudence, as you see, which is necessary for this task. Thus is my protection better, for certainly, if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be capable of correcting or filing or removing others’ rust.

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Discipline speaks in order to correct human behavior, so that the very words escaping her mouth fulfill the same function as the file she grips within her teeth: this is a neat illustration of metaphor itself, whereby words and concepts become objects and vice versa. Discipline’s speech at times repeats Ire’s verbatim, as when, for example, both talk about scrubbing away rust “jusqu’en la racine.” Now, however, protective measures have been put into place so that the filed object cannot become a new weapon. Ire shows that scraping away metaphoric rust can yield unintended consequences; Prudence is needed to ensure sufficient but not excessive action. In the second recension of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine this lesson is reinforced not just by personified virtues, but also by an object: the pilgrim’s staff, whose pommel is engraved with the entreaty “Quod ascendunt velociter Si sint sin rubigine” (that our prayers ascend rapidly, if they are without rust, 406, vv. 4845–46). The pilgrim clearly takes the lesson to heart, praying in a macaronic acrostic near the end of the text that “Michi succurret proxime Et sera viel rououl limé” (He will aid me from close by, and old rust will be filed away, 1160, vv. 16316–17). In Middle French literature rust can signify worthlessness or ruin, impurity, crudity, impairment; the absence of rust therefore stands in for perfection, and its removal signifies refinement, polish, making something or someone whole again.13 Yet rust can sometimes even be desirable, insofar as it slows human impulses to vice or signals a peaceful detachment (as in Charles d’Orléans’s “harnoys rouillé de Nonchaloir” (his armor rusted through indifference)).14 These figurative deployments of rust are generally easy to understand, at least on the surface, as the complex of signification that they create retains clear logical connections to the literal meaning of rust.

13 Hence the superiority of gold, which is not only ductile but impervious to rust. Evrart de Conty indicates that gold “ne se pourrit point ne ne consume, ne par ruil ne par feu, ainz le purefie le feu et le netoie de toutes superfluités” (neither spoils or consumes itself at all, neither by rust or fire, but rather, fire purifies it and cleanses it of all superfluities). Livre des eschez amoureux moralisé, ed. Françoise Guichard-Tesson and Bruno Roy (Montreal: CERES, 1993), 683. A century later, Octovien de Saint-Gelais writes in his Séjour d’honneur (c.1490–95) that imperfections can be removed after the fact, but it is best to purify one’s material before working: “Ja ne fera bon orfevre chief d’œuvre, / Si grossement premierement il n’euvre, / Car par aprés pourra son or pollir, / Et par peine sa rouille luy tollir” (Never will a good goldsmith make a masterpiece if he does not work hard at the beginning, for afterward he will be able to polish his gold and take away its rust with great effort). Séjour d’honneur, ed. Frédéric Duval (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 545. 14 Charles d’Orléans, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and his Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF MS. fr. 25458, Charles d’Orléans’s Personal Manuscript, ed. John Fox and Mary-Jo Arn, trans. R. Barton Palmer (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2010), 200. See the Epilogue for further discussion of the “rust of Nonchaloir.”



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Other rust metaphors remain more obscure, such as the expression avoir les dents pleins de rouil (having rusty teeth), an expression Evrart de Conty often uses when referring to engagement in mean-spirited or defamatory speech.15 In the aggregate, these metaphors show us that rust offers Middle French speakers a familiar image, even if the exact causes and characteristics of the physical process of oxidation have not yet been discovered. The deployment of “corrosive” imagery reveals a strong association between what we might identify as “mental breakdowns” and lapses in morality, especially the exercise of the Cardinal Virtues, thus permitting us to reconstruct a more nuanced view of the relationship between mental disability and sin; it also exposes a surprising interplay of organic and inorganic language used in late medieval French texts to evoke mental illness. The metaphor of cognitive or mental deficiencies as a form of rust enjoys a particular resonance in late medieval France thanks to its consistency with other, more established lexical and literary constructs. Old and Middle French characterizations of the human mind as an engin susceptible to rust implicate human subjectivity in a rich mechanized system. In later medieval texts, machine attributes increasingly become an extension of the allegorical bodies of the Cardinal Virtues (represented, in the New Iconography from the turn of the fifteenth century, by an array of mechanical attributes) and of Fortune (with her wheel, frequently depicted in late medieval illuminations as powered by a system of cranks and cogs). Man finds his engin caught between these two mechanical models, which, like the hinges that lend the Cardinal Virtues their name, come to signify mental and moral balance. Man, Mind, and Machine: Nature, Constructed The word most commonly used to designate the human mind and its capabilities, in Middle French, is engin. Derived from the classical Latin ingenium, engin is gloriously polyvalent.16 Its meanings in Middle French include: intelligence or intellectual capacity, reason; ingenuity, problem-solving; medical treatment;

15 The expression appears most notably in Evrart de Conty, Livre des eschez amoureux moralisé, 309, 462, 463. 16 Danielle Jacquart characterizes ingenium as “un terme dont le champ [sémantique] était vaste et flou dès le latin classique” (a term whose semantic field had been vast and ill-defined since classical Latin). “De l’arabe au latin: L’influence de quelques choix lexicaux (impressio, ingenium, intuitio),” in Aux origines du lexique philosophique européen: L’influence de la “latinitas,” ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 1997), 165–80, 171.

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procedure, stratagem; ruse, artifice, trickery; instrument, tool, equipment, clever machine; war machine; or an anagram concealing its author’s name.17 In standard late medieval usage ingenium and engin most commonly refer either to the intellect or to its (usually mechanical) products. Patricia Clare Ingham points out that “ingenium bridged what we today understand to be very different kinds of intellectual endeavors... [It] pertained to the technologies as well as to the arts, referring to invention in forms philosophic, aesthetic, and technical.”18 In his discussion of the valences of the term engin in twelfth-century romances, Robert W. Hanning points out that while the connotations of the term’s classical Latin etymon ingenium are largely positive, the medieval Latin ingenium and French engin carry with them “contradictory judgments on witty, problemsolving behavior.”19 An engin can be admirable or it can be a bit sneaky (not that the one necessarily precludes the other); it often gives rise to an illusion.20 According to Scott Lightsey, “the ambivalent referent of the term coalesces in the craft production of marvels for courtly consumption,” as these marvels typically elicit admiration precisely by tricking the spectator.21 In general, however, later medieval texts – from courtly poetry to medical and technical manuals – privilege the positive connotations of the engin, especially when it is “subtle.”22 For encyclopedists like Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the subtlety of one’s engin bore a direct relationship to the morphology of the brain: in Jean Corbechon’s Middle French rendering, “se la substance du cervel est mole et 17 On medical usage, see Danielle Jacquart, “La notion d’ingenium dans la médecine médiévale,” in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy. Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy (SIEPM), ed. Simo Knuttila, Reijo Työrinoja, and Sten Ebbesen (Helsinki: Publications of the Luther-Agricola Society, 1990), II: 62–70, 66–67; on anagrams, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Guillaume de Machaut au XIVe siècle: Un engin si soutil (Paris: Champion, 2001); for the others, see the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français informatisé, s.v. “engin.” 18 Patricia Clare Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 8. 19 Robert W. Hanning, “Engin in Twelfth-Century Romance: An Examination of the Roman d’Enéas and Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon,” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 84. Hanning traces the emergence of this “cultural ambivalence about the mind’s virtues” to the twelfth-century renaissance and the advent of scholasticism (88). See also Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 105–38. 20 “In the romances the hero usually wins out through an engin, or stratagem (the word used for the devices of Hesdin), that creates some kind of an illusion, even as the poet demands the admiration of his audience for his ingenuity in inventing the complicated plot and composing the artful descriptions.” Anne Hagopian Van Buren, “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), 117–34. 21 Scott Lightsey, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8. 22 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Guillaume de Machaut, passim.



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clere et reluisant il recoit de legier les empraintes des choses qui lui sont presentees et ceuls qui ont teil cervel sont de bon engin et aprannent legierement et oublient legierement” (if the substance of the brain is soft and light and shiny, it easily receives the imprints of things that are presented to it, and those who have such a brain are of good engin and learn easily and forget easily, BnF MS fr. 16993, fol. 44r). In medical treatises and commentaries, ingenium was used to translate a number of Arabic terms pertaining to judgment or intuition; often seen as a manifestation of the physician’s prudence, ingenium referred to a therapeutic approach bridging the gap between theory and practice.23 The thirteenth-century Lombard surgeon Guglielmo da Saliceto, for instance, constructed “the subtile ingenium [as] the link between reason and senses.”24 A subtle engin was instrumental to artistic as well as surgical proficiency: as Danielle Jacquart points out, it is by means of his ingenium that man sets out to supplant, to imitate and perhaps even to fool nature.25 In literary descriptions of the visual arts, engin constitutes, as Stephen Perkinson demonstrates, “the interior, mental counterpart to an externally manifested aptitude for working with material. To describe individuals as possessing a superior engin implied that they could make use of what was in their minds – memories, sense perceptions, and thoughts – with nearly miraculous results.”26 In short, the engin represents not only the intellect, but also the capacity to integrate and synthesize sensory experience, memory, imagination, and reason. It is both a site and a vehicle of cognitive connection and articulation. Beyond its coordination of various intellectual faculties, and beyond the ambivalence toward mental capacities that its different usages may manifest, the term engin performs an even more fundamental metaphoric amalgamation: joining the organic and the inorganic, and encompassing the intellect and the artifices to which it can give rise. Later medieval writers frequently associate ingenium with the term machina due to an influential passage from De consolatione philosophiae: “neque enim fas est homini cunctas divinae operae 23

latin.”

Jacquart, “La notion d’ingenium dans la médecine médiévale” and “De l’arabe au

24 Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “The Science and Practice of Medicine in the Thirteenth Century According to Guglielmo da Saliceto, Italian Surgeon,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 83. 25 “Par son ingenium, l’homme tente de se substituer à la nature, de l’imiter à tel point qu’elle-même s’y trompe” (By means of his ingenium, man tries to substitute himself for nature, to imitate it to such a degree that it even fools itself). Jacquart, “La notion d’ingenium dans la médecine médiévale,” 64. 26 Stephen Perkinson, “Engin and artifice: Describing Creative Agency at the Court of France, ca. 1400,” Gesta 41 (2002): 56.

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machinas vel ingenio comprehendere vel explicare sermone” (“For it is not allowed to a man either to comprehend with his natural powers [ingenio] or to express in words all the devices [machinas] of the work of God,” Book IV, prose 6).27 Boethius presents the ingenium as incommensurate with, and therefore incapable of understanding, divine machinas; still, the juxtaposition of the two terms reinforces their occupation of the same semantic field. Later vernacular writers will allow for far greater slippage between behavioral and mechanical engins, between human ingenium and divine machina: a particularly noteworthy example appears in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme (1355–58), his sequel to the Pèlerinage de vie humaine. While touring Hell and Purgatory, the pilgrim’s soul catches sight of a complex piece of infernal machinery, an engine of unequalled subtlety: “Moult fu celle roe soutil / Un tel engin n’a point en mil” (That wheel was very subtle, not one in a thousand engines is like it, 164, vv. 4929–30).28 The device tortures its victims by implicating them in the “circulier mouvement” (circular movement, 165, v. 4976) of its articulated parts. The “receveurs desloyaulx,” traitorous financial officers who have plotted to betray their king for personal profit, are caught up in an array of interlocking gears, carried through a tower and back out into the open again; the king, perched atop the tower, harangues the damned wheeler-dealers with an explanation of their punishment.29 Li uns tost les autres atrait Par les paignons qui y sont mis Ordeneement et assis. Les petis paignons font les grans Tourner par lons delaiemens Et les grans les petis tourner Font isnelement sans tarder 27 Boethius, Theological Tractates. The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 370–71, lines 197–99. On the association of ingenium and machina, see Jacqueline Hamesse, “L’apport des textes philosophiques des 12e et 13e siècles à l’étude de machina et de machinatio,” in Machina: XI Colloquio Internazionale, Roma, 8–10 gennaio 2004, ed. Marco Veneziani (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2006), 162. 28 Guillaume de Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. J. J. Stürzinger (London: Roxburghe Club, 1895). The most detailed critical reading of Deguileville’s infernal machine is Marie Bassano, “‘Aussi toujours est cremue l’ordenance que fait le roy.’ Pouvoir législatif et autorité royale dans le Pèlerinage de l’âme,” in Marie Bassano, Esther Dehoux, and Catherine Vincent, eds., Le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville, (1355–1358) Regards croisés (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 71–79. 29 Faral sees the punishment of the receveurs as an allusion to scandals of the 1350s, such as the 1350 execution of Raoul de Brienne for treason. Edmond Faral, “Guillaume de Digulleville, moine de Châalis,” Histoire littéraire de la France, 39 (1962): 115–16.



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Et maintes fois obliquement Selon le divers tournement Si com horloges et moulins Se monstrent avoir tels engins. Or vous di qu’il m’a este dit Que par le vostre sens maudit De ceste roe ci paignons Avez este et compaignons En autres compaignons mouvant De dent en dent et somounant Par aliance enclavee D’un en autre et conspiree Comme paignons entremesles, Entrelacies, entrendentes, A fin quë un grant roement Fust paignonne repostement Hors du royaume aus anemis… (165–66, vv. 4978–5001) One [wheel] quickly draws the others to it by means of the regularly spaced cogs. The small cogwheels make the large ones turn slowly. The large ones make the small ones turn quickly, and often obliquely, through their different rotations, with workings similar to those of clocks and mills. Now I tell you that I was told that with your cursed cleverness you were cogs of this wheel, moving companions tooth by tooth, bringing them together with secret conniving alliances, like intermingled, interlaced, intertoothed cogwheels, so that a great machination might be secretly maneuvered out of the country to the enemy.

The idea of a wheel (or even a system of wheels) as a torture device is far from remarkable; as Jérôme Baschet has noted, there is a proliferation of torture instruments in fourteenth-century descriptions of hell, and souls are often punished by being broken on wheels.30 Nor is this the only wheeled machine 30 Jérôme Baschet, “Les conceptions de l’enfer en France au XIVe siècle: Imaginaire et pouvoir,” Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 40 (1985): 194. However, Galpin does not find textual precedent for Deguileville’s first wheel torture (that of the corrupt counsellors) in any source. Stanley L. Galpin, “On the sources of Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pilgrimage of Ame,” PMLA 25 (1910): 295. The specific imagery of a millwheel as torture device will find an echo in the “Ballade contre les ennemis de la France” commonly attributed to François Villon, wherein it is wished that those who wish harm to the kingdom of France might be “mis entre meulles flotans / En ung moulin” (put between the moving grindstones of a mill, vv. 25–26). François Villon, Lais, testament, poésies diverses, ed. and trans. Jean-Claude Mühlethaler (Paris: Champion, 2004), 330–33.

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in the Pèlerinage de l’âme’s afterworld: soon after witnessing the punishment of the “receveurs desloyaulx,” the soul encounters the sad and slothful (“les fils de Tristece,” 176, v. 5325), who are turned on a huge wheel so that their heads collide with a pillar and their brains and eyes pop out (“En tel maniere a mon advis / Qu’au hurter s’escerveloient / Et que leurs yex hors yssoient,” 176, vv. 5320–22). In this latter example, those who allowed their perception of the world to be altered by their “fole desperacion” (foolish desperation, 177, v. 5342) have their brains, the seat of their intellect, destroyed by means of an engin. Yet the torment of the “receveurs desloyaulx” posits an even more explicit contrappasso of mechanical punishments for crimes of the intellect. The conceptual slippage between the two sorts of engin, the treasonous plotters’ machinations and the machinery through which they are tortured, could scarcely be more evident. The repetition of paignons and paignonné emphasizes the great technical innovation of this infernal torment: the sinners are not punished on a wheel, they are punished through engagement and incorporation into a mechanical system. That these paignons are characterized (excessively and redundantly) as “entremesles, / Entrelacies, entrendentes” draws extra attention to the status of both engin-treason and engin-machine as integrated systems. Yet the wheels are not formed of any corruptible, earthly metal or mineral. The torments of Hell and Purgatory are far more enduring: “Ou monde n’a fer ne acier, / Esparre, roche ou en rochier / Ne diamant ne aÿmant / Qui y durassent tant ne quant” (In the world there is no iron or steel, no beam, rock or boulder, nor diamond or lodestone that last so well nor so long, 110, vv. 3241–44). These wheels turn within a world that is itself conceived as a system of articulated wheels, a world that is in constant circular motion. The Pèlerinage de l’âme reveals a vision of heaven as a place of regular and well-regulated movement, where the music of the spheres is produced by the contrary but harmonious rotation of interlocking wheels: “esperes que vi tourner / L’une dedens l’autre et roer” (spheres that I saw turning and wheeling one inside the other, 288, vv. 8877–78), spheres that turn “A semblance de la roe / Qui dedens l’orloge roe (like the wheel that spins inside a clock, 289–90, vv. 8921–22). Such movements echo a passage added to the second recension of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine, in which a turning wheel representing Sensualité (Sensuality) is articulated with a smaller wheel within it, turning in the opposite direction; a butterfly, a delicate figure for the soul’s resistance to the body, flits above and helps the inner wheel counter Sensualité’s overwhelming force.31 As Vertu Morale (Moral Virtue) tells the pilgrim, “Ta vie est aussi com roë” (Your life is like a wheel, 620, v. 8211). For while life is a pilgrimage, it is also a “circulier mouvement” (612, v. 8131), as the soul seeks to return to the God who created 31

Deguileville, Le Livre du pèlerin de vie humaine, 610–20.



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it. Tellingly, this retour is effected my means of an integration of machine elements and a living thing, as the butterfly mediates the turn of the wheels. This is but one manner in which, even in Deguileville’s rather conservative Pèlerinages, a contemporary technological ethos shapes ways of talking about human mentality and morality. According to the late medieval vocabulary of engin, the mind that devises engines is itself an engine, a device. Seen in this light, the intellect consists of not just a series of differentiated chambers, but also a set of interlocking, moving parts.32 Or rather, it is a complex of parts that should move. Virtuous behaviors, and the cognitive processes that underlie them, rely upon regular, controlled movement and communication between the various components of the mind and soul. Only princes with a well-regulated engin are apt to understand and to heed political and moral instruction – hence Nicole Oresme’s construction of his audience as “prince de noble engin” (Traitié de l’Espere) and as “genz de grant engin et de bonne prudence” (Livre de Ethiques de Aristote).33 Jean Golein is even more emphatic in the prologue to his 1379 translation Le livre de l’informacion des princes, lauding the ideal princely reader’s “vif sens et soutil engin et memoire retentive et la volonté tres appereilliee et ordenee” (lively sense and subtle engin and retentive memory and very well-disposed and wellordered will).34 Indeed, a reader with an “engin rude” would require a differently tailored, and more figurative, mode of instruction. As Deguileville writes, a coarse intellect is harder than lodestone, steel, or diamond;35 his character Grace Dieu (the Grace of God) specifically chooses simile as the instructional tool with which to get through to a hard-headed student, Nature (“Si en pris similitude

32 The word soutil, often used to designate the well-functioning engin in Middle French, ultimately derives from tela (“web”) and therefore reinforces the imagery of an interwoven or interlocking structure. 33 On the vocabulary of engin in the Traitié de l’Espere, see Caroline Boucher, “De la subtilité en français: Vulgarisation et savoir dans les traductions d’auctoritates des XIIIeXIVe siècles,” in The Medieval Translator / Traduire au Moyen Âge, vol. 8, ed. Rosalynn Voaden, René Tixier, Teresa Sanchez Roura, and Jenny Rebecca Rytting (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 94; on similar language in the Ethiques, see Jeannine Quillet, “Nicole Oresme traducteur d’Aristote,” in Nicole Oresme: Tradition et innovation chez un intellectuel du XIVe siècle, ed. Pierre Souffrin and Alain-Philippe Segonds (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988), 82. 34 Jean Golein, Le livre de l’informacion des princes, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1950, fol. 2v. 35 The personified character Rude Entendement is “Plus dur est que n’est aïmant, / Plus dur qu’acier ne dyamant:” Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine, 176, vv. 5657–58; cf. Deguileville, Le Livre du pèlerin de vie humaine, 562, vv. 7331–32.

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/ Pour (en)fourmer vostre engin rude,” PVH1 61, vv. 1933–34).36 Elsewhere, defects or impediments to the intellect come to be figured either as erratic motion or as stillness, as impediments to movement. Here the image of mind as engin is again of capital importance. What causes a machine, built of moving parts, to seize up and lose mobility? If the machine is of ferruginous metal, the most apparent culprit is rust. In vernacular French literature, the rust metaphor becomes a remarkably flexible tool for producing nuanced visions of intellectual and moral impairment, and the ill effects of poor governance. The juxtaposition of machine elements with cognitive processes, already inherent in the word engin, creates a new mental model: intellectual products, (im)moral actions, and harmful public policy alike spring from a mental system that can be figured as a not-always-so-well-oiled machine. The notion of a mechanistic model of mental function may surprise the modern reader, but in fact, the later medieval West was undergoing a “technological boom” of sorts, as a result of which man and machine came to coexist as never before.37 Driven by advances in power generation and metallurgy,38 this “goût du machinisme” (appetite for mechanization), as Bruno Jacomy calls it, leads to important innovations such as the crown wheel escapement and the crankshaft.39 It also permeates later medieval romance, wherein, as Patricia Clare Ingham has persuasively argued, the representations of technological gadgets underscore the ambivalent status of novelty, invention, and ingenium.40 The romance-inspired Pèlerinage de vie humaine likewise adopts a skeptical stance toward novelty, especially in the second recension, wherein Orgueil (Pride) announces that “nouvelletés se font par moi” (novelties are made through me, 694, v. 9399); Orgueil, who has herself been described as a “mécanique organique” and as a “corps machine,” illustrates both the moral

36 Deguileville is perhaps citing the Roman de Fauvel, in which Fortune similarly uses the “figure” and “mistere” of her crowns and wheels in order to instruct humanity: figurative language, she says, “n’est que similitude / Pour miex enfourmer engin rude” (is nothing but a comparison, the better to instruct a coarse intellect). Gervais du Bus and Chaillou de Pesstain, Roman de Fauvel, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Poche, 2012), 388, vv. 2605–6. 37 See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1976); Frances and Joseph Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). 38 On the direct link between improved watermills and advances in metallurgy, with specific evidence of increases in the production of high-quality iron, see Marta Sancho, “El hierro en la Edad Media: Desarrollo social y tecnología productiva,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 41:2 (2011): 645–71. 39 Bruno Jacomy, Une histoire des techniques (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 155. 40 Ingham, The Medieval New, especially Chapter Four, “Little Nothings” (112–40).



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dangers and the creative possibilities of innovation.41 Deguileville’s pilgrimages, like other late medieval literary texts, display an increasing sense of the natural world as constructed, from God’s creation of the cosmos to man’s recreation of nature by means of gardens, gadgets, and automata.42 How better to cheat (and thus to remake) nature than with an engin? It is perhaps fitting to begin this discussion at the very origin of the world as we know it. By citing the well-known frontispiece to the Old French Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB MS 2554, fol. 1v), in which God fashions the cosmos, compass in hand. Executed in Paris around 1208 and 1215, this full-page painting belongs to a substantial body of high medieval images of God measuring out the machina mundi with an architect’s compass.43 Though the Bible moralisée frontispiece has often been exploited as an illustration of “the fruitful interaction of learned science and religious study in the high and late Middle Ages,” Katherine Tachau has quite convincingly refuted this interpretation, seeing the painting, rather, as a condemnation of vainglory and of vain curiosity, a reminder that all knowledge comes through God.44 But the image conveys another message as well: the idea of the cosmos (and by extension man) as a fabricated product, the endpoint of a technologically executed process.45 The compass, a man-made instrument, becomes the emblem of the imposition of order on chaos.46 Middle French idioms such as à compas and par compas (regularly, harmoniously,

41 Edwards and Maupeu, introduction to Deguileville, Le Livre du pèlerin de vie humaine, 31. This hybridity is even more pronounced in Philippe de Mézières’s version of Orgueil in the Songe du vieil pèlerin, who transforms into a statue/clock: see Chapter Four. 42 The famous garden of Hesdin, for instance, is aptly described as “un monde de nature recréée” by Alain Salamagne in “D’Hesdin au Quesnoy: jardins et parcs des châteaux de plaisance,” in Le Château, autour et alentours, ed. Jean-Marie Cauchiès and Jacqueline Guisset (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 149. On Hesdin, see infra note 61. 43 John B. Friedman has counted at least 40 such images created prior to 1400, mostly in psalters, books of hours, and picture Bibles. “The Architect’s Compass in Creation Miniatures of the Later Middle Ages,” Traditio 30 (1974): 419–29. 44 Katherine H. Tachau, “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas: Scientific Study in the Old French Bible Moralisée,” The Art Bulletin 80:1 (1998): 7. 45 On God as craftsman, and the significance of this image to a history of technology in the medieval West, see George Ovitt, Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), especially pp. 57–87. 46 Nor is the imagery limited to the realm of visual representation: in Dante’s Paradiso XIX, the souls of the just rulers, having collectively taken the form of an eagle, describe God as “Colui che volse il sesto / a lo stremo del mondo” (He Who with His compass drew / the limits of the world, vv. 40–41). Dante Alighieri, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, vol. 5, Paradise, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 184–85. There exists, moreover, a subset of texts presenting God specifically as a smith: see McDougall, “Studies,” 565–66n24.

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measuredly), remettre en compas (to put back in order), and sans garder raison ne compas (without rhyme or reason) underscore the power and popularity of the compass as a symbol of well-regulated creation.47 The compas may be used, literally and figuratively, to impose order on gardens (as in Machaut’s Dit de l’Alerion, wherein trees are “assis a ligne et a compas”), on songs (as in Baude Cordier’s canonical rondeau Tout par compas), or even on human behavior. Jean Froissart, in his Dit du florin, refers to travel routes chosen in order to gain a thorough firsthand knowledge of many places, “Pour mieuls les pays compasser” (v. 228).48 And in the Paroissien esconmenié, one of the fourteenth-century Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, a nobleman who is pretending to be insane advises a repentant sinner, “Mener dois vie par compas” (v. 2022).49 The compass, an instrument by which the excommunicated parishioner can reimpose moral order in his own life, is also a tool that reveals the method in the nobleman’s feigned madness. Such language is reflective of a broader late medieval impulse toward better living through technology. Even in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine, wherein the material world is denigrated and the human body is repeatedly characterized as a worthless simulacrum,50 the more authentic part of man – his soul, a pourtraicture of God – is made, figuratively, using a compas. As Raison explains to the pilgrim, Le cors forsclos dont t’ai parle Et de touz points hors separe, (Tu) ez de Dieu la pourtraiture Et l’ymage et la faiture, De nient te fist et te crea A sa semblance et compassa (185, vv. 5945–50) Aside from the body of which I’ve already spoken to you, and completely apart from it, you are the portrait and the image and the very form of God; He made you from nothing and created you and designed you (compassa) in His likeness.

47 Joel Kaye argues in A History of Balance for the emergence, in precisely this period, of a notion of the world as a self-regulating system of working parts. 48 Jean Froissart, An Anthology of Narrative and Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. Kristen M. Figg with R. Barton Palmer (New York: Routledge, 2001), 500. 49 Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages publiés d’aprés le manuscrit de la Bibliothèque nationale, ed. Gaston Paris and Ulysse Robert, 8 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1876–93; New York: Johnson, 1966), III.64. 50 See, for instance, Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine, vv. 5813–20, 5931–32, and 5947–50.



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Like the Bible moralisée frontispiece, the Pèlerinage de vie humaine condemns earthly endeavors even as it couches its lesson within the visual and lexical vocabulary of engineering. The other kind of compass, the navigational instrument, offers yet another rhetorical instrument by which to regulate human behavior through mechanical metaphor.51 In his Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, best remembered today for its retelling of the Griselda legend in Book IV, Philippe de Mézières proposes through “alkemie” (48) to moralize seven precious stones, seven medicines, seven metals (and so forth) in order to instruct his female reader in the joys of marriage. In Book III, chapter 25, Mézières develops the admittedly strange metaphor (“figure estrange,” 314) of marriage as a pilgrimage requiring accurate navigational instruments. In his moralization of the magnetic compass (a passage heavily dependent on Albert the Great’s explanation of magnets in his Mineralia), Mézières likens the parts of the compass to the members of the human body, and the iron needle both to the hearts of men and women and to human life tout court. Par la pointe de metail qui soustient la roe et est souvent enroullie se puet entendre la vie de l’omme, qui n’est que une petite poincte non pas d’or ou d’argent ne d’acier, mais de metail legierement pourri et defaillant. (318) The metal pin that supports the wheel, and is often rusty, can be taken to represent human life, which is but a little point, not made of gold or silver or steel, but of somewhat degraded and faulty metal.

The iron of human experience, says Mézières, must be kept free of rust through frequent contact with the magnet representing devotion to the Virgin Mary. The compass makes for an unorthodox but altogether satisfying metaphor for the pursuit of conjugal bliss, evoking as it does notions of attraction, movement, and constancy. It also constructs the imperfection of human desire as a rusted metallic part, one that must not be allowed to impede its instrument’s proper function. Philippe de Mézières employs a similar descriptive allegory of a compass in his Songe du vieil pèlerin, this time incorporating it in the larger figure of the ship of state. This second allegorical compass is an aid to the navigation of not just marriage but also proper governance writ large (including self-

51 Neither of the modern French words for the navigational compass, compas or boussole, appears before the sixteenth century, though the Italian compasso is used in this sense from the turn of the fourteenth century. Philippe de Mézières refers to the instrument as a “boiste ou aguille de navier” (navigational box or needle), the boiste being the etymological ancestor of the boussole. Philippe de Mézières, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 316.

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governance). Though the language remains quite similar to that used in the Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, the compass in the Songe subtly shifts both the audience it targets and the technical or scientific language it uses to impart its lesson. This compass, like its predecessor, features a turning, magnetized iron needle (“une aguille de fer tournant, frotee a la pierre d’aymant,” 633) representing the human heart.52 Par ceste boiste, dit la chambriere, parlant moralment, je n’entens aultre chose que le corps de l’omme, navigant en ceste mer salee; et par l’aguille qui est ague a la pointe et grosse au derriere et percie, et est comme en l’air en milieu de la boiste, je n’entens aultre chose que le cuer de l’omme en milieu de son corps (663) By this box, said the chambermaid [Droicture], speaking figuratively, I mean nothing other than the human body, navigating in this salty sea [i.e., the world]; and by the needle that is sharp at the point and wide and pierced at the back, and is as if floating in the middle of the box, I mean nothing other than the heart of man in the middle of his body.

The magnet against which the needle is rubbed is, again, the Virgin Mary in her humanity; the diamond that causes it to lose its magnetic attraction is glossed as Mary’s divinity, and the garlic that demagnetizes it is lust. The image’s implications are clear: the individual, existing in a state of tension between the Virgin’s humanity and her divinity, must avoid the temptation of sin in order not to lose his way. As in his earlier allegory, Mézières explicitly cites Albert the Great (“grant Albert de Coulongne, souverain philozophe,” 664) in his explanation of magnetism. This second allegory also contains a more detailed description of the compass itself, a move that Philippe Maupeu cites as an example of Mézières’s use of technical vocabulary to translate Deguileville’s allegory into more contemporarily contextualized terms.53 The major difference, though, is that in the Songe du vieil pèlerin there is no mention of the iron needle’s propensity to rust. As the allegory’s target audience changes from spouses (and especially wives) to political leaders, demagnetization supplants oxidation as the preferred explanation for misguided conduct. Still, even if Mézières eliminates this particular image of rust from his pedagogical treatise on government, his inclusion of a compass-allegory in two of his major works – like the language of living par compas in general – indicates the degree to which late medieval French language and literature tend to Philippe de Mézières, Songe du viel pelerin, ed. Joël Blanchard (Geneva: Droz, 2015). Philippe Maupeu, Pèlerins de vie humaine. Autobiographie et allégorie narrative, de Guillaume de Deguileville à Octovien de Saint-Gelais (Paris: Champion, 2009), 354. 52 53



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assimilate man and machine, and revel in the conflation of social and mechanical engineering. Automata, both real and imaginary, offer the most literal examples of the interplay of man and machine in medieval French culture. Medieval publics displayed a strong appetite for wonders, including articulated mechanical statues and other “manmade marvels” (to adopt Scott Lightsey’s term) or “medieval robots” (as E. R. Truitt calls them).54 Such objects abound in Old French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially those set in or inspired by the exotic East.55 Marvelous automata, typically serving ornamental or commemorative purposes, are found in romans antiques such as the Roman de Troie, the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d’Eneas, and the Roman d’Alexandre, as well as in the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne and Floire et Blanchefleur. Additionally, automaton-guards, often of limited intelligence, are typical of Arthurian romance: the Conte del Graal (Livre de Karados), prose Lancelot, Perlesvaus, Huon de Bordeaux, the prose Tristan, Cleomadés, Meliacin, Dame de lycorne, Li bastars de Buillon. As befits their intermediary status, somewhere between human and machine, these literary automata tend to occupy liminal spaces: “Their functions are surveillance and discipline, which signal not only the liminal status of the automata themselves, but also the ways in which they 54 See Alfred Chapuis and Édouard Gelis, Le monde des automates: Étude historique et technique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1928; rpt Geneva: Slatkine, 1984); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Lightsey, Manmade Marvels; E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 55 For a classic overview of literary treatments of humanoid automata, see J. Douglas Bruce, “Human Automata in Classical Tradition and Mediaeval Romance,” Modern Philology 10:4 (1913): 511–26. See also: Edmond Faral, “Le merveilleux et ses sources dans les descriptions des romans français du XIIe siècle,” in idem, Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du Moyen Âge (Paris: Champion, 1913), 307–88; Merriam Sherwood, “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction,” Studies in Philology 44 (1947): 567–92; Penny Sullivan, “Medieval Automata,” Romance Studies 6 (1985): 1–20; Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Le temps des automates,” in Le Nombre du temps, ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner (Paris: Champion, 1988), 15–21; Huguette Legros, “Les automates. Attirance, répulsion de l’étrange,” De l’étranger à l’étrange, Senefiance 25 (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 1988), 297–314; Jean Scheidegger, “Les automates dans le roman antique,” Le Roman antique au Moyen Âge, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1992), 177–86; Patricia Tannoy, “De la technique à la magie: Enjeux des automates dans Le Voyage de Charlemagne à Jerusalem et à Constantinople,” in Le merveilleux et la magie dans la littérature, ed. Gérard Chandès (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 227–52; Ian Michael, “Automata in the Alexandre,” in The Medieval Mind, ed. Ian Macpherson and Ralph Penny (Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 1997), 275–88; Jutta Eming, “Schöne Maschinen, versehrte Helden: Der Konzeption des künstlichen Menschen in der Literatur des Mittelalters,” in Textmaschinenkörper, ed. Eva Kormann, Anke Gilleir, and Angelika Schlimmer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 35–46.

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enforce boundaries of epistemological legitimacy and morality.”56 “The wonders of art,” write Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, “embodied a form of symbolic power – over nature, over others, and over oneself.”57 Fittingly, these carefully calibrated machines regulate human behavior, helping people to live par compas, and enforcing legitimate political authority. Metallic men can even offer an aspirational model of human virtue: witness Deguileville’s comparison of Saint Bernard, virtuously unmoved by a temptress’s efforts at seduction, to an “homme de fer.”58 Automata appear rather less frequently in later medieval French literature, with its turn from epic/romanesque to courtly forms – but by this time, fictional machines have given way to the real thing.59 As early as the thirteenth-century portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (BnF, MS fr. 19093), simple animated figures are designed as a real-world counterpart to the wonders of romance. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as Scott Lightsey puts it, such “armchair creations” began to be realized, “taken from the pages of romances and transformed by craftsmen into automated metal men and birds, musical silver trees, fantastic stage illusions, and elaborate clockworks, effecting these devices’ move into the lavish and ‘curiously ywrought’ pleasure gardens that already provided courtiers with a sumptuous physical environment of courtly magnificence.”60 Courtly entertainments incorporating mechanical devices are of course not limited to pleasure gardens, of which Hesdin in Artois is the bestknown example;61 royal entries such as Ysabeau de Bavière’s 1389 Paris 56 E. R. Truitt, “‘Trei poëte, sages dotors, qui mout sorent di nigromance:’ Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth-Century French Literature,” Configurations 12 (2004): 172. 57 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 91. 58 Deguileville, Le Livre du pèlerin de vie humaine, 450, v. 5516. 59 One notable exception is the preponderance of travel literature, treatments of the Alexander legend, and depictions of Eastern marvels in books collected in the fifteenth century by the dukes of Burgundy: see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 100–8. 60 Lightsey, Manmade Marvels, 5 and 1. 61 The chateau and gardens of Hesdin, mostly constructed under Robert II of Artois, featured marvels including mechanical monkeys and boars’ heads, a fountain in the form of a tree with animated birds perched on its branches, trumpeters, a collapsing bridge, and assorted booby traps. The authoritative study of medieval Hesdin remains Van Buren’s “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin.” Van Buren completes and corrects earlier studies, especially Marguerite Charageat’s “Le parc d’Hesdin. Création monumentale du XIIIe siècle. Ses origines arabes. Son influence sur les miniatures de l’épître d’Othéa,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’art français (1950): 94–106, as well as Andrée Van Nieuwenhuysen’s discussion of the construction and maintenance of the gardens in Les Finances du duc de Bourgogne Philippe le Hardi (1384–1404). Économie et politique (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1984), 427–30. See also Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 95–100; Truitt, Medieval Robots, 122–38. For a fanciful and highly inaccurate imagining of the medieval “amusement park,” see Michel Brunet, “Le parc d’attractions des ducs de Bourgogne à Hesdin,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 78 (Dec.



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celebration featured mechanical marvels, as did the 1453 banquet du Faisan described by Olivier de la Marche. However, the phenomenon of “automation” was not restricted to courtly elites; by the end of the medieval period, mechanized statues were a part of many Western Europeans’ everyday experience. They are documented to have figured in fifteenth-century religious life from Normandy to Languedoc: articulated Christ statues (and perhaps animals such as Villard’s eagle), as well as giant screw-mechanisms used to enact the Assumption of the Virgin, were used to punctuate sermons and public religious celebrations.62 Automata – animated organ statuettes and especially clock jacks – served to structure the townsperson’s day, participating in the transition to “merchant’s time” famously posited by Jacques Le Goff.63 The jacks of the Valenciennes belfry even speak in Jean Molinet’s poem Devise de maistre Jehan du Gaughier, one of several works in which Molinet uses objects to play at the boundaries of the human.64 Man and machine shape each other: craftsmen forge the automata that, in turn, restructure the natural day into hours of uniform length and thus transform the structures of human activity. From God with his compass to Jehan du Gaughier with his mallet, machines and mechanical devices play a defining role in medieval experience of the natural world. If we have paused so long to discuss a very different sort of machine than the mental models we propose as our primary object of study, it is simply to underline the frequent and rich relationships between man and machine (including machines that look like men) developed in medieval literary and historical accounts. By 1971): 331–42. François Duceppe-Lamarre offers an updated bibliography on medieval Hesdin in “Le parc à gibier d’Hesdin. Mises au point et nouvelles orientations de recherches,” Revue du Nord 83:343 (2001): 175–84, and in “Paysages et réserve cynégétique d’un lieu de pouvoir. Hesdin (Artois) à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Cauchiès and Guisset, Le Château, 119–133. 62 Chapuis and Gelis, Le monde des automates, 95–102; Jessica Riskin, “Machines in the Garden,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1:2 (April 2010): 16–43, http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/machines-garden, accessed May 23, 2018. 63 Jacques Le Goff, “Au Moyen Âge: Temps de l’église et temps du marchand,” in Pour un autre Moyen Âge: Temps, travail et culture en occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 46–65. 64 Jean Molinet, Les Faictz et dictz de Jean Molinet, ed. Noël Dupire, 3 vols. (Paris: SATF, 1939), II. 755–61. Molinet also personifies the jacquemarts in his pronostication joyeuse of 1498, the Guerre des grands (II:897–901). Following Cynthia Brown and Adrian Armstrong, I consider this ludic border-crossing to be an artefact of a critical transition in literary manufacture, as the book transforms from a handmade object to a mass-produced commodity. See Adrian Armstrong, Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France, 1470–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Cynthia Brown, “L’Éveil d’une nouvelle conscience littéraire en France à la grande époque de transition technique: Jean Molinet et son moulin poétique,” Le Moyen Français 22 (1989): 15–35; Julie Singer, “Parts and (W)holes: Confronting the Human in Molinet’s Graphic Games,” Neophilologus 96 (2012): 509–21.

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these mechanical means, the human world and the natural world structure each other – providing important context for a similarly machine-like figuration of man’s inner world, which gives rise to the conceptualization of rust as both a cause and a symptom of personal misconduct and political mismanagement. Fortune and Virtue in Strife The cognitive processes that govern moral behavior and rational decisionmaking are frequently figured as engines or machines, subject to rust; and they can also be disrupted or reinforced by other hybrid mechanical-intellectual constructs. More than any of the (literal) automata described above, personified Fortune and the Virtues influence these faculties. Fortune and especially the Virtues are often thought of in psychomachic terms, as personifications externalizing inner conflict.65 By the end of the Middle Ages, though, each of these personifications could also be thought of as a psychomachina (to coin a clumsy neologism): that is, a symbiotic integration of human(oid) and machine acting upon the human subject’s psyche. From Fortune’s wheel to the windmills and wine presses of the fifteenth-century New Iconography of the Cardinal Virtues, machine attributes increasingly become an extension of the allegorical bodies of Fortune and Virtue. Man – like the acteur of Martin le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et Vertu, whose title inspires that of this section – finds his engin caught between these two mechanical models. Fortune is surely the best-known example of an allegorical figure identified with a mechanical attribute: from about the twelfth century, she has been depicted with a wheel. The wheel iconography is but one means of representing Fortune – in the later Middle Ages she is also depicted with two faces (typically of contrasting colors and expressions), with many arms, with her precariously situated house, or wrestling with poverty – but the wheel is the most widespread, and arguably the most visually powerful.66 Its variations are well known: the goddess may sit atop the wheel or stand beside it; she or a subordinate may turn the wheel; human figures, often accompanied by the legends regno, regnavi, sum sine regno, and regnabo (I reign, I reigned, I am without a kingdom, I will 65 See Joanne S. Norman, The Metamorphoses of an Allegory: The Iconography of the Psychomachia in Medieval Art (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). 66 For overviews of variations in medieval Fortune iconography, see Tamotsu Kurose, Miniatures of Goddess Fortune in Medieval Manuscripts (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1977); Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), especially Chapter Five, “Fortune’s Wheel,” 147–77; Italo Siciliano, François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du Moyen Âge (Paris: Nizet, 1967), Chapter Three, “Fortune,” 281–311; F. P. Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1970), “Fortune,” 168–222; Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Emmanuelle Métry, eds., La Fortune: Thèmes, représentations, discours (Geneva: Droz, 2003).



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reign) may rise and fall with its cyclical motion.67 In some late medieval texts Fortune is characterized as wielding multiple wheels: one of the verbal portraits in Guillaume de Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit (1363–65) explicates Fortune’s five wheels,68 while Gervais du Bus’s Roman de Fauvel (1310–14) offers a unique description of Fortune’s two wheels (one moving slowly and one quickly), each circumscribing a small counterwheel that spins in the opposite direction: Deus roes out devant Fortune Qui touz jours tournient, mes l’une Va tost et l’autre belement, Et en chascune vraiement A une mendre roe mise Tout par dedens et en tel guise Que mouvement contraire tient Contre la roe ou el se tient. Ices roes sanz sejourner Font l’estat du monde torner (330, vv. 1966–75) Fortune had two wheels before her That always turned, but one Moves quickly and the other gently, And in each one, in truth, She has put a smaller wheel Completely inside, such that It makes a contrary movement Against the wheel in which it is seated. These wheels, without stopping, Keep the worldly social order in motion.

As Guillaume de Deguileville will later do in the second recension of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine, Gervais Du Bus figures human experience as a product of a mechanical system, which is composed of articulated wheels moving in opposite directions. Scoffing at Fauvel’s desire to marry her, Fortune explicates the significance of the two wheels, “Dont chascun[e] a une mendre / Et ont contraires movemens / Et par divers entendemens” (each of which has a smaller one, and they have contrary movements, and are governed by different 67 Catherine Attwood links the quadripartite structure of the regno, regnavi, sum sine regno, and regnabo figures with other series of four found in didactic works, including the Cardinal Virtues. Fortune la contrefaite. L’envers de l’écriture médiévale (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 174. 68 Guillaume de Machaut, Livre du Voir Dit, ed. Paul Imbs and Jacqueline CerquigliniToulet (Paris: Poche, 1999), 712–22, vv. 8189–8336.

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logic, 396, vv. 2722–24). One wheel raises people up, with the cooperation of Vaine Gloire; people who seem to be succeeding in life are then undone by “l’autre mendre contreroe / Qui adés ne fait qu’estriver / Pour desclouer ou desriver / Aucun de la roe deseure” (the other, smaller counter-wheel that always does nothing but oppose [the first] in order to un-nail or un-rivet someone from the upper wheel, 414, vv. 2802–05). It is interesting to note that one wheel incorporates humans into the mechanical system, taking up the victims after a human (or, at least, a personified-as-human) actor has lured them in; the other, in turn, disengages the human victim in machine terms, “un-nailing” and “un-riveting” him from the first wheel (desclouer ou desriver), reintroducing movement and instability by denying man the hardware with which he sought to immobilize himself at the top of the wheel. The only thing that can be “fixed” to Fortune’s wheel is uncertainty itself: Et si ne puet nul si sage estre, Soit philosophe ou autre mestre, Qui tous les cas puisse eschiver Qu’an mes roes ait fait river (380, vv. 2467–70) And no one can be so wise, Be he a philosopher or other scholar, That he can avoid all of the random occurrences [cas] That I have had riveted to my wheels

Continuing the dialectic of fixedness and movement, Fortune claims that her actions keep the world turning (“le monde qui tousjours tournie,” 368, v. 2264) by filing away the metaphoric rust of sin: “Et par ainsi faitis toouil / Est de cest monde le roouil / Lymez et le mal hors boutez” (And by means of such beautiful confusion the rust of this world is filed away, and the bad thrown out, 388, vv. 2581–83). The wheel’s proper operation eliminates rust: the mechanism is self-sustaining and even self-cleaning.69 Fortune’s later examples, however, belie the meritocratic illusion she seeks to inculcate, whereby good people rise and the bad and rusty fall. Fortune’s metaphor is valid only if she diverges from commonly accepted interpretations of “le roouil.” Following the description of her wheels – and following Fauvel’s complaint, added by “Chaillou du Pesstain” to the famous BnF MS fr. 146 – Fortune links 69 Joel Kaye sees notions of self-sustaining and self-equalizing mechanisms as an integral component of the new model of balance he identifies as having emerged between the middle of the thirteenth and the middle of the fourteenth century: A History of Balance, 6. Kaye argues that these “changes in the sense and imagination of what might constitute balance had the effect of opening up striking new vistas of imaginative and speculative possibility,” giving rise to “a profound re-visioning of the image of the world and its workings” (2).



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their contrary movement to the human body’s composition from contrary humors, and the entire world’s composition from contrary elements. Explicitly tying the human “Microcosme” to the “Macrocosme,” Fortune explains that the world is aging. As Armand Strubel notes, this passage transposes the commonplace of the “ages of the world,” wherein successive periods of human history are associated with increasingly impure metals, onto a hierarchical schema of the humors.70 Whereas the world once was sanguine – a disposition that liberated the engin (“adont fu l’engin ouvert,” 498, v. 3958) – the world has now become aged and melancholic (“Mes ore est le monde venus / En grant vieillesce et devenus / Trestout plains de melancolie,” vv. 3972–74). The association of the iron age with the melancholic humor is telling, for as I will demonstrate in this book, the melancholic’s mind, like an iron mechanism, is the most susceptible to “rust.” In the Roman de Fauvel, as in the other texts under consideration here, a single, fundamental logic underpins mechanical systems and human physiology. The wheels’ contrary motion is key to their use as a figure for cognitive function as well as for social upheaval: it is reflective of social differentiation71 as well as of reversals of individual destiny. Contrary to modern usage, a mechanical metaphor rarely implies a smoothly or predictably operating machine. In later medieval French texts the wheel of Fortune emerges as frequent site for the experimental melding of human experience with inorganic imagery. Fortune’s wheel often appears in surprising ways, as in the second recension of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine: here Deguileville greatly expands the first version’s discussion of Fortune and, unusually, assimilates her wheel to Charybdis “Qui [a] absorté mainte gent / Par son grant circuïement” (which has absorbed many people by means of its circular movement, 944, vv. 12903–4). People are drawn into a mechanical, wheeled system as into a whirlpool; natural and manufactured perils converge. The iconography of Fortune also lies just beneath the surface of the “faulx receveurs” episode in the Pèlerinage de l’âme, discussed above. The king’s fixed position atop the tower, from which he harangues the suffering souls enmeshed in the gears, calls to mind the kings rising and falling on many late medieval depictions of Fortune’s wheel, but with a twist, or a tournoiement: here it is the king who once ruled, regnavi, who has reassumed his place atop the infernal machine and no longer risks being dislodged – though his glory is only relative, for he still is, after all, in Hell. 70 Le Roman de Fauvel, 501n1. See also Jean-Marie Fritz, “Figures et métaphores du corps dans le discours de l’histoire: Du ‘Mundus senescens’ au monde malade,” in Apogée et Déclin. Actes du Colloque de l’URA 411, Provins, 1991, ed. Claude Thomasset and Michel Zink (Paris: PUPS, 1993), 78–80. 71 On social differentiation by movement rather than position, see Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 17.

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The Fortune iconography that best captures the simultaneous integration and tension between the human and mechanical worlds is a subset of images that show Fortune turning her wheel by means of a crank.72 The earliest such image is a twelfth-century marginal drawing in a tenth-century Spanish manuscript of Gregory’s Moralia in Iob (University of Manchester Library, Rylands lat. MS 83, fol. 214v). Still present in fourteenth-century French and Italian manuscripts, the crank illustrations come to constitute a significant minority of fifteenth-century depictions of Fortune and her wheel, particularly in northern French manuscripts produced from about 1450 to 1525. The surge in more “technological” depictions of Fortune follows closely after the reemergence of Fortune as an ever more frequent figure in early fifteenth-century French literature.73 Fortune most often turns a crank in illustrations of texts in which she is a central character: translations of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes),74 Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae (Des remèdes de Fortune),75 and Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae (Livre de consolation),76 as well as Martin le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et Vertu,77 Pierre Michault’s Danse aux Aveugles,78 and, in one celebrated painting, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune.79 72 This particular variant on Fortune iconography has not received a great deal of attention. Alexander Murray comments upon it briefly in Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, 99–100. Paul Strohm mentions Fortune’s crank in Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 3. Tamotsu Kurose offers several illustrations but I have not been able to ascertain whether the Japanese text comments upon the crank. 73 On the ubiquity of Fortune in the early years of the fifteenth century, see Bernard Guenée, Un meurte, une société: L’assassinat du duc d’Orléans, 23 novembre 1407 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 71–82, especially p. 77. 74 Fifteenth-century manuscripts of Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes containing miniatures of Fortune turning her wheel by means of a crank include Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, codex gallicus 369, fols 81r & 200v; Paris, BnF MS fr. 130, fol. 1; Paris, BnF MS fr. 226, fol. 12v; London, British Library, Harley 621, fol. 217. On Laurent’s translations and the images accompanying them see Anne D. Hedeman, Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s De casibus (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008). 75 Vienna, ÖNB MS 2559, fol. 5v (Paris, c.1470); Paris, BnF MS fr. 225, fols 1, 8, 23, 37v, 55, 66v, 78v, 100, and 120v (Rouen, 1503). 76 New York, Pierpont Morgan MS 222, fol. 21r (c.1465, Loire valley, illustrated by the Coëtivy master). 77 London, British Library, MS Royal 16 F IV, fols 3 & 38v (last quarter of the 15th century, southern Netherlands); Paris, Arsenal Rés. 5202, fol. 95; Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Thott 311, fol. 3 (16th century). 78 Geneva, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire MS fr. 182, fol. 198 (late 15th/early th 16 century, illustrated by Antoine Rolin). 79 Paris, BnF MS fr. 1586, fol. 30v (c.1350–55). Other examples of crank iconography are found in manuscripts of Herrade of Landsberg’s Hortus deliciarum (former Strasbourg MS, destroyed, fol. 215); Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (London, British Library MS



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This trend in late medieval book illustrations demonstrates that the iconography of Fortune is often sensitive to, or even participates in, the late medieval period’s renewed interest in mechanical innovations. In contrast to the comparatively incomplex iconography that typically illustrates thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury copies of the Roman de la Rose, in which Fortune simply holds a wheel, often interlacing her arms in its spokes, these later images gesture toward a significantly different relationship between Fortune and her attribute. She is now the operator of a machine. Instead of ensuring its regular and smooth motion, however (as would a clockkeeper or a miller, for instance), Fortune turns her crank in fits and starts, purposely catching human victims in the teeth of her mechanism.80 Her wheel has been transformed from a simple machine to an articulated system, one offering greater opportunity for control. That Fortune turns her wheel with a crank, a key technology transformed by profound and significant innovations in the first half of the fifteenth century, adds a layer of significance. Images of Fortune with her crank offer a remarkable illustration of the artistic reception and representation of contemporary technological innovation. The pictorial imagery becomes common shortly after the proliferation of crank technology begins in earnest: crossbow cranks appear in the late fourteenth or very early fifteenth century81; the compound crank (in the form of the carpenter’s brace) is invented in Flanders around 142082; and the connecting-rod – which constitutes, according to Bertrand Gille, the most important mechanical innovation of the late Middle Ages83 – is developed around 1430.84 Fortune becomes a machine operator at the very moment when cranks are becoming a part of more people’s everyday experience. Fortune’s crank, a mechanical extension of her human arm, transforms her wheel into a cog connecting the human and machine realms. In fact, the crank bears special implications for the interface of man and machine. The connecting

Royal 20 D I, fol. 163v, a Neapolitan manuscript from the second quarter of the 14th century that entered the library of Charles V); Domenico Bandini’s Fons Memorabilium (Oxford, Balliol College MS 238E, fol. 123, 1444–48); Chronique universelle (Pierpont Morgan M.224, fol. 53r, c.1460, probably made in Rouen); and a late Roman de la Rose made for François Ier (New York, Pierpont Morgan MS 948, fol. 61, made in Rouen c.1525). 80 In this respect, the choice to depict Fortune with a crank may be more mechanically accurate than it initially seems: Lynn White notes that before the innovation of the flywheel (which is not depicted in any of the twenty or so manuscripts whose Fortune-crank illustrations I’ve seen), crank motion was marked by “irregularities of impulse” and “dead-spots.” Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 115. 81 White, Technology and Social Change, 111. 82 Ibid., 112. 83 Bertrand Gille, “Machines,” in A History of Technology, vol. II, ed. Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 652. 84 White, Technology and Social Change, 115.

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rod is, as Lynn White puts it, “a mechanical substitute for the human arm.”85 And the compound crank, allowing “conversion of continuous rotary motion to reciprocating motion” without the drawbacks of springs, which were the only other method available in the period,86 draws together the very different forms of movement found in mechanical devices and in living things.87 The crank is therefore remarkably well suited to a depiction of the struggle between man and Fortune as it plays out on Fortune’s machine. The intermediary function of Fortune’s crank is made especially clear in the celebrated image from an early Machaut anthology, BnF MS fr. 1586 (MS C), probably made for Jean le Bon around 1350 and 1356 [Figure 1].88 The fifth of its thirty-four miniatures accompanying the Remede de Fortune portrays in its upper register the poet within a crenellated wall, composing a poem; the bottom half depicts a blindfold Fortune turning a crank, setting in motion a system of geared wheels that raise men only to crush them beneath the teeth of the great wheel. The miniature presents a connection between a geared mechanical system and the process of textual composition. As the miniature’s rubric indicates, this image illustrates “comment l’amant fait une complainte de Fortune et de sa roe” (fol. 30v). The following text, to be identified with the words the poet is writing on his scroll in the miniature, highlights Fortune’s instability (“car elle n’est ferme n’estable,” for she’s not fixed or stable, 921) and the unpredictability of her machine’s timing (“Fors tant que n’a moys ne semainne / Jour prefix, në heure certainne,” except that Fortune fixes no month, week, / day, or appointed hour, 961–2) and direction (“L’un met arrier, et l’autre avant,” she pushes one back and the other forward, 994).89 The poet portrayed Ibid., p. 113. Gille, “Machines,” 562. According to Lynn White, “Continuous rotary motion is typical of inorganic matter, whereas reciprocating motion is the sole form of movement found in living things. The crank connects these two kinds of motion; therefore we who are organic find that crank motion does not come easily to us” (Technology and Social Change, 115). He continues rather lyrically: “To use a crank, our tendons and muscles must relate themselves to the motion of galaxies and electrons. From this inhuman adventure our race long recoiled.” 88 The most important study of this manuscript’s illuminations remains François Avril, “Les manuscrits enluminés de Guillaume de Machaut: Essai de chronologie,” in Guillaume de Machaut: Poète et compositeur. Colloque-table ronde organisé par l’Université de Reims (19–22 avril 1978) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1982), 117–33. A recent study of this manuscript’s history, reception history, and contents, with a particular focus on the music, is Elizabeth Eva Leach, “Machaut’s First Single-Author Compilation,” in Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 247–70. 89 I cite Machaut’s French text and the English translation from Le jugement du roy de Behaingne and Remede de Fortune, ed. and trans. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988). Citations refer to verse number. 85 86 87



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Fig. 1 Fortune Turning a Crank, Guillaume de Machaut, Remède de Fortune (Paris, BnF MS fr. 1586, fol. 30v), c.1350–55

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in the top half of the miniature creates a textual image of Fortune that, in turn, inspires the visual image placed below. The subsequent text of the lover’s complaint is bookended by this image and one depicting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the metallic Statua (fol. 31v): an exemplum that brings together the human being and his simulacrum, the organic metaphor of the state and the decomposition of its inorganic constituents.90 As Sylvia Huot and Anna Zayaruznaya have noted, the pair of images establishes a visual analogy between Fortune and the statue as “allegories of opposition and disjunction.”91 The primacy of the poet’s role in this image-making is striking. The Fortune miniature is surrounded by text, but in a remarkable mise en abyme a portion of that external text appears, miniaturized, on scroll within the image.92 The poet describes Fortune’s machinery from an external viewpoint, yet the image suggests that he is at once separate from and implicated in the crush of gears. Despite the representation of the poet and Fortune as existing in entirely distinct, complementary, even antipodal spaces – his naturalistic and predominantly green backdrop of a vergier superposed on the barren, geometric, red landscape of her domain – he too appears as a part of Fortune’s cyclical system as the circular crenellated wall that surrounds him takes on the form of another toothed wheel. The human figure at the center of this wheel, and the pen with which he writes, become the central axle that would permit this upper gearwheel to articulate with the mechanical system depicted below. This image is indeed a critical juncture; it comes not just at a moment of “articulation” between different voices, as Julia Drobinsky has argued that many of the Remede illustrations in MS C do,93 but also at a moment where the product of the poet’s engin engages with and morphs into a marvelous machine. The poet-lover is at once creating a closed mechanical system and becoming enclosed within it.94 For further discussion of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, see Chapter Three. Anna Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiy Press, 2015), 162. She notes, in particular, the play of horizontal and vertical divisions in the images, 160–61. 92 Julia Drobinsky has shown that in the illustrations in this manuscript of the Remede, the parchment scroll recurs as a “signe distinctif de l’insertion lyrique” (distinctive sign of lyric insertion). “La polyphonie énonciative et lyrique dans le Remède de Fortune de Guillaume de Machaut. Inscription textuelle, rubrication et illustration,” PRIS-MA 20 (2004): 61. 93 Drobinsky, “La polyphonie énonciative,” 57. 94 Man is similarly caught up (visually) in the wheel of a divine machine in the frontispice to Arras MS 845, a manuscript containing Deguileville’s Pèlerinages followed by excerpts from the Roman de la Rose, made around 1400. A praying male figure, holding a banderole, kneels inside a wheel inscribed with the ten commandments; from each commandment emanates an arrow pointing inward toward the kneeling man. On this image, see Robert L. A. Clark and Pamela Sheingorn, “Were Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pelerinages Plays? The Case for Arras MS 845 as Performative Anthology,” European Medieval Drama 12 (2008): 139–41; on the manuscript, see Michael Camille, “The Illustrated Manuscripts of Guillaume 90 91



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The surest way to escape Fortune’s pernicious influence is to stop, or at least regulate, her wheel’s arbitrary motion – fixing it, perhaps, with the kind of nails or rivets that the Roman de Fauvel’s Fortune denies her victims.95 As Stanley Galpin notes, Jean de Meun twice “refers to the impossibility of arresting Fortune’s wheel” in his continuation of the Roman de la Rose,96 but such admonitions do not stop other authors from trying. Sometimes it suffices to ask, as Renart does at the conclusion of Jacquemart Gielée’s Renart le Nouvel (1289). At the end of this work from the “second cycle” of the Roman de Renart, Fortune offers to crown Renart and place him atop her wheel.97 The canny fox, wary of the all-too-temporary nature of her gifts, responds: Non ferai; Ja sour vo roe ne serrai, Car se vostre roe tournés, De si haut si bas m’asserrés.98 I won’t do it; I’ll never get on top of your wheel, For if you turn it, From so high you’ll crush me down low.

She vows never to move her wheel again (“Jamais au tans ki ore va / N’ert tournee un seul tour par moi,” Never in the time starting now will it be turned even a single rotation by me, 311, vv. 7692–93), a promise she keeps: “Fortune a sa roe escotee, / Si que mais n’ert par li tournee” (Fortune stopped her wheel,

de Deguileville’s ‘Pèlerinages,’ 1330–1426” (PhD diss., Cambridge, 1985), 147–53; and Carol Symes, “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theater,” Speculum 77 (2002): 831. 95 R. Howard Patch offers a few textual examples of such immobilizing procedures: The Goddess Fortuna, 157. 96 Stanley Leman Galpin, “Fortune’s Wheel in the Roman de la Rose,” PMLA 24:2 (1909): 341. 97 For a summary of this complex text, see Henri Roussel, “La structure narrative de Renart le Nouvel,” in Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, Jakemart Giélée et leur temps, actes du colloque de Lille, octobre 1978, ed. Henri Roussel and François Suard (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1980), 321–31. 98 Jacquemart Gielée, Renart le Nouvel, ed. Henri Roussel (Paris: Picard, 1961), 311, vv. 7687–90.

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so that never again would it be turned by her, 312, vv. 7731–32).99 Renart can only be brought down by God, by means of the virtues (v. 7734), and his ensconcement atop Fortune’s wheel signals the triumph of vice.100 Jacques Ribard calls this episode a “tableau,” highlighting its static quality;101 both the text and the accompanying image, which closes both the iconographic program of the MSS and the book itself (“Li figure est fins de no livre,” the illustration is the end of our book, 313, v. 7749), fix Renart’s status atop the immobilized wheel for all eternity.102 What works for Renart, though, is not a viable solution for real people, and especially rulers, wishing to immobilize Fortune’s wheel while they remain at the top. Short of vulpine scheming, how can men and women stave off their utterly unpredictable but seemingly inevitable downfall? A more practical response, proposed in an illustrated life of king Edward IV of England (Harley 7353, c.1461), is a brake wielded by Ratio, Reason. In this manuscript’s painting of Edward IV in majesty, the triumphant monarch sits atop a Fortune-less wheel while Ratio jams a pole through the spokes, immobilizing it with the king at the apex of his powers.103 According to Paul Strohm, this imagery is indicative of a new fifteenth-century political mindset according to which Fortune is countered by Virtue through the exercise of Reason.104 The literature of counsel plays a vital role in this struggle as it creates – as Misty Schieberle has recently argued – “a fantasy of combatting or controlling Fortune” in order to inculcate the “moral and social virtues that theoretically allow men – whether kings or not – to stabilize their worldly 99 While escoter clearly means to arrest the wheel’s movement, the exact meaning of the verb, and thus of the braking mechanism, is unclear. Its use may indicate that a branch has been used to block the wheel’s motion, as escoté can refer to a stick from which the side branches have been removed. Escoter is perhaps conflated with estoquer, meaning to obstruct, to hit or to break with a sword. The manuscripts’ images of Fortune’s wheel unfortunately do not resolve the question. 100 Renart is an incarnation of multiple vices in Renart le Nouvel: see Elina SuomelaHarma, “Les épigones du Roman de Renart: Évolutions et mutations,” Revue des langues romanes 90 (1986): 55. 101 Jacques Ribard, “À propos de l’épilogue de Renart le Nouvel: Quelques réflexions sur l’allégorie de Fortune,” in Roussel and Suard, Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, Jakemart Giélée et leur temps, 307. 102 The image can be found in BnF MS fr. 372, MS fr. 1581, MS fr. 1593, and MS fr. 25566. 103 I am very grateful to Misty Schieberle for alerting me to this image and to Paul Strohm’s explication of it. 104 Strohm, Politique, 2–4. I am not convinced that this is as “new” as he purports, at least not in the French literary tradition. Prudence and the other Cardinal Virtues, which Strohm posits as central to the “new” political conception, play a central role in French mirrors of princes and other political writings from at least the thirteenth century. What may be new is the way the machine metaphor is layered atop this older construct, which changes, in a way, what Prudence actually is. See Chapter Two.



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positions.”105 This idea is made explicit in the dedicatory epistle to Jean, duke of Berry, with which Laurent de Premierfait opens his second translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium: as Laurent writes, “Le saige n’est point subget a fortune” (the wise man is not at all subject to Fortune, 78).106 Such a strategy is also clearly at play in Martin Le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et Vertu (1448), which opposes Fortune and Vertu, who submit their debate to the judgment of Rayson. Not surprisingly, given Fortune’s long-standing association with folly,107 Rayson decides in favor of Vertu. It makes perfect sense to counter Fortune’s madness with reason. Yet Reason, unlike Fortune, admits no mechanical substitute; witness Laurent de Premierfait’s observation that men and women who are confident in having already arrested Fortune’s wheel, “ainsi comme se ilz eussent fermees leurs seignories a crocs de fer en roche de aymant” (just as if they had locked up their power with iron hooks in lodestone), are in fact already “destroiez” (fallen), gripped by “enragee follie” (insane madness; second prologue, 92). Even the toughest metals, the hardest minerals, the strongest powers of magnetic attraction are insufficient to arrest Fortune’s wheel. This challenge calls for an entirely different strategy. There is a deeper logic to positioning Fortune and Vertu both as adversaries and as pendants to one another, as Le Franc does: fifteenth-century iconographic trends depict both as “machines” operating according to their own mechanical principles – Fortune by random caprice, and the Cardinal Virtues by balanced movement and careful regulation.108 If the exercise of the virtues can put a stop to Fortune’s wheel, it stands to reason that Fortune might pose an equal risk to the well-ordered turning of the hinge virtues. The risk is compounded, moreover, by the fact that the engin is itself constructed, metaphorically, as a machine composed of moving parts. When reason strays too far from virtue, it too breaks down. It is especially revealing to consider mental and moral breakdowns as failings in the exercise of the Cardinal Virtues, since these very virtues are on 105 Misty Schieberle, Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1380–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 17–18. 106 Laurent de Premierfait, Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, ed. Patricia May Gathercole (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). It bears repeating that this is the text in which illuminations depicting Fortune with a crank most frequently appear. 107 Attwood, Fortune la contrefaite, 130–36. For a brief discussion on the intersection between Fortune and folie in late medieval literature, see also Ribard, “À propos de l’épilogue de Renart le Nouvel,” 315–16. 108 In the Estrif, these contrasting types of movement are reinforced by the fact that Fortune speaks only in prose, while Rayson and Vertu speak in both prose and verse. See Peter F. Dembowski, “Martin Le Franc, Fortune, Virtue and Fifteenth-Century France,” in Continuations. Essays on Medieval French Literature and Language in Honor of John L. Grigsby, ed. Norris Lacy and Gloria Torrini-Roblin (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1989), 261–76.

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some level understood as mobile metallic devices subject to rust if left unused. The Cardinal Virtues are, as the etymology of their designation suggests, the hinge upon which moral behavior turns; in their fifteenth-century “New Iconography,”109 these virtues come to be associated with an array of mechanical devices that underscore their ordered dynamism. The four Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance have existed, as a grouping, since antiquity. For patristic writers, these virtues represent divine gifts; later medieval admirers of the classics reevaluate the Cardinal Virtues, reconceptualizing them as “humanly acquired.”110 The Cardinal Virtues are popularized and to a certain degree secularized in the later medieval West, due in no small part to increased interest in Aristotle’s very different schema of the virtues.111 Though the numbers and classifications of the virtues are quite fluid in classical and earlier medieval texts, the Cardinal Virtues are cemented as a fixed unit by the fourteenth century. Textual descriptions of the virtues develop in tandem with the emergence of consistent and precise iconography; together, verbal and pictorial metaphors of the virtues achieve a degree of abstraction and subtlety that neither alone can capture.112 The spread of (and regularization of) verbal and pictorial representation of the virtues was propagated thanks in large part to the late medieval popularity of treatises on the virtues made for lay consumption: chief among these was Martin of Braga’s (pseudo-Seneca’s) sixth-century Formula honestae vitae and its many vernacular translations or adaptations.113 The Cardinal Virtues were frequently used as an organizing principle in regimens of princes, exegetical writings, even interpretations of classical literature.114 109 The representational system has been thus designated since Émile Mâle, L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1908). 110 István P. Bejczy, The Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages: A Study in Moral Thought from the Fourth to the Fourteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 4. 111 Bejczy credits Buridan with bringing the Cardinal Virtues into academic discussion of the Nicomachean Ethics, and thus facilitating their transition from a theological to a philosophical topic. “The Cardinal Virtues in Medieval Commentaries on the Nichomachean Ethics, 1250–1350,” in Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, 1200–1500, ed. István P. Bejczy (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 219. 112 See Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 19. 113 These include the anonymous early thirteenth-century translation edited by Eugen Irmer, Die altfranzösische Bearbeitung Der Formula Honestae Vitae des Martin von Braga (Frankenhausen: Druck von E. Krebs, 1890); Jean Courtecuisse’s widely distributed 1403 translation, Seneque des IIII vertus. La Formula honestae vitae de Martin de Braga (pseudoSénèque) traduite et glosée par Jean Courtecuisse (1403), ed. Hans Haselbach (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975); and Christine de Pizan’s Livre de Prudence/Livre de la prod’hommie de l’homme. 114 Bejczy, The Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages, 141. On the particular role of Prudence as a structuring principle in mirrors for princes, see infra, Chapter Two.



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The virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance have been designated “cardinal” since Ambrose’s funeral oration for his brother Satyrus (c.378), in which he appears to have coined the term.115 The word cardo may express a range of meanings, most of which evoke turning, movement, or transition.116 In the later twelfth century, Alain de Lille and Peter Cantor, interestingly, use the terms “cardinal” and “political” simultaneously to designate the same set of virtues.117 The term “cardinal” becomes increasingly prominent throughout the thirteenth century, and the definition of cardo/cardinale as hinge or pivot is the one that most later writers prefer, from Alain de Lille and Philip the Chancellor to Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The hinge connotes regular movement along a predetermined path, movement that is regulated thanks to a man-made, forged metal object. What is it that turns on such hinges? Some commentators propose the cardinal virtues as the hinges around which other virtues118 or “moral life”119 revolve; this is the interpretation given in secular vernacular works such as Honoré Bovet’s Arbre des batailles (1386–9), which states that “lez vertux cardinaulx sont pour ce ainsi appelleez car, ainsi come l’uis ou la porte se soustient et se tourne et revire sus les gouns, tout aussi la vie humaine prent exercice et estude sur cestes vertus communement” (the cardinal virtues are called thus because, like a door or a portal holds itself up and turns and swings on its hinges, in the same way human life commonly takes its exercise and study on these virtues, 236).120 In more specialized theological works the cardinal virtues are most frequently described as the hinges of the door to heaven.121 In Summa de bono, for instance, Philip the Chancellor writes that the cardinal virtues are named after hinges because they represent the hinges of the door that admits us to heaven (Cardinales enim 115 R. E. Houser, The Cardinal Virtues: Aquinas, Albert, and Philip the Chancellor (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), 6. 116 For a full discussion of cardo’s many meanings in Ambrose’s era, see Houser, The Cardinal Virtues, 33. 117 Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. 3, Problèmes de morale (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1949), 155. 118 For instance, Alain de Lille, De virtutibus et de vitiis 1.1, cited in Bejczy, The Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages, 168–69. 119 “Many authors prefer the view that it is ‘human life’ or ‘moral life’ which revolves around the cardinal virtues.” Bejczy, The Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages, 169. 120 Honoré Bovet, L’Arbre des batailles, ed. Reinhilt Richter-Bergmeier (Geneva: Droz, 2017). 121 Cf. Philip the Chancellor (Summa de bono), William Peraldus (Summa de virtutibus et de vitiis), Hugh of St. Cher (In Sententias III.33), and Thomas Aquinas (Super libros Sententiarum III.33.2.1.2, De virtutibus in communi 12 ad 24, De virtutibus cardinalis 1 ad 2). Interestingly, in Jean de Vignay’s translation of Gervais of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, the word charnières (hinges) is used to refer metonymically to the doors of heaven. See DMF, s.v. “charnières1.”

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dicuntur a cardine. Cardo autem per quod uoluitur ostium) and are also called cardinal because they are related to principal acts of man’s motor faculties (Actus enim harum uirtutum sunt principales, quoniam sunt trium uirium primo motiuarum respectu eorum que ad finem).122 The metaphoric “gates of heaven” are thus assimilated to familiar domestic interiors, where well-oiled hardware facilitates, and faulty hardware impedes, passage from one space to another. Thus the hinge metaphor renders the abstract (virtues) not only concrete but also familiar, and homely (heimlich). The hinge is a straightforward, uncomplicated mechanism. That the Cardinal Virtues have long been associated, by their very name, with this sort of machine logic allows us to understand the New Iconography that arises in the fifteenth century better: this innovative imagery is not an eccentric development, but a coherent extension of a familiar idea. In L’art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France, first published in 1908, the art historian Émile Mâle pauses to comment incredulously on a set of images produced in northern France during the latter half of the fifteenth century. In this representational system now known as the New Iconography, the earlier, more generic representations of the virtues have given way to female figures differentiated by the complex arrays of objects that surround them [Figure 2].123 Justice holds a scale and a sword, with another sword suspended above her as she stands on a bed made with a large pillow; Prudence balances a coffin on her head and stands on a bag of spilled coins, holding a mirror and a sieve and protecting herself with a shield emblazoned with the arma christi; Fortitude balances an anvil on her head or back as she wrestles a dragon from a tower and stands on a wine press; Temperance balances a clock on her head, wears a bridle and spurs, holds eyeglasses and her own reins, and stands on a windmill.124 Several of these objects, like Justice’s scales and Prudence’s sieve, are easily linked to more traditional modes of representation; but many of the mechanical devices are recent inventions as well as new introductions to Christian

122 Cited in Lottin, Psychologie et morale, III.176. 123 We should note that the New Iconography does

not supplant the older and more generic representational system: traditional (and less distinctive) depictions of the Cardinal Virtues remain prevalent throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Mâle, L’Art religieux, 311. 124 Rosemond Tuve emphatically states that these devices cannot be termed “attributes,” though that is precisely how Mâle had designated them. “Notes on the Virtues and Vices,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963): 283. For Tuve, these objects represent an amalgamation of traditions, or “descendants” of the Ciceronian and Macrobian sub-virtues that had earlier been depicted as handmaidens to the Cardinal Virtues (“Notes,” 288).



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Fig. 2 The New Iconography of the Cardinal Virtues, Jean Courtecuisse, Seneque des .IIII. Vertus (Paris, BnF MS fr. 9186, fol. 304r), c.1470.

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iconography. Each virtue is incorporated into an exaggerated rebus (or, as Lynn White puts it, a “bizarre hypertely”) of virtuous behaviors.125 Virtually every critic to have considered the New Iconography, from Mâle onward, has shared the judgment that the abundance of objects surrounding the virtues makes them “bizarre” indeed.126 The New Iconography is, however, not at all uncommon: it is found most frequently in manuscripts of literary, historical, and devotional texts produced in northern France and the Low Countries from about the 1430s to 1510s,127 but also in Pieter Bruegel’s

125 “The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology,” in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E. H. Harbison, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 197–219, 198. 126 Émile Mâle, L’Art religieux; Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices;” Tuve, Allegorical Imagery; Lynn White, “The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology;” Jennifer O’Reilly, Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1988); Michaela Bautz, “Virtutes. Studien zu Funktion und Ikonographie der Tugenden im Mittelalter und im 16. Jahrhundert” (PhD diss., Stuttgart, 1999), 78–80 and 207–14; William Voelkle, “Morgan M.359 and the Origin of the ‘New Iconography’ of the Virtues in the Fifteenth Century,” in Album Amicorum Kenneth C. Lindsay. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. S. A. Stein and G. D. McKee (Binghamton, NY: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1990), 58–61; William Voelkle, “The Amerongen/Vronensteyn Hours (Brussels MS II 7619), Morgan M.359, and the New Iconography of the Virtues,” in Masters and Miniatures. Proceedings of the Congress on Medieval Manuscript Illumination in the Northern Netherlands (Utrecht, 10–13 December 1989), ed. Koert van der Horst and Johann-Christian Klamt (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1991), 183–93. Only Tuve renders a more charitable judgment of the New Iconography’s aesthetic qualities. 127 The New Iconography is most often used to illustrate translations or adaptations of John of Wales’s Breviloquium de virtutibus (including the condensed paraphrase contained in Jean Mansel’s Fleur des histoires) and of Martin of Braga’s treatise. The manuscripts include: New York, Pierpont Morgan M. 359, fol. 116r–119r (Book of Hours, c.1430) Oxford, Bodleian, Laud misc. 570, fol. 9v, 16r, 21v (Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea and a French version of John of Wales’ Breviloquium de virtutibus, 1450) Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 927, fol. 17v (French translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, 1452–54) Brussels, KBR MS 9232, fol. 448v (Jean Mansel’s Fleur des histoires, 1454) Brussels, KBR MS II 7619, fol. 86r, 88r, 90v, 93v (Amerongen/Vronensteyn Hours, 1460) London, British Library Add. MS 6797, fol 276r (Fleur des histoires, 1467) Paris, BnF MS fr. 9186, fol. 14v, 304r (Seneque des quatre vertus, c.1470) Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 282, fol. 240v (Seneque des quatre vertus) Geneva, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire MS fr. 79, fol. 514v (Seneque des quatre vertus) Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek Oc 79, fol. 68v (Seneque des quatre vertus) Paris, BnF MS fr. 54, fol. 387, 391, 393v, 396v (Fleur des histoires, after 1454) London, British Library Add. MS 19900 (Seneque des quatre vertus)



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engravings dated 1559–60,128 in stained glass,129 in tomb sculpture,130 and in tapestry.131 The origins of the New Iconography are still unknown; the most recent hypothesis, put forth by William Voelkle, links it to the circle of the duke of Bedford.132 Many, and notably Rosemond Tuve, have sought a textual source for the iconography, proposing Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, or a lost or as yet undiscovered devotional manual as possible candidates.133 In the absence of any direct textual source, how can we understand the emergence and dominance of the “bizarre” New Iconography? I argue that these images would have looked far from outlandish to their contemporaries, as the insistence on the new attributes dovetails neatly with numerous other contemporaneous tendencies, some of which I have already outlined in this chapter. The New Iconography’s preponderance of mechanical devices, many of which (especially those associated with Temperance) are of relatively recent invention, makes sense in the light of the already-cited “technological revolution” of late Middle Ages, and is of a piece with the rapid incorporation of technological innovations in artistic representation exemplified by Fortune and her crank. The popularity of automata, too, might have made these hybrid humanoid objects less unpalatable to medieval viewers than they apparently were to Émile Mâle. Moreover, the prominent literary use of machine imagery as metaphors for inner and psychological phenomena (such as Fortune’s wheel, the human The Hague, KB, MS 76 E 13, fol. 5r, 6r, 7r, 8r, 9r, 10v, 11v (Le séjour de deuil pour la mort de Philippe de Commines, 1512) Private Collection, sold at Sotheby’s, 24 April 1985 (Pierre Choque, La Cordelière, c.1514) 128 The engravings are reproduced in H. Arthur Klein, Graphic Worlds of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (New York: Dover, 1963), 231–45. 129 Mâle, L’art religieux, 317–18. 130 Ibid., 318–19, 323–27 131 Glass and sculpture are discussed in Mâle, L’art religieux; on the sixteenth-century tapestries depicting Virtues and Vices, see Émile Müntz, “Tapisseries allégoriques inédites ou peu connues,” Monuments et mémoires publiés par l’Académie des inscriptions et belleslettres 9 (1902): 95–121. 132 Voelkle’s evidence could also point to an origin in the circle of Christine de Pizan or of the duke of Berry, as Tuve speculated many years ago. Still, Voelkle does provide the most convincing link (to date) between the early sites of New Iconography production: Paris, Rouen, England. See Voelkle, “Morgan M.359 and the Origin of the ‘New Iconography,’” 58–61; Voelkle, “The Amerongen/Vronensteyn Hours,” 183–93. 133 Rosemond Tuve has shown that the explanatory doggerel accompanying the images in several manuscripts is inspired by the illustrations, and not the other way around. JeanPhilippe Antoine has proposed that the New Iconography should be read as memory images: while his argument is not altogether convincing, it does point to “artificial memory” as another way the mind’s inner function can be supplemented by artifical means. “Ancora sulle virtù: La ‘nuova iconografia’ e le immagini di memoria,” Prospettiva 30 (1982): 13–29.

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clock of Jean Froissart’s Orloge amoureus, and, as I will argue, the rust metaphor for mental dysfunction) could have paved the way, in general fashion, for the New Iconography of the Cardinal Virtues. The specific objects associated with the Cardinal Virtues figure prominently in princely conduct literature of the late Middle Ages and of the Renaissance (Jean Meschinot’s Lunettes des princes, Antonio de Guevara’s Horloge des princes, Antoine du Saix’s Esperon de discipline, and of course the “mirror” genre itself) and in royal practice (the lit de justice134). The New Iconography’s linkage of the inner, spiritual, mental world to an array of devices including machines and mechanical objects is not so New after all. It is telling, however, that despite their cultural ubiquity, mechanical objects such as wheels, wine presses, and clocks serve exclusively as attributes for Fortune and the Cardinal Virtues in fifteenth-century French book painting – and not for other personified behavioral, moral, or proto-psychological concepts.135 The human behaviors conditioned by these personifications appear to be especially available, in turn, for depersonification. Because they so powerfully evoke a sense of movement and of articulation, the New Iconography’s very concrete objects, like the hinges that lend the Cardinal Virtues their name, become signifiers of mental and moral balance. These new uses of enginattributes to track and regulate the function of the human engin coalesce around the moment when the king’s cognitive “absences” lend new political weight to the literary conceptualization and representation of mental dysfunction. Tracing the uses of machine metaphors for mental function, and concentrating on the moments where those machines become immobilized, one can gain a new understanding of late medieval mentalities. Given the nature and severity of Charles VI’s illness, more than just an intellectual exercise lay in the balance.

134 On the medieval lit de justice, see Sarah Hanley Madden, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Ralph E. Giesey, “Models of Rulership in French Royal Ceremonial,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 41–64. 135 The New Iconography rarely encompasses the Theological Virtues as well, but similar representational strategies – i.e., objects balanced on the head, back, and hands – are apparently not applied to any other figures such as virtues, vices, or courtly personifications.

2

Une enroullure de sapience: Instituting Princely Virtues at the Court of Charles V Roy, duc et conte, donc pensez A ce miroir, et sagement Vous i mirez1 So, king, duke, and count, think

About this mirror, and wisely look at yourself in it

The advent of the New Iconography of the Cardinal Virtues, around the turn of the fifteenth century, heralds a technologically informed vision of human behavior, morality, and intellect. Even before this iconographic commingling of virtues and machines, though, it is possible to track changing conceptions of virtue and cognition – especially princely cognition – by examining representations of the virtues in conduct manuals. Showing a marked Aristotelian influence from the middle of the thirteenth century (as do many other learned genres), mirrors for princes accord an ever more prominent place to Prudence and the related virtue of Sapience (Wisdom). In the corpus of political and pedagogical texts translated into French at the behest of Charles V, the iconography of the virtues, discourses on virtue ethics, and the inorganic metaphor of the intellect as engin converge to precipitate a discussion of political virtue and personal vice, the latter of which is assimilated to oxidation. Mirrors for princes and other treatises on education propose to counteract these corrosive influences, but they cannot always compensate for princely imprudence. Prudence’s Mirrors for Princes Mirrors for princes, which are conduct manuals addressed to a noble readership, are the most widespread textual vehicle of late medieval political

1 Watriquet de Couvin, Le Mireoirs as princes, in Dits de Watriquet de Couvin, ed. Auguste Scheler (Brussels: Devaux, 1868), 228, vv. 934–36.

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theory.2 Beginning in earnest with John of Salisbury’s mid-twelfth-century Policraticus, such texts’ popularity blossomed in the thirteenth century with a number of mirrors inspired by the newly available Latin translations of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics:3 Vincent of Beauvais’s De eruditione filiorum nobilium and De morali principis institutione, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, which was translated into French quite early and often,4 and the pseudo-Aquinas’ De eruditione principum, among others. Vernacular mirrors are presented at the French court from the mid-thirteenth century onward.5 A greater number of the Latin mirrors were translated into French in the fourteenth century, followed by a flurry of mostly vernacular composition in the fifteenth. While there has been some discussion as to whether “mirrors for princes” constitute a literary genre in their own right, and whether the generic label of “mirror” is a misnomer,6 these medieval works of political science share a number of 2 For an inventory of mirrors, see Wilhelm Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1938). A more recent bibliography can be found in Cristian Bratu, “Mirror for Princes (Western),” in Handbook of Medieval Studies, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), III.1921–49. For background on the genre, see Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi. Idées et croyances politiques en France, XIIIe-XVe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 167–239. 3 On the Aristotelian influence on this wave of mirrors, see Roberto Lambertini, “The Prince in the Mirror of Philosophy. Uses of Aristotle in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum,” in Les philosophies morales et politiques au Moyen Âge / Moral and Political Philosophies in the Middle Ages, ed. B. Carlos Bazán, Eduardo Andújar, and Léonard G. Sbrocchi (New York: Legas, 1995), 1522–23. 4 Henri de Gauchy first translated the text into French at the request of Philip III; the earliest manuscript of the translation dates from 1282. Giles of Rome, Li Livres du gouvernement des rois, ed. Samuel Paul Molenaer (New York: AMS Press, 1966). All citations from the text are drawn from this edition, though I have added accents and punctuation for clarity, where necessary, to conform with modern editorial standards. On the early history of this text, see Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c. 1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9–19. For a more complete study of the seven different French-language versions of this book, their manuscript transmission, their reception, and the ways in which they construct a philosophy of princely education, see Noëlle-Laetitia Perret, Les traductions françaises du De regimine principum de Gilles de Rome: Parcours matériel, culturel et intellectuel d’un discours sur l’éducation (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 5 Sean L. Field dates the earliest vernacular conduct manual, the Miroir de l’âme translated from Latin and presented to Blanche of Castile, to the period 1240–52; the first known treatise of this genre to have been composed initially in French, Frère Laurent’s Somme le roi, is dated 1279. See Field, “From Speculum anime to Miroir de l’âme: The Origins of Vernacular Advice Literature at the Capetian Court,” Mediaeval Studies 69 (2007): 59–110. 6 The mirror terminology comes from early twentieth-century critics, according to Einar Már Jónsson, who casts doubt on the validity of “mirrors for princes” as a generic category in “Les ‘Miroirs aux princes’ sont-ils un genre littéraire?” Médiévales 51 (2006): 153–66. However, Ritamary Bradley has traced the medieval lineage of “speculum”



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characteristics that permit them to be grouped together.7 In addition to their audience, subject matter, and underlying logic of morality-driven ethics,8 mirrors for princes – especially those composed toward the end of the Middle Ages – share certain basic structural principles, as they are often ordered around the Cardinal Virtues.9 Whether they appear in a series of chapters, as a self-contained book, or even as allegorical figures appearing to a princely protagonist within a narrative framework, the virtues – and the Cardinal Virtues in particular – are integral to the vision of ideal leadership put forth in “mirrors” composed from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.10 The most influential of these manuals, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, justifies the prioritization of the Cardinal Virtues by declaring them “more principal than the others” (“plus principaus que les autres,” in Henri de Gauchy’s late thirteenth-century translation).11 Each of these treatises on education and governance is a mirror in which a prince sees who he ought to be and how he should conduct himself; in turn, as Christine de Pizan remarks in the Livre des trois vertus, the prince should then serve, for his people, as a mirror and example of virtuous comportment

terminology to Augustine, in whose writings scripture is presented as a mirror for man, and the rational mind is also, on occasion, figured as a mirror. Ritamary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title ‘Speculum’ in Medieval Literature,” Speculum 29 (1954): 100–15. Michel Senellart has also argued for the period appropriateness of the term, proposing that Seneca’s De clementia may have been the source of the expression “mirror for princes.” Senellart, Les arts de gouverner. Du regimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 49. 7 See the enlightening discussion in Senellart, Les arts de gouverner, 45–52. 8 As Misty Schieberle writes, mirrors for princes “establish a causal connection between morality and ethics, in which Christian moral virtues (‘moral theology’) undergird the ethical system that guides the individual choices rulers must make (‘ethical politics’).” Schieberle, Feminized Counsel, 9. 9 Conversely, treatises on the virtues often employ political leaders for a great number of their exempla. Such is the case with John of Wales’ Breviloquium de virtutibus (c.1260–70), which, as Rosemond Tuve has shown, is a source for several of the texts illustrated with the New Iconography of the Cardinal Virtues. See Chapter One. 10 The many mirrors for princes structured around the Cardinal Virtues (or containing a substantial section devoted to them) include Robert de Blois’s Enseignement des Princes (mid-thirteenth century), Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum (1277–80), Engelbert of Admont’s De regimine principum (c.1290), the anonymous Liber de informatione principum (c.1297–1314) later translated into French by Jean Golein (1379), Jacques Legrand’s Sophilogium (1398–99) and Livre de bonnes moeurs (1404/10), Christine de Pizan’s Livre du corps de policie and Livre des trois vertus (1405–7), Hugues de Lannoy’s L’instruction d’un jeune prince (c.1450), and Jean Thenaud’s Triumphe des Vertuz (1517–18). 11 Giles of Rome, Li livres du gouvernement des rois, 35. On this conception of the virtues see Sandra L. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa:” Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI (Toronto: PIMS, 1986), 52.

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(“comme mirouer et exemple de toutes bonnes meurs”).12 In the textual mirror he sees that exemplary statecraft is to be guided by the virtues, and especially by that first among equals, Prudence. It should come as no surprise that Prudence, a “moral virtue with special status,” as István P. Becjzy so aptly puts it,13 is often accorded pride of place in late medieval political writings, given that her chief attribute in early medieval art is a book,14 and in later medieval art, including the New Iconography, she carries a mirror. Literally and metaphorically, the mirror is that which permits one to mirer: to gaze, to reflect, to cogitate, or, in Middle French wordplay, to heal.15 In the New Iconography of Prudence and in late medieval mirrors for princes, the mirror serves as both symbol and metaphor: an object with its own physical reality, and a conceptual tool that renders Prudence’s cognitive processes visible to the human eye.16 The mirror offers, as Einar Már Jónsson points out, a metaphoric model that engenders more metaphors.17 Its function is assimilable to the poetic mode of allegory, for as Nancy Frelick shows, allegories are conceived as functioning “like the Pauline mirror because they convey veiled meanings indirectly or obliquely and conjure up mental images through metaphors, symbols, or enigmatic signs that serve both to hide and to reveal meaning.”18 Literary mirrors are sometimes accompanied by subsidiary attributes, or represented as consisting of multiple parts that allow for subdivision of the virtue of Prudence: the imagery of the three-fold mirror, for instance, is frequently used to represent the Ciceronian partes prudentiae or “sub-virtues” of memory, understanding, and foresight. The metaphor of the mirror can also catalyze further metaphors, such as that of cogitation as “reflection.” When it designates 12 Christine de Pizan, Le livre des trois vertus, ed. Charity Cannon Willard and Eric Hicks (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1989), 9, lines 65–66. The image of the prince as mirror for his subjects ultimately derives from Cicero: see Bratu, “Mirror for Princes (Western),” 1922. 13 Bejczy, “The Cardinal Virtues in Medieval Commentaries,” 204. 14 Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 31n1. 15 For a discussion of medicalizing play on the verb mirer see Julie Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 8–9. 16 In these titles, the substitution theory of metaphor does not hold – the textual title mirror names that which has no other name. Einar Már Jónsson, Le Miroir: Naissance d’un genre littéraire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), 12–13. On literary (and particularly, allegorical) mirrors, see Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), especially Chapter Seven, “Ancient and Medieval Europe: The Figurative Mirror,” 112–34. 17 Jónsson, Le Miroir, 15. 18 Nancy M. Frelick, “Introduction,” in The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: Specular Reflections, ed. Nancy M. Frelick (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 1–29. For further elaboration of this point see James I. Wimsatt, Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970).



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a literary text, the mirror dictates a meditative or identity-driven model of reading.19 If all goes well, Prudence’s mirror provides opportunity for insight, or even for self-discovery. Foresight and wisdom are focused via the mirror’s surface; human wisdom passes through, appears on, and becomes part of Prudence’s metallic attribute. Mirrors are of course not just textual genres, symbols or metaphors, but also material objects above all.20 The mirror’s materiality is, in a sense, embedded within the texts that bear its name.21 Medievalists are familiar with mirrors as luxury objects, with carved ivory backs depicting courtly scenes. If we turn these objects over in our minds, though, we will find that their reflective capacity is perhaps more theoretical than actual. Fabienne Pomel points out that medieval mirrors’ polished metal surfaces provided poor-quality images, especially because they would often have been stained with oxidized splotches.22 Nor were medieval glass mirrors, produced from the thirteenth century onward, more reliable. Such defects point to the inherent pitfalls of using a man-made technological object as a perceptual tool: mirrors’ threat of deformation, their disconcerting capacity to distort (reflected) reality, has fascinated commentators from Jean de Meun to Umberto Eco.23 It is this questionable reliability, along with the lure of idle self-absorption against which John of Salisbury warns in

19 As Margot Schmidt notes, literary mirrors evoke the ideals of self-knowledge and assimilation to a moral ideal; she proposes that most textual mirrors can be classified as either “instructive” or “exemplary.” Margot Schmidt, “Miroir,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. 10 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), columns 1290–1303. 20 As Fabienne Pomel cautions, “il faut en effet se souvenir de la matérialité de l’objet au Moyen Âge pour mieux comprendre son traitement métaphorique et symbolique” (it is in fact necessary to remember the materiality of the object in the Middle Ages to understand its metaphoric and symbolic treatment better). Fabienne Pomel, “Présentation: réflexions sur le miroir,” in Miroirs et jeux de miroirs dans la littérature médiévale, ed. Fabienne Pomel (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003), 17. On the materiality of premodern mirrors, see also Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 1994). 21 For an intriguing reflection on the relationship between mirror-titles and the mirror as material technology, see Anna Dysert, “Specular Art and Science: Mirror Metaphor in Medieval Alchemical Texts,” in Frelick, The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 73–87. 22 “Le miroir métallique, rarement sans taches à cause de l’oxydation, est généralement de qualité médiocre” (the metallic mirror, rarely without splotches caused by oxidation, is generally of mediocre quality), Pomel, “Présentation,” 17. Household mirrors would not typically have been made of iron, though A. Mark Smith details the use of iron mirrors in optical experiments by Alhazen. A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 195. 23 Umberto Eco, “Sugli specchi,” in Sugli specchi e altri saggi (Bologna: Bompiani, 1985/2001), 9–37. Funhouse mirrors could also provide for slightly perilous diversion: deforming mirrors were among the mischievous technological entertainments at Hesdin.

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Policraticus II.28, that contributed to the mirror’s resonance as visual shorthand for vanity or for acedia. If the same risk is inherent in the use of the metaphoric mirror as a conceptual tool – if a textual mirror, too, can distort reality, if the self-awareness it facilitates can slip into self-absorption, or if oxidized splotches can disrupt its speculative clarity –24 then the reader’s reflective process is fraught with peril. Mirrors for princes are, of necessity, “deforming” insofar as they impart their lesson by showing thing as they are not, but as they should be. Reading a mirror, a text designed to inculcate Prudence, requires careful discernment, or prudence.25 Little wonder that Jean Molinet, in his Roman de la Rose moralisé (1500), uses a discourse on the virtues to explicate Jean de Meun’s celebrated passage on mirrors. After a lengthy differentiation of deforming mirrors (“où l’on voit d’estranges faces aucunes bien formees et les aultres mal attournees,” where one sees some strange faces as well-formed and others as ill-formed, fol. XCVIIra) from more accurate or “neutral” mirrors, Molinet moralizes the latter as representative of the moral virtues; indeed, he singles out the Cardinal Virtues, of which he names Prudence first (fol. XCIXrb).26 Prudence offers a remarkably accurate mirror, but not all mirrors belong to Prudence.27 To interpret a textual mirror therefore requires an accurate moral mirror. This speculative model of readership gives rise to a vicious (or virtuous?) circle, in which texts require the very virtue that they are meant to foster. Prudence’s mirror attribute anchors her in the realm of the visual, signalling that the moral virtues must depend, in part, on the very body and senses whose temptations they should seek to overcome.28 For Giles of Rome, via Henri de Gauchy’s late thirteenth-century French translation, wisdom is an intellectual virtue (“vertu de l’entendement,” 38) that stems from the combination of a 24 Eustache Deschamps alludes to just such spots or impurities in a textual mirror, his Miroir de mariage: see Virginie Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique à l’époque de Charles VI. Imaginaires et discours (Paris: Champion, 2005), 281. 25 “La prudence du lecteur est donc requise: qu’il ne se laisse pas prendre à l’ombre des choses, qu’il ne se laisse pas fasciner par l’image trompeuse de lui-même, mais qu’au contraire il veille à comprendre la réalité, la vérité, à travers le reflet” (the prudence of the reader is therefore required: let him not allow himself to be taken in by the shadows of things, let him not allow himself to be fascinated by the deceptive image of himself, but on the contrary, let him take care to understand reality and truth by means of the reflection). Chantal Connochie-Bourgne, “Miroir ou Image… le choix d’un titre pour un texte didactique,” in Pomel, Miroirs et jeux de miroirs, 30. 26 Jean Molinet, Le romant de la Rose / Moralisié cler et net / Translaté de rime en prose / Par vostre humble molinet (Paris: Veuve de Michel Le Noir, 1521). Gallica. 27 Nor are all exemplary stories suitable for the “mirroring” process, as Schieberle points out (Feminized Counsel, 11). 28 On this point, see Irene Zavattero, “Moral and Intellectual Virtues in the Earliest Latin Commentaries on the Nichomachean Ethics,” in Bejczy, Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages, 42.



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good mind (“bon engyn,” 37) and virtuous intent. In this instance of what Romana Martorelli Vico has called Gilles’s “biological determinism,” the exercise of princely virtue is directly dependent on the prince’s mental and bodily state.29 Evil motives blind a man’s intellect (“la mauvestié de l’omme avegle son entendement,” 37–38) and virtue, by implication, restores his sight: Et tout aussi comme nous veons que cil qui tret ne puet soufisaument sa seëte adrecier a l’enseigne que il doit ferir, se il ne la voit, tout aussi li rois ne puet soufisaument adrecier son pueple a bone fin ne a la voie de verité, se il ne conoist la fin et le bien, là où il doit adrecier son pueple. (38) And just as we see that he who shoots [a bow] cannot properly aim his arrow at the target he should hit if he cannot see it, neither can the king sufficiently direct his people to good ends or the path of truth if he does not know the ends or the good to which he should direct his people.30

The danger of an unwise prince is similarly couched in the language of blindness in the Liber de informatione principum/Livre de l’informacion des princes.31 As Jean Golein renders the passage, “homme sanz sapience est avugle. Quel peril est quant l’avugle maine peuple innombrable chascun le puet en soy meïsmes penser” (a man without wisdom is blind. How dangerous it is when the blind man leads innumerable people, everyone can figure that out for himself, BnF MS fr. 1950, fol. 107v). Wisdom and Prudence are necessary to good kingship and they are not just ways of being in the world – they are ways of seeing the world. The iconographic shift in Prudence’s attributes, from book to mirror (and coffin, and shield, and sieve among others) reveals an evolving vision of readerly involvement in textual interpretation: in the later Middle Ages, even a straightforward pedagogical “mirror” is understood to require a sophisticated balancing act of readerly discernment, caution, and reflection. Moral, Intellectual, and Political Virtue Thus far this discussion of the late medieval literary and iconographic legacy of the Cardinal Virtues has focused primarily on Ciceronian and pseudo-Senecan traditions, but in discussing mirrors for princes and their treatment of Prudence, 29 Romana Martorelli Vico, “Fondamenti biologici di uno speculum principis. Il De regimine principum di Egidio Romano,” Micrologus 16 (2008): 257–70. 30 For a brief commentary on this passage, see Myriam Chopin-Pagotto, “La prudence dans les Miroirs du prince,” Chroniques italiennes 60:4 (1999): 93. 31 The most substantial overview to date of this text is Lydwine Scordia, “Le roi, l’or et le sang des pauvres dans Le livre de l’information des princes, miroir anonyme dédié à Louis X,” Revue Historique 306:3 (2004): 507–32.

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it is vitally important to consider Aristotelian schemas as well.32 Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, already influential in their thirteenth-century Latin translations, became even more so following Nicole Oresme’s vernacular French translations of the 1370s. The Aristotelian configuration of the virtues (which are categorized as moral or intellectual, for example) did not correspond directly to late medieval Christian constructs (by which the virtues were categorized as cardinal or theological for example). In later medieval mirrors for princes Aristotle’s ideas about virtues and their relationship to politics, as expressed in the Nicomachean Ethics, are adapted to conform to the quadripartite schema of the Cardinal Virtues; and, conversely, later characterizations of the Cardinal Virtues bear the imprint of Aristotelian influence. The “merger” of ancient and Christian models is especially apparent in the figure of Prudence. Situated at the intersection of both systems, where the intellectual, moral, political and cardinal virtues converged, Prudence was, for Aquinas and the thirteenthcentury Mirror authors who adopted his conciliatory model, the “virtus media.”33 As such it was increasingly represented as the first among equals.34 Nicole Oresme’s French translations of Aristotle, undertaken at king Charles V’s behest circa 1370–74, represent a key moment in the late medieval transformation of the notions of the Cardinal Virtues, and of Prudence in particular. While Charles’s librairie and his particular interest in vernacular translations of scientific and technical works are well known, it bears repeating here that Charles V was one of the first French monarchs to take a sustained interest in vernacular works of political theory: he commissioned Oresme’s translations of Ethics, Politics and Economics, as well as vernacular versions of mirrors for princes such as the Policraticus (translated by Denis Foulechat), the Liber de informatione principum (translated by Jean Golein), and Vincent of Beauvais’s De eruditione filiorum nobilium (translated by Jean Daudin), which is discussed in depth below.35 It has 32 The most complete treatment of this subject is Pierre Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1963). 33 Lambertini, “The Prince in the Mirror of Philosophy,” 1524. See also Lottin, Psychologie et morale, vol. 3; Roberto Lambertini, “Tra etica e politica: La prudentia del principe nel De regimine di Egidio Romano,” Documenti e Studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 3 (1992): 77–144. 34 As Jacques Krynen puts it, “le renouveau des études aristotéliciennes au XIIIe siècle a fait réaliser largement que la prudence était une vertu maîtresse, architectonique, spécialement dans la sphère politique” (the renewal of Aristotelian studies in the thirteenth century made it largely known that prudence was a master-virtue, an architectonic one, especially in the political sphere). L’Empire du roi, 218. 35 The authoritative account of Charles V’s commissioning and collecting of books remains Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V. For a concise summary of Charles V’s translation program, see Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3–12. On the French royal family’s particular interest in mirrors of princes, see Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, 16–17.

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been argued that Charles V’s translations were undertaken as a direct response to the imperatives of intellectual engagement set forth in mirrors for princes.36 Political texts constituted a significant element of the program of translation carried out “pour l’utilité publique du royaume et de toute la chrétienté” (for the public utility of the kingdom and of all Christendom).37 Many of the political texts whose translations Charles V commissioned were explicitly pedagogical in focus, and as Kate Langdon Forhan has noted, political authorities “and Aristotle in particular came to be esteemed not only for their philosophical wisdom or literary style, but in part because each of them had been tutor to a prince.”38 These translations laid the groundwork for a surge in the composition of mirrors for princes during the reign of Charles V’s son and successor, Charles VI.39 Of the translations commissioned by Charles V, one of the most celebrated – Oresme’s version of Aristotle’s Ethics– makes especially significant contributions to the development and expansion of late medieval discourses on the virtues. In the prologue to his Livre de Ethiques Oresme presents the Ethics and the Politics as “un livre divisé en deux” (one book divided in two), calling Ethics a “livre de bonnes meurs, livre de vertus ouquel il enseigne, selon raison naturel, bien faire et estre beneuré en ce monde” (book of good conduct, book of virtues where he teaches how to do well and to be successful in this world, according to natural reason) and Politics an “art et science de gouverner Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 228–31. Mandements de Charles V, cited in Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, 1–2. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet underlines the political importance of Charles V’s librairie in La couleur de la mélancolie: La fréquentation des livres au XIVe siècle, 1300– 1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), 16. On Charles V’s intellectual entourage, see also Jeannine Quillet, De Charles V à Christine de Pizan (Paris: Champion, 2004). 38 Kate Langdon Forhan, “Reflecting Heroes. Christine de Pizan and the Mirror Tradition,” in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmermann and Dina de Rentiis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 189–96. 39 “Il ne semble pas que les premiers Valois aient suscité la rédaction de miroirs du prince. Si l’on doit mettre à l’actif de Charles V d’avoir fait traduire le Policraticus (par Denis Foulechat) et le Liber de informatione principum (par Jean Golein), il faut attendre le règne de Charles VI pour voir la production de miroirs reprendre un rythme soutenu” (It does not appear that the first Valois inspired the composition of mirrors for princes. If one must credit Charles V with having Policraticus translated by Denis Foulechat and the Liber de informatione principum by Jean Golein, one has to wait for the reign of Charles VI to see the production of Mirrors regain a sustained pace). Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 191. Myriam Chopin-Pagotto imagines that the king’s madness must have prompted this surge of vernacular output: “sans doute la folie déclarée du roi à partir de 1392 en est à l’origine. Si le roi est en quelque sorte absent, on ne cesse pas pour autant de penser la royauté et d’analyser les vertus d’un bon gouvernement” (surely the king’s acknowledged madness starting in 1392 is at the origin [of this trend]. Even if the king is in some way absent, people do not stop thinking about royalty and analyzing the virtues of good government). Chopin-Pagotto, “La prudence dans les miroirs du prince,” 91. 36 37

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royaumes et citéz et toutes communitéz” (art and science of governing kingdoms, cities, and all sorts of communities).40 In Ethics, and especially in Book VI, Aristotle (as translated by Oresme) takes pains to distinguish moral from intellectual virtues, tying each category to a different faculty of the soul. In the specific context of later medieval faculty psychology, this definition of the virtues could be taken to suggest that the virtues are housed in discrete parts of the brain.41 The intellectual virtue Prudence is therefore separated both conceptually and perhaps physiologically from the moral virtues Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. How can Aristotle’s schema be reconciled with conventional models of the Cardinal Virtues when The Philosopher has situated Prudence away from her three erstwhile companions? The solution at which late medieval writers arrive places Prudence simultaneously in multiple categories and leads to her dominance in political and pedagogical writing. “Des vertus les unes sont intellectuelles, les autres sont morales” (Of the virtues, some are intellectual and the others are moral, I.21, 145). The reason for this distinction, as Oresme explains in his commentary, is rooted in the geography of the soul. Mais quant a nostre propos, il souffist parler d’aucunes [parties de l’âme] et dire ainsi que une partie de l’ame est sensitive et l’autre intellective; et chascune de cestes a .ii. parties, une qui cognoist et l’autre qui appete. De la sensitive la partie qui cognoist puet estre appelee sens, et celle qui appete est nommee apetit sensitif. Et de l’intellective la partie qui cognoist est appelee entendement et celle qui appete a nom volenté. Or di je donques, que les vertus intellectuelles sont du tout en la partie intellective. Mais les vertus morales sont principalment en l’appetit intellectif, c’est en volenté et toutevois, aucune en est en l’appetit sensitif. But as for our discussion, it suffices to speak of some [parts of the soul] and to say that one part of the soul is sensitive and the other intellective; and each of these has two parts, one that knows and the other that desires. In the sensitive faculty, the part that knows can be called sense, and the part that desires is called sensitive appetite. And in the intellective faculty, the part that knows is called understanding and the part that desires is called will. Now, I declare that the intellectual virtues are completely within the intellective part. But the moral virtues are principally in the intellective appetite, that is, the will; however, some are in the sensitive appetite.

40 Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de Ethiques d’Aristote, ed. Albert Douglas Menut (New York: Stechert, 1940), 97. On governance as an art, see Senellart, Les arts de gouverner. 41 For discussion of a literary deployment of such spatialized notions, see Chapter Five.



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Aristotle goes on to slice the virtues crosswise from what will become the popular Augustinian–Ciceronian–pseudo-Senecan schema. Phronesis (practical wisdom, which Oresme translates as Prudence) is termed an intellectual virtue – indeed, Prudence dominates Aristotle’s discussion of the intellectual virtues – while Liberality and Sobriety, recognizable to the medieval reader as components of the Cardinal Virtues Fortitude and Temperance, number among the moral virtues.42 For Aristotle, Prudence is not one of the moral virtues, but she is their constant companion: for instance, she is associated with Temperance in Ethiques VI.5, and in VI.16 the author asserts that “vertu moral ne peut estre senz prudence” (there can be no moral virtue without prudence, VI.16, 357) and that “quiconques a prudence, toutes autres vertus morales sont ensemble avecques elle” (whoever has prudence, all other moral virtues come along with it, VI.16, 360). The translation betrays Oresme’s ambivalence: he refers to Prudence and the other moral virtues (toutes autres vertus morales), as if Prudence were one of their number. Even when the distinction remains clearer, as in the description of Prudence’s collaborative relationship with the moral virtues in VI.15,43 Prudence straddles the divide between moral and intellectual virtues, between sense and intellect, opening the door to an overlap with the more popular schema of the Cardinal Virtues and Prudence’s place therein. The resulting contradiction between competing schemata of the virtues leads some medieval commentators, including Robert Grosseteste and Albert the Great, to posit that there exist both intellectual and moral varieties of Prudence, the moral avatar being the practical application of the intellectual.44 It is this versatility, the capacity to translate abstract principles into concrete action, that accounts for Prudence’s special political resonance in late medieval mirrors for princes. For while the Cardinal Virtues bear an explicitly political connotation in ancient world, they are largely depoliticized in the early and High Middle Ages – until the Aristotelian revival reintroduces the notion of

42 “Les intellectuelles sont sapience, entendement et prudence. Les morales sont liberalité et sobrieté et les autres dont l’en dira aprés” (The intellectual [virtues] are Wisdom, Understanding, and Prudence. The moral [virtues] are Liberality and Sobriety and the others of which it will be spoken later. Oresme, Ethiques I.21, 145). This configuration gives rise to the conflation, relatively common in medieval commentaries, of the Cardinal (cardinales) and moral virtues (consuetudinales). See Zavattero, “Moral and Intellectual Virtues,” 44. 43 Oresme writes that “bonne operacion a sa perfeccion selon prudence et selon vertu moral; car vertu moral fait avoir droite entencion a bonne fin, et prudence adresce les choses qui sont ordenees a celle fin” (Good behavior is perfected according to Prudence and according to moral virtue: for moral virtue causes one to have good intentions to a good end, and Prudence arranges things ordered to that end, Ethiques VI.15, 356). 44 Bejczy, The Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages, 164.

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virtus politica.45 The political virtue par excellence is Prudence, “qui est architectonique et principal et qui ordene de tout” (which is architectonic and principal, and which lends order to all, VI.9, 344). Oresme’s commentary accompanying this phrase betrays a fundamental slippage between Prudence and politics: in this supplemental explanation of the notion of an architectonic virtue, the translator identifies the principal structuring agent, previously called Prudence, as Politique. “Architecton en edificacion, c’est le principal et le maistre de l’uevre qui resgarde et commande sus tout. Et par semblable, la vertu qui prent garde et est maistresse sus toutes œuvres humaines, elle est architectonique; et c’est politique” (In building, architecton is the leader and master of the works who oversees and commands all. Likewise, the virtue that keeps watch and is mistress of all human works is architectonic; and it is political/Politics, 344–45). This implies that Prudence is political, but also, that Prudence is Politics. For, as Aristotle and Oresme continue, “est vérité que politique et prudence sont .i. meïsme habit et different aucunement” (Politics and Prudence truly are one and the same habit, and they scarcely differ from one another). Or, as Oresme explains in a commentary to a later chapter, “Politique […] est une espece de prudence” (Politics is a type of Prudence, 355). Prudence, this overarching virtue, subsumes even the topic and substance of the treatise itself. As we underline Prudence’s political significance, it is important not to neglect this virtue’s intellectual import, for in the mirrors for princes, these two dimensions of the virtue go hand in hand. Far-reaching though it is, Prudence still depends upon its fellow intellectual virtues, namely wisdom, knowledge, understanding, and art (Oresme’s sapience, science, entendement, and art, VI.3, 334). All of these offer means of arriving at the truth, and while Prudence is the undisputed leader (“appert que elle ordene de sapience,” VI.14, 355), Wisdom (Sapience) is a crucial quality without which neither Prudence nor any other virtue can exist (“sapience est une partie de toute vertu,” VI.15, 356). The two are often discussed in tandem: John of Salisbury, for instance, begins his first prologue to Policraticus with a citation from Proverbs 3, “Beatus homo qui invenit sapienciam et qui affluit prudencia,” which Denis Foulechat renders as “l’omme est benoit qui treuve sapience et qui afflue largement de prudence” (blessed is the man who finds wisdom and generously flows with prudence, 81). In a great number of mirrors for princes, wisdom comes to be characterized

45 István P. Bejczy, “The Concept of Political Virtue in the Thirteenth Century,” in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500, ed. István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 9. Bejczy discusses the “political virtues” at greater length in The Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages.



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as “the crowning virtue of rulers;”46 Jacques Krynen notes that the authors of mirrors for princes establish a strong link (and sometimes manifest confusion) between prudentia and sapientia, and remarks that prudens can even serve as a stand-in for sapiens.47 Such is the case in Henri de Gauchy’s translation of De regimine principum, wherein sagesce, numbered among the Cardinal Virtues, is distinguished as “plus principal que les autres” (more principal than the others, 37), just as the Cardinal Virtues are called “more principal” than the other virtues. Oresme’s commentary, on the other hand, maintains a distinction between the two, even as he draws a clear parallel between “sapience, c’est assavoir, cognoissance des choses divines et est speculative; et prudence est cognoissance des choses mondaines et civiles et est pratique” (Wisdom, that is, the speculative knowledge of divine things; whereas Prudence is the practical knowledge of worldly and civil things, I.11, 125). Later French writers do not maintain such careful distinctions between prudence and sapience, however. Jean Juvénal des Ursins lends Sapience the worldly application that Oresme would reserve for Prudence when he defines the former as “bien distribuer ce qui est affaire ou a delaissier” (properly determining what should be done and what should be abandoned)48; at the end of the fifteenth century Simon de Phares simply collapses the two into the synonymic reduplication “sapience et prudence.”49 For late medieval French writers, the connection is clear: a failure to exercise Prudence inhibits the development of the Wisdom that lies at the

46 Geoffrey Koziol, “Leadership: Why we have mirrors for princes but none for presidents,” in Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, ed. Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder (New York: Routledge, 2012), 183. 47 “Vertu cardinale selon la Bible, consistant dans la force de l’esprit et dans la connaissance de la vérité, la prudence (prudentia) ne cessera pas au Moyen Âge d’être étroitement liée à la sapientia, et souvent même confondue avec elle. […] Prudens, au Moyen âge, peut donc être employé pour sapiens” (A cardinal virtue according to the Bible, consisting in strength of spirit and knowledge of truth, in the Middle Ages prudence will not cease to be associated closely with sapientia, and often confused with it. Prudens, in the Middle Ages, can therefore be used to mean sapiens). Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 217. Myriam Chopin-Pagotto also remarks that “La prudence a toujours été présentée au Moyen Âge comme une vertu cardinale des rois bien que liée à la sagesse, jusqu’à être confondue avec elle” (Prudence was always presented in the Middle Ages as a cardinal virtue of kings, though one linked to wisdom, to such a degree as to be confused with it). “La prudence dans les Miroirs du prince,” 87. 48 Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Verba mea auribus percipe, domine, 332. 49 Simon de Phares, Le Recueil des plus celebres astrologues, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet (Paris: Champion, 1997), 121.

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root of all knowledge, virtue, and statecraft.50 A lack of these qualities is a failure of both moral and intellectual virtue: a failure that takes concrete form, in an influential pedagogical treatise, in the metaphor of a rusted engin. L’engien blechié par longue roullure s’endort, or, the Virtues of Pedagogy Good government depends on virtue: especially the cardinal or intellectual virtue Prudence and her double, Sapience. It is especially important to inculcate the intellectual virtues in the children of the highest nobility, for, in Giles of Rome’s terms, “les enfanz des rois et des princes doivent avoir plus de sens et plus de reson que les enfanz d’autrui” (the children of kings and princes ought to have more sense and reason than the children of other people, 189).51 How best to teach these principles of good government to future rulers? In late medieval France the pedagogical problem is confronted through readings drawn from a variety of genres, in all of which the virtues play a prominent role. In Book III of Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du vieil pèlerin (1389), queen Verité offers a reading list for the young king Charles VI.52 The ruler is instructed to read the Bible (in Latin rather than French), Oresme’s Ethiques and Politiques,53 Giles of Rome, Seneca, Titus Livius, Valerius Maximus, Boethius’s Consolation, “les enseignemens d’Aristote” (presumably the Secret des secrets), Augustine’s City of God, Policraticus, the life of Godfrey of Bouillon, and works of Roman, Jewish, and Christian history, along with “les dictiés vertueux de ton serviteur et officier Hustace Morel, et toutes autres escriptures vraies, honestes et catholiques, tendans a bonne ediffication” (the virtuous ditties of your servant 50 For Christine de Pizan sapience is “chief de toutes les sciences” (the head of all knowledge). Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, II.10. Additionally, Prudence allegorizes entendement humain in Christine’s Livre de la prod’hommie de l’homme, which we will discuss in Chapter Four. See Jean-Louis Picherit, “Le livre de la prod’hommie de l’homme et le livre de prudence de Christine de Pisan,” Moyen Âge 91 (1985): 394–96. 51 This idea is famously taken up in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, wherein Nature states that it is worse for a king’s son than for a carter’s, a swineherd’s, or a cobbler’s son to be foolish. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose vol. III, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1970), 66, vv. 18856–60. 52 Philippe de Mézières, Songe du viel pelerin, 948–52. 53 These are called “les .ii. livres sollempnelz que compossa le tressage phillozofe et theologien maistres Nicole Oresme, esvesque de Lisieux, a la requeste de ton bon pere, qui fu sage et preudomme, c’est assavoir les livres d’etiques et de pollitiques, qui singulierement appartienent a ta royale magesté pour ton gouvernement et le gouvernement de ton peuple” (the two solemn books that the very wise philosopher and theologian, master Nicole Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, composed at the request of your good father, who was a wise and virtuous man, to wit, the books of Ethics and Politics, which belong singularly to your royal majesty for your government and the government of your people). Philippe de Mézières, Songe du viel pèlerin, 949–50.



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and officer Eustache Morel [Deschamps], and all other true, honest, and catholic writings inclined to good edification, 951). Verité warns the king not to read “livres perilleux a l’ame” (books perilous to the soul, 949) such as the chivalric “bourdes” (deceptive fictions, 948) of Lancelot or the Voeux du Paon, nor should he read heretical works about magic, astrology, prophecies, the interpretation of dreams, “et briefment toutes escriptures qui pevent nuire a l’ame et au bon gouvernement de ta royale magesté” (and, in short, all writings that can do harm to your royal majesty’s soul and good government, 952). Verité insists on the pedagogical value of the list by means of a now-familiar image: Et tout ainsi que frotant le coutiau a la queus il s’aguise et devient plus trenchant, tout ainsi moralisant en lisant la sainte chevalerie sustouchee, ton premier varlet de ta chambre, Ardant Desir, soit la queus et ton cuer soit le cutel; si devendra aguisé et bien trenchant... (951) And just as, rubbing a knife on a whetstone, it is sharpened and becomes more keen, thus, in moralizing and reading about the aforementioned holy knighthood [of Godfrey of Bouillon], may your first valet Ardent Desire54 be the whetstone and may your heart be the knife; thus will it become sharpened and very keen...

In this instance, the pedagogical aim is to sharpen the heart, not to file away rust from an engin; still, the resemblance of Mézières’s figure to Deguileville’s metaphor of the lime is clear. Christine de Pizan takes up similar language in the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (1404). She emphasizes the importance of Prudence, “mere et conduisserrese des aultres vertus” (mother and guide of the other virtues, I.22, vol. 1, 59),55 and deplores the way this principal virtue is undermined by the folly of youth, comme passionné d’appetit, sanz ordre, par inclinacion naturele, non cognoiscent encore la lime et correction de raison, se par grant grace de Dieu n’est ottroyé aux aucuns par dessus le commun cours naturel, adonc les volontez agües et sensueles sont comme juges et fais et apetiz alumez et avivez d’yceulz 54 Ardant Desir is a narratorial persona; see Chapter Four for further discussion of the Songe du vieil pèlerin. 55 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs. On the importance of Prudence in this text, see Michael Richarz, “Prudence and Wisdom in Christine de Pizan’s Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V,” 99–116 in Healing the Body Politic: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Karen Green and Constant J. Mews (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).

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jeunes, qui les rent aveugles et non cognoissans la forme de droit usage, et tout ainsi comme le malade degousté, qui souvent jusge l’amer estre doulz ou aigre et plus appete contraire viande que la propre, par comparoison avient au jeune le plus des fois en ses jugemens sensitifs, et de ce la certaineté nous aprent l’experience de leurs oeuvres et fais. (I.9, vol. 1, 24) as passionate in appetite, disordered, by natural inclination, not yet knowing the file and correction of reason, if it is not by the grace of God offered to the few who are far above the common natural course. Therefore sharp and sensual desires are as if judged and made, and appetites inflamed and heightened in these young people, which makes them blind and ignorant of the right ways, and just like a sick man who has lost his sense of taste, who often judges the bitter to be sweet or acidic, and who prefers contrary meat to more appropriate foods, something comparable most often happens to a young person’s sensible judgment, and experience of their works and deeds teaches us to be certain of this.

Christine’s reference to the “lime et correction de raison” harks back to Deguileville’s allegory, while her comparison to a sick man corporealizes youthful lapses in judgment before localizing them within the cognitive faculties (“jugemens sensitifs”). She claims that Charles V, cognizant of these youthful tendencies, sought to counteract them in his own children and would have succeeded had his premature death not cut those efforts short.56 Thus we understand Charles V’s program of vernacular translations, famously described in the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V as a legacy of “enseignemens et sciences introduisables à toutes vertus” (lessons and knowledge leading to all of the virtues, III.12, vol. 2, 43), as more than just a pedagogical instrument. More precisely, it is a lime targeting young princes’ inclination to errors in judgment. Jean Gerson provides another royal reading list in his letter Claro eruditori, addressed to the tutor of the dauphin Louis of Guyenne and probably written between 1408 and 1410.57 The corpus Gerson suggests for the noble pupil’s 56 “Mais encore plus desirant pourveoir à l’entendement de l’enfant pour le temps à venir de nourriture de sapience, se faire se peust, à laquelle, à l’aide de Dieu, n’eust mie failli, se la vie du pere longue fust et accident de diverse Fortune ne l’eust empesché…” (but still more desirous of providing the food of wisdom to the understanding of his child for the future, if he could; in which aim, with God’s aid, he would not have failed, had the father’s life been long and had the accident of changeable Fortune not impeded it, I.21, vol. 1, 58). 57 Jean Gerson, “Claro eruditori,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Palemon Glorieux, 10 vols (Paris: Desclée, 1960–73), op. 42, II.203–15. On this letter and the somewhat later Erunt omnes docibiles (1417), see Yelena Mazour-Matusevich and István P. Bejczy, “Jean Gerson on Virtues and Princely Education,” in Bejczy and Nederman, Princely Virtues in the Middle



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“lectio studiosa” is similar to that proposed by Philippe de Mézières some thirty years earlier. Recommended texts include vernacular and Latin treatises on the virtues, such as Peraldus’s Summa de virtutibus, the Somme le roi, and the pseudo-Senecan De quatuor virtutibus; Oresme’s translations of the Aristotelian Ethics, Politics, and Economics; Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum and other mirrors for princes; and several of Gerson’s own works including the 1405 sermon “Vivat rex” (212–13). As Yelena Mazour-Matusevich and István P. Bejczy have argued, this is a booklist that reveals the centrality of the Cardinal Virtues to Gerson’s pedagogical ideal.58 Such a list presupposes a proficient, if not precocious, student reader. However, Gerson tempers such expectations at the beginning of his letter, insisting on what he calls the “stultitia” of all boys – even the worthiest ones. Si laudabilis et meritoria est pueri cujuslibet eruditio ad religionem et virtutes, cum stultitia colligata sit in corde ejus sensusque et cogitatio prona sint in malum… (203) Even if the boy’s knowledge of religion and virtue is praiseworthy and meritorious, it might be bound up in his heart with foolishness and sensuality, and his thought might be prone to evil...

A certain measure of stultitia is to be expected in any youthful pupil, for, as Aristotle remarks in Ethics VI.10, prudence comes with experience and thus is normally not a characteristic of the young. Mais il ne sont pas joenes faiz prudens. Et la cause est car prudence est de choses singulieres, lesquelles sont cogneües par experience. Et celui qui est joene n’est pas encore expert, pour ce que la multitude du temps fait experience. (VI.10, 347) But young men aren’t prudent. And the reason is that prudence comes from extraordinary things known through experience, and he who is young is not yet an expert, since experience requires a great deal of time.

Or, as Oresme paraphrases in his gloss, “L’en ne est pas fait prudent fors par pluseurs experiences. Et moult de choses sont de quoy l’en ne peut avoir pluseurs experiences en peu de temps” (One does not become prudent except through extensive experience, and there are many things of which one cannot have extensive experience in a short time, VI.10, 347). Giles of Rome, too, echoes Ages, 219–36. See also Antoine Thomas, Jean de Gerson et l’éducation des dauphins de France (Paris: Droz, 1930). 58 Mazour-Matusevich and Bejczy, “Jean Gerson on Virtues and Princely Education,” 228.

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the same passage of the Ethics in stating (as rendered in French by Henri de Gauchy) that “les jennes genz ont poi de sens et de reson et d’entendement, quer il sunt esprovez en poi de choses” (young people have little sense or reason or understanding, for they are experienced in few things, 126–27). Still, a pedagogue must attempt to overcome a boy’s natural stultitia – a word that connotes stupidity, foolishness, an overall lack of wisdom and reason – for otherwise, what might happen if the prince reached adulthood with his stultitia unremedied? The dangers posed by a foolish and ignorant king are described at some length, through a series of comparisons, in the Livre de l’informacion des princes translated by Jean Golein and presented to Charles V in 1379.59 As we have already seen, in the first chapter of part III (the third quarter of the book, dedicated entirely to wisdom) this anonymous treatise likens the “homme sanz sapience” to a blind man; it then paraphrases John of Salisbury’s famous axiom that an unlettered king is like a crowned ass. The chapter ends with two more comparisons: “Le roy insipient est aussi comme le forsené tenant le glaive en la main et aussi comme le marinier qui ne scet riens de gouverner ne de nagier qui tient le gouvernail de la nef ou temps de la forte tempete” (The unwise king is like the madman holding a blade in his hand, and also like a sailor who knows nothing of steering or of swimming who controls a ship’s rudder during a strong storm, 108r). An unwise and educated king poses a real, physical threat to his populace – though the comparison also indicates that the insipient and the forsené are two distinct categories. In order to stave off the threat of harm, it is essential that the king be educable and not hard-headed (“de dure teste,” 29v). In order to illustrate the ideal plasticity of a princely mind, the author turns to metallic imagery: Se doivent les roys et les princes garder de pertinacité obstinee qui les rende indoctibles et moins abiles à rayson. Car autressi comme de tant que elle est plus pure de tant est elle plus traittable et miex doctible. Et le metal de tant qu’il est moins mellé à autre liqueur de tant est il plus noble et miex ductible. Ainsi est il du noble courage qu’il est plus legier à mener par douceur que atraire par rigueur. (30r) Therefore kings and princes should keep themselves from the obstinate obduracy that would render them unteachable and less apt to reason. For as much as it [the head] is more pure, so much is it more malleable and better 59 For a biography of Golein and a description of the manuscripts of the Livre de l’informacion des princes, including BnF MS fr. 1950, the presentation copy from which I cite the text, see the Équipe Golein’s “Remarques sur la traduction de Jean Golein du De informacione principum,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 95 (1994): 19–30.



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teachable [doctible]. And metal, inasmuch as it is less alloyed with another substance, is more noble and more ductile [ductible]. Thus it is with a noble disposition, which is easier to lead with gentleness than to attract with rigor.

The play on doctible and ductible reinforces the comparison of mind to metal, offering a vision of a perfectly functioning mental mechanism. However, the attribution of metallic properties to a princely mind also recalls Giles of Rome’s less flattering comparison of an unintelligent king to a worthless token: Et bien apiert que li hons qui a digneté de roi sanz sens, il est aussi comme denier de plum ou d’arain mis el conte des marcheanz. Car nous veons que quant li marcheant content, en lieu de mil livres ou de grant pris il metent .I. denier de plum ou d’arain qui est signe de plus grant valor que il ne vaut. Tout aussi li hons qui est en digneté de roi, et a defaulte de sens et d’entendement, comme il soit de petite valor il a signe de plus grant valor que il ne vaut. (38–39) And it is perfectly apparent that the man who holds the title of king but lacks sense is like the lead or steel counting tokens that merchants use. For we see that when merchants count, instead of a thousand livres or some other great sum they put down one lead or steel denier which is a sign of a greater value than its actual worth. Likewise the man who holds the title of king, and lacks in sense and intellect, though he be of little worth he displays a sign of greater value than he is worth.

Giles implies that sens and entendement are innate qualities – one has them or one does not – and while Giles compares the king lacking sense to an ignoble lead or steel token, the anonymous author of the Livre de l’informacion des princes conversely compares a wise and teachable prince to the noblest and most ductile metal, that is, gold.60 However, while the Livre de l’informacion des princes lays out the different means by which a prince may be taught – by divine inspiration, by a tutor, even through the imitation of virtuous animal behavior – the treatise does not address the practical pedagogical question of how to educate a prince who shows himself to be neither doctible nor ductible. The question of princely stultitia is addressed at unusual length in Vincent of Beauvais’s De eruditione filiorum nobilium (1249–50), a treatise on princely 60 The ductility and nobility of gold are a commonplace in encyclopedic and naturalscientific works, and in the literary texts that draw upon these traditions. See the essays collected in L’or au Moyen Âge: Monnaie, métal, objets, symbole, Senefiance 12 (Aix-enProvence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 1983). Gold’s nobility is tied, since antiquity, to its insusceptibility to rust. Hierocles of Alexandria makes this point in In aureum Pythagoreorum (Halleux, Le problème des métaux, 146); so does Evrart de Conty in the Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés (683).

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education, which Jean Daudin translated for Charles V as De la erudition ou enseignement des enfans nobles. De eruditione filiorum nobilium belongs to a subset of mirrors for princes: explicitly pedagogical texts on education of sons of the nobility. Written between 1249 and 1250 for Marguerite of Provence (the consort of Louis IX) and revised in the late 1250s, it was designed as the last book of a projected four-part treatise on princely education, of which the only other completed portion, De morali principis institutione, was conceived as Book I.61 Although Arpad Steiner, the editor of the text in the twentieth century, claims that De eruditione filiorum nobilium had a very limited audience among later authors,62 Tomas Zahora characterizes it as a model for later writers63 and Dora M. Bell opines that it influenced a broad range of later moralists from Peraldus and Giles of Rome to Philippe de Mézières and Christine de Pizan.64 I will argue that its influence extends further, thanks especially to Jean Daudin’s French translation, executed for Charles V sometime before 1373 – a text available to, if not destined for, the future Charles VI.65 Through Daudin’s version, De eruditione filiorum nobilium exercised a considerable influence on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French vernacular discussions of mental aptitude.66 61 Vincent of Beauvais, De morali principis institutione, ed. Robert J. Schneider (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), xxiii. On the life of Vincent of Beauvais and the place of De eruditione filiorum nobilium within his œuvre, see Paulmier-Foucart and Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais et le Grand miroir du monde. See also Astrik L. Gabriel, The Educational Ideas of Vincent of Beauvais (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), 20–30. 62 According to Steiner “few writers have had direct knowledge of this most extensive precursor of the Humanist tracts on education.” Vincent of Beauvais, De eruditione filiorum nobilium, ed. Arpad Steiner (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1938), xi. 63 Tomas Zahora, “Since Feeling is First: Teaching Royal Ethics through Managing the Emotions in the Late Middle Ages,” Parergon 31 (2014): 50. 64 Dora M. Bell, L’idéal éthique de la royauté en France au Moyen Âge d’après quelques moralistes de ce temps (Geneva: Droz, 1962), 41. De eruditione filiorum nobilium has also been proposed as a source for Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale: see Kenneth A. Bleeth, “The Physician’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues for the Canterbury Tales II, ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 535–63. 65 Gilles Malet’s 1373 catalogue lists a copy of this translation as bearing the dauphin’s arms: “De erudicione puerorum nobilium, en françois, translaté par maistre Jehan Daudin, à deux fermouers des armes monseigneur le Dalphin, couvert de soye à queue,” cited in Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, 93. Delisle goes on to identify the sole surviving manuscript, BnF MS fr. 9683, as a later copy of Daudin’s work, since, as he says, it is highly unlikely that two writers would have undertaken the translation of the same text at the same time. Steiner cites references to another translation of De eruditione filiorum nobilium by Jean Golein (xxx), probably based on an erroneous reading confusing De la erudition with the Informacion des princes. On Charles VI’s likely exposure to Daudin’s translation, see Krynen, Idéal du prince, 56. 66 I will cite the Latin text from Steiner’s edition, and the French translation from the mid-fifteenth-century manuscript BnF MS fr. 9683. The manuscript has been transcribed,



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Like Aristotle’s Ethics and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, Vincent of Beauvais’s De eruditione filiorum nobilium foregrounds stultitia as a characteristically puerile weakness that manifests itself specifically in a lack of prudence, and that must therefore be extirpated from any prince who would become fit to rule. Certain vices, Vincent writes in the chapter De puerilibus euacuandis in uirili etate, are typical of the very young: “Denique puerorum uicia quedam sunt propria et ob hoc euacuanda siue uitanda. Primum est stulticia…” (Indeed, certain vices are characteristic of boys and must be purged or avoided; the first is stupidity, 158). Daudin’s translation is even more emphatic in its insistence on the purgation of this vice and the others that “il convient laissier quant on vient en aage d’omme” (it is expedient to leave behind when one comes of age, 152v): “auchuns vices des enfans sont comme propres et pour che les convient evacuer ou expurguer ou debouter ou eschever; le premier est folie” (some children’s vices are characteristic and for this reason it is expedient to eliminate or purge or reject or avoid them; the first is folly, 154r). The repetition of evacuer, expurguer, debouter and eschever highlights the urgency with which one must eliminate this vice; the rendering of stulticia as folie creates ambiguity around the precise nature of the prince’s mental debility, whether it be a matter of intellect or of mental health.67 Either way, “penser puerillement ou enfantinement” (thinking boyishly or childishly), defined more precisely as thinking “seulment des choses presentes et non pourveoir des choses avenir” (only about things in the present and not anticipating future events, 153v) impedes good governance because the self-indulgently childish thinker lacks the foresight that is an integral component of Prudence.68 For this reason, “Mieulx vault l’enfant povre et sage que le roy qui est enfant et fol, qui ne scet pourveir au temps avenir” (Better a poor but wise child than a king who is childish and foolish/mad, lacking foresight, 153v).

though I have not consulted the transcription: Frédérique Hamm, “La traduction du ‘De eruditione filiorum nobilium’ de Vincent de Beauvais par Jean Daudin” (diplôme d’archiviste paléographe, École nationale des chartes, 1993). On Daudin, best remembered as the first French translator of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, see Léopold Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, I.92–94; Frédérique Hamm, “Jean Daudin, chanoine, traducteur et moraliste,” Romania 116 (1998): 215–38. 67 On the semantics of folly, see Irina Metzler, Fools and Idiots? Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 42. 68 Here Daudin faithfully renders Vincent’s “pueriliter cogitare, sc. de solis presentibus et non de futuris prouidere” (157).

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Beyond such references to the childish intellect, De eruditione/De la erudition is notable for its explicit and unusual discussion of learning difficulties. Foregrounded through its position very near the beginning of the treatise, the fourth chapter, “De l’empeschement d’aprendre” beginning on fol. 12v (“De impedimentis addiscenti,” 17), posits that the seven deadly sins impede learning, as do imprudence (“imprudence de ordre et de maniere,” 12v, 16r), misfortune, and poor eyesight, among other difficulties. Vincent states that failures to learn can be imputed sometimes to the shortcomings of the teacher or of the curriculum, and sometimes to the slowness of the student:69 “Impedimenta quedam sunt ex parte uite, quedam ex parte studii uel doctrine” (The impediments are sometimes on the part of the grapes [i.e., that which is cultivated, namely the student], sometimes on the part of the school or of the teacher, 17).70 In contrast to prevailing modern attitudes, the student’s learning difficulties are at no point presented as either inborn or irremediable.71 As a pendant to Chapter Four, which identifies three types of weakness disruptive to learning (moral, physical, and pedagogical), Chapter Five exposes three other elements essential to it: nature, exercise, and discipline.72 This is a schema adopted from Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, and indeed, Vincent’s debt to the Didascalicon – throughout the treatise and in this fifth 69 I use the word “slowness” deliberately, despite C. F. Goodey’s claim that “slowness” of cognition is not a negative attribute in the Middle Ages, and that medieval texts therefore do not apply such language to those whom we might today label as “intellectually disabled,” nor are the intelligent characterized as “quick.” A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Goodey’s book is a first step toward a needed supplement to R. C. Scheerenberger’s quick overview of medieval attitudes in A History of Mental Retardation (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1983), 25–36. I will grant that (as Goodey argues) in texts for general readership as well as in natural philosophy, emphasis is often placed on intellectual subtlety rather than speed as an ideal or “gifted” state. However, I must dispute Goodey’s claim that “slowness” does not equate to “intellectual incapacity” prior to the Renaissance, as many texts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries demonstrate just the opposite. Daudin himself writes of “tardiveté de engien ou enfermeté d’entendement” (slowness of intellect or infirmity of understanding, 17r, my emphasis). The reduplication of “tardiveté” and “enfermeté” clearly indicates that for Daudin, at the very least, “slowness” designates an impaired state. 70 Daudin misunderstands uite, grapes, and instead translates as follows: “Auchuns empeschemens sont de la partie de la vie et aucuns de la partie de l’estude ou de la doctrine” (Some impediments are on the part of life and some on the part of the study or doctrine, 12v, emphasis added). 71 This comports with Eliza Buhrer’s claim that “medieval physicians, theologians, and philosophers did not identify intellectual impairment as a permanent, congenital disorder.” “But what is to be said of a fool? Intellectual Disability in Medieval Thought and Culture,” in Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 316. 72 De trois choses neccessaires pour aprendre, 17v; De tribus necessariis addiscenti, 21.



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chapter more specifically – has been well noted.73 However, it is important to point out that within the framework of ingenium and memoria borrowed from the Didascalicon Book III (with ingenium designating the acquisition of knowledge, and memoria its retention), Vincent adds and expounds at length upon the rust metaphor: an image that does not play any significant role in the Didascalicon. Here we can observe that, while De eruditione filiorum nobilium consists largely of a compilation of citations, Vincent’s particular choices and combinations of citations can be quite innovative, and at times he lingers on the explication of a particular concept in a manner that deviates from his overall pattern. In Chapter Five, Vincent takes a significant departure from Didascalicon. He begins by pairing citations pertaining to the “softness” and to the “rustiness” of the idle mind. This is a pairing that will crop up in later medieval texts as well: for instance, the author of Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté, writing around the turn of the fourteenth century, introduces the rust metaphor in a chapter (II.IV.XIV) whose purpose is to “détiermine de persévérance et de molece aussi en comparant à continence et incontinence” (define perseverance and softness, with a comparison to continence and incontinence).74 Perrece si fait molt de maus; car ele esveille les enchitements des visces, sen propre proufit lait; pour le froit se tient li perreceus d’ahanner, si con li iawe par estre coie pourist, et li fers enrungist; ensi les gens par pereche et wiseuses périssent. 73 See, for instance, Steiner’s introduction to his edition. For an overview of the intellectual milieu, and especially exchanges between Victorines and Dominicans, see Dominique Poirel, “Dominicains et Victorins à Paris dans la première moitié du XIIIe siècle,” in Lector et compilator: Vincent de Beauvais frère prêcheur, un intellectuel et son milieu au XIIIe siècle, ed. Serge Lusignan and Monique Paulmier-Foucart (Grâne: Éditions Créaphis, 1997), 169–85. 74 Jehan le Bel, Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté, ed. Jules Petit, 2 vols (Brussels: Devaux, 1867), vol. 2, 50. Petit’s attribution of the text to Jehan le Bel was soon demonstrated to be erroneous; the identity of the author of this vast philosophical and moral treatise is still contested. Charles Potvin argued for an attribution to Jehan d’Arkel, friend of Jehan le Bel and bishop of Liège from 1364 to 1378, in “Une énigme littéraire: qui est l’auteur de Li Ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté?” Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique, n.s. 47 (1879): 455–74. Far more recently, Janet F. van der Meulen has attributed the treatise to Guy d’Avesnes, bishop of Utrecht, in “Avesnes en Dampierre of ‘De kunst der liefde’. Over boeken, bisschoppen en Henegouwse ambities” in 1299: één graaf, drie graafschappen. De vereniging van Holland, Zeeland en Henegouwen, ed. D. de Boer, E. Cordfunke and H. Sarfatij (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), 47–72. See also Guy Guldentops and Carlos Steel, “Vernacular Philosophy for the Nobility: Li Ars d’Amour, de Vertu et de Boneurté, an Old French Adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’ Ethics from ca.1300,” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 45 (2003): 67–85, and Jessica Rosenfeld, “Arts of Happiness and Love: Translating Aristotle in the Later Middle Ages,” in Exploring Happiness, ed. Joanna Tice, Bryan Turner, and Yuri Contreras-Vejar (New York: Anthem, forthcoming).

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Laziness causes many evils, for it awakens the incitements of the vices, and abandons one’s own benefit: the lazy one refrains from making any effort because of the cold. Just as still water stagnates and iron rusts, so too do people perish through laziness and idleness.

Interestingly, the two metaphors for indolence seem to move in opposite directions, one suggesting excessive pliability, and the other, brittle destructibility. Both also move, in some sense, away from the “gold standard,” the ideal of a solid, well-polished, untarnishable head that predominates in later medieval mirrors for princes. In the De eruditione, the language of softness is presented as being conventional enough to require only passing comment, but the rust metaphor demands further clarification. Vincent therefore inserts a series of textual examples likening the unexercised mind to a rusty implement: these are derived from Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Jerome’s Commentaria in Ecclesiasten, and Ovid’s Tristia ex Ponto. Most of these citations are followed by much fuller explications than the citations on softness have merited, which suggests the relative unfamiliarity, at the time of the treatise’s composition in the mid-thirteenth century, of the rust metaphor as applied to the human intellect. Daudin’s translation further spreads this imagery and, with subtle variations on Vincent’s language, foregrounds the metaphor of the rusty engin.75 Vincent’s compilation of rust metaphors, as communicated in the Latin text and as interpreted by Jean Daudin, conveys a sense of both emotional and intellectual dullness, addressing the problem of scholastic inaptitude through the conjunction of metallic and moralizing language. The rust metaphor first appears as Vincent expounds upon exercise, the second component necessary to learning. Excercitacio autem est virtus animi, qua quis molliciem sive rubiginem ocii fastidiens aut detestans assidue bonis honestisque studiis vel actibus se occupat, ut nullum tempus vacuum pretereat. (21, lines 16–19) Exercise on the other hand is a virtue of the mind; so that no one who occupies himself in good honest studies or even actions, disdaining or scorning the softness or rust of leisure, might waste any time in idleness. 75 According to Maxwell John Walkley, “we gain a glimpse of his conception of translation from the fact that in the De eruditione version, Daudin consistently couples in binary expressions the words ‘translateur et expositeur’ and ‘translateur et interpreteur,’ as if he looks on these words as synonyms. In fact we shall see that Daudin conceives of his task as translator in terms of expounding and interpreting for his reader the text of Vincent of Beauvais.” Maxwell John Walkley, “Procedures of fourteenth-century French translation as evidenced by Jean Daudin’s translation of the De eruditione filiorum nobilium,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh Congress of the AULLA, ed. Ronald Dunlop (Sydney: AULLA, 1967), 129.



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Or, as Daudin translates: Excercitation est vertu de corage par laquelle la personne detestant ou reprouchant et reprouvant le lascheté roullure de huiseuse se occupe accoustumeement en estudes proufitables et en fais honorables afin que nul tamps vain ne passe… (18r) Exercise is a virtue of the heart by which one who detests or reproaches and reproves feebleness, the rust of idleness, habitually occupies himself with productive studies and honorable deeds so as not to waste any time.

Daudin’s version makes a slight but crucial tweak to the context in which the rust metaphor first appears. Vincent offers rust as an alternative, parallel image to the more familiar softness of idleness (molliciem sive rubiginem ocii); Daudin, suppressing the coordinating conjunction, presents roullure de huiseuse as an appositive explication of lascheté – thus allowing the language of rust to supplant the language of softness and become this phrase’s principal image. Jean Daudin’s stoic tendencies, as expressed in his prologues to his translations of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae and Vincent of Beauvais’s Epistola consolatoria, may well have colored this rhetorical choice.76 What is softness, then, in Daudin’s rendering of the text? It is the rust of idleness, the metaphor of a metaphor. Daudin’s rendering is apt, for Vincent does not go on to treat the two images as equals. Following a few aphorisms on strength and diligence,77 which ostensibly address the subject of softness but are provided without substantial comment, Vincent provides lengthy justification for his characterization of idleness as a sort of rust. He begins by explicitly identifying rust as a blight on the ingenium, a faculty that must be exercised and honed inuestigando (22, line 32). The ingenium’s susceptibility to rust and its responsiveness to sharpening through inquiry are illustrated through a series of authoritative texts, beginning with Ecclesiastes X.10: “si retusum fuerit ferrum et hoc non, ut prius, sed exhebetatum fuerit, multo labore exacuetur, et post industriam sequitur sapiencia” (If the iron is blunt, and one does not whet the edge, he must put forth more strength; but wisdom helps one to succeed).78 The authoritative Biblical text does not refer to rust, but it establishes an analogy between the mind and iron, 76 The sole manuscript of De la erudition is unfortunately lacking a translator’s prologue. On Daudin’s stoicism, see Hamm, “Jean Daudin,” 218, 229–30. 77 These are drawn from Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) XIV.14, Cicero Tusculanae disputationes I,18,41, and Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria nova, vv. 1707–08. 78 All English translations of Biblical verses are cited from the Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

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a metal that can oxidize. It is Vincent who makes the logical leap, pointing out that if the intellect is presented as analogous to iron – and not just any element of the intellect, but also ingenium specifically – then this engine must therefore be subject to rust. Ubi ferrum vocatur humanum ingenium sive mens propter perspicacitatis accumen. Et sicut ociositas ferrum obtundit ac denigrat, rubiginat et consumit, Econtra vero usus illud exacuit, dealbat, elimat et a corrupcione rubiginis conservat, Sic humanam mentem ocium vel desidia obtundit ac cetera predicta in ea facit. (22, lines 35–40) Where human intellectual aptitude [ingenium] or reason through sharpness of perspicacity is called iron. And just as disuse of iron blunts and darkens it, rusts and consumes it – and the contrary, that is, its use, sharpens it, cleanses it, polishes it, and preserves it from the corruption of rust – thus idleness or indolence blunts the human mind and causes the other aforementioned damage to it. Ou par le fer est entendu humain engien ou la pensee pour l’aguesse de sa soubtiveté. Et comme huisseuse rebrouissist noircist enroullist et degaste le fer au contraire usage le aguisse le blancist le desroullist et le garde de corruption. Ainssi huisseuse a pensee humaine fait tous les dangiers dessus dis. (18v)

This is a fuller explication than the preceding citations in the chapter have merited, suggesting that the application of Ecclesiastes X.10 to a pedagogical context, and the implicit risk of mental rust that the verse conveys, are both important and (relatively) unfamiliar to Vincent’s audience. The destructive disuse of an iron implement is subdivided into four phases, from blunting and darkening to oxidation and desintegration; each of these can be counteracted by a corresponding remedial or restorative action; and idleness’ erosion of the intellect is explicitly compared to the physical degradation of iron. Interestingly, the terms denoting damage to iron (obtundit, denigrat, rubiginat, consumit) are not “translated” or adapted for application to the mind; rather, they are adopted wholesale – the human mind undergoes the aforementioned damage. Rather than subjecting the human mind to processes analogous to discoloration, bluntness, rusting, and corrosion, idleness actually effects these very same metallic processes. Daudin foregrounds the novel metaphor even more, establishing a strong contrast between the effects of exercise and of idleness by rendering elimat (polishes) as desroullist (de-rusts). His lexical choices establish a series of stronger oppositions, rebroussist-aguisse, noircist-blancist, enroullist-desroullist, degaste-garde, creating an even starker contrast than that



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which he found in his source text.79 The distinction, in the context of a pedagogical treatise, is key: with proper instruction even an idle mind can be not only filed or polished, but also completely de-rusted. Following this initial presentation of the notion of intellectual rust, Vincent lingers on numerous citations revisiting and reworking that imagery. First, appropriately enough, he follows his own explication of Ecclesiastes X.10 with one from Jerome’s Commentaria in Ecclesiasten: “Unde super predicto verbo dicit Jeronymus: ‘Ocio ingenium hebetatur, et desidia est quasi quedam rubigo sapiencie’” (Whence, on the above proverb Jerome says: Idleness deadens the intellect, and indolence is, as it were, the rust of reason, 22, lines 40–41) – or, as Daudin renders it, “Sur la parole dessus ditte dist saint Jherome: ‘Par huisseuse l’engien est rebourssié, et lascheté est comme une enroullure de sapience’” (18v).80 Gérard Fry notes the antiquity of the image ferrum rubigo consumit has already become proverbial in Jerome’s day.81 Yet Saint Jerome, like Vincent of Beauvais after him, seeks to make sense of the rust metaphor by situating it within different, more human-centered discourses. Jerome couches his commentary in the language of health, therapy, and pedagogy: “Otium enim et desidia quasi quaedam rubigo sapientiae est. Si igitur quis hoc passus fuerit, non desperet remedium sanitatis, sed uadat ad magistrum et rursum instruatur ab eo” (for leisure and idleness are a kind of rust to wisdom. So if there is anyone to whom this has happened, let him not despair of a curative remedy, but rather let him go to a teacher and again be instructed by him, 338).82 Introduced after Vincent’s own, lengthier explication, the citation from Jerome is presented as support for, rather than the source of, Vincent’s interpretation of Ecclesiastes X.10; but further discussion of Jerome’s broader point (and its insertion within a discourse of illness and remedy) is eschewed in favor of a more varied smattering of citations, all presented briefly and decontextually so 79 These lexical choices provide an example of one of Daudin’s primary characteristics as a translator: his resistance to calques. “It is evident then that Daudin did not feel compelled to follow to the letter the Latin text of Vincent of Beauvais, but instead considered it part of his duty as translator to add to the text or alternatively to diminish it, with the ever-present idea of interpreting the treatise for a lay reader whom he seems to assume has no knowledge of the Latin language. Many of the procedures Daudin adopted he shared with other translators of the fourteenth century, although it seems that his reluctance to employ the calque process as a universal answer to vocabulary translation problems is idiosyncratic.” Walkley, “Procedures of fourteenth-century French translation,” 133. 80 For the original text cited (from which Vincent does not stray far) see Jerome, S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera I,1, ed. Paul de Lagarde, Germain Morin, and Marc Adriaen, Corpus Christanorum Series Latina LXXII (Turnhout: Brepols, 1959), 338. 81 Jerome, Commentaire de l’Ecclésiaste, ed. and trans. Gérard Fry (Paris: Migne, 2001), 271n43. 82 The translation is cited from Jerome, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, ed. and trans. Richard J. Goodrich and David J. D. Miller (New York: Newman Press, 2012), 114.

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that they might be brought to bear on the question of princely education more efficiently. And so, passing over the citation from Jerome without further comment, Vincent turns next to Ovid’s Tristia ex Ponto.83 Ingenium longa rubigine lesum Torpet et est multo quam fuit ante, minus fertilis, assiduo si non renovetur aratro. Nil nisi cum spinis gramen habebit ager. (22, lines 43–46) And besides, my talent [ingenium], damaged by long rust, is dull, much inferior to what it was before. A fertile field, if it is not renewed by constant ploughing, will produce nothing but grass and thorns.84

Or, in Daudin’s version: De che dist aussi Ovide que l’engien blechié par longue roullure s’endort et est moult mains proufitable s’il n’est remué ou resvillié par acoustumanche; en lieu de bonne herbe n’aportera que espines. (18v) On this matter Ovid also says that the intellect injured by long-term rusting falls asleep and is much less productive than if it were habitually shaken or awakened; instead of desired produce it will bring forth only thorns.

As before, the Middle French translation subtly suppresses just a few words of the original text in a manner that causes the reader to pause at the rust metaphor: here, Daudin eliminates a key element of the Ovidian logic. While Ovid (and Vincent, in citing him) describes an idle ingenium as prone to rust and an unplowed ager as similarly likely to produce only thorns, Daudin eliminates the explicit expression of the analogy that Ovid establishes between intellect and field. Instead, it is the rusted intellect itself that directly brings forth thorns: a delightfully mixed inorganic metaphor bearing an unnatural and useless

83 Though the transition from Jerome to Ovid may strike the modern reader as an abrupt change of course, Salvatore Battaglia has remarked that Ovidian texts enjoyed a nearly Biblical authority in learned circles from the eleventh and twelfth centuries through the advent of humanism: “Da allora Ovidio rappresentò un codice, una ‘bibbia’ come si definì dai contemporanei” (from then Ovid represented a codex, a “bible” as defined by contemporaries). Salvatore Battaglia, “La tradizione di Ovidio del medioevo,” Filologia romanza VI (1959): 190. 84 The translation is modified from Ovid, Tristia ex Ponto, ed. and trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 253.



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fruit.85 The rusted engien, as Daudin understands it, is perhaps less akin to the untended field than it is to the poorly maintained plow. Following the Ovidian verses, Vincent returns to his earlier four-phase explanation of Ecclesiastes X.10. This time he reframes mental rust as a reversible condition in order to effect a transition to Proverbs XXVII.17 and, thereafter, to a more explicitly pedagogical discussion. Itaque contra predicta mala, que facit ociositas menti humane, excercitatio studii vel discipline illam exacuit, perspicitate dealbat, candore puritatis et innocentie elimat, i.e. a rubigine viciorum detergit et ab omni peccati corrosione illesam custodit. Hec ergo quatuor desidie mala et quatuor exercicii bona ibi salomon insinuare nititur, ut ocium fugiatur et exercicium discipline requiratur. de quo eciam exercicio, quo ingenium acuitur in discendo, dicit idem in proverbiis XXVII: Ferrum ferro acuitur et homo exacuit faciem proximi sui. (22–23, lines 47–54) Accordingly, against the aforesaid ill, which the idleness of the human mind brings about, the practice or discipline of study sharpens [the mind], cleanses its perspicacity, polishes it to the brightness of purity and innocence, that is, it washes off the rust of vices and protects from the corrosion of all sins. Solomon therefore tries to hint at the four evils of idleness and the four benefits of exercise, so that one might flee idleness and the discipline of practice might have been sought. Furthermore, with regard to practice, which sharpens the intellect through learning, the same author [Solomon] says in Proverbs XXVII: Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. Et ainssi contre les maulx dessusdis que fait huisseuse a la pensee humaine excercitation d’estude ou de discipline l’aguisse par soubtiveté et le fait reluire par blancheur de innocence et de purté, et le purifie de la roullure des vices, et le garde d’estre blechié de pechié. Ces quatres maulx de huisseuse et les quatre biens de excercice ou livre dessusdit Salomon les demoustre afin que on fuie huisseuse et que on quiere excercice de discipline, duquel excercice par lequel l’engien est aguissié en apprenant dist Salomon en proverbes ou .xxviie. chapitre: Le fer est aguissié par fer et l’omme aguise la face de son prochain. (18v)

85 I do not believe Daudin is making any connection to the usage of “rust” to designate a crop blight. Godefroy cites two medieval instances of the agricultural usage, both from translations of Psalm 77, the Maskil of Asaph: Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, s.v. “rouil.” The Trésor de la langue française only attests this definition from the late sixteenth century onward.

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In a deliberate echo of his explanation of Ecclesiastes X.10, Vincent identifies the salubrious functions of study as exacuit, dealbat, elimat, detergit, and, in a slight variation of the earlier conservat, custodit. The language is largely the same, indicating that the preceding citations from Jerome and Ovid have illustrated the author’s larger point without diverting him from it. While Vincent displays lexical discipline, however, his translator is far less precise. Vincent replicates his earlier terms, whereas Daudin varies them: the earlier aguisse, blancist, desroullist, and garde have now become aguisse, fait reluire, purifie, and garde. It would appear at first glance that two of the original terms have been retained and the other two have been replaced with synonym or paraphrase. Even the repetition of the first and last terms, though, is not a precise echo of the earlier language: rather, it conceals another elimination that recalibrates the passage’s metaphoric balance. Daudin maintains the four-part scheme of the initial justification of the rust metaphor, condensing the first two steps and eliminating the language of cleansing in favor of that of polishing and sharpening. But his source material had gone much further.86 In this transition to Proverbs XXVII.17, Vincent expands the sequence of four remedial actions to incorporate a fifth: no longer a four-step process, with each function accorded equal importance, the discipline of academic study is now presented in three parts (sharpening the mind, cleansing its perspicacity, and polishing it to the brightness of purity and innocence), followed by two more metaphors that summarize the entire process described by the other three: washing off the rust of vice, and protecting from the corrosion of sin. It is noteworthy that the last two metaphors, the ones that englobe the others, involve the removal of rust and the prevention of corrosion: the most metallic images have been accorded pride of place. The removal of rust no longer constitutes a single step in the educative process; it offers overall protection from sin writ large. The enemy of wisdom and learning has shifted, from (mental) idleness to a more generalized state of vice. Rust, at first deployed as a sign of an idle intellect, has now become la roullure des vices: an intellectual and moral corrosion that impedes the proper exercise of the virtues. Consequently, with his explanatory paraphrase of Proverbs XXVII.17, Vincent steers his text toward a discussion of the mechanism by which this polishing and purification of the mind and spirit can take place.

86 This and other fairly minor inconsistencies raise the question of whether Daudin intentionally modified his sources, or simply lacked the proficiency in Latin to render the original texts more faithfully in Middle French. Frédérique Hamm remarks that while it is difficult to gauge Daudin’s knowledge of Latin, his university training (leading to the conferral of a bachelor’s degree in theology) would have given him solid knowledge of the language. Hamm, “Jean Daudin,” 217–18.



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sicut enim ferrum acuitur ferro per collisionem, sic et discipuli mens vel ingenium acuitur per doctrine a magistro recepcionem. (23, lines 54–56) just as, indeed, iron is sharpened by iron when they are struck together, so is a student’s mind or intellect sharpened by receiving instruction from a master. Comme le fer est aguissié par fer per froter l’un a l’autre ainssi la pensee ou l’engien de l’escolier est aguissié par recepvoir la doctrine de son maistre. (18v–19r)

In the proverb one man sharpens another, his neighbor, with whom he keeps company. Vincent of Beauvais transfers this language to a pedagogical context: a master sharpens his pupil. He thus harkens back to the “charismatic” educative model typical of the cathedral schools.87 The language is familiar, but its recasting within an educative context is new – much like Vincent’s overall treatment of the rust metaphor. Rust and Education, After Vincent of Beauvais The addition of and expansion upon rust imagery might seem to be a minor footnote to a discussion of Vincent’s relationship with his source materials, if not for the substantial influence of this discussion among fifteenth-century French vernacular writers. While De eruditione fell into obscurity in the early modern era, this was not its initial fate. The treatise survives in 19 manuscripts and in two late fifteenth-century print editions. Both the Latin text and the French translation were present in Charles V’s librairie and thus quite probably available in the courtly circle with which so many of the prominent poets of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were affiliated. Furthermore, we can note the penetration of rust imagery in the French versions of other political and pedagogical texts that were translated for Charles V. In the Politique Nicole Oresme, hewing closely to his source, uses the simile of rusted iron to describe military states whose stability and virtue diminish once they are at peace:

87 As Zahora writes, according to this model, “Apart from reading and imbuing themselves with the contents of texts, the students ought to obey and emulate their teachers in a slow, transformative process that requires the student’s full participation and the teacher to be the embodiment of virtues he tries to imbue.” “Since Feeling is First,” 55. On “charismatic” pedagogy in the cathedral schools, see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 76–83.

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Car pluseurs teles cités sunt salvees tant comme elles sunt en guerre, et apres, quant elles ont obtenu princey, elles perissent; car elles contrahent et cuillent ruil aussi comme fait fer quant elles sunt a paes et menent vie paisible. (VII.31, 327)88 For many such cities are safe as long as they are at war, and afterward, when they have achieved dominance, they perish; for when they are at peace and lead peaceful lives, they contract and gather rust just as iron does.

Oresme glosses this passage with a new set of citations that complement, but do not overlap with, those offered by Vincent of Beauvais. Oresme, like his predecessor, sets softness (here in the specific form of effeminacy) in parallel with rust. Car aussi comme un instrument de fer resplendist et reluist quant il est souvent en besoingne, semblablement vie de homme est clere et nette quant il se occupe et excercite en bonnes oevres. Mais quant le fer a repos le ruil le enlaidist et le gaste, si comme dit Seneque a ce propos: Vomer, si ab agricola obsconditur rubigine consumitur [De Beneficiis II, 11, 4]. Semblablement le vie de homme en oisiveté devient laide et obscure par ensuir concupiscences et desiriers charnelz, et semblablement toute une cité, selon Aristote. Et est jouxte ce que dit le Prophete: Ve civitate sanguinum ollas cuius rubigo in ea est, et rubigo ejus non exivit de ea [Ezech. 24:6]… Se les roys et les empereurs fussent aussi vaillans en paes comme en guerre, les choses humaines en vausissent mieux. Mes pour la defaute de ceste chose, les gens communement en temps de paes et de prosperité deviennent effeminés et perdent prudence et puissance… For just as an iron instrument shines and gleams when it is in frequent use, likewise human life is neat and clean when it occupies and exercises itself with good works. But when iron sits, rust ruins and wastes it, as Seneca says on this subject: if neglected by the farmer, the plough is consumed by rust. Similarly, the idle man’s life becomes ugly and dark as a result of succumbing to covetousnous and carnal desire – and a whole city’s too, according to Aristotle. And this agrees with what the prophet says: Woe to the bloody city, to the pot whose rust is in it, and whose rust has not gone out of it… If kings and emperors were as worthy in peace as they are in wartime, human affairs would be better off for it. But for lack of this quality, people commonly become effeminate in times of peace and prosperity and they lose prudence and power…

88 Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de Politiques d’Aristote, ed. Albert Douglas Menut, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 60:6 (1970).



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As in Vincent of Beauvais’s text, the rust metaphor requires extended commentary. This gloss, far lengthier than the others in Book VII, does the important work of tying metaphoric rust – not mental rust this time, but moral rust – back to questions of governance and, more specifically, failures of prudence. The Biblical quotation, in particular, reinforces the idea that rust can represent a moral and behavioral residue. Prudence, like a well-oiled machine, must be exercised and maintained in times of war and of peace alike. Denis Foulechat’s 1372 translation of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus likewise contains several metaphorical allusions to rust, only some of which appear in his source material. Foulechat does not take advantage of an early opportunity to use rust to evoke a mental state: he translates the incipit of the prologue and its famous “res scitu dignas situ aboleri non patiuntur” (they do not suffer things worth knowing to be destroyed by mold/rust) as “les choses dignes de memoire point ne sueffrent estre oubliees” (they do not suffer things worthy of memory to be forgotten).89 Aside from the difficulty of translating the play on scitu and situ, it is difficult to understand why Foulechat would opt for such a vague rendering, especially when he does employ the rust metaphor elsewhere. In Book IV, for example, Foulechat retains the metaphor as it appears in the Policraticus, translating “Vnde per inspiratam sapientiam hanc rubiginem rex contempsit egregius, ut ad contemptum pecuniae sui ipsius exemple posteros inuitaret”90 as “Selon la verité ycelui tresnoble roy par sa sapience, que dieu li avoit donnee et inspiree, si ot en despit cest enroulleure et ceste couvoitise et si tresnoblement que par sa bonne exemple il attrait touz ses successeurs à despiter monnoie et les y semont par grant prudence (In truth this very noble king, in his divinely given and inspired wisdom, so nobly despised this rust and this covetousness that by his good example he led all of his successors to scorn money and he thus instructed them in his great prudence).91 The passage is particularly noteworthy as, like Oresme’s gloss on Politics VII.31, it opposes rust-like vice (here, avarice) to prudence and sapience, reinforcing the notion that pedagogical inculcation of these particular virtues can ward off corrosive

89 Denis Foulechat, Le Policratique de Jean de Salisbury (1372) Livres I-III, ed. Charles Brucker (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 94. As Charles Brucker remarks in a note to this edition, Foulechat “a transposé l’image latine situ aboleri (‘être détruit par la rouille (de l’oubli)’) par une expression plus abstraite” (transposed the Latin image situ aboleri, to be destroyed by the rust of oblivion, into a more abstract expression), 296n1. 90 John of Salisbury, Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum libri VIII, ed. Clemens C. I. Webb, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909; Frankfurt: Minerva, 1965), I.250. 91 Le Policraticus de Jean de Salisbury, traduit par Denis Foulechat 1372, manuscrit no24287 de la B.N. Livre IV, ed. Charles Brucker (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1985), 38.

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vices.92 Moreover, the fact that Foulechat adds an explicative reduplication, rendering John of Salisbury’s “rubiginem” as “cest enroulleure et ceste couvoitise,” points to the same need for clarification that motivated Vincent of Beauvais’s and Jean Daudin’s deployments of the metaphor. Thus we see that the language of oxidation is already present in many of the Latin political and pedagogical treatises that were clearly valued by Charles V and his circle, and those texts’ late medieval translators tend to explain the metaphor in a way that enhances the reader’s attention to it. Raoul de Presles even cites the metaphor in the preface to his Bible (1377), as it appears in a manuscript (British Library, MS Lansdowne 1175) having belonged to the duke of Berry.93 The translator describes how he wrestled with the question of whether to accept as daunting an assignment as the Bible: Mais tandis come je debatoie ceste question en moy meismes, je me recordai que je avoie leu en un livre que nature humaine est come le fer, lequel, se l’en ne le met en euvre, il se use, et se l’en n’en use point, il s’enrouille et se gaste. Et toutevoies se degaste il moins quant l’en en use que quant l’en le laisse gesir. Et pour ceste cause je l’entrepris, et amai miex a moy user en exercitant que moy consumer en occiosité, comme, selon le dit du sage, occiosité sans lettres soit mort.94 But as I inwardly debated this question, I remembered I had read in a book that human nature is like iron, which, if one puts it to work, it is worn down, and if one does not use it, it rusts and is degraded. Yet it degrades less when one uses it than when one lets it lie. And so I undertook it [this translation project], and preferred to wear myself down through activity rather than to consume myself in idleness, as (according to the wise one’s saying) idleness without letters is a kind of death.95 92 Godefroy also alludes to Foulechat’s more positive use of rust imagery in the Euthetique (“que la ruyle de bonnes meurs soit sauve,” Le Policratique Livres I-III, 90) and in Book III (“la ruylle d’actemprance laisse ceste affeccion,” Le Policratique Livres I-III, 216); however, these examples are ambiguous, as ruylle could mean “rust” but more likely denotes “rule” (from the verb ruyler, to govern). The same ambiguity recurs in Jacques Legrand’s Livre de bonnes moeurs, wherein ruil is frequently associated, again, with Temperance: “attrempance est une vertu qui ruile l’omme” (322), “les anges veulent que l’omme soit sobre et ruillé par abstinence” (324). Jacques Legrand, Archiloge Sophie et Livre de bonnes moeurs, ed. Evencio Beltran (Paris: Champion, 1986). 93 On Raoul de Presles, see Anne Lombard-Jourdan, “À propos de Raoul de Presles. Documents sur l’homme,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 139 (1981): 191–207. 94 The passage is cited in Samuel Berger, La Bible française au Moyen Âge. Étude sur les plus anciennes versions de la Bible écrites en prose de langue d’oïl (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1884; Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), 246. 95 The wise one, in this case, is Seneca. Raoul de Presles refers to the same citation



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Raoul de Presles does not specify the book in which he encountered the rust metaphor – as we have seen, Vincent of Beauvais finds many sources to cite – but it is not inconceivable that the Bible translator could be referring to De eruditione filiorum nobilium or even to Daudin’s translation. His remarks, together with the treatments of the rust metaphor in Foulechat’s Policratique, in Oresme’s Politique, and in Daudin’s De la erudition ou enseignement des enfans nobles, point to such language having struck a chord, and even enjoyed a certain currency, within the specific milieu of Charles V’s circle of authors and translators.96 Daudin’s and Foulechat’s translations are among the earliest French-language attestations of rust as a metaphor for intellectual slowness or moral decay, but they are certainly not the last. When later French authors write about the intellect, they sometimes choose to illustrate their discussion with the metaphor of rust, but unlike Vincent of Beauvais and his fourteenth-century translator Daudin, they no longer seek to justify or explain the use of this language. Its pertinence to pedagogical discussions is accepted without further comment. Vincent’s digest of rust-imagery migrated to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular writing, and the same “rust” citations to which Vincent alludes recur in a variety of textual genres. For instance, in his Respit de la mort (1376), Jean le Fèvre alludes to Proverbs XXVII.17, one of the same texts Vincent cites.97 Vincent had explicitly related the proverb “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” to the sharpening of a student’s intellect upon receiving instruction from a master. Likewise, Le Fèvre uses the same turn of phrase in a specifically pedagogical context. Toward the end of a lengthy review of the estates and professions, le Fèvre discusses students in verses 2405–2608. He first characterizes scholarly disputations as “besoingne oiseuse / ou… oiseuse from Seneca’s epistle 82 in his preface to the Cité de Dieu: “je croi que vous aviés leue cele parole de Senèque qui dit ‘ociosité sans lettre est mort et sepulture de homme vif’”(I think you have read that saying of Seneca that says ‘idleness without letters is death and burial of a living man’”). Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, I.109. Seneca’s letters one through eighty-eight “were by far the most popular of his genuine works” in the Middle Ages: L. D. Reynolds, The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 112. 96 Frédérique Hamm has demonstrated that Jean Daudin and Denis Foulechat knew each other before Foulechat began work on his Policratique, as Daudin testified at a hearing organized by Foulechat in 1364. Hamm, “Jean Daudin,” 218–19. It is especially difficult to assess the impact Foulechat’s translation of the Policraticus may have had on contemporary discourse, as the manuscript “disappears from library inventories after having been borrowed by Louis, Duke of Anjou, in 1380.” Kate Langdon Forhan, “Polycracy, Obligation, and Revolt: The Body Politic in John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan,” in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 47. 97 Jean le Fèvre, Le Respit de la mort, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr (Paris: Picard, 1969).

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besoingneuse” (idle work or working idleness, 91, vv. 2467–68) devoted to the science of greed, which he dubs “philopecune” (92, v. 2498): his emphasis on the indolence of these scholars recalls Seneca’s formulation of idleness as anathema to wisdom and prudence.98 To counteract “philopecune” le Fèvre advocates a more high-minded, stoic approach;99 “A fausse queux son engien frote / Qui laist Seneque et Aristote” (He who abandons Seneca and Aristotle rubs his intellect against the wrong whetstone).100 The figure of rubbing one’s inner faculties against a whetstone appears rather frequently in Middle French texts composed from the 1380s onward. Those with a well-honed engin are often called aigu et subtil.101 By the turn of the fifteenth century, the verb aiguiser, literally “to sharpen” (as a knife), was quite frequently applied to intellectual acuity. The Livre de l’informacion des princes refers to a king “avec tresgracieux et avec tresmerveilleux engin et soutil et agu et passoit les autres en vive memoire entendement et faconde” (with very gracious and very marvelous, subtle, and sharp intellect, who exceeded all others in lively memory, understanding, and eloquence, 112v). Beyond this and the already-cited examples from Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du vieil pèlerin and from Christine de Pizan’s Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, all of which appear within a specifically pedagogical context, we can adduce a gloss on the “fable” of Pygmalion in Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (“firent les poetes que les entendemens des hommes s’aguisassent et soubtillassent a y trouver diverses exposicions,” poets made men’s intellects become sharper and more subtle in

98 “Li sages n’est onques oiseus, ensonnie tousjour son corage d’aucune bone chose. Il s’avise dou petit au grant, dou cler al obscur, de che qui est a ce a venir” (the wise man is not at all idle, he always occupies his heart with some good thing. He takes note of small and large, light and dark, that which is and that which is to come). Marguerite Oswald, “Les Enseignement Sénèque,” Romania 90 (1969): 55. 99 The fundamental stoicism of Le Fèvre’s approach seems to have been appreciated by his medieval readers, as the Respit de la mort very often appears in manuscripts also containing vernacular translations of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Of the six manuscripts (plus a seventh containing excerpts) in which the Respit de la mort survives, four include a translation of the Consolation of Philosophy (or excerpts therefrom). Other cotexts include excerpts from medical, philosophical, and encyclopedic texts, the Roman de la Rose, Machaut’s consolatory Confort d’ami, and, in the particularly interesting Brussels manuscript (KBR MS 4373–76), the Epistre Othéa, courtesy manuals for young women, and Jean Petit’s apologia for tyrannicide. There are two known sixteenth-century printed editions of the Respit. See Geneviève Hasenohr’s introduction to her edition. 100 Geneviève Hasenohr offers two alternate interpretations of the queux, as a sharpening stone or a touchstone. “La locution verbale figurée dans l’œuvre de Jean le Fèvre,” Moyen Français 14–15 (1984): 242. Hasenohr prefers the “touchstone” reading, finding it more evocative, but in the context of this expression’s proverbial source the former interpretation is more tenable. 101 Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, s.v. “aigu.”



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finding different interpretations, 235);102 in Hope’s speech in Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance (“Cil qui a le desus en sa fortune s’orgueillist et s’endort et entroublie […] et celuy qui est au desoubz aguise son engin a la presse de son engoisse,” He whose fortunes have raised him up becomes prideful and falls asleep and half-forgets […] and he who has been brought low sharpens his intellect on the press [machine] of his anguish, pr. XIV, ll. 130–33, p. 139);103 in the Repues franches de maistre François Villon et de ses compagnons, in which Villon’s companions egg him on by telling him to “esguise tout [s]on engin” (sharpen his entire intellect, p. 102);104 and even dietary advice such as that offered in the Régime de santé du corps (that turtledove flesh “confere et aguise l’entendement,” benefits and sharpens the intellect; and that partridge flesh is “enclin de augmenter et aguiser les operations de cerveau, c’est assavoir l’entendement, les cogitations, et la memoire,” apt to augment and sharpen the operations of the brain, namely intellect, reflection, and memory, 71–72).105 These examples show that Le Fèvre discusses the proverb’s language of sharpening in a way that, shortly after the time of the Respit’s composition, becomes quite idiomatic. The citation of the “iron sharpens iron” proverb in Le Fèvre’s didactic text is not in and of itself remarkable; the interpretation of that proverb as applying specifically to the engien, and to the pedagogical authority of two writers of treatises on political virtue ethics – all within a textual “mirror” composed by a prolific translator and procureur en Parlement du roy nostre sire – is perhaps more telling.106 Firmer evidence for vernacular echoes of De eruditione is to be found in Jean Juvénal des Ursins’s Verba mea auribus percipe, domine (Give ear, O Lord, to my words).107 In this treatise on kingship written for the adult Charles VII in 1452, just at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, the author discusses a number of timely topics, including the question of whether the king should 102 Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. Gabriella Parussa (Geneva: Droz, 2008). 103 Alain Chartier, Le livre de l’Espérance, ed. François Rouy (Paris: Champion, 1989). 104 Le Recueil des repues franches de maistre François Villon et de ses compagnons, ed.

Jelle Koopmans and Paul Verhuyck (Geneva: Droz, 1995). 105 Le Régime tresutile et tresproufitable pour conserver et garder la santé du corps humain, ed. Patricia Willett Cummins (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976). 106 Jean le Fèvre authored the juridical fiction Respit de la mort and the defense of women, as well as a number of translations (including the Lamentations de Matheolus and the Disticha Catonis) and perhaps a Danse macabre, now lost. 107 For a description of this epistle and the circumstances of its composition, see P. S. Lewis, Écrits politiques de Jean Juvénal des Ursins, vol. III, La vie et l’œuvre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), 174–81. Both Lewis and Franck Collard describe Verba mea as being more akin to a “mirror for princes” than any of Juvénal’s other political writings: Franck Collard, “Au-delà des miroirs ou de l’autre côté: Le Charles VII de Jean Juvénal des Ursins,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 24 (2012): 113–27.

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retain an active duty army (se l’ordonnance de gens d’armes se doit continuer, ou non, 261). After deploring the vices of idle soldiers, which include drink, gluttony, sloth, whoring, gambling, and self-indulgent or scandalous dress,108 Juvénal des Ursins introduces the rust metaphor: “Il n’est ni sage ne si vaillant que par oysiveté et non soy excercer ne enroulle ou arudisse son intendement ou vaillance” (He is neither wise nor valiant who, through idleness and failure to exercise, rusts or dulls his intellect or his valiance, 264). The concern for “rusting” valiance is warranted in this particular context, but the introduction of the notion of intendement signals a shift in textual focus. Juvénal des Ursins follows this declaration with the exact same citation from Ovid that Vincent of Beauvais had used at the same point in his argument: “Ingeniumque meum longe rubigine lesum / Torpet et est multo, quam fuit ante, minus” (and my intellect, long afflicted by rust, is lethargic and is much less than it was before). The Tristia are far from the most frequently cited Ovidian texts in medieval France – as Angelo Monteverdi remarks, the medieval Ovid is mainly a source of mythological and amorous knowledge – so the choice of this particular citation, in the midst of an admonition about exercise, idleness, rust, and intendement, signals that Juvénal des Ursins quite probably used De eruditione as a source for this passage.109 Just as Vincent of Beauvais advises rigorous 108 “Mais en la forme que vous les tenez il sembleroit que ilz ne feront que boire, menger et dormir; et auront les grandes poulaines et les ungs les robes trop courtes, les aultres trop longues, et seront oyseulx et par ce moyen enclins a tous vices, comme puterie, gourmanderie, jeux de dés et avoir chemises deliees et toutes choses desduites a toutes superfluités, sans faire aucum excercite d’armes; et tout aux despens du povre peuple” (But the way you keep them, it seems they’ll do nothing but drink, eat, and sleep. They will wear long poulaines [pointed shoes]; some will wear their robes too short, others too long. They will be idle and thus prone to all sorts of vices, like whoring, gluttony and dice games, and they will keep their shirts unfastened and will enjoy all things to excess, without any military exercises; and all this at the expense of the poor common people, 263). 109 As Angelo Monteverdi succinctly puts it, “non è la testimonianza dei Tristia e delle Ex Ponto che più interessa i lettori medievali” (it is not the testimony of the Tristia ex Ponto that most interests medieval readers). Angelo Monteverdi, “Ovidio nel medio evo,” Rendiconti delle adunanze solenni dell’Accademia nazionale dei Lincei 5 (1957): 700. In a survey of about 2,500 English sermons composed c.1350–1450, Siegfried Wenzel found just four references to or quotations from the Tristia: “Ovid from the Pulpit,” in Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 161n5. William of Orléans (fl. 1200) composed a commentary on the Tristia and there is some evidence for the Tristia’s continued school use, mainly in Italy, but evidence of its continued use in late medieval France is scant. See Frank T. Coulson, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the school tradition of France, 1180–1400: Texts, Manuscript Traditions, Manuscript Settings,” in Clark, Coulson, and McKinley, Ovid in the Middle Ages, 59; Robert Black, “Ovid in medieval Italy,” in Clark, Coulson, and McKinley, Ovid in the Middle Ages, 134, 137. Salvatore Battaglia mentions the Tristia only in passing, as a source for medieval discussions of Fortune: Battaglia, “La tradizione di Ovidio nel Medioevo,” 221–22. The Tristia



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academic and moral instruction as a remedy for mental rust, Juvénal des Ursins exhorts his monarch to counter idleness with direct action. The intertextual choice is not without significance. In applying material from a text about tutoring young princes (whose idle or inchoate intellects may be rusted with vice) in a treatise addressed to an adult king, Juvénal des Ursins adopts a surprisingly authoritative if not irreverent stance. Sometimes even the king, ostensibly a mirror of Prudence for his people, lacks the foresight that his advisors can provide. But if his engin is rusted, it is no longer pure, no longer ductile, no longer “doctible en persuasion” (Livre de l’informacion des princes, 29v). Le roy qui est enfant et fol Mirrors for princes rely on Prudence – as a core value and as a readerly practice – to reflect and to shape leaders’ virtues and values. The mirror carries with it an inherent risk of distortion, and so these texts’ authors, like Vincent of Beauvais, must ground their visions of princely virtue in learned citation and in measured and well-justified language. At the same time, the simple act of holding up a clear and reliable mirror to a distorted, rusted intellect hints at the textual mirror’s persuasive or even subversive potential. By presenting the prince’s reflection as a condition in need of remediation, the mirror author draws his reader’s attention to flaws in leadership, be they hypothetical or all too real. A mirror reflects its beholder, and hence a mirror for princes, while overtly upholding royal authority, also admits a less flattering possibility: that a deformed image produced by that mirror is not necessarily inaccurate. Mirrors for princes also depend on the notion that “the well-being of the whole community depends on the moral integrity and abilities of the ruler.”110 Accordingly, texts in the mold of De eruditione filiorum nobilium, which reflect a present or future monarch in dire need of instruction, correction, or de-rusting, take on greater urgency during the reign of Charles VI, who acceded to the throne in 1380 at the age of 11 and became progressively less competent to rule over the last three decades of his 42-year reign.111 This is a king whose stultitia (or worse) cannot be counteracted, a king who tests a number of the are scarcely mentioned in Jeremy Dimmick, “Ovid in the Middle Ages: Authority and Poetry,” 264–87 in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Franco Munari, Ovid im Mittelalter (Zürich: Artemis, 1960), whose overview of medieval Ovidianism contains only a single allusion to the Tristia. 110 Lambertini, “The Prince in the Mirror of Philosophy,” 1526. 111 Jean-Claude Mühlethaler studies the influence of mirrors for princes on political writing during the reign of Charles VI, and especially on Christine de Pizan, in “De ira et avaritia ou les faiblesses des grands à l’épreuve de l’actualité. Des miroirs des princes à l’engagement politique sous Charles VI,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 9 (2002): 215–35.

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mirror for princes’ basic premises: that a “roy fol” is as ridiculous and offensive as an enthroned monkey (as stated in both the Livre de l’informacion des princes fol. 4v and the Avis aus roys, Pierpont Morgan MS M 456, fol. 4v);112 that “cil qui a force de cors et defaut de soutillesce d’entendement et d’engin est sers par nature. Et cil qui a soutillesce d’entendement et sens por gouvernier soi et autrui doit estre seigneur par nature” (He who has a strong body but a lack of subtlety of understanding and intellect is subordinate by nature, and he who has the subtlety of understanding and sense to govern himself and others should be a lord by nature, Li livres dou gouvernement des rois, 2); and that, as Daudin puts it in his rendering of Ecclesiastes IV.13, “Mieulx vault l’enfant povre et sage que le roy qui est enfant et fol, qui ne scet pourveir au temps avenir” (Better a poor but wise child than a king who is childish and foolish/mad, lacking foresight, 153v).113 Writing around the time of Charles VI’s majority, Honoré Bovet reiterates these core principles in the final chapter of his Arbre des Batailles, detailing the characteristics of a wise and virtuous king: Et si n’est mie petite meschance, quant le sire n’est saige et bien entendent, et bien en faisoit semblant la sainte Escripture, quant elle dit: “Mal aventure viengne a la terre de laquelle le roy est enfent.” Et si ne veult mie l’Escripture dire enfent tant seulement par aage, maiz aussi veult dire de sens et savoir. (576–77) And it is no small misfortune when the lord is not wise and intelligent, and the holy Scripture reckons with this when it says: “Woe unto the land whose lord is a child.” And by that the Scripture does not mean a child only in age, but also in sense and knowledge.

Those who forget these principles will find, as Laurent de Premierfait writes in the dedicatory epistle to his second version of Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (1409), that “le plus grief cas et le plus dampnable trebuchet de noblesse c’est forsbannir et dechacier science et vertus de l’ostel des roys et aultres princes” (the most grievous fall and the most slip in nobility is to banish and run off knowledge and virtues from the lodgings of the king and the other princes, 83). During Charles VI’s troubled reign, in the absence of “a strong ruler, who guaranteed the peace and exemplified comprehensive sagacity and

112 On the Avis aus roys’ use of the Liber de informatione principum as a source, see Julien Lepot, “Le cœur équivoque dans l’Avis aus roys: Un ‘miroir des princes’ du XIVe siècle,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 26 (2013): 273–94. 113 This is a much-commented verse, as St. Jerome makes clear in his lengthy commentary on this passage: Jerome, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, 69–72.



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prudence among other qualities,”114 authors will revisit the language of “mental rust” in their effort to correct their government’s course. Even as mirrors for princes become more referential and reflective of current events,115 other poetic, political and historiographic writings will treat the king’s maladie through a blend of euphemism and metaphor, both organic and inorganic. Such discourse is facilitated by the prior convergence, in fourteenth-century political poetry, of two commonplaces: the allegorization of the state as a human body; and the political interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue. Together these two allegorical traditions comprise a composite body susceptible both to disease and rust, one that enables new textual reflections on the impaired head of state and his rusted engin.

114 Margarete Zimmermann, “Vox Femina, Vox Politica: The Lamentacion sur les maux de la France,” in Brabant, Politics, Gender, and Genre, 116. 115 Myriam Chopin-Pagotto, “Le prudence dans les Miroirs du prince,” 91.

3

Metaphors of the Body Politic “Le Moyen Âge a vécu profondément la métaphore du roi comme la tête de son royaume.”1 The Middle Ages deeply lived the metaphor of the king as head of his kingdom.

In medieval political theory, it is commonplace to compare the body politic to a living human body, one whose health depends on the healthy and complementary function of all of its members. Metaphorically bringing together the “natural” body and the man-made social order, this construct gives rise to a panoply of medicalized discussions of the body politic (and even politicized discussions of human physiology).2 Over the course of the fourteenth century, as vernacular authors more systematically bring together political and poetic discourses, the organic construct of the body politic comes to be combined with a very different anthropomorphic political metaphor, that of Nebuchadnezzar’s metal statue. Together these two metaphors create a new figure for the body politic that is at once humanoid in its anatomy and metallic in its composition. In this chapter we will trace a brief history of these two metaphors as they appear in medieval French literary culture, before turning our attention to an influential text in which the two bodies become one: Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de 1 Serge Lusignan, “La topique de la translatio studii et les traductions françaises de textes savants au XIVe siècle,” in Traduction et traducteurs au Moyen Âge, ed. Geneviève Contamine (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1989), 305. 2 On political language in Henri de Mondeville’s Chirurgia, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie à l’apogée du Moyen Âge. Savoir et imaginaire du corps chez Henri de Mondeville, chirurgien de Philippe le Bel (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). As further evidence of the interplay of medical and political discourses in fourteenth-century France, Albert Douglas Menut notes in his introduction to Oresme’s Livre de Politiques d’Aristote that Oresme uses many neologisms that originated in the French translation of Mondeville’s Chirurgia. Nicole Oresme, Politiques, 29.

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l’âme. Examining Deguileville’s “organic statue” and accompanying discourses on machinery, idolatry, and image-making, we will demonstrate how the “contamination” and “depersonification” of the metaphor of the body politic lays the groundwork for innovative metallic metaphors during the crisis of Charles VI’s madness. The Organic Metaphor and the Inorganic Statue The construct now known as the “organic metaphor” of the state builds on a long tradition of political metaphors, such as the fable of the stomach and members.3 It reaches a full, innovative, and influential expression in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159), a work that “commonly receives acclaim as the first complete work of political theory written during the Latin Middle Ages.”4 In Books V and VI, John of Salisbury famously assimilates the body politic to a human body, with sociopolitical hierarchies mapped onto human anatomy.5 John claims to stud his account with authoritative “insertions”6 from Plutarch’s Institutio traiani – a pedagogical text that John himself appears to have invented.7 Despite its putative dependence on a classical model, the

3 On the history of such metaphors see Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Anton Hierseman, 1978); Jacques Le Goff, “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, ed. Michael Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 12–27; Gianluca Briguglia, Il corpo vivente dello Stato: Una metafora politica (Milan: Mondadori, 2006). 4 Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2005), 51. On the question of whether the Policraticus was written, received, and used as a mirror for princes, see Julie Barrau, “Ceci n’est pas un miroir, ou le Policraticus de Jean de Salisbury,” in Le Prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’Antiquité aux Lumières, ed. Frédérique Lachaud and Lydwine Scordia (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2007), 87–111. Michel Senellart discusses it among the mirrors for princes, while acknowledging its greater depth, in Les arts de gouverner, 127–45. 5 Frédérique Lachaud studies this as one of the Policraticus’s “accumulation of metaphors” in “Corps du prince, corps de la res publica. Écriture métaphorique et construction politique dans le Policraticus de Jean de Salisbury,” Micrologus 22 (2014): 171–99. 6 Denis Foulechat renders John of Salisbury’s inserere as entrelacer: “les chapitres de ycelle civille constitucion qui sont ou livre qui est apellé Institucion de Trajan, les quiex j’ay voulu pour partie entrelacer en ceste presente euvre,” Foulechat, Policratique Livre V, 270. The subtle distinction between the Latin and French verbs, and the French verb’s association with the interlaced subplots of chivalric romance, perhaps offers interesting insight into late fourteenth-century translators’ philosophies of textual borrowing and narrative structure. 7 On the non-existence of this text, see Hans Liebeschütz, “John of Salisbury and Pseudo-Plutarch,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943): 33–39.



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iteration of the organic metaphor elaborated in Policraticus departs significantly from prior tradition and, as Tilman Struve demonstrates, is responsible for the “breakthrough” of the image in medieval political thought.8 According to John’s formulation, the body politic can be assimilated to a living human body, with the king as the head, knights as the arms, the financial bureaucracy as the stomach, and the feet as the poor, crushed under the weight of the rest of the system. As the fourteenth-century French translator Denis Foulechat renders the passage in which the image is initially elaborated: Le prince tient ou fait du bien commun le lieu du chief et est sougiet a un seul dieu et a ceulz qui tiennent son lieu en terre; car ou corps humain le chef a vie par l’ame et par elle est gouverné, et le senateur tient le lieu du cuer, du quel les commencemens de bonnes euvres et mauvaises si viennent. Mais les juges et presidens des provinces si tiennent les offices des iex, des oreilles et de la langue. Et les chevaliers et officiers sont apliquiez et comparez aux mains; ceus qui sont continuelment avec le prince resamblent aus costez. Les questeurs et receveurs et gardes non pas des prisons, mais des choses particulieres, sont raportez a la semblance du ventre et des entrailles. Et, se il avient que il prennent et traient a soy plus que il ne doivent et par ardeur et par couvoitise desmesuree, et le gardent en leur tresor plus estroitement que rayson, il engendrent maladies incurables de tant de manieres que c’est sanz nombre et tant que par leur vice tout le corps du bien commun si trebusche en ruine. Mais les laboureurs sont comparez aus piez, qui continuelment se joignent a la terre, aus quelz la prudence et le gouvernement du chief est de tant plus neccessaire comme il tiennent plus d’empeschemens quant il cheminent sur terre ou service du corps; et de tant par raison il leur est miex deu aide et deport tant de couverture comme de chaucemente que as autres membres comme a grant paine portent et soustiennent tout le fais et la mole du corps. Ostes au plus fort corps du monde la soustenance des piez, et il ne pourra pour tout son pooir aler se ce n’est que il se traie laidement et a grant meschief a ses mains ou qu’il soit porté ou trait par l’aide d’aucunes bestes. (272–274) In a commonwealth the prince occupies the position of head and is subject to the one God and to those who represent him on earth, for in the human body the head lives and is governed by the soul. The senator occupies the position of the heart, where good and bad works originate; judges and provincial authorities occupy the position of the eyes, the ears, and the tongue. 8 Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung, 123; Tilman Struve, “The Importance of the Organism in the Political Theory of John of Salisbury,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 303–17.

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Knights and officers are likened and compared to the hands; those who are always with the prince resemble the sides. Tax collectors and financial administrators and keepers of personal property are likened to the stomach and entrails. And if it happens that they take for themselves more than they should, driven by ardor and by immoderate covetousness, and keep it in their treasury more parsimoniously than is reasonable, they cause innumerable incurable maladies such that, through their vice, the entire body of the commonwealth falls into ruin. But the laborers are compared to the feet, which are always joined with the earth, to whom the prudence and guardianship of the head are all the more necessary since they encounter more obstacles when they traverse the land in service of the body; so it is only right that aid and protection in the form of shelter and footwear are more due to them than to the other members, since they take great pains to carry and support the very being and substance of the body. Take away the support of the feet from the strongest body in the world, and for all its might it will not be able to move unless it drags itself horribly and painfully with its hands, or unless it is carried or pulled by animals.

As Cary Nederman points out, the image is not anatomical, but physiological – its signification depending less on the one-to-one correspondence between body parts and political actors than on the characterization of their interactions.9 This is a working model of the human body and its interdependent parts, one that allows for social ills to be discussed in terms of disease and medical intervention. Indeed, Takashi Shogimen has argued persuasively that medical knowledge and medicalized language are essential to John of Salisbury’s political outlook.10 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this dimension of John’s political theory is facilitated and reinforced through the incorporation of new (Aristotelian) medical knowledge.11 Policraticus and its organic metaphor of the state are widely known in the later Middle Ages and are much imitated, especially in mirrors for princes.12 9 Cary J. Nederman, “The Physiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,” History of Political Thought 8 (1987): 211–23. 10 Takashi Shogimen, “‘Head or Heart?’ Revisited: Physiology and Political Thought in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” History of Political Thought 28:2 (2007): 208–29; Takashi Shogimen, “Treating the Body Politic: The Medical Metaphor of Political Rule in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan,” The Review of Politics 70 (2008): 77–104; Takashi Shogimen and Cary J. Nederman, “The Best Medicine? Medical Education, Practice, and Metaphor in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and Metalogicon,” Viator 42 (2011): 55–74. 11 Shogimen, “‘Head or Heart?’ Revisited,” 220. 12 See Amnon Linder, “The Knowledge of John of Salisbury in the Late Middle Ages,” Studi medievali 3rd ser., 18 (1977): 315–366; Walter Ullmann, “John of Salisbury’s Policraticus



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The metaphor is present, though not very fully developed, in the influential specula of Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome.13 Amnon Linder writes that “the most active attention to [Policraticus’s] political aspects can be observed in Paris, and more particularly in the Royal Court under Charles V and Charles VI,” a period in which, as we have seen, this genre proliferated.14 In Jean Golein’s 1379 translation of the Liber de informatione principum, for instance, the organic metaphor is tweaked so as to emphasize the head’s superiority to the other members: Car aussi comme le chief est superposé a touz les membres et si est le gouvernement a touz en haut eslevé et est doué de touz les membres et par singularité de dignité est ymaginé noblement, ainsi le roy ou le prince est a touz sousmis et a touz les subiects a gouverner et mettre en ordenance et comme eslevé pardessus touz il doit les iex du cuer et la face de l’omme lever au ciel et doit pardessus touz en parfaite cognoissance preceller et en noblesce de meurs resplendir et apparoir. (BnF, MS fr. 1950, fol. 4v)15 For just as the head is positioned above all of the members, so the control of all is raised high, and it is endowed with all of the members and it is portrayed nobly due to the uniqueness of its dignity; so too is the king or prince placed above everyone, having all of the subjects to govern and put in order; and since he is elevated above all he must raise the eyes of his people’s hearts, and their faces, to the heavens and he must surpass all in perfect knowledge, and he must shine and display himself in nobility of manners.

Policraticus, from which this image is derived, is, of course, also among the texts translated into French for Charles V.16 Denis Foulechat’s Policratique, completed in 1372, survives in only three manuscripts; still, its luxurious presentation copy (BnF MS fr. 24287), and the modifications made to the text in the later Middle Ages,” in Geschichtsschreibung und geistiges Leben im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Heinz Löwe, ed. Karl Hauck and Hubert Mordek (Cologne: Böhlau, 1978), 519–45; Frédérique Lachaud, “Filiation and Context: The Medieval Afterlife of the Policraticus,” in A Companion to John of Salisbury, ed. Christophe Grellard and Frédérique Lachaud (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 377–438; Gianluca Briguglia, Il corpo vivente dello stato. 13 Lachaud, “Filiation and Context,” 405–7. 14 Linder, “The Knowledge of John of Salisbury,” 347. 15 For a brief comment on this passage, see Lachaud, “Filiation and Context,” 417. 16 The Policratique has been edited by Charles Brucker: Books I–III (Geneva: Droz, 1994), Book IV (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1985), Books IV and VIII in Le Moyen Français 21 (1987), Book V (Geneva: Droz, 2006), Books VI and VII (Geneva: Droz, 2013). Brucker has also analyzed Foulechat’s style in “Quelques aspects du style de Denis Foulechat, traducteur de Charles V,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 80:2 (1970): 97–106.

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after that manuscript’s completion, indicate that Policratique was not merely gathering dust in the king’s librairie.17 While it did not circulate widely, Policratique did reflect (and probably also contributed to the propagation of) the influence that Policraticus retained in the late Middle Ages, especially on the continent. With its neologistic political use of corporeal language, Foulechat’s Policratique can only have amplified the resonance of John of Salisbury’s organic metaphor.18 In the final decades of the fourteenth century and at the beginning of the fifteenth, the figure of the body politic is increasingly present in French vernacular literature, including the works of Nicole Oresme, Raoul de Presles, Jean Gerson, and Christine de Pizan. Nicole Oresme cites Policraticus, or rather, the fictional Institutio traiani, in both De moneta (c.1356) and Le livre de politiques d’Aristote (1373). Although John of Salisbury is not considered to have been a major influence on Oresme,19 the latter does build upon his predecessor’s medicalized language, treating the body politic as both a living body and an artistic representation. First, in Chapter XXV of De moneta, Oresme describes the disproportions that result from gross inequality of wealth as a fundamentally medical problem. Adhuc autem propositum aliter declaratur; ait enim Plutarchus ad Traianum imperatorem, quod ‘res publica est corpus quoddam, quod diuini numinis instar beneficio animatur et summe equitatis agitur nutu, et regitur quodam moderamine racionis.’ Est ergo res publica siue regnum sicut quoddam corpus humanum, et ita uult Aristotiles quinto Politice. Sicut ergo corpus male disponitur, quando humores excessiue fluunt ad unum eius membrum, ita quod illud membrum sepe ex hoc inflammatur et nimium ingrossatur, reliquis exsiccatis et nimis attenuatis, tolliturque debita proporcio, neque tale corpus potest diu uiuere; ita conformiter est de communitate uel regno, quando diuicie ab una ipsius parte attrahuntur ultra modum. Communitas namque uel regnum, cuius principantes in comparacione ad subditos, quantum ad diuicias potentiam et statum, enormiter crescunt, est sicut unum monstrum, sicut unus homo cuius caput est tam magnum, tam grossum, quod non potest a reliquo debili corpore sustentari.

17 Marie-Hélène Tesnière, “Un cas de censure à la librairie de Charles V: Le fragment du manuscrit Paris, BNF, Français 24287,” Cultura neolatina 65 (2005): 271–85. Brigitte Roux discusses the presentation copy’s famous frontispiece portrait of Charles V in “Charles V et Charles VI en miroir(s),” Le Moyen Âge 116 (2010): 679–95. 18 Olivier Bertrand, “Les néologismes politiques dans la première traduction française de La cité de Dieu de saint Augustin (1375),” in Voaden, Tixier, Sanchez Roura, and Rytting, The Theory and Practice of Translation, 42–43. 19 Lachaud, “Filiation and Context,” 419.



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And the same thing is said elsewhere, for Plutarch says to the emperor Trajan that ‘the state is a body, living as it were by a gift of the gods, actuated by the decision of the highest justice, and governed by the restraint of reason.’ The state or kingdom, then, is like a human body and so Aristotle will have it in Book V of the Politics. As, therefore, the body is disordered when the humours flow too freely into one member of it, so that that member is often thus inflamed and overgrown while the others are withered and shrunken and the body’s due proportions are destroyed and its life shortened; so also is a commonwealth or a kingdom when riches are unduly attracted by one part of it. For a commonwealth or kingdom whose princes, as compared with their subjects, increase beyond measure in wealth, power and position, is as it were a monster, like a man whose head is so large and heavy that the rest of his body is too weak to support it.20

Inequality is a sort of inflammation, assimilable to a humoral imbalance, and resulting in deformity. Notably, it is the head that is portrayed as being monstrously out of proportion, endangering the state as a whole. This physiologically framed critique of undue royal wealth is tempered somewhat in Oresme’s later iterations of the organic metaphor. For instance, in the French translation of De moneta known as the Traité des monnoies, sometimes (but probably wrongly) attributed to Oresme, the translator still specifies that the target of this critique is “ung vray et royal membre” (a true and royal member) or “icellui qui y seigneurit et domine” (he who governs and reigns there) – but allows for the possibility that any member of the body politic might become overinflated. Et la comparation en est assez legière à faire, car quant le prince ou aucun de quelque vocation ou dignité qu’il soit, veult attraire à luy et de fait parvient à ce qu’il assemble en grande multitude par dessus ses subgectz ou ses semblables, ou préjudice de eulx, plusieurs richesses, il est comme ung monstre à nature, si comme ung corps duquel la teste est si grosse que le residu d’icelui est si foible qu’il ne la peut soustenir.21 And the comparison is quite easy to make, for when the prince or anyone of any occupation or class whatsoever wants to attract to himself, and indeed succeeds in amassing great riches far beyond those of his subjects or peers,

20 Both text and translation are cited from The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, ed. and trans. Charles Johnson (London: Nelson, 1956), 43–44. 21 Traictié de la première invention des monnoies, ed. M. L. Wolowski (Paris: Guillaumin, 1864), 78. Emphasis added.

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to their detriment, he is like a monster against nature, like a body whose head is so huge that the rest of it is too weak to support it.

The translator insists that either a person who rules over his subjects (i.e., a prince) or a person who is one of many semblables (i.e., not the singular head of state) may become such a monster;22 he also adds that disabling inequality arises when one member of the body politic enriches himself to his subjects’ or peers’ detriment (ou préjudice de eulx), implying that there is nothing inherently monstrous about the accumulation of great wealth as long as it does not occur at other people’s expense. By the time he composes his translation of and gloss on Aristotle’s Politics,23 Oresme has retained Policraticus as a point of reference, using its organic imagery in what Nederman sees as Oresme’s most significant departure from Aristotle.24 In a gloss on Politics V.4, Oresme echoes the sentiments expressed in his earlier treatise on coinage: ... car aussi comme un corps est composé de pluseurs [membres] differens desquelz chescun a son office et funt l’un pour l’autre et pour tout le corps; semblablement est il de toute bonne communité politique. [...] Item, si comme il est recité en Policratique, Plutarcus escript un livre a l’empereur Trajan 22 The phrase quant le prince ou aucun de quelque vocation ou dignité qu’il soit appears to be a misreading of the Latin principantes in comparacione ad subditos, quantum ad diuicias potentiam et statum, enormiter crescunt, a misunderstanding that, to my mind, substantiates the claim that Oresme is not the translator of the Traité des monnoies. On the question of attribution, see Louis Blancard, “Sur la traduction française du Traité des monnaies d’Oresme,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Marseille 1892: 543–51; Blancard dates the translation to the mid-fifteenth century. Serge Lusignan, however, attributes the translation to Oresme in Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue française aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 155 and in “Nicole Oresme traducteur et la pensée de la langue française savante,” in Souffrin and Segonds, Nicole Oresme, 93. 23 On the nature of Oresme’s glosses, see Serge Lusignan, “Lire, indexer et gloser: Nicole Oresme et la ‘Politique’ d’Aristote,” in L’écrit dans la société médiévale: Divers aspects de sa pratique du XIe au XVe siècle, ed. Caroline Bourlet and Annie Dufour (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1991), 167–81. 24 Cary J. Nederman, “Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Middle Ages,” Pensiero politico medievale 2 (2004): 69. On this point Nederman differs from Susan M. Babbitt, for whom Oresme “did not make very much of this analogy, but the text of Aristotle gave him little occasion to do so.” “Oresme’s Livre de Politiques and the France of Charles V,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 75 (1985): 94. Babbitt does later note, however, that most of Oresme’s references to the metaphor of the body politic are his additions, in the gloss rather than the text (95n136). To these Joel Kaye adds the observation that in the gloss on Politics V.4 cited here, Oresme combines bodily images from Policraticus and from Galen. Kaye, A History of Balance, 360n63.



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ouquel il dit [...] que la chose publique est .i. corps qui est aussi comme animé et vivifié d’un benefice d’un don divin. [...] Et apres est escript comment en ce corps, ce est assavoir en la chose publique, le prince tient le lieu de chief et lez prevosts et les juges tiennent le lieu des oreilles et des oylz. [...] Et donques a propos, tout aussi comme .i. corps est mal disposé quant .i. des membres attrait a soy trop du nourrissement et des humeurs; car par ce il est fait trop grant oultre proportion deue et est trop enflé et les autres membres sunt trop petis et aussi comme sechiés et desolés par deffaute de nourrissement. Et pour ce, tel corps ne peut longuement vivre. [...] Et tele policie est aussi comme .i. monstre et comme un corps malade. (209) …for just as a body is composed of several different members, each having its own function and acting in service of each other and of the entire body, so it is with any good political community. […] Item, as it is recounted in Policraticus, Plutarch wrote a book for the emperor Trajan in which he said […] that the republic is a body that is as animated and enlivened by the favor of a divine gift. […] And then it is written how in this body, that is, in the republic, the prince occupies the place of the head and the provosts and judges occupy the place of the ears and eyes. […] And so, on this subject, just as a body is ill disposed when one of its members attracts too much nourishment and too many humors – for thus it is made too large, beyond all due proportion, and it is too swollen, and the other members are too small, as if they were dried up and ruined for lack of nourishment, and for this reason such a body cannot long survive – so, too, is such a polity [in which a few have become excessively enriched] like a monster and like a sick body.

The body deformed by grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth is still monstrous, but it is no longer a monster with a giant head. The .i. des membres unfairly monopolizing resources remains unspecified, so as not to conflict with Aristotle’s example of a disproportionately large foot, as expressed earlier in the same chapter. Car se il ne estoit ainsi la bonne disposicion du corps seroit corrompue, si comme quant le pey seroit de .iiii. coutes et l’autre corps ne seroit que de . ii. palmes. Et aucune foiz cest corps seroit transmué en forme d’autre beste, ce est assavoir se il cresceit hors proportion, non pas tant seulement en quantité mes en qualité. For if it were not thus, the proper disposition of the body would be corrupted, as if the foot were four cubits long and the rest of the body were only two hands long. And sometimes this body would be transformed into the shape of another beast, namely if it grew out of proportion, not just in quantity but in quality.

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In his gloss, Oresme seeks to account for this language of transmutation by assigning Aristotle’s image to the domain of alchemy, superstition, and above all, metaphor, fabulation, literary license. Ce est a dire se sa complexion estoit muee en complexion d’autre espece de beste; mes ce est impossible naturelment, sans corruption de tel corps. Et pour ce, Aristote parle ici sub condition et pour exemple et non pas absoluement. Et nientmoins, aucuns veulent dire que aussi comme par alquimie un metal est mué en autre, que semblablement par art une beste peut estre muee en autre espece de beste. Et sunt livres de ce et est art magique. Et Saint Augustin ou livre De Civitate Dei recite de pluseurs teles transmutations, et les repute incredibles. Et tels sunt les fables de Ovide. (209) This means if its complexion was changed into the complexion of another species of beast; but this cannot occur naturally, without the corruption of said body. Therefore, here Aristotle is speaking conditionally, as an example, and not absolutely. Nevertheless, some people wish to say that through magic a beast can be changed into another species of beast, just as in alchemy one metal is changed into another. There are books about this, and it is a magic art. Saint Augustine, in his book De civitate dei, tells of many such transformations and deems them implausible. Such are the fables of Ovid.

Oresme calls attention to the fictitiousness of Aristotle’s image, just as he calls attention to the doubly literary nature of the organic metaphor (si comme il est recité en Policratique, Plutarcus escript un livre a l’empereur Trajan). Furthermore, unlike his citation of Policraticus in De moneta, here Oresme also underscores the status of the organic metaphor as fiction by inscribing it within a discussion of artistic proportion.25 Glossing Aristotle’s premise (in Politics V.4) that “un corps est composé de ses parties et convient qu’elles cressent et soient faites grandes proportionelment afin que la commensuration et la mesure des unes parties ou resgard des autres demeure et soit gardee” (a body is composed of its parts and it is best that they grow and are enlarged proportionally such that the scale and measure of the parts in relation to one another be maintained, 209), Oresme adds an observation not about bodies, but about simulacra of bodies: “Et ceste proportion doivent savoir ceulz qui funt les ymages” (And those who make images should know about this proportion, 209). With this comment, Oresme harks back to III.19, in which Aristotle states (within a discussion of the exile of excessively powerful individuals) that artists must keep the members of their human figures in proportion in order for their 25 This is in keeping with a recurrent preoccupation in Oresme’s works: on Oresme’s interest in proportion, across his literary corpus, see Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 217.



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creations to be beautiful (143–44). This is a metaphor that is illustrated in a number of royal manuscripts made in the 1370s, as Claire Richter Sherman has shown.26 These images, Sherman explains, depict an artist erasing a disproportionate hand or arm on a nude human figure; the figure’s nudity, she argues, indicates that it is meant to be understood as an artwork, and more specifically as a statue.27 Similarly, the earliest and most widely known depiction of the rarely illustrated organic metaphor, in the mid-fourteenth-century Avis aus roys (Morgan M456, fol. 5), depicts a naked “body politic” with a clear basis in a specific iconographic convention – in this case, the zodiacal man [Figure 3].28 The body is adorned only with a crown and with phylacteries identifying the metaphorical significances of the members.29 These images draw attention to the fundamental artifice of the body politic, which is not a real human body, but an art object, and a self-consciously created and revised one at that. The reference to ceulz qui funt les ymages and the illustrations of the artists at work lay the groundwork for Oresme’s striking declaration, in an exceptionally long gloss on VII.10,30 that “royalme est en partie une chose naturele et en partie artificiele” (a kingdom is partly a natural thing and partly an artificial one, 291). Likewise, while the metaphor of the body politic seems to be thoroughly “organic,” Oresme’s association of that metaphor with sculpture indicates that John of Salisbury’s “living” human body is now understood, in the late fourteenth century, as an inorganic fabrication. As the proportions of the organic body politic are increasingly described in reference to ideal artistic proportions, the living body of the state becomes ever less distinct from a sculpted image. Little wonder, then, that as it penetrates French vernacular poetry, John of Salisbury’s metaphor should converge with another widely known metaphor reifying political history in anthropomorphic sculptural form: that of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue.31 Although the Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 214–20. Ibid., 214–15. Ibid., 216–17. See also Michael Camille, “The King’s New Bodies: An illustrated mirror for Princes in the Morgan Library,” in Künstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange: Akten des 28. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 15–20 Juli, 1992, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 393–405. Julien Lepot points out that this is the earliest known representation of society as a human body: Lepot, “Le coeur équivoque.” 29 The text on the phylacteries is reproduced in Lachaud, “Filiation and Context,” 418 n200. The passage, which this image illustrates, is drawn heavily from the anonymous Liber de informatione principum later translated into French by Jean Golein: Lepot, “Le coeur équivoque,” 277. 30 This is the longest gloss in the whole book, according to Babbitt, “Oresme’s Livre de Politiques,” 12. 31 While John of Salisbury does allude in passing to “la statue que Nabugodonosor vit, la quelle figuroit l’ordenance des royaumes de diverses couleurs et pluseurs forces” (the statue that Nebuchadnezzar saw, which depicted the order of kingdoms of different colors and varied strengths, VI.27, 262), he does not connect it explicitly to the body politic. 26 27 28

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organic metaphor has been discussed in relation to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in some recent scholarship,32 neither the mechanisms nor the implications of this metaphoric convergence and transfer have been amply explored. Similarly, Anna Zayaruznaya has recently published a thoughtful and long overdue “cultural history of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue”, providing a brief overview of exegetical and poetic traditions, but this account does not aim to untangle the statue’s particular political resonances.33 Anxieties about statues as proxies for legitimate (“natural”) royal power, coupled with Nebuchadnezzar’s symbolic overdetermination (as an emblem of pride, madness, and politically significant dreams), make his statue a particularly potent site for political metaphor. When we dig deeper into the overlap between the two anthropomorphic metaphors within the burgeoning genre of political literature, we find that their conflation opens new avenues, medical and mineral, for the representation of power. The metallic parts of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, when merged with the notion of king as “head” of state, create fertile literary ground for the characterization of royal breakdowns as a manifestation of mental rust. In Daniel 2 the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar has a dream, which he then forgets; he summons all of his wise men, commanding them to tell him what he dreamed about and to interpret that dream for him. Daniel is the only person able to do so. He explains that the king has dreamed of a great statue with a golden head, silver arms and chest, bronze abdomen and thighs, iron legs, and feet of iron mixed with clay. At the end of the dream a great boulder detached itself from a mountain and rolled down, destroying the statue. Daniel tells the king that the statue represents four successive kingdoms, with that of Nebuchadnezzar being the first, golden one; the boulder is the eternal kingdom of God that will replace these earthly powers. This passage’s vision of translatio imperii is foundational to Christian historiography, as Jennifer Harris has recently pointed out.34 Indeed, it is through the historicized reading of the dream-statue in Peter Comestor’s bestselling textbook Historia scholastica

32 The connection is considered most fully in Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 281–97; and incidentally in Lynn Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2013), though Arner mainly glides from one metaphor to the other, apparently free-associating. 33 Anna Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous Art, 142–72. 34 Jennifer A. Harris, “The Bible and the Meaning of History in the Middle Ages,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 85.



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Fig. 3 The Body Politic, Avis aus roys (New York, Morgan M. 456, fol. 5r), c.1347–50 (c.1170) that most late medieval French Bibles present this story.35 Peter continues a long exegetical tradition going back to Jerome’s commentaries, identifying the silver part of the statue as representing the Medes and the Persians, the bronze as Alexander’s Macedonia, the iron as Rome, and the mixture of iron and clay as an evocation of civil discord; the boulder is Christ and his church.36 Comestor “moralizes” the materials of which the statue is made: bronze is a suitable material for the representation of Greece because bronze produces a pure sound when struck, just as the Greeks were eloquent; iron corresponds to the Romans because, in an echo of Isidore of Seville’s formulation, “ferrum domat omnia metalla” (iron conquers all metals). Comestor’s historically grounded reading also resonates with Ovid’s treatment of the four ages of history in the

35 See Mark J. Clark, The Making of the Historia scholastica, 1150–1200 (Toronto: PIMS, 2015). On medieval Bibles’ debt to the Historia scholastica, see James H. Morey, “Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible,” Speculum 68 (1993): 6–35; Guy Lobrichon, “Le Mangeur au festin. L’Historia scholastica aux mains de ses lecteurs: Glose, Bibles en images, Bibles historiales (fin XIIe–XIVe siècles),” 289–312 in Pierre le Mangeur ou Pierre de Troyes, maître du XIIe siècle, ed. Gilbert Dahan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 36 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, in Patrologia latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 198 (Paris: Garnier, 1855), col. 1449.

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Metamorphoses.37 It is noteworthy, too, that Comestor treats the statue’s head and feet differently than its other parts: the head is assimilated to a king (“Tu es caput aureum”) rather than to an empire, while the clay of the feet is linked to a political concept rather than a historical entity. The statue and its materials are clearly available for multiple modes of interpretation. Peter Comestor’s commentary, like Daniel 2 more generally, thereby “brings to the forefront of the reader’s mind the link between metaphor and interpretation.”38 In the late thirteenth century Guiart des Moulins renders the Historia scholastica in French as the Bible historiale (1295).39 This, and devotional (and especially typological) texts like the Speculum humanae salvationis,40 contribute to the wide dissemination of the story in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. Thus, while it makes fewer appearances in political treatises than does the organic metaphor, the dream-statue is illustrated in many more images thanks to its appearance in the Bible historiale and the Speculum humanae salvationis and its vernacular translations, much-copied works that tend to be quite richly illustrated.41 We should also note that while the Speculum humanae salvationis offers an apolitical spin on Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, Raoul de 37 Joel Fredell notes this resemblance, with specific reference to John Gower’s treatment of the statue: “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia et Humanistica 22 (1995): 65. 38 Tim Meadowcroft, “Metaphor, Narrative, Interpretation, and Reader in Daniel 2–5,” Narrative 8:3 (2000): 263. 39 On the Bible historiale, see Samuel Berger, La Bible française au Moyen Âge, 157–220; Morey, “Peter Comestor,” 21–24; Clive R. Sneddon, “The Old French Bible: The First Complete Vernacular Bible in Western Europe,” in Boynton and Reilly, The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 296–314; Xavier-Laurent Salvador, “Guyart des Moulins, traducteur de Pierre Comestor,” in Dahan, Pierre le Mangeur, 313–27; Rosemarie Potz McGerr, “Guyart Desmoulins, the Vernacular Master of Histories, and his Bible Historiale,” Viator 14 (1983): 211–44. 40 Paul Perdrizet, Étude sur le Speculum humanae salvationis (Paris: Champion, 1908); Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: “Speculum humanae salvationis,” 1324–1500 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). David Wells notes that the treatment of Nebuchadnezzar in the Speculum humanae salvationis and its vernacular translations gives rise to more positive interpretations of the Babylonian king in later medieval literature: David Wells, “The medieval Nebuchadnezzar. The Exegetical Tradition of Daniel IV and its Significance for the Ywain Romances and for German Vernacular Literature,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien: Jahrbuch des Instituts für Frühmittelalterforschung der Universität Münster 16 (1982): 427, 430. 41 Penelope Doob discusses illustrations of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, 75–76. Several images are reproduced in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous Art. Éléonore Fournié, L’iconographie de la Bible historiale (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012) notes that Daniel tends to be richly illustrated in the Bible historiale (22) and that the statue-dream is “un thème fréquent pour illustrer le début du livre de Daniel, qui est l’un des héros les plus populaires de la Bible” (a frequent theme used to illustrate the beginning of the book of Daniel, who is one of the most popular heroes of the Bible, 65).



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Presles’s Bible (1377), translated for Charles V – in contrast to Peter Comestor’s reading of the statue, and to Guiart des Moulins’s translation – highlights the image’s availability as a metaphor for contemporary geopolitical practices.42 Peter Comestor reads the feet of iron mixed with clay as indicators of civil strife: “Porro quia vidisti partem pedum testeam, partem ferream, sicut ferrum non potest misceri testae, sic erunt in eo civiles discordiae, et pars solidabitur, pars altera conteretur” (Next, because you saw part of the foot as earthenware and part as iron, since iron cannot mix with earthenware, thus there will be civil discord, and one part will be strengthened, and the other part will be crushed). Guiart des Moulins renders the passage rather faithfully, but Raoul de Presles offers a major addition.43 Et ce que tu as veu des piez et des doiz dont une partie est de testz de poz et l’autre de fer, ce signifie que le royaume sera divisé et sa force par les batailles et dissencions civiles socieles et intestines, et par ambicions par lesqueles le royaume des romains fu ramené aussi come a nient. Mais ce qui ystra de la plante de fer selon ce que tu as veu le fer merlé au test et a la boue. Et les doiz des piez en partie de fer et en partie de boue signifie que le royaume sera en partie ferme et en partie destruit par la force des richesces et de leurs puissances. Et ce que tu as veu le fer merlé du test qui est fait de terre et de boue sera qu’il se conioindront ensemble par humaine lignee en faisant mariages pour oster les divisions dont le royaume estoit affebloié. Mais il ne s’entretenront pas pource que par teles choses ne seront pas ostees les divisions des courages, aussi comme le fer ne se puet conioindre ne merler a la terre ne au test qui en est fait. (BnF MS fr. 158, fol. 281v–282r) 42 Many of Raoul de Presles’s textual interventions, especially those that allude to more contemporary events, are derived from the commentaries of Nicholas of Lyra – but such is not the case in the excerpt at hand. According to Mark Zier, “Nicholas’ use of such relatively recent historical illustrations [as Thomas à Becket] sets his work apart from earlier commentaries on Daniel, which rarely made reference to post-biblical history at all”: Mark Zier, “Nicholas of Lyra on the Book of Daniel,” in Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, ed. Philip D. W. Krey and Lesley Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 189. On Raoul de Presles generally, including his dependence on Nicholas of Lyra, see Berger, La Bible française au Moyen Âge, 244–58. 43 Anne Lombard-Jourdan notes Raoul’s predilection for digression, opining that “Le roi le choisit pour établir la version française de la Cité de Dieu et de la Bible parce qu’il appréciait son ton de plume doctoral et les commentaires et digressions qu’il ajoutait aux textes” (the king chose him to establish the French version of the City of God and the Bible because he appreciated his doctoral tone and the commentaries and digressions he added to the texts). Lombard-Jourdan, “À propos de Raoul de Presles,” 193. Lombard-Jourdan is perhaps alluding to Raoul’s prologue to Leviticus, in which he says the king has given him to understand that he would prefer more commentary in addition to his straightforward translation: the text is reproduced in Berger, La Bible française au Moyen Âge, 247.

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And what you saw of the feet and the toes, of which part is made of potsherds and part is iron, this signifies that the kingdom and its strength will be divided by civil, social, and internal battles and strife, and by ambitions, by which the kingdom of the Romans was also virtually brought down to nothing. But these will come from the iron sole, as you have seen, the iron mixed with clay and mud. And the toes being partly iron and partly mud signifies that the kingdom will partly hold firm and will partly be destroyed by the strength and power of the wealthy. And what you saw, the iron mixed with potsherds (which are made from earth and mud), will mean that they will join together through human lineage, using marriages to remove the divisions by which the kingdom was weakened. But they will not hold together because deeply personal divisions cannot be removed by such things, just as iron cannot be united or mixed with earth nor with potsherds made from it.

The political interpretation of the dream-statue has been extended to the present day, rather than ending with the Romans.44 The illusion of a prophecy being explained to an ancient king has also been disrupted: in the rest of the passage Daniel mostly remembers to talk about the successive kingdoms in the future tense, but here, while the strife and civil war and strategic marriages take place in the future, the Roman empire has “also” already been brought to its downfall. Raoul de Presles is moving away from a strictly chronological interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and toward one that seeks to establish the relevance of the “grant statue en fantasie ou en ymaginacion” (great statue in the fantasy or imagination, BnF MS fr. 158, fol. 281r) to contemporary sociopolitical concerns. The statue’s pertinence in a fourteenth-century French cultural context is also illustrated in poems by Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut. Anna Zayaruznaya has offered lucid and insightful readings of Philippe de Vitry’s motets Cum statua / Hugo (dated somewhere between 1315 and the 1340s) and Phi millies / O creator (1340s or 1350s, probably addressed to Jehan de la Mote), both of which weaponize Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in service of the lyrical and musical takedown of an adversary: in the former a comparison of Hugo to the fragmented statue is clearly intended as an insult, while in the latter the statue

44 This marks a divergence from previous commentaries, including Nicholas of Lyra’s: see Nicolaus de Lyra, Postilla super totam Bibliam (Frankfurt: Minerva, 1971), vol. 2, CCC, fol i. Similarly to Raoul de Presles, John Gower, in his slightly later Confessio amantis, will identify the clay feet with the present day. See Russell A. Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel,” in John Gower, Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 159–87.



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offers a vehicle for the prediction of France’s ultimate triumph over the English.45 In a lyric complainte within Guillaume de Machaut’s roughly contemporary Remede de Fortune, the statue serves as a figure for Fortune herself. Nabugodonosor figure Qu’il vit en songe une estature Grande et haute, qui la figure Horrible avoit, Et la teste d’or riche et pure, Les bras, le pis d’argenteüre, Ventre, cuisses de sa faiture D’arain portoit, Jambes de fer sus qu’elle estoit, Des piez l’une part fer estoit, L’autre terre. Et encor veoit Que d’aventure Une pierre sans main venoit Qui parmi les piez le feroit, Si qu’en pourre l’acraventoit Et en ordure. L’estature que ci pourpose Estre ne me semble autre chose Que Fortune qui ne repose Heure ne jour. La teste a d’or, se dire l’ose, Ou toute richesce est enclose, Ce samble aus musars qu’elle alose (223–25, vv. 1001–23) Nebuchadnezzar relates that in a dream he saw a statue, large and tall, with a hideous face, its head of rich, fine gold, its arms and chest of silverwork,

45 Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous Art, 107–38; on Philippe de Vitry’s exchange with Jehan de la Mote, see also Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 129; Elizaveta Strakhov, “Tending to One’s Garden: Deschamps’s ‘Ballade to Chaucer’ Reconsidered,” Medium Aevum 85 (2016): 236–58.

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its belly and thighs were made of bronze; it was standing on legs of iron, its feet were part iron and part earthenware. And then he saw that by chance a stone, untouched by any hand, came down and struck its feet, and shattered it to dust and refuse. The statue he presents here seems to me to be none other than Fortune, who doesn’t rest for a day, or even an hour. Her head, in which all wealth is enclosed, is gold, if I dare say so, or so it seems to the fools she flatters (222–24)

Fortune looks beautiful at first glance, but is actually built on an unstable foundation. Like Philippe de Vitry (and later, and more famously, John Gower), Machaut focuses on the statue as an emblem of fragmentation and ruin. Machaut’s novel use of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream46 is not overtly political, but it does include an idea that recurs, within a politicized context, in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme: the idea that the statue’s head may not truly be made of gold, but that it might just look that way to the unwise. Due to its situation within the complainte, in illustrated manuscripts of the Remede de Fortune the Nebuchadnezzar story and its illumination typically appear right after a more conventional image of Fortune.47 This is notably the case in the celebrated manuscript C (BnF, MS fr. 1586), whose depiction of Fortune and her wheel was discussed in Chapter One.48 In that image, the seated poet is enclosed within a crenellated wall situated above a depiction of Fortune and her gears; in the next illumination, the recumbent Nebuchadnezzar sleeps in a bed and the metallic statue appears to the right. The poet, depicted 46 On the novelty of Machaut’s interpretation, see Kevin Brownlee, “Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune: The Lyric Anthology as Narrative Progression,” in The Ladder of High Designs: Structure and Interpretation of the French Lyric Sequence, ed. Doranne Fenoaltea and David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 5. 47 See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 252 and 275. 48 See above, pp. 66–68.



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in the act of writing, may be seen as analogous to the dreaming king; the statue, with its integration of diverse metals into a humanoid shape, is the product of human imagination.49 With the textual and iconographic emphasis on the statue’s fragmentation and materiality, Machaut and the artist responsible for these images50 reinforce the idea that Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, like Fortune’s system of wheels, is a technological artefact that can implicate humanity within its parts. This, then, is the cultural status of the organic metaphor of the body politic and of Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of the statue in mid-fourteenth-century France: both are well known, but they clearly belong to separate traditions. The two images are superficially similar to one another in that they present two humanoid figures for the political order, each of which segments the body and assigns different values or functions to the various parts. There are obvious distinctions between the two models, though – distinctions that would seem to work against the integration of the two images. The organic metaphor offers a synchronic view of a single government, whereas Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s statue as revelatory of a diachronic view of successive governments. Beyond this fundamental contrast, the two figures also embody the political order through different, often complementary mechanisms. The organic metaphor imagines a functioning human body (as its commonly accepted name indicates); Nebuchadnezzar’s metaphor centers on an inorganic simulacrum of a human body. The bodily members of the organic metaphor are interdependent; the segments of the statue, especially in the vernacular poetic tradition, are distinct and disjointed. The organic metaphor appears characteristically in treatises with an explicit political orientation; Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is mainly found in Biblical texts and commentaries. The organic metaphor, rarely illustrated, is transmitted almost exclusively in text; Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is treated ekphrastically, a textual image of a sculpted image, and it is in turn represented in dozens of painted manuscript images. In sum, the literary trajectories between these two bodies politic appear thoroughly independent of one another – until the middle of the fourteenth century, when the evident distinctions between these metaphoric bodies break down. Then, the body’s susceptibility to disease and the statue’s malleability51 will allow the two metaphors’ members to be recast and reconstituted as one. Huot, From Song to Book, 252. On the Master of the Remede de Fortune, see Avril, “Les manuscrits enluminés,” 123–24. 51 On the malleability of idols, see Nicolette Zeeman, “The Idol of the Text,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43–62. 49 50

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Uns fermes estatus: The Inorganic Body Politic in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme Nebuchadnezzar’s statue comes to embody the synchronic political order in Guillaume de Deguileville’s influential Pèlerinage de l’âme (1355–58), the second and most politically engaged work in his immensely popular Pèlerinage trilogy. The Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville (or Digulleville), the “moine de Châalis,” was a prolifically active writer in the 1330s and again in the 1350s.52 He owed his considerable late medieval literary fame primarily to the first redaction of his Pèlerinage de vie humaine (1330–31; hereafter PVH1), a dream-vision explicitly framed as a spiritual rewrite of the Roman de la Rose. The enthusiastic reception of this work is demonstrated both in the large number of mss and early print editions and in the extensive marginal notes that tend to appear in the manuscripts.53 Some twenty-five years after the publication of PVH1 Guillaume produced a second version (PVH2): in it he takes a more severe stance toward the Rose, reorients his dream-vision toward a more clerical audience, and privileges written rather than oral modes of communication.54 Shortly after rewriting the Pèlerinage de vie humaine, Guillaume de Deguileville composed the Pèlerinage de l’âme (PA, 1355–58), then the Pèlerinage de Jésus-Christ (PJC, 1358). The three Pèlerinages circulated as a trilogy, or (rarely, in the case of the latter two poems) as individual works; their broad popularity is also evinced by allusions to the trilogy in other media, such as the marginal illuminations of the Fitzwilliam Hours (c.1415–31).55 While PJC 52 The author is usually called Deguileville in Anglo-American criticism, and Digulleville in French. The merits of both spellings have been amply discussed; I have opted for Deguileville in accordance with manuscript tradition and acrostics embedded within works. The best basic reference on Deguileville remains Faral, “Guillaume de Digulleville.” 53 Géraldine Veysseyre, “Manuscrits à voir, manuscrits à lire, manuscrits lus: Les marginalia du Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine comme indices de sa réception médiévale,” in The “Pèlerinage” Allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville: Tradition, Authority and Influence, ed. Marco Nievergelt and Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 47–63. 54 There is a substantial body of work analyzing the differences between the two versions; for a concise overview see the introduction to Deguileville, Le Livre du pèlerin de vie humaine. Additionally, I refer the reader to Kellie Robertson’s brilliant reading of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine in which she adduces the allegorical persona of Nature as “another primary node of Deguileville’s dissatisfaction with [Jean de Meun’s] poetic and philosophical vision.” Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 179. 55 See the extensive discussion of one marginal narrative cycle in Richard K. Emmerson, “A ‘Large Order of the Whole:’ Intertextuality and Interpictoriality in the Hours of Isabella Stuart,” Studies in Iconography 28 (2007): 51–110. See also Richard K. Emmerson, “Translating Images. Image and Poetic Reception in French, English and Latin Versions of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Trois Pèlerinages,” in Poetry, Place, and Gender: Studies in



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has a relatively restricted manuscript presence,56 the Pèlerinage de l’âme clearly enjoyed a wider circulation, appearing in 50 known manuscripts – and in contexts that underline its importance in bridging the gap between spiritual poem and political tract.57 Moreover, several of the earliest copies of PA were owned by Charles V and his brothers. The king owned five manuscripts of Pèlerinage texts,58 of which two contained the trilogy and two contained only PA; Stéphanie Le Briz and Géraldine Veysseyre have noted that although PVH was copied and circulated far more than PA overall, PA is overrepresented in the king’s librairie.59 This overrepresentation indicates a particular interest in PA, as do scholarly glosses that appear to link the poem to Charles V’s translation program.60 The learned PA invites such paratextual apparatus with its rich Medieval Culture in Honor of Helen Damico, ed. Catherine E. Karkov (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), 275–301. See also Elizabeth L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty, and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 114–51. 56 Maureen Boulton, “Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de Jésus Christ: A Poem of Courtly Devotion,” in The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 125–44; and Maureen Boulton, Sacred Fictions of Medieval France: Narrative Theology in the Lives of Christ and the Virgin, 1150–1500 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015). 57 In about half of the extant manuscripts (twenty-six of the fifty), PA appears alongside the other two Pèlerinages, usually in medial position. Another sixteen manuscripts contain PVH and PA as a set, without PJC. In the rest, PA either appears alone or in the company of shorter devotional texts (notably in BnF MS fr. 1648) or encyclopedic or political ones (Sidrac in BnF MS fr. 19186; Gossuin de Metz’s Image du monde in Phillipps 3655). The essential reference is Veysseyre’s list of manuscripts in Guillaume de Digulleville: Les pèlerinages allégoriques, ed. Frédéric Duval and Fabienne Pomel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 425–53. On PA’s cotexts, see also Frédéric Duval, “La mise en prose du Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville par Jean Galopes,” Romania 128 (2010): 425–26. On the reordering of the trilogy in some manuscripts, see the cited works by Maureen Boulton and, on the Arras manuscript in particular, Clark and Sheingorn, “Were Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pelerinages Plays?” 58 These are numbered 1155–1159 in Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, vol. 2, 189. 59 As Le Briz and Veysseyre write, “les traces documentaires attestent que le PVH était moins bien représenté dans la librairie de Charles V qu’il ne l’était ailleurs et que le PA y était plus prisé que de coutume” (documentary evidence attests that PVH was less well represented in Charles V’s library than it was elsewhere, and that PA was more than usually valued there). “Les notes marginales du manuscrit Paris, BNF, fr. 1648: Quand un clerc glose le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville,” in Bassano, Dehoux, and Vincent, Le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville, 27. 60 The glosses first appearing in BnF MS fr. 1648 consist of references to source texts, including references to a number of works that were being translated for Charles V around the same time the PA manuscript was being copied. For further details see Le Briz and Veysseyre, “Les notes marginales.”

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interweaving of source material. It also invites political readings. In his seminal “Guillaume de Digulleville, moine de Châalis,” Edmond Faral draws connections between PA and a number of political scandals that started in the late 1340s, such as Raoul de Brienne’s treason; more generally, Faral sees in this second Pèlerinage “l’esprit des États généraux de 1356.”61 Recently, Aurelle Lavasseur has argued that PA’s extended political critique, which she sees reaching its fullest development in the passage describing Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, reflects the aftermath of the French defeat at Poitiers.62 The Pèlerinage de l’âme imagines the same narrator who had awoken at the end of PVH2, once again falling asleep. This is an explicit continuation of the earlier vision: “deppendant / Est de l’autre songe devant / Pour continuer le chemin” (it is dependent on the other, previous dream, continuing its path, 2, vv. 27–29).63 After the pilgrim’s death his soul is claimed by both Satan and the pilgrim’s guardian angel. He undergoes a trial, during which things are not looking so good for our pilgrim – or rather, they are not sounding good, as the soul can only hear the proceedings, which are blocked from his view. Thanks to divine intervention, the soul is sent to Purgatory. Even as he is being tormented, his guardian angel takes him on a tour of Hell and Purgatory. Interspersed with descriptions of the condemned souls’ torments are lyric insertions,64 plus a number of episodic vignettes such as debates between the body and soul, and between the dry and green trees. Toward the end of his tour the soul speaks with Doctrine who, as she licks souls into shape, explains the care one must take in governing one’s own body. The soul inquires about two statues he sees: one represents a mounted knight, and the other turns out to be the statue of which Nebuchadnezzar dreamed [Figure 4]. The end of the angel’s explanation of these images coincides with the end of the soul’s purgation; his punishment over, he comes to heaven, and again the narrator awakens.

Faral, “Guillaume de Digulleville,” 115–17. Aurelle Lavasseur, “Dénoncer la tyrannie. Le jeu de l’antagonisme entre l’étranger et le naturel dans le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville,” in Bassano, Dehoux, and Vincent, Le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville, 39–48. 63 Graham Robert Edwards has shown that PA is clearly established as a continuation of PVH2 and not of PVH1. “Making Sense of Deguileville’s Autobiographical Project: The Evidence of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Latin 14845,” in Nievergelt and Kamath, The “Pèlerinage” Allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville, 129–41. Even more fascinating, John Moreau has found that during the trial scene in PA the pilgrim’s accusers cite material from PVH1 while his defenders cite PVH2. “‘Ce mauvais tabellion:’ Satanic and Marian Textuality in Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme,” in Nievergelt and Kamath, The “Pèlerinage” Allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville, 113–28. 64 On Deguileville’s lyric insertions, see Helen Phillips, “Chaucer and Deguileville: The ABC in Context,” Medium Aevum 62:1 (1993): 1–19; Boulton, “Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de Jésus Christ.” 61 62



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The descriptions of the two statues are the culmination of the soul’s time in Purgatory; after these final lessons he is cleansed. Both of the statue descriptions offer a peculiar manipulation of textual precedent: while the equestrian monument exploits both romance conventions and intertextual resonances with PVH, the much longer explication of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue forges a new, composite image from two textual traditions that each, in turn, present a composite political metaphor. The soul’s guardian angel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s statue by glossing it with the organic metaphor. That is, the soul sees an apparently concrete reproduction of the statue of which Nebuchadnezzar dreamed, but the extensive explanation he receives is actually a metallic version of John of Salisbury’s organic metaphor. Despite the offhandedness with which this metaphorical commingling has been treated in recent scholarship,65 it is in fact quite inventive, and emerges as part of a broader pattern within the PA: it is the most noteworthy in a series of images combining organic and inorganic, metallic or mechanical elements. Together, these composite images, functioning simultaneously as “assemblage discursif et unité organique” (discursive assemblage and organic unit),66 interrogate the spiritual stakes of political allegory. At the close of his dialogue with Doctrine, the soul sees two ymages (236, v. 7208) atop a masonry structure. One is an equestrian statue of a knight equipped for battle; the other resembles Nebuchadnezzar’s famous vision. L’autre ymage ne savoie Jugier, se n’en demandoie, Fors tant quë il m’estoit avis Qu’a l’estatue que jadis Nabugodonasor songoit En toutes choses ressembloit. En quantite estoit bien grant A vn regart espouentant Qui chief avoit d’or affine, Bras et pis d’argent espure, Le ventre et les cuisses d’arain, Les jambes de fer tout a plain, Les pies se mipartissoient De terre et de fer dont estoient. (236–237, vv. 7215–28) 65 Gilles Lecuppre, for one, dismisses Deguileville’s image as a slightly inflected variation on a traditional metaphor. “La société statufiée. L’idéal politique de Guillaume de Digulleville,” in Bassano, Dehoux, and Vincent, Le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville, 50. 66 Philippe Maupeu, “Statut de l’image rhétorique et de l’image peinte dans le Pèlerinage de vie humaine de Guillaume de Deguileville,” Le Moyen Âge 114:3–4 (2008): 527.

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I did not know what to make of the other statue, but it seemed to me to resemble in every way the statue that Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about long ago. It was of great size, with a fearful gaze; it had a head of fine gold, arms and chest of pure silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs entirely of iron, and particolored feet of earth and iron.

The angel confirms that this is indeed the statue from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. His explication differs from Daniel’s from the very beginning, though: he interprets the statue as a figure for good government, rather than as a figure for political history. Moreover, he shifts the statue from dream to concrete reality. Cil roy Nabugodonasor Celle estatue a ce chief d’or En la maniere qu’il la vit, Figurer et mectre ci fist, A fin que roys et empereurs Y preignent leur exemplaire Pour bon gouvernement faire. (238, vv. 7255–62) King Nebuchadnezzar had the golden-headed statue created and placed here just as he saw it, so that kings and emperors might take it as an exemplar of good statecraft.

The angel is claiming that Nebuchadnezzar actually had the statue built, “translating” the dreamed object into a concrete artifact. The statue, like the government itself, constitutes the king’s portrait, s’estatue et s’ymage (239, v. 7302), s’ymage et painturee (239, v. 7304). Yet in describing Nebuchadnezzar’s commissioning of the image, the angel refers to it as a golden-headed statue (Celle estatue a ce chief d’or, 238, v. 7256), erasing its composite nature to underline its value, stability, and integrity. Still, the multiple substances that make up the statue have already been enumerated, albeit briefly, and they will soon be described at length. Despite the elision of the statue’s less noble materials, they are still present. The angel’s introductory speech about the statue’s origins overtly emphasizes its stability and integrity, even as the fault lines between the statue’s disparate elements still show. The angel explains that a statue is by definition estable, Establie permanable, Ou que tousjours doit remanoir Sens soi remuer ne mouvoir; Dont on dit quë estatue Est cil qui ne se remue. (238, vv. 7271–76)



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Fig. 4 The Two Statues, Guillaume de Deguileville, Pèlerinage de l’âme (Paris, BnF MS fr. 377, fol. 154), c.1395 stable, permanently established, or should always remain without being moved or displaced; therefore they say a statue is that which is not moved.

This statement ushers in extended wordplay on the vocabulary of stability, statue, and statute. The angel thereby characterizes government as a textual system of laws, or statutes,67 that constitute the portrait, or statue, of their maker: for “L’ymage du roy proprement / Se monstre en son gouvernement” (238, vv. 7285–6). A king also forms his people in his own image: “Quel est le roy d’une cite, / Tel est le peuple en verite” (239, vv. 7297–98). The statue’s stability, and its resemblance to its subject, permit it to serve as a blueprint for good government: a portrait so faithful that it allows the viewer to “recognize” someone he has never even seen. A l’exemplaire cognoist on, A la figure et au patron, A l’estatue et l’image Pres aussi com au visage Un homme qui onques vëu N’avra esté ne percëu. (241, vv. 7363–68) 67 The vocabulary of “ordonnance” and “statut” used in this text gains prominence over the course of the fourteenth century, supplanting terms like “loi” and “mandement.” Bassano, “Aussi toujours est cremue l’ordenance.”

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From the exemplar, the figure, the pattern, the statue, the image, one can know a man never before seen or perceived, almost as [if one were looking at] his face.

The apparent revindication of the commemorative value of physiognomic portraiture68 prepares the reader to expect a mimetic one-to-one correspondence between the statue and its subject. But this expectation, like the stability of the representational model on which it depends, is consistently defied throughout the statue description that follows. The PA’s insistence on the stability of statues has largely been taken at face value by modern critics. Michael Camille has remarked that “for Deguileville, [the statue] is a public image of enduring stability;”69 Anna Zayaruznaya posits that “Though its parts are made of different materials, Digulleville’s statue is as unified as the ideal state it represents” and that “it represents not the deterioration of society but its stability;”70 Gilles Lecuppre agrees that Deguileville constructs the statue as an inherently stable model, though he does note that the author does so by means of glissements (slippages) between disparate semantic fields.71 The paradox written into this notion of stability through slippage is more of a problem, in the PA, than has been acknowledged. For all of the angel’s insistence on the stability of statues, the extended description that follows this speech sees that stability is repeatedly undermined by the indeterminacy of the statue’s creation, its location, and especially its material composition. With the claim that Nebuchadnezzar had his dream-statue built, the PA translates an allegorical/textual/oneiric object into concrete form – but this gesture ultimately underscores the instability that results from an organic reading of Nebuchadnezzar’s emphatically metallic statue. In his capacity as a dreamer and an artistic patron who envisions a statue and causes it to be made, the king is external to the statue’s allegorical system; he is also the whole of the system, as the government qua statue (and statute) is a portrait of the monarch; but the king, the golden head, is also just a part of that whole. The position of the king relative to his statue is ambiguous at best, and thoroughly disorienting – even 68 I borrow this terminology from Stephen Perkinson, who uses the term physiognomic likeness to denote “portraits that rely on the mimetic replication of aspects of bodily, and especially facial, appearances.” The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 6. Perkinson demonstrates that the fourteenth century is a period of changing attitudes toward physiognomic naturalism in the visual arts. See also Alexa Sand, “Vision and the Portrait of Jean le Bon,” Yale French Studies 110 (2006): 58–74. 69 “For Gower and Machaut, the statue signifies physical impermanence, while for Deguileville, it is a public image of enduring stability.” Camille, The Gothic Idol, 287. 70 Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous Art, 152–53. 71 Lecuppre, “La société statufiée,” 49.



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more so than in either the organic metaphor or the biblical dream of the statue. Even though the two source traditions operate according to a similar synecdochic logic,72 when these textual bodies are merged, the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. For all of its emphasis on stability, the description of the statue repeatedly admits doubt as to the integrity of the statue and of the materials that compose it. Despite Zayaruznaya’s claim that “Digulleville’s allegory is organic, and lacks any mention of degeneration or decay,”73 the political allegory is in fact rife with such allusions: to one type of metal being mistaken for another, and to impurities, deformities, and rust. The mentions of impurity and rust, especially, complicate the fiction of the statue’s structural integrity and point to the eventual mechanisms of its undoing. According to the angel, the statue’s golden head represents the king, the silver arms represent the nobility, the bronze belly is the financial bureaucracy, the thighs are the justice system, the iron legs are soldiers and bourgeois, the iron and clay feet are laborers. Even as Deguileville explicitly hierarchizes the materials of which his statue is made, however, he also points out the potential pitfalls of mistaking one metal for another. The head, for instance, is gold, the angel says, because this is the most worthy of metals; it is ductile (243, v. 7425), just as a king should benignly receive good advice (“recevoir benignement / Bon advis et apensement” 243, vv. 7439–40). Deguileville thus revisits the metaphor of ductility we have already observed in mirrors for princes, while identifying this desirable ductility even more explicitly as a property of a particular metal, gold. However, all that glitters is not gold. A king who responds to constructive critique with venom isn’t golden at all, but is made of cruder stuff. Qui amender ne se vouldroit Et trop hautement sonneroit Par paroles despiteuses De desdaing et orguilleuses, D’or estre dit pas ne devroit, Mes un rude metail par droit Ou ne puet estre fourmee, Entailliee ou figuree Fors figure de laidure Dont on ne doit avoir cure. (244, vv. 7449–58) Anyone who eschews self-improvement, instead ringing out with spiteful, disdainful, and proud words, should not be said to be made of gold; truly he 72 This is what Fabienne Pomel has called “l’allégorie par synecdoque” in Les voies de l’au-delà et l’essor de l’allégorie au Moyen Âge (Paris: Champion, 2001), 462. 73 Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous Art, 152.

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is made of a base metal, in which only ugly figures unworthy of our attention can be molded, carved or portrayed.

The metal symbolizing princely virtue is, as we are reminded, an artistic medium; the body politic is an artistic construct, and the material in which it is “fourmee, entailliee ou figuree” determines the physical form it can take. Interpreting the body politic is full of pitfalls: some kings aren’t golden at all, and some chevetains are made of cuivre that can be mistaken for gold (248, vv. 7596–99). What had originally appeared to be a single statue is in fact many, some with genuine gold heads, others with lower-quality heads that are difficult to distinguish from the genuine article; some bodies politic are endowed with auxiliary heads that can be mistaken for gold, giving rise to what Aurelle Lavasseur has astutely called “un royaume multicéphale, un monstre politique” (a many-headed kingdom, a political monster).74 The potential for duplicity and monstrosity continues in the description of the statue’s silver neck, arms, and chest. A long digression separates the statue’s head from its neck, highlighting the fissures between different segments of the body politic, fissures that do not always correspond to the joints between different metals.75 The statue’s golden neck, the pillar sustaining the head, represents the princes of the blood. The silver arms are the nobles and military leaders, who should sacrifice themselves before allowing harm to come to the king, and who should remain free of corruption. Avant devroient estre roups Ou tout outreement brisiés Ou estre mortelment saigniés Que chief ou membres ëust mal, Se d’argent sont et bien loyal, Sens rououl, sens composture De quelque male mixture. (254, vv. 7776–82) They should sooner be broken, or otherwise completely shattered, or bled to death, before the head or members could come to harm – if they are silver and loyal, without rust, without admixture of any bad substance.

Lavasseur, “Dénoncer la tyrannie,” 41. Lavasseur points out the digression and relates it to mid-fourteenth-century concerns about local versus centralized control in “Dénoncer la tyrannie,” 40–41. Lecuppre also comments on the same passage in “La société statufiée,” 57, noting that despite the separation between head and neck, this text does not admit the possibility that a body might wish to replace one head with another. 74 75



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Similarly, a disloyal council (that is, the chest of the body politic) would be “Dë ort metail plain de vilté” (made of dirty, thoroughly base metal, 257, v. 7880). Thus, in the discussions of the chest and the arms, as with the head, we are presented with the possibility that the statue’s metals aren’t what they seem to be. These misidentifications are not always negative: silver arms that distinguish themselves through the noblest of actions may become “dorés” (vv. 7791–94). Usually, however, the statue’s surface appearance threatens to mask a more menacing reality. Kings who ignore good advice are not truly made of gold. Military leaders do not rust – if they are silver and loyal. That if leaves open the possibility of corrupt, base, rusted members, introducing the possibility of degeneration at the very heart of the body politic. Nor is the statue’s disquieting, uncanny quality limited to the gap between perceived metallic composition and real substance. The humanoid figure has subtly monstrous potential, as it may through noble deeds endow itself with two right arms. Surprisingly, such an anatomic anomaly is presented as the figure’s ideal state.76 De ces deulx bras ne di mie Le quel a destre partie, Mes bien scai que chascun destre Se doit tousjours faire et estre Si com d’Ahoth est figuré En Iudicum et recité Qui chascune des mains avoit Destrë et come de destre usoit. Chascun des bras soy avancier Se doit tousjours pour miex aider. Nul ne se doit asenestrir, Se bon destre puet devenir. (253, vv.7757–66) I won’t tell you which of these is the right arm, but I know full well that each one should always make itself the right, just as the book of Judges says that Ehud had two right hands and used them both as such. One should always put forth both arms so as to help as much as possible. No one should make himself sinister if he can become right.

76 While Lecuppre characterizes the statue as ambidextrous (“La société statufiée,” 56), it is not that simple; rather, the statue’s arm structures are indeterminate, showing that the body politic can become ambidextrous through its actions.

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The idealized construct of the body politic deviates, slightly but significantly, from the idealized human form; nor is the statue’s form even fixed, as each arm has the potential to “se... faire et estre” either right or left. Hence it is only possible to interpret this statue as a realistic representation of good government by denying that it could be a naturalistic one. Elsewhere, too, the angel’s reading of the statue’s anatomy brings with it the threat of monstrosity or impairment. Witness the tirade against reliance on foreign mercenaries, embedded within the description of the statue’s iron legs: N’est pas merveilles, se bastons Ou potences queroit uns homs Mal jambu ou a mauvais piés Ou qui es jambes est froissiés; Mes qui a les jambes sainnes Et bons piés pour assés paines Soustenir, se quiert potence Pour soy soustenir, lasch’en ce Sera dit, car mieux vault assés Naturel membre qu’empruntés. Membre naturel aydera Ou l’emprunté tousjours faudra. Membres natureux tous ceux sont Qui ou royaume leur vie ont, Qui sens faillir sont tousjours prest D’aider au roy qui leur chief est. N’est pas doubte que mieux aider Ne ly puissent, quant est mestier, Que potences empruntees Qui sont d’estranges contrees. (266–67, vv. 8173–92) It’s no wonder if a man with a bad leg or a bad foot or a broken leg should seek a stick or a crutch; but if anyone with healthy legs and good enough feet to sustain him seeks a crutch to hold himself up, he’ll be called lazy, for natural members are far better than borrowed ones. A natural member will help where a borrowed one will always fail. Natural members are all those who live their life in the kingdom, who are always ready, without fail, to help the king who is their head. They undoubtedly can help him better, if need be, than can borrowed crutches from foreign countries.

The images of disability and prosthesis once again introduce the language of instability into the ostensibly idealized ymage of the king and his government. A preference for “natural” members, set forth within the description of a



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fabricated metal art object, creates an effect somewhere between ironic and absurd: what is natural about this cobbled-together body politic, anyway? Incidentally, this passage also contains some of the more inspired poetry of the PA, as the passage’s numerous enjambments – a rhythmic device infrequent in the rest of the poem – evoke the destabilized, limping gait of “uns homs / Mal jambu.”77 As in the descriptions of the gold and silver parts, this discussion of lameness, even in a portrait of a statue or kingdom that is itself presumed to have healthy legs, introduces the sort of infirmity that can undermine a statue’s stability. Natural members are preferable to prosthetic ones, but the fact that prosthetics are even mentioned confirms that natural members can become unsound.78 Moreover, if they are improperly maintained, even “natural” legs can rust. De fer est chevalerie Ou s’ouneur ne garde mie Et ceux aussi qui d’estre armés En bons faiz sont acoustumés. Tex ne se doivent pas laisser Par negligence enroullier (265, vv. 8145–50) The knightly class is made of iron or else it can’t hold onto its glory, and the same goes for those who are accustomed to performing great feats of arms. Such people should not allow themselves to rust through negligence.

More than their golden and silver leaders, soldiers are susceptible to rust and so the threat of deterioration looms large in this part of the statue description. Polish, here, is a bad thing; knights’ badges of honor are their “Hyaumes cassés,

77 The enjambment has long been associated with physical actions of walking or straddling, as the term’s etymology suggests, though it should be noted that enjambement only appears as a name for a technique of versification in the sixteenth century. Already in late medieval French verse, though, enjambment is exploited as an instrument of destabilization, as Peter V. Davies argues in “‘Si bas suis qu’a peine / Releveray:’ Christine de Pizan’s Use of Enjambement,” in Christine de Pizan 2000, ed. John Campbell and Nadia Margolis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 83. See also Agamben’s reflections on enjambment with particular reference to Dantean poetics in The End of the Poem, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109–15. William Watkin explicates Agamben’s argument about the “interruptive power” of enjambment in The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), Chapter Five, “Enjambement, The Turn of Verse,” 135–65. 78 On how prosthesis points to the instability and artificiality of the “natural,” see David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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plaies pluseurs” (broken helmets, many wounds, 265, vv.8152).79 Brokenness is the surest sign of integrity. From top to bottom, the statue’s metallic parts and the populations they represent interact, rewriting both human and mineral natures through the instrument of metaphor. The utility of the interactionist model in understanding this text is especially clear as we consider the statue’s feet, made of a mixture of iron and clay. We soon learn that contrary to Biblical tradition, there is nothing inherently “unnatural” or abject about the composite material of which the feet are made. The angel notes that while others scorn laborers (the feet), they are more important than money-changers or artists. Et sont souvent les vilz mestiers Ceulx dont il est plus grans mestiers. Les plantes des piés qui bas sont A desprisier mie ne sont. Elles sont tresnecessaires, Comment qu’on n’y pense guaires. […] Plus necessaire est un foueur Quë .i. orfevre ne changeur. Miex se aïd’on d’un charretier, Dë .i. couvreur, dë .i. potier Qu’on ne feroit d’un orgueneur, D’un paintrë ou d’un ymageur. (268, vv. 8225–30, 8233–38) And the lowest jobs are often the ones that are needed the most. The soles of the feet, low as they are, are not to be despised; they are very necessary, even though people hardly think about them. […] A ditchdigger is more necessary than a goldsmith or a moneychanger. One can make better use of a carter, a roofer, or a potter than an organist, a painter, or a sculptor.

The selection of professions to which working people are favorably compared is telling. Money-changers, goldsmiths, and artists are people who modify material through a process of exchange, who turn one thing into another – and who may be regarded, less charitably, as aping or even perverting nature. Laborers, on the other hand, fulfill a more “pure” economic and social role – albeit a subordinate one. The feet exist to aid and sustain the legs (“as jambes sont bien aidant, / Car il en sont soustenement,” 267, vv. 8214–15), and the 79 As the corresponding gloss in BnF MS fr. 1648 points out, a similar concept is expressed by Vegetius: “Vegecius non picturam non aurum & lapides sed scutum divulsum, fractam galeam, hebetem gladeum, faciem vulneratam cedere militi[bus] ad ornatum” (61r).



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peasants’ value lies in the availability of their services to their superiors (“se aïd’on d’un charretier,” 268, vv.8235). These statements instrumentalize and objectify the laborers with language that echoes the discussion of crutches that immediately preceded the discussion of the lowest bodily members: the feet are the “membre naturel” that “aydera / Ou l’emprunté tousjours faudra.” The material of which the feet are made might initially appear to signal their inferiority to artisans and professionals; on the contrary, it reveals the underlying similarity between these different members of the social body. The kind of transformation that artists and money-changers perform is reflected in the composition of the iron and clay feet, which are not an amalgam at all, but two phases of a single substance. Or voit on que mipartis sont Les pies et entremellés sont De deux matieres qui entre’eux Semblent estre moult despareux, Mes tant n’est pas, com il semble, Car nees furent ensemble. Le fer de la terre est issu Et de terre est et terre fu, Si que, se de fer est dite L’une des pars, n’est pas quite Qu’on ne la puist terre nommer Aussi com l’autre et appeller. Mes c’est moult dissemblablement, Car pris a grant alterement Sa fourme qui est muee En aultre et transfiguree. La terre est mole et le fer dur Et devenu ferme et sëur. (268–69, vv. 8239–56) Now we see that the feet are particolored, made of a mixture of two materials that seem quite disparate; but this is not as it seems, for those materials were born together. Iron comes from the earth, it is of earth, it was earth. So if one part is said to be of iron, it isn’t exempt from being called earth either, just like the other part. But it’s in a very different way, for its form, transfigured and changed into another, has been much altered. Earth is soft, iron is hard and has become firm and secure.

The disquisition on the origins of iron is not “scientific” in any real sense of the word: it is a feat of social rather than geological engineering, designed to

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valorize working people and their contributions.80 It continues the simultaneous and self-contradictory sameness and alterity that have characterized the description of the statue as a whole; it uses the statue’s visible fragmentation, even monstrosity, to gesture toward reintegration.81At the same time, this is a gesture that endangers the broader allegorical and didactic project. The angel has admitted that the statue’s materials are not what they seem; one kind of matter can be transfigured into another. The statue, originally envisioned as a mirror for princes, is impossible to interpret through perception alone. The viewer must see past the opaque minerals to grasp the truths they represent. The introduction of the organic metaphor is the interpretive key that renders the metals’ meanings and interrelationships comprehensible. In the angel’s closing remarks on the statue, though, he acknowledges the knowledge gaps that this mechanism has not overcome. After all, one cannot gloss what the source text does not discuss. “Scrupule louable, un peu tardif,” as Faral dryly notes.82 Or t’ai dit de l’estatue Selon ce que fu vëue, Et que Daniel en escript De pluseurs membres rien n’en dist, Car aventure rien n’en fu De Nabugodonasor veu, Et aussi fourmee autrement N’est point sus ce maçonnement, Pour la quel chose occasion J’ay asses bonnë et raison Que plus ne m’en doie meller, Mes la laisse du tout ester.

80 Lecuppre notes that this rather egalitarian view of the materials works against the strong hierarchization that would seem to inhere in the image of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue: “La diversité des éléments qui composent la statue semblait devoir se traduire par une forte hiérarchisation des catégories sociales retenues. Pourtant, des efforts répétés sont faits pour valoriser les matériaux qu’on aurait pu croire moins dignes, et donc pour rééquilibrer la présentation des appartenances, des fonctions et des métiers” (The diversity of materials composing the statue would seem to have needed to be translated into a strong hierarchization of social categories. However, repeated efforts are made to valorize the materials that could have been thought less worthy, and thus to rebalance the presentation of group identities, functions, and professions). Lecuppre, “La société statufiée,” 56. 81 Similarly, the statue is consistently presented in both metallic and corporeal terms. There is great attention paid, for example, to the anatomy of the bronze thighs, which “Bien ossus sont et bien nervés” (are well boned and sinewy, 263, v. 8079). 82 “Laudable scruple, coming a little late.” Faral, “Guillaume de Digulleville,” 63n1.



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Sens texte ne faut pas gloser Ne sens matiere edifier. (271, vv. 8331–44) Now I’ve told you about the statue as it was seen. In the scripture Daniel says nothing about several of its parts, for maybe Nebuchadnezzar didn’t see those. Besides, it’s not built any differently here [on this pedestal], therefore I have good enough reason not to bother with this anymore, but I’m letting the subject drop entirely. One shouldn’t gloss without a text or build without material.

The description of the statue is suspended on a note of incompletion. The final pieces are missing – from Nebuchadnezzar’s vision, from the Biblical source, from the imagined statue, and from the PA itself. The synecdochic process by which the body politic has been broken down into its constituent parts is not completely achievable, as parts of the puzzle are missing, and therefore it is not completely reversible either: the existing parts cannot be reincorporated into a complete and fully functional whole. Gaps will remain. This lack of material, and the analogy between textual composition and architectural construction, again raises the question of whether the statue exists as a physical object or merely as text, idea, and vision. Or maybe, as it draws together two disparate traditions of political allegory, this statue is composed of too much material. Resemblance and Representation On its own, Deguileville’s recasting of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue as a reified body politic offers a fascinating exercise in transtextual artistry. It takes on added significance, though, when considered alongside the other sculptural monuments that flank it within the text: the carved donkey tombs that precede Doctrine’s speech, and the equestrian statue explicated just after the allegory of the body politic. These are presented as concrete objects that memorialize their subjects by depicting their inner qualities, thus portraying their subjects faithfully – even as they bear a corporeal likeness of someone other than their true subject. Like Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, they require the viewer to look beyond the sculpted surface and find meaning in that which they do not explicitly show. Within the broader narrative arc of the PA, Nebuchadnezzar’s statue and the other sculptural monuments offer a meditation on surface reality and inner truth, constituting the final lesson the soul learns before ascending to heaven. While touring the afterworld with his guardian angel, some 500 lines before he encounters Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, the soul sees a cemetery next to a hermitage. As will become commonplace in later medieval French dreamvisions, the protagonist walks in the graveyard, contemplating the tombs and

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reflecting on the identities of the people memorialized therein. These monuments, however, are designed to conceal the identities of those they memorialize, subverting the very purpose of figurative tomb sculpture: for they are carved with images of donkeys. The soul mistakes the effigies for mimetic corporeal likenesses of those that they memorialize. En .i. lieu par ou je passai Pluseurs tombes [je] regardai Ou en chascune estoit gravé Un asne dessus et fourmé. Et sembloit que la enfouis Feussent les asnes du païs, Dont il me vint merveille grant (220–21, vv. 6705–11) In a place I was passing through I looked at several tombs that each had a donkey incised and sculpted on top, and it seemed that the donkeys of that land were buried there, which caused me no small amazement.

The donkeys emblazoned on the tombs form the basis of a parodic heraldry that, in a hyperbolic extension of the “heraldic crisis” of the fourteenth century, no longer communicates identity or status.83 The angel explains the unusual funerary sculpture with an anecdote about St. Bernard, who said that in order to enter the religious life, one must be a donkey, that is, one must bear all burdens humbly, submissively, patiently, and silently.84 During this explanation, the soul catches sight of some of his still-living loved ones and wishes to communicate with them, but cannot. En moi de ces asnes parlant Et leurs condicions comptant, Hommes et femmes terriens Des quiez y ot de mes parens Et d’autres que cognoissoie Vi et trouvai en ma voie. A eulx voul parler, mes ne peu,

83 On the “crisis of the heraldic system,” see Michel Pastoureau, “L’effervescence emblématique et les origines du portrait au XIVe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France 1985: 108–15. 84 Christopher Lucken traces the symbolism of the donkey in Biblical texts and in medieval encyclopedias and bestiaries. He notes, however, that the source of the PA anecdote has not been found in Bernard’s writings. “L’âne ou le corps silencieux d’une parole en souffrance,” Micrologus 8 (2000): 511–35.



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Mes asses tost en conte peu, Car ne me firent nul semblant Ne regarderent tant ne quant. (221–222, vv. 6769–78) As I was talking to myself about these donkeys and remarking on their condition, I saw earthly men and women, including my relatives and other people I knew, in my path. I wanted to talk to them but couldn’t, and soon I harbored no illusions of doing so, for they didn’t take notice or even look at me.

Here, with the narrator’s “trans-spatial gaze” directed toward “hommes et femmes terriens,” the overlap of the spectral/spiritual and earthly realms is at its most clear and most poignant.85 The living and the dead coexist, in different spheres but on the same plane. In a reversal of earthly realities, the dead can see and speak to the living, but the living can neither see nor respond to the dead. This inability to communicate is the flipside of the soul’s inability to interpret the donkey tombs. The living are individually identifiable, and the soul recognizes and remembers them; the virtuous dead elicit no such recognition, and are even mistaken for beasts of burden by the unsophisticated reader of their effigies. In reifying Bernard’s metaphor, the donkey tombs render the normally invisible qualities of the soul visible, while concealing the names and physical appearances of the dead. The monuments exalt the religious by humbling them and anonymizing them, realizing the memorial function of the tomb by means of a non-physiognomic mode of portraiture.86 The best likenesses are those that demand analytical work on the part of the reader; the cemetery tests the soul’s ability to perform the sort of reading that allegory requires, “to see through by seeing.”87 The literary cemeteries of late medieval French literature tend to linger on the identification of the illustrious dead, deploying the logic of the library as a strategy of canon-formation, as Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has

On the “trans-spatial gaze,” see Pomel, Les voies de l’au-delà, 258. Perkinson notes that funeral effigies did not necessarily “represent the body’s external appearance mimetically,” but that they increasingly did so from the late thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries; he demonstrates that the naturalism of tomb sculpture was a point of contention, positing that transi tombs “may have constituted another negative response to the tendency towards physiognomic likeness in tomb effigies.” The Likeness of the King, 93, 145. Perkinson also discusses Deguileville’s “negative response to the introduction of references to facial features into images” in PVH, ibid., 144–45. Indeed, this episode of PA picks up on PVH2’s enhanced focus on the perils of the literal interpretation of images as explored in Maupeu, “Statut de l’image.” 87 Stephen Russel, “Allegorical Monstrosity: The case of Deguileville,” Allegorica 5 (1980): 102. 85 86

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persuasively argued:88 in this “library,” though, a deindividualized ideal of virtue is the critical subtext. The description of the donkey tombs trails off as the soul catches sight of Doctrine, licking a deformed pilgrim into shape: Une dame qui se sëoit En chaiere et la langue avoit Hors traite dont aloit lechant Un pelerin par li passant Qui lait estoit et deffourmé Et treslaidement façonné (225, vv. 6843–48) A lady sitting in a chair with her tongue out, licking an ugly, deformed, and hideously made pilgrim who was passing by there.

While Doctrine’s lessons for the soul are initially apolitical in focus, by the end of her speech she has begun to interrogate the “likeness” of body, soul, and image – and government. In a passage that calls to mind the organic metaphor, Doctrine tells the soul that good government reflects God’s body (235, v. 7177) and warns that one must take care in governing one’s own body (vv. 7185–88). Doctrine thus establishes a multi-level analogy that interconnects the individual body, the government, and the cosmos. A social institution can furnish a non-physiognomic likeness of a person; the state of a state, like the state of a body, can reflect that of a soul. An effective ruling regime is one that can impose a salutary regimen on the body. But that body is only a waystation; social and anatomical structures are mere representations, projected and ultimately discarded. For the soul, encountering these lessons now, it is too late: “Tart fu, nul retour n’avoie / Lors au corps que laissié avoie” (It was late, by then I had no way back to the body I had left behind, 236, vv. 7203–4). It is on this note that the soul ends his conversation with Doctrine and catches sight of the two statues. Tantost apres ce parlement Un haut et fort maçonnement Vi sus quoi estoient mises Deux ymages et assises Qui grans et hauls a merveilles Estoient et despareilles. (236, vv. 7205–10)

88

Cerquiglini-Toulet, La couleur de la mélancolie, 134–36.



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Right after this conference [with Doctrine] I saw a tall and strong masonry structure on which two statues were placed and seated: they were marvelously large and tall, and mismatched.

These two portraits not only lack a physiognomic resemblance to the kings they purport to depict; they are also utterly unlike one another. Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, a notional artefact existing only in textual tradition, is presented in a head-to-toe gloss; the equestrian statue, a fictional image belonging to a politically significant real-world type of which concrete examples would have been familiar to Deguileville’s readers,89 is explained in a romance-like narrative. These contrasts in appearance and in textual strategy are another visual trap, testing the reader’s ability to see beyond their surface and recognize that both images, though “despareilles,” portray the same ideal. The equestrian statue, as the angel recounts, represents a foreign knight who once arrived at the court of king Poeticus. The knight champions a bereft lady (Liberality) whom he meets in a garden after the king has replaced her in his favors with a many-armed old monster (Covetousness). At the assigned hour of combat no one steps forward to defend the king, making the knight the winner by default. King Poeticus has the knight’s statue made, in memory of the foreigner’s restoration of liberality and honor in his realm.90 The statue is not meant to memorialize the foreign knight, however, who remains nameless; rather, it is designed as an aide-memoire and destined for a royal viewership: Affin aussi quë y prëist Chascun roi qui par cy venist Exemple de soi gouverner Et soi de faux conseil garder. (282, vv. 8703–6) Also so that every king who comes this way might take it as an exemplum of self-governance and the avoidance of false counsel.

89 Philippe Gabet indicates that there was an “appreciable number” of equestrian statues made in medieval northern France, though a few survive today. “L’image équestre dans le Nord de la France au Moyen Âge,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 31:124 (1988): 347–60. Michael Camille adds that “It is significant that the poet chose to embody the political function of memorials in the form of the equestrian statue – the only genre of classical sculpture that can be traced mostly uninterrupted throughout the Middle Ages” (The Gothic Idol, 289); its “politically stabilizing talismanic function, just as much as the symbolic reference to past imperial authority, made the equestrian statue the most important visual type for medieval rulers” (ibid., 290). 90 The statue is thus integrated into a story that was already recounted by Avarice in PVH: cf. PVH1 vv. 9309–56.

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King Poeticus’s “mirror” does not actually resemble its prince, either physiognomically or metaphorically. Instead, it offers what appears to be a likeness of a mounted knight; but it is truly a likeness of good government insofar as it shows all kings what their ideals should be. And so “est chose bien congrue / Que soit pres de l’estatue” (It is perfectly appropriate that it be near [Nebuchadnezzar’s] statue, 282, vv. 8707–8). The equestrian figure, like the statue and the tombs before it, uses an opaque sculptural body to reveal an inner truth even as it deforms or conceals the physical being that a casual observer might think it portrays. With these images Deguileville neatly reverses the literary trope by which beautiful bodies are “petrified” and described, piece by piece, in a process that Annie Combes has likened to sculpture.91 Unlike conventional descriptions that catalogue their subjects’ facial features, Deguileville obscures his sculptures’ visages; even his account of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, while treating its subject from head to toe, manages to conduct a lengthy discussion of the head without so much as a mention of the face. Instead, Deguileville, through his angelic guide, dismantles and defamiliarizes seemingly transparent sculptural representations in order to reveal the human social structures that lie beneath the inorganic surface. Taken together, the passages describing the donkey tombs and the two statues constitute a notable sequence of notional ekphrasis, a portrait gallery devoted to experimental representations of personal and political virtue.92 Each sculptural description processes and revises “the cultural image trove,” in a contemplative and didactic mode typical of medieval ekphrasis.93 Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in particular, with its overtly composite structure, mirrors the synthetic logic of the dream.94 These ekphrastic descriptions are situated one after the other, and they are also nested within a dream-vision, a textual genre that Claire Barbetti proposes to understand as fundamentally ekphrastic in nature.95 They 91 Annie Combes, “‘Comme un rêve de pierre:’ l’imaginaire de la sculpture dans le portrait médiéval,” in Façonner son personnage au Moyen Âge, ed. Chantal ConnochieBourgne (Aix-en-Provence: Presses de l’Université de Provence, 2007), 123–34. 92 The term “notional ekphrasis” for the description of an imaginary artwork is derived from John Hollander, “The Poetics of Ekphrasis,” Word & Image 4 (1988): 209–19. 93 Claire Barbetti, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 8. Along similar lines, Fabienne Pomel has described the PA’s voyage through the afterlife as a “promenade culturelle, entre la visite de musée et le théâtre processionnel” (cultural promenade, somewhere between a museum tour and processional staging); “une sorte de visite guidée dans des lieux qui mettent sous les yeux du pèlerin autant de signes (objets, personnages, scènes...) l’invitant à réfléchir à son salut” (a sort of a guided tour of places that put so many signs before the pilgrim’s eyes – objects, characters, scenes – inviting him to reflect on his salvation). Les voies de l’au-delà, 180. 94 On the fusion of contradictory ideas as a hallmark of dream-logic, see among others Pomel, Les voies de l’au-delà, 252. 95 Barbetti, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions, 11–21.



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lie at the center of a multi-layered play of static and dynamic elements, as the soul and the angel encounter the immobile sculptures during their voyage across an ambiguous and ever-changing landscape – all occurring within the imagination of a sleeping and presumably immobile dreamer. Vignettes such as the statue descriptions, like the Pèlerinage de l’âme’s lyric insertions and set-piece dialogues, create a sense of “stasis [contrasting with] narrative drama,”96 a suspension of place and time. The two statues are situated on a maçonnement, but while that foundation appears firm, its precise position in space is not fixed. Are the tombs and statues situated on earth or in Purgatory? Can only the dead see them, and if so, what exemplary function can they serve? While Deguileville, like other authors of visions of the afterworld, “fictionalizes (temporalizes) the relationships among the spiritual states and sacramental actions connected with penitential conversion,”97 this “temporalization” is only loosely sketched out in relation to earthly space and time. Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, having been converted from a linear, diachronic allegory of translatio imperii to a synchronic portrait of king, subjects, and government, epitomizes the Pèlerinage de l’âme’s unsettling incongruity. The statues, concrete in substance but indeterminate in their physical situation, stretch the logical limits of the process of temporalization. Infernal and Celestial Machines The statues stand at a crucial juncture in the soul’s journey, at the point (in space and in the soul’s spiritual progress) where earth, hell, and heaven converge. The geography of Deguileville’s afterworld is irrational by our standards, as Fabienne Pomel points out: it is composed of “des mondes qui s’entrecroisent et se superposent dans des espaces partagés, venant subvertir la belle ordonnance théologique d’une géographie rationnelle de l’au-delà” (worlds that criss-cross and overlay each other, subverting the beautiful theological order of a rational geography of the afterworld).98 Throughout the dream-vision, hell, purgatory, heaven and earth are also presented as interlocking spaces. Throughout the PA, 96 Here I borrow from Phillips’s characterization of the ABC prayer in PVH2, “Chaucer and Deguileville,” 2–3. 97 Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 144. 98 Fabienne Pomel, “Les entre-mondes de l’âme pérégrine en purgation dans le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Digulleville,” in Les entre-mondes. Les vivants, les morts, ed. Karin Ueltschi and Myriam White-Le Goff (Paris: Klincksieck, 2009), 40. Mattia Cavagna offers a lucid explanation of the structure of Deguileville’s afterworld, and its textual precedents, in “Enfer et purgatoire dans le Pèlerinage de l’âme de Guillaume de Deguileville, entre tradition et innovation,” in Duval and Pomel, Guillaume de Deguileville, Les Pèlerinages allégoriques, 111–30.

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these spaces are brought together by means of machine metaphors that, like the statues’ tension between living human subject and inorganic sculptural medium, illustrate human nature by figuring man as a cog in a machine. The organic–inorganic play of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue provides a crucial link in the progression from torment to salvation – extremes that are represented in PA by infernal, terrestrial, and celestial clockworks. Near the end of the PA the heavenly spheres are likened to a clock, its circles turning “A semblance de la roe / Qui dedens l’orloge roe (like the wheel that turns within a clock, 289–90, vv. 8921–22). It is the movement of the spheres, and more specifically their contrary movements, that reveals the heavenly order. The music of the spheres is the byproduct of an articulated mechanical system. Causë en sont les mouvemens Qui y sont et les tournemens Des esperes que vi tourner L’une dedens l’autre et roer Qui par contraires mouvemens Et par obliques tournemens Doucement s’entrecontroient Et en circuite faisoient Entour terre et les elemens Sens eux reposer en nul temps. (288, vv. 8875–84) The movements and turnings of the spheres that I saw turning one inside the other, which gently engaged one another by contrary movements and oblique rotations, were the cause of it [the music of the spheres]. They made an unceasing circuit around the earth and the elements.

The harmonious celestial machine, with its smooth and continuous motion, stands in opposition to the jarring movements of hell.99 The contrast is only heightened by the echoes between the celestial spheres and the PA’s other wheels that “s’entrecontroient,” but not “doucement.” In the PA, unlike in the visionary texts it has been presumed to draw on as sources, damned souls are enmeshed in infernal complexes of gears. Most notably, the soul witnesses the suffering of corrupt financial officers who, as discussed in Chapter One, are transformed into the cogs of a “roe soutil” (164, v. 4929). The officials, who illegally forged nouviaus estatus (new statutes, 99 As Jérôme Baschet has observed of fourteenth-century literary descriptions of the afterworld, “Autant l’enfer cultive les images de la déchirure, autant le paradis affectionne le lisse” (As much as Hell cultivates images of laceration, Heaven is fond of smoothness). Baschet, “Les conceptions de l’enfer,” 194.



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164, v. 4923) in order to divert resources to the kingdom’s enemies, are enmeshed in a system of gears, carried along on an endless loop that takes them through a tower, then underground, and back into the open. A king, atop the tower, berates the wrongdoers and ruminates on the lesson he has learned from their treachery: “Car meilleur conseil je crerai / Et miex je me gouvernerai” (For I will create better counsel and govern myself better, 167, vv. 5037–38). The mechanism of this punishment – by which people are turned into inanimate objects and incorporated into a mechanical system, which a king external to the system then uses as an instructive “mirror” – is analogous to the creation of the two statues in purgatory. Indeed, in her essay “Aussi toujours est cremue l’ordenance que fait le roy…” Marie Bassano has recently read the wheelpunishment in conjunction with the description of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, showing how these two most heavily politicized moments of the PA articulate a coherent and historically contextualized model of kingship. The lesson the king draws from the “subtle wheel” is the same one that Doctrine tries to teach the soul, and the same one that the two statues were designed to communicate. It is only when the soul sees the statues that he truly absorbs the lesson, though, and he is soon released from purgatory and initiated into the celestial wonders. The comparison of the infernal wheel to clocks and mills (“Si com horloges et moulins / Se monstrent avoir tels engins,” 166, vv. 4987–88) connects this textual moment with other spaces explored at other moments in the pilgrimage. The language of clockwork, as we have already seen, is used to characterize the movement of the heavens (A semblance de la roe / Qui dedens l’orloge roe). The reference to mills, on the other hand, links the receveurs’ punishment to inadequate earthly modes of penitence. During the soul’s trial, Reason argues that the pilgrim has merited damnation because his penitence during his time on earth was inconsistent, like the movement of a millwheel. Plus va avant, plus recule Comme la roe du moulin Qui tourne voulentiers, a fin Que revoist dont est venue Premierement et mëue (68, vv. 1894–98) The more he goes forward, the more he falls back, like a millwheel that turns readily only to come back to the place whence it first came.

Later, Justice conjures up the same image as she declares that penitence is meaningless when followed by immediate recidivism. C’est un tournement de roe Qui prestement de la boe

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Se gecte hors par derriere Et devant s’i met arriere. (76, vv. 2139–42) It is the turn of a wheel that throws itself out of the mud from behind only to plunge its front back in, in the other direction.

In these few condensed lines, with their confusing trajectory from derriere to devant and arriere, Deguileville has neatly captured the movements of the pilgrim’s soul. That the image of the uncommitted penitent as millwheel is repeated, even as Reason and Justice chastise the soul for revisiting the dark places “dont est venue,” shows its importance for our understanding of the PA’s overall textual trajectory. Circular rather than linear in its geography and (at times) in its logic, the “not quite balanced system”100 of the afterworld obliges the soul to retread familiar ground, to look upon its spectral object lessons again and again until it can truly see. Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is at the center of it all, encapsulating the spatial dynamics of the hereafter, imparting the lesson that finally allows the soul to progress beyond the overlapping spaces of hell, earth, and purgatory.101 That this lesson is overtly political in nature speaks to the moral and spiritual stakes of the mirror for princes. Political Legacies of the Pèlerinage de l’âme Contemporary reception of the Pèlerinage de l’âme confirms our intuitions about the centrality of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue to the narrative, and about the political import of the text (and of the statue passage in particular). The number of manuscript copies, early print editions, translations, and prose adaptations of PA points to a robust readership, while allusions to Deguileville in the works of later medieval writers demonstrate the text’s continued influence. The fact that the Pèlerinage de l’âme was rendered in prose in English, French and Latin before either version of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine was ever put in prose suggests that by the late fourteenth century PA was being distinguished as wielding a different sort of authority than its predecessor.102 Codicological developments, coupled with the apparatus of erudite references appearing in 100 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6. 101 The placement of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue as the centerpiece of the purgatorial narrative and of the soul’s journey jibes with Le Goff’s intuitions about Purgatory as the “centerpiece” of Christian ideas about the afterworld in this period. The Birth of Purgatory, 358. 102 Ursula Peters points out the chronology of translations and mises en prose in “The Pèlerinage Corpus in the European Middle Ages: Processes of Retextualization Reflected in the Prologues,” in Rethinking the New Medievalism, ed. R. Howard Bloch, Alison Calhoun, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Joachim Küpper and Jeanette Patterson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University



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one of Charles V’s copies, show that the PA, even more than Deguileville’s other dream-visions, was coming to be regarded as a learned treatise.103 The special attention given to the statue sequence, in several manuscripts, signals its particular intellectual and political import. This tendency manifests itself most visibly in the cycle of illuminations that are often integrated into the text. Although much of it takes place in Purgatory – a realm rather infrequently depicted in fourteenth-century art104 – the PA is a text that invites illustration. As with PVH, PA’s narrative structure is interlaced with a fully developed iconographic program, one that, if not explicitly designed by author, becomes a continuous tradition well integrated into the text.105 According to Émilie Fréger et Anne-Marie Legaré, the earliest illustrated PA manuscripts date from the 1370s, a period at which the PVH’s iconographic program is already well established.106 The greatest concentration of illustrated copies of PA is produced around the turn of the fifteenth century, from about 1390 to 1410.107 Indeed, though it was written in the 1350s, PA is a text that resonates particularly with the political concerns of Charles VI’s France. Over the fourteenth century the French monarchy practiced an increasingly sophisticated “manipulation of Press, 2014), 227. On the relationship of verse and prose forms, genre, and authority in this period, see Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 103 Géraldine Veysseyre has interpreted the presence of detailed rubrics and tables of contents in early fifteenth-century Pilgrimage manuscripts as evidence that Deguileville’s works are increasingly becoming “des autorités susceptibles d’être munies des apparats nécessaires à une consultation ponctuelle” (authorities eligible to be equipped with the apparatus necessary for non-linear reading). “Lecture linéaire ou consultation ponctuelle? Structuration du texte et apparats dans les manuscrits des Pèlerinages,” in Duval and Pomel, Guillaume de Digulleville: Les pèlerinages allégoriques, 326. 104 See Emmerson, “A ‘Large Order of the Whole,’” 108n69. Jacques Le Goff indicates a spread in the iconography of Purgatory in the later fourteenth century: The Birth of Purgatory, 367. 105 The iconographic program of PVH has been much more studied than the one accompanying PA. Both receive their fullest treatment in Camille, “The Illustrated Manuscripts.” On the continuity of the iconographic programs see Tuve, Allegorical Imagery; Michael Camille, “Reading the Printed Image: Illuminations and Woodcuts of the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine in the Fifteenth Century,” in Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, circa 1450–1520, ed. Sandra Hindman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 259–91. 106 Émilie Fréger and Anne-Marie Legaré, “Le manuscrit d’Arras (BM, ms. 845) dans la tradition des manuscrits enluminés du Pèlerinage de l’âme en vers: Spécificités iconographiques et milieu de production,” in Duval and Pomel, Guillaume de Digulleville: Les pèlerinages allégoriques, 331–47. 107 “L’essor des cycles richement enluminés coïncide avec la période de production la plus dynamique de la trilogie vers 1390–1410” (the boom in richly illuminated cycles coincides with the most active period of production of the trilogy, c.1390–1410). Fréger and Legaré, “Le manuscrit d’Arras,” 333.

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image-ideologies,” in media ranging from clothing and furnishings to emerging modes of portraiture.108 As Stephen Perkinson puts it, During this period, the combination of revised theories of vision, a reinvigorated interest in the mediating capacities of images, and the growing emphasis on the significance of surface appearances all combined to form a new “scopic regime” (to borrow a term from Martin Jay), under which members of the French ruling class increasingly acted out political and social relations in the realm of visual culture.109

It is a development mirrored in Deguileville’s own body of work, a shift visible in the changes effected from PVH1 to PVH2. John M. Moreau notes that “statements potentially critical of king and clergy have been omitted from the second version” of PVH.110 The revisions to the figure of Avarice and the addition of Idolatry help to frame the second version’s rather different political focus within a broader discourse about images, power, and, as Michael Camille puts it, “the base materiality of the substances used in three-dimensional representation.”111 Continuing PVH2’s increased consciousness of the political power of the visual arts, PA is a text punctuated by images, and built around central episodes that interrogate and ultimately reinforce the political function of images and the materials of which they are made. Not surprisingly, given its central role in the narrative, and given the apparent significance it may have held for late medieval monarchs, Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is frequently illustrated in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century manuscripts.112 Though miniatures are unable to attain the poem’s level of detail – which might explain Gilles Lecuppre’s otherwise puzzling contention that the statue episode “se prête mal à la mise en images” (lends itself poorly to illustration)113 – illuminations tend to use color to highlight the disparate materials of which the statue is composed. The statue passage is especially 108 Michael Camille, “The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguileville’s Idolatry in France and England,” in Dimmick, Simpson, and Zeman, Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm, 152. On clothing and furnishings, see especially Colette Beaune, “Costume et pouvoir en France à la fin du Moyen Âge: Les devises royales vers 1400,” Revue des sciences humaines 183 (1981–3): 125–46. 109 Perkinson, The Likeness of the King, 24. 110 John M. Moreau, Eschatological Subjects: Divine and Literary Judgment in FourteenthCentury French Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 75. 111 Camille, “The Iconoclast’s Desire,” 158. 112 “There is tantalizing evidence, too, that for medieval monarchs the image [of Nebuchadnezzar and his statue and/or idol] had a special relevance.” Camille, The Gothic Idol, 285. 113 Lecuppre, “La société statufiée,” 49.



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heavily illustrated in BnF MS fr. 829, a manuscript that belonged to the duke of Berry: a circumstance that Fréger and Legaré see as bearing a direct relationship to the owner’s political importance.114 It is certainly plausible to suppose that the duke of Berry or the artists working for him might have emphasized the statue illuminations as a reflection on (or of) current royal strategies of imagemanipulation. The marginal annotations in BnF MS fr. 1648 offer further evidence of PA’s reception as a learned treatise, as Stéphanie Le Briz and Géraldine Veysseyre have very convincingly argued.115 In this copy, which François Avril identifies as having belonged to Charles V, Latin glosses provide references to the Biblical passages Deguileville cites, as well as to other texts, many of which were among those of which Charles V commissioned translations.116 In this regard the manuscript resembles the much more ornate royal presentation copy of Denis Foulechat’s Policratique (BnF MS fr. 24287), part of which is similarly annotated; Le Briz and Veysseyre hypothesize that the glossator might have had access to the Latin texts that the king’s translators were using.117 To their observations we may add that the Nebuchadnezzar passage is among the most heavily glossed portions of the text.118 In addition to nearly twenty biblical references, there are notes signaling affinities between Deguileville’s lines and concepts expressed in: Aristotle’s De caelo et mundo (54r) and Metheora (56r); Vegetius’s De re militari (58r, 58v, and 61r), “Seneca” (58v);119 and Gregory’s and Bede’s 114 “L’importance de l’allégorie politique des deux statues dans le manuscrit fr. 829 pourrait s’expliquer par le poids politique de son propriétaire, le duc de Berry” (The importance of the political allegory of the two statues in MS fr. 829 could be explained by the political weight of its owner, the duke of Berry). Fréger and Legaré, “Le manuscrit d’Arras,” 336. 115 “Le rédacteur de ces notes marginales a été chargé de montrer qu’il était légitime de lire le PA et que le poème allégorique était digne de participer à l’instruction d’un lectorat pétri de lectures bibliques et féru de traités philosophiques bientôt – ou depuis peu – accessibles en langue vernaculaire. Peut-être réalisée à l’instigation du roi Charles V et de son entourage, et en tout état de cause à leur intention...” (The author of these marginal notes was charged with showing that it was legitimate to read the PA and that the allegorical poem was worthy of participating in the instruction of a readership shaped by biblical readings and avid for the philosophical treatises recently or soon to be made available in the vernacular. Possibly made on the orders of Charles V and his entourage, and in any event made with them in mind...). Le Briz and Veysseyre, “Les notes marginales,” 32. 116 François Avril, La Librairie de Charles V (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1968), 104. Avril remarks that even if the copy was not made specifically for Charles V, it appears in his library inventory of 1380. 117 Le Briz and Veysseyre, “Les notes marginales,” 30. 118 This passage boasts twenty-six notes out of roughly 150 for the whole poem. In other words, while the Nebuchadnezzar passage comprises about ten percent of the poem’s lines, it contains approximately seventeen percent of the marginal notes in BnF MS fr. 1648. 119 The passage cited and attributed to Seneca, Parvi enim sunt foris arma, nisi est consilium domi, actually comes from Cicero’s De officiis.

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commentaries on the proverbs (58v and 60v, respectively). The quantity and variety of works cited indicates that the statue description is read as a serious work of biblical and political commentary. The same marginal notes appear in two manuscripts of Jean Galopes’s French prose version of the PA, which was composed for the duke of Bedford somewhere between November 1422 and August 1427.120 The glosses were then incorporated into the body of Galopes’s Latin translation of his mise en prose.121 Their presence suggests that Galopes used BnF MS fr. 1648 while preparing his mise en prose, bolstering Jenny Stratford’s contention that the authors of compilations and translations made for Bedford in this period likely had access to the Louvre library.122 Galopes’s French and Latin prose versions are an early sign of Deguileville’s rich textual posterity in England, and another indication that the PA is increasingly seen as a didactic treatise, as well as a reminder that it is not just the House of Valois that recognizes PA’s political import. 123 Frédéric Duval sees the very gesture of translating PA into French prose as a promotion of the ideology of the dual monarchy.124 Political though it may be, the prose PA is by no means as obvious a work of pro-English propaganda as other French texts commissioned by Bedford, such as royal notary Lawrence Calot’s 1423 genealogical poem that was posted in France to reassure the populace of the legitimacy of young Henry VI’s rule.125 Galopes largely remains faithful to 120 On the authorship of the mise en prose, see Edmond Faral, “Guillaume de Digulleville, Jean Galloppes et Pierre Virgin,” in Études romanes dédiées à Mario Roques (Geneva: Droz, 1946), 89–102. The most complete study of Galopes’s text is Duval, “La mise en prose.” The mise en prose survives in BnF MS fr. 602 (MS P) and Oxford, Bodleian, Douce 305 (MS O). Duval notes that manuscript P of the mise en prose has eleven fewer glosses than manuscript O, which includes all of the glosses from BnF MS fr. 1648. Just one gloss is missing from the Nebuchadnezzar passage in manuscript P: a reference to Vegetius, glossing the statue’s iron legs, found on 61r of BnF MS fr. 1648. 121 Duval, “La mise en prose,” 427. 122 Jenny Stratford, “The manuscripts of John, duke of Bedford: Library and chapel,” in England in the Fifteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1987), 347. Duval notes that these glosses pass into English manuscript tradition: “La mise en prose,” 403. 123 On the text’s reception in England, see William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 184–97. On the mise en prose’s cotextual associations as indices of its reception as a didactic treatise, see Duval, “La mise en prose,” 426. 124 Duval, “La mise en prose,” 409. On contemporary views of the dual monarchy, see Philippe Contamine, “La ‘France anglaise’ au XVe siècle. Mythe ou réalité?” in La “France anglaise” au Moyen Âge. Actes du 111e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes (Poitiers, 1986), vol. I (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1988), 17–29. 125 On “deliberate pro-English political allusions” in French manuscripts made for Bedford, see Stratford, “The manuscripts of John, duke of Bedford,” 349. On Calot’s poem, see Benedicta J. H. Rowe, “King Henry VI’s Claim to France in Picture and Poem,” The



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Deguileville’s text. Even the passages about the unreliability of foreigners remain unmodified: Galopes writes, for example, that “Le propre chief est plus loyal a son propre corps que n’est ung emprunté” (the proper head is more loyal to its own body than a borrowed one).126 This is less counterintuitive than it might initially seem, for other political texts commissioned by Bedford maintain that the English rulers are legitimate heirs to the Capetians, not foreigners at all: Calot’s genealogical poem, for instance, underlines that English rule did not mean France was “en estrange main mise” (placed into foreign hands).127 Generally speaking, Deguileville’s remarks about good government are broad enough that they can apply as well to Bedford’s regency during the minority of Henry VI as they do to their original context of Charles V’s regency during Jean le Bon’s captivity. A few modifications to the description of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, however, do perhaps signal a lesser interest in image-manipulation as a political tool. Galopes has a tendency, throughout the text, to reduce the redundant repetitions that are so characteristic of Deguileville’s style. He typically just cuts a word here or there.128 In two places, though, he drastically reduces the statue passage: at the beginning, which lays out the conceptual framework by which a statue might be interpreted as a stable image of government, and at the end, which signals the incompleteness of the foregoing portrait. In the first instance, Galopes largely eliminates the language of resemblance and stability on which the pedagogical value of Deguileville’s statue-lesson relies. The prose section corresponding to verses 7265 to 7368 is highly condensed, to the point of losing some of its sense. In suppressing Deguileville’s couplet “Quel est le roy d’une cité, / Tel est le peuple en verité” (However the king of a city may be, thus are the people, 7297–98), Galopes eliminates the idea that a king and his subjects resemble one another. He also minimizes the basic premise that Deguileville works so hard to expound: the idea that a ruler’s government constitutes his own portrait. Galopes’s lexical streamlining largely strips the text of Deguileville’s rich borrowing from the semantic field of the visual arts: “patron” in line 7252; the dense repetition of “estatue,” “ymage,” painturee,” “estatue,” and “ymage” Library, 4th ser., 13 (1933): 77–88; J. W. McKenna, “Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda, 1422–32,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 145–62. The poem was published by Mary Floran, “Document relatif à l’entrée du roi d’Angleterre Henri VI à Paris en 1431,” Revue des études historiques 75 (1909): 411–15. 126 Paris, BnF MS fr. 602 (ms P), fol. 96r. I quote from this manuscript that, though later and slightly less complete than Oxford, Bodleian, Douce 305 (ms O), has the virtue of having been digitized and made available online. 127 Floran, “Document relatif à l’entrée,” 414. 128 Duval, “La mise en prose,” 139. Galopes tends to reduce trinômes and binômes, omitting obscure terms or (more frequently) replacing rare words with more common ones.

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in lines 7301–7305; the cluster equating the terms “exemplaire,” “figure,” “patron,” “estatue,” and “image” in lines 7363–7365; the analogy of a wise counselor to a “bon ymageur” in line 7480. Thus, while the description of the statue remains largely intact, the notion of a statue as a visual stimulus to royal self-reflection and self-recognition is substantially weakened. The lesser focus on the statue as royal portrait may conform to deeper differences in the ways that the Valois and Bedford (on behalf of Henry VI) mobilize visual representations of royal power: whereas the Valois favor depictions of the current royal family – perhaps because “with the end of the direct Capetian line [...] a public visualization of the family tree might have generated doubt rather than certainty concerning the king’s right to rule”129 – Bedford and Henry VI promoted the English king’s claim to France with genealogical posters, royal entry pageants, and sotelties, emphasizing the family line over the individual portrait.130 At the same time, Galopes eliminates much of the vocabulary with which Deguileville insists on the statue’s stability (e.g., “fermes, bons et permanables,” v. 7328). This is perhaps just an artefact of the way Galopes approaches the task of mise en prose, but these changes to the way in which Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is meant to “mirror” a prince are also evocative of the particular conceptual challenges of the dual monarchy. If a single king is to serve as the head of two distinct bodies, a single-bodied statue can no longer be presented as the exemplaire, figure, and patron by which he may be recognized. Galopes’s subtle revisions of Deguileville’s preamble to the statue description minimize the reader’s opportunity to interpret the dual monarchy as monstrous. Likewise, Galopes’s complete elimination of the statue description’s closing frame, in which Deguileville gestures toward the other body parts that he could not mention because of their absence from his Biblical source (vv. 8334–44), removes some of the doubt as to the statue’s bodily integrity that Deguileville had embedded in his narrative. Galopes’s interventions at the margins of the statue description thus privilege a mode of reading uncomplicated by extended reflection on the resemblance between a king and his body politic – but the passage’s core imagery remains intact, so that Deguileville’s word, if not his proposed interpretive framework, remains authoritative.131 The prose translations of PA are not the only means by which Deguileville’s politically inflected dream-vision remains culturally relevant during and immediately after the reign of Charles VI. The Pilgrimages exercise an outsized influence on the dream-vision as a genre, perhaps second only to the influence 129 Perkinson, The Likeness of the King, 139. 130 See Rowe, “King Henry VI’s Claim to France,” and McKenna, “Henry VI of England

and the Dual Monarchy.” 131 Duval argues that Galopes’s fidelity to Deguileville’s text shows that Deguileville has attained authoritative status, “La mise en prose,” 148.



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of the Rose itself: for they introduce this poetic form as a vehicle for exploring ever more dimensions of the human social experience, including increasingly overt political commentary.132 Pierre-Yves Badel has acknowledged Deguileville’s writings as the precursors to “le surgissement à la fin du XIVe siècle d’une littérature politique qui répond autant à des événements angoissants qu’au dessein de princes comme le roi Charles V” (the late fourteenth-century emergence of a political literature responding as much to distressing events as to the intentions of princes like Charles V).133 This surge culminates with a clear echo of Deguileville’s trilogy in the abundance of “songes politiques” at the end of the fourteenth century.134 The description of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in the Pèlerinage de l’âme, in particular, lays important groundwork for later political literature deploying the rust metaphor. It models how an anthropomorphic political vision can be at once organic and inorganic; it draws upon scientific knowledge about metals in order to make a point about good government; it introduces the idea of rust, not in the golden head, but in the silver arms and the iron legs; and it opens Nebuchadnezzar’s statue to a synchronic reading, rendering it more available for use in mirrors for princes and other practical behavioral manuals. Given the other ways Nebuchadnezzar is typically portrayed in didactic texts – as an emblem of pride and madness – it is not difficult to understand why the image of the statue, in particular, should recur, in increasingly complex formulations, and in political literature composed around the turn of the fifteenth century.

132 Edmond Faral credits Deguileville with having paved the way for the flowering of political literature in the era of Charles V, citing Raoul de Presles, Philippe de Mézières, Honoré Bovet, Jacques Bruant, and Nicole Oresme among the authors who followed in his path: “Guillaume de Digulleville,” 116–17. Fabienne Pomel pinpoints his use of a “parcours allégorique dans le cadre d’un songe” (allegorical journey in a dream-frame) as having opened the allegorical dream-vision to philosophical, political, historical, and existential reflections: Les voies de l’au-delà, 544. 133 Pierre-Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 379. 134 Christiane Marchello-Nizia, “Entre l’histoire et la poétique, le songe politique,” Revue des sciences humaines 183 (1981–3): 39–53.

4

Le fer en la playe Around the turn of the fifteenth century, the continued merging of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue with the organic metaphor of the body politic takes on new significance in the light of Charles VI’s mental illness and, particularly, in the light of the mad king’s changed relationship with metallic objects, inorganic identity markers, and even his own materiality. In this chapter I will trace an arc from Philippe de Mézières’s account of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in the Songe du vieil pèlerin (1389) to Jean Gerson’s deployment of the same image in Rex in sempiternum vive (1413); in between, I will examine how Jean Froissart invokes the figure of Nebuchadnezzar at the moment of the king’s first mental health crisis, how Pierre Salmon explores the link between Nebuchadnezzar’s pride and his madness within an overtly contemporary context, and how Charles VI’s own behavior, and the unorthodox “cures” to which he is subjected, reflect a similar preoccupation with inorganic stand-ins for royal authority. These repurposings of the Biblical statue illustrate innovative approaches to the very real problem of a sometimes incapacitated king, but are ultimately unable to reconcile the purity and incorruptibility of gold with the vulnerability and disorder of the monarch it represents. The king’s mental illness has opened a wound in the body politic, such that the organic metaphor’s ideal of bodily coordination and interdependence comes into direct tension with the disjuncture of the statue’s disparate parts; the resulting strife is the “fer en la playe” ([iron] blade in the wound), as Gerson puts it, that prevents healing and reconciliation. The madness of king Charles VI, lasting from the first acknowledged episode in August 1392 until the king’s death in 1422, was a condition universally known.1 The constraints presented by the king’s illness and the political upheaval that accompanied it had a transformative effect on French poetics, as

1 For overviews of the king’s condition and its impact on political life during his reign, see Françoise Autrand, Charles VI: La folie du roi (Paris: Fayard, 1986); R. C. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 (New York: AMS Press, 1986); Bernard Guenée, La folie de Charles VI: Roi bien-aimé (Paris: Perrin, 2004).

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Joël Blanchard has argued.2 Even highly politically engaged poets such as Christine de Pizan rarely characterized the king as mentally ill, though, preferring anodyne references to the king’s “malady.” Christine de Pizan’s famous ballade XCV, with its premise that “Pour noz pechiez si porte la penance / Nostre bon Roy qui est en maladie” (our good king who is ill bears the penance for our sins),3 is exemplary of two widespread tendencies: the euphemistic treatment of the king’s condition and the reluctance to attribute France’s woes to that condition.4 In the first years of the fifteenth century, even as princely rivalries led France toward internecine struggle and renewed hostilities with England, a few texts overtly considered the greater implications of the king’s illness, especially the impact of the king’s bodily condition on the body politic. The most notable exceptions to this rule tend to appear in Burgundian propaganda and in other writings of Burgundian partisans: the propaganda pamphlet known as the Songe véritable (second half of 1406), Jean Petit’s Justification for the assassination of the duke of Orléans (1408), and Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues (1409, second version c.1412–15). In the anonymous Songe véritable, various personifications lament and debate France’s current political woes.5 The king’s malady is cited by multiple parties, but its exact nature is never specified; of all of the text’s speaking characters, only Faulx 2 “Le rapport des poètes à l’histoire se transforme dans les premières décennies du XVe siècle sous la double contrainte des événements angoissants de leur temps et des conditions nouvelles du lyrisme de cour” (Poets’ relationship to history is transformed in the first decades of the fifteenth century under the double constraint of the distressing events of their time and new conditions of courtly lyricism). Joël Blanchard, “Christine de Pizan: Les raisons de l’histoire,” Le Moyen Âge 92 (1986): 417. 3 Christine de Pizan, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Maurice Roy, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1886–1896), vol. 1, 95–96. Similarly, Christine refers obliquely to the king’s illness by praying for his health in the fourth stanza of her Oroyson Nostre Dame: Œuvres poétiques, vol. 3, 1–9. 4 Gilles Lecuppre has noted the apparent contradiction between fourteenth-century political commentaries, according to which infirm or mentally deficient men are held unfit for rule, and the historical fact of infirm rulers such as Charles VI, John the Blind of Luxembourg, and many others. He concludes that these rulers maintain power thanks largely to personal charisma (as in the cases of John the Blind, of Edward II of England, and of Edward the Black Prince) or, in the case of Charles VI, to the people’s goodwill toward his dynasty and the particular sacrality of French kingship. “Déficience du corps et exercice du pouvoir au XIVe siècle,” Micrologus 22 (2014): 705–19. 5 “Le songe véritable. Pamphlet politique d’un Parisien du XVe siècle,” ed. H. Moranvillé, Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 17 (1890): 217–438. The edition is based on BnF MS fr. 12488 (late fifteenth century); there is also an early fifteenth-century paper manuscript (BnF nouv. acq. fr. 6222). For more recent discussions of the pamphlet, see Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 173–75; Tracy Adams, Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014), 129.



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Gouvernement (False Government) intimates that the king’s malady makes him an unfit ruler. Faulx Gouvernement, working at the behest of the dukes of Orléans and Berry, Jean de Montaigu, and the queen, is responsible for the crown’s financial mismanagement and is far from a reliable narrator. Quant le quint Charles sy fut mort, A regner commençay moult fort: Car à son filz en son enfance Je fis avoir tel gouvernance Et aprendre telle costume, Qui ne fu puis journée nesune, Qui ne s’en soit aperceu, Dont le peuple en est deceu; Car il chei en maladie: Dont est venu, tout en partie, Le meffait et le grant oultrage Qu’on vous a dit, et le dommage (751–62, pp. 34–35) When Charles V was dead, I began to reign in earnest: for I caused his youthful son to govern in such a way, and to learn such customs, that not a day went by that he didn’t call on me. The people have been let down by this, for now he has fallen ill, and this is the source of many of the misdeeds, outrages, and harm that you’ve been told about.

Such explicit characterizations of France’s misfortunes and its poor governance as stemming from the king’s madness are rare. More often, as in Christine de Pizan’s ballade, the king’s madness and his country’s misfortune are seen as two manifestations of the same phenomenon – signs of divine punishment, and symptoms rather than causes of the country’s ills.6 This is the stance adopted throughout the rest of the Songe véritable, for instance, wherein the word “fol” and its variants are used to characterize just about everyone except the king. The king’s illness is first raised as a point in his defense: the royal advocate Excusacion depicts Charles as a victim of his handlers, a man who is used when he is healthy and shoved aside when he is not. The king’s diagnosis and his cycles of lucid and insane episodes are just another means by which he is controlled: “On le fait saige, on le fait fol, / On joue de ly ou chapifol” (They

6 For other examples of texts attributing the king’s illness to a divine punishment for the sins of the people or of the court, see Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 82–87.

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say he’s wise, they say he’s a fool, they play blind man’s buff7 with him, 481–82). In a better-known Burgundian propaganda piece, Jean Petit’s Justification, it is claimed that the king’s brother has made him ill (through sorcery, poisoning, attempted murder at the so-called bal des ardents, unauthorized foreign alliances, and other nefarious schemes) in order to seize power for himself.8 According to the chronicler Monstrelet’s account of Petit’s speech, the Burgundian position is that the duke was assassinated par si grant neccesité comme pour défendre son Roy et le garder de péril de mort, et mesmement quant lesdictes machinacions et sortilèges ont si avant ouvré en sa personne qu’il en est tellement indisposé qu’il ne peut entendre à faire justice, et que ledit tirant a desservi si grande punicion que justice n’en peut bonnement estre faicte par sondit roy ey souverain seigneur, qui est affebli, blécié et endommagié en entendement et en puissance corporelle.9 by such great necessity as to defend the king and keep him from the peril of death, especially when the aforesaid machinations and spells have so advanced on his person that he is so indisposed by them that he cannot understand enough to impose justice, and the said tyrant [the duke of Orléans] deserved such a great punishment that appropriate justice cannot be done by his king and sovereign lord, who is weakened, wounded, and damaged in intellect and in physical strength.

As in the Songe véritable, the king is “defended” with explicit declarations of his unfitness for rule: he is, as Monstrelet reports Petit’s words, “tout indisposé en entendement et en force corporelle qu’il ne scauroit ou pourroit y mectre remède ni en faire justice” (completely indisposed in intellect and bodily 7 Jouer au chapefol was, according to the DMF, a “Jeu de société qui consiste à bander les yeux à un participant, à le placer au milieu d’un cercle de joueurs qui le frappent à tour de rôle, à charge pour lui de deviner qui l’a frappé” (game consisting of blindfolding a participant and placing him in the middle of a circle of players who hit him one by one, so that he must guess who has hit him). The expression refers, by extension, to “Faire ce qu’on veut de qqn, le mener par le bout du nez” (Having one’s way with someone, leading him by the nose). DMF, s.v. “chapefol.” 8 On the history of this text, see Alfred Coville, “Le véritable texte de la justification du duc de Bourgogne par Jean Petit (8 mars 1408),” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 72 (1911): 57–91. A helpful overview of Jean Petit’s career and of the circumstances surrounding his delivery of the Justification is found in Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 189–201. Similar accusations about charms, poisons, and the bal des ardents occur, under the veil of fiction, in the anonymous Pastoralet, written by the pseudonymous “Bucarius” c.1422–25. Le Pastoralet, ed. Joël Blanchard (Paris: PUF, 1983). 9 La chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douët-d’Arcq (Paris: Renouard, 1857–62), vol. 1, 211.



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strength, such that he neither would nor could remedy [his brother’s behavior] nor bring him to justice, 213). Petit instrumentalizes the king’s madness for his own patron’s benefit, just as much as he claims Orléans has done. Blaming the king’s condition on Burgundy’s victim in order to absolve the king’s cousin of murder, presenting the king’s illness as the result of a dastardly plot, Petit implies that the king should not be held to account for his failures – but his late brother should. Likewise, in the Songe véritable, once those in attendance have heard how the king has been mistreated by his brother and wife, who are taking advantage of his “maladie,” the Songe véritable’s complainants retract the “tresfoles opinions / Que encontre le Roy avions” (very mad opinions we held against the king, vv. 601–602).10 It was Charles VI’s suffering that made him le Bien-Aimé, as he is still known; Christine de Pizan reports in the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V that the people “plouroient de compassion de son enfermeté et malaage” (wept with compassion for his infirmity and suffering).11 Still, many people must have reached similar conclusions to those expressed in the Songe véritable about the “weaponization” of the king’s condition, and his use as a pawn in the princes’ power struggles – or even, perhaps, opinions similar to those expressed by Faulx Gouvernement. While such sentiments could surely not be openly expressed, we can find traces of them, as in the case of the peasant Jehan Jourdain. This man, whose remission letter Natalie Zemon Davis cites in Fiction in the Archives, publicly stated that not only “Le Roy est bien fol et enragié” (the king is raving mad) but also his madness had led to a crisis in leadership: “que se nous estions bien saiges et advisez autant que homme de nostre royaume, ceulx qui nous gouvernent ne nous gouverneroient pas, et ne seroient que nos varles” (that if we [the king] were sane and had as good sense 10 It is to works such as these that Jean Gerson refers in Vivat rex when he portrays the personified vice of Sedition carrying libelous pamphlets beneath her torn clothing: “Lors tray hors de son habit descire, grant foison de libelles diffamatoires, composeez partie par detraction sa cousine et malebouche, partie par souspecon melancolieux, partie par bruit de vile renommee [...] partie estoit de verite” (1154). Gerson attributes the authorship of these tracts to a collaborative team composed of Sedition, Detraction, Malebouche, Melancholic Suspicion, Rumors of Ill Repute, and Truth; while he does not name the Burgundians as sources of propaganda in Vivat rex, the decision to present Detraction as the cousin of Sedition does mirror patterns in the political interactions of the royal family circle. I cite Vivat rex from Jean Gerson, Œuvres complètes VII.2, ed. Palemon Glorieux (Paris: Desclée, 1968), 1137–85. This remains the definitive edition despite Olivier Delsaux’s demonstration of the need for a new edition based on BnF MS fr. 926: “Mise au jour d’un nouveau visage du Vivat rex de Jean Gerson. Une nouvelle édition critique du texte devient-elle nécessaire?” Le Moyen Français 70 (2012): 135–53. 11 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs, vol. 1, 166. See Bernard Guenée’s illuminating discussion in L’opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Âge d’après la Chronique de Charles VI du Religieux de Saint-Denis (Paris: Perrin, 2002), 181–96.

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as the men of our kingdom, those who lead us would not lead us, and would only be our servants).12 Despite the evident validity of Jehan Jourdain’s observations, one would have to be mad oneself to suggest that the king’s madness rendered him unfit to rule, as Jehan Jourdain claimed in his supplication to the king (“ledit suppliant [...] ait esté telement foulé et dommagié qu’il a perdu grant partie de sa chevence, et de son sens et mémoire,” the said petitioner was so afflicted and damaged that he lost a great deal of his wealth, and his sense and memory). In a similar vein, the political writer and self-styled royal agent Pierre Salmon indicates in his 1409 Dialogues that to speak too directly about the king’s condition might even be suicidal: quant il plaira a dieu et a vous que je soie devant vostre majesté mon entencion est vous dire verité et puet estre qu’il ne plaira mie à ceulx qui ne sont pas bienloyaulx envers vous, lesquelz porront considerer que se vous aviez vraie congnoissance de vostre estat que ce seroit leur confusion. Et pour ceste cause porroient iceulx moy blasmer envers vous et mettre en vostre indignacion, et par voies obliques et couvertes pourchacier mon dommage ou ma mort ainsy comme autrefois ont fait afin que je n’eusse audience devant vostre magesté. Et par ce je seroie homicide de moy mesmes pour moy mettre ès mains et en la puissance de mes ennemis mortelz. (BnF, MS fr. 23279, 108r )13 when it pleases God and you that I come before your majesty, my intention is to tell you the truth, and maybe that will not please those who are not altogether loyal to you, who may consider that if you were fully aware of your own condition, it would be their loss; and for this reason they might speak ill of me to you and put me out of your good graces, and by sneaky and covert means they could pursue my downfall or my death just as they already did, so that I could not have an audience with your majesty; and thus I would effectively have committed suicide, having put myself in the hands and in the power of my mortal enemies.

12 Natalie Zemon Davis alludes to the case in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 27. The letter (AN, JJ170, no. 106) is quoted from Louis Douët d’Arcq, Choix de pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI (Paris: Renouard, 1864) vol. 2, 180–82. Cited in Anne D. Hedeman, Of Counselors of Kings: The Three Versions of Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 1. 13 I cite Salmon’s Dialogues from the Paris manuscript of the first version of Salmon’s text. It was also edited as Les demandes faites par le roi Charles VI, touchant son état et le gouvernement de sa personne, avec les réponses de Pierre Salmon, ed. G. A. Crapelet (Paris: Crapelet, 1833).



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Throughout his Dialogues Salmon is frank about the king’s illness, and about its potential implications for the kingdom’s governance. In most of the political literature that we will examine in this chapter, however – texts mainly written in the final decade of the fourteenth century and the first decade of the fifteenth – the king’s malady is commonly alluded to but its exact nature most often remains unspoken. Ideally, according to Jean Gerson, rulers should be open to hearing the truth: “Chacun seigneur se doit monstrer en effect et en paroles que on luy ose dire verite, soit a sa louange soit a son blasme, soit a part soit en publique” (Each lord should show himself in deeds and in speech such that people dare to tell him the truth, either in praise or in criticism, either in private or in public, Vivat rex 1164). The French royal court of the early fifteenth century does not appear to have achieved this ideal. The resulting reluctance (especially in non-propagandistic literary texts) to speak openly about the nature of the king’s illness, lest such discussions be interpreted as efforts to “jouer de ly ou chapifol” (or to impede the princes’ efforts to play that game), leaves metaphor as the best vehicle through which to explore the question. Indeed, writing a few years before the king’s first psychotic episode, Philippe de Mézières highlights the utility of metaphor as a more secure vehicle for politically dangerous critique: “Ardant Desir, qui est mortel, se doubtoit que s’il eust traictié en personne des dessusdis contraires as grans seigneurs…” (Ardent Desire, who is mortal, doubted that he would have spoken in person [i.e., not under cover of allegory] about the abovementioned objections to the great lords, 626). The stakes grow even higher as the king falls into his post-1392 pattern of ever longer and more frequent mental crises. Thus Gerson presents the inception of Vivat rex as a struggle between the impulses of Dissimulation and Sedition, a struggle that can only be resolved when Discretion appears and instructs the preacher to couch his message in the “similitude” of the body politic (1155). Even after the death of Charles VI, the anonymous author of the Pastoralet opts to approach these troubled times by a “couverte voie / Sans apertement reveler / Les fais de quoy je voel parler” (hidden path, without openly revealing the facts of which I wish to speak, 39, vv. 8–10). Metaphor allows Mézières, Gerson, and other political allegorists, pamphleteers, and chroniclers to speak (veiled) truth to power.14 Not surprisingly, then, in the critical early years of the king’s illness the inorganic metaphors of cognition and statecraft that we have already studied 14 Rosalind Brown-Grant has also argued that allegorical reading can serve as a vehicle for princely salvation, as in the authorial preface to Christine de Pizan’s Avision Christine. Rosalind Brown-Grant, “L’Avision Christine: Autobiographical Narrative or Mirror for the Prince?” in Brabant, Politics, Gender, and Genre, 95–111. See also, to this point, Virginie Minet-Mahy’s application of Ricoeur’s concept of “refiguration” in Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 12–18.

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reemerge and converge, creating compelling new discursive constructs of a diseased body politic and a fragmented state. Building on the images of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue and the organic metaphor of the state discussed in Chapter Three, writers active around the turn of the fifteenth century – including Philippe de Mézières, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, and Pierre Salmon – deploy the language of statues and other objects, metals and inorganic materials, and disabled bodies politic to capture the political and social impact of the king’s illness. We will make particular note of the use of these strategies in the middle of the first decade of the fifteenth century, when an especially severe episode of the king’s malady, coinciding with the height of the Orleanist–Burgundian rivalry, inspires a number of authors to write urgently, yet obliquely, about the political implications of the king’s condition. The king’s peculiar symptoms, such as the defacement of his arms, his delusion that he was made of glass, and his purported self-harm with a rusted blade, further underscore the salience of inorganic metaphor as a means of understanding the king’s malfunctioning engin. In poems, sermons, letters, and chronicles, novel metaphors of minerals and metals, along with the familiar images of Nebuchadnezzar and the organic metaphor of the state, are redeployed in lively and wide-ranging discussions of the “bon roi qui est en maladie.” Nebuchadnezzar, Revisited The figure of Nebuchadnezzar is a potent political symbol during Charles VI’s reign, appearing in politically engaged works such as Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du vieil pèlerin, Froissart’s Chroniques, Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues, and Jean Gerson’s Vivat rex and Rex in sempiternum vive. In most of these works, Nebuchadnezzar appears in his incarnation as the bestial, mad king of Daniel 4, or as an emblem of the pride that leads to such a downfall. However, Philippe de Mézières sketches a more dynamic vision of the Babylonian king. In conjunction with a remarkable set of mineral and metallic metaphors, Mézières adapts and reconfigures Deguileville’s allusions to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, creating novel political and moral critiques. In his Songe du vieil pèlerin (1389), Philippe de Mézières – cosmopolitan knight, royal advisor, crusade enthusiast, and tutor to the young Charles VI, lately retired in the convent of the Celestines in Paris15 – reworks Guillaume de Deguileville’s pilgrimage texts, deploying the earlier allegories’ places, objects, and characters in service of a more concretely contextualized and 15 The definitive biography of Mézières remains Neculai Jorga, Philippe de Mézières et la croisade au XIVe siècle (Paris: Bouillon, 1896). For an excellent and recent complement, see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kiril Petkov, eds., Philippe de Mézières and His Age: Piety and Politics in the Fourteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2012).



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politicized allegorical vision.16 Among his many inorganic, metallic, and mechanical metaphors, a number of which he derives directly from “le noble moine de Chaalis,” Mézières repeatedly alludes to the Nebuchadnezzar sequence in the Pèlerinage de l’âme. Reading these allusions in conjunction with some of the guiding metaphors in Songe du vieil pèlerin, we will examine how Mézières reconfigures and reimagines the “moving parts” of Deguileville’s political allegory during the brief period between Charles VI’s majority and the publicly acknowledged onset of his madness. The Songe du vieil pèlerin is a densely layered allegorical dream-vision, an exhaustive guide to the moral and geopolitical foundations of good government, designed to instruct Mézières’s former charge at the onset of his independent rule. The vision’s “magnificent and audacious structure”17 begins with a retelling of the Biblical parable of the talents. The first-person author/narrator then defines his own literary activity in the parable’s terms, naming himself a Povre Pelerin who invests his “petit besant” by writing allegorical pilgrimage texts. Eventually, in his capacity as the messenger communicating the vision, he will be known as Ardant Desir and will be accompanied by Bonne Esperance on a tour of the civilized world; they will observe as queen Verité inspects the coinage of diverse kingdoms, looking for virtue, the purest alloy, “la belle monnoye de la sainte alkemie” (the beautiful currency of holy alchemy, 20). The journey is narrated in three books: one recounting the travels of Verité and her companions; one relating Verité’s parlement held in the French royal palace; and one in which she privately instructs the young king, the new Moses. All three books are studded with elaborate tableaux or “micro-allegories,”18 such as the monstrous vices in Book One; the ship of state, the organic metaphor of government, and the pierre de taille epidemic in Book Two; and the chessboard in Book Three. These set pieces interact, as Jeannine Quillet points out, as components of a vast, rule-bound system.19 Virtually nothing is expressed literally, as the Old 16 While the connections between Deguileville’s pilgrimages and Mézières’s songe are manifest, the relationship between these texts may have been mediated by another, as Alessia Marchiori posits that Mézières’s lost Pelerinage du povre pelerin may have served as an intermediate step in Mézières’s process of appropriation and adaptation. Alessia Marchiori, “Le Songe du vieil pèlerin de Philippe de Mézières et son projet de rénovation face au lecteur médiéval et moderne,” in Original et originalité. Aspects historiques, philologiques et littéraires, ed. Olivier Delsaux and Hélène Haug (Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2011), 119–28. 17 Dora M. Bell, Étude sur le Songe du vieil pèlerin de Philippe de Mézières (1327–1405) d’après le manuscrit français B. N. 22542, document historique et moral du règne de Charles VI (Geneva: Droz, 1955), 9. 18 Armand Strubel, “Le Songe du vieil pèlerin et les transformations de l’allégorie au quatorzième siècle,” Perspectives médiévales 6 (1980): 57. 19 Jeannine Quillet, “Songes et songeries dans l’art de la politique au XIVe siècle,” Études philosophiques (1975): 345.

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Pilgrim “habitually speaks in figures, parables, analogies, and reflections or imagery” (“communalement parle par figures et par paraboles, par similitudes et par consideracions ou ymaginacions,” 28–29). The deliberately striking images are designed for maximum impact. de tant que les examples sont aournees et recitees par maniere de figure ou similitude un pau estrange, l’audicteur ou le lisant met plus grant paine a les entendre et bien encorporer en son entendement par maniere de memoire (29) insofar as the examples are adorned and recited by means of somewhat strange figures or analogies, the listener or the reader works harder to comprehend them and remember them, incorporating them in his understanding.

This strategy gives rise to a disorienting profusion of figures: Charles VI, for instance, is identified with no fewer than seven different names over the course of the text. To help his readers negotiate the labyrinth of images, Mézières furnishes a “table et exposicion” at the end of the prologue so that the reader “entendra clerement toutes choses” (will clearly understand everything, 31), as well as a list of “les rebriches de tout le livre, et par nombre, qui renvoie a chascun chappitre de tout le livre” (the rubrics of the entire book, numbered, which refers to every chapter of the entire book, 32). Thus, as in the Pèlerinage de l’âme manuscripts dating from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Songe du vieil pèlerin is endowed with a robust textual apparatus that facilitates silent and selective reading, signalling the book’s suitability as a serious reference work. The Songe’s “strange figures and analogies” include an unusual abundance of metaphors drawing together organic and inorganic elements. This orientation is evident from the outset, as the entire narrative is framed within the masterallegory of coinage.20 Mézières’s discussion of coins participates in larger fourteenth-century debates on monetary policy, as has been duly noted.21 It is strikingly focused on the materiality of coins as metal objects: not just in its advocation for pure alloys (a position expressed most famously in Oresme’s 20 For a helpful overview of this allegory, and of the intersection of coinage and alchemy, see Carolyn Collette, “Reading Chaucer Through Philippe de Mézières: Alchemy, the Individual, and the Good Society,” in Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture, ed. Christoph Huber and Henrike Lähnemann (Tübingen: Attempto, 2002), 177–94. 21 For an overview of this topic see Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 289–310. See also Daisy Delogu, “How to Become the ‘roy des frans:’ The Performance of Kingship in Philippe de Mézières’s Le songe du vieil pelerin,” in Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Petkov, Philippe de Mézières and His Age, 162.



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De moneta), but also in its exploitation of the language of alchemy and the forge to interrogate the very meaning of “purity.” This attention to the material coin, and the “alchemy” through which it is forged, is one of the “concretizing gestures”22 that anchor Mézières’s allegory in the physical world, situating it, as Anouk De Wolf writes, at the limit where allegory and historical narrative meet.23 Even as Mézières invokes concrete objects, though, he maintains a palpable distance between his readers’ lived experience and the alternate material reality he creates. Andrea Tarnowski points out, for example, that Mézières chooses to “deal” in an unfamiliar currency (the golden besant), not the silveralloy coins that most people in late fourteenth-century France would have used24: aligning the coinage metaphor with the broader cultural resonances of metals requires a certain poetic license, a compositional process that Mézières himself refers to as “nostre soutile alkemie” (our subtle alchemy, 1074). Indeed, like an alchemist, Mézières creates a series of artificial constructs (his allegorical objects and tableaux), combining them in a “mechanical assemblage,” lacking unity, rivaling but never equaling nature.25 Out of aurifaction, Mézières creates (to borrow a term from Bernard Joly) aurifiction.26 Mézières’s alchemical metaphor destabilizes objects’ relationship to the abstract concepts they signify, just as alchemists’ imitation of nature makes it impossible to assess a substance’s essence merely by observing its external properties.27 This is not to say that metals cannot signify. Gold, especially – pure gold – still stands in for princely virtue in the Songe du vieil pélerin, just as it 22 Sara V. Torres, “Remembered Pèlerinage: Deguileville’s Pilgrim in Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du Vieil Pelerin,” in Nievergelt and Kamath, The “Pèlerinage” Allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville, 169. 23 Anouk De Wolf, “L’allégorie en contexte: La mise en œuvre des personnifications dans le Songe du Viel Pelerin,” Le Moyen Français 24–25 (1989): 262. Or, as Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski puts it, this is “an extreme case of allegory invaded by contemporary reality.” Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006), 106. On heightened interest in alchemy during the Hundred Years’ War, see Will H. L. Ogrinc, “Western Society and Alchemy 1200–1500,” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980): 103–32. 24 Andrea Tarnowski, “The Consolations of Writing Allegory: Philippe de Mézières’ Le songe du vieil pelerin,” in Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Petrov, Philippe de Mézières and His Age, 237–54. On the metallic content of fourteenth-century currency, see Harry A. Miskimin, “L’or, l’argent, la guerre dans la France médiévale,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 40 (1985): 171–184. 25 See Barbara Obrist, “Art et nature dans l’alchimie médiévale,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 49 (1996): 215–86. 26 Bernard Joly, “Quand l’alchimie était une science,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 49 (1996): 147–57. 27 On alchemy and “the problem of the verbal representation of truth,” see Lee Patterson, “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 25–57.

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does in the Pèlerinage de l’âme’s allegory of the statue. From the very beginning of the work, though, the material properties and signification of the seemingly pure substance are called into question. In the Prologue, as the Pilgrim explicates the “Blanc Faucon pelerin au bec et pies dorés” (pilgrim White Falcon with golden beak and feet, 23), representing Charles VI, he remarks that the bird’s color signifies “innocence et toute purté” (innocence and utter purity, 24). However, this purity is merely contingent: “Quant cestui songe fut escript, il se peut dire que le Blanc Faucon estoit innocens et n’avoit encores moustré ne excersé aucune tirannie, de laquelle Dieu l’en veulle garder et la doulce Vierge Marie” (When this dream was written, it can be said that the White Falcon was innocent and had not yet shown or exercised any tyranny, may God and the sweet Virgin Mary keep him from it, 24). The delicate balance of past, present, and future underlines either that the materials of which the king is composed (figuratively speaking) are subject to change, or that they may not be what they seem. The king had not yet shown any signs of tyranny when this book was written, or so it can be said.28 Charles’s golden embellishments give the people hope that they will turn out to signify the virtues of a great king: Encores oudit Faucon Blanc a petites estincelles dorees, saillans entre les plumes blanches par tout le corps, qui enbellissent le Faucon; par lesquelles estincelles pevent estre entendues, parlant moralement, les vertus gracieuses qui ja se moustrent en nostre Blanc Faucon, par lesquelles vertus les subgiés du royaume ont bonne esperance d’estre repeus des bons foins du bon gouvernement a venir du Blanc Faucon au bec et piés dorés.” (24–25) Also, the Falcon is embellished with little golden spangles, emerging between its white feathers all over its body. These spangles can be understood, figuratively speaking, as the gracious virtues that already show in our young White Falcon, which give the subjects of the kingdom reason to hope that in the future the White Falcon with golden beak and feet will nourish them with the good fodder of good government.

All of this leaves open the possibility that the king may have shown tyrannical tendencies in the interim, or that he has or will fail to live up to the ideals of good government. The questionable “stuff” the king is made of reemerges on a lighter tone in Book Three, when the sage counselor advises the hard-partying king to go to bed at a reasonable hour, lest he find himself too fatigued to exercise “sens et 28 For further discussion of the long shadow that tyranny casts over the tenor of Mézières’s instructions for the king, see Amandine Mussou, “Le Roi, le tyran et le sage: Charles VI, Evilmerodag et Moïse dans Le Songe du Vieil Pèlerin,” Questes 13 (2008): 67–80.



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entendement ou rayson judicative” (sense and intellect or good judgment, 927) in council. Je pense bien, biau filz, que avant que le conseil sera finé tu froteras maintesfois ton front par grant melencolie et te semblera que le conseil ara duré .vi. heures. Tu seras ennuyés et te sentiras toute foulés et recognoistras lors en toy meismes qu’il vausist mieulz que tu eusses dormi la nuit a suffisance. Quel merveille ! car pour ta personne, qui n’est pas de fer ne d’acier, qui sera mal disposee, tu sentiras es difficultés des consaulz et oppinions de tes plus sages conseilliers ton vif engien aussi comme tout rebuté. (927–28) I really think, fair son, that before the end of the session you will repeatedly rub your forehead with great melancholy and it will seem to you that the council has lasted six hours. You will be bored and you will feel all exhausted and then you will realize that you ought to have slept more the night before. It’s no wonder! Because of your body – which is not made of iron or steel, and will be in bad shape – you will have trouble with the counsel and opinions of your wisest advisers, and your lively mind will be discouraged.

He is susceptible to breakdown because he is not made of metal; his mental “engine” can only take so much abuse. Unlike constructive leisure, described by Nicolas de Gonesse in his translation of and gloss on Valerius Maximus as restorative of the entendement, the king’s recreations threaten to drain or even break his power.29 Mézières again stakes the king’s surprising fragility in inorganic terms as Verité warns him to take better care of himself: Qui mettroit une tresriche pierre precieuse qui fust d’une tres grant valour legierement non estimable, a tous essais discrés et non discrés, il pourroit avenir legierement que ladicte pierre precieuse esdis essais par indiscrecion pourroit estre brisee et sa grant vertu par son maistre anullee. Biau filz, dit la royne, tu es la pierre precieuse, parlant moralment, de laquelle tous les François attendent une fois estre secouru de sa tresgrant vertu... (984) Whoever would put a precious and priceless stone to all sorts of prudent and imprudent tests might soon find that the precious stone could be indiscreetly broken in the said assays, its great power undone by its master. Fair son, said

29 Nicolas de Gonesse, Les faits et paroles memorables, dated 1400–1401. On this text, and on the distinction between good and bad forms of royal leisure in this period, see Joël Blanchard, “Le corps du roi: Mélancolie et ‘recreation.’ Implications médicales et culturelles du loisir des princes à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Joël Blanchard and Philippe Contamine (Paris: Picard, 1995), 199–211.

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the queen, you are the precious stone, figuratively speaking, by whose great power all of the French people wait to be saved…

The comparison of a monarch to a gem is fairly conventional, and it recurs in Mézières’s other writings, such as the letter to Richard II; but as Joan Williamson argues, the use of such language within this particular book’s allegorical program “goes beyond mere metaphor. This is indeed a compliment, but one which contains a whole meaning of divine mission.”30 Yet Verité’s emphasis on the mineral’s vulnerability, even more than its value, is one of many daring ways that Mézières, through his allegorical alter egos, speaks truth to power. Where Ardant Desir can only criticize the ruling class under cover of metaphor, certain images, many inspired by Deguileville’s pilgrimages, take on particular importance. Mézières adapts his traveler’s accoutrements, including his scarf and his staff, from the Pèlerinage de vie humaine,31 and to these Mézières adds Deguileville’s powerful evocation of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue from the Pèlerinage de l’âme, which he adapts twice (in I.49 and II.49). Mézières plays on “the political tensions and ambiguities attached to the image of King Nebuchadnezzar” throughout the Songe du vieil pèlerin.32 His habit of combining different parts of Nebuchadnezzar’s story reinforces the connection between the dream statue, the idol, the king’s pride, and his insanity; it underlines just how much the decline of a body politic is intertwined with its leader’s mental state. The statue’s second appearance in the Songe du vieil pèlerin is the more overtly didactic, and it hews more closely to what we recognize as the organic metaphor. Its source is explicitly identified, at the close of the preceding chapter, as the Pèlerinage de l’âme. Droicture tells Ardent Desir that gouvernement et pollicie d’un royaume est tres bon quant le prince maintient les habitans du royaume chascun en son degré […] c’est assavoir que l’un ne doit pas usurper la dignité ou office de l’autre, car ce faisant le royaume en puet venir a confusion, si comme il peut apparoir clerement […] par une belle figure que le noble moisne de Chaalis recite en son Pelerinage de l’Ame par le moyen de la statue du roy Nabugodonosor… (684)

30 Joan B. Williamson, “Jewels in the Work of Philippe de Mézières,” in Autour d’Eustache Deschamps, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Amiens: Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, 1999), 268. 31 Philippe Maupeu catalogues most of Mézières’s direct references to Deguileville in Pèlerins de vie humaine, 344 et ss. 32 I borrow this phrase from a discussion of Nebuchadnezzar’s portrayal in Gower’s Confessio amantis, but it applies just as well to Mézières. Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,” 83.



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A kingdom’s government and administration are best when the prince keeps each inhabitant in his place; that is, one should not usurp the dignity or function of another, for if one does, the kingdom can fall into disorder, as can be seen clearly in a nice figure that the noble monk of Chaalis narrates in the Pèlerinage de l’âme, using king Nebuchadnezzar’s statue…

Despite the claim that this is the same figure that appeared in PA, what follows is substantially different. Droicture does more than “abregier la figure qui est assés prolixe” (abridge the figure, which is rather wordy, 684); if anything, her allegorical vision of the state is far more similar to John of Salisbury’s or Aristotle’s (via Oresme) than it is to Guillaume de Deguileville’s. Apart from the introductory remarks cited above, and the rubric to chapter 49, this “abbreviated” figure has been stripped of any indication that the body in question is a statue. No reference is made to metals or to clay; rather, the body politic is presented just as if it were a living body. Mézières’s focus on the problem of disproportionate fingers also suggests that this reading of the statue owes as much to Nicole Oresme’s 1373 translation of Aristotle’s Politics (especially the glosses to III.19 and V.4 and their illustrations) as it does to Deguileville.33 The ultimate lesson that this metaphor illustrates also seems quite small in comparison to Deguileville’s grand political vision. The takeaway of Mézières’s version is that the fingers, the “varlés et serviteurs neccessaires pour la personne du roy” (valets and servants needed to take care of the king, 685), should not be given greater importance than their rank would dictate: for “se l’un des dois de la main, les .ii. ou les .iii., estoient devenus en la main si gros comme l’espaule ou les bras, comment d’une telle main ainsi defiguree s’en porroit aider le roy?” (if one or two or three fingers of the hand were to become as large as the shoulder or the arms, how could the king use such a disfigured hand?, 685). Unlike the guiding metaphor of the besants in the Songe du vieil pèlerin, this “belle figure” does not appear to raise larger questions of authenticity, of purity, of the puzzle of representation or the unreliability of signs. These questions do linger beneath the surface, though, for Droicture describes the body of state specifically to denounce the inordinate power of lower-born servants; her lesson is countered by the objections of one such upstart, “le mahommet du seigneur [qui] argue fort contre les dis de la chambriere” (the king’s favorite [who] argues strongly 33 In Politics III.19, Aristotle states (within a discussion of the exile of excessively powerful individuals) that artists must keep the members of their human figures in proportion in order for their creations to be beautiful. This is a metaphor that is illustrated in a number of royal manuscripts made in the 1370s, as Claire Richter Sherman has shown. These images, Sherman explains, depict an artist erasing a disproportionate hand or arm on a nude human figure; the figure’s nudity, she argues, indicates that it is meant to be understood as an artwork, and more specifically as a statue. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 214–20.

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against the chambermaid’s words, 687). The objections of the “mahommet” hint at a new political resonance of the sculpted image in the fourteenth century. The word Mézières uses throughout the Songe du vieil pèlerin to designate a royal favorite, mahommet, is a current Middle French term for an idol, closely related to the Middle French marmouset, which can also designate either a figural sculpture or a royal favorite.34 Thus the mahommet’s speech brings us to the disorienting realization that the seemingly human image on which the metaphor of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is based is, as Mézières writes it, doubly inorganic. Not only is the body politic a statue; so, too, are its fingers, idols (mahommets) that can grow to the point of destabilizing the very structure they are meant to sustain. The statue’s paradoxical instability is far more explicit in the Songe du vieil pèlerin’s other extended treatment of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, contained within the self-portrait of Orgueil. The description of Orgueil, one of the hideous vices headquartered in Avignon, deploys mechanical language and Biblical imagery as it draws upon and reworks the instruments of Deguileville’s allegories. Orgueil has inflated breasts, and the richly clothed body of an empress. Her three heads (those of a lioness and two snakes) are surmounted by an iron crown; she wields an iron rod; and as she presides over a “perilleuse orloge” in her forge (perilous clock, 339), she feels herself transformed into Nebuchadnezzar’s statue. Dame royne, quant je suis assise sus mon faulzdesteul et poissant throne, tresredoubté et bien acompaignié de mes chieres filles et de ma poissant maignie, lors soudainement, parlant moralment, par un froit vent je suis convertie et transmuee en l’idole et statue du roy Nabugodonosor, qui avoit .lx. coubtés de hault, et estoit d’argent, de fer et de metail, et avoit les pies de boe, lesquelx je ne puis veoir pour la haulteur de ma poitrine et 34 Froissart’s usage has inspired the common adoption of marmousets as a name for the circle of former advisers to Charles V who rose to prominence in 1388 as Charles VI achieved majority and rejected his uncles’ rule. The close relationship between Mézières’s ideas and the policies promoted by the “marmousets” has been noted, especially by John Bell Henneman, who calls Mézières “the intellectual godfather of the Marmousets” in Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France Under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 136. See also Gisela Naegle, “À la recherche d’une parenté difficile: Miroirs des princes et écrits de réforme (France médiévale et Empire),” in Lachaud and Scordia, Le prince au miroir de la littérature politique, 259–75; James Magee, “Crusading at the Court of Charles VI, 1388–1396,” French History 12:4 (1998): 372. On the relationship between Mézières and the marmousets, see also Philippe Contamine, “La crise de la royauté française au XIVe siècle: Réformation et innovation dans Le songe du vieil pelerin (1389) de Philippe de Mézières,” in Tradition, innovation, invention: Fortschrittsverweigerung und Fortschrittsbewusstsein im Mittelalter, ed. Hans-Joachim Schmidt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 361–79.



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l’empechement de mes eles et l’enflure de mes mamelles. Et lors je, souveraine royne d’orgueil, d’oultrecuidance et de vanité, toute ravie par maniere d’idolatrie, je commande a sonner la grant trompe royale, la grant cloche de l’orloge, et les .vii. petites cloches, qui sont les .vii. pechiés mortelx, par maniere de doulx instrumens. Et lors sans arester, qui ne me vendra aourer, mieulx li vaudroit estre oultremer, car tantost je le feray jeter en la fournaise ardant avec les .iii. enfans Sidrach, Midrach et Abdenago. Et ainsi, comme dit est, de lui m’en vengeray, et a mon pooir sur tous je regneray, et, qui qu’en poit, mes riches besans forgeray. Or avés oÿ, dame royne, le biau mistere de ma precieuse forge et l’atrempance de ma gracieuse orloge. (341–42) My lady [Verité], when I am seated in my mighty throne, venerated and accompanied by my dear daughters and my powerful entourage, suddenly, figuratively speaking, a cold wind converts and transforms me into Nebuchadnezzar’s idol and statue, which was sixty cubits tall, and was made of silver, iron, and metal, and had clay feet, which I cannot see, for my view is impeded by the prominence of my chest, my wings, and the swelling of my breasts. And then I, sovereign queen of pride, presumption, and vanity, carried away with idolatry, I command that the great royal trumpet, the great bell of the clock, and the seven little bells (which are the seven deadly sins) be played as if they were sweet instruments. Anyone who does not come to adore me would be better off overseas, for I will have him thrown immediately into the fiery furnace with the three innocents Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Thus, as it is said, I will avenge myself on him, and I will reign over all with my power, and like it or not, I will forge my rich coins. Now you have heard, my lady, the fine mystery of my precious forge and the keeping of my lovely clock.

The importance of transformation in the portrait of Orgueil is immediately apparent: the forge becomes an orloge that transforms metal into coins, as the wind from the bellows transforms Orgueil into the statue. This is the epitome of the “false alchemy” of which the prologue warns. There is a good deal of literary alchemy at play, too: the transtextual mutations that occur as Mézières apparently adapts his earlier verse Pelerinage du Povre Pelerin into prose, and as Mézières repurposes and reconfigures pieces of Deguileville’s allegorical apparatus to construct this new machine.35 Mézières brings together the portraits 35 The description of Orgueil is one of many extended passages of vestigial rhyme found in the Songe du vieil pèlerin, especially in the first book. Janet M. Ferrier has proposed, not unconvincingly, that these embedded passages are recycled from an early verse work, which Ferrier tentatively identifies with the no longer extant Pelerinage du Povre Pelerin to which Mézières alludes in the SVP’s prologue. Janet M. Ferrier, “Philippe de Mézières as poet? Vestigial rhymes in Le Songe du Vieil Pelerin,” French Studies 37:4 (1983): 385–390.

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of Orgueil and other vices in the Pèlerinage de vie humaine (especially the second recension), the Pèlerinage de l’âme’s characterizations of celestial and infernal clockworks, and the Pèlerinage de l’âme’s extended allegory of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, creating a composite put together from Deguileville’s spare parts. The evocation of the “idole et statue” is reminiscent of Deguileville’s Idolatrie, one of the vices added to the second redaction of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine. At the same time, the bellows’ transformative power, and even their association with Nebuchadnezzar, echo Deguileville’s image of Orgueil, who declares that Ce soufflet en sa forge avoit Nabugodonosor qui disoit Que Babiloine avoit fondé En sa force et en sa beauté (PVH2 704, vv. 9553–56) Nebuchadnezzar, who said he had founded Babylon in its strength and beauty, had this bellows [i.e., Vaine Gloire, the bellows of Orgueil] in his forge.

The idea of being “puffed up” with pride does not originate with either Mézières or Deguileville, of course, but this notion is made especially concrete within the broader mechanism of Orgueil’s clockwork: a machine whose complex of gears mirrors the larger text’s “heavy machinery” of allegory (as Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski memorably puts it36), a machine into which Orgueil herself is subtly incorporated. While Orgueil is mainly characterized more as a clockkeeper concerned with the machine’s “atrempance,”37 certain of her attributes suggest that she is a part of her own machine, caught up in its workings, regulating its movement from within. As noted, she holds a “verge de fer” (iron rod, 323), ostensibly to keep others away, and she is “richement couronnee d’une couronne de feu qui avironnoit les .iii. testes” (richly crowned with an iron crown that surrounded her three heads, 325). These seemingly simple attributes in fact belong to the technical vocabulary of clockmaking, and specifically, of the verge-and-foliot (or crown wheel) escapement pioneered in fourteenth-century clockmaking. Mézières was familiar with the most celebrated device of his era boasting such a mechanism: Giovanni Dondi’s astrarium, described in Songe du vieil pèlerin II.69. In the course of her description of the astronomical clock, the chambermaid Bone Foy makes a rare reference to the book’s author (as opposed to his fictive personas) in order to underline his Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries, 107. On the relationship between clocks and temperance in the late fourteenth century, see Julie Singer, “Clockwork Genres: Temperance and the Articulated Text in Late Medieval France,” Exemplaria 21:3 (2009): 225–46. 36 37



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firsthand knowledge: “de ce a esté infourmé l’escrivain de cestui livre qui a eu grande amistié audit maistre Jehan” (the writer of this book, who was a great friend of Master John, was well informed of this, 737). One can imagine that Mézières might even have seen Dondi’s celebrated drawing of the escapement, in which the crown wheel takes the form of a circlet decorated with delicate fleurs-de-lis, a crown that is articulated, by means of a verge, with a complex of gears.38 Indeed, if we visualize Mézières’s description of Orgueil, we can very nearly map her body onto Dondi’s diagram. Orgueil wears a couronne surrounding her three heads; she wields a verge; her “clock” has three wheels, including the “Folet de la Gent” (339, 341). Thus, through the assignment of attributes that call to mind the technical vocabulary of clockmaking, Orgueil is assimilated to her orloge; even before she is “convertie et transmuee en l’idole et statue du roy Nabugodonosor,” this monstrous creature is part machine. Lastly, the statue into which Orgueil is transformed is itself a shifting sign. The physical description of the statue combines characteristics of two different Biblical objects: it is made of different metals, like the statue from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, but it is an “idole” sixty cubits tall, like the golden idol Nebuchadnezzar erects in Daniel 3; the reference to the fiery furnace cements the association with this latter statue. By fusing the two statues, Mézières builds upon Deguileville’s proposal that Nebuchadnezzar actually had his dream-statue built; here, the allegory of government and the emblem of overweening pride become one and the same.39 This slipperiness underscores just how many things Nebuchadnezzar can signify in late medieval political allegory, a multivalency that makes him a particularly potent figure in the tumultuous years of Charles VI’s reign. Moreover, in fourteenth-century letters the Babylonian king and his dynasty frequently serve as emblems of tyranny – the chief vice against which the Songe du vieil pèlerin warns the young king. This association with tyranny plays a

38 This drawing illustrates the Tractatus Astrarii in the autograph MS 631, Biblioteca Civica, Padua, folio 13r (1364). See Silvio A. Bedini and Francis R. Maddison, “Mechanical Universe: The Astrarium of Giovanni de’ Dondi,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 56: 5 (1966): 1–69. See also the critical edition: Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio, Tractatus astrarii, ed. and trans. Emmanuel Poulle (Geneva: Droz, 2003). 39 Hippolytus of Rome, in the early third century, also conflates the two statues in an explication that Penelope Doob describes as “novel and un-biblical.” Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, 64. There is no reason to think that Mézières, or any medieval French exegete, knew of Hippolytus’s interpretation. Tim Meadowcroft, however, sees the conflation of the two statues as a natural consequence of Daniel 2’s narrative structure: “the link [of the idol] with the head of gold of the previous narrative cannot be ignored”; “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the statue [in Daniel 3] is a direct outcome of Nebuchadnezzar’s interpretation of the unstable metaphor of the dream statue.” Meadowcroft, “Metaphor,” 266.

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pivotal role in the Jeu des eschaz moralisé, which Mézières uses as his main source for the chessboard allegory in Book III. The Jeu des eschaz moralisé is framed, in its first chapter, as a lesson devised to correct king Amel-Marduk’s tyrannical excesses: a tendency he has inherited from his father Nebuchadnezzar. Il estoit de toute tele condicion comme Neron et trop bien resembloit a son pere Nabugodonozor qui voult une foiz faire mourir touz les sages de Babiloyne pour ce qu’il ne li savoient dire son songe qu’il avoit songié la nuit et l’avoit oublié, si comme il est escript en la Bible ou livre Daniel. Souz cest roy Elmoradach fu ce jeu trouvé.40 He was just like Nero and he was too much like his father Nebuchadnezzar, who once wanted to put to death all of the wise men of Babylon because they could not tell him about the dream he had dreamed at night and forgotten, as it is written in the Bible in the book of Daniel. Under this king Amel-Marduk the game was invented.

The Jeu des eschaz moralisé then introduces the game’s inventor, Xerces, who dared to try to instruct the king rather than endure any more of the king’s “vie de beste mue” (life of a mute beast, 130) – another turn of phrase that cements the association between Amel-Marduk and his father, as we will discuss below.41 Of course, if Mézières occupies the position of the wise philosopher, this relegates Charles VI to the role of a (subtextual) tyrant made in the image of Nebuchadnezzar. When Nebuchadnezzar is cited by name in the Songe du vieil pèlerin, it is most often as an emblematic shorthand for the sin of pride. The king is admonished to remember “la figure du roy Nabugodonosor, de l’estatue d’or qu’il fist et de son biau mistere” (the figure of king Nebuchadnezzar, the golden statue he made, and its hidden significance, 1115) so that he might eschew excessive political ambition; he is counseled not to indulge in “l’orgueil de Nabugodonosor” (the pride of Nebuchadnezzar, 1330); Providence Divine reminds him of the fate of “l’orgueilleux roy Nabugodonosor lequel je fis 40 Jacques de Cessoles, Le jeu des eschaz moralisé. Traduction de Jean Ferron (1347), ed. Alain Collet (Paris: Champion, 1999), 129. 41 This is, however, an association that remains unspoken in the Songe du vieil pèlerin. As Amandine Mussou notes, Mézières identifies the man who invented chess and the tyrant who inspired it simply as “ung saige philosophe” and “un roy.” This anonymizing gesture is unusual in the Songe du vieil pèlerin and, as Mussou argues, it seems to “faciliter une lecture qui ferait du mythe des origines des échecs une mise en abyme du dessein politique de Philippe de Mézières.” Mussou, “Le Roi, le tyran et le sage,” 72. See also Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, “Tristesses de l’engagement: L’affectivité dans le discours politique sous le règne de Charles VI,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 24 (2012): 23–24.



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mengier fain avec les beufs en milieu des forés par .vii. annees” (the proud king Nebuchadnezzar whom I made to eat hay with the cattle out in the forest for seven years, 1384). The association of Nebuchadnezzar with pride is widespread, and is by no means limited to the writings of Mézières or to the political allegories of his contemporaries; but Mézières special glides with unusual ease from one part of Nebuchadnezzar’s story to another, using the Babylonian king (and, at times, his relatives or officers)42 to evoke a number of the pitfalls of poor governance, from excessive reliance on mahommets to pride or folly. For, as Providence Divine reminds the young king, Nebuchadnezzar’s pride went before a very specific sort of fall: a seven-year descent into bestial madness.43 Indeed, pride is what draws together the varied episodes from Nebuchadnezzar’s life that we have discussed here; and that there is a special relationship between pride and madness is evident not only in the Songe du vieil pèlerin, but also in other near-contemporary texts, like Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune, in which pride is equated with frenasie in Book IV’s medical allegorization of the sins.44 It is impossible to know whether the inner circle of Charles VI entertained any serious concerns as to the king’s mental health at the time when Mézières was composing his Songe, several years before his breakdown of 1392.45 Although Mézières writes before the onset of the king’s madness, he points out that certain character flaws, which in retrospect we might seek to tie to his psychiatric condition, are already in evidence. What is clear is that Mézières writes with a sense of his limited ability to guide the monarch: he can only make his edifying examples available to the king “s’il les vouldra veoir” (if he will wish to see them, 42 In the Chevalerie de la Passion Mézières includes Nebuzaradan, the commander of Nebuchadnezzar’s guard, as Vaine Gloire’s majordomo. See Jorga, Philippe de Mézières, 493. 43 Penelope Doob has remarked on Nebuchadnezzar’s extraordinary availability as a representative of different literary conventions of madness (Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, 55), a flexibility that mirrors Nebuchadnezzar’s broader metaphoric availability in the Songe du vieil pèlerin. Wendy Turner points out that while the Bible never refers to Nebuchadnezzar in terms of madness, his story reflects many facets of medieval discourse surrounding mental illness – not just in his descent into bestiality, but in his vivid dreams and his fury in throwing the innocents into the fiery furnace. Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, 21–22. Before Mézières, many of these threads are brought together in the Roman de Fauvel, 376 vv. 2385–98. 44 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune, ed. Suzanne Solente (Paris: Picard, 1959–1966), vol. 2, 112, line 7434. 45 Froissart suggests that the king’s illness predated his first acknowledged crisis of 1392: at that time, he reports, the king’s physicians told the duke of Burgundy that “le roy dès grant temps avoit engendré ceste maladie.” Jean Froissart, Œuvres complètes de Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: Devaux, 1867–77), vol. 15, 44. All references to Froissart’s Chroniques cite this edition unless otherwise noted.

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26). Of the many things he invites the king to see, two are reworkings of Deguileville’s allegory of the statue, reimagined in service of Mézières’s broader allegory of good government as a form of “spiritual alchemy.” In suggesting how a king might transmute his political administration into pure gold, Mézières also illustrates the transformative power of metaphor itself. But mineral and metallic imagery can also reveal human frailty, from the parable of the “stone” epidemic (II.55) to warnings about the vulnerability of the king’s own “vif engien.” In the decades following the publication of the Songe du vieil pèlerin – when the king’s mental illness becomes public knowledge and the state of his “engien” takes on far greater political urgency – the political metaphor forged by Deguileville and recalibrated by Mézières takes on new life. Froissart’s and Salmon’s King, desvoyé The best-known account of the onset of Charles VI’s illness is that of Jean Froissart, which draws a most explicit connection between Charles and Nebuchadnezzar: not the Nebuchadnezzar who dreams and erects statues, but the Nebuchadnezzar who, with his seven bestial years in the wilderness, serves as the ultimate medieval emblem of madness precipitated by pride. The analogy is not as simple or straightforward as Penelope Doob suggests in her rather literal reading of the passage, however.46 Froissart’s narrative repeatedly signals the king’s impending illness and emphasizes its organic, embodied origins – but continually defers the account of the crisis itself. This episode of the Chroniques is remarkably atmospheric, both in the way it sets the scene and in the way it accords agency to meteorological phenomena of heat and sun.47 At the same time, Froissart establishes the king’s mental illness as a “pre-existing condition,” as it were, making his sickness a part of the context for this episode as well as its main subject – simultaneously decentering and recentering it. The digression on Nebuchadnezzar, intervening at the moment when the reader expects (finally!) to hear about the king’s wild rampage, plays a vital role in this representation of deviance effected through narrative deferral and decentering. Charles and his men, having entered Brittany in pursuit of the architects of the attempted assassination of the connétable Olivier de Clisson, have been delayed in Le Mans as Charles recuperates from a fever. Nor is the king’s illness solely physical, according to Froissart. Charles has been “foible de chief” for “toute la saison” (weak in the head throughout the entire season, 36) – a linking of mental debility and seasonal changes that prefigures the impending psychotic break – and he is deeply troubled by the attempt on his close adviser’s life: Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, 45–49. See Pierre Talmant, “Le soleil: Un emblème redoutable: Une lecture typologique de la crise de folie du roi Charles VI,” Journal of Medieval History 24:1 (1998): 53–60. 46 47



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Traveil de corps et de chief luy estoient grandement ennemis et contraires: aveuc tout ce l’advenue de son connestable dont il estoit durement fort mérancolieux et son esperit tourblé et desvoyé, et bien s’en perchevoient ses medechins, et pareillement faisoient ses oncles, mais ils n’y povoient pourveir, ne remédier, car il ne vouloit, ne on ne luy osoit conseillier du contraire de non aler en Bretaigne. (37) Physical and mental suffering were his great enemies and afflictions; on top of all that there was the situation with his constable, as a result of which he was terribly exceedingly melancholic and his mind troubled and unbalanced. His physicians saw it plainly, and so did his uncles, but they could neither handle nor remedy the situation, for he did not want it, nor did anyone dare contradict him by advising him not to go to Brittany.

Froissart takes great pains to emphasize that Charles’s woes far exceed a simple, situational reaction to the affaire Clisson. Moreover, the precise language he uses – the polyvalent tourblé,48 the medicalized mérancolieux, and especially the adjective desvoyé, which can be used to denote madness – frames the episode that will follow not as the beginning of the king’s mental illness, but merely the moment at which it becomes publicly visible. The king and his retinue finally leave Le Mans on August 5, 1392, a day that is “asprement chault” (bitterly hot, 36). As they pass through a forest, an apparent hermit or madman leaps into their path, crying out that the king has been betrayed. The man’s mental state can be inferred from his eccentric attire: he is “ung homme en pur le chief et tous deschaulx et vestu d’une povre cotte de burel blancq, et monstroit mieulx que il fuist fol que sage” (a totally bareheaded man, completely barefoot and wearing a humble robe of coarse white wool, showing more that he was mad than sane, 37). The madman dressed in wool speaks, and the ill man dressed in velvet and wool49 listens: “Ceste parole entra en la teste du roy qui estoit foible” (this word entered the head of the king,

48 Jacqueline Picoche remarks that Froissart uses tourblé to characterize “émotions plus fortes qu’un simple dérangement” (emotions that are stronger than a simple disturbance); it can also express hostility, “dissensions,” “agitation politique,” “questions difficiles à trancher” (dissension, political agitation, or thorny questions). Jacqueline Picoche, Le vocabulaire psychologique dans les Chroniques de Froissart, vol. 1 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1976), 159. 49 Among other garments, the king “avoit vestu ung noir jaques de velours qui moult l’eschauffoit, et si avoit sur son chief ung chaperon songle de vermeille escarlatte et ung chappellet dessus de grans gros perles que la royne sa femme luy avoit donné au prendre congié” (had put on a black velvet jacket that made him very warm, and he also had on his head an unlined hood of red wool and overtop of it a circlet of large pearls that his wife the queen had given him as they parted, 40).

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which/who50 was weak) and “son esperit se frémy et se sangmella tout” (his mind trembled and was disturbed).51 Then, in yet another act of folly, the king’s guards chase the man away et ne tindrent compte de sa parole non plus que d’un fol, dont ce fut folie, sicomme il est advis à plusieurs; car à tout le moins ils se deuissent estre arrestés sur l’homme ung petit pour en avoir eu la congnoissance et luy examiner et enquester, et bien veu se il estoit naturellement fol ou sage, et sçavoir qui luy faisoit telles paroles dire, ne dont elles luy venoient à savoir. (37) and paid no more heed to his words than to those of a madman, which was itself mad, as it seems to many people; for at the very least they should have stopped the man for a little while in order to have known who he was and to examine and question him, and to have seen whether he was mad or sane by nature, and to know who had put him up to saying such words, or how he had come to know them.

The episode of the strange warning is underpinned by a logic of contagion, as the hermit’s seeming derangement and the king’s already-manifest psychological weakness echo and amplify one another, and bleed over into the deeds of the king’s men, who madly dismiss the madman. The episode also establishes a complex set of nested and shifting frames of reference, as the reader is invited to assess the judgment of the many people (plusieurs) who judge the madness of the king’s men as the latter judge the madness of the hermit whose words have roiled the king’s brain (se sangmella). It becomes as difficult for the reader as it is for the men-at-arms to determine who is sane and who is mad, or to determine on whose authority anyone speaks (qui luy faisoit telles paroles dire). Indeed, the hermit’s admonition perfectly encapsulates the crisis of authority that will emerge from the afternoon’s events. Already, the king is presented not as a leader but as an object in need of protection, and more specifically of a protection that it is impossible for his familiars to effect: for his doctors and his uncles perceive his mental illness but lack the power or the will to avert disaster, and his men-atarms themselves succumb to folie in the heat of the moment. Charles and his retinue continue their journey despite the overwhelming heat. At midday, in a clearing, the men are assaulted by the sun’s rays. The sun 50 From context, it is evidently the king’s head, not the king himself, referred to here as foible – though both readings are possible. 51 Jacqueline Picoche points out that the use of se sangmeller highlights the violence of the king’s emotion; she observes its similarity to sancmeuçonnés, which Froissart uses to characterize Edward III’s reaction to the death of Jacob van Artevelde. Picoche, Le vocabulaire psychologique, 158.



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“tapoit de telle manière que on estoit tout tresperchié de sa réverbération” (beat down in such a way that one was pierced clean through by its radiance, 38): a solar réverbération that echoes and amplifies the frémissement of the king’s jangled nerves. The sun strikes and the king, dressed in heavy black clothing and armor, becomes inflamed (“enflambé,” 41) and loses his wits. But that is not exactly how Froissart tells the story: for interposed between cause and effect, between the sun’s blows and the king’s rampage, the figure of Nebuchadnezzar intervenes. Froissart brings his reader up to the very moment of Charles’s violent loss of sanity, then steps back into the exemplum of the mad Babylonian king, followed by a detailed description of Charles’s attire and the weather; after all of these delays, the chronicler finally gratifies his audience’s thirst for the gory details of Charles VI’s mad frenzy. Lengthy though it is, I will reproduce the Nebuchadnezzar passage in full in order better to track the ways in which the exemplum disrupts the narrative. Having named the men present, Froissart recounts that they devisoient et parloient les ungs aux autres, et ne se donnoient garde de ce que soubdainement advint et sus le plus grant chief de la compaignie: ce fut sur le propre corps du roy, et pour ce sont les oeuvres de Dieu moult manifestes, et ses verges crueuses, et sont à doubter à toute créature. Et on a veu en l’Anchien Testament et ou Nouvel moult de figures et d’exemples. N’avonsnous pas de Nabugodonosor, roy des Assiriens, lequel ung temps régna en telle puissance que dessus luy il n’estoit nouvelle de nul autre, et soubdainement en sa greigneur force et règne le souverain roy Dieu, souverain sire des cieulx et de la terre et fourmeur de toutes choses, l’appareilla tel que il perdy sens et règne, et fut sept ans en tel estat que il vivoit de glans et de pommes sauvages, et avoit le goust et l’appétit d’un pourcel? et quant il ot fait celle pénitance, Dieu luy rendi sa mémoire, et adont dist-il à Daniel, le prophète, que dessus le Dieu d’Israel n’avoit nul autre Dieu. A parler par raison et esclairchir vérité, Dieu le Père, Dieu le Fils, Dieu le Saint-Esperit, trois en ung nom et tout en une substance, fut, est et sera tousjours aussi puissant pour monstrer ses euvres comme il fut oncques, ne on ne se doit esmerveillier, ne esbahir de chose que il fache: pour quoy en revenant au propos, je dis ces paroles et ay dittes pour une influence du Ciel merveilleuse qui descendy soudainement ce jour sur le roy de France, et ce fut sa coulpe, ce dient les plusieurs; car selon la disposition de son corps et l’estat où il estoit et que ses médechins le sçavoient et jugoient, qui justement la congnoissance avoir en devoient, il ne deuist pas avoir chevauchié en si hault jour, ne à telle heure, fors du matin ou du soir à la froidure, et pour ce en furent encoulpés, demandés et deshonnourés ceulx qui le menoient et qui à conseillier l’avoient et par lesquels consaulx le plus pour ce temps il usoit et se gouvernoit et s’estoit usé et gouverné. (38–39)

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were chatting and speaking amongst themselves, and were not on the lookout for what suddenly happened, and to the greatest head of their company: it happened to the very body of the king, and thus are the works of God most manifest, and his punishments severe and to be redoubted by all creatures. One has seen many figures and examples of this in the Old and New Testaments. Have we not the example of Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians, who long reigned in such power that there was word of no one above him, and suddenly at the peak of his strength and his reign the sovereign king God, sovereign lord of the sky and the earth and creator of all things, took care of him so that he lost his sanity and his dominion, and was in such a state for seven years that he lived on acorns and wild apples, and had the taste and appetite of a pig? And when he had done that penance, God gave him back his memory, whereupon he said to Daniel, the prophet, that there was no other God above the God of Israel. Speaking reasonably to illuminate the truth, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three in one name and all in one substance, was, is and will always be as forceful in showing his works as he ever was, so no one should marvel at or be stupefied by anything he does. Therefore, getting back to our subject, I speak these words and have spoken through the influence of the marvelous Heavens that suddenly descended on the king of France that day, and it was his own fault, as many say; for according to the condition of his body and the state he was in, as his physicians (who certainly had to know about it) knew and judged it, he should not have ridden out in such broad daylight, nor at such an hour, but only in the cooler morning or evening. Thus were accused, questioned and dishonored those who led him and counseled him and whose counsel he most often enacted and followed at that time, and [whose counsel he] had enacted and had followed [in undertaking the Breton campaign; i.e., the so-called Marmousets].

The Nebuchadnezzar passage is noteworthy for its exemplary, almost homiletic, character. The Babylonian king is presented as a figure for pride brought low; his fall is echoed in the events that befall Charles VI, who, startled by the noise when a page “laissa celle lance et le fer cheoir sur le chappel d’achier que l’autre page avoit sur son chief” (let that lance and its point fall on the steel helmet that the other page had on his head, 40), “falls” into madness (“Chéy en telle débilité que de perdre son sens tout soudainement,” 43).52 Nebuchadnezzar’s punishment is righteous (God l’appareilla) and while Froissart does not hide the fact that Nebuchadnezzar lost his sanity (il perdy sens; Dieu luy rendi sa mémoire), the chronicler dwells more on the abased king’s animality than on 52 The king’s downfall quite literally causes his men to fall, too. Unwilling to strike back against their sovereign’s blows, every man he attacked “se laissait cheoir devant le coup” (allowed himself to fall before the blow, 42).



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his temporary madness.53 I cannot, however, concur with Pierre Talmant’s assertion that Froissart’s incorporation of Nebuchadnezzar is merely an unoriginal typological exercise.54 For Froissart subtly writes the exemplum within the French king’s body, in a way that locates Charles’s malady in his head even as it enmeshes the Biblical past with the tumultuous present. References to Charles VI’s body serve as the framing mechanism by which Froissart both introduces and concludes the Biblical exemplum. First, by way of introduction, Froissart remarks that it is the literal body of Charles VI, le propre corps du roy, in which God’s will is made manifest – and this king is himself the plus grant chief of his company and his country. This language harks back to the organic metaphor of the state, of course, but also to the very language with which Froissart has just characterized the king’s “pre-existing condition:” all summer Charles has been foible de chief and weakened by traveil de corps et de chief. At the close of the Nebuchadnezzar digression, too, Froissart uses the king’s body as the instrument with which he picks up the thread of his narrative. The king’s suffering is his own fault because he has proceeded despite his illness (la disposition de son corps et l’estat où il estoit) and despite his doctors’ orders (que ses médechins le sçavoient et jugoient). Again, the reference to the king’s physicians closely mirrors the language Froissart used at the start of the chapter: bien s’en perchevoient ses medechins. Thus the king’s illness is presented not as an inscrutable act of God, but as a logical consequence of the king’s own actions: actions that, like the hermit’s words, common opinion has judged to be mad (ce dient les plusieurs). In echoing his earlier language throughout this passage, Froissart indicates that the king’s madness is not a new condition, just a newly visible one, and one that ought already to have been apparent – belying his fellow chronicler Michel Pintoin’s description of it as an “infirmitate mirabili et alias inaudita” (marvelous and previously unheard-of illness, II.18).55 53 This is a tendency mirrored in several other late medieval treatments of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness, in which the king is described not just as becoming bestial, but also as having transformed into a beast. For examples, see Tania van Hemelryck, “La Ballade contre les ennemis de la France, une ultime relecture?” Le Moyen Français 48 (2001): 38–39. 54 “Froissart applique à la crise de la forêt du Mans une méthode de lecture qui n’a en soi rien d’original puisqu’il relève de la typologie biblique” (Froissart applies to the crisis in the forest of Le Mans a method of reading that is not at all original in and of itself since it appertains to Biblical typology). Talmant, “Le soleil,” 60. 55 The question of the lag between the onset of an illness and that illness’s manifestation in visible signs is a vexed one in later medieval medical commentaries. Physicians such as Taddeo Alderotti, following Galen, point out that “as the body moves from health to sickness, there must necessarily be a period, and a state, where the body is sickening but does not yet appear sick, and where the operation of the body is weakening but the operational failure is not yet apparent to the senses” (Kaye, A History of Balance, 201). In the passage describing the events on August 5, 1392, Froissart appears to situate a significant lapse of time preceding the crisis in such a grey area of latent but as-yet undiagnosed pathology.

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I have been referring to the reference to Nebuchadnezzar as a “digression.” Is it indeed one? Froissart frames it as such, closing it with the classic digressionmarker en revenant au propos.56 The exemplum presents a departure from the main narrative in terms of both subject and style;57 indeed, the change in tone is marked enough that Froissart makes an explicit effort to account for it, claiming divine inspiration (je dis ces paroles et ay dittes pour une influence du Ciel merveilleuse qui descendy soudainement ce jour sur le roy de France). One cannot help but wonder if, in claiming that the same Ciel merveilleuse that descended on Charles VI has also descended on him, Froissart is undermining the credibility or the rational soundness of his own narration. Indeed, his insertion of a digression at this particular juncture is richly evocative. As the king and his men follow a single, linear path through the forest, Froissart’s narration opens an alternate path – digressio in its etymological sense –58 and thereby represents, formally as well as thematically, the moment in which Charles becomes desvoyé and strays definitively from the path of sanity.59 The significance of Froissart’s Nebuchadnezzar digression is all the more apparent if we compare Froissart’s account of this fateful day to that of the chronicler Michel Pintoin, also known as the Religieux de Saint-Denis. The two accounts agree in most details, and both deploy similar strategies of deferral at this moment in the story, but only Froissart cites Nebuchadnezzar: a contrast that speaks both to Froissart’s greater interest in introducing “novelistic” detail and to the potency of Nebuchadnezzar as a multivalent metaphor. Like Froissart, 56 Froissart typically uses such markers in his historiographic and poetic texts alike. For a discussion of digression in Froissart’s dits (but not in the Chroniques), see Peter Ainsworth, “Jean Froissart: Chronicler, Poet and Writer,” in “The Online Froissart,” ed. Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, v. 1.5 (Sheffield: HRIOnline, 2013), http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/ onlinefroissart/apparatus.jsp?type=intros&intro=f.intros.PFA-Froissart, accessed May 23, 2018. 57 The insertion of a digressive exemplum is by no means rare; Karin Ueltschi, for instance, notes the kinship of exemplum and digression in “La digression dans l’économie du discours didactique vernaculaire du Moyen Âge français: Manifestations et enjeux dans Le Mesnagier de Paris,” in La digression dans la littérature et l’art du Moyen Âge, ed. Chantal Connochie-Bourgne (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2005), 391–408. 58 On the medieval poetics of digression, including its characterization as a divergent narrative path, see the essays collected in Connochie-Bourgne, La digression dans la littérature et l’art du Moyen Âge. For a broader rhetorical overview of digression, see Randa Sabry, Stratégies discursives. Digression, transition, suspens (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1992). 59 The term desvé and the related Picard dervé, both meaning “mad,” appear to derive ultimately from vagari (to wander), thus deploying a similar logic of mental illness as a straying from a determined path. See Jakob Jud, “Rêver et desver,” Romania 62 (1936): 145–57. For a contrary viewpoint, see Giovanni Alessio, “Saggio di etimologie francesi,” Revue de linguistique romane 17 (1950): 174–75.



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Pintoin does not proceed immediately to his account of the king’s public loss of his sanity. Describing Charles’s Breton campaign, the Religieux de SaintDenis states that the king’s sudden illness “hobbled” him in the execution of his plans (prepeditus, II.18) – an intriguingly embodied turn of phrase.60 The chronicler then inserts himself in the narrative, much as Froissart does in the Nebuchadnezzar digression: in this instance highlighting his proximity to the chief actors in this episode, and expressing the conflict between his personal reluctance to tell the details and his professional obligation to record them.61 Pintoin then backtracks in his otherwise chronological account in order to foreshadow the king’s crisis. He first says that people unfamiliar with the king’s condition (“statum sane incolumitatis regis ignorabant,” II.18) report that a statue of the Virgin in the church of Saint Julien in Le Mans had turned around, on its own, untouched, for a half hour, and that this was a sign of calamity to come.62 Then he returns to the beginning of August 1392, acknowledging that Charles had already been showing signs of mental illness.63 Only then does the chronicler proceed to tell of the strange warning,64 its effect on the king’s already troubled mind (“ymaginacio jam turbata,” II.20), and the king’s frenzy, which this account situates immediately after the warning. Thus, while both chroniclers seek to delay their accounts of the king’s violent rampage of August 5, 1392, only Froissart piles up these delaying tactics for page upon page, and only Froissart punctuates his history with the Biblical exemplum of Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonian king’s presence in Froissart’s account signals

60 I cite the text from Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, contenant le règne de Charles VI, de 1380 à 1422, ed. and trans. Louis Bellaguet, 6 vols (Paris: Crapelet, 1839–1852). A more recent edition is Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, contenant le règne de Charles VI, de 1380 à 1422, ed. Bernard Guenée, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1994). 61 “In castris residens, dum acerbitatem hujus mente revolvebam, manus libens calamum retraxisset, ne ad noticiam transisset posterorum, nisi hujus regis commendabilia gesta et note subjacencia scriptis redigenda ex officio suscepisset. Et, si circumspectorum veraci relacione standum est, infortunium hoc dolendum non contigit sine precedenti signo” (II.18). The obligation to relate both the positive and the negative is key to Michel Pintoin’s conception of the role of the chronicler: on this point see Bernard Guenée, “Tragédie et histoire chez le Religieux de Saint-Denis,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 150 (1992): 224–25. 62 “Nam reffertur inter preciosa jocalia ecclesie sancti Juliani Cenomanensis sigillum beate Marie Virginis contineri; quod quia tune sine tactu cujuscunque se volubile reddidit fere per mediam horam, ut alias experti fuerant, vaticinaverunt scandallum in regno proxime affuturum; statum sane incolumitatis regis ignorabant” (II.18). 63 “…ab augusti mensis principio, velut vir non sane mentis, verbis fatuis utendo, gestus eciam majestatem regiam dedecentes exercuerat inter eos” (II.18). 64 The warning was delivered, he writes, by an “abjectissimum virum” whom Pintoin situates just outside the “leprosarium” (II.18), and who followed the king for half an hour (II.20).

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an overtly poetic approach to the subject matter,65 one that invites the metaphoric readings of the king’s illness that the Religieux de Saint-Denis deliberately avoids. In Froissart’s telling, Nebuchadnezzar’s moment of madness, superposed on Charles VI’s, is revelatory of the overlap between chief as head of state and chief as site of mental disturbance; building on the works of Deguileville and Mézières, Nebuchadnezzar serves in the Chroniques as a signal of the convergence of metaphors of statecraft and the perhaps brutal reality of a mentally ill monarch. Froissart initially treats Charles’s madness as a choice bit of gossip, more than as a crisis of statecraft; at the same time, digressive though it may be, his allusion to Nebuchadnezzar signals a willingness to attack the subject of the king’s madness head-on even as it defers the literal treatment of that subject. One might expect greater delicacy in works written specifically for the French crown, however. This is the case with the Religieux de Saint-Denis, who, though he does not long shy away from discussing the king’s condition, never treats it salaciously.66 One work that bucks this general trend, though, is the minor royal secretary turned Burgundian partisan Pierre Salmon’s highly idiosyncratic Dialogues, also known as the Demandes faites par le roi Charles VI (1409, second version c.1412–15).67 The first version of this work combines a two-part dialogic mirror for princes (wherein the king asks political and theological questions and Salmon responds), and an autobiographical account of Salmon’s royal service supported with copies of his correspondence with the king and his circle, all richly illustrated; the second recension adds a Boethian narrative incorporating a lengthy treatise on virtues and vices.68 The first recension’s three parts display three complementary approaches to the problem of the king’s illness; the rich program of illustrations, too, has been interpreted as offering representations of the king’s illness. In the first part, the king describes the difficulties facing him and his kingdom, and Salmon advises him to listen to good counsel and to elevate himself. In the second book Salmon offers Biblical 65 See Marjorie Curry Woods’s remarks on the association of digression with poetry in “Poetic Digression and the Interpretation of Medieval Literary Texts,” Acta conventus neo-latini sanctandreani. Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, St. Andrews, 24 August to 1 September 1982, ed. I. D. McFarlane (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), 617–26. 66 On the vocabulary with which Pintoin discusses the king’s illness, see Guenée, “Étude de mots.” Guenée notes that Pintoin’s language, blunter at the beginning, grows more euphemistic over time. 67 Brigitte Roux demonstrates the text’s pro-Burgundian orientation in Les dialogues de Salmon et Charles VI: Images du pouvoir et enjeux politiques (Geneva: Droz, 1998). For an overview of Salmon’s political and literary career, see Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 210–15. 68 For a thorough and deeply insightful account of the two versions and their manuscript traditions and illustrative programs, see Anne D. Hedeman, Of Counselors of Kings. See also Roux, Les dialogues de Salmon et Charles VI.



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commentaries designed to help Charles achieve the ideal of the “roy chrétien,” with an emphasis on humility and contrition, and it is here that Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned for the first time. In the third part, Salmon narrates his own efforts to secure medical, magical, and diplomatic remedies for the king’s illness: in this account, and in the letters that punctuate it, the exemplum of Nebuchadnezzar plays a small but significant role. In his efforts to reach the king (both metaphorically and literally) Salmon repeatedly invokes Nebuchadnezzar; and in all three instances of this comparison, the Babylonian king is presented as an emblem of prideful disbelief and bestial madness. Salmon’s multi-pronged approach to the king’s illness plays on all of Nebuchadnezzar’s symbolic resonances, and while the comparison of Charles VI to the mad Babylonian king shocked the Dialogues’ nineteenth-century editor Georges-Adrien Crapelet, Salmon’s allusions to Nebuchadnezzar focus less on the king’s insanity than on the healing power of contrition.69 In the Dialogues Salmon seeks every available remedy for the king’s illness: rhetorical, spiritual, and medical. The text’s explicit aim is to heal the king’s body – and, by extension, the schism and the other “grans tribulacions divisions guerres mortalitez et mauvaises fortunes” (great tribulations, divisions, wars, mortalities and disasters, 6v) that have afflicted the kingdom.70 As Salmon explains in his final letter, to the duke of Burgundy, his entire undertaking (diplomatic and literary) is inspired by the king’s madness and Salmon’s desire to see it cured. He is moved to act after seeing “la maladie et la neccessité en quoy le roy a esté et les inconveniens avenus et qui pueent avenir a cause de sa dicte neccessité” (the illness and the critical condition in which the king found himself, and the harms that had come or could come because of the aforementioned critical condition, 119v) – an assessment that uses the phrase la maladie et la neccessité to draw explicit connections between medical and political emergencies, and that, in attributing certain real and potential inconveniens to the king’s illness, comes remarkably close to Faulx Gouvernement’s assessment of Charles’s actions in the Songe véritable. However, Salmon seeks not to conceal the king’s weakness but to heal it, “en querant voies et manieres de lui faire avoir alliegement du mal en quoy je veoie qu’il estoit” (seeking different paths and manners of easing the ill state in which I saw that he was, 119v). In response to the king’s desvoyement, his straying from the path of sanity, Salmon seeks multiple “voies et manieres” of healing; he explores a branching, non-linear route in order to set his king back on the 69 Philippe Maupeu pushes back against Crapelet’s reading in “Portrait de Charles VI en Nabuchodonosor. Positionnements rhétoriques dans les Dialogues de Pierre Salmon et Charles VI,” Le Moyen Âge 116 (2010): 657–78. 70 On the association of schism and the king’s illness, see Hedeman, Of Counselors of Kings, 20.

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path of recovery. To this end, he has directly engaged the subject of the king’s mental health, or his “estat,”71 from the very beginning of the Dialogues.72 It is in the voice of Charles VI, not that of his faithful servant Salmon, that the king’s personal suffering and his country’s ill fortune are presented in the Dialogues’ preface. Et pource que ou temps passé nous n’avons pas eu vraie congnoissance de nous ne de la tresgrant grace et gloire que dieu nous a donné pour les vanitez mondaines en quoy nous avons prins singuliere plaisance et tant que nous avons esté tout aveugle en cuer et en pensees sicomme nous le veons et appercevons bien par ce que nous avons ignoré la propre signifiance de nostre nom et tiltre par le quel nom et tiltre nous sommes nommez Charles roy de France par la grace de dieu. (5v–6r) And because in the past we have not truly known ourself nor have we recognized the great grace and glory that God gave us, because of the worldly vanities in which we took extraordinary pleasure such that we were blind in our heart and our thoughts, as we well see and perceive, for we knew not the true significance of our name and title, by which name and title we are named Charles, by the grace of God king of France.

Charles VI is at once object and subject in this text, as Philippe Maupeu points out.73 The king’s avowed lack of self-knowledge (nous n’avons pas eu vraie congnoissance de nous) refers both to the callow pursuits of youth and to his mental illness, his loss of self. In a way, it is made “safe” for Salmon to speak about the king’s madness because the (fictionalized) king is the one who has first broached the topic. In his questions, too, Charles (as imagined by Salmon) does not shy away from the subject of his own shortcomings.74 He interprets both madness and civil unrest as divine retribution for his own failings, and signals an openness to the remedial value of Biblical exempla:

71 On Salmon’s use of “estat” to refer specifically to the king’s mental state, see Albert Rigaudière, “Le bon prince dans l’œuvre de Pierre Salmon,” in Penser le pouvoir au Moyen Âge (VIIIe–XVe siècle). Études d’histoire et de littérature offertes à Françoise Autrand, ed. Dominique Boutet and Jacques Verger (Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm, 2000), 376. 72 While I accept Hedeman’s point about intervisuality (Of Counselors of Kings 27), I find that Salmon is not quite as covert or as indirect as she suggests, despite the delicacy of the situation. 73 Maupeu, “Portrait de Charles VI en Nabuchodonosor,” 662 74 Rigaudière calls the king’s ventriloquized speech an “aveu de faiblesse” (admission of weakness). Rigaudière, “Le bon prince,” 367.



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comme pluseurs roys princes et pueples du vielz et nouvel testament ont esté maintes fois afflictz et punis pour leurs faultes et pechiez sicomme bien appert en la saincte escripture. Tout ainsy sommes nous afflictz par nostre coulpe selon nostre advis et consideration (6v) as many kings, princes, and peoples of the Old and New Testaments were many times afflicted and punished for their faults and sins as is plain in the holy scripture, thus are we afflicted for our faults, as it seems to us upon reflection.

The king’s first question concerns the conduct necessary to regain divine grace; in his answer Salmon does not explicitly posit a relationship between the king’s illness and his supposed punishment, but he does revisit the king’s language of self-knowledge and self-forgetting. Citing Bernard of Clairvaux, Salmon states that “la congnoissance de l’omme doit commencier de lui mesmes” (man’s knowledge must begin with himself, 11r); a man who seeks knowledge of the world but lacks self-knowledge “ressambleroit cellui qui edefie sans fondement, car cellui qui n’a entendement de soy mesmes congnoistre differe peu de beste mue” (would resemble him who builds without a foundation, for he who lacks the reason to know himself differs little from a mute beast, 11r); it is wrong for a person of high degree to display “grant auctorité et nulle estableté” (great authority and no stability, 11v). Here Salmon alludes to Bernard’s De consideratione and its premise that meditation (consideration) is the key to self-knowledge and to the intellectual virtue of humility. However, while the simile of a building without a foundation appears twice in De consideratione, the comparison to a beste mue does not appear in conjunction with it in Saint Bernard’s text; this language is perhaps a significant intervention on Salmon’s part.75 By portraying the king’s first question as a product of his advis et consideration, Salmon suggests that the redemptive process is already underway: there is hope that the king’s quest for humility and self-knowledge through meditation promises a direct remedy to the effects of his mental illness. But the specific nature of Salmon’s allusions to Saint Bernard offers a more pointed image of the king’s malady than do the king’s references to his own coulpe. Salmon zeroes in on the king’s acknowledged lack of congnoissance, 75 The image of a building without a foundation comes from De consideratione Book II, section III, paragraph 6: “Although you know every mystery, the width of the earth, the height of the heavens, the depth of the sea; if you do not know yourself, you are like a building without a foundation; you raise not a structure but ruins.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Five Books on Consideration: Advice to a Pope, trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 53. See also John R. Sommerfeldt, The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux: An Intellectual History of the Early Cistercian Order (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 53–88.

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then develops the need for self-knowledge with a set of quotations that bring together the architectural and animal metaphors for instability and madness. The discussion of stability and of foundations harks back to Deguileville’s remarks on the etymology of estatue and the plinth on which Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is situated; the reference to man as beste mue looks forward to the madness of Nebuchadnezzar during his seven years in the wilderness. When Nebuchadnezzar appears in books II and III of the Dialogues, it is in his mad, bestial form. Among the final Old Testament exempla in Part II are the stories of rulers whose “descongnoissance” of God led to their punishment: first Moses’s pharaoh, then Nebuchadnezzar. Et samblablement Nabugodonozor qui par son orgueil et par descongnoissance de son createur fu privé de son royaume et mué en beste paissant herbe avecques les bestes mues jusques a ce qu’il eut contricion et vraie congnoissance de lui comme la bible le recite. (49v) And the same with Nebuchadnezzar who, through his pride and his failure to recognize his creator, was deprived of his kingdom and changed into a beast grazing on grass with the mute beasts, until he experienced contrition and true self-awareness, as the Bible tells.

The account is similar to the version given by Froissart, with its focus on animal transformation and appetite (“mué en beste paissant herbe avecques les bestes mues”), albeit with one subtle but significant difference: Froissart’s king “perdy sens et règne,” while Salmon’s king was explicitly deprived only of his kingdom (“fu privé de son royaume”) and of his human form. The madness of Salmon’s king is merely implied: it is only when the king’s congnoissance de lui is restored that Salmon lets on that it was ever lacking. Thus, while the exemplum gestures toward Charles VI’s condition, it also pivots the discussion away from a description of the king’s present troubles, and toward the anticipation of his future health.76 The Nebuchadnezzar exemplum serves primarily to reinforce the importance of contricion as a precondition to healing. It also provides a sort of a baseline, a standard account of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness in the light of which we may read the two further allusions to the Babylonian king appearing later in the text. 76 This allusion to Nebuchadnezzar disappears from the second recension of the Dialogues, which I was able to confirm in consulting Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève MS fr. 165, available online at http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/fr/list/one/bge/fr0165, accessed May 23, 2018. The suppression of this mention of Nebuchadnezzar at the end of Part Two reinforces Anne D. Hedeman’s contention that the second recension largely abandons the first recension’s remedial aims: if the king cannot be healed, the exemplum no longer serves its intended purpose.

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In the compelling third book of the Dialogues, Salmon recounts his diplomatic misadventures as he moves through England, France, and the papal territories. The narrative and its embedded letters present a large body of warnings, some cryptic, some overt, which Salmon attempts (with increasing desperation) to convey to the king. These initially include allegations against the duke of Orléans: that he is poisoning his brother, or that he is bewitching him with a voodoo-doll-like ymage. After his death, the king’s brother becomes an instrument of a different sort, as his failure to heed Salmon’s earlier warnings makes him yet another cautionary exemplum for the king. A mysterious white monk, urging Salmon to inform Charles VI of a plot against him, juxtaposes the figures of Nebuchadnezzar and the duke of Orléans: Et se le roy ton seigneur differe ce que tu lui diras comme Nabugodonozor differa l’advis que Daniel lui donna et comme le duc d’Orleans differa oÿr ta parole il verra ains qu’il passe long temps ce qu’il ne vouldroit pas veoir. (81v) And if your lord the king puts off what you’ll tell him, like Nebuchadnezzar put off the advice Daniel gave him and like the duke of Orléans put off listening to you, he will see, before long, that which he’d rather not see.

Such a comparison plays up the monk’s (and Salmon’s) prophetic role, making him a modern Daniel. Salmon apparently likes the strategy, as he amplifies it in a subsequent letter to the king, sent from Avignon, February 16, 1409: a letter that, for Maupeu, itself constitutes a miniature mirror for princes.77 Having failed to capture the king’s attention with his previous missive’s exempla of Richard II and the duke of Orléans, Salmon returns to the figure of the mad Babylonian king. Et ne vueilliez pas, tresredoubté Prince, estre si incredule, si rude ne si desdaingneux de vostre salut recevoir, comme furent deux grans princes que je vous nommeray cy aprez, l’un du Viez Testament et l’autre de ce temps present. Tresredoubté prince, ne vueilliez estre si incredule comme fu Nabugodonozor le roy de Babiloine quant Daniel lui dist et exposa la persecucion et merveille qui lui devoit avenir se Dieu ne lui faisoit grace, le quel n’en tint compte et bien tost aprez fu privé de son royaume par certain temps et transmué en beste paissant herbe avecques les autres bestes mues jusques a ce qu’il ot contricion en lui, et lors leva la face et les yeux devers le ciel en requerant grace a Dieu qui le receut a mercy et le restitua en son royaume, sicomme plus aplain le povez veoir en la Bible ou .iiii.e chappitre du livre 77

Maupeu, “Portrait de Charles VI en Nabuchodonosor,” 668.

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de Danyel. Et ne vueilliez aussy, tresredoubté Prince, avoir le cuer si dur ne si desdaingneux comme ot monseigneur le duc d’Orléans vostre frere, dont Dieux ait l’ame, lequel differa a recevoir le message qui lui apportoit son salut et lui venoit donner advis du mal qui lui est avenu. (93v–94r) Most revered Prince, do not be so incredulous, so rude or so disdainful of your own salvation, as were two princes I shall name for you hereafter, one from the Old Testament and the other from the present day. Most revered prince, do not be as incredulous as was Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon when Daniel told and explained to him the persecution and marvel that would come to him if God did not grant him grace; he paid no attention and soon afterward was deprived of his kingdom for a certain period and was transformed into a beast grazing on grass with the other mute beasts until he felt contrition. Then he raised his face and his eyes skyward, asking for the grace of God, who received him in mercy and returned his kingdom to him, as you can see more fully in the Bible in the fourth chapter of the book of Daniel. And also, most revered prince, do not have as hard and disdainful a heart as had my lord the duke of Orléans, your brother, may God have his soul, who stalled in receiving the message that brought his salvation and came to tip him off to the evil that came to him.

In both instances, the princes’ losses stem from their failure to take advice, which would have staved off personal and political disaster (madness in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, death in the case of the duke). Salmon’s repeated characterization of each of his negative examples as incredule effectively shames his audience into believing him, conflating a lack of humble respect for God with skepticism toward Salmon’s proffered advice. The king must humble himself before God and, perhaps, before Salmon in order to heed the latter’s counsel and thereby find his medical and moral salvation. The narrative and the letter downplay Nebuchadnezzar’s madness, as Philippe Maupeu has shown, serving more to cement Salmon’s rhetorical stance as truth-teller than to comment on the particulars of Charles’s predicament. Yet Salmon’s wholesale adoption of the white monk’s preferred exempla also raises questions of voice and reliability: who, exactly, is offering this warning, and can he be trusted? In this regard Salmon’s narrative again mirrors Froissart’s account of the mysterious and possibly mad hermit who warned the king in the forest near Le Mans – and moreover, the iconography of BnF MS fr. 23279, fol. 64v, which depicts Salmon grabbing the bridle of the king’s horse, also calls to mind that episode from Froissart’s chronicles (Figure 5).78 Like Froissart’s hermit, Salmon 78 Philippe Maupeu, “Salmon le fou, Salmon le Sage. Portrait de l’auteur en conseiller du Prince,” Romania 132 (2014): 410–11.



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Fig. 5 Salmon arrested; Salmon saves Charles VI from drowning, Pierre Salmon, Dialogues (Paris, BnF MS fr. 23279, fol. 64v), c.1409

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presents his king with an urgent warning, one whose expression may ultimately cast doubt on the speaker’s sanity. We see this anxiety come to the surface in the passage, cited at the beginning of this chapter, where Salmon observes that his own frankness in speaking of the king’s condition may prove suicidal. It takes a touch of madness to be willing to speak unveiled truth to power. Even though Nebuchadnezzar is a widely recognized signifier of madness in the late medieval West, the king’s derangement goes unstated in Salmon’s letter of February 16, 1409, the Dialogues’ most extended allusion to his story. The topicality of Nebuchadnezzar as an emblem of the loss of political power precipitated by a king’s madness is clear only if the allusions in Part III of the Dialogues are read in conjunction with the exemplum in Part II, and with the more explicit conflation of mental and civil unrest in Part I.79 Throughout the Dialogues the Babylonian king’s resonances grow subtler and subtler, so that by the letter of May 16, 1409, Salmon no longer names Nebuchadnezzar at all: he alludes simply to the unfortunate fate of “les princes dont en mes dictes lettres est faite mencion” (the princes mentioned in my letters, 107r). This is not to say that Salmon’s autobiographical section downplays the king’s madness. On the contrary, the search for the malady’s causes and cures drives the narrative; as the once-overt comparison to Nebuchadnezzar fades away, references to king’s illness become, as Albert Rigaudière puts it, “ever more precise, and ever more menacing.”80 By May 16, 1409, Salmon has abandoned exempla in favor of frank references to the king’s entendement. Treshault tresexcellent et trespuissant prince, mon tresredoubté et souverain seigneur, je me recommande a vostre excellence tant humblement comme je puis, priant le roy des roys tout puissant qu’il veuille enluminer vostre entendement et vous donner grace de gouverner vostre royaume en bonne prosperité de votre personne et au salut de vostre ame. (106v) Most high, most excellent and most powerful prince, my most feared and sovereign lord, I recommend myself to your excellency as humbly as I can, praying to the all-powerful king of kings that he might illuminate your understanding and give you the grace to govern your kingdom in good personal health and to the good of your soul. 79 These are, as Maupeu puts it, “échos textuels que l’on observe d’une partie à l’autre, du récit autobiographique au miroir du prince, parmi lesquels la comparaison suspecte à Nabuchodonosor assume, nous y revenons, une place stratégique” (textual echoes that can be seen from one part to the other, from the autobiographical narrative to the mirror for princes, in which the suspicious comparison to Nebuchadnezzar assumes, we repeat, a strategic position). Maupeu, “Portrait de Charles VI en Nabuchodonosor,” 667. 80 “Toujours plus précises, toujours plus menaçantes aussi.” Rigaudière, “Le bon prince,” 376.



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As Salmon moves away from the typological logic of the Biblical exemplum, his interventions take other forms. This is only fitting, as references to Nebuchadnezzar necessarily look backwards, while Part III of the Dialogues – at least in the work’s first recension – looks forward to a time of healing and redemption.81 Salmon offers literature as a remedy, when all else fails. Still, Salmon’s text is but one of the “voies et manieres extraordinaires faictes et experimentees en sa personne pour le restituer en santé” (extraordinary paths and methods employed and attempted on his person in order to restore his health, 119v–120r). Among these sometimes unorthodox methods, and among the purported causes of the king’s condition, figure metallic representations of the monarch: not Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, but instruments of image-magic. Ceuls qui se confient es paroules des ydoles: Mental Illness and Magical Cure One noteworthy characteristic of the efforts to cure Charles’s condition, as described by contemporary writers, is the degree to which magic was entertained as an alleged cause and a potential cure for the king’s illness. According to late medieval conventional wisdom, one of the necromancer’s most common commissions was to make a target insane.82 Faced with the crisis of the king’s madness, many of Charles’s intimates attributed his illness to sorcery. The king’s physicians and most of his family, including the duke of Berry, dismissed these accusations.83 Still, the rumors were widely believed, according to the Religieux de Saint-Denis.84 The alleged sorcery was often described as image-magic: a practice present in Western lore since Antiquity,85 but which gained particular cultural prominence 81 On the king’s future recovery as the “horizon” of part III, see Maupeu, “Portrait de Charles VI en Nabuchodonosor,” 672–73. However, the deletion of the reference to Nebuchadnezzar in Part II changes the dynamic, supporting Hedeman’s contention that the second version is less focused on the idea of curing or healing the king. 82 Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre science et nigromance. Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XIIe-XVe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006), 359. 83 Froissart has the duke of Berry saying “Nous nous débatons et traveillons pour néant; car le roy n’a esté empoisonné, ne ensorcelé fors de mauvais conseil; et il n’est pas heure de parler de ceste matière maintenant” (We are debating and troubling over nothing, for the king has not been poisoned, nor ensorceled except through poor counsel, and now is not the time to speak of such things, XV.45). 84 “Sed nobilium et ignobilium major pars astruebat regem sic maleficüs et veneficiis detentum, quibus in regno Francie multi utriusque sexus et ordinis tune pro dolor utebantur,” II.24. 85 On the textual history of image-magic, including its reintroduction in learned Latin discourse via translations from Arabic, see Claire Fanger, “Christian Ritual Magic in the Middle Ages,” History Compass 1 (2013): 610–18.

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in the fourteenth century.86 Pierre Salmon repeatedly alludes to such a plot in the Dialogues. He reports that Richard II of England told him that Charles VI was being bewitched by his brother, the duke of Orléans: “et lors me dist le roy qu’il savoit certainement que tout le mal et la tribulacion que son beau pere le roy de France avoit procedoit de monseigneur le duc d’Orleans son frere qui le gouvernoit ainsy par art dyabolique pour le destruire et pour estre roy” (and then the king told me he knew for sure that all of the ills and the tribulation that his father-in-law the king of France suffered came from my lord the duke of Orléans, his brother, who thus controlled him through diabolical arts in order to destroy him and become king, 60v). Later, Salmon devotes considerable effort to substantiating the allegations of a Lombard monk, then imprisoned at Siena for sorcery, who claimed that the duke of Orléans’s in-laws, the Viscontis of Milan, possessed a silver figurine with which they were bewitching Charles: “il avoit demouré grand temps avecques François Barbevaire et veu et tenu pluseurs fois une ymage d’argent qui avoit esté faicte pour tenir le Roy en subjection, laquelle ymage ledit François avoit en garde de par le duc de Millan” (he had stayed a long time with Francesco Barbavara and had repeatedly seen and held a silver statue that had been made to hold the king in subjection, an image the aforementioned Francesco had been given by the duke of Milan for safekeeping, 77r).87 After the revelation of this supposed plot, much of the end of the Demandes’ third section is dedicated to Salmon’s attempts, in collaboration with the duke of Burgundy, to procure medical treatment for the king. Here we see clearly how the lines between magical and medical remedies for Charles’s madness were sometimes blurred – especially, as Boudet points out, as a tool in the duke of Burgundy’s power plays.88 Like his father before him, Jean sans Peur pushed for magical remedies, committed as he was to the promulgation of charges of sorcery against the duke of Orléans. These accusations find their most virulent expression, of course, in Jean Petit’s Justification, wherein, as

86 The century is bookended by two scandalous image-magic plots, one supposedly perpetrated against pope John XXII in the 1320s, the other against Charles VI in the 1390s. For an overview of the two “plots” see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 18–38 and 526. On the period’s “veritable craze for accusations of image magic,” see Camille, The Gothic Idol, 279–80. See also William R. Jones, “Political Uses of Sorcery in Medieval Europe,” The Historian 34 (1972): 670–87, for a detailed discussion of accusations of magic in the early fourteenth century. 87 Bernard Guenée notes that this particular accusation, “evidently inspired by the duke of Burgundy,” does not appear in any document other than Salmon’s text. Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 215. 88 Boudet, Entre science et nigromance, 391.



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Monstrelet reports it, Petit exploits associations of lèse-majesté with heresy and sorcery.89 Death is the only appropriate punishment, Petit argues, for tous subjectz et vassaulx qui appenséement machinent contre la santé de leur Roy et souverain seigneur pour le faire mourir en langueur, par convoitise d’avoir sa couronne et seigneurie, fait consacrer, ou à plus proprement parler, fait exorer espées, dagues, badelaires ou couteaulx, verges d’or ou anneaulx dédier ou nom des dyables par nigromance, faisans invocacions de caractères, sorceries, suggestions et maléfices […] Cellui ou ceulx qui le font ne commectent point seulement crime de lèze-majesté ou premier degré, mais commectent crime de lèze-majesté divine. (217) all subjects and vassals who, with malice aforethought, plot against the health of their king and sovereign lord to cause him to languish and die, out of covetousness for his crown and his rule; consecrating or, rather, enchanting swords, daggers, baselards or knives, golden rods or rings, dedicating them to devils through necromancy, invoking charms, sorcery, suggestions and curses… He or they who do it commit not only the crime of lèse-majesté in the first degree, but they commit the crime of divine lèse-majesté.

Those who machinent, or plot, against the king – a verb that evokes both the mechanical and the cognitive realms90 – often use inanimate objects to disrupt human physiology. Following this general observation, Petit claims that the duke used a sword, a dagger, and a ring to ensorcel his brother. Nor do such accusations emerge only after August 1392: according to both the Religieux de Saint-Denis and Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Pierre de Craon was disgraced and banished from court in 1391 for having asserted that the duke of Orléans and his inner circle were practicing black magic.91 Craon blamed Olivier de Clisson for his banishment and attempted to assassinate him, and it was in retaliation for that conspiracy that the king pursued the would-be assassin to Brittany. Thus, the Breton campaign during which the king’s madness emerged, a madness that prompted accusations of sorcery, was possibly itself set in motion by such accusations. 89 On the fourteenth-century association of these concepts, see Jacques Chiffoleau, “Sur le crime de majesté médiéval,” in Genèse de l’état moderne en Méditerranée (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1993), 207. 90 Robert-Léon Wagner notes the phonetic similarity between machiner and imaginer, and points out that in Pierre Cochon’s Chronique normande, the descriptions of Petit’s apologia – adapted from Monstrelet’s chronicle – replace the verb machiner with the form ymachiner. Robert-Léon Wagner, “Notules pour le lexique du Moyen Français,” Romania 63 (1937): 241–47. 91 Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, II. 2; Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Chronique de Charles VI in Choix de Chroniques vol. 4, ed. Jean-Alexandre C. Buchon (Orléans: Herluison, 1875), 376.

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Another text that likewise circulated amongst the king’s intimates, Honoré Bovet’s Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun (1398), provides further indication that for the duke and duchess of Orléans and those sympathetic to them, the imputation of the king’s illness to a spell or curse was a cynical ploy meant to dupe the masses.92 It is significant that one of the surviving presentation copies produced under Bovet’s supervision was made for the duchess of Orléans, Valentina Visconti, whose Lombard origins helped make her an especial target of conspiracy theories: as Jean Juvénal des Ursins puts it, reporting on the events of 1393, “on disoit et publioient aucuns qu’elle l’avoit ensorcelé, par le moyen de son pere le duc de Milan, qui estoit Lombard, et qu’en son pays on usoit de telles choses” (people said, some publicly, that she had bewitched him by means of her father the duke of Milan, who was Lombard, and that in his country such things were done, 383).93 Multiple characters in the Apparicion forcefully dismiss allegations of image-magic, and attributions of the king’s illness to sorcery, as ignorant superstition. As the physician complains, Sy n’ose passer par Paris, Car, par le Dieu de paradis, L’ygnorant gent prent tel propos, Duquel vraiement ne me los, C’un prince n’aye maladie Ne prengne desroy par folie, Se ce ne vient par traison, Par sorcerie ou par poison. Et vecy fole oppinion, Simple ymaginacion, Car un prince est aussy pacibles Comme autres homs corruptibles I therefore dare not pass through Paris, Because, by God in heaven, The ignorant folks are of such a mind – They are not praising me much these days –

92 The two surviving manuscripts produced under the author’s supervision were presented to the duchess of Orléans (BnF MS fr. 811) and to the “Marmouset” Jean de Montaigu (BnF MS fr. 810). See Michael Hanly’s description of the manuscripts in his edition, translation, and commentary, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue: The Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2005). 93 Juvénal des Ursins closely follows the Religieux de Saint-Denis, who reports, “sed quod eis videbatur verissimile, allegantes quod in Lombardia, unde ducebat originem, intoxicaciones et sortilegia vigebant plus quam aliis partibus” (II.88).



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That a prince is not ill Or has a disorder because of insanity But rather comes from treason, From sorcery or from poison. This is a fool’s point of view, Pure hallucination, Because a prince is just as susceptible to illness As other mortal men.94

The Apparicion’s marginal apparatus lends further force to these indictments of foolish superstition. The two contemporary presentation copies include seventy-five Latin glosses authored by Bovet, many of which lend particular support to claims about medicine, magic, and the king’s illness. In an initial gloss appearing only in Jean de Montaigu’s presentation copy, Bovet clearly alludes to the king’s madness; the note includes references to Gratian, to the book of Wisdom, and, most evocatively, to a passage from the Liber sextus Bonifacii VIII in which the king of Portugal, unfit for rule, is made to share power with his far more capable brother.95 Later glosses, also present in Valentina Visconti’s copy, invoke the madness of Nebuchadnezzar to support the Physician’s speech about the causes of mental illness.96 Like Salmon, Bovet uses Nebuchadnezzar largely as an emblem of penitence, one who signals the possibility of an eventual cure. Written by a reform-minded political poet, dedicated to the duke and duchess of Orléans and to a former “Marmouset,” the Apparicion adopts a voice of medical authority to push back against magic and superstition. Like Bovet, many writers decry the folly of magical therapies. Christine de Pizan seeks to differentiate medicine from perilous sorcery in chapter 39 of the Epistre Othéa;97 Eustache Deschamps rails against magic, and particularly against princes “qui se confient es paroules des ydoles” (who have faith in the words of idols), in his Demoustracions contre sortileges.98 In the absence of convincing medical explanations of the king’s condition, though, magical explanations took hold; and accordingly, magic cures were proposed in the absence of effective medical remedies. The Religieux de Saint-Denis records several attempted magical therapies including, most famously, the engagement of two Augustinian frauds 94 Both text and translation are cited from Hanly, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews, 70–71, lines 99–110. 95 Ibid., 164–66n2. 96 Ibid., 184n36. 97 See the discussion in Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 117. 98 Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, ed. Gaston Raynaud, vol. 7 (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1891), 192–99.

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who claimed they could heal the king in 1398, and the sorcerers who erected a ring of iron at the duke of Burgundy’s considerable expense in 1403.99 The king, too, sought to remedy his illness with specifically targeted religious interventions, such as his veneration of the shroud of Cadouin in 1399 and his votive offerings.100 Increasingly personalized in the later Middle Ages,101 ex-votos may offer either a physiognomic likeness of the donor, a figurative representation (of a body part, for example), or a symbolic representation (such as an object sharing the donor’s height, or a quantity of wax sharing his or her weight).102 Insofar as they exploit and manipulate the symbolic relation between a person and his image in an effort to achieve a desired outcome, these offerings may be seen as akin to benevolent forms of image-magic.103 Stephen Perkinson observes that Charles VI “appears to have been particularly enamored with images that shared his height, as can be seen in offerings he made to several churches in hopes of receiving relief from his frequent bouts with mental and physical illness in the 1380s and 1390s.”104 As described by Froissart, “ung homme de cire en fourme du roy de France et ung très-beau chierge et grant” (a wax man in the form of the king of France and a very beautiful and large candle) were sent to shrines of St. Acaire, St. Hermer, and others, “en tous lieux

99 Multiple attempts at magical cures are recorded by the Religieux de Saint-Denis (II.88, II.542, III.114–16). On the Augustinians’ attempts to cure the king with a tea brewed from ground stones, see Yann Grandeau, “Isabeau de Bavière ou l’amour conjugal,” in Études sur la sensibilité au Moyen Âge, 132. On the iron circle affair, see Léon Mirot, “Un essai de guérison de Charles VI en 1403,” Revue des questions historiques 47 (1912): 96–100. 100 The history of the shroud of Cadouin, and Charles’s request to have it sent to Paris in 1399, are documented in Michelle Fournié, “Les miracles du suaire de Cadouin-Toulouse et la folie de Charles VI,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France 99 (2013): 25–52. Fournié notes that an unusually high proportion of the shroud’s reported miracles concern cures for mental illness, especially in the decade preceding the king’s request, and concludes that this relic was seen as particularly efficaceous in that domain (41–43). 101 Catherine Vincent, “‘Protection spirituelle’ ou ‘vigilance spirituelle’? Le témoignage de quelques pratiques religieuses des XIIIe-XVe siècles,” Cahiers de recherche médiévales et humanistes 8 (2001): par. 22. 102 On the active, figurative, and symbolic functions of ex-votos, see Pierre-Jean Trombetta, “L’ex-voto au Moyen Âge. Un phénomène sous-estimé,” in Religion and Belief in Medieval Europe, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe (Zellik: Instituut voor het archeologisch patrimonium, 1997), 255–64. For a detailed study of votive offerings of wax equal to a person’s weight, and other dynamics of bodily measurement, see Giordana Charuty, Folie, mariage et mort: Pratiques chrétiennes de la folie en Europe occidentale (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 198–205. 103 The drawing together of magic and votive practices is informed by David Freedberg’s interrogation of what images can do to and for people in premodern and early modern Europe in The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 104 Perkinson, The Likeness of the King, 138. On these offerings see also Guenée, La folie de Charles VI, 151–55.



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où on sçavoit corps saint ou de sainte qui euissent grâce et mérite par la vertu de Dieu à garir de frénaisie et de derverie” (in every place where there was known to be the body of a male or female saint who might have had the grace and merit, by the virtue of God, to cure frenzy or madness, 52). This is just one example, among many, of early efforts to deploy positive forms of imagemanipulation – in a sense, to transform the king into an image in order to counter the more nefarious uses of statues and simulacra.105 And, as chroniclers report, the king’s illness manifests itself as a loss of identity: Charles VI loses his memory of himself and his family, he denies his own name and effaces his arms, and suffering from the “glass delusion,” he experiences an altered perception of his own materiality. The Fragility of the Inanimate King The fourteenth century is an era that, as David Freedberg notes, sees “a notable expansion in the functions of images in general” and a changing understanding of the symbolic relation between image and person.106 These developments are manifest in the Valois kings’ changing strategies of royal self-representation, as art historians such as Anne D. Hedeman and Stephen Perkinson have amply demonstrated,107 and also in literary discourse surrounding the king’s arms, devices, colors, and regalia. From Philippe de Vitry’s Chapel des trois fleurs de lis and Guillaume de Deguileville’s Roman de la fleur de lis to Pierre Salmon’s allegorization of the king’s clothing and regalia, fourteenth-century political writers pay notable attention to these visual identity markers that can serve as signifiers of and inorganic proxies for royal authority.108 The phenomenon is clearly illustrated in an illumination preceding Jean Petit’s Justification in a 105 As Michelle Fournié notes, the king undertakes a great many of these interventions in the last two years of the fourteenth century, a crisis point in his malady at which his episodes become more frequent and his remissions briefer. Fournié, “Les miracles du suaire de Cadouin-Toulouse,” 47. 106 Freedberg, The Power of Images, 270. 107 Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Perkinson, Likeness of the King; Colette Beaune, Le miroir du pouvoir (Paris: Hervas, 1989). 108 On the fleur-de-lis, see William M. Hinkle, The Fleurs de Lis of the Kings of France 1285–1488 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Fabienne Pomel, “Généalogie d’un ‘vrai signe’ politique ou l’investiture allégorique dans le Roman de la fleur de lys de Guillaume de Digulleville,” in Vérité poétique, vérité politique: Mythes, modèles et idéologies politiques au Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque de Brest, 22–24 septembre 2005, ed. Jean-Christophe Cassard, Élisabeth Gaucher et Jean Kerhervé (Brest: Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique, 2007), 327–41; on Salmon’s discussion of clothing and regalia, see Rigaudière, “Le bon prince,” 375; on the visual representation of Charles VI’s colors and devices in the manuscripts of Salmon’s Dialogues see Hedeman, Of Counselors and Kings, 31–32.

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number of manuscripts: a lion (representing the duke of Burgundy) slashes a wolf (representing Louis of Orléans) as the latter tries to grab the crown perched atop a fleur-de-lis.109 In this image, which Charity Cannon Willard speculates might be considered “the first example of the political cartoon,”110 all three major players are represented, metonymically, by their emblems or elements of their coats of arms – but the two princes are active, living beasts, whereas the king is a passive, inanimate object, whose size only distinguishes itself from the decoration of the pavilion behind it. The position of the crown also establishes the golden flower as a substitute “face” for the sovereign.111 While this image’s depersonification of the king is striking, the use of the princes’ personal emblems as stand-ins is not. Such signifiers are a highly prominent tool in what Laurent Hablot calls the “mise en scène [and] mise en signe” of the royal body around the turn of the fifteenth century.112 Charles VI’s penchant for arms, devices, colors, and other such markers is well documented.113 Charles instituted a system of mass distribution of clothing and objects bearing his device: modeled on English practice, this system was an effective instrument of political-social control.114 The king’s favored colors and devices change over time, revealing not a fixed identity, but what Susan Crane has called a “complex of ever-shifting personal signs.”115 As Colette Beaune has shown, these changes closely track the political and personal upheavals of the king’s reign; the king’s madness, in particular, marks a noticeable disruption to the king’s personal visual signature.116 While the colors, mottoes, and images may change, what remains constant is Charles’s commitment to the prominent display and distribution of his devices. 109 The image is described in detail in Coville, “Le véritable texte.” The Vienna manuscript has been digitized and is available online at http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AL00163804, accessed May 23, 2018. 110 Charity Cannon Willard, “The Manuscripts of Jean Petit’s Justification: Some Burgundian Propaganda Methods of the Early Fifteenth Century,” Studi francesi 13 (1969): 274. 111 See Laurent Hablot’s remarks on crowned arms as “un autre visage du souverain,” in “En chair et en signes. Le corps héraldique et emblématique du prince au coeur des rituels de cour,” Micrologus XXII (2014): 659. 112 Hablot, “En chair et en signes,” 657. 113 See Beaune, “Costume et pouvoir”; Élisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, ed., Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004). On the vogue for personal emblems at the turn of the fifteenth century see also Roux, Les dialogues de Salmon et Charles VI, 57. 114 Hablot also interprets these distributions as a sign of the fragmentation and specialization of the diverse components of the body politic. Hablot, “En chair et en signes,” 671. 115 Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 16. 116 Beaune, “Costume et pouvoir,” 144.



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It is all the more striking, then, that during the worst periods of his illness Charles rejects much of what had otherwise been such a major component of his public persona. The king’s loss of identity goes hand in hand with a changed relation to the visual and material markers of that identity. While suffering through his episodes of illness the king fails to recognize any of his intimates, save his sister-in-law the duchess of Orléans – a phenomenon that only fueled the accusations of sorcery leveled against her.117 Moreover, not only does he fail to recognize himself, but he also denies himself. In the words of Jean Juvénal des Ursins, “Luy-mesme se descognoissoit, et disoit que ce n’estoit-il pas” (He failed to recognize himself, and said he was not he, 383). In his own estimation, and in that of those who observe his speech and behavior, Charles has become a different man (“mutatur in alterum hominem,” as Pius II writes in his Commentarii118). According to the Religieux de Saint-Denis, the king denies his own name as well as the visual representation of his identity as he repeatedly effaces his own arms from household objects. Nam cum notos et amicos, aulicos et omnes servientes regios, tam presentes quam absentes, solito more nosceret et nominaret, successu tamen temporis, sic nubibus ignorancie habuit mentem sepultam, ut penitus oblivisceretur jure memorandorum naturali. Dictu sane mirabile et auditu mirabilius non solum se uxoratum liberosque genuisse denegabat, ymo suimet et tituli regni Francie oblitus, se non nominari Karolum, nec defferre lilia asserebat; et quociens arma sua vel regine exharata vasis aureis vel alicubi videbat, ea indignantissime delebat.119 Now, he had usually recognized and named his friends and acquaintances, courtiers and all of the royal servants, present and absent; but over time, his mind was buried in clouds of ignorance, such that he thoroughly forgot even that which he ought naturally to have remembered. It is truly amazing to say and hear not only that he denied his own wife and the children they had produced, but indeed, he forgot himself and his title of King of France, he claimed he was not named Charles, and he removed the fleur-de-lis; and whenever he saw his arms or those of the queen engraved on golden vessels or anywhere else, he furiously scratched them out.

Later, he creates a new identity for himself, complete with a changed name and arms. 117 Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys II.88. 118 Pius II, Pii II Commentarii, ed. Adrian Van Heck, vol. 1 (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica

Vaticana, 1984), 371, line 4. 119 Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys II.86–88.

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Arma propria et regine si in vitreriis vel parietibus exarata vel depicta percepisset, inhoneste et displicenter saltando hec delebat, asserens se Georgium vocari, et in armis leonem gladio transforatum se defferre.120 If he saw his own arms or the queen’s etched or painted on windows or walls, he deleted them, jumping around shamefully and distressingly, asserting that he was named George and announcing his arms as a lion pierced by a sword.

The king’s madness fundamentally changes his relationship to the material trappings of power. This would appear to be an extension of the sort of “schizophrenic thinking” Charles displayed, according to R. C. Famiglietti: conflation of literal and figurative understandings.121 “George’s” new arms particularly reflect his paranoia, which often fixates on blades: from the clash of iron that set off his frenzy on the path outside of Le Mans, to the king’s preemptive confiscation of his and his courtiers’ knives when he feels another episode is imminent.122 This is a paranoia exploited in Petit’s Justification, with its references to Louis d’Orléans’s alleged use of enchanted swords and daggers. And as Pius II famously reports, Charles VI suffered from the “glass delusion,” an irrational fear of fragility.123 grauescente in dies morbo mens illi prorsus excidit. existimabat nonnunquam se uitreum esse nec tangi patiebatur; uirgas ferreas uestimentis inserebat multisque modis sese armabat ne cadens frangeretur.124 His malady grew worse every day until his mind was completely gone. Sometimes he thought he was made of glass and would not let himself be

120 Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys II.404. 121 Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, 17–18. 122 “Sed sequenti die mente se alienari senciens, jussit sibi cultellum amoveri, et avunculo

suo duci Burgundie precepit ut sic omnes facerent curiales,” Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys II.544. It is unclear from the context whether the king fears that others will harm him while he is vulnerable, or fears that he will harm himself. It is tempting to see echoes of the king’s anxiety about blades in Pierre Salmon’s curious rewriting of Matthew 7’s parable of the speck and the log, expressing his grievances against “aucunes personnes qui disoient veoir un festu en mon oeil et ilz n’appercevoient pas un glaive qui estoit et encore est devant les leurs” (certain people who said they saw a speck in my eye and they did not perceive a blade that was and still is before theirs) in his letter of May 16, 1409 (108v). 123 On the history of this delusion, widely mentioned in Early Modern medical texts, see Gill Speak, “An Odd Kind of Melancholy: Reflections on the Glass Delusion in Europe (1440–1680),” History of Psychiatry 2 (1990): 191–206. 124 Commentarii, vol. 1, p. 371, lines 7–10.



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touched. He had iron rods put into his clothing and protected himself in all sorts of ways so that he might not fall and break.125

The king believes he has become an inanimate object, a lifeless thing. His delusion is consistent with the symptoms of melancholia, as summarized by Avicenna, who reports that melancholics often believe themselves to have been turned into “artificial instruments.”126 The man of glass has become an instrument requiring other instruments, rods of iron, to support him and to maintain his bodily integrity; fearful of the harm he may do to himself, he seeks to distance himself from metal weapons. The practicality of such measures became apparent in June through November 1405, when the king refused to bathe, shave, change his clothes, or get out of bed. The episode is recounted by both the Religieux de Saint-Denis and Juvénal des Ursins, though the latter, who hews closely to Pintoin in most details, diverges from his source in introducing the possibility that king actually did harm himself. C’estoit grande pitié de la maladie du roy, laquelle lui tenoit longuement, et quand il mangeoit c’estoit bien gloutement et louvissement. Et ne le pouvoiton faire despouiller, et estoit tout plein de poux, vermine et ordure, et avoit un petit lopin de fer, lequel il mit secrettement au plus près de sa chair. De laquelle chose on ne sçavoit rien, et luy avoit tout pourry la pauvre chair, et n’y avoit personne qui ozast approcher de luy pour y remédier; toutesfois il avoit un physicien qui dit, qu’il estoit nécessité d’y remedier ou qu’il estoit en danger, et que de la guarison de la maladie il n’y avoit remede, comme il luy sembloit.127 It was a real shame about the king’s illness, which had gripped him for so long, and when he ate he avidly wolfed his food down. And no one could undress him, and he was all full of lice, vermin and filth, and he had a little piece of iron that he hid right next to his flesh. No one knew about it, and his poor flesh was all infected, and there was no one who dared approach him to help; nonetheless he had a physician who said it was necessary to intervene or else he was in danger, but as for the healing of the [mental] illness there was no remedy as far as he could see. 125 This translation is slightly modified from Pius II, The Commentaries of Pius II, Books VI-IX, trans. Florence Alden Gragg (Northampton, MA: Department of History of Smith College, 1951), 425. 126 As Avicenna remarks in Book III, Fen III, doctrina 19 (De melancolia), “imaginant seipsos factos reges aut lupos aut demones aut aves aut instrumenta artificialia.” Avicenna, Liber canonis (Venice 1507; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), 188v. The passage’s English translation by Martin Eisner appears in Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 77. 127 Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Chronique, 430.

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Again it is an iron object that signals the king’s vulnerability and his physical and mental degradation. Contact with human blood is supposed to rust iron, as writers from Pliny to Corbechon point out; but when this “petit lopin de fer” slices the king’s flesh, it is the flesh, not the metal, that ends up “tout pourry.” Finally in late November the king was forcibly bathed and changed, after five months of poor hygiene.128 According to Juvénal des Ursins, when word got out of the king’s pitiful condition, public opinion turned very sharply against the king’s guardians, especially his wife and his brother.129 Rumors such as this, in part, laid the groundwork for Jean Petit’s later justification of the duke of Orléans’s murder – so much so that historian Bernard Guenée has speculated that the story of the king’s miserable condition in the latter half of 1405 might have been more Burgundian propaganda than reality.130 Whatever the truth of the situation, the story clearly enjoyed considerable currency even as it was still unfolding: for Jean Gerson alludes to it in his celebrated sermon of November 1405, Vivat rex.131 Ung membre nuysant par maladie a tout son corps: The Organic Metaphor According to Jean Gerson Vivat rex (Long Live the King), a sermon delivered to the most important royal counselors and princes of the blood, is an intricately constructed political vision that made an immediate impact at court.132 Gerson begins with a commentary on his sermon’s title, and a defense of the University’s standing to deliver an urgent political message to the king and his intimates. He then introduces the 128 Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys III.348. 129 Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Chronique, 437–38. 130 Guenée, La Folie de Charles VI, 244–51. 131 For a detailed account of the political context for Vivat rex, see Brian Patrick McGuire,

Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 186–87. Louis Mourin even argues that Gerson’s “protestations discrètes” are what prompted the princes to get the king cleaned up: Louis Mourin, Jean Gerson, prédicateur français (Bruges: De Tempel, 1952), 170. 132 Daniel Hobbins notes that Vivat rex garnered Gerson his first mention in the chronicle of the Religieux de Saint-Denis, and that within months of the sermon’s delivery nobles were requesting copies of it. Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 158–59. One such manuscript (BnF MS fr. 926), made in 1406 for Marie, daughter of the duke of Berry, is described in Taburet-Delahaye, Paris 1400, 328. On the Religieux de Saint-Denis’s account of Vivat rex, see Valérie Jouët, “Que deviennent les discours français dans la Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denis?” L’analisi linguistica e letteraria 1–2 (2000): 399–416. Vivat rex clearly contributes to Gerson’s “cultural positioning” as a “public intellectual,” as described in Hobbins, “The Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval Tract,” The American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1308–37.



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concept that the king has three bodies, one corporeal, one civil, and one spiritual (“trois manieres de vie; la vie corporelle, charnelle et personnelle; la vie civile, politique ou universele; la vie de grace, divine ou espirituelle,” 1144). Maintaining the health of these three bodies is paramount, and can only be achieved through adherence to the four Cardinal Virtues. Gerson begins speaking of the king’s corporeal health, then interrupts this discourse to give an account of an internal, personal struggle: a vision in which he is assailed by Dissimulation and Sedition, who are finally chased off by Discretion. Inspired by Discretion, Gerson offers the political guidance necessary for the restoration of the king’s, and the kingdom’s, good health. He structures his counsel through the organizational schema of the Cardinal Virtues, frequently referring to the guiding metaphor of the body politic. Denouncing vice, he stresses the interdependence of the members of the civil body in order to affirm the kingdom’s critical need for reform and above all for unity.133 Because the first of the king’s three bodies is corporeal, Gerson cannot avoid explicit reference to Charles’s illness. He begins with a protest against antimedical discourse and against magical cures: though he acknowledges that people are saying physicians are useless (“que medicins ne sont point prouffitables,” 1146) in their quest to cure the king, he insists that it is far more appropriate to turn to university-educated physicians than to “gens anathematiziez et mauldis de Dieu et de sainte Eglise, sorciers, magiciens, charmeurs et telz fols gens et perversez” (people anathemized and cursed by God and the holy church, sorcerers, magicians, enchanters, and such foolish and perverse people, 1147). Rather than taking such desperate measures, the king’s corporeal life should be preserved through balance of qualities and maintenance of balanced complexion – in short, with a health regimen (“bon regime de la royalle personne du roy,” 1146). Gerson exhorts the king’s intimates to help him maintain the health of his corporeal body by removing any impediments to his healing, and they must also prevent him from harming himself; he reassures them that to do so would not be insubordinate. Les bons amys et loyaulz subiectz du roy doibvent querir la sante et vie corporelle du roy comme ilz vouldroient et devroient vouloir pour eulz, en ostant tous empeschemens de fait qui le griesvent ou nuysent a avoyr sa sante, non pour quant par heures ce ne lui pleust point; car ainsi le deveroit chascun vouloir avoir fait en soy; et de fait requerroit soy mesmez que on ne le retint 133 For a helpful outline of this complex text, see Virginie Minet-Mahy, “Fonction structurante et pragmatique de la locution dans la prose ‘engagée,’” in Texte et discours en moyen français: Actes du XIe Colloque international sur le moyen français, ed. Anne Vanderheyden, Jesse Mortelmans, Walter De Mulder, and Theo Venckeleer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 192–95.

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contre son gre se par ignorance ou aultrement il se vouloit tresbuchier ou blecier. Encores plus se de la vie d’ung tel dependoit le bien de tout ung royaulme. Or faire ainsi a ung prince ce ne seroit point resister ou contrarier a sa seignourie et puissance, ou mettre la main in christum Domini, mais seroit y obeir et prouffiter, comme s’il avoit ung membre nuysant par maladie a tout son corps on le trebucheroit par feu ou par coutel. Et a ce doivent soy unir et accorder tous les plus prochains de son sang sans ce que l’ung voise devant et l’autre derriere pour mal complaire. (1147) The king’s good friends and loyal subjects must seek his health and corporeal life just as they would and should want others to do for them, removing any obstacles to his health, even if he doesn’t like it at the time; for that is how everyone should want to be treated; and indeed they would want others to hold them back, against their will, if through ignorance or some other cause they wanted to harm or kill themselves. Now, doing so to a prince would not mean resisting or flouting his authority and power, or putting forth one’s hand against the Lord’s anointed, but rather it would be a way to obey and benefit him, just as, if he had a sick member threatening his entire body, one would get rid of it by flame or knife. His closest blood relatives must all come together and agree to this, instead of going in opposite directions just to be disagreeable.

Gerson delivered Vivat rex during one of the king’s most alarming (and politically consequential) bouts of madness, one to which this passage rather transparently refers. The mention of “ignorance or some other cause” prompting suicide attempts allows him to sidestep the tricky question of what vocabulary to use to discuss the king’s condition. Nor does he specify how the king might attempt to harm himself, but his listeners are likely to have thought of his willful refusal to eat and bathe, his secreted blade, or the other acts of symbolic self-violence enumerated in contemporary chronicles. And in the rather unusual amputation analogy, it is tempting to see an allusion to the king’s episode of summer 1405, too. The gangrenous limb in need of removal, the “membre nuysant par maladie a tout son corps,” is not far off from the infected and rotting flesh around the king’s secret wound. To discuss the amputation of a sick member in this specific context – where the “head” of state is the one who is literally ill, and whose illness is harming his subjects – might seem dangerously close to the treasonous suggestion that said “head” be removed for the good of the people.134 Moreover, in urging the princes of the blood to take care of their ruler, Gerson implies 134 This question is discussed in Andrei Sălăvăstru, “The Body Politic of Vivat rex: An Allegorical Political Discourse and its Reception at the Court of France,” Hermeneia 16 (2016): 110–11.



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heavily that they have hitherto failed to do so. This passage’s dangerous proximity to treasonous speech is confirmed by the subsequent appearance of Sedition. Her denunciation of the “faulz traitrez qui gastent [le roy] et son royaulme” (false traitors who harm the king and his kingdom) as being “comme le fer ou l’espine en la playe, qui ne la seuffre venir a garison” (like the [iron] blade or the thorn in a wound that keeps it from healing, 1153) is the logical extension of Gerson’s implication that the king’s “bons amys et loyaulz subiectz” have failed to remove all of the empeschemens to his health (such as, perhaps, the petit lopin de fer to which Juvénal des Ursins refers). Clearly, if he is to avoid sedition, Gerson must find a different way to speak about the king’s bodies. The solution upon which he settles is the organic metaphor of the state. Although this becomes a guiding image in Vivat rex, it is only presented after the vision of Dissimulation, Sedition, and Discretion, that is, more than a third of the way through the sermon. Hints of it are evident much earlier, though, as when Gerson justifies his own political speech by citing the precedent of Plutarch – “Plutarchus ung seul homme osa bien escripre a l’empereur Traianus la maniere de son gouvernement” (Plutarchus, just one man, dared to write to the emperor Trajan about his mode of government, 1146) – the reference being, of course, to the pseudo-plutarchan Institutio traiani in which John of Salisbury had elaborated the organic metaphor.135 Later, when Gerson first warns of the vices that work to undermine the Cardinal Virtues, he presents the civil body as a head and members (“en chief et en membres,” 1151), a particular partition of the body that really only makes sense in the light of the organic metaphor. Finally, following the encounter with Discretion, Gerson explicitly presents the topic of the body politic. Tout mon propoz par quelque mot je l’expose, est que le roy vive; vive, dy je, de vie non pas seulement corporelle comme dit est, mais civile et mistique, laquelle se tient a garde par unite de luy comme d’ung chief avecques ses subietz, qui sont comme le corps aians divers membrez selon divers estas et officez qui sont ou royaulme. Pour tant ung roy n’est pas une personne singuliere, maiz est une puissance publique ordonnee pour le salut de tout le commun, ainsi comme de chief descent et despand la vie par tout le corps… (1155) 135 Frédérique Lachaud notes the importance of Policraticus as an intertext for Gerson in Rex in sempiternum vive, though she does not mention this reference, and she states that the sermon contains no direct reference to Policraticus. “‘Plutarchus si dit et recorde…’ L’influence du Policraticus de Jean de Salisbury sur Christine de Pizan et Jean Gerson,” in Hommes, cultures et sociétés à la fin du Moyen Âge. Liber discipulorum en l’honneur de Philippe Contamine, ed. Patrick Gilli and Jacques Paviot (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2012), 65.

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My entire purpose, by whatever words I state it, is that the king may live; live, I say, a life that is not only corporeal, as it is called, but civil and mystical; one which keeps itself safe through unity, like a head with its subjects, which are like a body having different members corresponding to the different estates and offices of the kingdom. Thus a king is not a singular person, but is a public power ordained for the salvation of the commons, just as from the head life descends and spreads throughout the whole body…

It is telling that the organic metaphor should appear only after a psychomachic interlude – one that is framed in terms both corporeal and inorganic. Dissimulation had told the preacher that it was no use speaking up, for even a hundred steel tongues would not be strong enough to convey an effective message (“dy tout ce que tu vouldras, tu useroiez cent languez d’acier, car riens ne s’en fera,” 1153); Sedition had railed against Dissimulation for closing critics’ mouths (“Ceste peureuse dissimulacion clot a tous la bouche,” 1154) and proclaimed that even inanimate objects ought to be speaking out against the world’s evils: “Les pierrez mesmement les deveroient accuser, et feu et glaive sans respit exterminer” (Even stones should accuse them, and fire and blade should exterminate them without mercy, 1154). Both of these intemperate exhortations merge the human and mineral realms, either by grafting metal into a human mouth or by according agency to stones and blades; but Discretion proposes a different conception of embodied speech and power. While literal (and medicalized) language had been adequate to the discussion of the king’s physical health, considerably more care is required when broaching the subject of political reform. Like the other writers mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Gerson walks a fine line between obfuscation and sedition; seeking a discreet way to tell the truth, he settles on the metaphor of the body politic. Gerson uses the metaphor to highlight the reciprocity and interdependence that characterize a healthy state. The political body is governed by the same complexional theory, the same principles of balance, as the corporeal body; the four Cardinal Virtues are to the civic body what the four humors are to the corporeal body.136 Dissension, Gerson says, arises when the ruling class behaves “comme se le chief vouloit attraire a soy tout le sang, l’humeur et la substance

136 “Comme la vie corporelle se garde en la bonne proporcion, ordonnance et armonie des quatre qualitez premierez, comme dit est, et c’est la complexion naturelle qui se garde en une qualite de justice naturelle selon medicine, pareillement ceste vie civile se maintient et garde en la proporcion et conionction des quatrez vertus cardinales ou principales” (Just as corporeal life is preserved through the good proportion, order, and harmony of the four primary qualities, as it is said, and according to medicine the natural complexion is preserved in a quality of natural justice, likewise civic life is maintained and preserved in the proportion and conjunction of the four cardinal or principal virtues, 1149).



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des aultrez membres” (as if the head wanted to draw all of the blood, the humors, and the matter from the other members to itself, 1156). The admonition “que le chief ne traie trop a soy l’umeur et le sang des aultrez membrez” (that the head not draw too much to itself the humors and the blood of the other members, 1159) is reminiscent of Aristotle’s and Oresme’s description of tyranny, but without Oresme’s vivid description of the monstrosity that would result from such immoderate greed. Poor statecraft does carry with it the risk of grotesque deformity, though: a king without good counsel is like a head with no eyes, ears, or nose (“roy sans la prudent conseil est comme le chief en ung corps sans yeulz, sans oreillez et sans nez,” 1166); without good counsel and good knights he is like a heartless and armless body (“le roy est comme corps sans cueur et sans bras,” 1167). The king depends on his subordinates to remain whole, for, as Gerson twice declares, “chief sans corps ne peust durer” (a head cannot survive without a body, 1155, 1156). Despite his insistence on the reciprocity of the king’s ideal relationship with his counselors and subjects, Gerson never argues the inverse, that a body cannot survive without a head. In highlighting the detrimental effects of political dysfunction, Gerson’s focus is not the monstrosity of the body politic, but the medical intervention needed to restore its proper function. The transposition of medicalized language onto the body politic allows Gerson to revisit and clarify his previous, potentially seditious remarks about king’s corporeal body. Whereas he had earlier remarked that a “membre nuysant par maladie” should be removed, here he clarifies that if the head is the affected member, gentler remedies are called for. Il ne convient pas que si le chief se deult ung peu, que la main l’abate, ce seroit faict de fol; ou ne convient pas tantost le trancher et separer du corps, mais le mediciner en toutes doulceurs, tant par bonnes parolles comme aultrement a l’exemple des bons medicins. (1159) It is not appropriate that, if the head should hurt a little, the hand should cut it down; this would be an act of folly. Nor is it appropriate to cut it and separate it from the body in haste, rather, it should be doctored gently, with good words and otherwise, following the example of good physicians.

The advocacy for gentler remedies for an ailing head is reassuring, though Gerson’s warning that one should not cut off the head too precipitously (tantost) does not entirely rule out decapitation as a treatment of last resort. Still, all medical interventions must be taken soberly and deliberately; “La medicine desmesuree greve plus que la principale maladie, ce dit Lucain” (excessive medicine does more harm than the original illness, as Lucan says, 1159). With this discussion Gerson largely sidesteps the hazard of the amputation problem, instead making the broader point that the princes of the blood must all seek to

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preserve the kingdom’s bodily integrity just as they ought to have been caring for the king. In proposing his gentle verbal medicine, Gerson once again turns his attention to false magical interventions, which he dismisses in even more scathing terms than before. Contre ceste vertu font sorciers et sorcieres, charmeurs, magiciens mauldis et tous ceulz qui usent de supersticions pour guarir maladiez en invocant l’aide de l’ennemy, comme si Dieu fut mains puissant ou sagez ou bien veuillant a aider qu’ilz ne sont. (1183) Acting against this virtue [hope] are sorcerers and sorceresses, charmers, cursed magicians, and all those who use superstition to cure maladies by invoking the aid of the devil, as if God were less powerful or wise or willing to help than they.

These magicians’ works, crimes against Hope, cannot be construed either as a miracle or a natural cure; “Folz est qui se fie” (He who trusts in them is mad, 1184). Those who seek to cure the king with superstition rather than virtue are as mad as the king himself. This condemnation of magic and those who rely on it represents just one of many references to madness throughout Vivat rex. Some are overt, such as the three references to Nebuchadnezzar: the Babylonian king is cited as one whom flatterers led to believe he was a god (1161), as an idolater (1177), and as a cautionary tale of pride brought low through madness. Nabugodonosor pour ce qu’il ne recognossoit point Dieu, cheut en telle melancolie qu’il cuidoit estre beuf. Si n’est plus bel conseil contre lez adversitez que nous sentons et doubtons, fors labourer et avoyr vie espirituelle, tant au roy comme es subjectz. Muons nostre male vie; Dieu muera sa dure sentence. (1181) Nebuchadnezzar, because he did not acknowledge God, fell into such melancholy that he thought he was cattle. So there is no better counsel against the adversities that we feel and fear, but to labor and to lead a spiritual life, both the king and his subjects. Let us change our bad ways; God will commute his harsh sentence.

Here Nebuchadnezzar’s madness appears in its familiar role, as a reminder of the power of contrition. Other allusions to mental illness are more difficult for modern readers to spot: for example, the idea that flattery inflates the lord who listens to it, but that this inflation is as insignificant as “troiz pois en une vessie enflee” (three peas in an inflated bladder, 1162), draws upon iconography of the madman, who is often depicted carrying a bladder filled with beans or



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peas.137 Once one begins looking for them, verbal traces of madness are everywhere in Vivat rex; the language of folly accumulates, becoming unmistakeable by the sermon’s end.138 Another type of image, recurring throughout Vivat rex, shows the real corporeal and civil effects of the king’s madness: there is a preponderance of anecdotes about the suffering, self-harm, and suicide of the common people. Gerson opens with an account of the horrors that the current political disorder has wrought: pillage, rape of virgins, married women prostituting themselves, church arson, murder, and – worst of all (“qui pis est”) – people killing themselves out of violent madness and despair stemming from the unendurable pressure of living (“occire soy mesmes par raage et desespoir des contraignans qu’ilz ne peuent endurer,” 1138). Toward the end Gerson again illustrates the people’s woes by raising the specter of suicide. Car le paoureux soucy, l’angoisseuse doubte d’estre pillez par prinsez ou par gens d’armez, lez livre a tres griefz, tres impacient et douloureux tourment, en tant que de nostre temps plusieurs sont cheuz en desespoir et se sont occis. Dieu, quel horreur ! (1171) For fearful worry and the anguishing dread of being pillaged by princes or men at arms lead them into very grievous, impatient and painful torment, such that in these times many have fallen into despair and have killed themselves. My God, how horrible!

Gerson’s examples largely do not present suicide as a sign of mental illness – at least, not as a sign of its own victims’ mental illness.139 Rather, it is the cause of a disability of a different sort: the self-destruction of the “feet” deals a crippling physical blow to the body politic. Paradoxically, the most inwardly directed form of violence becomes a generalized aggression with the capacity to disable an entire social order. Moreover, suicide is a somewhat rational response to an untenable situation, which is exacerbated by the folly of the princes. While the king may not be the direct cause of this self-harm, it is 137 Ménard, “Les fous dans la société médiévale.” 138 It is an affront to God to misuse his gifts, “abuser dez dons de Dieu en son reprouche

comme de force, beaulte, sens, engin” (1181); “fol ne croit” (1181); “a fole fin ramener” (1181); “Comprehendit sapientes in astucia sia et adducit consilium eorum in stultum finem” (1182); Gerson praises the king for having tamped down “les abhominations mauldictez et comme ydolatriquez qui se font es esglises de France soubz l’ombre de la feste aux folz” (1183); “fols sont ils et pernicieulz folz non a souffrir” (1183). 139 Learned discourses about suicide typically do not treat the act as a consequence of mental illness. See Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–2000).

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happening on his watch, and he therefore bears some culpability: “Tu ne faiz pas telz maulz; c’est vray; mais tu les souffres” (You are not committing such evils, it is true; but you are allowing them to happen, 1171).140 Gerson suggests that suicide is at an all-time high in order to propose a model of interdependency between the different estates, wherein the common people suffer because they must pay for the folly of the lords (“quelque folie que les seigneurs font, le peuple l’achate,” 1142). The greater their leaders’ folly, the greater the citizens’ suffering.141 The sickness of the head is visited on the members. The common people’s suicides are both an undeniable fact (in lived reality) and a signifier of the “divisions et scismes qui murtrissent la vie civile et divine” (divisions and schisms that are tearing at civic and divine life, 1184); an act of self-harm on the corporeal level figures internecine conflict ravaging the king’s civic and spiritual bodies. Comme au regart corporel n’est chose plus crueuse, horrible et hideuse que veoir ung corps humain ou naturel soy dessirer ou desmembrer par morsure ou aultrement, semblablement au regart espirituel de raison n’est pas maindre cruaulte mais trop plus grande, ou corps mistique se les partiez sont divisez et se persecutent l’une l’autre comme subiez seigneurs ou seigneurs subiectz. (1156) Just as there is nothing more cruel, horrible, or hideous to the corporeal gaze than to see a natural or human body tear or dismember itself, by biting or otherwise, so too is there no greater cruelty to the spiritual gaze of reason

140 A similar tension between exculpating the king and assigning him responsibility for the consequences of his decisions is on display in a remarkable statement from the University of Paris, as described by Brian Patrick McGuire: “On 1 December 1413, the entire University of Paris, in congregation at the church of Saint Mathurin, deplored the actions of the preceding years but concluded that the king was more to be pitied than accused for approving them. This is a rare indirect reference to the king’s illness. [...] Gerson may have been one of the authors of this declaration.” Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation, 232. 141 Of course, there is no way of accurately gauging suicide rates in the fifteenth century, and contemporary sociological scholarship is divided on the question of suicide trends during wartime. Durkheim’s hypothesis of lower suicide rates in times of war is not fully borne out by recent studies. James R. Marshall has found that national wars decrease suicide rates not because they produce greater political integration in society, but because they decrease the national unemployment rate, thereby producing greater economic integration. This observation clearly does not extend to the French countryside of the turn of the fifteenth century. James R. Marshall, “Political Integration and the Effect of War on Suicide: United States, 1973–76,” Social Forces 59 (1981): 771–85. A group of Croatian researchers, studying suicide rates before, during, and after the slightly more analogous Serbo-Croatian war of the 1990s, found elevated suicide rates during wartime. Časlav Loncar et al., “War, mental disorder and suicide,” Collegium antropologicum 28:1 (2004): 377–92.



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than to see the parts of the mystical body divided and persecuting one another, subjects against lords, lords against subjects.

In the Livre de la paix (September 1412–January 1414) Christine de Pizan will make a similar point, characterizing civil war as forcenerie (insanity), a form of self-destruction that could only be motivated by desverie (madness). Avisons quel forcenerie sembleroit estre veoir un homme tel atourné par grant yre que il mesmes se beast a destruire, si comme se les dens esrachacent sa propre char, les mains s’entreferissent grans coups et tirassent a confondre l’une l’autre, les piéz a frapper es yeulx se estre puest, et ainsi tout le corps fut en tel forcené mouvement contre soy meismes, certes bien diroit on que un tel seroit meu par grant desverie. Helas! n’est ce pas pareil de guerre civille en une contrée, et par especial en ceste, dont il n’est leu que oncques nobles y fussent si comme un meismes corps, si que estre doivent fors a ceste foiz? Reflect on what insanity it would seem to see a man so charged with anger that he strove to destroy himself, by tearing his own flesh with his teeth, his hands hitting each other with great blows, and pulling against the other, the feet striking his eyes if that were possible, and withal the whole body thrashing in furious [mad] movement against itself. One would certainly say that such a man was moved by great madness. But alas! Is it not similar with civil war in a country, and especially in this one? For in no place were nobles ever so like one single body as here and now – as they should be.142

Christine’s language hews quite closely to Gerson’s imagery in Vivat rex and especially in Adorabant eum (1391), the earliest sermon in which he uses the organic metaphor of the state – but to this image developed before the king’s illness, Christine adds the vocabulary of madness, forcenerie, and desverie.143 Both Christine and Gerson point out that the health of the head impacts the rest of the members, and that the very ills that are leading common people to take 142 Christine de Pizan, The Book of Peace, ed. and trans. Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, Janice Pinder, and Tania Van Hemelryck, with Alan Crosier (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008), 277; the translation is modified from Christine de Pizan, The Book of Peace, 146. Alain Chartier creates a similar image in the Quadrilogue invectif. 143 From Adorabant eum: “se lez membres et les partiez de l’omme estoient contrairez l’une a l’autre, tellement que les mains crevassent les yeulx et les piez tresbuchant le corps, et le cuer n’envoyast pas sa chaleur aux aultrez membrez, le royaulme personnel de l’omme seroit bientot mis a perdicion” (7.2.528). On Adorabant eum as Gerson’s first known exploration of the organic metaphor, see Sălăvăstru, “The Body Politic of Vivat rex,” 102.

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their own lives are a direct consequence of the head of state’s mismanagement. Gerson’s three-body schema also allows for this sort of contagion across different metaphorical bodies. As Gerson puts it, Tenez de certain que pour lez peches du corps mistique, soient es chefs, soient es membrez, nous viennent adversitez corporellez et civiles, et par especial quant ce sont horribles peches, estranges, ors et vilains, contre Dieu et nature. Pour ce guerres; pour ce faminez; pour ce pestilencez; pour ce sedicions et divisions nous sourdent. (1181) You can be sure that corporeal and civil adversities come to us as a consequence of sins of the mystical body, either in its head or its members, especially when those sins are horrible, strange, dirty and vile, against God and nature. Thence come wars, famines, pestilences, seditions, and divisions.

A failing in one part of the mystical body manifests as suffering in a different part of the body politic, a form of suffering that is ultimately written in corporeal bodies – that of the king, or those of the suffering commoners. The king’s body, like the bodies of the suicides, is less important as a corporeal body than as a sign of a deeper problem.144 Thus, while Vivat rex might initially appear to expose the king’s body as a subject of discussion, it also does quite the opposite. The organic metaphor reframes the king’s physical body as a figurative rather than a literal phenomenon, and with its focus on the “connexion” (1160) between the different parts of the body, the organic metaphor deflects attention away from the inner workings of any individual body part – including the king’s mind.145 Much the same dynamic is at play in our final major example of the organic metaphor of state, Rex in sempiternum vive. This is Gerson’s last surviving French-language sermon, preached on September 4, 1413 at the close of the

144 As Daisy Delogu puts it, “Gerson’s comparable and connected kingdoms or realms allow for conceptual movement from one to another. Indeed herein, for Gerson, lies the interest of metaphor, which is not about exploring the connections of parts to each other or to a whole, but rather the affinities between a series or set of mystical bodies.” Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 112. 145 Nancy McLoughlin makes a similar point when she argues that “rather than talking about how individual vices worked within or upon the king’s soul to overcome his sense of reason, Gerson made use of the commonplace identification of the king’s body with his kingdom as a means of mapping the sins onto historical actors.” Nancy McLoughlin, “Jean Gerson’s Vivat rex and the Vices of Political Alliance,” in La pathologie du pouvoir: Vices, crimes et délits des gouvernants, ed. Patrick Gilli (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 331.



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Cabochian revolt,146 and its numerous echoes of Vivat rex establish it as a pendant to, if not a continuation or completion of, the 1405 sermon.147 The title of Rex in sempiternum vive already appeared in Vivat rex, wherein the two salutations/titles were presented as being nearly identical.148 Nous lisons en Daniel, ou second chapitre, que les saiges de Babilon la grant qui faisoient lors l’universite de celle cite et contree, quant furent venus devant le roy Nabugodonosor pour exposer son songe, leur premiere parolle fut samblable a la nostre: Rex, inquiunt, in eternum vive; o roy, dirent ilz, vivez pardurablement. Vive le roy; c’est belle entree et sage salutacion. (Vivat rex, 1138) We read in Daniel, in the second chapter, that the wise men of the great Babylon, who made up the university of that city and country, when they had come before king Nebuchadnezzar to interpret his dream, their first words were similar to ours: Rex, inquiunt, in eternum vive; o king, they said, may you live forever. Long live the king; it is a nice beginning and a wise salutation.

As the later sermon’s title indicates, Rex in sempiternum vive uses Nebuchadnezzar’s dreamt statue (and the interpretation thereof) as a structuring principle. The preacher, repeatedly giving voice to the Babylonian sages’ words, is thereby assimilated to Biblical interpreters of dreams. But the title also signals a failure of interpretation: after all, the “sages philosophes” (wise philosophers, 1005) of Daniel prove unable to analyze the king’s dream, for they lack access to his forgotten vision, and the inner workings of his mind. Gerson seeks to bridge this gap with a strategic multiplicity of metaphors. He explores the statue’s full range of metaphoric capabilities, while also spatializing and literalizing the motto le droit chemin (the straight path): this language is designed both to account for the king’s incapacities and to nudge the desvoyé back onto the path of good governance. This sermon stands out from Gerson’s other developments of similar themes through the sheer number of metaphorical bodies that are presented, and the number of metaphorical valences they are allowed to signify. In Rex in sempiternum vive, as in many other sermons (beginning with Adorabant eum 146 On Rex in sempiternum vive and its historical context, including the assertion that this is Gerson’s final surviving French sermon, see Mourin, Jean Gerson, 205–16. See also McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation, 229–34. 147 McGuire characterizes Rex in sempiternum vive as a “continuation” of Vivat rex. Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation, 230. 148 Not much later in Vivat rex Gerson again cites a similar salutation: “La Bible nous recite, Neemi 2o, que quant Neemie maistre de la loy, voult impetrer du roy de Babilone la deliberacion du peouple d’Israel captive et que le temple de Jherusalem fut reedifie, il commenca par dire: Rex in sempiternum vive” (1140).

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in 1391 and continuing through Vivat rex), Gerson elaborates a vision of the king’s three bodies or “triple life.” Many more bodies are joined to those of the king: “le corps de votre fille l’Université, le corps de votre Parlement, le corps de votre clergie de cette dioceze, le corps de votre bonne ville de Paris et de votre bon peuple sont joints a vous et a votre roïale seignorie” (the body of your daughter the University, the body of your Parlement, the body of your clergy of this diocese, the body of your good city of Paris and of your good subjects are attached to you and to your royal sovereignty, 1009). The means by which these bodies are appended to the king’s is not specified – are they joined organically, or prosthetically? – but Gerson does posit that the strength of this union has been revealed through recent troubles: it was the recent Cabochian revolt, and its eventual suppression, that has confirmed the soundness of the bond between these varied bodies. The primary effect of the beginning of the sermon, then, is to celebrate a composite vision of the state: Gerson proclaims the kingdom’s unity, but does not conflate this unity with homogeneity. On this note, Gerson introduces the figure of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue. The logical step from discussion of the Cabochians to explication of the Biblical statue follows, he says, “le droit chemin sans fiction ne palliation” (the straight path, without fiction or dissimulation, 1011). This is the same path Discretion had opened for him in Vivat rex: “Discrecion tient le droit chemin royal, sans decliner a dextre de dissimulacion, ou a senestre de sedicion” (Discretion keeps the straight royal path, without bearing right toward Dissimulation or left toward Sedition, Vivat rex, 1154). In Rex in sempiternum vive, too, the veil of metaphor is no longer an integumentum or a pallium, but a means of direct access to truth. The denial of the metaphor’s palliative function also indicates that Gerson’s diagnosis of the ailments of the body politic will not be a surface-level intervention glossing over the body’s political and social divisions.149 On the contrary, it is the joints and the ruptures between the statue’s metals, more than the integrity of the figure they comprise, that will unite Gerson’s varied readings of the statue. Gerson first offers a diachronic reading of the statue, consistent with Biblical commentaries in the tradition of Peter Comestor, wherein the different metals represent successive kingdoms. He calls this interpretation “la signification litterale” (the literal signification, 1012); then, in the “morale signification ou application” (moral signification or application), he reads the statue in conjunction with the organic metaphor of the body politic, which he identifies as deriving from Aristotle, St. Paul, and Plutarch. 149 In Middle French, “palliation” may refer to medical interventions that treat only surface symptoms (a sense similar to “palliative care” as it is understood today), as well as to veiling or dissimulation. See DMF, s.v. “palliation.”



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Mais prenons une morale signification ou application qui est plus a notre propos present, et conformement a la sentence d’Aristote et de saint Paul et de Plutarque qui comparent un roiaume a un corps humain et a ses membres, et disons que vous, Sire, et votre roïaume pouves estres figurés par cette statue et image qui etoit grande et merveilleuse et terrible a regarder. (1013) But let us take a moral meaning or application that is more pertinent to the topic at hand – and in keeping with the pronouncements of Aristotle and Saint Paul and Plutarch who compare a kingdom to a human body and its members – and let us say that you, Sire, and your kingdom can be figured by this statue that was huge and wondrous and terrible to behold.

Like Deguileville in the Pèlerinage de l’âme, Gerson indicates that the king is represented both by the whole statue and by one of its parts, i.e., the head. The bulk of the sermon, however, considers the statue piecemeal – focusing almost exclusively on the head, whose value as a signifier of the king Gerson repeats insistently – and the whole statue is never more than the sum of its parts. The king and the three estates are associated with the four segments of the statue, which are linked in turn to the four Cardinal Virtues (justice for the king/golden head, fortitude for the nobility/silver chest and arms, prudence for the clergy/ bronze belly, and temperance for the bourgeoisie/iron legs) and to four areas in which reform is needed. These multiple significations are the “foundation” on which the edifice of the sermon is built. “Nous avons mis et coloquez les fondemens de cette proposition comme en quarreure [...] Venons a edifier sur chacune de ces quadratures aucunes veritez et considerations” (We have placed and established the foundations of this proposition, as in a square; let us come and build some truths and considerations on each of these squares, 1015). By reducing the statue to its four segments – each of which is assigned four possible meanings – Gerson has refashioned the statue into a cubical plinth on which the sermon can be constructed. Though the head is the part of the statuary body politic that receives the most attention in Rex in sempiternum vive, it takes an unconventional form. Despite Gerson’s repeated insistence that “le chief de notre image est le roy auquel est l’or de valeur et d’authorité et de vertu dominative” (the head of our statue is the king, to whom belongs the gold of merit and authority and sovereign virtue, 1016), he also conceives of the head as comprising both the king and his lineage (thus reintroducing the diachronic element, the in sempiternum of

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the king’s reign).150 The diverse components of this corporate head are not hierarchically organized (although the reigning king is, of course, the chief of chiefs), nor is a distinction made between true and false heads (as in Deguileville when the question of multiple heads is raised); here, multiplicity does not undermine legitimacy. It does complicate the question of who is actually in charge, though. The area of reform linked to the head is “du bon gouvernement du roy et de sa personne et de son hostel” (that of the good government of the king, both of his person and his household, 1014), indicating that the king is feeble and in need of better management. Whether this might be “bon gouvernement” by the king or of the king is left unsaid. The metal head is opaque, its inner workings unknowable. Despite Rex in sempiternum vive’s focus on “the primacy of reason,”151 it must be observed that, throughout this instantiation of the metaphor of the body politic, the head does not reason at all – only the preacher does. Rational function has been outsourced from the body politic to the “corps de l’Université.” The University fulfills a prosthetic function, as a structure supplementing the royal head whose reason has failed. Moreover, while France’s recent woes are not directly attributed to the head – that honor belongs to the Cabochians themselves, and ultimately to the duke of Burgundy’s political philosophy as expressed in Jean Petit’s apologia for tyrannicide – it should nonetheless be noted that the word Gerson consistently uses to refer to the Cabochian revolt and to other troubles is meschief. Etymologically as well as pragmatically, these miscarriages of justice are traced back to the head, with a vocabulary reminiscent of the by-then proverbial expression: Quand faible et malade est le chef, les membres en sont a meschef.152 A statue is not an automaton; it has no inner workings. In part because of its reliance on the guiding image of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, then, this instance of the organic metaphor is far less physiological than that in Vivat rex. Whereas Vivat rex likened governance to the flow of blood and humors, specific anatomical structures and physiological processes are strikingly absent from Rex in sempiternum vive. The most medicalized vocabulary comes toward the end of the sermon, as Gerson exhorts his listeners that good faith, and the ability to trust in others’ good faith, is essential to the success of the state: “Certes qui publie que en aucun cas on puet mentir ou parjurer sa foy, il detruit 150 For Daisy Delogu it is “surprising to see that the head includes some who are not and will not be king, that it has become a corporation constituted synchronically as well as diachronically.” Allegorical Bodies, 118. 151 Ibid., 121. 152 Or, as it is phrased in the Pastoralet, “Cest pourpris, par faulte de chief, / Declinera. Las ! quel meschief !” (This enclosure [France], lacking a head, will decline. Alas! what misfortune,” 90, vv. 2011–12).



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toute police humaine, toute conversation et toute paix et alliance et demeure le corps de la chose publicque comme sans nerfs et sans connexion” (Certainly whoever says openly that sometimes one can lie or break his faith destroys all human polity, all conversation, and all peace and alliance, and the body politic remains as if without nerves or articulations, 1024). Gerson does not tell us anything about how the body works; he only tells us how it does not work, in the absence of the “connective tissue” of a social contract that should keep the body’s disparate parts working jointly and cooperatively. This is unsurprising, since Gerson ultimately uses the metaphor of the body politic in service of an admonition against internecine conflict. Falsity erodes bodily connections, and falsity prevents the body from healing itself, from restoring its own integrity: “car fausseté contraire ne puet et ne doit venir en traittié de paix, mais seroit comme le fer en la playe qui jamais ne la souffriroit venir a guerison” (for hostile falsity cannot and should not have a place in peace negotiations, but it would be like the [iron] blade in the wound that would never let it heal, 1016). Like the little rusted blade that the king kept secreted against his skin in 1405, and like the “fer ou l’espine en la playe” of which Sedition warns in Vivat rex, the Burgundians’ bad faith is what has prevented the wounded body from coming back together. Gerson’s prescription for healing and unity is not a medical one; rather, the means by which the polity may come back together is for all people to follow the “droit chemin.” If any good Frenchman is asked which side he is on, he should simply reply, “je suis vrai François, je suis a roy et non a d’aultre. C’est la voye royalle, c’est le droit chemin” (I am a true Frenchman, I belong to the king and no other. That is the royal road, that is the straight path, 1019). This, according to Gerson, is the only “bonne reponse,” for only the “droit chemin” can lead to paradise: “Si concluons en suppliant que paisiblement et concordéement et uniement le droit chemin nous parvenions a la vie perdurable de paradis” (Thus we conclude, begging that peacefully, harmoniously, and in unity we might take the straight path to the eternal life of paradise, 1030). And indeed, the motto “le droit chemin” has run through the sermon like a thread, like the “nerf... et connexion” that the body politic is sorely lacking. At the beginning, Gerson identifies this motto as having recently been adopted by the city of Paris (1005–6) and argues that this motto perfectly complements the city’s other motto, Vive le roy. Et vous scavez, Sire, que la devise de votre bonne ville est: Vive le roy, et moult s’accorde la devise qu’ils ont darrainement prise: Le droit chemin. Et qui est, Sire, le droit chemin? C’est le chemin roïal qui ne va a dextre ni a senestre, qui est patent et publique, sans angles, sans aguettes, sans fraudes ou deceptions. (1009)

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And you know, Sire, that the motto of your good city is Vive le roy [Long live the king], and the motto they have recently adopted is in great accordance with it: Le droit chemin [The straight path]. And what is, Sire, the straight path? It is the royal path that goes neither to the left nor to the right, that is open and public, without corners, without ambushes [i.e., hiding spots from which one can be spied on or ambushed], without fraud or deception.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cabochian uprising the motto “le droit chemin,” as Monstrelet and the Bourgeois de Paris report, is used, along with a straight white cross inspired by the royal emblem, as an anti-Burgundian device.153 Gerson uses it not only as a call to both royal and popular action, but also as a foil against which to interpret the character of Nebuchadnezzar: for, while the “droit chemin” has no angles in it, Nebuchadnezzar’s fault lies in turning, of his own free will, to heretical pride and tyranny (“Or avient que Nabuchodonosor de son franc vouloir se tourne a la fois a orgueil et tyrannie,” 1015, emphasis added). The emphasis of straight and narrow paths may also remind the audience of the illness of the king who has become desvoyé – the same image exploited to such great effect by Froissart. And, of course, in Rex in sempiternum vive “le droit chemin” alludes to Gerson’s own rhetoric: “allons le droit chemin sans fiction ne palliation.” Gerson has adopted a political motto, both literalized it (as a path to walk) and re-metaphorized it (as a salutary rhetorical and political act), letting it stand in for royal action. This rhetorical strategy is of a piece with the general importance of arms, mottoes, and devices during the years of the king’s mental illness, and with the king’s ever-fluctuating relationship with the material markers of his identity and authority. Just as “George” seeks to establish his new identity by scratching out the royal arms wherever he finds them, Gerson uses the “chief d’or” to respect the king’s authority, even as he blunts it through a corporatist vision of at least somewhat shared sovereignty. Both accept the logic of a material stand-in for royal identity. The “droit chemin” takes this strategy even further, setting up the king not as a person but as a path and a process. Hence the singular appropriateness of the figure of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue: with Gerson’s simultaneously synchronic and diachronic spin on it, the statue likewise represents a royal identity that is eternally in-a-process-of-becoming, but is at the present moment opaque and perhaps even hollow.

153 See Emily J. Hutchison, “Partisan Identity in the French Civil War, 1405–1418: Reconsidering the Evidence on Livery Badges,” Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007): 272. It is perhaps in reaction to the Armagnac use of the “droit chemin” motto that the pro-Burgundian author of the Pastoralet declares the need for a “couverte voie.”



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Conclusion: Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and les membres qui se deullent du chief If the king’s health cannot be restored, as Juvénal des Ursins reports that the royal physician feared, what are the implications for the health of the body politic? The king’s affected member cannot be excised, but metaphorically, France might become a headless monstrosity, a “corps sanz teste” as Eustache Deschamps suggests in a dream-vision in the form of a chanson royale bearing the refrain “Riens ne me fault, mais que j’aye bon chief” (I’m lacking nothing but a good head”).154 In fact, the organic metaphor appears with some frequency in the ballades of Eustache Deschamps, in a manner often suggestive of Charles’s madness, though both the language and the dating of the poems are vague enough that attempts to see these poems as reflections of the king’s madness must remain inconclusive.155 Likewise, although she does not go so far as to imagine a headless body politic, Christine de Pizan makes extensive use of the organic metaphor of state in her political writings, often pathologizing that metaphorical body and especially its chief.156

154 Chanson royale 387, in Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, III.155–57. Daisy Delogu wisely observes that “The knight may allude to Charles VI’s madness, though without a confirmed date of composition this proposition is speculative. The headless knight could also suggest the minority of Charles VI and the government of the royal uncles, who were each more concerned with their personal advancement than with the administration of the kingdom.” Allegorical Bodies, 64. 155 For an overview of Deschamps’s vision of good government, see Thierry Lassabatère, “Le bon gouvernement,” in Eustache Deschamps en son temps, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), 173–93. Miren Lacassagne, in her analysis of Deschamps’s corporeal political metaphors, studies ballades 252, 387, 388, 398, 958, 978, and 1056; to these Delogu adds Ballade 141. Miren Lacassagne, “Poétique et politique du corps dans l’œuvre d’Eustache Deschamps,” in Le geste et les gestes au Moyen Âge (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 1998), 319–37. 156 For a thorough study of Christine de Pizan’s use of the metaphor, see Stephen H. Rigby, “The Body Politic in the Social and Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Unabridged Version),” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, http://crm.revues.org/12965, accessed January 19, 2017. More recently, Tracy Adams has proposed a link, in the Cent balades, between ballade V (a lamentation for the loss of “cil qui estoit le chief de tous mes biens et de ma nourriture”) and the aforementioned ballade XVC (the lamentation for “nostre bon roy qui est en maladie”). Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, 46. If Adams’s provocative reading is correct, then this is the closest Christine comes to Eustache Deschamps’s vision of a “corps sanz teste.”

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Christine de Pizan emerges as one of France’s most prominent political poets157 in the early years of the fifteenth century.158 Perhaps more than any writer since Philippe de Mézières, Christine de Pizan’s political discourse is highly metaphorical and often concretely visual.159 She makes prominent use of the organic metaphor, most obviously in the Livre du corps de policie (composed between November 1404 and November 1407), which Cary Nederman identifies as the only medieval or Early Modern book based entirely around the metaphor of the body politic –160 but also in other works including the Lamentacion sur les maux de la France (dated August 23, 1410) and the Livre de la paix (September 1412–January 1414).161 Many have argued persuasively that her use of the metaphor, especially in the Livre du corps de policie, is inspired by Gerson’s Vivat rex.162 As Angus J. Kennedy notes, however, 157 Christine’s status as a political writer was long questioned by critics, though it is generally recognized today. For an overview of critical efforts to deny Christine’s status as a political writer, see Sarah Hanley, “Mapping Rulership in the French Body Politic: Political Identity, Public Law and the King’s One Body,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 23 (1997): 148n54. Most notoriously, Gianni Mombello dismisses Christine as a political writer in “Quelques aspects de la pensée politique de Christine de Pizan d’après ses œuvres publiées,” in Culture et politique en France à l’époque de l’humanisme et de la Renaissance. Atti del convegno internazionale promosso dall’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino in collaborazione con la Fondazione Giorgio Cini di Venezia, 29 marzo–3 aprile 1971, ed. Franco Simone (Torino: Accademia delle Scienze, 1974), 43–153. Claude Gauvard rebuts Mombello’s argument in “Christine de Pisan e-t-elle eu une pensée politique?” Revue historique 250 (1973): 417–30. That Gauvard’s position has won the day is evident in the wealth of recent volumes dedicated to Christine’s political thought. 158 Charity Cannon Willard pegs Christine’s “transition from poet to commentator on the contemporary political scene” to composition of Prod’hommie, which she dates to 1403 or early 1404. Charity Cannon Willard, “Christine de Pizan: From Poet to Political Commentator,” in Brabant, Politics, Gender, and Genre, 29. More recently, though, Tracy Adams has argued that even some of Christine’s earlier amorous texts bear political meaning, arguing, for example, that the impotence and absence of the king-figure in the Epistre au dieu d’amours and the Dit de la rose, respectively, are commentaries on the contemporary political situation. Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, 51, 61. 159 “Very much a visual thinker, Christine was profoundly imaginative – in the literal sense – and often used metaphors as the catalyst for her ideas about community.” Kate Langdon Forhan, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 45. 160 Cary J. Nederman, “The Living Body Politic: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in Nicole Oresme and Christine de Pizan,” in Green and Mews, Healing the Body Politic, 19. 161 On the debts of Christine’s body politic metaphors to John of Salisbury, see Lachaud, “Plutarchus si dit et recorde.” 162 Claude Gauvard underlines the similarity between Gerson’s and Christine’s political views in “Christine de Pisan a-t-elle eu une pensée politique?” 420–21. Angus J. Kennedy notes the influence of Vivat rex in the introduction to Christine de Pizan, Le livre du corps de policie, ed. Angus J. Kennedy (Paris: Champion, 1998), xix–xx; as does Earl Jeffrey



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the Livre du corps de policie is far less topical than Vivat rex, written to be read at any time in the young dauphin Louis de Guyenne’s life.163 Still, Christine’s treatment of the head of state in that text is noteworthy, prominent, and undoubtedly colored by current events. Christine presents the body politic in conventional head-to-toe order, beginning with the sovereign, whom she will later call “le chief de tous, le roy de France” (110, lines 24–25). But her account is riddled with uncertainty from the outset, as she declares that le prince ou les princes tiennent le lieu du chief, en tant qu’ilz sont ou doivent estre souverains, et de eulx doivent venir les singuliers establissemens, tout ainsi comme [de] l’entendement de l’omme sourdent et viennent les foraines oeuvres que les membres achevent” (1, lines 30–34, emphasis added) the prince or the princes occupy the position of head, inasmuch as they are or should be sovereign, and personal orders should come from them, just as the external movements that the members carry out originate and come from man’s intellect.

This head can be either singular or plural (le prince ou les princes), and while Christine insists on the singularity of personal rule (les singuliers establissemens), her references to the sovereigns remain plural throughout. It is not clear that the king is the only head of state, nor even that he can succeed in retaining any significant power: he and the princes should be sovereigns (ou doivent estre), but nothing is guaranteed. More than in earlier iterations of the organic metaphor, Christine de Pizan’s political vision makes much of the head’s status as the seat of the intellect.164 This is plain in the Livre du corps de policie and even more so in the Épistre de la prison de vie humaine (June 1416–January 1417), wherein Christine explains the “particularitez de quoy sert cellui don d’entendement, lequel est et a sa situation ou chief” (the ends that this gift of intellect serves, which exists and is housed in the head).165 But in the Livre du corps de policie she neatly

Richards in “Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson: An Intellectual Friendship,” in Campbell and Margolis, Christine de Pizan 2000, 198. 163 Angus J. Kennedy, “Le thème de ‘l’atrempance’ dans Le livre du corps de policie et Le livre de paix,” in Desireuse de plus avant enquerre... Actes du VIe Colloque international sur Christine de Pizan (Paris, 20–24 juillet 2006). Volume en hommage à James Laidlaw, ed. Liliane Dulac, Anne Paupert, Christine Reno and Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Champion, 2008), 15–31. 164 On the new physiology of the body politic, see Forhan, “Polycracy, Obligation, and Revolt,” 42. 165 Christine de Pizan, Épistre de la prison de vie humaine, ed. Angus J. Kennedy (Glasgow: French Department, University of Glasgow, 1984), 34.

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sidesteps the implications of this physiological model by suggesting that an “ill” head lacks not intellect or reason, but virtue. Et ainsi par ceste presente descripcion puet-on entendre que estre vertueux n’est autre chose fors avoir en soy toutes les choses qui tirent a bien et qui retraient et tirent en sus de mal et de vice. Doncques est-il neccessaire pour bien gouverner le corps de la policie publique que le chief soit sain, c’est a savoir vertueux. Car s’il estoit malade, tout s’en sentiroit. Sy commencerons a dire de la medicine du chief, c’est a savoir du roy ou des princes (3, lines 3–9) And thus by this present description can one understand that being virtuous is nothing more than having in oneself everything that leans toward the good and pulls away from evil and vice. Therefore it is necessary to the good government of the body politic that the head be healthy, which is to say virtuous. For if it were sick, all [the rest of the body] would feel it. So we will begin to speak of the medicine of the head, that is, of the king or the princes.

While Christine retains the observation that an illness of the head would negatively affect the members, she distances such maladies from anything we might understand today as “mental illness.” She avoids the implication that Froissart and Gerson make in juxtaposing the king’s madness with the madness or folly of others: that royal insanity bears a risk of contagion as the king’s condition and the resulting turmoil drive the people to desperation. She also avoids the sort of frank speech that must be disavowed as “madness” in order to be excused, like the desperate words of the peasant Jehan Jourdain. By the end of Christine de Pizan’s literary career, however, she, too, presents herself as having fallen prey to the contagion of melancholy, as in the explicit of the Épistre de la prison de vie humaine: à cause de maints desplaisirs qui depuis le temps que je le commençay, qui fut dès pieça, ont mon povre entendement, pour sa foiblece, tenu si empeschié en tristes ymaginacions et pensées qu’il n’a esté en ma puissance de plus tost l’avoir achevé que à cestui .xx. jour de janvier l’an mil CCCCXVII. (53) because of many disappointments which, since the time when I began it, which was quite a while ago, have so impeded my intellect, because of its weakness, with sad ideations [ymaginacions] and thoughts that it was not in my power to have finished it any sooner than this twentieth day of January, 1417.



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This rhetorical stance, of the poet driven to despair by France’s suffering, colors the Épistre de la prison de vie humaine as well as medieval France’s most novel literary treatment of mental illness: Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance, which will be the focus of the next chapter.

5

Alain Chartier’s rooil de oubliance The later years of Charles VI’s reign were marked by political turmoil, military reversals, and civic unrest, from the defeat at Agincourt (1415) and the Burgundian taking of Paris (1418) to the Treaty of Troyes (1420), which declared the dauphin Charles illegitimate and made England’s Henry V heir to the French throne. Upon his father’s death in 1422 Charles VII was considered king in the areas loyal to him, which centered on Bourges in the Berry region. The dauphin’s cause was famously bolstered by Joan of Arc’s military campaign, which cleared the path to Reims for his coronation ceremony in summer 1429. Responses to the exploits of Joan of Arc figure among the final writings of several major political authors: Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, and Alain Chartier. More broadly speaking, the events of the latter half of Charles VI’s reign inspired a continuing wave of political poems, many of which shift their focus from the cognitive capacities of the monarch to the author-narrator’s often-unhealthy affective response to current events. In this chapter I will study how the vernacular political dits of Alain Chartier, spanning the years from Agincourt to the rise of Joan of Arc, respond to these tumultuous times through inquiries into the geography of the pathologically depressed mind. Alain Chartier was a Norman, born in Bayeux, probably in the mid-1380s.1 He is twice mentioned as an officer in the household of Yolande d’Anjou (mother of René and mother-in-law of Charles VII), in account books covering the period from 1409 to 1414. His exact function in her household remains unknown, as do the dates of the two payments to him that are recorded in that account book. But we do know that it is to this period that Chartier’s earliest surviving lyrics date: these are mostly occasional ballades, verse debates, and a Lay de plaisance. Chartier entered the service of the dauphin, the future Charles VII, by 1417, less than a year before the bloody Burgundian conquest of Paris and 1 This biographical summary is drawn from James C. Laidlaw, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 1–27. See also C. J. H. Walravens, Alain Chartier (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Didier, 1971); the most up-to-date summary is James C. Laidlaw, “Alain Chartier: A Historical and Biographical Overview,” in A Companion to Alain Chartier (c. 1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence, ed. Daisy Delogu, Joan E. McRae, and Emma Cayley (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 15–32.

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the dauphin’s subsequent flight to Bourges. Alain Chartier followed the dauphin into exile, never to return to Paris. The dauphin’s court was highly mobile, even by contemporary standards, due to his unstable political position. In Charles’s court, Alain served primarily as a secretary, writing letters and royal acts, and accompanying ambassadors on several diplomatic missions.2 Alain Chartier countersigned nearly three dozen known extant documents in his capacity as notary and secretary to Charles VII, which were composed in at least fifteen different locations; Chartier also participated in diplomatic missions to the emperor Sigismund (probably ending up in either Prague or Buda), to Venice, Bruges, and Scotland. He continued serving as a royal secretary at least until 1428, and we know from the Latin epistle about Joan of Arc which he penned in July 1429 that Alain was present at Charles’s coronation that month. He died soon thereafter, in Avignon, in March 1430.3 Of course, Alain Chartier is significant today because of his literary, not his secretarial, career. He first gained prominence with his courtly poetry, mostly composed from about 1414 to 1425; this period of his work culminates in 1424 with La Belle Dame sans Mercy and the literary quarrel that followed. He is also known for his political dits, mostly composed during the 1420s, and for his Latin speeches and epistles. Unlike his equally prominent contemporaries, Chartier left us no complete works manuscript; nonetheless textual and manuscript evidence shows us that he was well known in his time, and widely read.4 The present chapter focuses on discourses of melancholy 2 One document identifies him as a notary; an epitaph, discovered in the eighteenth century and of dubious authenticity, also identifies him as a counselor to the king. Notarial and secretarial functions overlapped significantly in this context, as both wrote letters and royal acts, and members of the two professions belonged to a single confraternity. In early fifteenth-century France secretaries were more numerous, their duties more wide-ranging and the documents entrusted to them typically more important. Secretaries often accompanied ambassadors on diplomatic missions, as Chartier did on several occasions, and their presence at court was required on a daily basis (minute paperwork survives regarding secretaries’ appeals for leaves and excused absences). 3 On the date of Chartier’s death, see James C. Laidlaw, “Alain Chartier and the Arts of Crisis Management, 1417–1429,” 37–53 in War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France, ed. Christopher Allmand (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 53. The legend of Chartier’s suicide is unfounded in any documentation, and seems to be derived from the Livre de l’Espérance. On Chartier’s death, see also Walravens, Alain Chartier, 40–48. 4 In the 1960s James Laidlaw identified 192 manuscripts containing at least one work by Chartier, none of which contains all of his writings. “The Manuscripts of Alain Chartier,” Modern Language Review 61 (1966): 188–98; see also David Hult, “Alain Chartier in Manuscript: Authorial or Scribal Culture?” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 83:3 (2005): 769–83. More manuscripts continue to be discovered. Chartier’s reception in the early print era is outlined in Olivia Robinson, “Alain Chartier: The Manuscript and Print Tradition,” in Delogu, McRae, and Cayley, A Companion to Alain Chartier, 223–52.



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in several of Chartier’s vernacular political writings: these comprise the Livre des quatre dames (c.1416),5 the Quadrilogue invectif (1422), the Lai de paix (c.1424–26), the Lay de complainte pour les guerres (undated), the Curial (c.1427, composed in Latin but widely diffused in a French translation typically misattributed to Chartier in contemporary manuscripts), and the Livre de l’Espérance (1429–30).6 In these, the topos of the melancholic poet facilitates exploration of the psychological effects of political engagement. In the Livre de l’Espérance, Chartier’s last and most fully developed rumination on these questions, the Theological Virtues emerge as an antidote to a pernicious case of mental “rust.” Tousjours angoisseuse, Melencolïeuse: Topical Melancholy in the Political dits Melancholy has been called late medieval France’s “mal du siècle.”7 Both a bodily humor and a malady resulting from an excess thereof, melancholy is variously interpreted as a physiological imbalance, a mark of genius, or an

5 The text is generally thought to have been written soon after the French defeat at Agincourt. Emma Cayley has proposed a slightly later date of c.1420–22, though she also reports the discovery of a possible presentation copy that might fix the poem’s composition prior to 1418. Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 123. 6 I will also make occasional reference to Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis, a text that was often copied in Latin alongside Chartier’s vernacular political writings, and which appears in French translation in a single manuscript. For information about circulation and translation of the Dialogus, see Emma Cayley, “‘Ainchois maintien des dames la querelle:’ Poetry, Politics and Mastery in the Manuscript Tradition of Alain Chartier,” in Chartier in Europe, ed. Emma Cayley and Ashby Kinch (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 83. Many of Chartier’s other Latin writings are political in focus as well, but I will omit these from the present discussion. Other vernacular texts by Chartier that discuss the virtues desirable in the ruling class, such as the Breviaire des nobles (c.1422–26) and the undated Débat du héraut, du vassal et du vilain, might be termed “quasi-political” (or “pseudo-political,” as Helen Swift calls the Débat in “Alain Chartier and the Death of Lyric Language,” Acta Neophilologica 35 (2002): 57–65). While Chartier’s lyric poetry and La Belle Dame sans Mercy lie beyond the scope of this project, in recent years they have increasingly been seen as participating in political debates: see Emma Cayley, “Drawing Conclusions: The Poetics of Closure in Alain Chartier’s Verse,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 28 (2002): 51–64; Marie Jennequin, “La Belle Dame sans mercy d’Alain Chartier et sa dimension politique,” Le Moyen Français 59 (2006): 55–68; Emma Cayley and Hanno Wijsman, “The Bilingual Chartier: Authorial Duality and Identity in the French and Latin Œuvre of Alain Chartier,” in Delogu, McRae, and Cayley, A Companion to Alain Chartier, 57–71. 7 Michel Mollat, “La sensibilité médiévale au temps des crises (XIVe–XVe siècle),” in Études sur la sensibilité au Moyen Âge, 23.

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impetus to political or poetic greatness.8 In the political dits of Alain Chartier, melancholy – and specifically, a melancholy prompted or exacerbated by grim current events – prompts and even justifies textual composition. The best-known medieval discussion of the positive value of melancholy as a creative stimulus is found in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, which were translated into French by the physician Evrart de Conty around 1380.9 In Book XXX, question 1, it is famously stated that melancholics make the most gifted writers, philosophers, and statesmen: Cy commence la .30e. partie des problemes de Ari. en la quele il determine des problemes appartenans a prudence et a sapience et as autres intellectueles vertus pource qu’il y ha ausi en ceste matere pluseurs merveilles et premierement il demande selon la maniere acoustumee ainsi: pour quoy est ce que li ancien saiges qui ont esté excellent et notables soit en phylosophie, ou en aucune aultre science ou art samblent avoir esté communement tuit melancolieus et de complexion melancolique. (BnF fr 24282, fol. 177r)10 Here begins the thirtieth part of the Problems of Aristotle in which he resolves questions pertaining to prudence and wisdom and the other intellectual virtues, for there are also many marvels in this subject matter. First he asks, in his usual way, why the ancient sages who were excellent and notable either in philosophy or in any other science or art all seem to have been melancholic and of a melancholic complexion.

8 On the distinction between melancholy as a temperament and melancholy as an illness, see especially Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, Chapter Two, “Melancholy in Medieval Medicine, Science, and Philosophy,” 67–123. 9 On the prominence of the Problemata in the Middle Ages, see Joan Cadden, “Preliminary Observations on the Place of the Problemata in Medieval Learning,” in Aristotle’s Problemata in Different Times and Tongues, ed. Pieter De Leemans and Michèle Goyens (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), 1–19. On Evrart de Conty’s translation, see the essays by Françoise Guichard-Tesson, Caroline Boucher, and Joëlle Ducos in De Leemans and Goyens, Aristotle’s Problemata; Michèle Goyens, “Le développement du lexique scientifique français et la traduction des Problemes d’Aristote par Evrart de Conty (ca 1380),” Thélème 2003 (special issue): 189–207; Joëlle Ducos, “Traduction et lexique scientifique: Le cas des Problemes d’Aristote traduits par Evrart de Conty,” in Traduction et adaptation en France, Actes du colloque organisé par l’université de Nancy II, ed. C. Brucker (Paris: Champion, 1997), 237–48. 10 I cite the text from the second volume of Evrart de Conty’s autograph manuscript, which is noteworthy for its consistency in spelling, its rigorous (and, by this date, old-fashioned) declension of nouns, and, in an indication that modern stereotypes about physicians may have deep roots, its messy handwriting. On this manuscript, see Françoise Guichard-Tesson, “Le souci de la langue et du style au XIVe siècle: L’autographe des Problèmes d’Evrart de Conty,” Le Moyen Français 33 (1993): 57–84.



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Melancholy is bound up, from the outset, with prudence and wisdom – announcing that psychological pathologies are properly discussed in tandem with creative gifts and intellectual virtues. Later, as he synthesizes the pseudo-Aristotelian text and Pietro d’Abano’s commentary, Evrart de Conty summarizes the principal argument as follows: li melancolieus sont plus pensif, plus ymaginatif, et plus consideratif que nul des autres desus dis, et ausi sont il de plus grant soign et de plus grant sollicitude. Et pource quant il se appliquent a aucune chose il y entendent volentiers si afichiement qu’il ne cessent dusques il ont lor entente acomplie et c’est pour lor forte ymaginacion. Et par ainsi il ont grant avantage de sourmonter les autres en toute art ou science ou il se appliquent. Et par consequens s’il sont plus excellent que li autre ne sont communement ce n’est pas grant merveille. (183v) melancholics are more pensive, more imaginative, and more deliberative than any of the aforementioned types, and they are also more careful and solicitous. Therefore, when they apply themselves to anything, they willingly attend to it so fixedly that they do not stop until they have accomplished their goal; and this is because of their strong imagination. In such a way they enjoy a great advantage over others in every science or art to which they apply themselves. And consequently if they are more excellent than others usually are, it’s no wonder.

Evrart de Conty’s translation was popular among a courtly audience – prominent book collectors owning copies included Charles d’Orléans, the duke of Berry, Louis of Guyenne (elder brother of Charles VII), the counts of Nassau, and the dukes of Cleves – and Joan Cadden has remarked that it appears to have been received not just as a medical and scientific resource, but also as a conduct book.11 Its readers, both learned and courtly, would have found in it a thorough

11 Cadden, “Preliminary Observations,” 14; Françoise Guichard-Tesson, “Évrart de Conty, poète, traducteur et commentateur,” in De Leemans and Goyens, Aristotle’s Problemata, 153. The breadth of this text’s audience is further implied by Evrart’s prefatory remarks commenting on the need to interpret the “obscure” Aristotle for a modern audience less versed in philosophy: quoted in Caroline Boucher, “Brièveté et prolixité des traducteurs en langue vernaculaire à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Lost in Translation?, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 274.

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exposition of the purported relationship between melancholic complexion, imagination, and artistic creation.12 The literary convention by which a mood of despair gives rise to vivid narrative dreams (or dream-vision texts) is perfectly consistent with contemporary medical understandings of the intellectual capacities of melancholics, as well as the perceived link between melancholy and the powers of prophecy, vision, or dream. According to Bartholomew the Englishman’s De proprietatibus rerum, melancholics are afflicted with vivid, sensorially rich nightmares. In Jean Corbechon’s late fourteenth-century French translation: “celz gens songent choses terribles et tenebreuses et choses qui sont tres mauvaises a la veue et puantes a odorer et aigues a savourer” (those people dream of terrible, dark things, horrible to see and putrid to smell and acrid to taste; BnF, MS fr. 16993, fol. 39va). No author would want to think his dream-turned-text foul or pungent – but the point stands that melancholics do not only dream of stranger things, they also simply dream more than others due to their complexion’s effect on memory processing. These dreams, and the insight they offer, can all too easily feed delusion. Illustrating this point, Bartholomew the Englishman closes his chapter on melancholy with two cases: a contemporary tale of a nobleman who believes himself to be a cat, and the familiar Biblical story of Nabugodonosor qui cuidoit estre une beste qui avoit partie de lyon l’autre d’aigle et l’autre de buef sicomme dit le maistre des histoires. Et en teil estat demeure vii ans. Ce qui est dit de la melancolie et des autres humeurs naturelles et non naturelles si soufise tant comme aceste euvre appartient. (MS fr. 16993, 39vb) Nebuchadnezzar, who thought he was a beast, part lion, part eagle, and part bull, as the Master of Histories [Peter Comestor] says. And in such a state he remains seven years. Let that which is said about melancholy and the other natural and non-natural humors suffice as far as this work is concerned.

The encyclopedist casts Nebuchadnezzar’s affliction as a delusion (“cuidoit”), a mental illness more than a divine punishment. Nebuchadnezzar, whom we have already seen to be one of the Bible’s most important dreamers for medieval readers, is used here as a cautionary tale about melancholy’s powers to distort 12 A detailed account of Aristotelian concepts of imagination and medieval derivations thereof is found in Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 23–61. The relationship between melancholy and imagination is enriched, from a modern viewpoint, by Jean Starobinski’s observation that unlike the other three humors, the “black bile” of melancholy is itself an imaginary substance. Jean Starobinski, “L’encre de la mélancolie,” Nouvelle revue française 11 (1963): 410–23.



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perceptions of reality. But melancholics’ dreams can also be converted into poetic production. Evrart de Conty remarks in his translation of Problemata XXX.1 that the melancholic humor “fait la personne encline a prophetie et a divinacion” (inclines one toward prophecy and divination, 181v). This inclination stems, more precisely, from an extraordinary ability to convert external sensory impressions into phantasms and figures. Par ce que dit est ausi que la complexions melancolique fait l’ame ainsi retraire en soy et ausi comme fuir les choses forainnes c’est a dire quelle le fait convertir as fantasies et as similitudes des choses du monde qui sont entour li ou elle se occupe et se excercite ausi comme continuelement, et est en ce, […] secondement que tele ame est plus preste de recevoir la impression de la vertu du ciel que celle qui ha l’oeil au vent, et as choses foraines et sensibles desus dites. (183v) For it is also said that the melancholic complexion causes the soul to retreat into itself as if fleeing external things; that is, it causes the soul to convert things from the world around it, in which it dwells and acts, into phantasms and images. Secondly, that such a soul is more ready to receive the impression of heavenly power than those who keep their eyes fixed on this world, and on the aforementioned sensible, external things.

Thus melancholics, who tend to make the best writers, have a particular aptitude for the conversion of sensory experiences and worldly circumstances into dreams, visions, or language – note that the word similitudes might just as well refer to figurative speech as to mental images. Nicolas de Gonesse, too, links scholarly activity and vivid dreams in the commentary accompanying his translation of Valerius Maximus (Les faits et paroles memorables, 1400–1401), prescribing leisure – not sleep – as an antidote to melancholy: Ceste oiseuse n’est mie cessation de toute œuvre corporele, mais est oevre joyeuse et esbatant par la quele l’entendement est recrées, car par longue attention d’estude, les vertus sensytives dedens sont lassees et elles ne sont mie ramenees a leur repos et leur tranquillité, par cessation de toute operacion, par ceulz qui ont parfaitement estudié, s’il s’endorment il ont grant travail pour la commocion de l’imaginative qui se fait par songes terribles et merveilleux et pour tant le remede de sa fatigacion de l’entendement est soy occuper en œuvres de jeu et de esbatement. (BnF MS fr. 282, fol. 325v) This leisure is not at all a cessation of all bodily activity, but it is joyful and relaxing activity by which the intellect is recreated, for through long attention in study, the internal sensitive faculties are fatigued and they are not at all brought back to rest and tranquillity through the cessation of all activity in

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those who have studied well; if they fall asleep they labor greatly because of the commotion of the imaginative [faculty] which is effected through terrible and wondrous dreams. Therefore the remedy for one’s fatigue of the intellect is to occupy oneself in activities of play and relaxation.

Alain Chartier embraces and illustrates this commonplace in a number of his most widely read works: the studious reader falls asleep and falls prey to vivid works of the imagination. Sad experiences and tragic reading material only heighten this effect, for as Sodalis remarks in Chartier’s Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis, “Profundus dolor grande ingenium facit” (“Griefve doleur rend grand engin”; grave sadness makes for a great intellect, 274–75).13 A significant number of Chartier’s narrative works are purportedly motivated by grief: these include the Belle Dame sans Mercy, which begins as the first-person narrator grieves the death of his beloved, as well as several of Chartier’s vernacular political writings. In the Livre des quatre dames, the Quadrilogue invectif, and the Livre de l’Espérance, an Acteur’s dismay at France’s political and military reversals feeds a series of visions or encounters that are then translated into the written word.14 Alain Chartier first applies the trope of the melancholic author to contemporary political concerns in his Livre des quatre dames.15 This verse narrative, transmitted in thirty-two manuscripts, is Chartier’s earliest vernacular political text, and, at 3531 lines, his longest work in verse. A response to the French defeat at Agincourt,16 it stages an Acteur and four unnamed ladies comparing their woes, their speeches constituting what Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski has called a “blending of public import and private consolation.”17 One lady’s beloved has died in battle, another’s husband has been taken captive,18 the third lady’s beloved is still missing, and the fourth’s has deserted; ultimately the Acteur returns to Paris and submits to his beloved’s judgment the question

13 The Dialogus is quoted from Les œuvres latines d’Alain Chartier, ed. Pascale BourgainHemeryck (Paris: CNRS, 1977), 246–325. 14 One interlocutor’s despair at current events is also the impetus for the Dialogus. 15 Le Livre des Quatre Dames, in Alain Chartier, The Poetical Works, 196–304. 16 Although Agincourt is never mentioned within the poem, the reference is clear, and the rubric in BnF MS fr. 1131 makes this connection explicit: Le Livre des quatres dames dont les maris furent à la bataille d’Agincourt (1r). 17 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Two Responses to Agincourt: Alain Chartier’s Livre des quatre dames and Christine de Pizan’s Epistre de la prison de vie humaine,” in Contexts and Continuities. Proceedings of the IVth International Colloquium on Christine de Pizan, Glasgow, 21–27 July 2000, vol. I, ed. Angus J. Kennedy with Rosalind Brown-Grant, James C. Laidlaw, and Catherine M. Müller (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2002), 82. 18 The second lady is almost certainly meant to call to mind Bonne d’Armagnac, second wife of Charles d’Orléans.



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of which lady has suffered the most. Since the ladies’ suffering can only be judged in the light of their lovers’ actions at Agincourt, Barbara Altmann has noted, “the historical event alluded to is inseparably intertwined with the conventions of a love debate poem,” even more so than in other contemporaneous love debate poems.19 While the Livre des quatre dames is not a dream-vision, it is inscribed within a melancholic state of mind from its opening lines: “Pour oublïer melencolie / Et pour faire chiere plus lie, / Un doulz matin es champs yssy” (In order to forget my melancholy and put on a happier face, one fine morning I went out into the fields, 198, vv. 1–3). The source of the narrator’s unhappiness is never identified, but given the book’s conventional opening (springtime in an outdoor locus amoenus, with blooming flowers and singing birds), the Livre des quatre dames conforms at first to the thematic conventions of amorous rather than political engagement. Not long distracted by the charmingly evoked beauty of springtime, the Acteur quickly sinks back into his melancholic brooding. “Ains rentroie soubdainement / Ou penser ou premierement / J’estoie […] Car Espoir m’estoit deffailly” (On the contrary, I soon fell back into my earlier way of thinking, for Hope had abandoned me, 201, vv. 113–120). In this frame of mind he encounters the four ladies, and the more serious complaints, centering on the personal fallout from larger political and military disorder, begin.20 Thus the Livre des quatre dames presents a delicate interweaving of literature and politics, melancholy and despair, creation and destruction. An amorous dit in the tradition of Machaut’s Jugement poems slides into a sometimes harsh critique of French military leadership (and, of course, of English perfidy), in what Tania Van Hemelryck has termed “la remotivation politique du discours amoureux” (the political remotivation of amorous discourse).21 Political concerns invade and overtake a courtly discursive space: as Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski notes, “The ladies’ plight embodies the destruction of courtly values in the context of the destruction of the French

19 Barbara Altmann, “Alain Chartier’s Livre des Quatre Dames and the Mechanics of Allegory,” in Cayley and Kinch, Chartier in Europe, 61–72. 20 Andrea Tarnowski notes that this opening frame echoes Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose and Guillaume de Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Jugement du roy de Behaingne even as it fuses them with a “grieving poetic voice.” Andrea Tarnowski, “Alain Chartier’s Singularity, or How Sources Make an Author,” in Delogu, McRae, and Cayley, A Companion to Alain Chartier, 33–56. 21 Tania Van Hemelryck, “Le Livre des quatre dames d’Alain Chartier, un plaidoyer pacifique,” Romania 124 (2006): 522; on the relationship of amorous and political discourses, see also Daisy Delogu, “Le Livre des quatre dames d’Alain Chartier: Complaintes amoureuses, critiques sociales,” Le Moyen Français 48 (2001): 7–21.

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nation.”22 The conventional lover’s melancholy is superseded by a very different and arguably more authentic sort of suffering, stemming directly from current events unfolding far from the love-narrative’s idealized springtime garden. Like the Livre des quatre dames, a number of Chartier’s shorter vernacular political works evoke melancholy as a framing device or as a fundamental component of contemporary France’s woes, even in the absence of a dreamvision. For instance, the undated and as-yet unedited Lay de complainte pour les guerres, preserved in BnF MS fr. 1131, departs from a contrast between the amorous joy of jadis and the pain of the present (“or me plains,” 84v, v. 5) by way of introduction to the hellish state of confusion in France at the time. The notion that a comparison of present and past can embitter the author and prompt the composition of a political complaint is only lightly sketched here, but in so doing this text anticipates the Quadrilogue Invectif, the Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis, and especially the Livre de l’Espérance, in which Chartier will revisit the same idea and develop it into a full narrative frame. Another short political poem, the Lay de Paix23 (forty-eight manuscripts), ties the country’s suffering more overtly, and more precisely, to melancholy: as the personified Lady Peace remarks, Discorde hayneuse Fait vie attayneuse Et souspeçonneuse, Tousjours angoisseuse, Melencolïeuse, Plaine de douleur et d’ire (vv. 61–66, p. 413) Hateful discord Makes life hostile And suspicious, Always anguished, Melancholic, Full of pain and ire.

22 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Alain Chartier and the Crisis in France: Courtly and Clerical Responses,” in Huber and Lähnemann, Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture, 213. Similarly, though to a less apparent degree, even Chartier’s best-known “courtly” work picks up on this notion. As Ashby Kinch remarks, in the Belle Dame sans Mercy “The literature of amour courtois… [serves] to identify weaknesses in the ideology of chivalry.” Ashby Kinch, “‘De l’ombre de mort en clarté de vie:’ The Evolution of Alain Chartier’s Public Voice,” Fifteenth Century Studies 33 (2008): 152. 23 Alain Chartier, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, 410–20.



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Melancholy is but one of the results of the “discorde hayneuse” that has overtaken French public life.24 In this environment, brought about “Par fautte d’entendement, / D’advis et de sentement” (through lack of understanding, judgment and sense, 416, vv. 153, 156–7), virtue is forgotten and error abounds (“Les vertuz s’oublïent; / Erreurs multiplïent,” 418, vv. 214–15). Here melancholy is a described condition, not a cause for textual composition. However, Chartier’s most important vernacular political works, the Quadrilogue invectif and the Livre de l’Espérance, are structured within elaborate framing mechanisms that more directly establish textual composition as a symptom of melancholy that is itself a response to political turmoil. The Quadrilogue invectif was Chartier’s most successful and longest-lived political fiction.25 The prose traictié26 stages a verbal exchange between four personages (hence the neologistic title): personified France complaining to the peuple, the chevalier and the clergé, representing the three estates. This quadrilogue pertains directly to current events, yet it is separated from the real world by the interposition of multiple textual, pictorial, and oneiric frames. In a prologue, a first-person voice self-identifying as “Alain Charretier, humble secretaire du roy nostre sire et de mon tresdoubté seigneur monseigneur le regent” (Alain Chartier, humble secretary to our lord the king and to my very feared lord the regent [i.e., the dauphin], 3) muses about political woes past and present.27 General reflections on mercy and justice lead him to the subject of astrologers, who can predict the rise and fall of empires. This leads the author-narrator to a series of ancient exempla, an ubi sunt of crumbled superpowers: Nineveh, Babylon, Troy, Thebes, Sparta, Athens, Carthage, and Rome. The notion of translatio imperii creates a logical bridge to France’s present suffering.28 24 Isabelle Bétemps argues that in this passage, the pentasyllabic verses with a rhyme in –euse evoke the figure of Fortune. Isabelle Bétemps, “Guerre et paix dans la poésie lyrique du XVe siècle: Alain Chartier, Pierre de Nesson, Charles d’Orléans,” in Images de la guerre de Cent ans, ed. Jean Maurice, Daniel Couty, and Michèle Guéret-Laferté (Paris: PUF, 2002), 115. 25 Philippe Contamine discusses the text’s longevity in “Le Quadrilogue invectif d’Alain Chartier (1422): Texte de circonstance ou œuvre littéraire?” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 24 (2012): 37–50. 26 On this generic designation, see Florence Bouchet, “Un petit traictié bon à tout faire: Réflexions sur la mouvance générique à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales 18 (2009): 201–15. 27 Alain Chartier, Quadrilogue invectif, ed. Florence Bouchet (Paris: Champion, 2011). 28 “Par ceste maniere, chascune en son tour et en son ordre, si changent, rabaissent ou subvertissent les eureuses fortunes et le bruit des royaumes, ainsi comme la monarchie du monde et la dignité du souverain empire fut jadiz translatee des Assiriens aux Persans aux Grecs, des Grecs aux Rommains, des Rommains es mains des François et des Germains.” (In this manner, good fortune and the reputation of kingdoms change, lower, or subvert each

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Comme doncques en l’an mil .iiiic. xxii je veisse le roy anglois, ancien adversaire de ceste seigneurie, soy glorifier en nostre ignominieux reproche […] j’ay conclut en ma pensee que la main de Dieu est sur nous et que sa fureur a mis en œuvre ce flail de persecution, et ay curieusement encerchié par les discours des sainctes espriptures les faultes et les punicions de noz peres et des primerains et en grande craincte debatu en ma pensee se ceste douloureuse affliction en est en verge de pere pour nostre chastiement ou en rigueur de juge pour nostre exterminacion. (7) Therefore, when I saw the English king, former adversary of this kingdom, raise himself up in our ignominious dishonor in the year 1422, I concluded to myself that God’s hand is upon us and that his wrath has set this flail of persecution into motion. Out of curiosity, I looked through the holy scriptures for passages about the faults and the punishments of our ancestors and predecessors, and I fearfully debated with myself whether this painful affliction is more like a father chastising us with a stick or a judge condemning us to extermination.

The author’s tumultuous state of mind is in constant movement, trapped between past and present (and fear for the future, as the allusion to astrology suggests). The trajectory from general truth via prognostication, ancient exempla, contemporary France to Biblical precedent leads “Alain Charretier” to the book of Isaiah. Reading of the signs of divine wrath, he weeps (“les yeulx obscurciz de larmes,” 7) and then he sets about the task of composing his treatise.29 Et je, meu de compassion, pour ramener a memoire l’estat de nostre infelicité et a chascun ramentevoir ce qui lui en touche, ay composé ce petit traictié que je appelle quadrilogue, pource que en quatre personnages est ceste oeuvre comprise, et est dit invectif en tant qu’il procede par maniere d’envaïssement de paroles et par forme de reprendre. (8) And I, moved by compassion, in order to call back to memory our unhappy condition and to remind everyone what is at stake for him, composed this one, in turn and in order, just as rule over the world and the dignity of sovereign empire were long ago transferred from the Assyrians to the Persians to the Greeks, from the Greeks to the Romans, from the Romans into the hands of the French and the Germans; 6, lines 8–15.) 29 Thus does Jean-Claude Mühlethaler classify the Quadrilogue invectif’s narrator as a “narrateur-prophète.” Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, “Le Poète et le prophète: Littérature et politique au XVe siècle,” Le Moyen Français 13 (1983): 37–57. Florence Bouchet concurs that “The humility, weakness or even the melancholy of the poet in the first few pages of the Quadrilogue, far from undermining him, confer upon him the exemplary singularity of the prophet.” Florence Bouchet, “‘Vox dei, vox poetae:’ The Bible in the Quadrilogue invectif,” in Cayley and Kinch, Chartier in Europe, 31–44.



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little treatise that I call quadrilogue (because it is made up of four characters) and invectif (because it proceeds through verbal attacks and reprimands).

Despite the temporal upheaval of the prologue’s beginning, in the rest of the opening frame the author-narrator largely follows a smooth, linear sequence of events: he muses on the relationship between the present and the historical past, then he reads a Biblical prophesy of doom; this reading provokes a fearful and sad emotional response, as a direct result of which the author composes his treatise. In other words, reading and reflection about current events and their historical antecedents place the writer in a melancholic frame of mind and thus precipitate the composition of a text.30 The trope by which reading material causes dream-visions, or depressed moods that in turn predispose the author-narrator toward such visions, is nothing new: the dreams recounted in Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine and in Jean Gerson’s Songe contre le Roman de la rose were both purportedly inspired by readings of the Roman de la Rose, and Christine de Pizan builds her Cité des dames out of the depression and shame she feels upon reading the misogynistic Lamentations de Matheolus. Yet the Quadrilogue proffers an even more complex system of textual frames, as the prologue, with its foundational myth of the text’s inspiration, precedes a dream-vision embedded within a daydream – an innovative twist that Peter Haidu wrongly dismisses as “the conventional poetic form of the dream allegory.”31 In many manuscripts the nested effect of the frames is compounded and complicated by a visual element. The prologue is frequently preceded by a miniature depicting the author in his study, in the presence of France and her interlocutors:32 that is, by an image of 30 On the recurrence of livres in the prologue, see Florence Bouchet, “L’écrivain et son lecteur dans le prologue et l’épilogue du Quadrilogue invectif d’Alain Chartier,” Bien dire et bien aprandre 19 (2001): 23. As Martin Gosman explains, through these references Chartier engages in a rhetorical procedure of laudatio temporis acti: Martin Gosman, “Le discours référentiel du ‘Quadrilogue Invectif’ d’Alain Chartier,” in Exemplum et Similitudo: Alexander the Great and other heroes as points of reference in medieval literature, ed. W. J. Aerts and Martin Gosman (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1988), 159–89. For a broader discussion of fifteenth-century authorial personae’s affective responses to reading material, with particular reference to the Quadrilogue invectif, see Florence Bouchet, Le discours sur la lecture en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles: Pratiques, poétique, imaginaire (Paris: Champion, 2008), 174–86. 31 Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 314–15. For a more favorable view of the complexity of the Quadrilogue’s frame, see Delogu, Allegorical Bodies, 143–44. 32 These include BnF MS fr. 126, BnF MS fr. 24441; BnF MS fr. 1125, which leaves an empty space for a frontispiece, might have been laid out with a similar image in mind. See Patricia Gathercole, “Illuminations on the Manuscripts of Alain Chartier,” Studi francesi 20 (1976): 504–10; Camille Serchuk, “The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Works of Alain Chartier,” in Delogu, McRae, and Cayley, A Companion to Alain Chartier, 72–118.

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the text’s inner frame, in which the author has given way to the Acteur and musings on past and present woes have been converted into oneiric narrative. The placement of such images “out of time,” on a different textual plane from the moment they represent, only augments the Quadrilogue’s artful juxtapositions of past and present, of wakeful composition and unconscious vision.33 The Quadrilogue proper begins at dawn, as the Acteur lies in a state of dorveille, half awake and half asleep. His thoughts come alive as he is in this receptive state: “Et ainsi que a l’entendement aprés repos se presente ce que l’en a plus a cuer, me vint en ymaginacion la douloureuse fortune et le piteux estat de la haulte seigneurie et glorieuse maison de France” (and since the thoughts that preoccupy us present themselves to our consciousness after repose, the sad fortune and pitiful state of the kingdom and the glorious house of France came to my imagination, 8–9). In the prologue, the author has set the stage by establishing a mood and choosing his reading material; now the Acteur is effecting the “retreat into oneself as if fleeing worldly things” of which Evrart de Conty writes, converting, within the ymaginacion, “things from the world around… into phantasms and images.” Thus, as Haidu remarks, “the author’s psyche is the ground of history.”34 Later, still torn between hope and despair, the Acteur falls asleep. Thereupon the real dream-vision begins, as personified France, with her first words, addresses all “hommes forvoiez du chemin de bonne cognoissance” (men distracted from the path of good discernment, 14): an audience that, with its vocabulary redolent of mental pathology, clearly includes the Acteur. Once France and the representatives of the three estates have spoken, the dream-vision ends – though not until the book’s penultimate paragraph, when France exhorts the Acteur to serve the “chose publique” (83) by transcribing the quadrilogue he has just witnessed. And so the author-narrator awakens, appeals to the reader’s generosity of spirit, and draws his narrative to a speedy close. Like many medieval dream-visions, the Quadrilogue invectif sits within an asymmetrical frame, one that involves far more setup at the incipit than resolution at the explicit.35 The effect is particularly pronounced in the Quadrilogue, as the text’s multiple framing devices are resolved in just two brief paragraphs. The asymmetrical framing of Quadrilogue makes sense, though, if we think of it in terms of the association between melancholy, visions, and artistic creation. The 33 In a similar vein, Daisy Delogu has noted that in the Quadrilogue, Lady France’s physical appearance allows her “to overcome the limits of time by conveying information about both her past and her present.” Daisy Delogu, “Performance and Polemic: Gender and Emotion in the Works of Alain Chartier,” in Delogu, McRae, and Cayley, A Companion to Alain Chartier, 136. 34 Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern, 325. 35 “L’épilogue est traditionnellement beaucoup plus bref que le prologue, voire abrupt” (The epilogue is traditionally much shorter than the prologue, even to the point of being abrupt). Florence Bouchet, “L’écrivain et son lecteur,” 20n4.



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Acteur’s initial state of disorder, the relationship of this mental state to political history, and the nature of the vision to which it gives rise require explanation before the onset of the narrative proper; the use of reason to transcend that initial state of disorder is a process engaged throughout the entire vision-narrative, not an endpoint to be recounted at its conclusion.36 The epilogue therefore is relatively unimportant, because how one comes to transcribe a vision is less important than how one comes to experience it and how one comes to understand it. When writing a dream-vision about serious matters, it is vital to establish authority at the outset, and one way to do so is to stake a claim to a melancholic mindset. As we observed in late fourteenth-century translations of encyclopedic and scientific texts, melancholic minds are particularly receptive to truthful visions. Therefore, by presenting in great detail the events leading up to his text’s composition – the worldly images he was contemplating, the state of mind to which they gave rise, and then the end result of those images’ mental conversion (i.e., the text itself) – the author can demonstrate that his exhortation to the people of France is more than mere fiction.37 Surprisingly to the modern reader, a claim to a non-normative mental state, one that would today be classified as a mental illness, serves here as a claim to authority. An even greater asymmetry marks Chartier’s final political dit, albeit for a different reason: the frame of the Livre de l’Espérance remains unclosed as the work was never finished. The frame structure of the Livre de l’Espérance marks a logical progression from that of the Quadrilogue, as does its exploration of the relationship between actuality and affect. Indeed, the Livre de l’Espérance is often presented – in medieval manuscripts and in modern scholarship – as a companion piece to the Quadrilogue invectif.38 Espérance’s asymmetry is 36 On the Quadrilogue as a text in which reason transcends the woes arising from the disorder of the passions, see Florence Bouchet, “Alain Chartier et les paradoxes de la guerre: Le Quadrilogue invectif,” in Maurice, Couty, and Guéret-Laferté, Images de la guerre de Cent ans, 125–35. 37 He thus avoids “the constitutive aporia of language, which calls on an ‘external’ reality and constitutes that reality in its systemic self-referentiality” (Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern, 325). 38 The Quadrilogue invectif and the Livre de l’Espérance are frequent cotexts, appearing on their own as a pair (in nine manuscripts), in conjunction with Chartier’s Latin political writings (in eight manuscripts), or in compilations of political treatises and mirrors for princes, such as BnF MS fr. 126. As Florence Bouchet remarks, “Il n’est pas rare, notamment, que le Livre de l’Espérance ou le Quadrilogue invectif cohabitent avec d’autres œuvres relevant de la littérature de conseil moral ou politique” (It is not rare, notably, that the Livre de l’Espérance or the Quadrilogue invectif exist side by side with other works of moral or political advice; Alain Chartier, Quadrilogue, xxvi). For a catalogue of Espérance manuscripts, editions, and variants, see Karl Moldenhauer, “Zür Überlieferung des Livre de l’Espérance von Alain Chartier” (dissertation, University of Greifswald, 1904; Greifswald: Julius Abel, 1904). See also François Rouy’s introduction to his edition of Alain Chartier, Livre de l’Espérance, xliv–xlvi.

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evocative, and not altogether inappropriate to the text: Chartier’s final work is constructed as relaying a melancholic vision, even more explicitly than the Quadrilogue, and its unfinished state leaves unresolved the question of whether the Acteur can be drawn out of his depressive state.39 The Livre de l’Espérance begins with an unusual portrayal of what we would now identify as mental illness. In this unfinished prosimetrum consisting of sixteen poems alternating with sixteen prose passages, the suicidal Acteur, beset by Dame Melancholy and her helpers (Defiance, Indignation, and Despair), becomes separated from his lethargic personified Entendement (Intellect).40 Entendement finally finds the wherewithal to open the rusted-shut door of the Acteur’s memory, whence the three Theological Virtues come forth. The divided Acteur’s impaired faculties, both sensory and intellectual, are then repaired by Faith and Hope (and, presumably, Charity, though the unfinished book neither provides her dialogue nor reveals the identity of a young lady who accompanies the three Theological Virtues). The healing unrolls in suitably Boethian fashion – indeed, this rewriting of the Consolation of Philosophy is identified in several manuscripts as the Consolation des trois vertus. The prosimetric structure of the Livre de l’Espérance also adds a framing element unlike those found in Chartier’s earlier dits. The metric sections often summarize, anticipate, or expound upon the themes of the prose dialogues that surround them. However, as we will discuss below, the poems typically express an indeterminate time, place, and voice; it is therefore difficult to ascertain just 39 Regula Meyenberg sees Espérance as a “prolongement et approfondissement du Quadrilogue” (continuation and deepening of the Quadrilogue), one that expands the Quadrilogue’s musings on the debate between hope and despair and makes of them the later text’s principal framework. Regula Meyenberg, Alain Chartier Prosateur et l’Art de la Parole au XVe Siècle. Études Littéraires et Rhétoriques (Berne: Francke, 1992), 174. 40 Following Helen Swift’s example, I will leave this character’s name in French in acknowledgement of the range of cognitive faculties it can represent: intellect, understanding, knowledge, perception. Helen J. Swift, Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in LateMedieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 80n32. The personification of Entendement is somewhat rare prior to the early fifteenth century, but not altogether unprecedented in French literature: Jean de Condé’s Dis d’entendement features the personified “Entendemens, qui tous jors veille” (Entendement, ever watchful, v. 486), whose alertness stands in contrast to the sleepiness of Espérance’s Entendement. Li Dis d’entendement, in Dits et contes de Baudouin de Condé et de son fils Jean, ed. Auguste Scheler (Brussels: Devaux, 1866–67), 49–95. Other examples are found in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine, Jacques Bruyant’s La Voie de Povreté et de Richesse, Jean Gerson’s Traité contre le Roman de la Rose, and Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Paix and Livre de Prudence. Personified Entendement appears rather more often after Chartier, especially in Rhétoriqueur poetics. Many examples are enumerated in Bouchet, Le discours sur la lecture, 52–53. On another example not cited by Bouchet, Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s L’estrif de Science, Nature et de Fortune (1488), see Frédéric Duval, “L’estrif de Science, Nature et de Fortune de Jacques et Octovien de Saint-Gelais,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 160 (2002): 195–228.



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what sort of temporal framework these verse texts might provide for the narrative prose. The first poem is the one that most resembles a traditional prologue, as it suggests a time frame (“N’a pas granment,” not long ago, 1, v. 5) and it invites the reader to identify the narratorial voice with that of the author (“Au diziesme an de mon dolent exil,” in the tenth year of my painful exile, 1, v. 1). This first metric section also, again, makes explicit the relationship between reading, political turmoil, mental anguish, and artistic creation.41 As the book opens, a first-person authorial persona is perusing chronicles of France’s illustrious past. Instead of uplifting him, this reading material leads him into melancholic brooding about the sad world he lives in. Like in the Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis – wherein Sodalis concludes that in comparison with past ages (gold, silver, iron, and tin) the present era can only be called the “stercorea” (“eage d’ordure,” age of shit, 260–61) – the Espérance’s authorial persona compares past to present and finds the latter wanting. Et noz peres, qui devant nous nasquirent, En ce bon temps durerent et vesquirent; Et passerent tout le cours de leur aage Seurs de leurs corps, en repos de courage. Las ! nous, chetifz et de male heure nez, Avons estoy a naistre destinez, Quant le hault pris du royaume dechiet, Et nostre honneur en grief reprouche chiet. Qui fut jadis franc, noble et beneuré, Or est fait serf, confus et espeuré… (1–2, vv. 25–34) And our forefathers, born before us, lived and endured in these good times, and lived out all of their years with their bodies in safety and their hearts at peace. Alas ! poor us, born at the wrong time, we were destined to be born as the kingdom’s great status plunges and as our honor sinks into bitter reproach. Who once was free, noble and blessed is now subjugated, defeated and frightened…

As in the Quadrilogue invectif, a first-person narrator grows depressed while reading and reflecting on comparisons between past and present. Such an immoderate affective response to historical reading and reflection is defended, 41 Chartier’s construction of depressive ruminations as fodder for poetic composition contrasts with Christine de Pizan’s claim, in the Épistre de la prison de vie humaine, that current events (“maints desplaisirs”) have given rise to “tristes ymaginacions et pensees” (sad imaginations and thoughts) that have impeded her entendement (“mon povre entendement, pour sa foiblece, tenu si empeschié”) and prevented her from finishing her poem in a more timely fashion. Christine de Pizan, Épistre de la prison de vie humaine, 53.

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as natural, by Sodalis in the Dialogus. In Espérance, the psychological effects are made more immediate by the lack of distinction between the prologue’s author and the narrative’s Acteur: here they are one and the same, and the frame flows directly into the dream-vision. Moreover, the Livre de l’Espérance is much more pointed in its identification of the Acteur’s affliction as melancholic in nature – this is pathological melancholy, not the healthy melancholic complexion praised in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata – and it dwells far more on the behavioral effects of that condition. In the first metric and the first prose sections, a direct causal link is drawn between reading and reflecting about political actuality and experiencing suicidal despair. This time the problem is not excessive similarity, but excessive contrast between history and actuality: the Acteur’s mood is a byproduct of the stark discrepancy between textual subject matter and contemporary reality. Current events affect Chartier’s writerly output, turning him from courtly themes and genres, and even causing him to grow old before his time.42 Je souloye ma jonnesse acquiter A joyeuses escriptures dicter; Or me convient aultre ouvrage tissir: De cueur dolent ne pourroit joye issir. Paine, paour, povreté, perte et doubte Ont assiégé si ma pensee toute, Qu’il n’en sault rien fors que par leur dangier: Ainsi me fault mon sentement changier; Et en moy n’est entendement ne sens D’escripre fors ainsy comme je sens. Douleur me fait par ennuy, qui trop dure, En jonne aage viellir maugré nature, Et ne me veult laissier mon droit cours vivre; Dont par douleur ay commencé ce livre. (2, vv. 47–60) I used to spend my youth composing joyful writings, but now I must weave other works: no joy can come from a grieving heart. Pain, fear, poverty, loss, and dread have so besieged my mind that nothing can slip past them unless they allow it. Accordingly, I must change my sentiment [or perception]; I lack the intellect or the sense to write anything but the way I feel. Pain, through over-long suffering, is making me old before my time, and it will not let me live out the natural course of my life; so, in pain, I began this book.

42 Cayley identifies this as a gesture of recusatio used to establish literary authority: Cayley, “‘Ainchois maintien des dames la querelle,’” 86–87.



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In the first prose section, the Acteur even more explicitly pathologizes the living conditions that have given rise to his depression and his lack of “entendement ne sens.” Deficiencies in entendement can be either congenital or acquired, as Christine de Pizan explains at length in the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (1404). Aucuns aussi en sont retrais par mauvaise complexion, c’est assavoir, si comme dit Geber au commencement de son livre albrimiste, ou par deffaut de l’ame, ou par deffault du corps; deffault de l’ame (dist-il) organizacion es membres dedens, par lesquelz la cognoiscence est faitte, comme fantasieux, ydios o folz ont; et du corps, qui est es membres ou des orgues dehors, comme ont aucuns malades sours, ou qui n’ont point de veue; lesquelles choses aucune fois avienent par nature ou par Fortune.43 (vol. 2, 164–65) Some are also drawn away [from man’s inherent seeking of knowledge] by a bad complexion; that is, as Geber says at the beginning of his book of alchemy, either through a defect of the soul or a defect of the body. A defect of the soul, he says, [is a defect in] the organization of the inner faculties by means of which knowledge is acquired, such as the delusional, idiots, or madmen have; and a defect in the body, in the external members or organs, such as that of some sick people who are deaf or cannot see. These things sometimes come from nature, sometimes from Fortune.

What Alain Chartier depicts in the Livre de l’Espérance is a defect in the organization of the inner faculties, brought on by an external cause. The narrator’s “petit entendement” (little intellect) falls into a deep sleep, and he remains like a madman (“demouray comme homme esperdu”), because the surrounding world is so full of “desplaisans frenesies” – unpleasant, violent agitation (3).44 The application of the medical diagnosis of frenaisie (frenzy, violent delirium, agitated madness) to the course of current history suggests that contagion from a world gone mad has given rise to the narrator’s unhappiness and to the vision he is about to recount. This is a vision which, even more than the one recounted in the Quadrilogue, is situated within mental space; a vision to which we will

43 Christine focuses a great deal on entendement in her account of the virtues of Charles V and the virtues required of any good ruler; as Michael Richarz points out, for Christine “Entendement does not only stand for the possession of an intelligent mind, but also for its goal-directed use.” Richarz, “Prudence and Wisdom,” 103. 44 On the history of the term frenaisie, see Fritz Schalk, “Beiträge zur romanischen Wortgeschichte (II): Phreneticus, Phrenesia im Romanischen,” Romanische Forschungen 65 (1953): 19–37.

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return after discussing another important intertext in Chartier’s political œuvre, the Curial. Intimate Architectures: The Curial and the Livre de l’Espérance Melancholy and even despair are present in Chartier’s vernacular political writings from the author’s first forays into that subject matter; the Livre de l’Espérance, however, is the only of these texts to engage in an extended reflection on its Acteur’s mental health, and to characterize the suicidal depressive’s forgetful listlessness as a symptom of mental rust. This dramatization of the Acteur’s mental state takes place within an architectural spatialization of the melancholic mind which, as we will discuss below, corresponds to late medieval scientific models of the brain. Beyond its relationship to contemporary scientific theories, though, Espérance’s notion of architecture is also key to our understanding of its place within Chartier’s body of political work. While (as already noted) Espérance is most frequently recognized as a Boethian rewrite in the vein of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune or Christine de Pizan’s Avision Christine,45 or as a companion to the Quadrilogue invectif, its architectural quality is most directly related to the discussions of public and private spaces in another of Chartier’s widely read political treatises. Chartier takes the language of court “insiders” and “outsiders” to the extremes of architectural logic in De vita curiali, a Latin-language attack on court life, ostensibly addressed to the author’s brother, that was widely diffused in a French translation as Le curial.46 The translation was not executed by Chartier, though it was often attributed to him in fifteenth-century manuscripts. Based on the “maturity” of its style the De vita curiali has been tentatively dated to 1427, but there is no internal or external evidence to support or refute this date. In this brief prose work Chartier’s first-person narratorial persona seeks to dissuade his addressee from court service, drawing upon Latin models (Lucan, Juvenal, Seneca, and possibly Petrarch). As he defines the court, “est virorum conventus, qui ad se invicem decipiendum, boni communis simulacione, communicant” (c’est ung convent de gens qui soubz faintise du bien commun s’assamblent pour s’entretromper, 368–69). It is an assembly of men who join together, under the pretense of the common good, to mutually deceive each 45 See, for example, Douglas Kelly, “Boethius as Model for Rewriting Sources in Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’esperance,” in Cayley and Kinch, Chartier in Europe, 15–30. 46 The Latin text is contained in eleven manuscripts, starting from the 1430s, and the French in twenty-one (though none of these is earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century). The Curial was also, like the Livre de l’Espérance, translated into Middle English. I will consider both the Latin and French versions, but for brevity’s sake will henceforth refer to the text simply as the Curial.

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other. Like modern definitions, Chartier’s identifies the court not as a place, but as a network of people linked by their shared (and in this case, morally dubious) practices. Still, throughout his little treatise, the contrast of court service and private tranquility depends on spatial, even architectural language exploiting contrasts between interior and exterior. This rhetorical choice is hardly surprising, as court life is rife with the rhetoric of insiders and outsiders – not just in the Middle Ages, but in modern scholarship. We can note, for instance, that Pascale Bourgain-Hemeryck’s comments on anticurial literature, which serve as introduction to her edition of Chartier’s Latin works, rely on such spatial language: Parmi la nombreuse littérature hostile aux gens de cour, il faut distinguer la satire, qui vise le courtisan ou le parasite lui-même, regardé de l’extérieur comme un personnage scandaleux et chargé de vices, et l’attaque contre la vie de la cour, considérée de l’intérieur comme contraire à la vie morale et intellectuelle, comme pernicieuse pour l’individu, par quelqu’un qui connaît d’expérience ses dangers et ses misères.47 Within the abundant corpus of literature hostile to courtiers, one must distinguish satire (which targets the courtisan or the parasite, seen from the exterior as scandalous and vice-ridden) from attacks on court life, judged from within as pernicious to the individual and contrary to moral and intellectual life, by someone with experiential knowledge of its dangers and miseries.

In the Curial, this same notion of insider and outsider – which might otherwise remain quite abstract, given the mobility and permeability of so many medieval Western courts – is made concrete through frequent references to domestic architecture. More specifically, Alain Chartier devotes great attention to the little private house in which he advises his “frater” to take refuge (variously called a tugurium, domuncula, or in the French version maisonnette, hostel). Sins and vices cannot enter a humble home (Illuc non entrant scelera; illecz ne entrent nulz pechiés, 372–73). The only wise course of action, then, is to see to the structural integrity of one’s home, and to keep one’s door shut.48 The best way to prevent the hypocrisy and the artificiality of the court from corrupting one’s being is to batten down the hatches. It is a recommendation that, for Chartier, bears repeating. Alain Chartier, Les œuvres latines, 71, emphasis added. Images of structural integrity, or the lack thereof, recur in Chartier’s political writings: witness the Quadrilogue’s vision of France as a collapsing building, or the Dialogus’s metaphor of the folly of taking a sumptuous feast in a collapsing house. 47 48

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Vide domuncula quantum libertatis tibi conferat tua, [eique graciam referas], que te solum dominum capit et hostiolo clauso alium te nolente non admittit. (366) Regarde doncque, frere, regarde combien ta maisonnette te donne de francise et lui sacez gré de ce qu’elle te rechoipt comme seul seigneur, et depuis que ton huisset est clos n’y entre aultre s’il ne te plaist. (367) Look how much liberty your little house confers upon you, and give thanks for it, that it takes you as its only master, and, the little door closed, it admits no one else against your will.

A life away from court grants the non-courtier liberty, rendered in French as francise – a concept whose importance has been demonstrated in other of Chartier’s political and courtly works, most notably the Belle dame sans Mercy.49 Here, the writer advises his addressee to remain free by treasuring and preserving his privacy, that substantive that has famously disappeared from modern French but that still figured in Middle French vocabulary: la priveté (359). This privacy is to be maintained by retreating behind a door, an hostiolo, a huisset. BourgainHemeryck states that the author (or at least his persona as given voice in the Curial) “dreams of freedom, at home in a well-ordered house fitted with good locks” (“c’est la liberté, chez soi, dans une maison ordonnée, munie de bons verrous, à laquelle Chartier rêve”).50 She notes that this is an unusual rhetorical move, and a divergence from Chartier’s source material, in which court critics conventionally seek a bucolic rather than a domestic (and securely locked) escape.51 But it is entirely consistent with Chartier’s interest, throughout his literary career, in “writing […] about writing from within confines.”52 Indeed, the Curial offers an especially clear illustration of this tendency: its references to doors are numerous and, especially in the example cited above, curious enough to be quite noteworthy. The fuller implications of this image of the huisset become clearer when we read the De vita curiali in tandem with the Livre de l’Espérance. There is reason to think that many early readers of Chartier did encounter these two texts as a pair; in studying them together, I hope to follow up on Emma Cayley’s important work in breaking down the artificial barrier between Chartier’s vernacular and 49 See Helen Solterer, “The Freedoms of Fiction for Gender in Premodern France,” in Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 135–63. 50 Alain Chartier, Les œuvres latines, 72. 51 “Et ce besoin de pousser des verrous pour se sentir libre, à l’abri de la cour, n’est pas non plus courant.” Ibid., 72. 52 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, 100.



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Latin works.53 In the more than thirty-five surviving manuscripts of Espérance, the text is often immediately preceded or followed by the French-language Curial; only the Quadrilogue invectif is more often paired with Espérance. The text’s modern editor points out that Espérance is often confused with other works, especially the Curial (“elle est assez souvent confondue avec d’autres ouvrages, notamment avec le Curial,” i). Espérance bears the title Curial in at least two fifteenth-century manuscripts.54 The same pattern continues in early print editions. Beginning with Pierre Le Caron in 1489, there was a standard order given to the collected works of Alain Chartier, with Espérance first and the Curial second.55 Espérance again appears under the title Curial in Galliot du Pré’s 1526 edition; and Daniel Chartier’s 1582 Le Curial de M. Alain Chartier où il est amplement traittié de la vie et moeurs des courtisans et des malheurs et calamitez des hommes qui conviennent fort bien à cest aage (The Curial of master Alain Chartier, in which the life and manners of courtiers and the misery and calamities of man are amply treated, which are very appropriate in this era) bears the one title but contains both Espérance and the Curial. Thus, while I am aware of no modern studies that specifically acknowledge the relationship between these two texts – indeed, neither has received a great deal of critical attention at all – such a reading is textually and codicologically justified. In order to tease out the peculiar interweaving of architectural and psychological spaces in Chartier’s final political work, we return now to the point at which we left Espérance: the moment of transition from the frame-narrative, in which the Acteur responds to chronicles of France’s illustrious past (meter 1), to the vision, which begins in prose 1 as the Acteur expounds on the world’s “desplaisans frenesies” and lies half-awake, “comme homme esperdu, le visage blesme, le sens troublé, et le sanc meslé au corps” (3). The shift from frame to vision – if indeed there is one – does not correspond to the division between verse and prose; the continuity between the Acteur’s readings and his reactions to them is undeniable. In the absence of the conventional cues (falling asleep, or finding oneself in a new location), there is little certainty as to the boundary between lived experience and vision, between the author’s study and the inner chambers of his mind.56 As David Hult has remarked with reference to another of Chartier’s works, 53 Ibid.; Cayley and Wijsman, “The Bilingual Chartier.” Tania van Hemelryck, too, argues that the Quadrilogue and Espérance should be read in tandem with Chartier’s Latin work, namely the Dialogus: Tania van Hemelryck, “Le modèle du prosimètre chez Alain Chartier: Texte et codex,” in Le prosimètre à la Renaissance, ed. Nathalie Dauvois (Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm, 2005), 11. 54 These are BnF MS fr. 126 and Moulins, Bibliothèque municipale MS 26. 55 See Walravens, Alain Chartier, 222–39. 56 Hence Virginie Minet-Mahy’s observation that the Acteur bridges the gap between reality and fiction. Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 417.

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the Belle Dame sans Mercy, the Acteur in the Livre de l’Espérance “charts a vacillating course along the uncertain borderline separating the real and the allegorical.”57 As the Acteur sulks in this especially pathological form of dorveille, an old woman approaches him, “une vielle toute desaroyée et comme non chalant de son habit…” (an old woman, messy as if she didn’t care about her dress, 3). She is Dame Melencolie, a personification “saturated with the power of traditional psychiatric descriptions of melancholy.”58 As soon as she has arrived, she wraps the Acteur in her cloak and disrupts his senses: “de ses mains me tenoit la teste et les yeulx embrunchés et estouppés, si que n’avoye laisir de voyr ne ouir” (she held my head with her hands and covered and obstructed my eyes, so that I could not see or hear, 3). In this manner she fulfills her ultimate function, which is to trouble people’s thoughts, dry out their body, corrupt their humors, weaken sensitive spirits, and lead man to langor and to death (“trouble les pensees, deseiche le corps, corrompt lez humeurs, affoiblit les senssitifz espris, et maine l’omme a langueur et a mort,” 4). She is especially prone to do this to the finest minds and most elevated intellects, as Chartier is quick to point out (“les haulx engins et eslevés entendemens des parfons et excellens hommes,” ll. 37–38, p. 4), echoing the link between melancholy and entendement outlined in Problemata aristotelis XXX.1: “la impression de ceste humeur ataint la vertu fantastique, et les autres vertus qui servent a l’entendement” (the impression of this humor reaches the faculty of fantasy and the other faculties that contribute to the intellect, 181v). Dame Melancholy is able to disrupt the Acteur’s cognitive function because the mental faculties are housed in organic, bodily structures.59 As the Acteur had explained in prose 1, les quatre vertus sensitives dedens homme, que nous appellons sensitive, ymaginative, estimative et memoire, sont corporelles et organiques, et se pevent grever par trop souvent ou en trop fort œuvre les exploicter, ainsi que entre les cinq sens de dehors l’oeil se trouble par regarder clarté trop resplendissant, ou par trop souvent lire, ou fichier son regard sur choses menues... (4)

David Hult, “The Allegoresis of Everyday Life,” Yale French Studies 95 (1999): 221. Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 225. Moreover, as Starobinski points out, Melancholy is the only one of the four humors to be personified in medieval literature and treated as a fictive character: “L’encre de la mélancolie,” 413. 59 Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl justly note the degree to which Chartier’s mental constructs represent “the contemporary modification of a notion formed and transmitted by medical and scientific tradition.” Saturn and Melancholy, 225–26. 57 58



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the four internal senses of man, which we call the sensitive, imaginative, estimative, and memory, are corporeal and organic, and they can be damaged with excessively frequent or rough use, just as among the five bodily senses the eye is perturbed by looking at overly bright light, or reading too often, or fixing one’s gaze on tiny things.

The Acteur is now separated from his personified Entendement, or Intellect, which lies asleep nearby. Melancholy completes her impairment of the Acteur in prose 2 when she lobotomizes him, so to speak, removing “the part seated in the middle of the brain in the imaginative faculty, which some call the fantasy” (“partie qui au meillieu de la teste siet en la region de l’ymaginative, que aucuns appellent fantasie,” 5). Then the Acteur espies her three minions, Defiance, Indignation, and Despair. The first carries a double-locked coffer and purses full of all sorts of things; she has a saddlebag slung over her shoulder, full in the front and empty in the back. Indignation holds a bloody cat-o’-nine-tails in one hand, and in the other, a tablet on which she has written her enemies list. Despair is a disheveled mess with a knife. In proses 2 through 4, each of these three addresses the Acteur in turn, deploring court life,60 berating the Acteur, and exhorting him to consider suicide.61 Indignation is so eager to speak that she starts babbling: in their mad rush to escape from her, the words all block each other, as Alain writes, like a mob of people, all trying to rush through a narrow doorway (“ainsi que presse de gens qui se hastent de yssir par ung estroit guisset,” 6). In this case we see that the narrow access points counseled in the Curial do not provide sufficient protection. Indignation’s words do get through, and she addresses the Acteur. This is where the most obvious filiation between Espérance and the Curial 60 Joël Blanchard characterizes the monsters’ speeches as “une violente satire de la Cour” (a violent court satire). “Artéfact littéraire et problématisation morale au XVe siècle,” Le Moyen Français 17 (1987): 27. 61 Irina Metzler points out that “In the fifteenth-century artes moriendi one of the last temptations by the devil is to the sick man who is already lifting his dagger, ready to commit suicide: ‘Go ahead and kill yourself,’ the devil suggests.” A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages, 150. Although Metzler does not specifically make the connection, the Livre de l’Espérance’s resonance with the ars moriendi tradition is clear and quite intriguing. The deathbed temptations and their sources are discussed in Sister Mary Catharine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 29–31, 41–44; and in Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars moriendi in England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 10–18. The earlier, longer version of the Ars moriendi was probably composed c.1414–18, and it was quickly disseminated; it is not impossible that Chartier might have known it. If in fact the Ars moriendi is an important intertext, this relationship might ultimately help us to identify Espérance’s unnamed female character, perhaps as Patience, Humility, or Largesse.

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begins: in short, Indignation’s rant is a condensed, aggressive version of the Curial.62 Indignation first asks the Acteur why he was ever foolish enough to get near the court or the royal palace, a place where Truth cannot make it through the door, a place where one can only come to know Fortune and her fickle ways. In one particularly interesting rhetorical gesture, the court is both spatialized and personified: Se tu as le courage ou plus proprement parler la folle cuidance de toy vouloir ingerer jusques au dangereux donjon ou dame Court se retrait en son privé, saches que le guichet en est si petit, la planche si estroicte, la fosse desoubz si parfont, et y court le vent d’envie a si grant bouffeez, que a l’entrer ou a l’issir tu te pourras blecer sans garison ou tresbuchier sans resourse. (8) If you have the courage, or rather, the foolhardiness to want to get yourself into the dangerous keep where lady Court withdraws in private, know that the door is so small, the bridge so narrow, the moat below so deep, and the winds of envy so strong, that upon entering or exiting you could wound yourself beyond cure, or fall without hope of escape.

While the personification of “Lady Court” is novel, these private spaces behind little doors are familiar to the reader of the Curial. Indignation has twisted the earlier text’s imagery: whereas in the Latin text it was the sane man who needed to protect his privacy behind an hostiolo, it is now the court – the very antithesis of private life – that retreats to a private space behind the hostiolo’s etymological descendant, the guichet. The court is now a closed space, whereas one of the primary critiques in the Curial was of the court’s excessively public nature that left the individual vulnerable to attack. Which is not to say, of course, that Indignation paints the court in a rosier light. On the contrary, she concludes her anticurial laments with a deploration of one-sided friendship and a series of examples of ancients undone by court life, beginning with Seneca and ending with Boethius – not exactly heart-warming models for the successful balance of literary production and political engagement. Melancholy’s other two minions say their piece in proses 3 and 4. Defiance, like Indignation before her, laments the current state of French political life. She first generalizes the Acteur’s experience to all Frenchmen, claiming that if men’s inner thoughts were converted into voices, one would hear nothing but cries and sobs in every village and crossroads.

62 Virginie Minet-Mahy also notes this resemblance in Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 436.



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Se les pensees dez hommes estoient tourneez en haultes voix, et les couvers gemissemens en lamentations publiques, noz oreillez seroient estonneez et noz cueurs espoentés de ouir la doloureuse affliction et les piteuses plaintes dez bons Franchoys; car en villes ne en carrefours n’orroit on que criz et pleurs, et parfons souppirs, qui a present murtrissent et tuent en recellee lez courages ou ilz sont tapis. (11–12) If men’s thoughts were spoken aloud, and hidden sighs turned into public lamentations, our ears would be stunned and our hearts terrified to hear the painful affliction and piteous complaints of the good French people; for in cities and crossroads one would hear nothing but cries and sobs, and deep sighs, which now are secretly afflicting and killing the hearts where they are hidden.

She then berates the Acteur for having chosen the solitary life instead of working for the good of the “chose publique” (12). As Indignation had done, Defiance revisits the language of the Curial, troubling its binary opposition of court and private life. Whereas the speaker in the Curial encourages his addressee to retire to a small house away from cities and court centers, Defiance points out that in fact there are no good choices, no places to escape: cities are too expensive, the countryside is ravaged by invaders and marauding bandits, and foreign exile provides no escape from misery. In other words, no matter where one goes, an hostiolo cannot offer sufficient protection from the dangers of the world outside. Lastly, Despair’s discourse in prose 4 consists of an enumeration of the miseries of the time and a series of classical exempla of suicide meant to inspire the Acteur to follow suit. Que pense tu voyr pour plus vivre, si non mort d’amis, rapine de biens, champs en gast, cités destruites, seigneurie forcee, pais desolé et commune servitude? Que apprandra ton engin desormais, fors a plaindre et gemir, et changer nourreture en disete, et honneur en reprouche? (18) What more do you think you’ll see if you remain alive, friends dead, goods pillaged, cities destroyed, forcible domination, ravaged country and widespread servitude? What more will your mind learn from now on, except how to complain and sigh, and to turn food into famine and honor into reproach?

Then she piles on more exemplary suicides, Cato,63 Mithridates, Hannibal, Jugurtha, Lucretia, and Dido, before bringing her disourse back to the present. 63 Cato is also cited by Sodalis as a positive exemplum in the Dialogus; several of Sodalis’s exempla are shared with the Quadrilogue or the Esperance, strengthening the association between these works.

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Et toy, pour quoy veulx tu viellir en telle malle meschance, et vivre en soubzhaitant la mort tous lez jours? La chevalerie de ton pais est perie et morte; les estudes sont dissipees; le clergié est dispers et vague et opprimé, et la regle de moderation et honnesteté ecclesiastique tournee avecquez le temps en desordonnance et dissolution; les citoyens sont despourveux d’esperance, et descongnoissans de seigneurie par l’oscurté de ceste trouble nuee; l’ordre est tournee en confusion, et loy en desmesuree violence; juste seigneurie et honneur dechiet; obeissance ennuye; pacience fault; tout tumbe et font en l’abisme de ruine et desolation. […] Romps doncques le lien de ta vie qui te tient en cest amer servage, et te delivre a coup de meschiefz infinis par ung tout seul meschief; eschappe a une foiz les dangiers de fortune, et oublie tout, fors que aussi bien tost ou tart te convient il de mourir. (19–20) And you, why do you want to grow old in such grave misfortune, and live every day wishing for death? Your country’s chivalry is dead and gone; intellectual life has desintegrated; the clergy is dispersed and wandering and oppressed, and the rule of ecclesiastical moderation and virtue is, over time, becoming disorder and dissolution; the citizens are utterly lacking in hope, and can’t recognize governance through the dark cloud; order has become confusion, and law, unbridled violence; righteous lordship and honor are falling; obedience too; patience is lacking; everything is falling and crumbling in the abyss of ruin and desolation. […] So break the bond of life that is keeping you in such bitter servitude, and with one little evil, free yourself all at once from these infinite evils. Escape once and for all the dangers of Fortune, and forget everything, except for the fact that sooner or later you must die.

Despair seeks to exploit the typological “spirit of reenactment” that underpins exemplary narratives, pushing it to its most extreme form.64 But meter 5, which immediately follows Despair’s harangue, puts her bad advice back into perspective: its disembodied poetic voice describes the suicide as one who “wants to do such wrong to himself, and, in error, falsify the noble law of nature” (se veult tant meffaire / Et par erreur contrefaire / La noble loy de nature, 20, vv. 2–4), disfiguring his own body and breaking the divine bond. Thus the disembodied poetic voice reaches the same conclusion as that expressed by Christine de Pizan in the Épistre de la prison de vie humaine: “Certes ne puet estre plus vituperable mort que occire soy-meismes par desespoir” (Certainly there can be no more condemnable death than to kill oneself out of despair, 64 Martin Gosman explores this “spirit of reenactment” in “Alain Chartier: Le mythe romain et le pouvoir royal français,” in Entre fiction et histoire: Troie et Rome au Moyen Âge, ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997), 161–82.



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23). But in prose 5 it is still apparent that the Acteur is unable to heed reason, for the three demons have upended his sense, blinded him, and brought him to the brink of mortal madness (“bestourné le sens et aveuglé la rayson, et mené jucquez pres le mast de mortelle forcenerie,” 21–22). He has been separated from his sleeping Entendement; Melancholy has redirected his fantasia and taken control of his mental images; and the suggestions of suicide are beginning to sound like a good idea. So Nature, who would hate to see one of her creatures destroy himself, awakens Entendement. Lest we think of Nature as a mere personification, Chartier underlines her corporeality: “Si s’esvertua tellement et esmeut toutes ses vaines, ses nerfz et ses arteriques, spondilles et musculles, que par son esbranler et debatre elle esveilla Entendement” (She exerted herself so, moving all of her veins, nerves and arteries, vertebrae and muscles, that with her motion and agitation she woke Entendement, 22).65 Entendement is at first restored to a semi-vegetative state, eyes half open, “bauboyant” (22), babbling just as Indignation had earlier done. The Acteur is still preoccupied with his hideous visitors (“ma fantasie fichee vers ces troys monstres,” 23) and he is thus unable to imprint Entendement’s words in his thought (“ne povoye ses parolles imprimer en ma pensee,” 23). Seeking to remedy the Acteur’s continued impairment, Entendement heads to a corner of the chamber that has previously gone unnoticed. Car j’avoye tourné ma face, et ma fantasie fichee vers ces troys monstres, jucquez a ce que Entendement se retrait vers la partie de ma memoire, et ouvrit a grant effors pour donner plus grant clarté ung petit guichet dont les varroux estoient compressés du rooil de oubliance. Par la entrerent incontinent troys dames et une debonnaire et bien encontenancee damoiselle qui longuement avoient musé a ce petit huys, mais nul ne leur ouvroit l’entrée. Mesmement Entendement qui defferma le guichet de ma memoire lez mescongneust a l’entrer, car encores avoit il ses yeux esblohis, comme prisonnier qui d’une trouble chartre vient soudainement a la lueur du solleil. Par l’entrée de ces dames fut la place esclarcie de lumiere…” (23) For I had turned my face and fixed my fantasy on those three monsters, until Entendement went back toward my memory, and with great effort opened a little door whose locks were seized up with rust, in order to admit more light. By that door three ladies immediately entered, along with a noble and well-turned-out young lady. They had long stared at that little door, but no 65 Curiously, François Rouy deems Nature as lacking “un haut degré de corporéité” because she is an “intrapersonnification” lacking a body distinct from that of the Acteur. François Rouy, L’esthétique du traité moral d’après les œuvres d’Alain Chartier (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 38.

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one opened it to them. Even Entendement who opened the little door of my memory didn’t see them enter, for his eyes were still dazzled, like a prisoner who suddenly goes from a dark prison to the light of day. The ladies’ entry filled the place with light…

The dazzling light and the specific allusion to a prisoner recall the book’s Boethian intertext, as well as the comparison of disturbed mental faculties and impaired eyesight in prose 1. The sudden entry of the Theological Virtues distracts the reader from a fundamental question: how did the virtues get there – wherever there may be – and whence did they come? Just where does the little door with its rusted hardware lead? It is never specified where the Livre de l’Espérance takes place. The only clues that the first few proses yield suggest a private domestic space, as there is a “couche” where the Acteur slumps, and after Melancholy’s arrival the place is described as a sickroom (“logeis d’enfermeté,” 3).66 Manuscript illuminations, which typically depict the characters within a bedchamber, support such a reading.67 Six of the Espérance manuscripts contain multiple illuminations, many quite elaborate, while other manuscripts leave spaces for never-completed images. One of the most richly illustrated is BnF, MS fr. 24441, a manuscript containing the Quadrilogue invectif (with two miniatures) and the Livre de l’Espérance (four miniatures), dated between 1440 and 1461. All four of the Espérance miniatures are located within the same space: a room with a highbacked chair situated between a door on the left and a canopy bed in the center. In the first image, on folio 34 [Figure 6], we clearly see Entendement dozing in the chair, next to the bed (labeled “la couche d’angoise”) where Melancholy wraps the Acteur in her cloak and forces him to drink her poisonous brew as Indignation, Defiance, and Despair look on.68 Opposite those three hags, in a forgotten corner, stands the little door. In the second illustration (41r), Entendement reaches to open the door, from which rays of light now emanate, and in the third (44r), the virtues and their companion have entered. In the final

66 Andrea Tarnowski argues that “There is no physical setting for him here other than the prologue itself, no mention of a study or a chamber. He is only in the book, which marks his presence as a historical body, the rubric over the prologue giving his name.” Tarnowski, “Alain Chartier’s Singularity,” 53. 67 Gathercole remarks that “‘L’Espérance’ generally portrays miniatures with mournful sympathizers leaning over the bed of an invalid” (“Illuminations,” 505). Aside from the misidentification of the Acteur’s tormentors as sympathizers, the remainder of her description stands. See also Serchuk, “The Illuminated Manuscripts,” 78–9 and 106n58. 68 It is telling that Entendement should be the one in the cathedra, occupying a typical authorial role, while the Acteur lies in bed – further underscoring the fragmentation of the first-person narrator’s psychological and authorial function.



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Fig. 6 The Acteur in his Chamber, Alain Chartier, Le Livre de l’Espérance (Paris, BnF fr 24441, fol. 34r.), c.1440–61. illustration (71r), Faith gestures toward Hope, probably signalling that it is the titular character’s turn to speak.69 Within the text itself, prior to prose 5 there is no hint of any doors or windows by which Melancholy and her crew might have entered: indeed, they simply appear before the Acteur. The petit guichet by which Entendement admits the virtues is presumably not a door to the exterior, and yet opening it fills the Acteur’s chamber with light.70 The guichet is small, as so many of Chartier’s doors seem to be, and its hardware is rusty. These two facts link it to the doors 69 For a more detailed description of these miniatures, see Rouy’s introduction to his edition of the Livre de l’Espérance, xxix–xxxi. I believe he confuses Acteur and Entendement, but otherwise his descriptions are accurate. 70 The Esperance bucks the trend, described by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, toward “the decreasing importance of light in fifteenth-century allegory.” Seeing Through the Veil, 236–37.

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Fig. 7 The “Cambridge Diagram” of the Internal Senses, after Avicenna, De anima (Cambridge Univ. Lib. MS G.g.I.i, fol. 490v), c.1310. separating public and private spaces in Chartier’s anticurial writings, from the Curial’s hostiolo to Indignation’s guichets – and its position “vers la partie de ma memoire” (toward my memory) also orients it with respect to the mental map the Acteur sketches with his discussion of the internal senses in prose 1. If these mental faculties are “corporelles et organiques,” it follows that they also occupy space, and that they are positioned, in relation to each other, in a manner that could be mapped. One thinks, for example, of the Cambridge diagram [Figure 7] brilliantly commented by Michael Camille in his article “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing.”71 In this well-known illustration of the Avicennian physiology of cognition we see the sensitive faculty just behind the forehead, and next the imaginative, 71 Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–223.



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which is connected to the estimative (above) and the cogitative (below); the memory is, of course, at the back. Cognitive processing involves the movement of a stimulus from the front to the back of the brain, from sense perception to judgment and memory. Mental function is thus contingent on the free (albeit largely unidirectional) movement from one cell to the next. The door in Espérance is specifically situated back toward the memory, and Entendement must move backward (“se retrait”) in order to open it – it is part of the architecture of the Acteur’s own brain – but the door is stuck shut because of forgetfulness. “Les varroux estoient compressés du rooil de oubliance.” The implications are clear: Entendement’s mere presence, and the location of the door that he ultimately opens, suggest that we are in fact within a mental space.72 What has seemed until now to be a domestic interior, perhaps an author’s estude, is revealed to represent the recesses of the Acteur’s mind.73 The illuminations in the six illustrated manuscripts of Espérance, then, would constitute rare depictions of a metaphorical cognitive space, a “mental model” in both senses of the term.74 Within this model forgetting is construed as a type of rust that accretes within the mind and impedes the movement essential to the engin’s healthy cognitive function.75 The narrator of the Livre de l’Espérance never tells us how or when the hardware of the little door got so rusty; the reader only becomes aware of the rust within the context of the mental anguish that Melancholy and her minions 72 Christine de Pizan, too, emphasizes Entendement’s localization within the brain in her Épistre de la prison de vie humaine, with an extended explanation of “sa situation ou chief” (its position in the head, 34, lines 708–23). 73 Florence Bouchet argues that the author’s estude can serve as a metaphor for “entendement,” adducing the example of Meschinot’s Lunettes des Princes. Le discours sur la lecture, 174. 74 In a similar vein, Philippe Maupeu has argued convincingly that the little house depicted in one of the manuscripts of Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues – BnF MS fr. 23279, fol. 64v [our Figure 5] – might represent an “espace mental.” Maupeu, “Salmon le fou,” 402. 75 The idea of a door of memory persists in fifteenth-century French texts. Olivier de la Marche cites, as a reason for writing his Mémoires, a desire “que ces coups de foüetz et divines batures fierent et hurtent à la porte de vostre pensée pour ouvrir le guichet de sage memoire, affin que vous doubtiez et cremiez les persecutions du ciel” (that these whiplashes and divine blows strike and knock at the door of your thought to open the little door of wise memory, so that you might fear and dread divine punishment). Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont (Paris: Renouard, 1883), vol. 1, 13. In a less serious vein, Dame Mémoire’s armoire in stanza 36 of François Villon’s Lais may constitute a direct descendant of Chartier’s mental door: Jean-Claude Mühlethaler identifies the Livre de l’Espérance as “l’hypotexte parodié à la fin du Lais” (the hypotext parodied at the end of the Lais). Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, “Le ‘Rooil de oubliance:’ écriture de l’oubli et écriture de la mémoire dans Le Livre de l’Espérance d’Alain Chartier,” Études de lettres 276 (2007): 204. On the Lais’ debt to Chartier, and especially to the Belle Dame sans Mercy, see Hult, “Alain Chartier in Manuscript,” 780.

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have caused, and the rust is perhaps to be understood as a direct consequence of Melancholy’s arrival.76 After all, Dame Melancholy’s primary functions include not only the corruption of the humors, but also, in this book, the act of covering: when she first arrives, we may recall, she victimizes the Acteur by covering him with her foul garment. Indeed, the moment when “A l’aproucher sans mot dire m’envelopa soudainement entre ses bras et me couvry visage et corps de ce maleureux mantel” (Upon her approach, without a word she suddenly wrapped me up in her arms and covered my face and body with this woeful mantle, 3) is the precise action that most of the book’s fifteenth-century illuminators choose to portray, suggesting that this is the catalyst for the Acteur’s desperate plight and his ultimate rescue by the virtues.77 Melancholy also gives the Acteur and his Entendement a foul, poisonous beverage to drink. Just as Melancholy covers (and humidifies) the Acteur and his Entendement; likewise, the locks of the Acteur’s mental door have been covered with rust. Melancholy is insidious precisely because she assails her victim from without and within simultaneously.78 When Melancholy is present, the rust of forgetting blocks access to the memory; conversely, the release of the virtues from the memory disperses Melancholy and her followers. The opening of the door and the entry of the virtues into the “sickroom” raises a number of questions: is the mind to be read as a prison-like space? If so, who has been liberated upon the virtues’ release? Read in the light of the Boethian intertext, it would seem apparent that Entendement and the Acteur, the recipients of the virtues’ consolations, are the ones who have been imprisoned. Here we are only one step away from Guillaume de Deguileville’s declaration in the Pèlerinage de l’âme that “Entendement n’est que cage” (the intellect is nothing but a cage, 354, v. 10934) – and while the Livre de l’Espérance presents Entendement as more of a prisoner than a prison, the virtues’ consolations are indeed targeted toward correcting the melancholic subject’s tendency to overthink his problems. However, the permeability of the “sickroom” space, and the active role Entendement must play in the admission of the virtues, invite alternate interpretations. Perhaps it was the virtues who were previously confined. They are infused in man’s soul but can still be consciously ignored – it is, after all,

76 This is consistent with melancholy’s long-standing association with corruption: Marie-Pierre Krück, “Mélancolie et corruption,” in Miroirs de la Mélancolie/Mirrors of Melancholy, ed. Hélène Cazes and Anne-France Morand (Paris: Hermann, 2015), 29–38. 77 Further evidence for the importance of this scene to fifteenth-century readers is found in Saint-Gelais’s Séjour d’Honneur, in which, as Helen Swift describes it, “the despondent persona meets a very ugly lady (v. 22) called Malady who throws over him a poisoned mantle (v. 30) that gives him a year-long fever.” Swift, Representing the Dead, 253n110. 78 For a discussion of Melancholy as a force coming from without and within (in specific reference to the poetry of Charles d’Orléans), see Starobinski, “L’encre de la mélancolie,” 415.



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Entendement who controls if and when they are released, and who opens the rusted bolt even before the virtues have given him the “file of correction.” The virtues themselves are powerless to escape from the deep recesses of the mind if no one opens the door for them. In this case, memory would seem to be a trap, a dead end. The position of Espérance’s “escape route,” its only door, within the mind suggests that Defiance may have been right: there is no way for a little door to adequately separate inside from outside. The only doorways within individual control separate inside from inside, self from intellect or virtue, and those are the doors one ought to worry about breaking down. Unlike the hostiolo of the Curial, shut for protection, the guichet of Espérance is sealed shut with the rust of forgetting only so that it can be pried open again. Thus the Livre de l’Espérance offers not just a rewriting of Boethius,79 but also of the Curial, introducing an innovative resolution to the insider–outsider dilemma that, according to Ad Putter, prevents the Curial from developing into a narrative.80 Where the Curial narrator is emphatic in his denunciation of court life, the Espérance narrator demonstrates that the only way to remain safely inside is to open the door and let the light shine in. Reframing Political (Dis)engagement Opening the rusty little door to the narrator’s memory underscores a fundamental change in the Livre de l’Espérance’s direction: literally, a moment charnière. Despite its external, political impetus, this has become a discourse of mental health situated within mental space. The external stimuli that led to the Acteur’s suicidal thoughts now demand internalized corrective strategies, progressively divorced from political context. The presence of the Theological Virtues signals a new remedy for mental rust: not a “rubbing away” of corrosion, which would restore the mind’s function, but a political disengagement that liberates the mind from any mechanical constraint.

79 Or of other Boethian narratives: Joël Blanchard sees Chartier’s guichet as an echo of the huisselet by which Philosophie enters in Christine de Pizan’s similarly Boethian Avision Christine. Blanchard, “Artéfact littéraire,” 28. 80 Ad Putter, “Animating Medieval Court Satire,” in The Court and Cultural Diversity: Selected Papers from the Eighth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 26 July–1 August 1995, ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 67–76.

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The Theological Virtues arrive in a dramatic and highly visual manner. Their first act is to heal Entendement’s bleary eyes,81 but it soon becomes apparent that their proposed solution to the Acteur’s affliction will involve a new, reduced role for the bodily senses. As François Rouy has noted, the Virtues’ physical appearance is described in far less detail than was that of Melancholy and her minions.82 Entendement recognizes the Virtues by their attributes: Foy with two books (a Pentateuch and a New Testament with seven opened seals) and a golden crown with twelve points representing the twelve articles of faith; Espérance with a cypress box containing “la balsme de consolation” (the balm of consolation, 89) and, in the poem’s sole nod to the New Iconography, a golden anchor. Otherwise the Virtues are never described, an omission that anticipates their arguments in favor of the sublimation of bodily senses to spiritual ends.83 Foy begins her speech in prose 5 by talking about faculties and appetites (24), but once she has healed Entendement’s vision, she encourages him in prose 7 to use his senses only as a means to greater insight: “par l’administration dez sens corporelz, et par l’espece des materiellez choses, te fault faire ton discours aux espirituellez” (by means of the administration of the bodily senses, and the species of material things, you must turn your discourse to spiritual matters, 39). Indeed, the Virtues address their lessons only to Entendement, while the Acteur’s participation is limited to rare comments on the pedagogical dialogue; even at the level of plot, the body is sidelined in favor of the intellect, in what Joël Blanchard calls an “act of depersonalization.”84 Espérance goes further, declaring in prose 10 that the mind should be divorced from, and hold sway over, the body. Man, she says, is a mixture of stone, plant, animal, and angel characteristics; only his entendement rises above these “mixtions” and should thus work to curb rather than to serve the passions of the body. Humanité print toutes ces mixtions et elemens corruptibles et passibles excepté toy qui vins au corps par infusion des cieulx pour estre par dessus lez aultres parties elementelles, auxquellez tu ne dois pas estre subgeit ne duysible, maiz les seigneurir et tyrer a rayson par obeissance. (92) 81 Christine de Pizan, too, attributes contemporary France’s woes to a deficiency in “les clers yeux du noble entendement” (the clear eyes of noble intellect): Angus J. Kennedy, “La Lamentacion sur les maux de la France de Christine de Pisan,” in Mélanges de langue et litérature françaises du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance offerts à Charles Foulon, vol. I (Rennes: Institut de Français, Université de Haute-Bretagne, 1980), 80. 82 François Rouy, L’esthétique du traité moral, 12, 20, 25, 27. 83 For Rouy, the vagueness and simplicity of the descriptions of the Virtues renders them more polyvalent, lending them “de la ductilité et de la perméabilité aux effets de suggestion” (ductility and permeability to the effects of suggestion; L’esthétique du traité moral, 35). 84 Blanchard, “Artéfact littéraire,” 29.



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Humanity absorbed all of these admixtures and these corruptible and ephemeral elements [e.g., appetites and sensations], except for you [Entendement], who were infused in the body by heaven and are therefore above the other elemental parts. You should not be subject to them or swayed by them; rather, you should reign over them and compel them to reason through obedience.

The intellect is distinct from, and superior to, the body.85 Yet even it has its limits: “crestiens sont tenus croire aucuns articles plus haulx que la capacité de engin humain” (Christians are required to believe in some things beyond the capacity of the human mind, 128). Just as the mind must overcome the weakness of the body, the spirit must overcome the limits of the mind. As soon as the Virtues have entered the Acteur’s chamber, they set about remedying his pathological state of mind: not only by contradicting the discourses of Defiance, Indignation, and Despair, but also by countering the language that has characterized Alain Chartier’s vernacular political corpus. By revisiting specific images and questions – the inside–outside rhetoric of architectural spaces, reversals of fortune, texts’ mediating role in the relationship of past and present – Foy and Espérance reject the lessons of the Curial, of the Livre de l’Espérance’s beginning, and, most pointedly, of the prologue to the Quadrilogue invectif. The Livre de l’Espérance thus constructs itself at once as a summa and a repudiation of Alain Chartier’s political corpus. Foy and Espérance first collaborate to redefine the notions of public and private space that underlie the Curial’s critique of court life, with the former repurposing the language of doorways to spiritual ends, and the latter rejecting architectural language as an instrument for the separation of public and private domains. Foy likens the body to a shelter (“le corps est ung herberge de ton pelerinage,” 33–34) and evokes the doors to salvation and perdition. La porte par qui on entre en vie beneureuse est petite, estroicte et penible, et se fault bessier, humilier et courber ses membres en mesaise, et en angoisse. Mais le portail par ou l’en va a perdition est large et patent, et y entre l’en de legier par une double porte, dont l’un des huys est commission de pechié, l’aultre est omission de bienfait. (26) The door by which one enters the blessed life is small, narrow and difficult, and one must lower and humiliate oneself and bend one’s members in discomfort and anguish. But the portal through which one goes to perdition

85 From this point onward “in Alain Chartier’s treatise, the separation of mind and body is explicit.” Glynnis Cropp, “Boethius and the Consolatio philosophiae in XIVth and XVthcentury French writing,” Essays in French Literature 42 (2005): 27–43.

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is wide and open, and one enters easily through a double door: one of the doors is the commission of sin, the other is the failure to do good.

Gone are the literal doors of the Curial and the mental portal of the first part of Espérance: the door of memory needs to be opened only to restore access to the door of grace (“la porte de grace,” 26). This is a door separating pain and reward, or time and eternity, not public and private experience. Indeed, while the Livre de l’Espérance finishes with the question of public and private order, these are best established (according to Espérance’s speech in prose 16) through spiritual rather than architectural means: “oraison et sacrifice prouffitent a conserver et restablir les choses priveez et publiques” (prayer and sacrifice serve to conserve and reestablish public and private life, 179). Once public and private lives are both situated on the same side of the door of grace, the Curial’s hostiolo becomes immaterial. The Livre de l’Espérance’s response to Chartier’s other political writings is not always as subtle as Foy’s and Espérance’s remodeling of the notions of public and private space: Foy’s speech in prose 7, for instance, constitutes a direct refutation of the ideas expressed in the prologue to the Quadrilogue invectif. In this section, Entendement and Foy discuss whether France is deserving of punishment or mercy – the same question that motivates the composition of the Quadrilogue. When Entendement asks why, as a punishment for their sin, the people are victimized by even greater sinners, Foy replies that Ung fer lime l’autre, et ung pecheur chastie son semblable, et devient instrument de la divine justice. La lime se use et puis est degettee comme inutile, et le fer limé par l’amendement du maistre est reabillité et mis a prouffit. (42) One piece of iron files another, and one sinner castigates his fellow, and becomes an instrument of divine justice. The file is used up and is then thrown away as useless, and the iron filed through the master’s ministrations is rehabilitated and put to good use.

Foy’s answer is immediately recognizable as another redeployment of Proverbs XXVII.17 (Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another), this time used in a rather different pedagogical context. The use of this metaphor, already familiar to us from the treatises discussed in Chapter Two, signals a change from the remedial strategy proposed in mirrors for princes and instructional manuals. The Livre de l’Espérance is a vehicle for memory work,86 as Virginie 86 On the work of memory, particularly as a working-through of trauma, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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Minet-Mahy points out, and not a conduct manual.87 As we see in the above citation, Foy’s pedagogical emphasis is placed not just on the benefits to the student, but on both the lime and the fer limé as tools and divine instruments. In the course of this type of instruction, as in an interactionist metaphor, both the recipient of an action and the tools of that action themselves are changed. Political education is being set aside in favor of moral and spiritual edification, one that seeks to restructure the actor’s deployment of memory; but the pedagogue, rather than “filing” the student directly, causes one object to act upon another – and then discards the file. Foy follows her proverbial response with imagery that directly echoes the Quadrilogue, likening divine chastisement to a father beating a child, and encouraging Entendement to read a bit further in the book of Isaiah. She sends her student backward, back to childhood, back to his earlier reading material, back toward his memory, so that he might then proceed forward. The same metaphor and the same reading material that provoked the Quadrilogue’s desperate vision can now be administered as correctives to that way of thinking. The most important strategy by which Foy and Espérance counter the lessons of Chartier’s earlier political writings is to foster different ways of thinking about history and actuality, and the role of texts in constructing productive connections between past and present. First of all, in prose 6 Foy revels in the very same reversals of fortune that so trouble the narrator of the Quadrilogue. Espérance picks up on the same idea in prose 14, where she declares that those who suffer the most have more reason to hope, for misery sharpens their acumen: while the victorious often grow complacent, “celuy qui est au desoubz aguise son engin a la presse de son engoisse” (he who has been brought low sharpens his intellect on the press [machine] of his anguish, 139). The exact nature of these reversals and miseries remains unspoken, however. Foy and Espérance also foreclose the possibility of leading a reader into politically-inspired brooding by providing only the most oblique references to current events. Foy speaks in prose 9 of the iniquity that has reigned in France since the death of Charles V (65) and laments that the few nobles remaining after France’s years of bloodshed have proven themselves deficient (80), but she never names names. Espérance, too, promises in prose 14 that usurpers tend to fail (141), without mentioning the specific usurpation cited in the Quadrilogue: the English monarch’s claim to the French throne. France’s current suffering should not be kept present in the mind, but rather relegated to the past, redeemed as an impetus to future perfection. Hope is itself a way of achieving present understanding of the future, and Espérance, in particular, offers Entendement new ways of engaging with the past and the future. Most notably, she rejects conventional models of governance 87

Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 460.

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in redefining sapience in prose 11 not as a political or intellectual virtue, but as “la certaine expectation dez biens du ciel” (the certain expectation of the blessings of heaven, 96) – that is, a paraphrase of Peter Lombard’s famous definition of Hope itself.88 Human wisdom is subsumed into hope, which tends to condense present and future into a single frame of mind; the true relationship of past, present, and future can only be known by God, who experiences them simultaneously (161). If man seeks to juxtapose past and present, on the other hand, he must proceed with great caution. We see an instance of the productive use of the past events to shed light on present circumstances in prose 14, in which Espérance provides exempla – at Entendement’s request – in order to fix her lessons in her pupil’s memory.89 The first set she provides is a list of cities that resurged after destruction or defeat: Troy, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Rome (137–39). These are the same exempla featured in the prologue of the Quadrilogue invectif, where they served the opposite purpose; now the same examples and chronicles are used to feed hope.90 This is the proper use of books, which, as meter 15 reinforces, exist largely in order to call positive examples to mind. Pour lez haulx faitz meritoires, Lez renommees et gloires Des victoires, Les malfaitz et biens notoires, Ramener en noz memoires Transitoires, Et noz sens ediffier, Sont escriptes lez hystoires Et poesiez fictoires… (148, vv. 1–9)

88 Sentences III, D, 26; Aquinas discusses this definition in Summa theologica II.2.18, article 4. 89 Janice C. Zinser remarks that “Each new exemplum serves to draw the author gradually away from his initially myopic and self-pitying perspective.” “The Use of Exempla in Alain Chartier’s Esperance,” Res publica litterarum 3 (1980): 179. 90 Jean-Claude Mühlethaler sees the Virtues’ exempla as engaging in the same strategies as the exempla offered by Melancholy’s minions: “le bien comme le mal recourent à la mémoire collective, se servent des mêmes armes pour tirer l’homme de leur côté” (good and bad alike have recourse to collective memory, use the same weapons to draw man to their side). Mühlethaler, “Le ‘Rooil de oubliance,’ 203. However, the fact that the former foist their exempla upon a melancholic Acteur, while the Virtues offer exempla at an increasingly enlightened Entendement’s request, indicates that these two exemplary strategies differ substantially.



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In order to recall noble, meritorious deeds, the renown and glory of victory, and noteworthy misdeeds and good works to our transitory memory, and in order to edify our senses, histories and fictional poems are written…

Espérance’s promotion of reading as an edifying aide-mémoire counters and corrects the negative reading practices illustrated in the prologues of both the Quadrilogue invectif and the Livre de l’Espérance. However, the use of a poem to promote uplifting and productive reading perversely highlights another problem that remains unresolved for the Livre de l’Espérance’s reader: how should one read the verse sections, both on their own terms and in relationship to the prose? Espérance’s prosimetric form is best understood as a framing device and as a sign or vehicle of the restoration of psychological balance. As Sylvia Huot has noted, prose serves “a variety of purposes – chastisement, philosophical disquisition, historical narrative, the articulation of Entendement’s confusion, the presentation as well as the critique of false doctrine – while allowing verse to function purely as a medium of instruction and illumination.”91 The formal distinction between meter and prose is visually accentuated in the mise en page of several manuscripts, which tend to copy the meters in two columns but the prose in a single block stretching all the way across the page.92 Prose and verse are further differentiated in their relationships to history and the passage of time. The temporal separation of verse and prose – with the prose sections narrating a story in the past, and the majority of the poems seemingly issuing from an authoritative and ahistorical voice – highlights the multiple temporalities at stake in Chartier’s political dits.93 The speaker of the verses, that is, the voice through which they are expressed, is not typically specified, resulting in what Virginie Minet-Mahy calls a “de-subjectivity” of poetic language.94 Certain meters are attributable to various characters in the prose narrative: meter 1 is composed in a voice that suggests the Acteur, though it is not explicitly attributed to him; proses 5 and 6 both suggest that meter 6 is voiced by Entendement; and meter 11 seems to be in Espérance’s voice. The other meters, though, remain more troubling; if we accept Sylvia Huot’s convincing argument 91 Sylvia Huot, “Re-Fashioning Boethius: Prose and Poetry in Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance,” Medium Aevum 76:2 (2007): 279. 92 Van Hemelryck, “Le modèle du prosimètre,” 16. 93 Chartier’s use of a prosimetrum to explore these questions proves highly influential: both Tania van Hemelryck and Virginie Minet-Mahy credit the Livre de l’Espérance with the introduction of the prosimetrum as a preferred vehicle for political expression, especially engagement with a political crisis; this puts the prosimetrum on a par with the “songe politique” of the previous generation. Van Hemelryck, “Le modèle du prosimètre,” 12; Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 404. 94 Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 504.

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that the poetic passages are spoken through the voice of the authorial persona, then we can see that they represent the end result of the pedagogical process that the three Virtues undertake from prose 5 onward.95 Rather than a “poetic gloss” on the preceding prose, as Regula Meyenberg would have it,96 meter is the chosen vehicle of expression for the already-healed voice, the one that, as Huot puts it, “speaks from a point beyond that of the mental breakdown that he chronicles in prose.”97 Poetry is also, then, the primary vehicle of truth.98 Verse and prose thus help reinforce the distinction between author and narratorial persona, and allow for the concurrent presence of a persona in desperate need of instruction and an author who has already absorbed the Virtues’ lessons.99 Our author situates himself inside and outside simultaneously (in this case, thanks to a framing device); in the prose he is still trapped in his own mind, but the verse suggests that he has already opened his rusted hinges and liberated himself through the teachings of the Theological Virtues. The dit’s structure therefore appears to rely on the reintegration of the authorial self, which is deferred and ultimately denied by the incomplete text. The prosimetric form creates a frame that is also a loop, or a Möbius strip, since the Virtues’ prose teachings must inevitably bring the authorial persona, by the end of the text, to his present, enlightened state; that is, to the detached, disembodied frame of mind that finds its expression in the metrical sections. The end of the text is (presumably) its beginning, and its beginning, the end. Conclusion: A Darkened Mirror Despite the Livre de l’Espérance’s innovative elaboration of a mental model as diegetic space, and despite the clear causal relation it establishes between political actuality and mental dysfunction, these structures appear, paradoxically, in service of a moral lesson that will ultimately undo them. The remedies 95 Huot, “Re-Fashioning Boethius.” This reading gives the lie to Pierre-Jean Roux’s facile and unjustified dismissal of the Livre de l’Espérance as a “pathetic dialogue” whose title is a misnomer. Pierre-Jean Roux, “Alain Chartier devant la crise du pouvoir royal au début du XVe siècle,” in Culture et pouvoir au temps de l’humanisme et de la Renaissance, ed. L. Terreaux (Geneva: Slatkine, 1978), 7. 96 Meyenberg, Alain Chartier Prosateur, 182. 97 “Re-Fashioning Boethius,” 273. Similarly, Minet-Mahy reads the verse as a site of resolution and harmony: Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 497. 98 Virginie Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 433. For a deeper discussion of the relationship between verse and truth in later medieval French writing see Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry. 99 However, as Andrea Tarnowski points out, “Chartier has not been transformed in the same way” as Boethius’s narrator, who writes his prologue from the perspective of one already consoled; the Espérance’s conflicting temporalities are not fully resolved. Tarnowski, “Alain Chartier’s Singularity,” 53.



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proposed by the virtues are designed to heal the suffering subject by progressively removing him from worldly concerns and contemporary contexts; despite the Virtues’ concern about the “infirmity” of the Acteur and his Entendement,100 the healing process involves a detachment from, rather than an intervention in, physical or material reality. In this regard the Livre de l’Espérance diverges from prior, more pragmatic traditions in political literature, even as it picks up on the themes and imagery of the “mirror for princes” and the “songe politique.” Entendement’s initial questions for Foy, for instance – why is God allowing us to suffer so, why are the innocent and powerless beings punished – recall those that recur in the political writings of Christine de Pizan, Pierre Salmon, or the earlier political works of Chartier himself. Indeed, Entendement’s questions, and the tone in which he poses them, are highly reminiscent of Sodalis’s arguments in Chartier’s Dialogus. Foy’s answers, however, doggedly draw Entendement out of the contemporary world, relying instead on Biblical exempla.101 Even those examples with clear contemporary resonances, like that of Nebuchadnezzar in prose 7 (41), are treated in an emphatically ahistorical fashion. Whereas the Acteur has suffered because of the way that past glories have thrown present suffering into sharp relief, Foy flattens Biblical exempla and recent calamities into a single plane, one that is morally rather than historically or chronologically orientated. The Livre de l’Espérance boasts a great deal of language reminiscent of the mirrors for princes, especially in Foy’s speeches in proses 7 and 9. She repeats a number of aphoristic phrases familiar to readers of John of Salisbury or Giles of Rome: “a prince sans sens, peuple sans discipline” (for a prince without sense, a people without discipline, 45); “roy sans lettres est ung asne couronné” (an unlettered king is a crowned ass, 72); “les hommes d’eslevé entendement sont habiles par don de nature a gouvernement et seigneurie, et les rudes qui ont leur vigour es forces corporeilles sont deputés et donnés a naturelle servitude” (men of elevated intellect are naturally gifted with an ability for government and lordship, and coarse men whose strength is in corporeal force are relegated to natural servitude, 72); “prince non sachant trouble l’estat d’un chacum” (an 100 Both Foy and Espérance begin their speeches by deploring their interlocutor’s “enfermeté:” Foy interrogates Entendement in order to ascertain “lez causes de l’essoine d’entendement humain et de l’enfermeté du corps malade” (the causes of the blockage of the human intellect and the infirmity of the sick body, 30); Espérance reminds him of the compassion God has shown in “secourir par grace a ton enfermeté” (aiding, by His grace, with your infirmity, 98). Joël Blanchard remarks upon the repeated evocations of “enfermeté” in “Artéfact littéraire,” 40. 101 In this respect Foy’s exempla are akin to those proffered in the Quadrilogue: see Gosman, “Le discours référentiel,” 166. On the exemplarity of the Livre de l’Espérance see Meyenberg, Alain Chartier Prosateur, 139; Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 450.

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ignorant prince puts everyone’s condition at risk, 72). The organic metaphor of the state is largely absent from Foy’s discourse, but she does couch her citations from mirrors for princes within an overarching metaphor of political mismanagement as a physical malady.102 In prose 7 Foy likens an unworthy king both to a book (a faulty exemplar whose errors are perpetuated in all copies) and a disease of the head, “car de la maladie qui vient du chief se sentent tous lez membres” (for all of the members feel the effects of a malady that comes from the head, 45). In prose 8 she calls political misdeeds “publiquez infections” (public infections, 53) and warns that even seemingly innocent subjects can become “infectz par la contagion dez aultrez” (infected through the contagion of others, 53).103 And in prose 9, having noted that in a kingdom “tout despent du chef” (everything depends on the head, 69), Foy points out that a poorly functioning head can disable its body: “puissance sans sens est comme ung arc sans corde, et comme ung beau bras paralitique, bien formé d’os et de chair et de nerfz, et desgarny de sensitif esperit” (power without sense is like a bow without a string, and like a beautiful but paralytic arm, well formed in its bones and flesh and sinews and stripped of its sensorial spirit, 74). These speeches, setting up an analogy between Entendement’s woes and physical ailments, suggest that his healing, too, will be carried out by means of embodied metaphor.104 But these expectations are defied by Espérance, whose rhetoric supersedes any consolatory model framed in terms of human embodiment, and whose remedial gestures contradict the techniques put forth in preceding political mirrors or dream-visions.105 Specific allusions to mirrors for princes, 102 Blanchard claims that in prose 9 “Foi refait l’histoire du péché à travers le corps politique” (Faith rewrites the story of sin through the lens of the body politic, “Artéfact littéraire,” 35); given that the presence of the organic metaphor of state is at most a tacit substrate for Foy’s speech, this seems something of an overstatement. 103 Or, as Minet-Mahy puts it, “La maladie qui touche aussi le corps de l’État, signe des dysfonctionnements sociaux, politiques, culturels, brise le sujet” (The illness that also affects the body of state, sign of social, political and cultural dysfunction, breaks the subject). Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 438. 104 For Minet-Mahy, it is precisely the availability of polysemous therapeutic metaphors that underlies the use of this language: Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 408n1. However, I argue that Chartier’s virtues largely reject the use of such metaphors. 105 For instance, Espérance, like Mézières and Gerson, proposes a reading list geared toward edification and consolation: “Lis Omer, Virgile, Titus Livius, Orose, Troge Pompee, Justin, Flore, Valere, Lucan, Julle, Celse, Brunet Latin, Vincent, et les aultres hystoriens” (Read Homer, Virgil, Livy, Orosius, Pompeius Trogus, Justin, Florus, Valerius Maximus, Lucan, Julius Caesar, Celsus, Brunetto Latini, Vincent of Beauvais, and the other historians, pr. 14, lines 76–79, p. 137). But whereas the authors with an interest in princely pedagogy recommend works of political and moral philosophy, Chartier’s Espérance recommends only historiographic texts, reinforcing the notion that spiritual healing must be effected not only through a separation from pragmatic concerns, but through temporal and corporeal dislocation.



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such as those identified in Foy’s speech, are largely absent from Espérance’s ministrations. Rather than offer direct counsel aimed at the mitigation of human suffering, Espérance urges the intellect to disengage from the body and leave the material behind. More remarkably, Foy and especially Espérance reject a number of the inorganic metaphors that we have been tracing throughout late medieval political literature – the mirror, the file, the engin, the wheel – and in the penultimate prose section Espérance even undermines the very validity of metaphor as “mental model.” Foy negates the specific model of specularity undermining the mirrors for princes when she reminds Entendement, at the very outset of their dialogue, of the Pauline pronouncement that the intellect can only know the world through a glass darkly (30).106 And later, in a rare allusion to recent French history, Foy criticizes the brothers of Charles V, who “devoient estre patron de honneur et mirouer de perfection” (ought to have been a pattern of honor and a mirror of perfection), for having in fact shown themselves to be “monstre de pompe et aguillon d’envie” (monsters of pomp and pricks of envy, 66). According to Foy, then, the princes who ought to reflect positive values to their people are providing the wrong image, and in any event, Entendement is better off bypassing specular illusions in favor of anticipation of the divine insight that will be gained face to face.107 As for the “file,” which has been used to remove the rust of vice by Vincent of Beauvais, Guillaume de Deguileville, and many others, it too is transformed by Foy, as discussed above. And although the virtues appeal to Entendement, they discourage any identification of entendement with engin. Entendement attributes his own inability to follow Foy’s reasoning to the fact that “l’art de l’engin humain ensuyt nature en ses oeuvres, maiz l’art divin dont tu es instrument la precede et tient serve et subjecte, et luy mue ses riglez et ses loys par espirituel povoir” (the art of the human mind follows nature in its works, but the divine art of which you are the instrument precedes nature and holds it servile and subject, and by spiritual power changes its rules and its laws, 33). In a world where the laws of nature are subject to change according to divine will, an engin cannot operate. Espérance confirms this outlook when she declares in prose 15 that many learned men have sharpened their engins in an effort to understand the question of free will, but their engins have ended up “entreveschiez” – mixed up, or seized up, as a malfunctioning system of interlocking gears (158–59). She follows this statement by explaining the atemporality of divine knowledge with a mechanical analogy: 106 On the relation of the Pauline mirror to medieval allegorical literature, see Frelick, “Introduction.” 107 These remarks supplement Isabelle Bétemps’s observation that the [psychically] wounded poet presents himself as a darkened mirror to his prince. Bétemps, “Guerre et paix,” 123.

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God is like an axle that remains immobile even as the parts of the wheel turn around it (161). Virginie Minet-Mahy has remarked that this is a clear “elaboration of an image-model in the scientific sense of the term.”108 However, when we read the image in the context of Espérance’s speech, during which she has just deplored the human reliance on the bodily senses, we understand that she is downplaying the metaphor’s worth even as she illustrates its utility. Mortals rely on mental models because “homme ne congnoist riens s’il ne lui est representé par les sens de dehors” (man knows nothing if it is not presented to him via his bodily senses, 160). This overreliance on bodily stimuli is precisely the fault that Espérance seeks to remedy: she presents Entendement with a metaphorical, mechanical mental model only so that he will learn enough that he might no longer resort to such cognitive aids. Otherwise his mental rust, like the material rust described in the Livre des propriétés des choses, would be ever more likely to return to the same spot from which it has been scraped away. Instead, the very mental structure from which Entendement has begun to remove the rust is one that, once the subject has achieved enlightenment, will no longer exist in its present form.

108 “Ici clairement on a affaire à l’élaboration d’une image-modèle dans le sens scientifique du terme: la métaphore permet au sujet de comprendre une réalité obscure, de saisir le sens couvert” (Here one is clearly presented with the elaboration of an image-model in the scientific sense of the term: the metaphor permits the subject to understand an obscure reality, to grasp the hidden meaning). Minet-Mahy, Esthétique et pouvoir de l’œuvre allégorique, 474.

Epilogue: Men Without Machines What I hope to have shown in the preceding chapters is that the human mind is quite commonly figured in metallic or machine-like terms in later medieval French texts. Political engagement, in particular, requires the activation of these cognitive processes in the exercise of virtue. Delving deeper into these metaphors, and into the network of scientific, textual, and cultural allusions that they “map,” sheds light on the productive power as well as the political utility of metaphor in late medieval France. Such discourses long predate the reign of Charles VI, but the stakes of machine metaphors for cognitive function increase dramatically following the crisis of August 1392: questions of mental illness are thrust to the forefront of political discourse, even as the terms by which mental illness can be portrayed are increasingly circumscribed. At the end of Charles’s reign, in response to the calamities of Agincourt and the Treaty of Troyes, Alain Chartier converts the image of a rusted engin from a model of princely cognition to a mental model of the poet himself. This rhetorical move is particularly suggestive of the creative power of scientific metaphor, its potential to remap both biological and poetic constructs of consciousness, memory, and intellect. The examples cited thus far have brought us to the cusp of major political change: the coronation of Charles VII, and the turning of the tide of the Hundred Years’ War. Though the political landscape is vastly different in the mid- to late fifteenth century than it was a hundred years earlier, natural scientific knowledge remains similar to what it was in the time of Charles V; not surprisingly, rust and other inorganic metaphors continue to be deployed in political literature, such as in Jean Juvénal des Ursins’s Verba mea auribus percipe, domine (1452) or Jean Meschinot’s Lunettes des Princes (1461–65). But I do not claim, in the closing pages of this book, to trace the history of the rust metaphor further forward in time, nor do I seek to pin the rust metaphor’s continued fortune to political circumstances, nor to developments in the history of science or technology. Instead I will end this study with brief remarks on two late medieval writers, both of whom engage thoughtfully with the metaphorical world of Alain Chartier: Charles d’Orléans, who deploys the rust metaphor to novel effect, and George Chastelain, who rewrites the Livre de l’Espérance but erases Chartier’s “mental model.” Rather than “concluding” the study, my closing

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remarks will use these last two examples as a springboard to a few final thoughts about the intersections of poetry, politics, and the mind. Tout enroillié de Nonchaloir The Livre de l’Espérance is fascinating in part because of its obviously fictionalized first-person account of suicidal impulses stemming from despair at political and social disorder, and the apolitical remedies it proposes in order to counter such pathological thought processes. It is crucial to note, nonetheless, that pathology is not corrected by apathy. For Chartier, an excessive lack of engagement (designated by the term non challance) is just as blameworthy as the misdirected political engagement illustrated in the prologues to the Quadrilogue invectif and the Livre de l’Espérance. Dame Melancholy is described as “comme non chalant de son habit” (as if she didn’t care about her dress, 3), and a comparable nonchalance is simply not a viable option for the Acteur or his Entendement, according to the Virtues. Foy opines that following the reign of Charles V, France lost its former peace and prosperity “par non challance de bien faiz” (through indifference to good deeds, 66); the “non chaloir” of Paresse is a vice (88), and one of the sure signs of divine punishment is the fact that “les hommes cheent en non chailance de remede en adversité” (men fall into indifference to the remedies for their adversity, 79). Espérance adds that God will not help those who decline to help themselves: “Et si tu te laisses couller en non challance, il te laissera non chalu” (And if you let yourself plunge into indifference, he will leave you unwarmed, 102). The negative consequences of non challance in the Livre de l’Espérance stand in stark contrast to the best-known fifteenth-century literary deployment of that concept: Charles d’Orléans’s Nonchaloir, the particular form of not-caring that recurs as a protective or healing presence throughout the duke’s lyrics, especially his later production.1 The duke of Orléans, whose familiarity with the works of Alain Chartier is well documented,2 offers an alternate model of protective disengagement: the evocation of the rust of Nonchaloir in two of his ballades lays bare a very different allegorical and physiological configuration of the mind. Charles’s use of metaphor is unlike that which we have observed in earlier texts, for, as Claudio Galderisi has convincingly argued, he reimagines the way in which a reader draws upon her mental “encyclopedia” in order to 1 Charles’s Nonchaloir has been much commented. The fundamental studies remain Costanza Pasquali, “Charles d’Orléans e il suo ‘Nonchaloir,” in Studi in onore di Angelo Monteverdi (Modena: Società tipografica editrice modenese, 1959), vol. II, 549–70; Shigemi Sasaki, Sur le thème de nonchaloir dans la poésie de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Nizet, 1974). 2 See Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince. L’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: PUF, 1965), 286.

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interpret his images.3 With the image of rust, in particular, Charles simultaneously “crystallizes” a familiar phenomenon from the material world (to use Daniel Poirion’s apt term4) and defamiliarizes it, inserting it into the “parallel plane” of his mental world.5 The rust of Nonchaloir is but a small element in a vast “mental landscape,”6 a tiny feature in an unmappable universe of metaphors and reifications – but an important one, at once novel, frequent, and distinct from the duke’s other personifications.7 Indeed, given the novelty of the figure of Nonchaloir, and its association with rust precisely at the point when personified Nonchaloir emerges as a major force in the duke’s lyric world, the rust metaphor serves less as a model of the poet-persona’s mind than as a key to another metaphor. Charles introduces the rust metaphor at a turning point in his poetic corpus, using it to mark an evolution from amorous youth to melancholic old age. This effect is amplified in the mid-fifteenth-century English and Latin translations of the duke’s lyrics, which, even more than the French lyrics in the duke’s personal manuscript, rewrite the dynamics of desire, politics, and Fortune. Charles d’Orléans describes Nonchaloir as a rusting agent in two poems, Ballades 72 and 84 (Champion’s Ballade 108).8 In the first, and arguably more

3 Claudio Galderisi, En regardant vers le païs de France. Charles d’Orléans: Une poésie des présents (Orléans: Paradigme, 2007), 138, 143. 4 For Poirion, “c’est la cristallisation autour d’une image qui devient le principe du montage poétique” (it is crystallization around an image that becomes the principle of his poetic montage). Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince, 393. 5 As Susan L. Stakel writes, “he constructs his literary world on a plane parallel to that of the real world:” “Allegory and Artistic Production in the Poetry of Charles d’Orléans,” Fifteenth Century Studies 14 (1988): 168. 6 On world-building in Charles’s poetry, and the use of metaphoric places to map the poet’s “mental landscape,” see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “Espèces d’espaces. Espace physique et espace mental dans la poésie de Charles d’Orléans,” Moyen Français 70 (2012): 7–20. 7 Paul Zumthor notes that of Charles’s personifications, only Nonchaloir and Vieillesse exist outside of the poet’s “allegorical fields,” or networks of morphosemantically-related personifications; for this reason, he argues, they are “fortement valorisés” (strongly valorized). Paul Zumthor, “Charles d’Orléans et le langage de l’allégorie,” in Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune, vol. 2 (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1969), 1490. On the novelty and originality of the duke’s Nonchaloir, see among others Claudio Galderisi, “Personnifications, réifications et métaphores créatives dans le système rhétorique de Charles d’Orléans,” Romania 114 (1996): 385–412. 8 I cite Charles’s French poetry from Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and John Fox, which reorders the poems subsequent to the fonds ancien on the basis of painstaking codicological research; I also furnish Champion’s numbering wherever Arn and Fox deviate from it, as his is the reference edition for most Aurelian scholarship. I use R. Barton Palmer’s English translations from the Arn and Fox edition, except where modifications are noted.

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important,9 the first-person lyric persona describes a state of agraphia: “rassoty” (become a fool, v. 13) and “tout enroillié de Nonchaloir” (all rusty with Indifference, refrain), he has abandoned the practice of love poetry. He finally expresses the hope that he might have himself “scraped” (“fourbir,” v. 38) and thereby renewed. Like earlier metaphors, this one suggests the possibility of restoration through pedagogical interaction, yet the ballade’s emphasis on solitary disengagement is quite distant from the ethos of improvement that underlies the use of the rust metaphor in mirrors for princes, sermons, and Chartier’s prosimetrum. Charles uses rust as a tool with which to meditate on a contrast between past and present states of being, but without the realistic prospect of converting this meditation into poetic production, or any other action contributing to the greater good. The image of rust that emerges in Ballade 72 – as an affliction that marks the passage of time but that, with the right tools, can be remedied – is reinforced through the poem’s sophisticated manipulation of temporality. Largely writing in the present and passé composé, Charles evokes past experiences and their effect on his current state. Like Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier, he presents his sadness and his lack of writerly productivity as a response to external factors: “Car ennuy et pensees maintes / M’ont tenu long temps endormy” (For boredom and many thoughts have long kept me asleep, vv. 3–4). The distinction between the present and the past is underscored in stanza 3, where the strong caesura in v. 26, followed by an enjambment and the rejet of “j’ay esté” at beginning of v. 27, plays up the contrast. Amoureux ont parolles paintes Et langage frois et joly. Plaisance dont ilz sont accointes Parle pour eulx. En ce party J’ay esté, or n’est plus ainsi. (vv. 23–27) Those in love utter fancy words And speech both novel and elegant. Pleasure, whose friends they are, Speaks for them. Of their number I have been, but now it is no longer so.10

9 Unlike Ballade 84, Ballade 72 was translated into English and Latin. Poirion calls it an “importante ballade” in Le Poète et le Prince, 293. 10 This translation is modified from Palmer’s in order to maintain the contrast between past and present supported by the original versification.

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The ballade’s lyric persona also looks to the future, especially as he approaches the refrain. In the first stanza the poet expresses a desire to begin writing again “pour passer soussy” (in order to expel care, v. 5); he will do what he can (“j’en feray mon povoir,” v. 8), but he expects to fail, surmising that “mon langage trouveray / Tout enroillié de Nonchaloir” (I’ll find my words / All rusty with Indifference, vv. 10–11). The rust is explicitly notional: theorized but not yet substantiated by the lyric persona. Likewise, in the second stanza he predicts that “je vendray aux attaintes / Quant beau parler m’aura failly” (I will be at wit’s end when eloquence will have failed me, vv. 14–15).11 The use of the future perfect establishes a clean, if prospective, sequence of events; in the third stanza, however, the lyric persona complicates this psychological chronology. He states that his “beau parler” (beautiful speech) will be assayed and found to be rusted, but he characterizes this rust as a present, not a future state: “Il est, quant vendra a l’essay, / Tout enroillié de Nonchaloir” (it is, when it will be put to the test, / All rusty with Indifference, vv. 32–33, translation modified, emphasis added). Lastly, in the envoi, because Bon Espoir has promised the lyric persona that he will recover, he resolves, “Pource mon cueur fourbir feray / Tout enroillié de Nonchaloir” (For [this reason] I’ll have my heart scraped clean, which is / All rusty with Indifference, vv. 38–39). The image of having oneself scraped (fourbir) ties this ballade to a long pedagogical tradition, as outlined in the first two chapters of this book. Here, though, the lyric persona appropriates himself a new sort of agency. He states quite explicitly that he will be the one to decide to have his heart scraped, but he never specifies who will do the scraping: the student commands, and subsumes, his teacher. Nor is it even apparent that such scraping will ever be needed. Paradoxically, the poet expresses “in ballade form that he can not or will not compose ballades,”12 furnishing another example of the counterintuitive “surcroît mystérieux de pouvoir” (mysterious surge of power) that Jean Starobinski details in Charles’s poems about melancholy.13 The fact that this poem has already been written suggests that the “rust” the speaker expects to find is nonexistent, or is not a complete barrier to function, or has already been removed by other means, or has in fact inspired rather than deterred artistic creation. In Ballade 84, rust reappears as a descriptive detail rather than a primary focus. Wearing armor rusted with Nonchaloir and mounted on a horse crushed 11 Here I diverge again from Palmer’s translation, which I believe misinterprets the expression “vendray aux atteintes.” Palmer renders the phrase as “I’ll achieve my goal,” but the context suggests that here Charles is talking about failure, pushing him to the limits of what he can withstand. 12 Mary-Jo Arn, The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d’Orléans (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 25458) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 149. 13 Starobinski, “L’encre de la mélancolie,” 423.

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by Weakness (“Portant harnoys rouillé de Nonchaloir / Sus monture foulee de Foiblesse,” vv. 1–2), the lyric persona has been ejected from the army of Lïesse (Joy) and fears he will be conscripted into that of Vieillesse (Old Age) – hence the refrain, “Las! fauldra il son soudart devenir?” (Alas, am I to become her soldier?). The switch in allegiance from Lïesse to Vieillesse brings with it all sorts of status changes: from noble knight to “soudart” (mercenary), from health to debility and disease. As a “soudart,” the lyric persona becomes unmoored from any principled allegiance: likewise, while the antecedent of “son soudart” is clearly Vieillesse in the first two stanzas, the antecedent becomes less certain in the third stanza and in the envoi, where context opens a wider range of possibilities.14 The persona’s embodiment is similarly unfixed: the “foibles jambes” (feeble legs) in v. 17 are not attached to any single body, but could variously be interpreted as belonging to Bon Vouloir, to the lyric persona, or even to the persona’s horse.15 Paradoxically, though the lyric persona in this ballade presents himself “portant harnoys,” the poem progressively reveals his increasing vulnerability. The armor, and perhaps Nonchaloir, can no longer protect him. Bon Vouloir can remain in his company “Quant, Dieu mercy, Maladie ne presse” (When, thank God, Illness does not torment me, v. 20, translation modified), but the end of life presents a constant threat (“la fin de menasser ne cesse,” life’s end never stops threatening, v. 23) and the envoi acknowledges the inevitability of death. The ballade is all about loss, from the loss of metallic material (as armor is eaten away by rust) to the loss of life. The poem also signals a loss of the idealism inherent in mirrors for princes.16 For the one thing the persona has to gain from the company of Vieillesse, he says, is “un peu d’atrempee sagesse” (a bit of temperate wisdom, v. 10). Temperate wisdom is precisely what mirrors for princes and other works of political parenesis seek to inculcate in their readers; but Charles minimizes it (“un peu”) and finds that in achieving it, one also inflicts mental distress upon oneself.

14 The lyric persona might be referring to himself as Bon Vouloir’s soldier in the third stanza, and as Mort’s in the fourth. It also appears that the meaning of the refrain’s question changes: while initially the “Las” expresses anguish at the prospect of joining Vieillesse, in the latter half of the poem it also appears to express trepidation at the thought of dying before reaching old age. The only thing worse than getting old is not getting old. 15 Palmer interprets the legs as belonging to Bon Vouloir. Logically it makes the most sense that these be the lyric “je”’s legs, but given that it was his “monture” who was previously described as the victim of “Foiblesse,” it is certainly possible that the horse’s legs are carrying both poet and personified Will. 16 This reading reinforces Florence Bouchet’s argument that Nonchaloir “incarne une forme de sagesse désabusée” (embodies a form of disillusioned wisdom), marking a movement, in Charles’s lyric, from the “false wisdom” of courtly love to the “interior wisdom” of serenity. Florence Bouchet, “Les ballades de Charles d’Orléans, une quête de sagesse?” Moyen Français 70 (2012): 21–33.

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With temperate wisdom come “Ennuy, Soussy, Desplaisir et Destresse” (Worry, Care, Misery, and Distress, v. 12). The ballade’s “métaphore grinçante, lyrisme grimaçant” (trenchant metaphor and contorted lyricism, as Poirion memorably describes them17) indicate that the noble ideals of princely conduct literature may levy too burdensome a price on its addressees. Read together, the two rust poems enact a demedicalizing, and denaturalizing transformation of the rust of Nonchaloir. First, Ballade 72 presents the image of rust while actively dodging any temptation to pinpoint the location of the corroded metal part within the body. Initially it is not a physical organ, but his langage, that the lyric persona expects to find rusted. Later the metallic dimensions of langage are developed even further, with an extended metaphor of coinage and currency in the third stanza. Back when he was eloquent, he says, he found as many choice words as he wanted, “a bon marchié” (at a cheap price, v. 29). Now he has spent his knowledge (“ay despendu mon savoir,” v. 30), saving only a little (“un peu espargnié en ay,” v. 31), and he suspects that when he sends his remaining treasure to be assayed, he will find it rusted. It is not language itself, but language in its specific capacity as the currency through which knowledge is exchanged, that is becoming degraded. Whereas langage remains tied to the body (the langue that speaks it), the treasure of savoir belongs more firmly to the realm of the symbolic. When he seeks a remedy for the hypothetical rust, however, the lyric persona relocates the corrosion to a physical organ, his “cueur.”18 Paradoxically, by abandoning the metallic language of coinage and assay, he finds an organic object that can more easily be “scraped,” thanks to the long-standing pedagogical metaphor of the file. While the turn to anatomy and Bon Espoir in the envoi might seem to echo the remedy offered in the Livre de l’Espérance, here Charles is in fact proposing a different and less embodied model of cognition. Constantly shifting from one stanza to the next, with its origin finally revealed to lie in the heart rather than in the brain, the language of amorous poetry eludes any effort to spatialize or “model” its progress. As the site of the disillusioned persona’s rust is redefined, from language to knowledge, heart, and later armor, it becomes ever more difficult to map the persona’s inner life in relation to the metallic objects external to his body. Everything becomes a flattened surface.19 Charles’s repeated use

Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince, 568. The heart is more than just a physical organ, of course; as Sasaki observes, Charles places little importance on the heart-as-organ in his poetic works (Sur le thème de nonchaloir, 56). Here the cueur represents a cognitive/linguistic capacity that happens to share its name with a body part, along the same lines as langage. 19 This development of the rust metaphor anticipates the flattening literalization that Zumthor observes in Charles’s later lyric. “Charles d’Orléans et le langage de l’allégorie,” 1500. 17 18

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of the rust metaphor only brings his reader ever further from anything resembling a “mental model.”20 The language of renewal or restoration in Ballade 72 resonates with the significant number of poems in which Nonchaloir is personified as a physician.21 It is already paradoxical, as Shigemi Sasaki points out, for Nonchaloir, or No Care (as it is called in the English poems), to be responsible for caring for the patient.22 This contradiction is thrown into even greater relief in the rust ballades, for while Nonchaloir is usually seen as a positive force in Charles’s poetry, in these two instances he is presented as destructive. In Ballades 72 and 84 he wears away the lyric persona’s protective armor and eats away at the essence of his identity, undermining Nonchaloir’s more typical presentation in Charles’s poetry as an active choice, a willed state of protective disengagement.23 Charles’s rust metaphors are also syntactically atypical within the poet’s corpus, constructing a relationship of agency rather than identification. The poet has a clear, and much-studied penchant for metaphors consisting of two nouns linked by “de:” the “Forêt de Longue Attente,” for example, or the “livre de pensée.” In these, Charles creates “composites of the concrete and the abstract” in which “it is the concrete noun which seems to subsume its abstract partner, giving it its own material substance.”24 But the rust metaphor is different: here the “de,” linking past participle to agent, creates a passive construction. He, his language, his heart, his armor, all of these concrete bodies are subsumed to Nonchaloir, powerless to resist. The poetic subject becomes metaphorical object. Rather than his mind being constructed as a working system that might lend some of its concreteness to personified Nonchaloir, his body and its covering instead become more alike; both are reduced to a simple substrate on which for Nonchaloir to do its corrosive work. The material world is pulled away from the natural order. The particular application of rust to an abstraction, to langage, denaturalizes the metaphor and complicates the reader’s dependence on her “encyclopedia.”25 For Ballade 72 overtly constructs a similarity that defies the 20 Charles does make occasional use of machine metaphors: the wheel of Fortune and, in one notable instance, the “moulin de pensee.” For Sasaki, the “moulin de pensee” is associated with the wheel of Fortune (Sur le thème de nonchaloir, 120). Virginie Minet-Mahy also ties the metaphor to mystical imagery. Virginie Minet-Mahy, “Charles d’Orléans et son moulin de pensée: Allégorie et polysémie,” Lettres romanes 53 (1999): 13–27. 21 See on this subject Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince, 574–76. 22 Sur le thème de nonchaloir, 106. 23 On Nonchaloir as a willed state or an active choice, see Pasquali, “Charles d’Orléans,” 558. 24 Stakel, “Allegory and Artistic Production,” 167. She is rephrasing the argument made by Zumthor in “Charles d’Orléans et le langage de l’allégorie.” 25 My thinking is informed by Claudio Galderisi’s rigorous and eye-opening study of Charles’s use of metaphor. Galderisi, En regardant, 127–61.

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logic of the natural world, allowing for the physical transformation of an immaterial quality. When cognition is seen as coming from a palpable, physiological place, as in Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance, it requires only a few small logical steps to construe these places as being constructed of materials susceptible to rust; but when linguistic production can be rusted without existing in any concrete form, as in Charles’s ballade, the resulting meaning diverges ever further from literal sense.26 In these poems, the departure from the more usual construction of Nonchaloir as a protector represents not an insignificant, momentary variation, but a crucial turning point in Charles’s lyric sequence – as it becomes especially clear when Ballade 72 in French is read in parallel with the English version (British Library, MS Harley 682) and in the light of the poem’s resequencing in the bilingual French-Latin manuscript whose production Charles oversaw near the end of his life (Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 873). The ballade is already situated near a turning point in the original French sequence, as recorded in the duke’s personal manuscript: it is one of the last ballades of what Champion called the ancien fonds, the core of poems written in England or shortly after the duke’s release from captivity. As such it appears at a key moment in the chronology of the French sequence’s composition, in its thematic shifts from love to melancholy and from youth to old age, and in its formal progression from ballades to rondeaux.27 The key role played by Nonchaloir, whom Poirion pithily characterizes as the “symbol of [Charles’s] psychological conversion,” renders Ballade 72 particularly significant.28 Christopher Lucken has written emphatically of this ballade, calling it a “new point of departure” within the

26 In this respect the feature transfer inherent in the metaphor of the “rust of Nonchaloir” mirrors that in many of Charles’s metaphors, according to Galderisi: “Ce transfert de contenus implique une absurdité du sens de la lettre et par conséquent une fausseté de l’encyclopédie, qui devrait être ressentie comme telle aussi bien par le poète que par son lecteur” (this transfer of content implies an absurdity in the literal sense and thus a falseness in the encyclopedia, which must be felt as such by the poet as well as his reader). Galderisi, En regardant, 138. 27 For Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, the turn to melancholy is a liberating move. “D’Alain Chartier à Octovien de Saint-Gelais: Enjeux du lyrisme à l’ère du doute,” Perspectives médiévales 28 suppl. (2002): 119. The bibliography on melancholy in the works of Charles d’Orléans is quite extensive: see in particular Michèle Gally, “La ‘merencolie,’ nouvel ethos lyrique? L’art subtil de Charles d’Orléans,” Le Moyen Français 70 (2012): 73–82; Pilar Andrade Boué, “Quelques aspects de la Merencolie de Charles d’Orléans,” Thélème 15 (2000): 167–77; Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “Le matin mélancolique. Relecture d’un topos d’ouverture aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 45 (1993): 7–22. 28 Le Poète et le Prince, 291. Poirion also asserts that this portion of the manuscript constitutes a “turning point,” ibid., 559.

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duke’s corpus, an “art poétique” elucidating his new poetics of rupture and renunciation.29 The pivotal role of Ballade 72 in Charles’s poetic trajectory is even more evident in the English poem sequence, published by Mary-Jo Arn in 1994 under the title Fortunes Stabilnes.30 The question of whether Charles authored the English poems remains unresolved, and while I find the arguments in favor of Charles’s authorship of the English lyrics compelling, I do not propose to relitigate the matter here.31 Suffice it to say that regardless of their authorship, the English manuscript illustrates how Charles’s earlier lyrics could be “repurposed” in service of a revised narrative. The English book shows a significant overlap with the French ancien fonds, though there are added English poems with no French counterpart; in the English book, unlike the French one, the lyrics are arranged as a coherent narrative sequence within a verse frame. The eighty-third ballade, “Baladis, songis, and complayntis” (247–48), hews quite closely to Ballade 72 in French. Notably, in the English version it is the poet’s “tonge” that he will find “rollid in No Care” – a more ambiguous phrasing that might indicate a body part as well as an intellectual capacity. Other departures include the near-elimination of the coinage metaphor in the third stanza, replaced with a greater emphasis on degradation and mental decline: whereas French persona “deviens assoty” (v. 13), the English speaker is “forsotid in foly” (v. 3082); whereas the French speaker’s sweet words are “estaintes” (extinguished, v. 12, my translation), the English speaker calls his words “disyoentis” (v. 3081) and adds that they now “ly in decay” (v. 3099); his tongue is “fer out of aray” (v. 3102). The English persona’s tongue falls apart organically – disjointed, decayed – and there is no more hope for a remedy. Rust does not move to the English speaker’s heart, and the speaker does not call upon Good Hope or anyone else to remove it: “And yet for fere my tonge saith ‘Nay, nay, nay!’ / Forwhi y fynde him rollid in No Care” (3108–9).

29 Christopher Lucken, “Le coffin d’oublie de Charles d’Orléans,” in Figures de l’oubli (IVe – XVIe siècle), ed. Patrizia Romagnoli and Barbara Wahlen (Lausanne: Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Lausanne, 2007), 238. 30 Mary-Jo Arn, Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love: A Critical Edition (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994). 31 Key publications in this debate are, on the pro-Charles side, John Fox, “Charles d’Orléans, poète anglais?” Romania 86 (1965): 433–62; on the anti-Charles side, William Calin, “Will the Real Charles of Orleans Please Stand! or Who Wrote the English Poems in Harley 682?” in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 69–86. Arn, also an advocate for Charles’s authorship of the English poems, carefully details the current understanding of Charles’s command of English in Fortunes Stabilnes 29–32 and summarizes the authorship debate in 32–37.

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Moreover, the position of the rust ballade within the English narrative frame signals a major life change and a “change [in the lyric persona’s] relation to writing.”32 Picking up on the reference to “jubilé” in Ballade 72, v. 34, which many critics have used in an attempt to date the French poem,33 the English sequence develops the poet’s retirement as a major component of its narrative arc. After the English Ballade 83 announces the persona’s “Iewbile” (v. 3104), the following ballade, which has no French equivalent, announces the retirement feast – setting up the presentation of the roundels, which begin immediately afterward, as the tasty morsels being served. Thus the rust ballade signals a thematic as well as generic shift.34 Rust forecloses an entire category of literary production and necessitates a major discursive change, but also inspires new creativity. Rust’s effects on the “tonge” may also bear political implications, as Rory Critten has argued; for if English writers attributed Charles’s danger as an adversary to his intelligence and powers of speech, depiction of tonguerust may be seen to enable more than one sort of creative liberation.35 Moreover, Charles’s English sequence signals a fundamental departure from the machine logic that underpins so many of the texts I have been studying. In the French and English ballades alike, Charles’s use of metaphor marks a new model of interiority, as the lyric persona’s psyche is represented as a series of buildings, furniture, and geographic features – even his interior is seen as a series of largely impenetrable exterior surfaces, which he navigates but never maps. This tendency toward static surfaces rather than dynamic models is compounded, in the English poems, through the rewriting of the lyric persona’s relationship to Fortune. Whereas Fortune has traditionally been depicted as the mistress of an unpredictably mobile wheel and efforts to counteract her influence have focused on immobilizing her wheel, as seen in Chapter One, in Charles’s

32 A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 228–29. Charles’s English poems are discussed in 225–47. 33 The “jubilé” has been taken to refer to the poet’s fiftieth birthday, which fell in 1444. For a defense of this dating see Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince, 293; see also the entry “Jubilé” in Daniel Poirion, Le lexique de Charles d’Orléans dans les ballades (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 89. However, Arn and Fox suggest that “jubilé” be read less literally, and surmise that the poem may, like the preceding Songe, have been written in 1437. Poetry of Charles d’Orléans, 876–77. 34 This is a transformation grounded in the language of the French ballade’s envoi, as John Fox points out: the jubilé and the conviction that renouvelleray are expanded into the English sequence’s “Book of Jubilee” and “Love’s Renewal.” Fox, “Charles d’Orléans,” 459. 35 Rory G. Critten, “The Political Valence of Charles d’Orléans’s English Poetry,” Modern Philology 111 (2014): 361.

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English poems Fortune is reproached for the immobility of her wheel.36 In what Mary-Jo Arn characterizes as “an image unique in the vast medieval lore concerning Fortune,” the speaker has been trapped, for far too long, at the bottom of her unmoving wheel.37 In fact, this is the logical flip side of the more familiar imagery of Fortune. If Renart or Edward IV can stop Fortune’s wheel with himself on top, it only stands to reason that someone else will remain wedged underneath. So if Fredet can laud Nonchaloir as protection against Fortune in a complainte copied in the duke’s notebook,38 it is not because Nonchaloir stops the wheel’s movement – to do so might create more problems than it resolves! – but because he simply does not care whether the wheel rises or falls. Accordingly, although in Charles’s later French lyric Nonchaloir becomes therapeutic, a state to be desired, in the English sequence it is not: immobilization with the rust of Nonchaloir simply means that one is stuck in a bad situation. The state of being “rollid in No Care” illustrates how a mechanism, like Fortune’s wheel, becomes a trap. The ballade’s contribution to a thematic turning point in the duke’s poetic project is also evident in its position within the Grenoble manuscript, wherein it takes on added political significance. This book, which A. E. B. Coldiron has characterized as both “an end-of-life effort to establish a permanent world-lyric œuvre” and a significant rearrangement of the corpus indicating “what final shape and emphasis the poet wanted his work to take,”39 offers a bilingual edition of selected lyric poems, framed with Latin verse and epistles penned by the translator, Antonio Astesano.40 The poems are arranged thematically, divided into seven sections; Ballade 72 appears in the sixth section, which, as Coldiron explains in her groundbreaking study of this manuscript, marks a pivot from amorous to political poetry. The ballade appears in a context similar to that in the duke’s personal manuscript: this section consists of the Songe en complainte, the Requeste, the Départie d’amours, and then a sequence of six ballades, 36 While Fortune is also a major presence in the French poems, these do not place a similar emphasis on immobility. On Fortune in the French poems, and her relationship to Nonchaloir, see Sasaki, Sur le thème de nonchaloir, 71–77, 141–45, 212. 37 Arn, Fortunes Stabilnes, 10. Arn takes her edition’s title from the ballade in vv. 4680– 4735, another of the English-only poems. 38 Poetry of Charles d’Orléans, 330. 39 A. E. B. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 119. On the question of the depth of Charles’s involvement with the production of this manuscript, see also Arn, The Poet’s Notebook, 161n41. 40 On Antonio Astesano, see Marco Balzaretti, “Antonio Astesano traduttore di Charles d’Orléans,” Studi francesi 29 (1985): 58–62; Renato Bordone and Donatella Gnetti, “Cortesia, corti, cortigiani: Asti all’autunno del medioevo,” in L’Affermarsi della corte sabauda: Dinastie, poteri, élites in Piemonte e Savoia fra tardo medioevo e prima età moderna, ed. Paola Bianchi and Luisa C. Gentile (Torino: Zamorani, 2006), 206.

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including Ballade 72, followed by ten shorter poems. As in the duke’s personal manuscript, Ballade 72 is followed immediately by Ballade 73, “L’emplastre de Nonchaloir.” This pair of ballades appears squarely in the middle of the section – and then the Grenoble manuscript diverges from the duke’s notebook, following “L’emplastre de Nonchaloir” with two later ballades and with ten rondeaux and chansons. What makes Ballades 72 and 73 important to the Grenoble manuscript’s sequence is that they stand at the cusp of a reconfiguration of the sequence, as everything that follows them in Section VI has been reordered in order to rewrite the overarching narrative to which the lyrics contribute. For if the duke’s personal manuscript constructs “a sort of dit-inside-out,” as Mary-Jo Arn calls it,41 the Grenoble manuscript is more like a lyric reconsideration of the songe politique: the love lyric serves as an elaborate preface showing how the lyric persona came to abandon amorous pursuits in favor of more serious political truths. As Coldiron remarks, section VI ends with the double rondeau “Que voulez-vous que plus vous die” (What more would you have me tell you: Arn and Fox’s Rondeau 73, Champion’s Rondeau 60) – and the answer, apparently, is to turn to “war, morality, diplomacy, kingship, and nationhood.”42 Similarly, in Ballade 72 the declaration of an abandonment of “balades, chançons et complaintes” is repurposed as a synecdoche for the poetic corpus’s newly constructed turn from questions of love to weightier matters of war and peace. Rust is not a state of mind, but as it concretizes the exhausted potential of amorous lyric, it opens new doors to the poet. The Grenoble manuscript reorders the duke’s book so that closure is to be found in a turn toward politics and actuality, not away from it (as in the Livre de l’Espérance); whereas Chartier’s fictive Acteur responds to political reality with a deeply personal pain, in the Grenoble manuscript, conversely, “the personal is answered by the political.”43 The structure of the Grenoble manuscript supports Deborah McGrady’s contestation of the traditional exclusion of Charles from the ranks of the late medieval poètes engagés.44 Indeed, as Critten remarks, the ordering of the poems in the Grenoble manuscript “appears designed to stress the importance of the political role played by the duke in the closing

Arn, The Poet’s Notebook, 60. Coldiron, Canon, Period, 129. Ibid., 143. “Although these silences [on Agincourt and Joan of Arc] may justify Joël Blanchard and Jean-Claude Mühlethaler’s exclusion of Charles from their study of poètes engagés, it is nonetheless crucial to acknowledge that his verse bears the deep psychological wounds caused by wartime trauma.” Deborah McGrady, “‘Guerre ne sert que de tourment:’ Remembering War in the Poetic Correspondence of Charles d’Orléans,” in Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World, ed. Noah D. Guynn and Zrinka Stahuljak (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 153. 41 42 43 44

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decades of the Hundred Years’ War.”45 But his is an engagement out of time: it is effected only through a careful rearrangement and recontextualization of the lyric artefacts, unmooring them from both their order of composition and their order of presentation in the duke’s personal manuscript.46 In this regard, too, Ballade 72 distills the broader purpose of its section of the Grenoble manuscript – an illustration of how the turn away from amorous discourse might allow for a new mode of political expression – into a powerful, condensed expression: the ballade’s disrupted temporality of present suffering precipitated by future rust prepares the way for the paradoxical, engaged atemporality of the political lyric with which the Grenoble manuscript concludes. Nonchaloir has broken the temporal bonds that allow meditations on the contrast between past and present to color current and future mental states. Remapping Chartier’s Mind Charles d’Orléans is but one of many mid-fifteenth-century writers to revisit and subvert the poetic commonplaces of courtly lyrics and dits, and his refiguration of mental rust as “the rust of Nonchaloir” is not the only way of rethinking the utility of rust as a metaphor for writerly cognition or production. Whereas the duke retains the image of rust but disengages it from any anatomically informed model of mental processes, his younger Burgundian contemporary George Chastelain does rather the opposite: in his Exposicions sur Verité mal prise Chastelain offers a view into the authorial mind, but one that resists any suggestion of mental rust. In the Exposicions Chastelain appropriates the narrative of Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance in defense of one of his own poems, now known as the Dit de Verité. Composed between March 1459 and July 1461, and thus overlapping with his early career as a Burgundian chronicler, the Exposicions explore the author-narrator’s relation to both political subject matter and his contemporary audience.47 Penning this remarkable self-gloss,48 Chastelain revindicates his Critten, “The Political Valence,” 354. McGrady notes the “atemporality” of many of Charles’s peace lyrics, despite their engagement with current events. “Guerre ne sert que de tourment,” 157. 47 On the dating of the text, see Jean-Claude Delclos’s introduction to his edition. Georges Chastellain, Les Exposicions sur Verité mal prise. Le Dit de Verité, ed. Jean-Claude Delclos (Paris: Champion, 2005), 8. 48 Claude Thiry calls the Exposicions “un document à vrai dire assez exceptionnel pour l’époque: une auto-glose presque complète, qui constitue un remarquable témoignage de première main sur le travail de l’écrivain, en même temps qu’un manifeste pour la dignité de l’homme de lettres” (a document that is truly quite exceptional for the period: an almost complete self-gloss, which constitutes a remarkable firsthand witness to the author’s work, at the same time a manifesto for the dignity of the man of letters). Claude Thiry, “Stylistique et auto-critique: Georges Chastelain et l’Exposition sur Verité mal prise,” in Actes du VIe colloque 45 46

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own authorial career – but the carefully staged dialogue of his inner faculties repels all efforts to read it, like Chartier’s, as a mental model. At the beginning of the Exposicions the authorial persona sits in his study, wavering “entre faire et laissier, entre accuser et parer” (between working and abandoning work, between criticizing and ornamenting, 28). His state of consciousness does not correspond to a traditional dorveille, but constitutes an overtly writerly equivalent: indecision as to whether or not to write, and in a meliorative or invective tone.49 Suddenly four monsters come knocking at the four corners of his estude: vindrent a la croisure de mon estude crier quatre impetueuses voix moult agües, et disant icelles: “Oeuvre cy ! Oeuvre !,” fellement fraperent sur huys et fenestres, qui toutes churent du cop et y entrerent quatre dames moult espoentables en regart… (28) four impetuous and very sharp voices came crying at the corners of my study, saying, “Open here! Open!” They aggressively knocked on the doors and windows, which all fell from the blow, and there entered four ladies, very frightening in aspect.

The four figures whose blows knock down all of the windows and doors are Indignation, Reprobacion, Accusacion, and Vindicacion. Incensed at the criticisms leveled at the French crown in Chastelain’s Dit de Verité, they harangue the Acteur, leaving him paralyzed except for his sense of sight: “comme homme a demi mort et qui n’avoie riens en vigueur fors seulement la fantasie ou tout je recueilloie” (like a man half-dead who had strength in nothing but my fantasy, where I received all, 29). The Acteur’s soul comes to his aid, bucking him up with a reminder of the many texts he has authored; she then transforms into a “trinity” consisting of Entendement, Memoire, and Volenté. The four attackers begin to shrink back (“commencerent a reculer ung petit en arriere,” 47); their ally Ymaginacion Françoise (French Imagination, i.e., a personification of the negative French reception of the Dit de Verité) appears and urges them to stand their ground. Then the Exposicions begin in earnest: as Ymagination Françoise attacks the Dit de Verité, quoting from the earlier text at length, Entendement and the other faculties defend the work on both moral and stylistic grounds. After the dialogue, the text ends not with an sur le Moyen Français, Milano, 4–6 mai 1988, vol. 3 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1991), 102. 49 Estelle Doudet remarks that Chastelain rarely takes up the topos of the melancholic writer: “George travaille relativement peu ces entrées mélancoliques, concessions à une tradition poétique qu’il quitte” (George works rather rarely with these melancholic entries, concessions to a poetic tradition he is leaving behind). Estelle Doudet, Poétique de George Chastelain (1415–1475): Un cristal mucié en un coffre (Paris: Champion, 2005), 103.

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awakening, but with a vision of Charles VII and the duke of Burgundy. As Estelle Doudet remarks, the Exposicions do not close the allegorical conflict with a return to a realistic depiction of contemporary politics; instead they “open to the fantasy of a cosmic dialogue, beyond time and space.”50 The influence of Alain Chartier, and of the Livre de l’Espérance in particular, is evident throughout the Exposicions and especially in its opening narrative frame.51 Nor are the Exposicions the only work in which Chastelain borrows from Chartier: he revisits the Quadrilogue’s personified France at the beginning of his Chroniques,52 and as Doudet points out, the frequency of the rhyme Alain/Chastelain in later tributes by the Rhétoriqueurs cements the association of the two poets.53 Chastelain’s adaptation of the Livre de l’Espérance is by no means a slavish imitation, however. Making key changes to the Acteur’s psychology and the way it is inscribed within an interior space, Chastelain redraws Chartier’s mental map, orienting his text biographically and bibliographically rather than spatially and anatomically. The Exposicions, like the Livre de l’Espérance, take place within a restricted, domestic architectural space. But Chastelain does not portray his Acteur as experiencing the melancholic’s traditional “unhappy relationship with space,”54 nor does he situate his Acteur within a space as vulnerable to Melancholy’s predations. Whereas Chartier’s “sickroom” features a small door that seems to communicate with another interior space, Chastelain’s study is constructed in a way that facilitates communication with the outside world. It is defined by its exterior features, its doors, windows, and corners. The Acteur’s accusers come to the “croisure” of his study, its four corners: the brief description of the study suggests that it be visualized as a free-standing, single-room building with no interior doors or partitions. The attackers enter after knocking down all of the windows and doors, so the ensuing dialogue must take place in a room with nothing to impede movement between the interior and the exterior. The

50 “Le conflit allégorique d’Exposition ne s’achève pas pour laisser place à une situation politique réaliste. Il ouvre au fantasme d’un dialogue cosmique, hors du temps et de l’espace.” Doudet, Poétique de George Chastelain, 196. 51 For a comparison of the mises en scène of Espérance and the Exposicions, see ibid,, 648–50. 52 “L’ouverture d’Exposition sur Vérité mal prise est ainsi modelée sur des réminiscences du Livre de l’Espérance d’Alain Chartier; de même le premier chapitre de la Chronique de Chastelain s’achève sur une fugitive allégorie de France, empruntée au Quadrilogue invectif du même auteur” (The opening of the Exposicions sur Verité mal prise is thus modeled on reminiscences of Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance; likewise the first chapter of Chastelain’s Chronique ends with a brief allegory of France borrowed from the same author’s Quadrilogue invectif). Ibid., 467. 53 Ibid., 699–703. 54 Starobinski, “L’encre de la mélancolie,” 418.

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other personified entities simply appear, with no specific or spatially defined point of ingress. While the Acteur refers to his “fantasie” and indicates that his attackers have begun to move backward, he does not link any cognitive processes with specific spaces or directions, as Chartier does when Entendement notices the door “back toward the Acteur’s memory.” Chastelain’s study, with no directionality, no internal structure, and no hardware to rust, is neither a mappable space nor a mental model. Sometimes a room is just a room. Chastelain dispenses with not only all of his study’s doors in dramatic fashion, but also the Virtues, the hinges to the door of heaven, who are replaced in their remedial offices by the Acteur’s own faculties. Each of these faculties responds to its counterpart in the Livre de l’Espérance. Chartier’s muscularly embodied Nature gives way to Chastelain’s Ame, who releases the Acteur’s defenders not with a feat of strength, but with a theatrical flourish: “me besongne changier personnages maintenant,” she declares as she transforms herself into the new trinity (I must change characters now, 46). All three of the new “personnages” revisit concepts that appeared in Chartier’s book, but only one in personified form. Now, in Chastelain’s version, Entendement is a part of the solution, not a contributor to the Acteur’s problems; Memory is personified, not spatialized; and the Will is lauded as a “vertu appetitive naturelement infuse en l’ame” (appetitive virtue naturally infused in the soul, 63), not debated as a philosophical problem. The qualities of the Acteur’s mind present a united front in his defense. It is other people’s mental health that is in question, not the Acteur’s. With the entry of Ymaginacion Françoise, Chastelain internalizes a psychological, perceptual phenomenon – but it is other people’s psychology that he casts in an adversarial and ultimately inferior light.55 By personifying his earlier dit’s hostile reception in the form of Ymaginacion, Chastelain paints his opponents as prey to dreams or delirium.56 Given that the Acteur himself does not fall asleep at the beginning of the Exposicions, the figuration of his opponents as those who “imagine” things helps him stake out a position of greater reliability, while distancing him from the mode of creation characteristic of melancholics. In this way the narrative echoes the prologue, in which Chastelain claims to have composed the Exposicions in order to “reduire par aigreurs veritables a la voye de raison saine les desvoiéz” (conduct the distracted back to the path 55 Hence Graeme Small’s assertion that the Exposicions are apparently addressed to a “hostile royalist audience,” one whose hostility, I add, he returns in kind. Graeme Small, George Chastelain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy: Political and Historical Culture at Court in the Fifteenth Century (London and Woodbridge: The Royal Historical Society/ The Boydell Press, 1997), 14. 56 Giovanna Angeli briefly discusses Chastelain’s entries into visions, and the association of Imagination with dreams, in “Le type-cadre du songe dans la production des Grands Rhétoriqueurs,” in Les Grands Rhétoriqueurs. Actes du Ve Colloque International sur le Moyen Français, Milan, 9–8 mai 1985, vol. I, 7–20 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1985).

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of sane reason by means of truthful invective, 26). It is not the Acteur whose mental health is failing, but the reader’s. And so, instead of being separated from his Entendement, the Acteur is separated from the mentality of his (French) reader – and it is the reader who is found wanting. This reorientation also underpins the way Chastelain uses the language of corrosion and contamination: for while the mental rust in the Livre de l’Espérance is “real,” and has a profoundly detrimental impact on the Acteur’s mental operations, the Exposicions are devoted to proving that Chastelain’s “corrosive” words can have a salutary effect on the reader’s cognitive and moral function. Chastelain’s accusers repeatedly couch their critiques in such terms: in the prologue the Acteur laments that the Dit de Verité has been called “contamineur du glorieux throne françois” (sullier of the glorious French throne, 26); Accusacion similarly calls his words “corrosives et de mauvaise digestion” (corrosive and hard to digest, 37). His language is not just mordant, but also dirty and destructive. The Acteur defends himself not by denying his words’ corrosivity, but by defending such a quality as appropriate to his subject matter: la ou corrosiveté aucune se trouvera en ma tractacion non aggreable a chascun, que icelle veullent plus imputer a la nature du temps, celi de alors, que a la perverse et oblique intencion de l’acteur, qui son œuvre a proporcionnee a la qualité des causes qui l’ont fait escripre, et dont les declaracions cy aprés assoufiront et douront contentement aux lisans, que Dieu maine a salut. (27) wherever any corrosivity disagreeable to anyone is found in my discourse, may they impute it more to the nature of that time [when the Dit de Verité was written] than to the perverse and twisted intentions of the author, who made his work in proportion to the characteristics of the causes that made him write it, and whose following declarations will suffice and will give satisfactions to the readers, may God save them.

In other words, the author’s goal is not to counteract the corrosion his earlier text might have provoked, but to make the reader accept and like it. Accordingly, the Acteur’s defenders occasionally embrace the very terms with which he is criticized. So, whereas Reprobacion calls the Acteur a “dangerous tool” (“ung instrument tresperilleux,” 35), Entendement embraces and expands upon the image. When Ymaginacion complains that the Acteur has portrayed all French people as wicked, without regard for their individual merits, Entendement counters with an extended agricultural comparison. Just as one who wishes to clear land for agriculture must use “divers engins de fer” (varied iron machines) to tear up the existing vegetation and regrade the soil (157), the author has taken up his iron hooks to uproot the faults of the French.

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Si ne le peut faire que par fer, par ce que le fer rude et de rigoreuse matere est tout propre a la rigueur de l’ouvrage, et que vaincre et rompre couvient fort par fort. Qui est la chose, dame, qui plus s’aguise que le fer, ne qui est la chose qui plus perçant soit ne plus agüe que parole? (158) It can only be done with iron, because the hard material of rough iron is entirely appropriate to the hardness of the work, and because it is fitting to overcome and break strength with strength. My lady, what thing can be sharpened more than iron, and what thing is more piercing or sharper than words?

Iron does not sharpen iron, as in Proverbs XXVII; iron tears out the impure and rejects them so that one can build anew. When the sharpening of iron can no longer be assimilated to a pedagogical process, foolish, delusional readers become not an audience but a casualty. The questions of reception and the reader’s mental state draw us back to what is, perhaps, the most significant distinction between Chartier’s and Chastelain’s books: the mechanisms by which reading becomes fodder for contemplation, pathology, and new artistic production. Chartier’s Acteur grows depressed after reading other writers’ accounts of the illustrious past and contemplating the vast gulf between his reading material and the present strife that reigns in his country; his melancholic nature allows this reading to engender vivid images; and he can only be healed by learning to read the past differently and link present suffering to future reward. The text that inspires Chastelain, on the other hand, is his own – or rather, it is the negative reception of his own Dit de Verité that motivates the composition of the Excusacions. While the Dit de Verité and the Excusacions refer periodically to political strife, this exists more as a backdrop to the first text than as an impetus for the second. Chastelain does not offer a meditation on contemporary politics, or the processes by which sociopolitical observations might inspire a poetic text; his metapoetic exercise focuses instead on the ideal figure of the writer, and the qualities that have allowed Chastelain himself to approach that ideal.57 The Acteur’s attackers threaten him precisely by threatening his reputation, and his memory. Indignacion, for instance, promises to dismember him and make other people forget about him: 57 “Il est vrai que ce traité, dont l’objet exclusif est un écrit antérieur, se prêtait de façon particulièrement heureuse à une extension de la réflexion vers l’art littéraire en général et, plus profondément, vers la définition du profil de l’écrivain idéal, tant dans sa technique que dans sa personne morale et son rôle social” (It is true that this treatise, whose sole object is an earlier text, lent itself particularly well to an extension of the reflection on the literary art in general and, more profoundly, to defining the profile of the ideal writer in his techniques as well as his moral self and his social role). Thiry, “Stylistique et auto-critique,” 121.

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au moins m’est l’espoir de te monstrer une fois ton mesus et de te faire sentir amerement tes outrages, car ne morras jamais, ne moy aussi, que mon ire et ma fureur, mon sang et ma cuisance ne te percent et deveurent et descirent et desrompent et desmembrent et charpissent, et te facent fondre et poudroier en terre, char et ossemens, et ton nom estaindre en la memoire des hommes. (33) I at least hope to show you your misdeed one time, and to make you feel your offenses bitterly, for you shall not die, nor shall I, until my anger and my fury, my blood and my burning pierce and devour and tear and break and dismember and shred you, and cause you to sink and desintegrate into the earth, flesh and bone, and extinguish your name in the memory of man.

The threat to the Acteur’s bodily integrity is inseparable from a threat to his memory: not his capacity for memory, but the likelihood that others will remember him.58 Again, Chastelain outsources the cognitive work, leaving his Acteur free of psychological burden. Indignacion’s escalating acts of violence, from piercing to ripping to pulverizing, culminate with the ultimate act of destruction: oblivion. Little surprise, then, that the Soul’s primary intervention, upon her arrival, is to enumerate for the Acteur (and, of course, for the reader) the works Chastelain has already produced. And yet, Chastelain’s project is also dependent on the tacit erasure of another literary name: that of Alain Chartier, whose influence Chastelain never acknowledges. Estelle Doudet muses that “the massive imitation of Alain explains, paradoxically, his erasure,”59 not just from the Exposicions but from Chastelain’s entire œuvre. Nowhere is this process of elimination more evident than in the Exposicions. Beyond erasing Chartier, Chastelain dismantles him from within, reconfiguring the architecture of his mind.60 Chastelain’s vision has given him “fondement tres seur d’un noble edifice” (a firm foundation for a noble new edifice, 183). 58 That this is a broader preoccupation in other works by Chastelain (such as the Temple de Bocace) and later Rhétoriqueur works is brilliantly demonstrated by Helen Swift in Representing the Dead. 59 “On peut supposer également que l’imitation massive d’Alain explique paradoxalement son effacement. Là où Boccace est comme un prétexte assez maniable, Chartier est texte, véritable socle du discours” (One can also suppose that the massive imitation of Alain explains, paradoxically, his effacement. Whereas Boccaccio is a fairly manageable pretext, Chartier is a text, a true foundation for his discourse). Doudet, Poétique de George Chastelain, 709. Elsewhere in the same book she rightly calls Chartier Chastelain’s “most elaborated and most complex intertext, always dismissed from the text” (705). 60 Such architectural rewritings of the mental space are characteristic of the Rhétoriqueurs, especially in the generation following Chastelain. See David Cowling, Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), especially Chapter Four, “‘Colloquerons ceans le sien ymage:’ Architectural Metaphors for the Mind and Memory,” 109–38.

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Rusting Out: Final Thoughts on Poetry, Politics, and the Mind By the middle decades of the fifteenth century the rust metaphor must be quite a familiar one to readers of vernacular, politically-inspired poetry and prose; yet Charles d’Orléans and George Chastelain, in their own politically inflected works, use the familiar metaphor in ways that defy both literary convention and traditional configurations of knowledge. While rust remains embedded in the semantic context of thought, knowledge, and poetic speech, its uses in Charles’s Ballade 72 and in Chastelain’s Exposicions subvert the patterns that poetic precedent has led the reader to expect. They rewrite the reader’s notional “encyclopedia,” creating dissonance between existing connotations of destruction and new, protective or salutary associations – or they write the reader’s expectations out of the text entirely. This has the effect of destabilizing the metaphor’s productive power, undermining the interaction between its two terms. How can metaphor help build a mental model when the mind is no longer constructed as a mappable or modelable space? These two final examples of a rewritten rust metaphor return me to my guiding questions: what is metaphor and how does it create knowledge? How do medieval metaphors of metals, machines, and rust shed particular light on the matter? I argued in the Introduction that what makes the medieval rust metaphor especially productive is its mapping onto one another of two equally real, but to some degree poorly understood, types of activity: transformations of metal and of the mind. The language of engins and rust reveals how, for medieval writers, the human and mineral worlds interact – not literally, as in the lapidary tradition, but conceptually, forging a moral compass and the hardware of the doors of perception. The image of mental rust does not appear to have altered medieval scientific understandings of cognitive function, but its prevalence in vernacular texts written for courtly audiences suggests that it proved a helpful tool with which laypeople could visualize the workings of the brain. And while the rust metaphor may not ultimately add a great deal to our knowledge of medieval conceptualizations of mental function, it has much to show us about conceptualizations of mental dysfunction. Most tellingly, the image of rust helps us to understand how, for a late medieval French audience, mental dysfunction could be embodied in the brain yet not necessarily be seen as a pathology. Rust, undesirable as it may be, is a natural phenomenon. Forged from iron and blood, consuming that which gives rise to it, rust, like the melancholic humor, plays a vital role in a larger balance of elements. And if the rust metaphor constructs a “disabled inorganic,” a malfunctioning mechanical foil to the functioning human brain, this is a construct that also plots a course toward the restoration of mental health. Rust is a form of degradation, but even when it is presented as an impediment to wisdom, as in Vincent of Beauvais’s

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REPRESENTING MENTAL ILLNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRANCE

pedagogical treatise, the rust metaphor is not degrading to those whom it characterizes.61 On the contrary, the rust metaphor allows for the conceptualization of cognitive difficulties as a tangible and therefore reparable breakdown. With the advent of Charles VI’s intractable illness, however, the calculus of dysfunction and pathology changes, and writers renew their focus on mental illness: reading the external signs and symptoms of the king’s condition, political poets cede before the inscrutability of the inner workings of the king’s mind. The king is a solid metallic head of state, one whose corruption is visited on the inferior members; it is now his subject, the authorial persona, like Alain Chartier’s Acteur, who boasts an engin whose parts can be examined and repaired. A mechanical metaphor for mental function is a tool with which to bridge the gap between the invisible and visible worlds, between the intimacy of thought and the public domain. As such, it is not difficult to understand why this type of metaphor should prove so compelling to political writers seeking to characterize a monarchical system or form a present or future monarch. Royal governance, too, requires an “articulation” of inner and outer worlds, a balance of personal morality and ethical social behavior. Natural inclinations, instruction, and other outside influences merge in the person of the prince, and the health of the body politic depends on their successful, balanced interaction. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the rust metaphor becomes a cognitive tool that facilitates our understanding of other metaphors. It is not just on less familiar figures, like Nonchaloir, that rust imagery can shed light. The assimilation of mental function to a machine susceptible to rust, and the association of that machine with other mechanisms such as the Virtues’ attributes and Fortune’s wheel, also helps in understanding the latter not as picturesque ornaments or flights of fancy, but as coherent components in the human perception of the world (and in perceptions of our perception of the world). Using metallic metaphors, writers can interrogate public actions as well as the inner life of the mind; what emerges at the intersection of the two is politics – and poetry.

61 The rust metaphor thus stands in contrast to the rock metaphors to which Kellie Robertson alludes, metaphors that “give insult by degrading the dynamic into the inert.” Robertson, “Exemplary Rocks,” 93.

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Index Agincourt 37, 245, 247n5, 252, 253, 291, 303n44 Albert the Great 14, 21–23, 30, 55, 56, 73, 89 alchemy 16, 22n83, 83n21, 130, 181, 182n20, 183, 189, 194, 263 Aquinas 4, 73, 86, 125, 284n88 pseudo-Aquinas, De eruditione principum 80 Aristotle 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22, 26n113, 114, 167, 234–35, 250n12 Ethics and Politics, see Oresme pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata, see Evrart de Conty schematization of the virtues 72, 80n3, 86, 87, 88–90 Armagnac or Orleanist faction 180, 238n153 ars moriendi 269n61 Astesano, Antonio 302, 302n40 automata 37, 45, 53, 57–59, 60, 77, 236 Avicenna 8, 9, 14, 15–17, 20, 221, 276 Avis aus roys 118, 131, 133 bal des ardents 176 Bartholomew the Englishman (Bartholomaeus Anglicus), De proprietatibus rerum 14, 23–24, 25–26, 27n114, 28, 29–30, 46, 250 see also Corbechon, Jean Bedford, John, duke of 77, 168–170 Bernard of Clairvaux 58, 156–57, 205

Berry, Jean, duke of 18, 71, 77n132, 112, 167, 175, 211, 222n132, 249 Boccaccio, Giovanni, De casibus virorum illustrium, see Laurent de Premierfait body politic (organic metaphor) 1, 121–31, 148–55, 170, 173, 179–80, 186–88, 216n114, 223, 225–27, 229, 232, 234–37, 239, 240–42, 312 Boethius, Consolatio philosophiae 48, 64, 92, 114n99, 202, 260, 264, 270, 274, 278, 279, 286n99 Bourgeois de Paris 238 Bovet, Honoré 171n132 Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun 214–15 Arbre des batailles 73, 118 Burgundian faction 174, 176, 177n10, 180, 237, 245 Burgundy, dukes of 58n59 Philip II (Philippe le Hardi) 193n45, 216, 220n122 John I (Jean sans peur) 177, 203, 212, 218, 236 Philip III (Philippe le Bon) 306 Cabochian revolt 233, 234, 236, 238 Camille, Michael 68n94, 131n28, 132n32, 146, 159n89, 165n105, 166, 212n86, 276 Cardinal Virtues 1, 45, 67n61, 70n104, 71–74, 81, 84, 85–86, 88, 89, 91, 95, 223, 225, 226, 235

356 Index New Iconography 37, 45, 60, 72, 74–78, 79, 81n9, 82, 280 Cent nouvelles nouvelles 39n2 Charles V 283, 289, 292 books belonging to 9n30, 65n79, 96, 109, 125–26, 141, 165, 167 regency 169 translation program 14, 24, 28–29, 79, 86–87, 94, 96, 98, 112–13, 125, 135, 141 Charles VI 1, 6, 12n47, 37, 78, 87, 92, 98, 117–18, 122, 170, 173–239, 245, 291, 312 Charles VII 115, 245–46, 249, 291, 306 Charles d’Orléans 44, 249, 252n18, 278n78, 291–304 English poems 293, 298, 299, 300–2 Chartier, Alain 37, 245–47, 291, 292, 294 Belle Dame sans Mercy 246, 252, 266, 268 Curial 247, 264–67, 269–70, 271, 276, 279, 281, 282 Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis 247n6, 252, 254, 262, 265n48, 267n53, 271n63, 287 Lai de paix 247, 254–55 Lay de complainte pour les guerres 247, 254 Livre de l’Espérance 9n33, 115, 243, 247, 252, 254, 255, 259–63, 266–90, 291, 292, 294, 299, 303, 312; as intertext of Chastelain’s Exposicions sur Verité mal prise, 304–10 Livre des quatre dames 247, 252–54 Quadrilogue invectif 231n142, 247, 252, 254, 255–59, 261, 265n48, 271n63, 274, 281, 282–83, 284, 285, 287n101, 292 Chastelain, George 291 Chroniques 306

Dit de Verité 304, 305, 307, 308, 309 Exposicions sur Verité mal prise 304–10, 311 Christine de Pizan 6, 98, 117n111, 126, 180, 239, 245, 287, 294 Avision Christine 179n14, 264, 279n79 ballade XCV 174, 175 Cité des dames 257 Épistre de la prison de vie humaine 241, 242–43, 261n41, 272, 277n72 Epistre Othea 76n127, 77, 114–15, 215 Lamentacion sur les maux de la France 240, 280n81 Livre du corps de policie 240–42 Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V 24, 92n50, 93–94, 114, 177, 263 Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune 193 Livre de la paix 231, 240, 260n40 Livre de la prod’hommie de l’homme 72n113, 92n50 Livre des trois vertus 81, 82n12 Oroyson Nostre Dame 174n3 Chaucer, Geoffrey 98n64 clocks 49, 50, 53n41, 58, 59, 65, 74, 78, 162–63, 188–91 compass 53–57 Corbechon, Jean, Livre des propriétés des choses 8, 9, 10, 14, 24–30, 46, 222, 250 see also Bartholomew the Englishman Daniel 37, 132, 134–36, 139, 144, 154–55, 180, 191, 192, 197–98, 207–8, 233 Daudin, Jean, De la erudition ou enseignement des enfans nobles 29n118, 37, 40, 86, 98–109, 112, 113, 118

Index

depersonification 33, 37, 78, 122, 218 Derrida, Jacques 34 Deschamps, Eustache 92–93, 180 Demoustracions contre sortileges 215 lyric poetry 239 Miroir de mariage 84n24 digressio 135n43, 148, 194, 199–200, 201, 202 Dioscorides, De materia medica 23, 27n114 disabled inorganic 35, 311 Dondi, Giovanni 190–91 dreams 93, 160 dream-visions (literary genre) 41, 140, 155, 160, 165, 170, 171, 181, 239, 253, 254, 257, 258–59, 262, 285n93, 287, 288, 303 and mental illness 193n43, 250–52, 257, 307 Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue 37, 68, 119, 131–39, 142, 143–47, 160, 186, 191, 192, 233 Eco, Umberto 13, 83 ekphrasis 139, 160 engin 1, 37–38, 45–48, 49–50, 51–53, 60, 63, 68, 71, 78, 79, 92, 93, 102, 104, 114–15, 117, 118, 119, 163, 180, 185, 229n138, 252, 268, 271, 277, 281, 283, 289, 291, 308, 311, 312 Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Chronique 176, 213, 238 enjambment 151, 294 Evrart de Conty Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés 44–45, 97n60 Livre des Problemes de Ariistote 7, 8, 12n48, 248–50, 258, 262

357

Fortune 116n109, 137–39, 255n24, 263, 270, 293 wheel of 37, 52n36, 60–71, 78, 139, 298n20, 301–2, 312 immobilization of 62, 69–71, 302 turned with crank 45, 64–68, 77 Foucault, Michel 5 Foulechat, Denis, Policratique 29n118, 86, 87n39, 90, 111–12, 113, 122n6, 123, 125–26, 167 Froissart, Jean Chronique 173, 180, 188n34, 193n45, 194–202, 206, 208, 211n83, 216, 238, 242 Dit du florin 54 Orloge amoureus 78 Prison amoureuse 18n64 Galen 7, 8, 128n24, 199n55 Galopes, Jean, Pèlerinage de l’âme in prose 168–70 Geber 16, 22, 263 Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova 31, 32, 34n136, 103n77 Gerson, Jean 126, 180, 242, 245 Adorabant eum 231 Claro eruditori 94–95, 288n105 Rex in sempiternum vive 173, 180, 232–38 Songe contre le Roman de la rose 257, 260n40 Vivat rex 177n10, 179, 180, 222–31, 232, 233, 234, 240 Gervais du Bus, Roman de Fauvel 52n36, 61–63, 69, 193n43 Gielée, Jacquemart, Renart le Nouvel 69–70, 302 Giles of Rome, De regimine principum 80, 81, 84–85, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 99, 125, 287 see also Henri de Gauchy Glass delusion 180, 217, 220–21 Golein, Jean, Le livre de l’informacion

358 Index des princes 51, 81n10, 85, 86, 87n39, 96–97, 98n65, 114, 117, 118, 125, 131n29 Grands Rhétoriqueurs 306, 310n60 Guiart des Moulins, Bible historiale 134–35 Guillaume de Deguileville 68n94, 181, 188–90, 202 Pèlerinage de vie humaine (PVH) 41–44, 50–53, 54–55, 61, 63, 93, 94, 140, 141, 142, 143, 157n86, 159n90, 164, 165, 166, 186–87, 190, 260n40, 289 Pèlerinage de l’âme (PA) 48–50, 63, 121–22, 138, 140–71, 180, 186, 190, 191, 194, 206, 235, 236, 278 Pèlerinage de Jésus-Christ (PJC) 140–41 Roman de la fleur de lis 217 Guillaume de Machaut Dit de l’Alerion 54 Jugement poems 253 Livre du Voir Dit 61 Remede de Fortune 64, 66–68, 136, 137–39, 146n69, 264 Henri de Gauchy, Li Livres du gouvernement des rois 80n4, 81, 84, 91, 96 see also Giles of Rome hinges 1, 45, 71–74, 78, 286, 307 Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 100–1 Institutio Traiani 122, 126–27, 129–30, 225, 234–35 Isabeau de Bavière 175, 195n49, 219–20 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 14, 19–21, 23, 26, 28, 30, 32n127, 133 Jacques de Cessoles, Jeu des eschaz moralisé 192

Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose 69, 83, 84, 92n51, 140 Jean de Montaigu 175, 214n92, 215 Jerome, Commentaria in Ecclesiasten 102, 105–6, 108, 118n113 Joan of Arc 245, 246, 303n44 John of Salisbury, Policraticus 37, 80, 83–84, 90, 92, 96, 111–12, 122–25, 126, 128–29, 130 131, 143, 187, 225, 240n161, 287 see also Foulechat, Denis Juvénal des Ursins, Jean Chronique 213, 214, 219, 221–22, 225, 239 Verba mea auribus percipe, domine 40, 91, 115–17, 291 Laurent d’Orléans, Somme le roi 40, 80n5, 95 Laurent de Premierfait, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes 64, 71, 118 learning disabilities 100 le Fèvre, Jean, Respit de la mort 113–14, 115 Legrand, Jacques 81n10, 112n92 lèse-majesté 213 Liber de informatione principum, see Golein Livre des simples médecines, see Platearius Louis de Guyenne (dauphin) 94, 241, 249 magic 93, 130 as cause of illness 211–15, 217 as remedy for illness 203, 211, 212, 215–17, 223, 228 Mâle, Émile 72n109, 74, 76, 77 marmousets 188, 198, 214n92, 215 Martin of Braga, Formula honestae vitae 72, 76n127 Martin Le Franc Champion des dames 40

Index

Estrif de Fortune et Vertu 60, 64, 71 melancholia/melancholic disposition 1, 10, 12n48, 30, 63, 195, 221, 228, 242, 246–55, 256n29, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 268, 278, 293, 295, 299, 305n49, 306, 307, 309 Meschinot, Jean, Lunettes des princes 78, 277n73, 291 metaphor, interactionist theory of 2, 21, 33–34, 152, 283 Metzler, Irina ix, 2n2, 12, 99n67, 269n61 mills and millwheels 49, 52, 60, 65, 74, 163–64, 171 mirror as attribute of Prudence 74, 84, 85 as material object 83 and metaphor 32, 82, 289 for princes, genre 6, 37, 70n104, 72n114, 78, 79–83, 84–87, 89–91, 95, 98, 102, 115, 117–19, 122n4, 124, 147, 154, 164, 202, 207, 259n38, 282, 287–89, 294, 296 Molinet, Jean Devise de maistre Jehan du Gaughier 59 Roman de la Rose moralisé 84 Nebuchadnezzar as embodiment of tyranny 191–92, 238 madness 173, 180, 186, 193, 194, 197–200, 202, 203, 206–8, 210, 215, 228, 250 idol built by 188–90, 191 pride 173, 180, 186, 188–91, 192–93, 194, 203, 206, 228, 238 statue (in dream) 37, 68, 119, 121, 131–39, 140, 142, 143–47, 154n80, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170,

359

171, 173, 180, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 206, 233, 236, 238 see also dreams Nicolas de Gonesse, Les faits et paroles memorables 185, 251 nightmares, see dreams nonchaloir 44, 292–99, 302, 303, 304, 312 Olivier de Clisson 194, 195, 213 Oresme, Nicole 86, 171n132 De moneta 126–28, 130, 182–83 Livre de Ethiques d’Aristote 51, 86, 87–91, 92, 95 Livre de Politiques d’Aristote 39n2, 86, 87–88, 92, 95, 109–111, 113, 121n2, 126, 128–31, 187, 227 Traitié de l’Espere 51 Yconomique 86, 95 organic metaphor of the state, see body politic Orléans, Louis, duke of 174, 175, 176, 177, 207–8, 212, 213, 214–15, 218, 220, 222 Ovid Metamorphoses 18n64, 130, 133–34 Tristia ex Ponto 102, 106–8, 116 Pastoralet 176n8, 179, 236n152, 238n153 Peraldus 73n121, 95, 98 personification 32, 41, 44, 60, 62, 78, 174, 254, 255, 258, 260, 268, 270, 273, 293, 298, 305, 306, 307 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica 132–34, 135, 234, 250 Peter Lombard 284 Petit, Jean, Justification 114n99, 174, 176–77, 212–13, 217–18, 220, 222, 236 Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunae 40n6, 64, 99n66, 103

360 Index Pfau, Aleksandra ix, 3n4, 4n14, 11, 12 Philippe de Mézières Chevalerie de la Passion 193n42 Epistre au roi Richart 186 Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage 40, 55–56 Pelerinage du Povre Pelerin 181n16, 189 Songe du vieil pèlerin (SVP) 32n125, 53n41, 55–56, 92–93, 95, 98, 114, 171n132, 173, 179, 180–94, 240, 288n105 Philippe de Vitry 136–37, 138, 217 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, see Pius II Pintoin, Michel, Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys 177n11, 199, 200, 201–2, 211, 213, 214n93, 215–16, 219–20, 221, 222n128, 222n132 Pius II, Commentarii 219, 220–21 Platearius, Matthaeus, Circa instans 27 Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis 14, 17–19, 20, 21, 23, 29, 30, 31, 33, 222 Plutarch (pseudo-), see Institutio Traiani Problemata (pseudo-Aristotle), see Evrart de Conty prosthesis 150–51, 234, 236 Raoul de Presles, Bible 112–13, 126, 134–36, 171n132 Religieux de Saint-Denis, see Pintoin, Michel Richard II of England 186, 207, 212 Ricoeur, Paul 31–35, 179n14, 282n86 Salmon, Pierre, Dialogues 173, 174, 178–79, 180, 202–11, 212, 215, 217, 220n122, 277n74, 287 ship of fools 5 ship of state 55, 181

songe politique, see dream-visions Songe véritable 174–76, 177, 203 Speculum humanae salvationis 134 suicide 1, 178, 210, 224, 229–30, 232, 246n3, 260, 262, 264, 269, 271–73, 279, 292 Thomas of Cantimpré 23 translatio imperii 132, 161, 255 translation, scientific 24–25; see also Charles V Troyes, treaty of 245, 291 Villard de Honnecourt 58, 59 Vincent of Beauvais 288n105, 289 De eruditione filiorum nobilium 80, 86, 97–101, 102–9, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116; see also Daudin, Jean De morali principis institutione 80, 98 Speculum naturale 16n60, 23, 26 Visconti, Valentina, duchess of Orléans 214–15, 219

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A

t the turn of the fifteenth century it must have seemed to many French people that the world was going mad. King Charles VI suffered his first bout of mental illness in 1392, and he underwent intermittent bouts of frenzy, melancholy and ever-scarcer lucidity until his death in 1422. The king’s scarcely mentionable malady was mirrored at every level of social experience, from the irrational civil war through which the body politic tore itself apart, to reports of elevated suicide rates among the common people. In this political environment, where affairs of state were closely linked to the ruler’s mental state, French writers sought new ways of representing the psychological dynamics of the body politic. This book explores the innovative mix of organic and inorganic metaphors through which they explored the relationship between mind, body and government at this period; in particular, it considers texts by such authors as Alain Chartier and Charles d’Orléans which describe mental illness and intellectual impairments through the notion of “rust”.

Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France

Gallica

Julie Singer is Associate Professor of French at Washington University, St. Louis.

Singer

Cover image: The Acteur in his Chamber, Alain Chartier, Le Livre de l’Espérance (Paris, BnF fr 24441, fol. 34r.), c.1440–61. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France Machines, Madness, Metaphor 1 Julie Singer 1