The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture 9781843845669

Table of contents :
Front cover
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Preface
1: Richard II and the Luxembourg Court
2: The Familiar Patron:Collaboration and Conflict in Chaucer and Late Medieval European Courtly Writing
3: Scandals at Court:Pride and Penitence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthur
4: Pearl in its Setting:Piety and Politics at the Luxembourg and Ricardian Courts
Conclusion: The End of the Ricardian Court Culture
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ALFRED THOMAS is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Cover image: Initial depicting Anne of Bohemia presenting Shrewsbury’s city charter to Richard II, from the Shrewsbury Charter of 1389 (ref. No. 3365/24). Reproduced by permission of Shropshire Archives.



Alfred Thomas

Design: Toni Michelle

The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture

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ohemian culture exercised an important influence on the court of King Richard II, but it has been somewhat overlooked, with previous scholarship on its writers and artists generally confined to the role played by the French court of King Charles V and the Italian city states of Milan and Florence. This book aims to fill that gap. It argues that Richard’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, one of the greatest rulers and patrons of the age, exposed England to the full extent of this international court culture. Ricardian writers, including Chaucer, Gower and the Gawainpoet, wrote in their native language not because they felt ‘English’ in the modern national sense but because they aspired to be part of a burgeoning vernacular European culture stretching from Paris to Prague and from Brabant to Brandenburg; thus, one of the major periods of English literature can only be properly understood in relation to this larger European context.

Alfred Thomas

The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture

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The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the Gawain Poet alfred thomas

D. S. BREWER

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© Alfred Thomas 2020 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 Alfred Thomas 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 2020 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  978 1 84384 566 9 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 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

Design: Toni Michelle Cover image: Initial depicting Anne of Bohemia presenting Shrewsbury’s city charter to Richard II, from the Shrewsbury Charter of 1389 (ref. No. 3365/24). Reproduced by permission of Shropshire Archives. Cover Design: Toni Michelle

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for derek pear sall

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Contents

List of illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii Author’s Note xiv Preface xv

1 Richard II and the Luxembourg Court 2 The Familiar Patron: Collaboration and Conflict in



Chaucer and Late Medieval European Courtly Writing



3 Scandals at Court: Pride and Penitence in Sir Gawain and



4 Pearl in its Setting: Piety and Politics at the Luxembourg

1 43

the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthur 85 and Ricardian Courts

Conclusion: The End of the Ricardian Court Culture

131 185

Bibliography 205 Index 217

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Illustrations The Luxembourg and Přemyslid family tree Map of Luxembourg Europe ca. 1400 1. King Richard II meets the earl of Northumberland at Conway and offers to resign the crown. British Library Harley 1319, f. 44 (1401–5). (Bridgeman Images) © The British Library Board. 2. Crown of Anne of Bohemia (1370–80). Schatzkammer, Residenz Museum, Munich. (Art Resource, NY) Photograph by Scala. 3. Tomb effigies of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. Made by Nicholas and Godfrey Priest. Westminster abbey (1395). (Bridgeman Images) Photograph by Werner Forman Archive. 4. The Eagle Ceiling: Imperial eagles painted on the wooden ceiling of the Great Hospital in Norwich (1383). By permission of the Great Hospital, Norwich. 5. Jean Le Noir: The Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg (1348–49). New York City, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters. Inv. 69.86. f. 321v/322r. (Bridgeman Images) © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 6. La Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (1247). (Bridgeman Images) Photograph by Sylvie Bersout/Aredia. 7. Karlstein castle, Czech Republic (founded 1348). (Bridgeman Images) Photograph by C.Sappa/Agostini Picture Library. 8. St Wenceslas chapel, St Vitus cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic. (Bridgeman Images) Photograph by Peter Langer/ Design Pics/UIG 9. Constantinople. From the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Bohemian ca. 1400), British Library Add. 24189, f. 9v. (Bridgeman Images) © The British Library Board.

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10. View of Prague with the Charles Bridge in the foreground and St Vitus cathedral in the background. (Bridgeman Images) 27 11. Statue of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in the style of a Roman emperor. (Bridgeman Images) Photograph by Luisa Ricciarini. 35 12. Westminster portrait of Richard II, Westminster Abbey, London. (Bridgeman Images) © Westminster Abbey, London. 37 13. Peter Parler: Bust of Emperor Charles IV. Triforium of St Vitus cathedral, Prague. (Art Resource, NY). Photograph by Erich Lessing. 39 14. St Elizabeth of Hungary. Chapel of the Holy Cross, Karlstein castle, Czech Republic. (Bridgeman Images) © Narodni Galerie, Prague, Czech Republic. 83 15. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. British Library Add MS 24189, f. 3v. (Bridgeman Images) © The British Library Board. 95 16. The Green Knight beheaded by Sir Gawain. British Library Cotton Nero A.x, f. 94v. (Bridgeman Images) © The British Library Board. 96 17. May. From Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 65/1284, f. 5v (Bridgeman Images) © Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. 100 18. The Passion relic triptych. Chapel of the Virgin Mary, Karlstein castle, Czech Republic. (Bridgeman Images) © Karlstein Castle, Czech Republic. 101 19. Peter Parler: Statue of St Wenceslas in the chapel of St Wenceslas, St Vitus cathedral, Prague (1370s). (Art Resource, NY) Photograph by Erich Lessing. 103 20. A banquet scene from Les Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (1375–80). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. français 2813, f. 473v. (Bridgeman Images) © Universal History Archive/UIG. 105 21. October. From Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1410– 16). Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 65/1284, f. 10v. (Bridgeman Images) © Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. 111 22. The Golden Bull of Charles IV, State Library, Vienna, Cod. Vind. 338 title page. (Bridgeman Images) Photography by G. Nimatallah © Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Austria / De Agostini Picture Library. 117

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23. The Mystical Embrace from the Passional of Abbess Kunigunde. Prague, National Library of the Czech Republic, MS XIV. A. 17, f. 16v. (Bridgeman Images) © National University Library, Prague, Czech Republic. 138 24. Wenceslas II of Bohemia from the Manesse Codex (1305–40), University of Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. f. 10r. (Bridgeman Images) Photograph by A. Dagli Orti © Universitatsbibliothek, Heidelberg, Germany / De Agostini Picture Library. 140 25. Master Theodoric: Portrait of St Catherine in the chapel of the Holy Cross, Karlstein castle. © Středočeské Muzeum, Roztoky u Prahy, Czech Republic / Bridgeman Images / Fine Art Images. 145 26. Statue of an Anglo-Saxon king commissioned by Richard II for Westminster Hall, Trinity church, London. © Bridgeman Images / View Pictures. 151 27. Peter Parler: Statues of St Vitus flanked by Emperor Charles IV and Wenceslas IV on the Old Town tower, Prague (1370–80s). © Bridgeman Images. 153 28. Emperor Charles places the relics of the Passion in a reliquary. Church of the Virgin Mary, Karlstein castle, Czech Republic (Bridgeman Images) © Karlstejn Castle. 156 29. The Wilton Diptych (ca. 1395–99). (Bridgeman Images) © National Gallery London. 160 30. Coat of arms of Richard II and white hart resting on a bed of rosemary, one of Queen Anne’s devices. Reverse of the Wilton Diptych. (Bridgeman Images) © National Gallery London. 161 31. Richard II kneeling before the Virgin and Child. Wilton Diptych (detail). (Bridgeman Images) © National Gallery London. 163 32. Votive panel of Archbishop Jan Očko of Vlaším (1370s), National Gallery, Prague. © Bridgeman Images / De Agostini Picture Library. 164 33. The Virgin and Child surrounded by angels. Wilton Diptych (detail). (Bridgeman Images) © National Gallery London. 165 34. Krumlov Madonna. Bohemian ca. 1400. Kunsthistorsiches Museum, Vienna. (Bridgeman Images) Photography by Luisa Ricciarini. 166 35. Seth at the Gates of Paradise. Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Bohemian, ca. 1400), British Library Add. 24189, f. 13r. (Bridgeman Images) © The British Library Board. 172

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36. Coronation of a king and queen. Liber Regalis, Westminster Abbey Library. (Bridgeman Images) © Werner Forman Archive. 37. The Dreamer meets the pearl maiden. British Library Cotton Nero A.x, f. 42r (1375–1400). (Bridgeman Images) © The British Library Board. 38. The Apocalypse tapestry, Angers, France (1377–82). (Bridgeman Images) © Musée des Tapisseries, Angers. 39. Mosaic of the Last Judgment, St Vitus cathedral, Prague. (Bridgeman Images) Photograph by Paule Saviano. 40. The Sherborne Missal. British Library Add MS 74236, Trinity Sunday f. 276 (early fifteenth century). (Bridgeman Images) © The British Library Board.

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The author and publisher 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 publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgment in subsequent editions.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Thomas Bestul and Michael J. Bennett for reading parts of the manuscript and for offering helpful insights. I am particularly indebted to the anonymous readers for Boydell & Brewer who carefully read the entire manuscript and made invaluable suggestions as to how the project might be more focused and its thesis more effective. My ­special gratitude goes to Caroline Palmer, Elizabeth McDonald and Rohais Landon at Boydell & Brewer for championing the cause of this project and helping it come into being with such patience and professionalism. Judith Oppenheimer did a scrupulous job of copyediting the manuscript. Thanks go to Niki Tansley for permission to reproduce the image of the beautiful “Eagle Ceiling” (1383) in the Great Hospital in Norwich, England. Closer to home, I would like to thank Jay Yencich for compiling the bibliography and Ann-Marie McManaman for designing the family tree of the Luxembourg family and the map of Luxembourg Europe. Friends should be mentioned as sources of personal support during the gestation of this project: Paul J. Smith, Jonathan Romney, Robin Grey, James Williams, Eric Osipow, Sergei Golota, and many others. My beloved cats Mia and her sons Evil Twin and Sweet Twin, now in the heavenly court, were my constant companions during the last thirteen years and lent their support to the book in their own way by rubbing themselves against the manuscript and lying on the keyboard.

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Author’s Note

A note on the use of quotations, languages and abbreviations: foreign languages are quoted in translation with the original language placed in the footnotes, except for non-Chaucerian Middle English texts, where the original and the modern translation are placed in the text. Czech-language titles of monographs and articles are translated only in the bibliography. Shorter Czech quotations are followed by translations in parentheses. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise. In chapter 3 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been abbreviated to Sir Gawain and the Alliterative Morte Arthur to the Alliterative Morte. All quotations from Chaucer’s work are from The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, edited by Larry D. Benson. Quotations from the work of the Gawain and Pearl poet are from The Works of the Gawain Poet, edited by Ad Putter and Myra Stokes.

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Preface

It is more than twenty years since I published Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society (1310–1420) (1998). The aim of that book was to familiarize the interested reader with the rich literature and culture of late medieval Bohemia. My argument was that Anne of Bohemia, who married King Richard II of England in January 1382 and was Queen of England for twelve years until her untimely death in 1394 at the age of twenty-eight, did not spring from a cultural and literary vacuum but from an international court culture in which German, Czech, Latin, and French all intermingled. The great Italian humanist Petrarch visited Anne’s father, Charles IV of Luxembourg, in Prague and was so impressed by the learning and erudition of the emperor and his courtiers that he likened them to the ancient Athenians. In the present book I return to this international court culture of the late fourteenth century by focusing on the English court of Richard II (r. 1377–99). This time my project will consider the influence of Anne’s presence in England. I began this comparative project with my earlier monographs A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007) and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (2015). Those studies, however, only partially addressed the phenomenon of the international court culture to which Anne belonged and which she brought with her to England. In this more ambitious book I aim to build upon the valuable scholarship of Gervase Mathew, Nigel Saul, Andrew Taylor, David Wallace, Michael van Dussen, Peter Brown, Linda Burke, and Michael J. Bennett by considering the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the anonymous Gawain (and Pearl) poet, John Gower, and other poets associated with Richard’s court in the light of Anne’s presence in England. My argument will be that we can adequately appreciate the extraordinary achievement of these writers and the efflorescence of English art and literature in the last two decades of the fourteenth century only by placing these great writers in the larger context

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of the Bohemian influence exerted upon all aspects of English court life, including fashion, vernacular writing, and the visual arts. Notwithstanding the valuable comparative work currently being undertaken in medieval literary studies, there still seems a long way to go before we fully dismantle the old-fashioned taxonomies that insist on reading late medieval culture through the lens of modern nation-states. Anglocentrism remains a problem, partly the legacy of Britain’s imperial past but also of America’s imperial present, as well as the status of (American) English as the world language. Monolingual and mono-cultural habits die hard. Despite recent laudable reassessments of Chaucer as a European writer rather than the traditional “father of English literature,” our definition of “Europe” often remains circumscribed in its focus on western Europe (France, Italy, and Spain) to the exclusion of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany and Bohemia) to the east. What defined late medieval European culture was not national identities in the modern sense but familial and dynastic affiliations that transcended the west–east European divide: the Valois kings of France were related in marriage and culture to the Luxembourg family that ruled entire swaths of Europe, from Brabant and Luxembourg in the west to Bohemia, Moravia, Brandenburg, and Silesia in the east. Only by taking these family affiliations into account can we begin to appreciate the momentous cultural as well as political impact of the marriage of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. Anne was not simply an eligible royal-imperial princess but the very embodiment of the international court culture. It was with the Anglo-Bohemian marriage that this international court culture spread to England in a manner unprecedented in the history of the Plantagenet monarchy. This book will argue that a greater awareness of this Franco-Bohemian influence is crucial for an adequate understanding of the transformation of English literature and art in the Ricardian era, including, as we shall see, English poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain poet.

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RICHARD II (1367-1400)

m

ANNE OF BOHEMIA (1366-1394)

Elizabeth of Pomerania (4th Wife) (1347 – 4393)

Edward of Woodstock “The Black Prince” (1330-1376)

Edward III (1327-1377)

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m Joan of Kent (1328-1385)

Emperor Sigismund (1368-1437)

Wenceslas I (1205-1253)

m

Anne of Schweidnitz (3rd Wife) (1339-1362)

King Charles VI of France (1368 - 1422)

m

Louis Duke of Orleans (d. 1407)

King John II of France (1319-1364)

m

John of Luxembourg (1296-1346)

Jeanne of Brabant (d. 1406)

m

Emperor Henry VII (1278/9-1313)

Beatrice of Bourbon (2nd Wife) (1320-83)

John Duke of Berry (d. 1416)

Wenceslas Duke of Luxembourg (1337-1383)

m

House of Luxembourg (Counts / Dukes of Luxembourg)

Louis Duke of Anjou (d. 1384)

Elizabeth (1st wife) (1292 – 1330)

Guta of Habsburg (1271-1297)

King Charles V of France (1338-1380)

m

Kunigunde of Hohenstaufen (1200-1248)

Bonne of Luxembourg (1315-1349)

Wenceslas III (1289-1306)

Wenceslas II (1271-1305)

Přemysl Ottokar II (1233-1278)

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Constance of Hungary (1180-1240)

The Luxembourg and Přemyslid family tree

Wenceslas IV King of the Romans (1361-1419)

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Abbess Kunigunde (1265-1321)

Emperor Charles IV (1316-1378)

House of Plantagenet (Kings of England)

St. Agnes of Prague (1211-1282)

Přemysl Ottokar I (ca. 1155-1230)

House of Přemyslid (Kings of Bohemia)

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1 Richard II and the Luxembourg Court History and literature and painting should never be studied in complete isolation. (Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II)

On July 24, 1399, King Richard II landed on the Welsh coast, having hastily abandoned his expedition to Ireland. He was returning to England to confront the threat posed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke.1 Richard had sentenced Bolingbroke to a five-year exile, but, following the death of his uncle John of Gaunt and the confiscation of his vast Lancastrian estates, the sentence was extended to banishment for life. The duke had returned to England to claim his rightful inheritance, but few people doubted that he now had designs on the crown itself. Richard’s immediate departure for Ireland so soon after disinheriting Bolingbroke severely undermined his ability to defend his kingdom against a rebellion that signaled a broad rejection of his rule. Richard’s regime began to crumble almost as soon as he arrived in Wales, while Bolingbroke, now controlling a vast army in Bristol, was gaining ever greater support from the disgruntled nobles of the realm. Meanwhile Richard’s regent in England (his uncle Edmund, duke of York) was unable to prevent Bolingbroke’s advance and joined forces with the insurgents. Faced with the collapse of his support, Richard now abandoned his troops and made a mad dash across Wales to link up with his only remaining ally, the earl of Salisbury, in the north. He fled in the middle of the night, attended by only fifteen companions and dressed as a poor friar. As a result, the army that had accompanied the king from Ireland rapidly began to dissolve. Richard found himself trapped in Conway castle in North Wales; and his attempts at negotiation with Bolingbroke led to his humiliating surrender (fig. 1). Conveyed to London as Bolingbroke’s prisoner, Richard was confined to the Tower of London, where he 1 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, 1997), p. 411.

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Fig. 1  King Richard II meets the earl of Northumberland at Conway and offers to resign the crown. British Library Harley 1319, f. 44 (1401–5).

resigned the crown in favor of Bolingbroke, who succeeded him as Henry IV. Richard was sent to one of the new king’s northern holdings, Pontefract castle, where he was subsequently murdered.2 The collapse of Richard’s rule in 1399 is well known today, thanks largely to William Shakespeare’s dramatic account of these events in his history play Richard II (1595). Less recognized is the extent to which the cosmopolitan court culture that Richard helped to establish also came to an end after his death. That international court culture is the focus of this book. Richard II was the most cultured and artistic king of England before Charles I. As with Charles, whose outstanding collection of European 2 Michael Bennett, “Henry of Bolingbroke and the Revolution of 1399,” in Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs (York, 2003), pp. 9–33, at p. 30.

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paintings was sold off and dispersed after his death during the Commonwealth, Richard’s court culture did not survive his murder.3 An intriguing example of this attrition is the crown made at the imperial court in Prague, probably for Anne of Bohemia. In 1401 Henry IV sent it back to Europe as part of the dowry for his daughter Blanche of Lancaster’s marriage to Ludwig III of Bavaria. Henry may have been anxious to rid himself of all memories of Queen Anne and the international court culture she represented. By an interesting twist of fate, this beautiful example of the international goldsmith’s art has survived the vagaries of time and can still be seen today in the royal treasury in Munich. As we shall explore in chapter 4, a memory of this exquisite work of art may be fossilized in the description of the pearl maiden’s crown in the anonymous poem Pearl (fig. 2).

Fig. 2  Crown of Anne of Bohemia (1370–80). Schatzkammer, Residenz Museum, Munich 3 See Francis Haskell, The King’s Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and his Courtiers, edited with an introduction by Karen Serres (New Haven, 2013).

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Fig. 3  Tomb effigies of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. Made by Nicholas and Godfrey Priest. Westminster Abbey (1395)

Even before Richard formally abdicated the crown, Bolingbroke’s followers were already beginning to destroy the physical evidence of his rule. Upon their arrival at Warwick on July 24, Henry’s men removed the badges of the king’s personal device of the White Hart that the Ricardian duke of Surrey had had carved on the gatehouse of Warwick castle.4 Richard was buried in a private ceremony at the Dominican friary of King’s Langley; 4 See Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud, 1999), p. 157.

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the body arrived in the dead of night and the ceremony took place the following morning. It was a simple affair, stripped of pomp and ceremony. Richard’s body remained at King’s Langley for the duration of Henry IV’s reign. It was only on the accession of Henry V in 1413 that the body was exhumed and reinterred in the double tomb in Westminster abbey commissioned by Richard during his life-time as a memorial to himself and his beloved first wife and consort, Anne5 (fig. 3). Henry V’s decision to bury Richard next to his Bohemian wife in the royal mausoleum at Westminster was clearly a pious gesture of reconciliation and atonement for his father’s crime of murder; but it was also a shrewd move to bring closure to the divisive politics of the previous reign. Henry IV’s usurpation had led to frequent rebellions and insurrections by Richard’s supporters, even after the latter’s death. Not only were the material attributes of the former reign removed, but there was also a posthumous blackening of Richard’s memory. In a sermon preached immediately after Henry IV’s accession Archbishop Arundel took his theme from 1 Corinthians 13:11 to draw a stark contrast between Richard’s “childish” conduct and his successor’s maturity, although in fact the two men were very close in age.6 Henry V’s reburial of Richard was also a calculated act of Realpolitik.7 The new king was keen to establish closer diplomatic links with Queen Anne’s brother Sigismund, elected King of the Romans in 1410. What better way to impress the emperor than to reunite Richard and his wife by placing them together in the double tomb created precisely for that purpose? In the spring of 1414 Sigismund visited England, ostensibly in order to broker a peace with France. The visit was considered so important that Sigismund was lodged in Henry’s own palace at Westminster while the king moved across the river Thames to stay at Lambeth, the official residence of the archbishop of Canterbury. It is likely that Sigismund went to Westminster abbey in order to pay his respects to the memory of his deceased sister and her husband. On May 24 Sigismund was taken to Windsor for the St George’s Day service of the Order of the Garter, to which he was admitted as a knight. The emperor gave Henry 5 Saul, Richard II, pp. 428–29. 6 See Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 12–14; see also Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 1–2. 7 See Paul Strohm, “Reburying Richard: Ceremony and Symbolic Relegitimation,” in England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, 1998), pp. 101–27.

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a special gift – the heart of St George, to whom the English king had a special devotion, and whose cult was also important in Bohemia.8 The imperial visit to England lasted for four months and clearly reflected the importance of the Anglo-German alliance. On August 15, 1416, Henry and Sigismund signed the Treaty of Canterbury, committing them and their heirs to perpetual friendship. For Sigismund the alliance was mainly intended to unify Christianity and facilitate the work of the Council of Constance, while Henry envisaged the alliance as a way to isolate France prior to an invasion. Emblematic of Richard II’s status as a non-person during the reign of Henry IV (1399–1413) is the famous frontispiece of the de luxe manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (MS 61, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), dating from the first decade of the fifteenth century. It depicts Chaucer standing at a lectern and reciting his poem to Richard and his courtiers who congregate below. This was a visual representation of Chaucer as the “laureate” poet and “father” of English poetry which, in the words of Seth Lerer, was a “construction of his later fifteenth-century scribes, readers, and poetic imitators.”9 The image of a poet speaking from a pulpit and elevated above a king is unusual and has generated a great deal of critical discussion.10 Less attention has been paid to the defaced features of the figure standing in front of the lectern, presumably those of King Richard himself. As the Lancastrian dynasty promoted Chaucer as the first great English poet, so it sought to obliterate the memory of the king whose court he had served. We do not know who commissioned the manuscript, but whoever owned it decided at some point that Richard II had become a liability. Comparing the defaced features of medieval felons and criminals with the political victims of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the Swiss medievalist Valentin Groebner asserts that “the visual representation of extreme

8 See Christopher Allmand, Henry V (New Haven, 1992), pp. 104–6. 9 See Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers (Princeton, 1993), p. 3. 10 See Derek Pearsall, “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience,” in The Yearbook of English Studies vol. 7 (1977), 68–74; Elizabeth Salter, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeman (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 267–71. For the argument that the frontispiece reflects the political agenda of the Lancastrian regime, see Anita Helmbold, “Chaucer Appropriated: The Troilus Frontispiece as Lancastrian Propaganda,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 30 (2008), pp. 205–34.

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physical violence renders its victims anonymous.”11 The violent fate of Richard II meant that he too became anonymous, his features expunged from the Troilus frontispiece so as to render him invisible to history. As this book will argue, his violent death also led to the deliberate erasure of the international court culture that came to England with his marriage to Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, in 1382.12 The queen had brought with her a large entourage of artists, clerks, confessors, and scribes, all trained at her father’s international court in Prague. Many of these Bohemians became recipients of the king’s favor, including the household knight Roger Siglem, for whom Richard found an English bride and to whom he gave a gilt cup on the occasion of Siglem’s marriage in 1387. Richard also granted prebends and benefices to Bohemian clerks who came over with Anne. In 1383 the prebend of Selsey, in Chichester cathedral, was granted to Bernard Lobdewe, a clerk of the duke of Teschen; and in July 1385 the custody of Montacute priory was bestowed upon Queen Anne’s confessor, Nicholas Hornyk.13 The royal favor shown to these foreigners caused resentment in some quarters, and many of the Bohemian dependents were sent home during the Merciless Parliament of 1388, when the king’s adversaries, the so-called Lords Appellant, were in the political ascendancy. The articles of indictment drawn up against Richard’s former tutor and chamberlain, Sir Simon Burley, charged him with causing Richard to give preferment to the queen’s countrymen and women: The said Simon by wicked design and procurement counselled our lord the king to have a great number of aliens, Bohemians and others, and to give them great gifts out of the revenues and commodities of the realm.14

The reason for Burley’s indictment was not only his support for the queen’s Bohemian entourage; it was also related to his Francophile tendencies, which he shared with other Ricardian chamber knights such as 11 Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York, 2008), p. 11. 12 See Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca, 2007). 13 Saul, Richard II, pp. 92–93 fn. 36. 14 “Le dit Simon par malveis engyn et procurement counseilla nostre seignur le roy davoir deinz soun hostelle grant nombre des aliens, Beaumers et autres, et de les doner grantz dons des revenuz et commodites du roiaume.” The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford, 1982), pp. 274–75.

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Sir John Salisbury. These Francophile sympathies among Richard’s retainers incurred the wrath of the pro-war party, who viewed the French as England’s traditional enemy. Looking back to the “glory days” of Richard’s grandfather, King Edward III, and his father, Edward the Black Prince, who had achieved memorable victories over the French at Crécy and Poitiers, the Appellants regarded the international and pro-French complexion of Richard’s court as a direct threat to their own influence and interests. As Ardis Butterfield puts it, “in moments of strain, the term ‘alien’ is wielded with unabashed chauvinism.”15 Queen Anne famously kneeled in front of the Appellants for three hours in order to beg for Burley’s life. But Richard Fitzalan, fourth earl of Arundel, brusquely dismissed the queen’s appeal for mercy and ominously replied: “Mamie priez pour vous et pour vostre mary, il vault mieux” (“Madam, you would do better to pray for yourself and your husband”).16 Richard never forgave this insult to his wife and the cruelty shown to his old tutor, and took his revenge in 1397 when Fitzalan was beheaded on the same spot where Burley had died. This was a political purge with inevitable cultural consequences. The Appellants succeeded in their aims, at least in the long term, when Richard was deposed by Henry Bolingbroke, one of their junior members. The Lancastrian usurpation entailed a shift from an international court to an inward-looking, Anglocentric court presided over by a king (Henry IV) who was anxious to retain his power in the face of frequent rebellions and insurrections, and with Chaucer as its leading poet.

The Luxembourg Family as Patrons of the Arts It is the aim of this study to explore the contribution made by the Luxembourg dynasty to the development of the Ricardian court. This influence has been largely overlooked by medievalists. The biographer of Richard II, Nigel Saul, has little to say about this influence – including Queen Anne’s crucial cultural role in mediating between her native Bohemia and her adoptive England. Reacting to what he considered to be Gervase Mathew’s disproportionate focus on the courts of King Robert of Naples 15 Ardis Butterfield, “French Culture and the Ricardian Court,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. A.J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 82–141, at p. 94. 16 Quoted from Andrew Taylor, “Anne of Bohemia and the Making of Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), 95–120, at 103.

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and Charles IV of Luxembourg,17 Saul attributes greater importance to the cultural influence of the Valois monarchy, in particular the highly cultured bibliophile King Charles V.18 In fact, Mathew has relatively little to say about the Luxembourg court. More importantly, the distinction between “Bohemian” and “French” implied by Saul’s critique of Mathew’s book is itself misleading, since the Valois kings of France were related by marriage and closely connected in culture with the rulers of Bohemia, Brabant, and Luxembourg. The Luxembourg and Valois dynasties were celebrated for their patronage of art and literature. Rather than distinguishing between these cultures along modern national lines, it makes more sense to see them as a unity. As Malcolm Vale has convincingly argued: “The desire to differentiate artistic production by means of its supposed ‘Englishness,’ ‘Dutchness,’ or ‘Frenchness’ is more often than not doomed to fail. Courts were cosmopolitan places, accustomed to receiving a constant stream of envoys, guests, visitors, entertainers and performers of all kinds.”19 This was especially true of the court of Richard II, where foreign knights and diplomats were constantly coming and going. Among the illustrious foreign guests was the exiled King Leo of Armenia, whom Richard sumptuously received in 1385.20 Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400) is usually seen as the preeminent literary figure at the court of Richard II. And yet there is no evidence that Richard ever patronized Chaucer. The recorded favors received by Chaucer were related to his role as a royal bureaucrat and administrator, not as a poet. As Derek Pearsall states, “If Edward III or Richard II actually knew Chaucer it was with but a fleeting recognition.”21 Chaucer’s reputation as the first great English poet was firmly established by the fifteenth century. Yet it is a curious fact that not a single reference from the Chaucer life-records gives him the title of poet.22 Whether this was because the chamber records of the Ricardian court have not survived is impossible to say; but it is not out of the question that Chaucer never received money from Richard II for his literary activity. 17 Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (New York, 1968). 18 Saul, Richard II, p. 249. 19 Malcom Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe 1270–1380 (Oxford, 2001), p. 250. 20 Saul, Richard II, p. 336. 21 See Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1992), p. 180. 22 See Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, 1989), p. 6.

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Pearsall is equally skeptical about Chaucer’s compliments to Queen Anne in Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women, seeing them as purely conventional.23 But it is surely significant that Chaucer compliments the queen so frequently, as we shall see in the next chapter. The idea of the queen as a reader of his work does not necessarily make Anne his actual patron. Rather, it suggests that Chaucer may have imagined Anne receiving his work and being receptive to it. This presupposes that Anne enjoyed a reputation among Chaucer and his circle as a woman of letters. So why did Chaucer imagine Anne rather than Richard as his patron? After all, the evidence shows that English aristocratic households and royal courts in the fourteenth century cultivated French poets but not indigenous English ones.24 But this is really the point: Chaucer imagined Anne as his patron because there was no tradition of rewarding vernacular English poets. This was not the case at the Paris court of the Valois King Charles V (1338–80) or the Prague court of the Emperor Charles of Luxembourg and his son Wenceslas IV (1361–1419). Chaucer would have been all too aware of the reputation of Anne’s family as generous patrons of poets and entertainers. In particular, the Brussels court of her uncle Wenceslas, duke of Luxembourg and Brabant (1337–83) and his wife, Jeanne of Brabant, was celebrated for its munificence, and “payments recorded to musicians and poets reached high levels”.25 Chapter 2 will argue that Chaucer’s vision of himself as a court poet is intimately tied up with his vision of Anne of Bohemia as his patron, and more broadly with his knowledge of Anne’s grandfather and father, both illustrious patrons of vernacular poets and writers. Chaucer’s reading of Guillaume de Machaut, secretary of King John of Bohemia, provided the English poet with an imaginative role as an intimate of Anne of Luxembourg, just as Machaut in Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne (The Judgment of the King of Bohemia) presents himself as having easy access to Anne’s grandfather John of Luxembourg and his daughter Bonne of Luxembourg, Anne’s aunt. Anne’s influence on Chaucer’s imagination would help to explain the fact that Chaucer was active as a court poet yet does not appear to have received any concrete patronage from Richard II. As Nigel Saul points out, “there was a division of taste between the middle-ranking officials at court and the higher aristocracy – the former preferring the newer lyric poetry 23 Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 180. 24 Butterfield, “French Culture and the Ricardian Court,” pp. 98–99. 25 Butterfield, “French Culture and the Ricardian Court,” pp. 97–98.

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and the latter the more traditional romances and chivalric works.”26 But this distinction may have been complicated by Anne’s role as a cultural mediator not only between her native Prague and her adopted London but also between her husband’s court and the English poets who were drawn to it. This study will also reexamine the status of the anonymous Gawain poet by arguing that his anonymity may have something to do with his important role at the court of Richard and Anne. The fact that one of the most important English poets of the period remains anonymous to this day, while Chaucer has emerged as the preeminent court poet of Richard’s reign, may implicate the former not only as a Ricardian poet but also as one closely associated with the life and memory of Richard’s beloved consort, as we shall explore further in chapters 3 and 4. Although it is true that the Gawain poet is not identified by any of the surviving contemporary court records, it may be that he too was a casualty of the Lancastrian strategy to obliterate the memory of Richard’s reign. Chaucer and the Gawain poet may have looked to Anne rather than to Richard as their source of inspiration. As we shall see in the following chapters, Anne’s influence can be felt not only in Chaucer’s courtly romance Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1382–86) and The Legend of Good Women; it is also palpable in the poem Pearl, which may have been intended as an elegy on her death in 1394, and even in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with its subtle modulation between courtly splendor and intense piety. As chapters 3 and 4 will explore, a close reading of the historical subtexts of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl will suggest that, far from being remote works of provincial society, these poems may have been written for an audience familiar with the leading players of the court. The amorous subplot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can be seen as a carefully veiled allusion to the scandalous love affair between Richard II’s favorite courtier, Robert de Vere, ninth earl of Oxford, and Queen Anne’s Bohemian lady-in-waiting Agnes Lancecrona. Pearl has been interpreted as an elegy on the death of Anne in 1394, and chapter 4 explores this hypothesis in greater depth.27 Bohemia was certainly not a remote destination for European travelers in the late fourteenth century. Guillaume de Machaut accompanied his 26 Saul, Richard II, p. 364. 27 See John Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 155–70.

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master, John of Luxembourg, to Bohemia on several occasions. In his last work, La Prise d’Alixandre (The Taking of Alexandria), written long after King John’s death, Machaut mentions the central importance of Prague as the imperial capital in his account of the travels of Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who was visiting the courts of Europe in the hope of gathering support for a new crusade to the Holy Land: On the ninth day they parted And took their way and path Straight to Prague, a city that has great importance. There the emperor makes his home, a man whom God loves, honors, and esteems.28

Machaut’s literary descendant, Eustace Deschamps, who wrote a famous ballad in praise of Chaucer’s verse, was sent there on diplomatic business by his patron Louis d’Orléans in January 1397. Deschamps found Bohemian food and lodging uncongenial, but his experience was not all negative, and he praised Prague as a city of beautiful churches in his “Rondeau 1330”: There are three cities in Prague, and many large and noble churches, and devout, praiseworthy people.29

Unlike Machaut and Deschamps, Chaucer never went to Prague, but that may tell us more about England’s cultural insularity than about Bohemian remoteness. Prior to Richard II’s reign, England was deemed provincial by many continental men of letters. The Plantagenet kings of England were known abroad largely as men of arms rather than of letters. Richard’s grandfather Edward III and his father, the Black Prince, were famous for their military victories at Crécy and Poitiers in France. In the final poem of his pastoral sequence, the Bucolicum carmen, the Italian humanist poet Petrarch depicts Pan, an allegorical personification of the king of France, in confrontation with Arthicus, the king of England. Before Edward III’s 28 “Au ix. jour se partirent/ et leur voie et chemin prenirent/tout droit a prague une cite/ qui est de grant auctorite,/ li empereres y demeure/ que dieux aimme prise et honneure” (975–80). Guillaume de Machaut, La Prise d’Alixandre, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 2002), pp. 80–81. 29 “Il a a Prague trois citez/ Et mainte grant et noble eglise,/ Et gens devoz, don’t je les prise.” Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. Gaston Reynaud (Paris, 1981), vii, p. 91.

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victories in France Petrarch had viewed the English as a timid race, but now he at least acknowledged their martial spirit. But the Plantagenet rulers of England had no reputation for culture and literary patronage. By contrast, Petrarch had the highest opinion of the learning and erudition of Emperor Charles IV and his court. After meeting Charles in Mantua in 1354, he described the emperor in glowing terms as “a prince no less Italian than German in gentleness, language, and morals” (“princeps ille mitissimus, lingua et moribus non minus Italicus quam Germanus”).30 This reputation is borne out by Charles’s contemporaries. In his funeral panegyric in 1378 the imperial Chancellor John of Středa ( Johann von Neustein) compared the emperor with Solomon and even referred to him as “wiser than Solomon” (sapiencior Salomone).31 In La Prise d’Alixandre Machaut praises Charles as “the second Solomon”: In no land could be found A man more prudent than him, People there and across the mountains too say He’s the second Solomon in fact.32

Machaut also praises Emperor Charles for bringing peace to “all of Germany,/ To Austria and to Bohemia,/ To Munich, Bavaria, and Hungary/ As far as the Russian marches,/ To Moravia, Prussia, and Cracow ...”33 In marked contrast to his war-like father, John of Luxembourg, who had died at the battle of Crécy fighting the English alongside the flower of French chivalry in 1346, Emperor Charles was inclined to peace rather than war, and more adept at increasing his power through diplomacy and marriage than through conflict. It is significant that of all the mythic and historical ancestors included in the lost Luxembourg Genealogy Murals from Noah to Charles IV (formerly in Karlstein castle but surviving as sixteenth-century drawings in the National Gallery, Prague), not one is a military hero. Emperor Charles’s nephew, King Charles V of France, 30 Letter to Zanobius de Strada. Quoted in Fidel Rädle, “Karl IV. Als lateinischer Autor,” in Kaiser Karl IV. Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Ferdinand Seibt (Munich, 1978), pp. 253–60, at p. 153. 31 Rädle, “Karl IV,” p. 253. 32 “On ne porroit en nulle terre/ Nul plus sage homme de li querre/Con dit ca et dela les mons/ Que cest li secons salemons” (989–92). Machaut, La Prise d’Alixandre, pp. 80–81. 33 “Pais a mise par toute alemaingne/ en osteriche et en behaingne/ en misce en baiviere en hongrie/ jusques es marches de russie/ en morave en prusce en cracoe” (1033–37). Machaut, La Prise d’Alixandre, pp. 82–83.

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Fig. 4  The Eagle Ceiling: Imperial eagles painted on the wooden ceiling of the Great Hospital in Norwich (1383). By permission of the Great Hospital, Norwich

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was also celebrated as a peace-maker and embodiment of wisdom in the tradition of King Solomon.34 There is some evidence that Richard was so deeply influenced by his Valois and Luxembourg relatives that he saw himself more in the learned guise of his father-in-law than in the martial spirit of his grandfather and father. This difference is exemplified by the epitaphs to Edward and Richard on their tombs in Westminster abbey. The epitaph around the chamfered upper edge of Edward III’s tomb-chest likens him to Judas Maccabeus in triumphs in war and peace.35 In stark contrast, the epitaph to Richard II on his tomb commemorates the king’s wisdom and compares him with Homer (animo prudens ut Omerus).36 We can still see visual evidence of Richard’s identification with his wife’s imperial pedigree in the wooden roof painted with imperial eagles of the Great Hospital in Norwich, visited by Richard and Anne in 1383 (fig. 4), as well as the eagles embroidered on his robe in the Wilton Diptych. The king’s Continental ambitions were given further artistic expression in the carved head of an emperor wearing a triple crown still visible in the southeast pier of York minster and probably dating from the 1390s.37 The influential role of foreign consorts like Anne of Bohemia was instrumental in fostering cultural contacts between England and continental Europe. Prior to Anne these queen consorts of England were usually French, like Adeliza of Louvain, wife of Henry I, and Eleanor Provence, wife of Henry III; or occasionally Spanish, like Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I.38 Anne’s presence in England marked a significant shift from a monolingual (French) to a multilingual court culture. Whereas previous English queens had been monolingual, Anne of Bohemia’s background was distinctively polyglot and cosmopolitan. Her father was the son of John of Luxembourg, the French-speaking and Francophile son of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, and of Elizabeth of Bohemia, a Czechand German-speaking member of the native ruling dynasty of Bohemia, which had died out in the male line in 1306 when its last king (Wenceslas 34 See Deborah McGrady, The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure: The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France (Toronto, 2019), p. 34. 35 “Tertius Edwardus regni complens jubileum/Invictus pardus bellis pollens Machabeum.” Quoted in Mark Duffy, Royal Tombs of Medieval England (Stroud, 2003), p. 150. 36 Duffy, Royal Tombs, p. 171. 37 John H. Harvey, “Richard II and York,” in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F.R.H. du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London, 1971), pp. 202–17, at p. 214. 38 See Deirdre Jackson, Medieval Women (London, 2015), ch. 6.

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III) was assassinated. The Přemyslid family to which Elizabeth belonged was Slav and German by ancestry but German by cultural adoption and practice, as we shall see in chapter 3. Elizabeth’s son, Emperor Charles IV, reflected this multilingual background and spoke five languages fluently (French, Italian, German, Latin, and Czech).39 The emperor passed on this polyglot family tradition to his children. His daughter Anne brought to England copies of the New Testament in German, Czech, and Latin from her native Prague; her ability to read the Bible in the vernacular caused shock waves in a country where translations of the Bible into English were forbidden. The religious reformer and Oxford theologian John Wyclif invokes Anne’s trilingual Bible as an exemplary reason for having the Gospels translated into English.40 This does not make Queen Anne a reform-minded supporter of Wyclif, of course, but it does demonstrate the degree to which knowledge of the queen’s multilingual learning and piety pervaded not only the court but, more widely, the religious reform movement clustered around Wyclif ’s ideas.41 The reason for the multilingual profile of the Prague court had a great deal to do with the role of German princesses whose marriages to the kings of Bohemia led to the importation of German culture and writers to the court of Prague. It is hardly a coincidence that the emergence of the Prague court as a major center of German literature began in the reign of Wenceslas I (1230–53), whose wife, Kunigunde of Hohenstaufen, was a German princess.42 Prague’s status as a center of German literary culture attracted many poets from abroad. One of the Germans drawn to the Prague court was Ulrich von Etzenbach, the author of a voluminous romance of Alexander the Great which flatteringly compared the warrior King Přemysl Ottokar II with the hero of Antiquity.43 Another German poet was Heinrich von Meissen (also known as der Frauenlob because of his praise of women), who spent part of his early career at the Prague court of Přemysl’s son King Wenceslas II. Heinrich hailed from Meissen 39 Rädle, Karl IV., p. 253. 40 John Wyclif’s Polemical Works in Latin, ed. R. Buddensieg, 2 vols. (London, 1883), vol. 1, p. 168. 41 See Michael van Dussen, From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2012). 42 See Václav Bok’s introduction to his anthology of German poets at the court of the kings of Bohemia, Moravo, Čechy, Radujte Se! (Prague, 1998), p. 13. 43 See Hans Joachim Behr, Literatur als Machtlegitimation. Studien zur Funktion der deutschsprachigen Dichtunng am böhmischen Königshof im 13. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1989).

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in Saxony, which was not far from Bohemia.44 The international court culture cultivated by the late Přemyslid kings of Bohemia was continued and expanded by their Luxembourg descendant Emperor Charles IV, whose glittering court drew men of talent like the Italian humanists Petrarch and Cola di Rienzo. Plantagenet England was culturally remote from these avant-garde trends in east-central Europe. Only with the marriage of King Edward III (1312–77) to Philippa of Hainault did this situation begin to change. As was the tradition, Philippa brought with her to England the culture and language in which she had grown up. As queen consort of England she attracted the service of her fellow Hainaulter Jean Froissart, the distinguished poet and chronicler, who later influenced the young Chaucer – and vice versa. As Michael Hanly has demonstrated, the cultural sophistication of the court of Edward III was been underestimated. He is often described as being uninterested in books, but contemporary records show that he owned 160 volumes, which were housed in the Tower of London.45 These were mainly traditional French romances such the Roman du Roy Arthure and the Quest de Saint Grael.46 At the same time, the use of English as a medium of literary entertainment was increasing during Edward’s reign. The famous Auchinleck Manuscript, compiled in the 1330s, includes an English version of the romance Guy of Warwick adapted from Anglo-Norman. Such works were probably composed for the regional gentry and the prosperous merchant class; it was certainly a merchant who commissioned the Auchinleck Manuscript. To what extent these English romances found an audience at Edward’s court is difficult to assess. His most recent biographer asserts that the king encouraged the writing of English romances in order to bolster his belligerent anti-French policy,47 but the evidence indicates that French remained the dominant cultural language of the English court throughout his reign. Only in the reign of Richard II did literature in English begin to assume an influential role at the royal court, and even then it coexisted with French rather than displacing it. Ardis Butterfield has demonstrated that the French language played a far more vital role in English cultural life in the later Middle Ages than is often assumed and that French retained 44 See Barbara Newman, Frauenlob’s Song of Songs (University Park, PA, 2006), p. 49. 45 Michael Hanly, “France,” in A New Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Chichester, 2019), pp. 167–84, at p. 170. 46 See W. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven, 2011), pp. 456–57. 47 Ormrod, Edward III, p. 459.

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a vibrant cultural dominance in England throughout the Hundred Years’ War.48 It was during Richard’s peaceful reign, when Francophile tendencies were at their height and England was largely at peace with France, that English burgeoned as a courtly medium. How can we explain this apparent paradox? To understand the complexity of the situation we need to go back to the last years of Edward III’s reign. By 1360 the Anglo-French war begun by him had temporarily concluded with the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), when Edward agreed to relinquish his claim to the French throne in exchange for the French acceptance of his ownership of Aquitaine and other ancestral lands in France.49 When Richard II assumed the English throne in 1377 at the tender age of ten he continued this new policy of peace and détente with England’s traditional enemy, which lasted for the rest of his reign – an act that led to the opposition of many of the young king’s uncles and family members. Inevitably, this policy of peace allowed for closer contacts with Continental courts. Richard was an avowed European and Francophile prince who modeled his own kingship on the example of the cultivated Valois King Charles V.50 His marriage to Anne of Bohemia broadened his European horizons even further, and deepened Richard’s French cultural sympathies, since his young bride was as northern French as she was Bohemian.51 Anne’s grandfather, John Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia, had been the patron of the great French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut; his daughter, Bonne of Luxembourg, who had married the heir to the French throne, John, duke of Normandy (later King John II of France) was also Machaut’s patron and commissioned the beautifully illuminated psalter which is named for her and which is now in the Cloisters in New York (fig. 5). Anne’s uncle Wenceslas, duke of Brabant, was the patron of Jean Froissart, who interpolated the duke’s French love lyrics into his own Arthurian romance Méliador. Her father, Charles, was also a great patron of the arts and transformed his capital, Prague, into a leading center of Gothic art and architecture. Charles 48 Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy. Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2010). 49 Ormrod, Edward III, p. 405. 50 See Michael J. Bennett, “Richard II and the Mirror of Christendom,” in Ruling Fourteenth-Century England: Essays in Honour of Christopher Given-Wilson, ed. Rémy Ambühl, James Bothwell and Laura Tomkins (Woodbridge, 2019), pp.  263–88, at p. 264. 51 Mathew, The Court of Richard II, p. 16.

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Fig. 5  Jean Le Noir: The Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg (1348–49). New York City, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters. Inv. 69.86, f. 321v/322r

was born in Prague in 1316, but at the age of seven left his homeland and went to France to be educated at the Paris court of his brother-in-law, King Charles IV of France. He remained in France for seven years, returning to Bohemia only in 1330. On returning to his native land he began to recreate the cosmopolitan sophistication of the Paris court in the city on the Vltava and became one of the leading figures of the international court culture.52 It is possible that Anne’s multilingualism provided a precedent for a similar linguistic and cultural plurality to emerge at the Ricardian court. This plurality would help to explain the apparent paradox of Chaucer writing in English for a court – or, more accurately, within a milieu broadly 52 There is a voluminous amount of scholarship especially in Czech and German on the reign and court of Emperor Charles IV. See František Kavka, Život na dvoře Karla IV. (Prague, 1993); František Kavka, Historie života velkého vladaře (Prague, 1998); Kaiser Karl IV. Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Ferdinand Seibt (Munich, 1978); Iva Rosario, Art and Propaganda: Charles IV of Bohemia 1346–78 (Woodbridge, 2000); Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, ed. Barbara Drake Boehm and Jiří Fajt (New Haven, 2006); Jan Royt, The Prague of Charles IV, trans. Derek and Marzia Paton (Prague, 2016).

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defined as courtly – that was largely Francophile and French speaking. As Butterfield has suggested, “it may be time … to argue that it is important not to think of Chaucer as English.”53 Chaucer’s status as a European rather than an English writer has become the focus of a recent biography.54 Yet, as Butterfield indicates, he is often paradoxically enlisted into the familiar narrative of “the triumph of English.” This literary historical narrative of the rise of English has tended to follow the model of late medieval English historiography in frequently positing a “rising tide of nationalism” from the reigns of Edward III to Henry V. But this model of ever-growing national sentiment conveniently overlooks Richard’s policy of peace, and thus unwittingly perpetuates the process of political amnesia practiced by the Lancastrian regime. As Professor Butterfield adroitly points out: “If we took instead the period between 1337, when Edward III began his military campaigns, and the late 1390s, when Richard II was looking instead for peace and retrenchment (and fighting for his political life) we would have the very different sense that English ambition was in a state of decline.”55 The reluctance to celebrate warfare is reflected in the work of the writers attached to the court of Richard II. As John Burrow points out, none of the great “Ricardian” writers (Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain poet) was much interested in feats of arms.56 This rejection of the traditional subject-matter of heroic epic can be understood as a reflection of the influence of the Valois and Luxembourg courts. Emperor Charles was a ruler of great piety and unusual learning, which he acquired at the court of the Valois in Paris (1323–30), where he came under the influence of the Benedictine abbot Pierre Roger de Fécamp, later Pope Clement VI (1342–52). It was at the University of Paris that Charles studied the works of Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, a most unusual achievement for a lay prince.57 And it was at the court of Paris that he also acquired a deep interest in the Passion of Christ and the cult of the saints, whose relics he collected with great fervor. Charles would have seen (and probably worshipped in) the Sainte-Chapelle, built by Louis IX (1226–70) for his newly acquired Crown of Thorns and a segment of the True Cross. This mag53 Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, p. 10. 54 See Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, NJ, 2019). 55 Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, p. 19. 56 J.A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet (London, 1971), p. 56. 57 See Franz Machilek, “Privatfrömmigkeit and Staatsfrömmigkeit,” in Kaiser Karl IV. Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Ferdinand Seibt (Munich, 1978), pp. 87–94, at p. 87.

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Fig. 6  La Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (1247)

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Fig. 7  Karlstein Castle, Czech Republic (founded 1348)

nificent building is typical of the court style of the thirteenth century in its combination of architecture and elaborate metalwork. This association had a long ancestry in western art, from Nero’s Golden House in Rome, which was covered in gold and adorned with gems and pearls, to the Bucoleion palace in Byzantium, where the relics of the Crown and Cross had been housed before they were sold to St Louis by the emperor of Byzantium.58 Based on the form of a reliquary, the Sainte-Chapelle became an important influence on the construction of Karlstein castle near Prague,

58 See Robert Branner, St Louis and the Court Style in Gothic Architecture (London, 1965), p. 58.

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which Charles built both as a residence for his family and to house his own precious collection of holy relics (figs. 6 and 7). These relics included a piece of the True Cross and two thorns from the Crown of Thorns presented to him by the French dauphin (the future King Charles V) and a relic of the Holy Sponge given by Ludovico, marquis of Gonzaga. The presentation of the holy relics was commemorated in a triptych of paintings by Nicholas Wurmser of Strasbourg on the wall of the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in Karlstein (ca. 1356–58). Charles’s special veneration for the Arma Christi was shared by his sister, Bonne of Luxembourg, as well as by his great aunt Princess Kunigunde, both of whom proudly displayed this motif in their books of devotion. As we shall explore in greater depth in chapter 4, the highest and largest chapel of Karlstein, known as the chapel of the Holy Cross (or Passion), not only replicated the reliquary concept of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; like Louis IX’s thirteenth-century foundation, it served an ideological purpose in equating temporal with spiritual power, the earthly with the heavenly court. King Louis symbolized the westward translation of imperial power from Byzantium to France by placing the Crown of Thorns in his new foundation in Paris. In receiving relics of the Passion from the French dauphin, Emperor Charles effected a translatio imperii in the opposite direction, from Capetian France to Luxembourg Bohemia, which now became the center of his imperial lands. In locating his new empire in east-central Europe, Charles was implicitly equating it with the Earthly Paradise, which the medieval imagination situated in the East following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.59 The extraordinary amalgamation of metalwork, precious gems, and paintings in the chapel of the Holy Cross in Karlstein castle and in the St Wenceslas chapel in St Vitus cathedral in Prague (fig. 8) not only combines French and Byzantine artistic influences in an eclectic fashion; it situates Bohemia ideologically at the confluence of western and eastern Christianity. It is of interest in this connection that the depiction of Constantinople in the famous Bohemian manuscript of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville in the British Library, London, envisions the capital of eastern Christianity as a Bohemian town with a square surrounded by colonnaded houses that can still be glimpsed today in the Malá Strana (Lesser Side) of Prague. It seems that the artist was not only representing Constantinople as a Bohemian 59 See Ian Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia, PA, 1993), p. 1.

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Fig. 8  St Wenceslas chapel, St Vitus cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic

town; on an unconscious level at least, he was also reconstituting Prague as the new Constantinople (fig. 9). Like Emperor Charles, King Charles V of France also preferred the arts of peace to the arts of war; indeed his success over the English was attributed by his contemporaries to his learning and wisdom rather than his military prowess.60 The adoption of a pro-peace policy at the court of Richard II thus marked a major departure from the pro-war policies of the earlier generation (Edward III and John of Luxembourg). The resistance to war is reflected in many texts associated with Richard’s court, including the works of Chaucer and the Gawain poet. Even the Alliterative Morte Arthur, discussed in the second half of chapter 3, shows a curiously clerical discomfort with the devastation of war. Albeit still in the heroic mode of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1136), this curious hybrid of epic and romance reflects the reign of Richard II in its disillusionment with war. The doomed figure of King Arthur may even have been intended to mirror the tragic fate of Richard himself, as we shall see in chapter 3.

60 McGrady, The Writer’s Gift, p. 34.

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Fig. 9  Constantinople. From the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Bohemian ca. 1400), British Library Add. 24189, f. 9v

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The easy commerce between languages at Richard’s court is reflected in the multilingualism of the imperial court in Prague. Both London and Prague were thriving, bustling commercial centers in the second half of the fourteenth century and the vibrancy of these mercantile spaces was inseparable from the polyglot complexion of the royal courts themselves. As Caroline Barron has shown, medieval London was a porous, open environment in which vernacular languages jostled with each other.61 But the same is true of Prague and its royal court. By the mid-fourteenth century Prague was the most populous European city north of the Alps, and Charles IV was instrumental in transforming it into one of the most significant and imposing cultural sites in Europe. In his autobiography, written in Latin (Vita Caroli Quarti), he relates how he came back from the Valois court in Paris, where he was educated, to find the Prague castle neglected and dilapidated after years of absentee rule by his father. King John was uninterested in Bohemia and essentially ceded it to Charles even during his own lifetime, for a hefty payment and a guarantee that John would not return to his kingdom for three years. In the meantime Charles proceeded to reassert royal control and rebuild the neglected kingdom.62 After John’s death in 1346, Charles decided not only to renovate Prague castle but to erect a new cathedral. He brought the architect Matthew of Arras (d. 1352) from Avignon to build St Vitus cathedral; and after his death this French architect was succeeded by Peter Parler (ca. 1333–99), a sculptor and architect from Cologne, who was responsible for the construction of other new buildings, including a bridge (now named for Charles) that would connect the two halves of the city (fig. 10). In 1348 Charles also founded in Prague the oldest central European university north of the Alps, which attracted scholars and writers from across Europe. Evoking the classical past, the Italian early humanist Uberto Decembrio (1350–1427) stated that, “What Augustus did for Rome, Charles IV did for Prague.”63 Emperor Charles had also shown an interest in the translation of devotional works from Latin into the vernacular (although he drew the line at translations of the Vulgate Bible). A major devotional work undertaken 61 See C.M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004). 62 “Post cuius recessum Karolus feliciter et satis industriose regni gessit gubernacula, et queque dissipata et distracta revocando in statum debitum disposuit ac reduxit.” Vita Karoli Quarti/Karel IV. Vlastní životopis, trans. Jakub Pavel (Prague, 1978), p. 138. 63 Quoted from Stephanie Porras, Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce and Devotion (London, 2018), p. 15.

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Fig. 10  View of Prague with the Charles bridge in the foreground and St Vitus cathedral in the background

at his behest was a Czech translation of the Franciscan Meditationes Vitae Christi. The anonymous author makes it clear that it was Emperor Charles who commissioned the translation: “I, unworthy man, began to compose this work on the orders of Emperor Charles, King of Bohemia.”64 This allusion to Charles as the patron is mentioned in only one manuscript of the text from the later fifteenth century, so it is impossible to know whether it is a later interpolation. At all events, it signals the importance attached to Charles IV as a patron of literature well into the fifteenth century. Charles was also interested in the history of his native Bohemia and commissioned historians like the author Přibík Pulkava z Radenína to write a history of Bohemia in Czech, and the Italian minorite Giovanni Marignola to compile a two-volume Latin history of Bohemia from the Flood to the present (1353–56).65 His ideological investment in historiography as a means of establishing his illustrious and imperial pedigree may well have influenced 64 “Protož já, neduostojný, přikazáním ciesaře Karla, krále českého, jal jsem se pro toto dielo” (279, 5–16). Quoted in Život Krista Pana, ed. Martin Stluka (Brno, 2006), p. xiv. 65 See Michael Eschborn, Karlstein: Das Rätsel um die Burg IV. (Stuttgart, 1971), p. 37.

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his son-in-law Richard, who sponsored a history of Britain from its mythic foundation by Brutus of Troy to his own day (Corpus Christi, Cambridge, MS. 251).66 Emperor Charles’s son King Wenceslas IV (r. 1378–1419) inherited his father’s multilingualism; he spoke German (to his chamberlain) and Czech (to his confessor). Although he lacked his father’s political and diplomatic skills, he was a great patron of the arts and a passionate collector of books, an interest he probably acquired from the bibliophile Charles V after visiting the Paris court in 1378. Together with John, duke of Berry, and Gian Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, Wenceslas was “one of the three outstanding patrons of the turn of the century, whose personal preferences raised Gothic book-making to unparalleled heights of splendor and artistic achievement.”67 Wenceslas continued the Luxembourg patronage of vernacular writing, even transgressing his father’s ban on vernacular translations of the Gospels when he commissioned a splendid illuminated Bible in German, now in the State Library in Vienna (Cod. 2759–64). In so doing Wenceslas helped to open the Pandora’s box of religious reform in Bohemia that his father had been so concerned to keep shut. His readiness to have the Bible translated into German would confirm Wyclif ’s claim that Anne of Bohemia brought a German and Czech translation of the Gospels to England. Wenceslas also patronized secular literature in the vernacular and owned an illuminated manuscript of the German courtly romance Willehalm by Wolfram von Eschenbach, now in the State Library in Vienna (Cod. Ser. N. 2643).68 This interest in literature extended also to texts written in Czech. The Bohemian courtier and writer Laurence of Březová tells us that he wrote his History of the World in Czech at the command of Wenceslas and his chamberlain: At the command of that man of esteemed value John of Eisemberk, most illustrious chamberlain, and the Lord Wenceslas, king of the Romans and king of Bohemia, I, Master Laurence, servant of that worthy king, assembled with great diligence this chronicle from the chronicles of the

66 Bennett, Richard II, p. 42. 67 Quoted from Ingo F. Walther and Norbert Wolf, Codices illustrés. The World’s Most Famous Illuminated Manuscripts 400–1600 (Cologne, 2018), p. 242. 68 See “Wenceslas IV’s Books and their illuminators,” in Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, pp. 22–24.

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Christians, the Jews and the pagans so that the Czech language might be magnified.69

In the preface to his translation of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville into Czech, Laurence mentions that he undertook the work “in order to make known also to the Czechs what was described in it.”70 The emergence of Czech as a language of the royal court of Prague finds a parallel in the rise of English at the Ricardian court. English began to make inroads in the works of Chaucer, John Gower, and the Gawain poet, but not for the same reasons. The English nobility still identified with French culture (especially French romances), even if they were largely anti-French. The rise of English at the court of Richard II may have had to do less with Richard’s policies and more with the cosmopolitan atmosphere fostered by Anne of Bohemia’s presence there. Chaucer had written his first English poem, The Book of the Duchess, as an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster in 1369, but there is no concrete evidence that it was a royal commission.71 The same is true of his courtly romance Troilus and Criseyde (1382–86), which coincides with the early years of Richard and Anne’s marriage and their youthful, hedonistic court. But it seems more than coincidental that Chaucer should compose his most courtly work at precisely the time that Anne of Bohemia arrived on the scene; and it is tempting to speculate whether the presence of this European polyglot princess at the English court inspired Chaucer to write such a carefully crafted poem with the obvious intention of making an impact on that illustrious court. The compliment addressed to Anne early in the poem (“right as oure first lettre is now an A”) (line 171) certainly suggests that Anne was on Chaucer’s mind as he began his great work and that her cosmopolitanism animated it in some fashion. As David Wallace has proposed, Chaucer’s exposure to the

69 “Ku požádání slovutné vzácnosti muže Jana z Eisemberka, komorníka přejasného, a pána Václava, římského krále, vždy rozmnožitele a českého krále, já, mistr Vavřinec, tého duostojného krále služebník, túto kroniku z křiest’anských, z židovských i pohanských kronik s robotnú pilností sebral sem, aby českého jazyku zveličena.” National Library Prague, MS XVII F47, fol. 1r. 70 “Aby i Čechům to známo bylo, což jest v nich popsáno.”Cestopis tzv. Mandevilla, ed. František Šimek (Prague, 1963), p. 21. 71 See Jenni Nuttall’s essay on patronage in A New Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Chichester, 2019), pp. 307–18.

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Italian works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio may even have been facilitated by the presence of Anne and her Bohemian courtiers in London.72 Given the large Bohemian entourage that accompanied Anne to England, it is probable that Czech and German were heard at Westminster, Eltham, and Sheen, the queen’s manor houses, alongside French and English. The discovery of a Czech prayer in a Book of Hours of English provenance in the Huntington Library (the Felbrigg Book of Hours, HM 58285) suggests that Czech was being used and spoken – if only for liturgical purposes – in England. The Book of Hours was owned by Anne of Bohemia’s lady-in-waiting Margaret of Teschen, who was married to the king’s standard bearer, Sir Simon de Felbrigg.73 The Czech prayer, which is in a Bohemian scribal hand, indicates that the queen’s entourage included trained scribes and clerks. Modeled on the examples provided by Valois Paris and Luxembourg Prague, the Ricardian court was genuinely cosmopolitan, multilingual, and inclined to peace rather than war. Ricardian poets like Chaucer showed more interest in fashionable French genres such as the love-visions and love-allegories crafted by Machaut, Froissart, and Deschamps than in the chivalrous romances favored by the older generation of English aristocratic book-owners.74 Even the Gawain poet seeks to embed the traditional British heroic figures of Brutus of Troy and King Arthur within the narrative framework of the French Arthurian romance created by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century, thus creating a deliciously ironic gloss on such notions of heroism in the guise of the deflated Sir Gawain. The Gawain poet was seeking to synthesize traditional Arthurian romance derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1136) with a more up-to-date interest in French romance for an audience that was metropolitan and sophisticated. The same is true of Pearl – a dream-allegory in the latest fashion of French poetry, heavily influenced by the Roman de la Rose and Machaut’s dream poems. Michael Bennett has argued that the anonymous Gawain poet probably moved within the

72 See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997). 73 See Alfred Thomas, “Margaret of Teschen’s Czech Prayer: Transnationalism and Female Literacy in the Later Middle Ages,” Huntington Library Quarterly 74.2(2011), 309–23. 74 See Derek Pearsall, Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), p. 61.

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Ricardian courtly orbit and displayed the same cosmopolitan tastes as other court poets.75 The four masterpieces contained in the modest Cotton Nero A.x manuscript (British Library) – most famously Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl – should perhaps be seen less as products of a “provincial” culture remote from London and more as sophisticated poems produced for a Cheshire elite gathered around King Richard and his itinerant court, which moved around the country with long periods spent in the north, including in the cities of York and Chester, which Richard made his power base after falling out with London and its leading citizens. It seems likely, as Bennett has argued, that Richard’s peripatetic mode of governance was based on the imperial model which required the Emperor Charles, with no permanent capital, to be constantly on the move within the territories under his jurisdiction.76 The Gawain poet may have written his works for this itinerant courtly audience. His most likely patron was Sir John Stanley, a Cheshire magnate attached to Richard’s court, and the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may well have been composed as entertainment for the court as it perambulated through the kingdom. This itinerant mode of the court is to some extent reflected in Sir Gawain’s movements between the French imaginary world of Logres and the real, topographically familiar world of Wales and the north-west Midlands. Adding to the possibility that the poem was recited to a royal audience is the fact that Cheshire English was spoken to the king by his Cheshire bodyguard in a curiously intimate fashion.77 Given the king’s familiarity with the Cheshire dialect, it is conceivable that he and his Cheshire courtiers were the first viva voce audience of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The traditional inclination to equate the English provinces with rustic backwardness is the product of a distinctly modern nationalistic anachronism which envisages culture radiating out from the capital city to the provinces. In the Middle Ages poets and writers (with few exceptions like the London-born Chaucer) tended to originate from the provinces and gravitated to the royal courts, for the obvious reason that these courts 75 See Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983). 76 See Michael Bennett, “Richard II and the Wider Realm,” in Richard II. The Art of Kingship, ed. Anthony Goodman and James L. Gillespie (Oxford, 1999), pp. 187–204, at p. 200. 77 “Dycun, slep sicury quile we wake, and dreed nouzt quile we lyve sestow.” Quoted by Saul, Richard II, p. 394.

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offered employment to talented men of letters. This is true of a major French writer like Machaut, who was born of a humble family in a village in Champagne, but it is also true of many of the English poets at the court of Richard II, including the Gawain poet. The courts of France, Bohemia, and England all shared the same tendency to complicate the modern binary distinction between foreign and native. Not only did royal courts attract writers and artists from the provinces, they also attracted illustrious writers from abroad. As already mentioned, Petrarch and Cola di Rienzo visited the imperial court at Prague and were very impressed by what they saw. Charles’s matrilineal ancestors King Přemysl Ottokar II and Wenceslas II of Bohemia had already transformed Prague into a major center of German literature and culture by the late thirteenth century. Both rulers were sufficiently well known in Italy for Dante to mention them in canto VII of his Purgatorio: Ottokar was his name, and of more worth in his Swaddling clothes than bearded Wenceslas, His son, with his diet of lewdness and idleness.78

Wenceslas II was a major patron of German courtly poetry, as can be seen in the famous Manesse Codex where he is depicted among other great exponents of the Minnesang. These long-standing literary strains in Charles IV’s family came together and were perpetuated in his children Wenceslas IV and Anne. Anne’s grandfather John of Luxembourg is a good example of the transnational nature of late medieval European courts: the son of Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg, he was elected king of Bohemia and crowned in Prague in 1311. But John as ruler did not remain in his adoptive land for long, but was constantly on the move between his kingdom and his ancestral lands in Luxembourg.79 The familiarity between the European poet and his patron will be examined at length in the next chapter. There is some evidence that the Ricardian court also fostered a new relationship between the artist and his patron that is reminiscent of the Valois and Luxembourg courts, one characterized by the dignity and respect that we normally associate with the Italian Renaissance. It is significant that the artist first came into prominence as a member of the royal familia in the fourteenth century with 78 “Ottacchero ebbe nome, e ne le fasce/ Fu meglio assai che Vincislao suo figlio/ ­Barbuto, cui lussuria e ozio pasce” (VII, 99–101). Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. W.S. Merwin (Port Townsend, WA, 2018), pp. 68–69. 79 See Jiří Spěváček, Jan Lucemburský a jeho doba 1296–1346 (Prague, 1994).

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the emergence of the international court culture. This began in Naples at the Angevin court in 1310, when a painter called Montano of Arezzo was received into the royal household (inter familiares); and in 1313 in the household of Philip the Fair there was an illuminator called Maciot. The first surviving independent portrait from life is often claimed to be a profile portrait of King John II of France (1319–64), husband of Bonne of Luxembourg. His court painter Girard d’Orléans remained with the king even when he was in captivity for four years in England after losing the battle of Poitiers. The realism of the portrait suggests a familiarity and friendship between the sitter and the painter, confirming Alberti’s insight that the portrait – whether painted from life or from memory – is the product of friendship.80 In 1367, at the imperial court of Prague, the painter Theodoric was styled in an imperial grant as “beloved master … Our painter and familiaris.”81 Froissart’s La prison amoureuse (The Prison of Love) – an allegory based on Wenceslas of Brabant’s actual imprisonment – focuses on the close friendship between the poet and the prince and includes intimate letters and poems sent between them (but probably composed by Froissart) in which Wenceslas signs himself as the “Rose” and Froissart as the “Flos” (“flower” in Latin). In a flattering allusion to Wenceslas as duke of Brabant, Froissart simultaneously compliments his patron and affirms himself as his equal: “And even if he were the count of Champagne, or the duke of Brabant or Austria, since he has a merry and an active heart and is in love just as I am, we are therefore more or less equals.”82 Peter Parler carved busts of Charles IV, his family (including Duke Wenceslas), and the cathedral’s highest clergy along the triforium of St Vitus cathedral; but he included among these busts a self-portrait, which serves as a kind of signature for his work on the entire building and an assertion of the artist’s prominence and dignity.83 It seems high time, therefore, to reconsider the Ricardian court in the light of the Luxembourg influence. Discussing the cult of the flower and the daisy in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women, Alastair Minnis 80 See James Hall, The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History (London, 2014), p. 51. 81 See Andrew Martindale, The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (New York, 1972), pp. 36–37. 82 “Et fust or contes de Campagne,/ Dux de Braibant ou d’Osterice,/ Puis qu’il a le coer gai et frice,/ Amoureus, et je l’ai otel,/ Nous sommes auques tout yevel” (lines 811–81). Jean Froissart, La prison amoureuse (The Prison of Love), ed. and trans. Laurence de Looze (New York, 1994), pp. 50–51. 83 Porras, Art of the Northern Renaissance, p. 17.

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asserts: “Such elegant entertainments, as practiced on both sides of the English Channel, afford yet another example of how the international (i.e. French-dominated and oriented) court culture found fertile soil in England.”84 Minnis goes on to claim that Queen Anne may have featured in such entertainments, given her status as a member of the international French-speaking culture: “She was fluent in French, the international language of court poetry and song, and the prologue to Chaucer’s Legend reads very much like a French marguerite or daisy poem which just happens to have been written in English, so to speak.”85 Joyce Coleman has made a similar claim that the presence of Anne and her ladies may have encouraged Chaucer to write the Legend.86 Whether Anne was able to read or understand the poem is perhaps less important than the fact the she would have been familiar with the conventions it addresses. We can thus assume at the very least that Chaucer was imagining the queen’s participation in the cult of the flower and the leaf even if she was totally ignorant of English.

Imperial Politics and the Visual Arts Another component of this book is its emphasis on the courtly visual arts and their relation to Ricardian literature. Amanda Simpson’s monograph on the connections between English and Bohemian painting concludes that there was little Luxembourg influence on Ricardian court culture.87 It is on the basis of style alone that Simpson avers that Bohemian influence in England was negligible. My approach differs from Simpson’s in emphasizing questions of ideology and iconography rather than simply aspects of style. However, Simpson correctly acknowledges the tight-knit nature of the Bohemians at the English court and Richard’s marked preference for their company. This is an important point, since it suggests that Richard was susceptible to the cultural influence of his Bohemian dependents. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that Richard’s fondness for 84 See Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems, ed. A.J. Minnis and V.J. Scattergood with J.J. Smith (Oxford, 1995), p. 329. 85 Oxford Guides to Chaucer, ed. Minnis et al., p. 328. 86 See Joyce Coleman, “The Flower, the Leaf, and Philippa of Lancaster,” in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 33–58. 87 See Amanda Simpson, The Connections between English and Bohemian Painting during the Second Half of the Fourteenth Century (London, 1984), p. 54.

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Anne and her Bohemian entourage colored his artistic tastes, as we shall see in chapter 4. Important as stylistic questions are to the problem of Bohemian artistic influence on the English court, they elide the political and dynastic issues at stake in the cultural interaction between the Ricardian and Luxembourg courts. As we shall see, the famous Wilton Diptych, commissioned by Richard after his wife’s death in 1394, is not just an example of Richard’s exquisite taste; its highly encoded allusions to Anne of Bohemia are also a testament to the king’s political and dynastic ambitions to become Holy Roman Emperor, a process that gained momentum in the late 1390s. Royal patrons like Emperor Charles IV, Charles V of France and Richard II

Fig. 11  Statue of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in the style of a Roman emperor

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were not simply arbiters of taste; they were also propagandists concerned to use their court art in the interests of their political ambitions. Indeed, lavish self-promotion was one of the formal charges leveled against Richard during his deposition (“ad sui nominis ostentacionem et pompam ac vanam gloriam”).88 But Richard was merely doing what ambitious rulers had always done; and it was clear that he had imperial ambitions. The close relationship between the arts and imperial politics dates back to the reign of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194–1250). Dubbed the “wonder of the world” (stupor mundi) by the English monk Matthew Paris, Frederick actively sought to revive the greatness of the Roman Empire and, in that spirit of renovatio, commissioned marble busts of himself and minted coins in the style of a Roman emperor (fig. 11). Frederick was multilingual and well educated, and personally composed a treatise known as The Art of Hunting with Birds (De Arte Venandi cum Avibus), an original contribution to natural history based on his own observations of nature.89 Following the example of Frederick of Hohenstaufen, Charles IV also used painting and sculpture to enhance his prestige in Germany, and the numerous images of the emperor witness to his political ambitions.90 Like Charles, Richard II was also heavily invested in using architecture and art to enhance his prestige. Exemplary of Richard’s sacral vision of his kingship is the Westminster abbey portrait (fig. 12). As art historians have been keen to emphasize, court art in England and elsewhere in Europe cannot be defined in terms of modern “national” identities. Discussing the Bohemian stylistic traits of the figures in the Liber Regalis, the coronation book commissioned at this time, Paul Binski discerns an eclectic mix of styles common to London and Prague: “The range of Lombard, central Italian, Netherlandish and German-influenced styles at Westminster and in London in the 1390s in fact presents a kind of mirror image to the fabulous internationalism of Luxembourg Prague.”91 88 Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, p. 12. 89 See A.G. Dickens, “Monarchy and Cultural Revival: Courts in the Middle Ages,” in The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage and Royalty 1400–1800, ed. A.G. Dickens (New York, 1977), pp. 8–31, at pp. 22–23. The standard biography of Frederick II is David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (Oxford, 1988). 90 See Iva Rosario, Art and Propaganda. Charles IV of Bohemia, 1346–1378 (Woodbridge, 2000); Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1440 (New Haven, 1995), p. 51. 91 Paul Binski, “The Liber Regalis: Its Date and European Context,” in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas and Caroline Elam (London, 1997), pp. 233–46, at p. 46.

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Fig. 12  Westminster portrait of Richard II, Westminster Abbey, London

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As Jonathan Alexander has similarly reminded us, the style of the Wilton Diptych does not identify it with any one nation or artist but with the mixed styles of the international court culture: We should not leap to conclude that the painter of the portrait of Richard II was French or Netherlandish, however. Rather we must recognize that the portrait belongs with an International Court current which, as the major exhibition Die Parler held in Cologne in 1978 demonstrated, extended throughout Europe at this same period of the 1390s. This is an artistic mode which circulated among the patrons of the European courts, a style which is for that reason as international as they were.92

As Alexander also points out, there is a tension in the portrait between its ideological function and its wish for individualization. We also see this mode of individualized subjectivity in the tomb effigy of Charles V of France (André Beauneveu) and Peter Parler’s carved bust of Charles IV in the triforium of St Vitus cathedral in Prague (fig. 13). The Westminster abbey portrait has been attributed to the Frenchman Beauneveu, whose work was known in England.93 The more important point, however, is that the style of the portrait is consistent with the realism of Beauneveu’s work in France and Peter Parler’s work in Germany and Bohemia. A particularly fine example of late medieval realism in sculptural portraiture is the kneeling statue of Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy by Claus Sluter and Jean de Marville at the portal of the church of the Charterhouse of Schampmol (ca. 1391–33).94 Like Richard II’s tomb effigy, the statue of Duke Philip dates from the late-fourteenth century. What remain from the court of Richard II are a series of brilliant shards of a shattered international mirror – the Wilton Diptych; an exquisite crown that once belonged to Anne of Bohemia; as well as outstanding works of courtly literature written in English by Chaucer and the Gawain poet. What all these works of art share is their cosmopolitan aspect and their integration into a culture that was as visual as it was literary. Each of the following chapters will consist of close readings of works of literature 92 Jonathan Alexander, “The Portrait of Richard II in Westminster Abbey,” in The Regal Image of Richard, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 197–207, at p. 204. For works of art by the Parler family from the 1978 exhibition in Cologne, see: Die Parler und der Schöne Stil 1350–1400: Europäische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern, ed. Anton Legner (Cologne, 1980). 93 Alexander, “The Portrait of Richard II,” p. 201. 94 For an illustration see Shirley Neilsen Blum, The New Art of the Fifteenth Century: Faith and Art in Florence and the Netherlands (New York, 2015), p. 48.

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Fig. 13  Peter Parler: Bust of Charles IV. Triforium of St Vitus cathedral, Prague

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not only in the way they relate to each other intertextually but also as to how they relate to the material artifacts of European court culture in general. Rather than examining the literary and visual arts in separate chapters, this study will treat them as a unity, for the simple and obvious reason that works of late medieval literature were themselves indebted to and influenced by paintings and manuscript illuminations. When Chaucer compliments Anne of Bohemia as “oure first lettre” (“A” being the first letter in the alphabet) in Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1382–86), he is giving literary form to the fashionable practice of using initials and monograms on manuscripts and sculpture. Examples are the letters “A” and “R” etched onto Richard’s gown on the king’s tomb effigy at Westminster abbey; the letter “W” (for Wenceslas) in the Golden Bull of Charles IV (1390s) and in the German Bible of Wenceslas IV. There is also a similarity between the crowned “R” on Richard’s robe in the Westminster portrait and the crowned “C” of Charles V of France in the border of the Parement de Narbonne in the Louvre (ca. 1380). Another example of an individualized initial is the crowned “C” of Casimir the Great of Poland (d. 1370) on the doors of Cracow cathedral.95 The traditional attribution of the Wilton Diptych to the “English or French school of painting” elides the cosmopolitan nature of the work, including Bohemian influence discernible in the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was probably modeled on a statue once owned by Anne of Bohemia.96 At the same time the content of the painting clearly relates to Richard’s strong sense of his own English royal ancestry. Two of the saints who accompany him are Edmund the Martyr and Edward the Confessor, both Anglo-Saxon kings. The configuration of Three Kings also alludes to Richard’s birthday, the Feast of Epiphany ( January 6), and may have been influenced by Emperor Charles IV’s inclusion of himself in the Adoration the Three Magi in the Morgan Diptych in New York (ca. 1360).97 English and European influences blend imperceptibly in the Wilton Diptych in a way that defies the dichotomous label “English or French school.” The same synthesis of insular and European elements is apparent in the literature produced at the Ricardian court. Sir Gawain and the Green 95 Alexander, “The Portrait of Richard II,” p. 205. 96 See Dillian Gordon, Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych (London, 1997), pp. 91–92. 97 See Olga Pujmanová, “Portraits of Kings Depicted as Magi in Bohemian Painting,” in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 27–32, at pp. 28–29.

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Knight is clearly a romance in the French tradition, with a hero (Gawain) more in the French romance mode of a lady’s man who becomes involved with a seductive lady.98 But Gawain’s ethical dilemma also places him in an English tradition as well; and it is the tension between the two Gawains that creates the comedic irony of a plot that is neither fully French nor fully English but a brilliant synthesis of both. This dialectical relation of the French to the English (or British) tradition of Arthurian romance is also true of the poem’s opening section: the account of Brutus of Troy’s arrival on British soil replays the insular myth of heroic foundations established by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae; but this Galfridian heroic myth rapidly gives way to a very ironic – and very Gallic – treatment of the Arthurian court as distinctly unheroic. The same tension between English and European forms of identity is at work in Chaucer’s oeuvre, as we shall explore in the next chapter.

98 See Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Cambridge, 1995).

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2 The Familiar Patron: Collaboration and Conflict in Chaucer and Late Medieval European Courtly Writing

In this chapter I explore forms of imagined collaboration between European court poets and their Luxembourg patrons, with a special emphasis on Chaucer’s oeuvre. The congenial setting for this kind of familiarity between poet and patron came about through the international court culture of the fourteenth century. In a document dating from 1368 Charles V of France referred to his court painter as “nostre ami Jehan de Bondolf, dit de Bruges” (“our friend Jean de Bondolf, of Bruges”).1 Charles’s young brother, John, duke of Berry, patron of the Très Riches Heures, also entertained friendly relations with the artists who worked for him, including the Limbourg brothers who illuminated his famous Book of Hours. He bestowed favors upon them, and they in turn were generous with their gifts to him.2 A similarly informal ambience prevailed at the court of the Luxembourg Emperor Charles IV in Prague. The court poet Heinrich von Mügeln enjoyed cordial relations with the emperor; and his encomium Der Meide Kranz (The Maiden’s Wreath) flatteringly assigned the role of judge to Charles in what was probably a conscious imitation of Machaut’s decision to make John of Luxembourg the judge of the love dispute in Le jugement du roy dou Behaingne. Although Machaut did not serve Emperor Charles, he dedicated his poem La Prise d’Alixandre (The Capture of

1 Quoted from Francis Muel, Front and Back: The Tapestry of the Apocalypse at Angers (Nancy, 1976), p. 6. 2 The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, intro. Jean Longnon and Raymond Cazelles (New York, 1969), p. 16.

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Alexandria) to him, perhaps with the hope of securing the emperor’s patronage.3

John Gower and Chaucer This spirit of familiarity between the court writer and the royal patron also became part of the literary landscape of the Ricardian court. Richard Maidstone’s panegyric to Richard II celebrating his triumphal entry into London in 1392 and known as the Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie begins with an affirmation of friendship between the author and the patron based on classical models such as Cicero’s De amicitia (On Friendship). Maidstone highlights that both men are bound together by the same name (Richard) and by companionship (“Nomen et omen habes: sic socius meus es”).4 Another Ricardian writer who appears to have partaken of this spirit of poet–patron familiarity was John Gower. In the first recension of his English poem Confessio Amantis Gower describes a chance encounter with King Richard on the river Thames. Referring to London by its fanciful name of “new Troye,” Gower tells us that Richard invited him onto his barge and suggested he write “some new thing”: I thence and have it understonde, As it bifel upon a tyde, As thing which scholde tho bityde, Under the toun of newe Troye, Which took of Brut his ferste joye, In Temse whan it was flowende As I by bote cam rowende, So as Fortune hir tyme sette, My liege lord par chaunce I mette; And so bifel, as I cam neigh, Out of my bot, whan he me seigh, He bad me come into his barge. And whan I was with him at large, Amonges other thinges seyde He hath this charge upon me leyde, 3 See the introduction to Guillaume de Machaut, The Judgment of the King of Navarre, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, vol. 45 (New York, 1988), p. xiv. 4 Richard Maidstone, Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), trans. A.G. Rigg and ed. David R. Carlson (Kalamazoo, 2003), p. 50, line 10.

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And bad me doo my busynesse That to his hihe worthinesse Some new thing I scholde booke, That he himself it mighte looke After the form of my writing. (lines 35–53)5

It is impossible to know for sure whether Gower’s chance meeting with the king really took place. More significant is the relaxed familiarity between patron and poet that it imagines. Gower locates his conversation with the king not in London per se but in a fanciful literary version of London (“new Troye”). This familiarity between prince and poet is typified by Machaut’s ready access (real or imagined) to John of Luxembourg at his castle of Durbuy in Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne. This is an idealized world characterized by what Deborah McGrady, discussing Machaut’s relationship with various French kings and princes, has called “fictions of engagement” between the poet and his patron.6 Seen in these terms, the Ricardian court is not so much an actual space as a construct mediating between reality and imagination.7 A lot of attention has been paid to Richard’s putative commissioning of Gower’s work. But Anne of Bohemia may have played a more powerful role in the poet’s imagination. As Linda Burke has importantly discussed, the Confessio Amantis may have been sponsored by Richard (in reality or imagination), but its pro-feminist sympathies are entirely consistent with Queen Anne’s cosmopolitan tastes and her mediating cultural influence at the Ricardian court.8 Burke sees Gower’s poem as a “creative reworking” of Machaut’s Le jugement dou roy de Navarre, with the difference that it is unequivocal in its praise of women in contrast to Machaut’s and (as I shall argue) Chaucer’s rather more complicated stance toward women. Like Gower, Chaucer also appears to have imagined a degree of familiarity between himself and Queen Anne. As in the case of Gower, this imagined female patronage was probably inspired by Machaut’s rela 5 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo, 2000), vol. 1, p. 67. 6 See McGrady, The Writer’s Gift, ch. 3. 7 For the idea of the Ricardian court as a “construct” see Michael J. Bennett, “Richard II and the Promotion of Literature,” in Chaucer’s England, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 2–20, at pp. 8–9. 8 Linda Burke, “Bohemian Gower: Confessio Amantis, Queen Anne, and Machaut’s Judgment Poems,” in Machaut’s Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman (Gainesville, FL, 2017), pp. 192–216.

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tionship with Anne’s aunt Bonne de Luxembourg, allegorized as Lady Bonneurté (“Good Fortune”) in the Navarre poem. The Luxembourg family connection is hardly coincidental and may well explain Chaucer’s identification with Machaut as Bonne of Luxembourg’s literary collaborator. But this also implies a connection between Chaucer and Richard II: just as Richard identified with Anne’s Luxembourg family in order to enhance his own pedigree, so did Chaucer identify with the illustrious European poets Machaut, Froissart, and Petrarch who served members of the Luxembourg dynasty, in order to enhance his own reputation as a European poet. Anne of Bohemia is probably the real-life inspiration for the two pivotal figures of Venus and Alceste in Gower’s Confessio and Chaucer’s Legend. Supporting this historical reading is the fact that both poets reference the court of Richard II in these scenes, Gower alluding to the “fashion of Bohemia” at the court of Love and Chaucer to Anne’s manors of Eltham and Sheen to which the chastened narrator-poet is instructed to deliver his finished work. Book 8 of the Confessio Amantis includes a scene in which the ageing narrator kneels before Venus, the Queen of Love. Like Chaucer’s Goddess of Love, Alceste, in the prologue to his Legend, we can see the real-life figure of Anne of Bohemia lurking behind this allegorical personification. Gower would have been aware of the important literary role of Anne’s Luxembourg family, especially as the judge figures in such works as Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement du roy de Navarre – where Anne’s aunt, Bonne of Luxembourg, serves as the real-life prototype for the allegorical figure of Good Fortune who admonishes the narrator for writing a negative assessment of women in love in his previous Jugement du roy de Behaingne. In this earlier work Machaut presents his royal master, King John of Bohemia, as the judge who adjudicates between the jilted Knight and the widowed Lady, choosing ultimately in favor of the former – much to Bonne’s chagrin. Another member of the Luxembourg family who is assigned the role of judge, albeit in an academic rather than an amatory context, is Anne’s father (and Bonne’s brother), Emperor Charles, in Heinrich’s The Maiden’s Wreath. The reputations of John, Charles, and Bonne of Luxembourg as wise judges and as patrons of literature would help to explain Gower’s and Chaucer’s investment in Queen Anne as an imagined (if not real) patroness and intercessor in affairs of the heart. However, there is a significant difference of emphasis between Anne as Queen of Love in Gower and Anne as the Goddess of Love in Chaucer. In Chaucer’s Legend Alceste/

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Anne serves as a mediatrix or intercessor between the contrite poet and the irate God of Love, whom David Wallace, among others, has equated with the temperamental and imperious Richard II. Indeed, Anne famously kneeled before Richard at the staged reconciliation between the king and the citizens of London in 1392. Gower’s Venus/Anne, by contrast, brings out another aspect of Anne’s persona that we shall explore in this chapter, as the source of moral authority at a court riotously led by Youth (an allegorical designation for the youthful Richard II in the mid-1380s). In her role as the clear-sighted and realistic assessor of Gower as too old to be a member of her court of Love, Venus resembles Anne’s role as the sensible and restraining consort of Richard’s waywardness. Moreover, her act of hanging a rosary around Gower’s penitential neck recalls Anne’s reputation as a pious queen – a reputation she shared with her holy female ancestors, as we shall explore further in chapter 4. Chaucer repeatedly compliments Queen Anne’s learning and wisdom in a way that betrays his awareness of her highly educated relatives and the poets they served – in particular her grandfather John of Luxembourg, the patron of Guillaume de Machaut, and her father, Emperor Charles, who commissioned works of literature in Czech, German, and Latin.9 Chaucer would have been aware of the illustrious role of the Luxembourg family as patrons of Machaut based on his reading of Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne and its palinode Le jugement dou roy de Navarre. In the first of these works John of Luxembourg plays a prominent role as the judge who adjudicates in a dispute on the nature of love between a jilted Knight and a widowed Lady. The dispute revolves around the question: who of these two has suffered more, the abandoned Knight or the bereaved Lady? King John decides in favor of the Knight. In the second work John’s daughter, Bonne of Luxembourg, accuses the narrator Guillaume (i.e. Machaut) of having judged unfairly in favor of the male lover and instructs him to write another poem which would reverse the decision in favor of women. The Navarre poem was thus conceived as palinode or penance poem for Machaut’s allegedly misogynistic faux pas. It seems likely that the Navarre poem inspired Chaucer to write The Legend of Good Women as a palinode for his earlier courtly romance Troilus and Criseyde, in which Chaucer had allegedly impugned the good reputation of women by presenting the heroine as unfaithful in love. Here 9 See Alfred Thomas, Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (New York, 2015).

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Chaucer is not only imagining Anne as his patron but imagining himself as Machaut’s literary descendant. In the F Prologue to the Legend the Goddess Alceste imposes a penance on the narrator and tells him to send his finished work to Queen Anne at one of her manors at Eltham or Sheen. There is no way of knowing whether Anne commissioned the poem in real life. It seems more likely that the commission was imagined rather than real, the product of an international court culture that had given women prominence as patrons of literature and arbiters of taste since the twelfth century. The same might be said of Machaut’s relationship with Bonne of Luxembourg (disguised allegorically as Lady Bonneurté) in Le jugement dou roy de Navarre. As Deborah McGrady has explored, Machaut’s poem articulates a struggle between Bonneurté /Bonne, who demands that Machaut “efface” his earlier misogynistic work (“Que ce jugement effacies”), and the poet’s unwillingness to comply with the Lady’s demands.10 As a result of this impasse, poet and patron agree to defer to the judgment of the king of Navarre, who commands Machaut to compose three lyric poems for the Lady. But, as Sarah Kay points out, Machaut hardly answers the Lady’s commission and in offering her the Navarre he presents her with a poem “in which his lack of repentance is flaunted.”11 Chaucer’s debt to Machaut has been extensively discussed by scholars.12 But his debt to Queen Anne has proved to be a more vexed issue, since there is no evidence that any royal patronage was involved in Chaucer’s work. What can be said for certain, as Florence Percival reminds us, is that the F Prologue of The Legend of Good Women is dedicated to the queen and the reference to the daisy is a clear compliment to Chaucer’s “lady sovereyne.”13 What scholars have not grappled with is what kind of imagined relationship existed between Chaucer and Queen Anne. Does Chaucer reproduce the collaborative connection between Machaut and Anne’s aunt Bonne of Luxembourg? And, if so, is it a fraught or a harmonious relationship? In fact, as this chapter will argue, the Legend is not commissioned even in Chaucer’s imagined version of it. Rather, it replicates the Navarre poem in making Alceste command the narrator to write 10 McGrady, The Writer’s Gift, p. 98. 11 Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia, PA, 2007), p. 98. 12 See James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto, 1993). 13 See Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 88–89.

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a new work about virtuous women to make up for his earlier one about a flawed heroine (Troilus and Criseyde). In contrast to Machaut, who defies Lady Bonneurté/Bonne by writing a sequel that does not satisfy her demands, Chaucer bows to Alceste’s command to write a legendary of virtuous women. But this submission to the will of the Lady comes at a price in driving a wedge between what Chaucer wants to write (a humanist defense of classical women) and what he is expected to write – an idealization of women along the lines of Christian hagiography. In fact, this conflict is not between the poet and a real (or imagined) female patron but is an unconscious struggle within Chaucer himself that reproduces the kind of internal conflict which we shall find within other court poets of Luxembourg patrons (including Petrarch). It will be my claim that what creates the tension between the poet and his Luxembourg patron is, ironically enough, the very familiarity that exists between the patron and the poet in the first place. What is at stake in this relationship is a power struggle, since the patron is inevitably more powerful than the poet. In the words of Marion Turner: “The court poet forever struggles, not only with the classic question of how to speak truth to power but with the issue of how selfhood is split and compromised by politics and power. Selfhood becomes a performed practice in which one is always acting a part, always dissembling, always conscious of the difficulty of trying to influence someone much more powerful than oneself.”14

Dante and Petrarch Before turning to Chaucer’s imagined engagement with Anne of Bohemia, let us consider the artistic interactions between some European poets and their Luxembourg patrons. This will allow us to reconstruct Chaucer’s projective fantasies about Anne as his ideal patron. The earliest vernacular poet to be associated with the Luxembourg dynasty was Dante. The great Tuscan poet regarded Emperor Henry VII as the hoped-for savior of Italy just as, fifty years later, Petrarch would envision Emperor Charles as the restorer of Italy’s Roman greatness. Dante wrote a letter to the emperor-elect in April 1311, after Henry had been crowned king of Italy in Milan on January 6, 1311, the Feast of the Epiphany. Dante was writing on behalf of himself “and all Tuscans who desire peace” (“ac universaliter omnes Tusci qui pacem desiderant”). Here he was serving as a public relations 14 Turner, Chaucer, p. 137.

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officer for those who, like himself, had been exiled from Florence.15 But Dante’s hopes were dashed when Henry died suddenly of malaria on August 24, 1313, in Buonconvento near Siena. Devastated by this calamity (some suspected that Henry had even been poisoned), Dante later gave the emperor a special seat in heaven in canto 30 of Paradiso: Your eyes are fixed upon a single throne, Drawn by the crown already set on that. And long before you join this marriage feast, The soul will sit – imperial in the world – Of noble Arrigo, who came to rule An Italy unready for him yet.16

A crucial European influence on a major European poet who did not serve the Luxembourg court, although he did spend time at the Naples Court, is Giovanni Boccaccio. Curiously, Chaucer does not acknowledge Boccaccio among the European writers he admires, yet the Italian poet is nevertheless the primary source for much of Chaucer’s work (including Troilus and Criseyde, based on the Filostrato, and “The Knight’s Tale,” based on the Teseida).17 There is no evidence, however, that Chaucer drew upon Boccaccio’s celebrated account of Famous Women (De mulieribus claris, 1361–62), although it betrays many points of similarity with The Legend of Good Women, especially the ambiguous treatment of classical women which we find in both Latin and English works.18 Another Italian poet with Luxembourg connections was Francesco Petrarch. The great laureate poet had been on familiar terms with Anne of Bohemia’s father, whose court at Prague he visited in 1356 in his capacity as the ambassador of the duke of Milan. During his stay in Bohemia Petrarch became friendly with the emperor and some of his leading courtiers – educated humanists and bibliophiles such as the imperial chancellor 15 See Marco Santagata, Dante: The Story of His Life, trans. Richard Dixon (Cambridge, MA, 2016), pp. 241–42. 16 “E’n quell gran seggio a che ti li occhi tiene/ Per la corona che già v’è sù posta,/ Prima che tu a queste nozze ceni,/ Sederà l’alma, che fia giù agosta,/ De l’alto Arrigo, ch’a drizzare Italia /Verrà in prima ch’ella sia dispost” (30, 133–38). Dante, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradiso, trans. and ed. Robin Kirkpatrick (London, 2007), pp. 294–97. 17 See R.R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Houndmills, 2002), and David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1985). 18 See Carolyn P. Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (York, 2104), pp. 35–59.

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John of Středa and Ernest of Pardubice, archbishop of Prague. Petrarch had already corresponded in Latin with all three men. Of special interest to us in this chapter are Petrarch’s three letters addressed to Emperor Charles. In the third and last of these missives he thanks the emperor for his gracious informality.19 In a letter sent from Padua on February 24, 1351 Petrarch took advantage of the emperor’s kindness to urge him to descend into Italy and restore the glories of ancient Rome. Charles’s response was polite but evasive, prompting Petrarch to react like an impatient lover eager to meet his beloved in person. When Charles finally entered Italy, Petrarch wrote to him from Milan like an excited bride-to-be, assuring the emperor that everything was ready for his arrival: Now for me you are not king of Bohemia but of the world, now you are emperor of Rome, now the true Caesar; you will find (never doubt it), what I promised you, everything ready: a diadem, imperial command, immortal glory and the way to heaven laid open, in short whatever is granted to a man to wish or hope for.20

But compliments soon gave way to reproach when Charles left Italy immediately following his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1355. Petrarch wanted the emperor to stay in Italy in order to restore the imperium Romanum. But Charles was far too shrewd to succumb to the humanist’s rhetorical blandishments and idealistic fantasies of Italian unity. Angry with Charles’s reluctance to go along with his plan, Petrarch petulantly accused the emperor of having no greater ambition than to be king of Bohemia and contrasted his limited vision with the chivalrous ambitions of his father, John of Luxembourg, and his grandfather, Emperor Henry VII. The latter had intervened in Italian politics and had suffered the fatal consequences of becoming mired in that fractured peninsula.21

19 “Primo dulcis gratulatio privatim pro sui familiaritate.” Petrarca, Selected Letters, Volume II, trans. Elaine Fantham (Cambridge, MA, 2017), pp. 220–21. 20 “Iam michi non Boemie sed mundi rex, iam romanus imperator, iam verus es Cesar: invenie, ne dubita, que tibi pollicitus sum, parata omnia: dyadema, imperium, immortalem gloriam apertumque celi adytum, et ad summam quicquid optare aut sperare datum homini.” Petrarca, Selected Letters, pp. 202–3. 21 See Deutsche Könige und Kaiser des Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1989), pp. 272–77.

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The Flower and the Rose: Jean Froissart and Wenceslas of Luxembourg In the autumn of 1388 Jean Froissart became acquainted with Gaston Phébus, count of Foix. His previous patron, Wenceslas, duke of Luxembourg and Brabant (1337–83), had died five years earlier, so the Hainault poet was eager to seek a new patron in the guise of the count. In an episode from his Chroniques Froissart describes how he read aloud to Gaston and his court his voluminous Arthurian romance Méliador: To show on what terms he [the Count of Foix] was with me during that time, I should say that I had brought with me a book which I had composed at the request of my lord Wenceslas of Bohemia, Duke of Luxemburg and Brabant. Contained in this book, entitled Méliador, are all the songs, ballades, rondeaux, and virelays which the noble duke wrote in his time. These things, thanks to the skill with which I had inserted and arranged them in the book, pleased the Count greatly, and every night after supper I used to read some of them to him. While I was reading no one presumed to speak a word, for he insisted that I should be heard distinctly, and not least by himself.22

Froissart had intercalated seventy-three love lyrics by Wenceslas of Luxembourg, thus creating a curious hybrid of chivalric romance and love poetry and an even odder “collaboration” between an ambitious poet and his illustrious patron. A major precedent for this informality between writer and patron is Guillaume de Machaut’s devotion to King John of Bohemia’s daughter, Bonne of Luxembourg, whom he compliments in La Prise d’Alixandre: King Jean – and may God save his soul – Had wed the finest lady Who could be found anywhere in this world, For she was devoid and free of pride, 22 Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. and ed. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 264. “L’accointance de luy a moy fut telle pour ce temps que je avoye avecques moy porté un livre, lequel j’avoie fait a la requeste et contemplation de monseigneur Wincelaut de Boesme, duc de Luxembourg et de Brabant, et sont contenues ou dit livre, qui s’appelle de Meliador, toutes les chansons, ballades, rondeaulx et virelais que le gentil duc fist en son temps; lesquelles choses, parmy l’imagination que j’avoie de dittier et de ordonner le livre, le conte de Fois vit moult voulentiers. Et toutes nuits après souper, je luy en lisoie, mais en lisant nulluy n’osoit sonner mot, ne parler, car il vouloit que je fuisse bien entendu.” Quoted in Jean Froissart, Meliador, ed. Auguste Longon (Paris, 1895), I, 11.

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And she knew whatever Nature bestows, In the way of good things; this was my lady Bonne. I knew her well, having performed much service for her. But never did I lay eyes on any woman this “good.” She was daughter to the good king of Bohemia, Who made his son the king of Germany.23

What Froissart does not mention in his account of how he came to write his romance Méliador is that he had already written an earlier version (without Duke Wenceslas’s inserted love lyrics) while he was at the court of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault in the 1360s. The romance had been composed to flatter Edward by drawing a parallel between the English king and the figure of King Arthur, who conquers Scotland in the poem.24 Edward’s queen, Philippa, died in 1369, prompting Froissart to return to the continent to seek new patronage. The first of these patrons was Wenceslas, duke of Brabant. Froissart no longer had any interest in making his Arthurian romance fit a Plantagenet political vision, for the obvious reason that he had ceased to work for Edward III’s court. Continuing to recycle his Arthurian romance for new patrons, he now collaborated with Wenceslas by incorporating his lyrics into the romance framework. This collaborative project was intended not to serve Wenceslas’s political agenda but to demonstrate the close literary affinity between the poet and his Luxembourg patron, thereby empowering the poet rather than the patron. In 1395 Froissart returned to the English court in the hope of currying favor with Edward III’s grandson, King Richard II, to whom he presented a book of his love poems. This gift was significant in signaling Froissart’s knowledge that Richard had more in common with his Luxembourg patrons than with his own martial grandfather. It was more appropriate, therefore, to give Richard a book of love poems rather than a chivalric romance that had been written to serve the political agenda of Edward III: And the king asked to see the book which I had brought. I took it to his chamber, for I had it ready with me, and laid it on his bed. He opened it 23 “Li roys jehans dont dieus ait lame/ Ot epouse la milleur dame/ Quon peust trouver en ce monde/ Car dorgeuil estoit pure et monde/ Et sot quan que nature donne/ De bien – ce fu ma dame bonne/Bien le say car moult la servi/ Mais onques si bonne ne vi/ Fille yert dou bon roy de behaingne/ Qui fist son fil roy dalemaingne” (763–72). 24 Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chrétien to Froissart, trans. Margaret and Roger Middleton (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 272–77.

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and looked inside and it pleased him greatly. Well it might, for it was illuminated, nicely written and illustrated, with a cover of crimson velvet with ten studs of silver gilt and gold roses in the middle and two large clasps richly worked at their centres with golden rose-trees. The King asked me what it was about and I told him: “About love!”25

Another work by Froissart which exhibits the intimate relationship between patron and poet is La prison amoureuse (The Prison of Love), written for Wenceslas of Luxembourg around 1372. This fascinating proto-epistolary novel written in verse (with interpolated letters in prose) describes the close friendship between Flos (an allegorical designation for Froissart) and Rose (an allusion to Wenceslas). Flos and Rose send letters to each other in which they disclose the details of their secret love affairs with anonymous ladies; these epistles are usually accompanied by virelais in which the love for the lady is articulated in verse. The striking use of the amorous motif of the Rose for Wenceslas (derived from the Roman de la Rose) has the effect of blurring the distinction between the platonic and erotic spheres of intimacy. The name Rose feminizes Wenceslas as the narrator’s lover as well as his correspondent, suggesting an imagined engagement between poet and patron that foreshadows the equally fraught relationship between Chaucer and Wenceslas’s niece, Anne of Bohemia. More significantly, the fictional correspondence between Froissart and Wenceslas can be understood as a reflection of the internal split within the poet himself – between the autonomous and social equality of friends and the more traditionally feudal hierarchical subordination of the poet to his aristocratic patron.

The Poet and the Lady: Guillaume de Machaut and Bonne of Luxembourg Of all the poets who served Luxembourg patrons it was Guillaume de Machaut’s relationship with King John of Bohemia and, especially, with John’s daughter, Bonne that formed the basis for Chaucer’s “fictional engagement” with Anne of Bohemia. Machaut was John’s secretary, and when John fell at the battle of Crécy in 1346 the poet transferred his allegiance to Bonne of Luxembourg, wife of John, duke of Normandy and future king of France. Before turning to Chaucer’s relationship with Anne (whether real or imagined), let us consider Machaut’s familiarity with 25 Froissart, Chronicles, p. 408.

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Anne’s grandfather as depicted in Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne. The poet-narrator is walking in a garden where he overhears a dispute between a Knight and a Lady; they are discussing who of the two has suffered more in love, he as a jilted lover or she as a bereaved widow. The poet-narrator is inadvertently exposed as an eavesdropper when the Lady’s dog discovers him hiding in the foliage. Machaut steps forth and offers to mediate in the dispute by taking the sad lovers to his master, the king of Bohemia, who will serve as a judge of their case. All three go to John’s nearby castle at Durbuy (in Luxembourg), where they discover him seated on a silk carpet and listening to a clerk reading from a book about “the battle of Troy:” Seated in great joy upon a silken carpet, And a clerk, whom I cannot name, Was reading to him from the Battle of Troy.26

The king graciously agrees to adjudicate the dispute; and by the end of the poem the king decides in favor of the jilted Knight. In his sequel judgment poem – Le jugement dou roy de Navarre, conceived as a palinode for the previous work – Machaut assigns the role of judge to his new patron, Charles of Navarre. But the new poem is now a different dispute – not between an anonymous Knight and a Lady but between Machaut (identified as Guillaume) and a noble Lady – a thinly veiled allegory of Bonne of Luxembourg. The story is set in 1349, the year in which the Black Death broke out in Europe. In contrast to the light-hearted mood of the earlier poem, Le jugement dou roy de Navarre is overshadowed by death as the poet sequesters himself in his room from the ravages of the pandemic that killed between a third and a half of the population of Europe in a period of only two years, including Bonne herself: So there I suffered sadness All alone in my room and gave thought to How the world in all things Was ruled by a drunkard’s wisdom: How justice and truth Have been murdered by the iniquity Of Greed, which in many realms Rules as sovereign lady –

26 “En moult grant joye/ Estoit assis sur.i. tapis de soye;/ S’I ot .i. clerc que nommer ne saroye/ Qui li lisoit la bataille de Troye” (1473–75). Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne, ed. and trans. James M. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens, GA, 1998), 134–35.

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As mistress, as queen – And Greed spawns hatred ...27

These introverted ruminations lead the narrator to find a scapegoat for the tribulations of the day; and he inevitably finds them in the guise of European Jewry: After this, a group of scoundrels appeared Who were false, traitorous, and heretical: This was shameful Judea, The evil, the disloyal, Who hate good and love all evil doing, Who gave and promised much Gold and silver to the Christian people, That then, in many places, They poisoned the wells, streams, and fountains That had been clear and healthy, And thus many lost their lives.28

Machaut’s anti-Judaic invective, which identifies the Jews as the instigators of the Black Death, is hardly original, nor coincidental. Indeed, it ties him more closely to his patron, Bonne of Luxembourg, than we might think. Bonne’s illustrated prayer book, made around 1340, contains thirteen beautiful illuminations; one of them is, in the words of Sara Lipton, a “thoroughly nasty image.”29 On the folio illustrating the first verse of Psalm 52 (“the fool says in his heart there is no God”), one man is about to beat another who drinks from a chalice. The face of the drunkard is unmistakably a Jewish caricature: big-nosed and bearded. The Jews had been expelled from France in 1327 but, as in England, their expulsion did not exorcise the ghost of anti-Jewish feeling. On the contrary, it may have intensified it. Bonne’s devotion to the Passion of Christ, displayed 27 “Après ce, vin tune merdaille/ Si que la merencolioie/ Tous seuls en ma chamber et pensoie/ Comment par conseil de taverne/ Li mondes par tout se gouverne;/Comment justice et verité/ Sont mortes par l’iniquité/ D’Avarice qui en maint regne/ Com dame souverainne regne,/ Com maistresse, comme roÿne – /Qu’Avarice engenre haine …” (37–45). 28 “Fausse, traïtre et renoïe:/ Ce fu Judée la honnie,/ La mauvaise, la disloyal,/ Qui het bien et aimme tout mal,/ Qui tant donna d’or et d’argent/ Et promist a crestienne gent,/ Qui puis, rivieres, et fonteinnes/ Qui estoient cleres et seinnes/ En plusieurs lieus empoissonerent,/ Dont pluseurs leurs vies finerent” (212–22). 29 Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York, 2014), pp. 171–72.

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in her prayer book – the vagina-shaped wound in Christ’s side takes up an entire folio and echoes Abbess Kunigunde’s Passional with its Arma Christi motifs – is the inevitable corollary of the anti-semitic image of the boney-nosed Jew. Insofar as the Jews were by this stage synonymous with Christ’s crucifixion, it is hardly surprising that images of Christ’s Passion and a Jewish caricature should feature in the same manuscript. We might say that Machaut and his patron are bound together not only by their “fictional engagement” but also by their very real hatred of Jews. The plague finally recedes, and the narrator Guillaume emerges from his self-imposed exile to celebrate the fine weather by hunting hares. During the chase Guillaume comes across the noble Lady (i.e. Bonne) and her entourage. She summons him to her presence and a dispute ensues between them. The Lady reprimands Guillaume for having written an earlier poem (Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne) that adjudicated in favor of a man rather than a woman in matters of the heart. The dispute between Machaut and Good Fortune (i.e. Bonne) is no longer about the difference in suffering between two individuals bereft by love but, rather, about the gender inequity that arose out of the earlier debate. The Lady accuses Guillaume of favoring men over women and proceeds to impose a penance in the form of a revised poem that will set the record straight and decide in favor of women. What purports to be an act of atonement is in fact more akin to a literary battle of wills when the Lady insists that Guillaume “efface” his earlier offending work as if commanding him to write over it in the form of a palimpsest: Therefore, I advise you to do what you can To erase this judgment And quickly recall it. Guillaume, if you are indeed worthy enough, You could rather easily accomplish this By affirming just the opposite. For the opposite view, that’s the correct one Wherever proper loving is valued.30

30 “Si vous lo que vous tant faciez/ Que ce jugement effacies,/ Et que briefment le rapellez./Guillaume, se vous tant valez,/ Vous le pouez bien einsi faire/ Par soustenir tout le contraire./ Car li contraires, c’est li drois/ En tous bons amouereus endrois” (1031–38).

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In response Guillaume remonstrates with the Lady, suggesting that they cooperate to find a resolution to the problem: And yet, my sweet lady, So that you will not be angry with me in your heart, We will proceed with this singular matter Not secretly, but openly, And thus your peace of mind will be preserved And my honor upheld.31

Given his years of service as secretary of King John of Bohemia, Machaut was most likely aware of the Luxembourg tradition of women as powerful patrons of literature. Paradoxically, Machaut in the guise of Guillaume appears at times to be resisting this pro-feminist tradition by refusing to comply with Lady Bonneurté’s commands to efface his earlier work. As we shall now see, Chaucer steps into Machaut’s shoes in at once collaborating with and (unconsciously) resisting this powerful pro-feminist tradition within the Luxembourg family.

The Parliament of Fowls The imagined relationship between Machaut and Bonne of Luxembourg provided the blueprint for Chaucer’s fantasy of Anne of Bohemia as his patron even before she arrived on English soil. The Parliament of Fowls, an early poem written to celebrate the engagement of Richard and Anne in 1380, assumes the form of a courtly dream poem in the manner of the Roman de la Rose and Machaut’s dits. The Parliament describes how three tercel eagles compete for the hand of a formel (female) eagle and are counseled in their wooing by a congregation of birds (“fowls”). The allegorical work alludes to the three principal suitors for the hand of the fourteen-year-old Anne: Friedrich of Meissen, to whom the princess had been betrothed for six years; the French dauphin (the future Charles VI); and the young King Richard II of England. The formel eagle’s deferral of her decision may help us to date the poem to immediately before the actual marriage contract was signed. According to Larry Benson, The Parliament was probably written sometime in 1380 to mark the betrothal of 31 “Et nompourquan, ma dame douce,/ Que vostres cuers ne se courrouce/ A moy, nous ferons une chose/ Ouvertement, nom pas enclose,/ Ou vostre pais soit contenue,/ Et m’onneur y soit soustenue” (1059–64).

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Richard and Anne.32 In May of that year the marriage negotiations were in full swing, with diplomats shuttling back and forth between London and Prague. Benson opines: “It is pleasant to speculate that The Parliament of Fowls was written for some gathering to bid good speed to the ambassadors.” Given the survival of fourteen manuscripts of The Parliament, many more than of his previous poems, it seems likely that this occasional poem gave Chaucer a public reputation for the first time in his career.33 More important for our purposes is the fact that Chaucer invests Anne with real agency by giving her the right to choose her own mate and to defer her decision to become betrothed. This is hardly coincidental and strongly suggests that Chaucer was aware of the tradition of female agency in her family. In her speech Nature makes it clear that the formel eagle has the right to accept or reject her suitor: But natheles, in this condicioun Mote be the choys of everych that is heere: That she agre to his eleccioun, Whoso he be that shulde be hire feere. (lines 407–10)

The formel eagle’s agency is also apparent in her decision not to decide one way or the other; or even to reveal her mind on the matter: “Of this formel whan she herde al thys./ She neyther answerde wel ne seyde amys” (lines 445–46). The exercise of female discretion in the face of male power is characteristic of the world of courtly love dating back to the twelfth century. In Wace’s Roman de Brut, written for the Angevin court of Eleanor of Aquitaine around 1154, the lovely Igerne, faced with the unwelcome and crude advances of Uther Pendragon, shows the kind of delicate restraint required of aristocratic women in such situations, neither granting nor denying Uther’s wishes.34 We find later iterations of female agency in fourteenth-century courtly romances such as the Bohemian Arthurian romance Tandariáš and Floribella (ca. 1380), based on a thirteenth-century German romance by the Austrian Der Pleier. In the Czech version Tandariáš sends the knights whom he captures during his adventures to

32 Larry D. Benson, “The Occasion of the Parliament of Fowls,” in The Wisdom of Poetry Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, 1982), pp. 123–44, at p. 144. 33 See Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 127. 34 See Wace and Layamon, Arthurian Chronicles, trans. Eugene Mason (London, 1962), p. 36.

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his beloved Floribella, not to King Arthur as in the German source.35 This change of focus from male to female agency also typifies Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” in which the fate of the rapistic knight is placed in the hands of Queen Guinevere and her ladies rather than of Arthur and his knights. In all these late fourteenth-century narratives women are endowed with the kind of power and agency that we shall also see embodied in the intercessory figure of Alceste in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Seen in this light, Alceste’s influence over the irate God of Love seems to be a fictional reflection of the power exercised by Anne of Bohemia over her husband, Richard II, as she kneeled before him on behalf of the citizens of London in 1392. According to one historian, this kind of female agency was a feature of late-medieval Bohemian society in general and may well have colored the depiction of female characters in works of Czech fiction such as the so-called Dalimil Chronicle, with its account of strong Amazonian women engaged with their brothers and fathers in a life-and-death struggle for power.36 It seems likely that these fictional accounts of strong, assertive women reflected the prestige and power that was accorded to female members of the Luxembourg family. Reflecting such female agency, the formel eagle in The Parliament decides to think about the whole matter and postpone her decision for a year: This formel egle spak in this degre: “Almyghty queen, unto this yer be don, I axe respite for to avise me, And after that to have my choys al fre.” (lines 646–49)

Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer’s most ambitious attempt to attract the queen’s attention came in his next work – Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1382–86). The Legend of Good Women was allegedly written as an act of penance for Chaucer’s negative depiction of his Greek heroine Criseyde in Troilus. According to John 35 See Karel Brušák, “Some Notes on Tandariáš a Floribella, a Czech Fourteenth-Century Chivalrous Romance,” in Gorski vijenac: A Garland of Essays Offered to Professor Elizabeth Mary Hill, ed. Robert Auty et al. (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 44–56. 36 For the continuation of this trend in fifteenth-century Bohemia, see John M. Klassen, Warring Maidens, Captive Wives, and Hussite Queens: Women and Men at War and Peace in Fifteenth Century Bohemia (Boulder, CO, 1999).

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Lydgate in his Fall of Princes, the new poem was written “at request off the queen,/ A legend off parfit holynesse” (lines 330–31). It is unclear whether Lydgate had some prior knowledge of the Legend’s genesis or whether he gleaned his information at second hand from Chaucer’s own prologue. The assumption is that Queen Anne intervened in this literary quarrel because she took offense at the negative portrayal of Criseyde’s betrayal of her lover, Troilus. Such offense may have been compounded by the fact that Chaucer had complimented Anne at the beginning of his romance in a way that links her initial “A” with his flawed heroine Criseyde in a rhyme: Among thise othere folk was Criseyda. In widewes habit blak; but natheles, Right as oure firste lettre is now an A, In beaute first so stood she, makeles. (lines 169–72)

Whether Anne became directly involved or not is impossible to prove. But it is reasonable to assume that in comparing the queen of England with Criseyde, Chaucer’s compliment backfired – or at least did so in his own mind. Chaucer clearly made the compliment in order to ingratiate himself with the royal couple: the wording “now an A” points to the likelihood that Anne had only recently arrived on English soil, which allows us to date the inception of the romance to 1382, the year in which she was crowned queen of England. But there was perhaps another reason why Chaucer felt the need to make up for his apparent faux pas, and that has to do with war rather than love, conflict rather than collaboration. Troilus and Criseyde is set against the backdrop of the ten-year Greek siege of Troy as retold by Homer in his epic Iliad. Chaucer, of course, derived his version of the story not from Homer but from Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, composed in the late 1330s. Boccaccio in turn derived the love story of Troilus, the son of the Trojan King Priam, and Criseyde not from Homer but from Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s twelfth-century French Roman de Troie. In the French romance the woman who loves Troilus is named Briseida. Boccaccio also knew Guido de Colonne’s Latin Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), a prose redaction of Benoit’s Roman that, since it was written in Latin rather than the vernacular, largely superseded Benoit as the authority of the Trojan War. Chaucer knew and directly used material from Virgil, Ovid, Benoit, and Guido. As with the classical sources for The Legend of Good Women, these multiple sources created a problem for Chaucer, since they did not tell the story in the same way. As James Simpson has shown in an important

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article “The Other Book of Troy,” Guido’s account represented an anti-imperial contrast to the pro-imperial stance of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1136), which provided the foundational legend of Aeneas’s grandson Brutus of Troy, who, as at the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, precedes King Arthur as the first of a native tradition of British heroes.37 In order to paper over these cracks, Chaucer pretends that one Lollius, a Latin writer, is his authentic source. If the disparate sources were one source of potential conflict for Chaucer, equally so was the ideological profile of Troy itself, which in the later Middle Ages became a discursive site of rivalry between various European courts and dynasties – what Sylvia Federico has termed “competing narratives of empire.”38 The opening passage about the Trojan foundation of Britain in Sir Gawain and the Gawain Knight reflects the vogue for all things Trojan in the 1380s, a decade in which it was proposed in some circles that the name of London be changed to Troynovant (New Troy). In 1390/91, the fourteenth year of his reign, Richard II commissioned a history of England that began with Brutus of Troy and ended with his own reign, thus linking him in a circular and flattering fashion with the Trojan founder of the state.39 As Sylvia Federico has shown, Trojan history was claimed by various rulers throughout late medieval Europe as their rightful patrimony. The dukes of Burgundy were avid collectors of Trojan texts: Philip the Good owned seventeen Troy manuscripts and founded the Order of the Golden Fleece; the Visconti library contained four copies of Guido’s work as well as six other Trojan books;40 and the Valois kings appropriated the story of Troy in the interests of the mythic origins of France and their own dynastic legitimacy. In the Grandes chroniques de France (ca. 1375–80), commissioned by Charles V, a series of four images traces the arrival of the Greeks at Troy, the siege of the city, the eventual fall of the city through treachery, and the Trojan diaspora with the leader of the Trojans attacking Rome dressed in the colors and livery of the French king himself.

37 James Simpson, “The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Collone’s Historia Destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Speculum 73 (1998), 397–423. 38 Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures, vol. 36 (Minneapolis, 2003), p. xii. 39 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 251. See Bennett, Richard II, pp. 42–43. 40 Federico, New Troy, p. 68.

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Another dynasty heavily invested in the Trojan myth was the Luxembourg family, as we have seen with reference to John of Luxembourg’s fascination with the story of Troy. John’s interest in the Troy story was at once fashionable and politically motivated, since his family claimed descent from Aeneas. John’s son, Emperor Charles IV, had his family tree – the so-called Luxembourg Genealogy Murals – painted on the walls of the reception hall at his castle of Karlstein for his visitors to see and admire. These murals are now lost, but copies of them survive in the sixteenth-century Codex Heidelbergensis (now in the National Gallery, Prague). These drawings reveal that the original murals began with Noah and included the heroes of the Trojan War as well as Charlemagne and other Carolingian rulers, culminating in Charles IV himself: The sacred pedigree passes from Noah to Saturn and Jupiter and, then, via Dardanus, founder of Troy, reaches Charles through the Roman emperors, Clovis and the Carolingians. According to this genealogy, the blood of the brothers Aeneas and Antenor, who established Trojan realms in Italy and Germany, meets in Charlemagne (who has a Roman mother and a German father) and culminates in Charles IV.41

Charles’s son and heir, Wenceslas IV, is known to have proudly shown the Genealogy Murals to a foreign visitor to Karlstein, Edmund de Dynter, who records that Wenceslas boasted that he was descended from the Trojans and Charlemagne through his great-grandfather’s marriage to John of Brabant.42 This identification with Troy was passed on to Richard II in respect of his wife, Anne of Bohemia, and fueled his imperial ambitions. As Wenceslas’s political fortunes in the Holy Roman Empire waned, so Richard’s ambitions to succeed him as king of the Romans waxed. Indeed, if the ceiling in Norwich Great Hospital, painted with imperial eagles, is anything to go by, Richard’s imperial ambitions were kindled as early as 1383, when he and Anne paid a visit to the city. This was about the time that Chaucer began work on Troilus and Criseyde; and it is tempting to see this courtly romance about the Greek conquest of Troy as a complimentary reference to Richard II’s desire to become Holy Roman Emperor. “The Knight’s Tale” (written before its incorporation into The Canterbury Tales) similarly begins with Duke Theseus bringing the subjugated Amazon Queen Hyppolita back to Athens, another possible reference to Richard’s 41 Federico, New Troy, p. xiii. 42 See Magister Theodoricus: Dvorní malíř císaře Karla IV., ed. Jiří Fajt (Prague, 1997), p. 99.

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marriage to an imperial princess. Reinforcing the topicality of the Bohemian marriage is the allusion to the storm that wrecked Anne’s ship the day after her arrival on English soil: “of the tempest at hir hoom-comynge” (line 884).43 Both courtly tales can be read as flattering allusions not only to Richard’s prestigious marriage but also to his European ambitions. We might go so far as to say that his “fantasy of empire” was inseparable from his wife’s imagined Trojan pedigree, just as Chaucer’s fantasy of becoming a European poet was dependent on the role of Anne as his imagined patron. Richard’s “fantasy of empire” was shared by other poets such as Richard Maidstone, the court panegyrist who refers to London as “New Troy” in his poem Concordia about the staged reconciliation between the king and the city of London (1392). As Nancy Bradley Warren has observed, Maidstone gives Queen Anne not only a walk-on part in this spectacle but also a speech in which she encourages her husband to identify with the Trojan past and, by implication, with her own father’s illustrious descent from Aeneas.44 Maidstone proceeds to reinforce the connection between Anne’s family and Trojan history by comparing her beauty to that of the Amazons: “Very beautiful herself, she stands surrounded by beautiful maidens; the New Troy conquers under these Amazons” (“Pulchra quidem pulchris stat circumcincta puellis;/ Vincit Amazonibus Troia novella sub hiis”) (123–24). Following Federico, Warren shrewdly points out that this compliment backfires on Maidstone, since it makes King Richard reliant on a powerful conquering Amazon rather than a submissive uxorial figure.45 Here two images of Anne conflict: Anne as the conquering queen of the Amazons who comes to the aid of Troy, and Anne as the Esther-Marian type who kneels humbly before the king. The same tension between incompatible images of Anne is at play in Chaucer’s Troilus. On the one hand, the poet’s compliment to the queen early in the poem equates Criseyde with Marian humility, an identification amplified by the word “makeles” (“immaculate”) to describe the blackclad widow. Whereas Boccaccio identifies with the tragic male figure of Troilus, Chaucer shows a great deal of sympathy for his heroine and 43 See Alfred Thomas, “Bohemia,” in Brown (ed.), A New Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Chichester, 2019), pp. 71–86, at pp. 74–75. 44 See Nancy Bradley Warren, “‘Old Stories’ and Amazons: The Legend of Good Women, the ‘Knight’s Tale,’ and Fourteenth-Century Political Culture,” in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 83–104. 45 Warren, “‘Old Stories’ and Amazons,” p. 103.

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gives her far more inner life than does his Italian source, Il Filostrato. This emphasis is consistent with Chaucer’s enthusiasm for the pro-feminist humanism of the international court culture and likely reflects his desire to attract the attention of Queen Anne. On the other hand, Criseyde goes on to betray Troilus and abandons him both in Chaucer and in his Italian source. No longer the submissive woman, she becomes the perfidious woman of misogynistic medieval tradition. Of course, none of this has to do with the historical Anne of Bohemia but, rather, with Chaucer’s own conflicted status as a humanist courtier grappling with his source material. Moreover, not only does the implied equation of Criseyde with Anne shed an awkward light on the queen’s morals, it also makes Richard look like a Trojan loser rather than a Greek conquering hero. Here Chaucer is contradicting his own neat analogy between Richard/Theseus and Anne/ Hyppolita in “The Knight’s Tale.” As Nancy Bradley Warren has astutely pointed out, Chaucer – like Maidstone – is unwittingly moving into controversial political waters by placing Richard on the wrong (losing) side of the Trojan conflict. In some ways Chaucer’s implied parallel between Criseyde and Anne was apt – but not for the right political reasons: like Criseyde, Anne was a transplant not only from a different country but from a foreign dynasty that claimed the Trojans as their ancestors and were thus regarded as potential rivals and competitors of the (Plantagenet) family. Seen in this light, Criseyde’s treachery toward Troilus assumes an awkward counterpoint to Anne’s marriage with Richard. Even if Chaucer was not fully aware of the political rivalry that existed between Richard and Anne’s brother Wenceslas, the fact that both claimed Troy as their heroic origin automatically made his romance fraught with political implications. Did Chaucer realize that he had committed a political faux pas, or was he simply replicating Bonne of Luxembourg’s dispute with Machaut in making Alceste command him to write a palinode in the form of The Legend of Good Women? There is no way of knowing. Possibly, Chaucer felt that his attempt to attract royal favor and patronage in the Troilus had backfired, and felt the need to make amends by writing a legendary of virtuous women that would appeal more to the queen’s pious tastes. Ironically, as we shall now see, this compliment also backfired insofar as Chaucer created a series of legends that – far from flattering classical women – only made them look like two-dimensional victims.

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The Legend of Good Women As we have seen, Chaucer’s first allusion to the queen – at the end of his Parliament of Fowls (ca. 1380), where the querulous birds defer to Anne as their judge in matters of love – actually preceded her arrival in England and may have been written as an occasional poem to celebrate the engagement of the royal couple. But the most explicit compliment to Anne comes in the F Prologue of The Legend of Good Women when Alceste commands the narrator to take his finished book and give it to the queen at one of her manors: Goo now thy wey, this penauce ys but lyte. And whan this book ys maad, yive it to the quene, On my byhalf, at Eltham or at Sheene. (F, 495–97)46

Queen Anne’s reputation as a patron and intercessor also exerted an imaginative hold on other courtiers, like Sir John Clanvowe and Thomas Usk, both of whom regarded the queen as a muse of sorts. Usk’s The Testament of Love shows some affinity with Pearl in its imagistic connection of marguerites (pearls) with Anne of Bohemia, while Clanvowe’s choice of the queen as judge in the birds’ dispute on love in his Boke of Cupid obviously recalls Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Here the manor in question is the royal hunting-lodge at Woodstock near Oxford: And this shal be, withouten any nay, The morowe of Seynt Valentynes day, Under the maple that is feire and grene, Before the chambre wyndow of the quene, At Wodestok, upon the grene lay. (lines 281–85).47

The imagined intimacy between the vernacular poet and his patron might even help to explain the curious line in Pearl where the dreamer-narrator refers to the pearl maiden in terms of kinship as “me nerre then aunt or nece” (line 233) (“nearer my heart than aunt or niece”). The editors of Pearl argue that “the line suggests the pearl was a daughter or sister” of the poet, but the comparison with a family member actually implies

46 Quotations from Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston, 1987), 3rd edn. 47 Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, ed. Dana M. Symons (Kalamazoo, 2004), p. 52.

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contrast rather than sameness.48 It is salutary to recall that medieval allegories do not automatically entail a literal meaning. If we take the example of the near-contemporaneous German prose allegory Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (The Plowman from Bohemia, ca. 1401), written by Johannes von Tepl, the city notary of the New Town in Prague, the deceased wife lamented by the plaintiff-narrator should not be understood in literal terms, since archival evidence shows that the author’s wife was alive at the time that the work was written and that she was named Clara, not Margaret. The couple had been married for twenty years and Clara survived her husband.49 The name of the Plowman’s deceased wife identifies her as an allegorical ideal as much as a real person and can be related to the marguerite tradition of French poetry pioneered by Froissart and Machaut. The word margarita (“pearl” in Latin) designates purity and virtue. The Plowman’s wife is a real person insofar as her death elicits her husband’s heartfelt grief; but she is also an ideal in terms of what she represents to him. As C.S. Lewis argues in The Allegory of Love, “it is a mischievous error to suppose that in allegory the author is ‘really’ talking about the thing symbolized, and not at all the thing that symbolizes; and the very essence of art is to talk about both.”50 In addition to the pearl, marguerite also refers to the daisy, a flower linked to Anne in the F Prologue where the narrator kneels before and worships the daisy. It appears that this flower was one of Anne’s personal devices and, as such, figures with other cut blossoms in the flowery meadow where the Virgin, Child, and angels face the similarly kneeling Richard II in the Wilton Diptych.51 The cult of the daisy had also been made famous by Machaut and was mediated to Chaucer via the marguerite poetry of Jean Froissart.52 Thus the daisy motif not only links Chaucer

48 See The Works of the Gawain Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London, 2014), p. 419. 49 See Mark Chinca, “Horizons of Loss: Consolation and the Person in the Ackermann by Johannes von Tepl,” in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Miller (New York 2008), pp. 165– 83, at pp. 165–66. 50 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936), p. 225. 51 See Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca, 2007), p. 40. 52 See Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, pp. 23–42. For Machaut’s use of the marguerite motif, see James I. Wimsatt, The Margeurite Poetry of Guillaume de Machaut (Chapel Hill, 1970).

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to Anne; it also binds him with Machaut and Froissart in a collaborative project in which poets and patrons all participate in a creative fashion. Anne can also be equated with Alceste in her role as the intercessor for the poet-narrator with the irate God of Love, who, as David Wallace has pointed out, recalls the tyrannical proclivities of Richard II and the Lombard rulers of Italy against which Alceste warns her husband:53 This shoolde a ryghtwis lord have in his thought, And nat be lyk tirauntz of Lumbardye, That han no reward but at tyrannye. (F Prologue, 373–75)

It is no coincidence that the Legend was probably written around 1387, precisely the time that Richard’s rule was under assault from the Lords Appellant and his power was curtailed by the Merciless Parliament. It was during this crisis that Anne kneeled before one of the most powerful Appellants – the earl of Arundel – to beg for the life of Richard’s former tutor and chamberlain, Sir Simon Burley. We see Anne’s act of intercession replicated in Alceste’s intervention with the irate God of Love on behalf of the offending poet-narrator. As Paul Strohm has shown, such acts of female intercession were a tradition of English queens (including Queen Philippa’s intervention with her husband, Edward III, on behalf of the condemned burghers of Calais), based on the assertive model of the Virgin Mary in the New Testament and Esther in the Old Testament.54 Important in Chaucer’s F Prologue is his awareness not only of this English tradition of queenly intercession but also of the Continental tradition of female patronage within Anne’s Luxembourg family. Like Le jugement dou roy de Navarre, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women can be understood as an imagined literary collaboration with Anne of Bohemia in which the patron provides not only the subject-matter (a legendary of classical women) but also the meaning to be attached to the work (women as martyrs of love). This female “collaboration” recalls Chrétien de Troyes’ recognition at the beginning of Lancelot that his patron, Marie, countess of Champagne, furnished him with the matière and the sens of his romance. Like Anne of Bohemia, Marie came from a distinguished family of patrons: her mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had presided over 53 For the connection between Richard II’s absolutism and the tyrants of Lombardy, see David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997), p. 338. 54 See Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow. The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), pp. 96–97.

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a glittering court at Poitou and gathered around her groups of ladies in “courts of love” that handed down judgments in matters of the heart. The source of this legend is Andrew the Chaplain’s On Love, a handbook for courtly lovers addressed to a friend who was a new “recruit of love.”55 Chaucer clearly places himself within this long-standing courtly tradition stretching back to the twelfth century “courts of love” initiated by Eleanor of Aquitaine and continued by Machaut in Le jugement dou roy de Navarre. Whether or not Anne of Bohemia actually commissioned Chaucer to write The Legend of Good Women as a palinode for Troilus and Criseyde is a moot point. More significant is the fact that Chaucer imagined himself as a latter-day Chrétien or Machaut, with Anne cast in the role of Machaut’s patron Bonne and Chrétien’s patron Marie de Champagne. As it turns out, Alceste’s matière (a legendary of female martyrs) is deeply at odds with the sens (pro-feminist treatment) of Chaucer’s poem. Alceste (Anne) insists on a complete revision of the traditional tales of classical women (including the highly problematic historical figure Cleopatra, whose story begins the sequence) by turning them into martyrs of love along the lines of Christian virgin-martyrs. Chaucer might have been aware of the queen’s fondness for virgin-martyr narratives such as The Legend of St Catherine of Alexandria, a late fourteenth-century Czech hagiographic romance written for the court of Emperor Charles IV.56 Supporting this likelihood is the fact that Chaucer wrote a virgin-martyr legend (The Life of St Cecilia) most likely to please the pious queen, who may have modeled her own marriage with Richard II on Cecilia’s chaste marriage described in Chaucer’s legend. Just as Bonne of Luxembourg insists that Machaut efface his earlier work and write a palinode in the form of Navarre, so now Alceste commands Chaucer to compose a new work that will not only exonerate women but idealize them as martyrs of love. The fact that she then enjoins the author to present his finished work to Queen Anne at “Eltham or Sheen” suggests that Chaucer had the queen in mind as his patron and ideal reader. Chaucer’s attempt to please the queen by rewriting the lives of classical women along the lines of Christian martyrs miscalculated that the stories of classical heroines inherited from Ovid and other classical auctores did not lend themselves easily to medieval martyr narratives. The consequence of Chaucer’s flawed attempt to write a legendary of classical women’s lives as martyrs of love was to 55 See Ralph V. Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine (New Haven, 2009), pp. 198–99. 56 See Thomas, Reading Women, ch. 6.

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render them and their stories flat and two dimensional.57 Virgin-martyrs like St Cecilia and St Catherine of Alexandria are victims not just of male tyranny but of pagan despots. Catherine of Alexandria and Margaret of Antioch are defiant, not compliant: it is this crucial difference that allows them to prevail in a way that is not possible in the case of classical women, whose involvement with men is emotional and sexual rather than political and ideological. Even if Queen Anne really did commission Chaucer to write a legendary of good classical women along Christian lines, the project was doomed to failure because of the very different nature of classical and Christian narratives about women. That Chaucer imagined Anne’s collaboration in his project is supported by the fact that he had already anticipated the disapproval of the ladies of the court at the close of Troilus and Criseyde, presumably well before the poem was circulated: Byseching every lady bright of hewe, And every gentil womman, what she be, That al be that Criseyde was untrewe, That for that gilt she be nat wroth with me. Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se; And gladlier I wol write, yif yow leste, Penolopeës trouthe and good Alceste. (lines 1772–78)

The legendary of good women sponsored by Alceste turns out to be less than satisfactory, and the classical heroines in them lacking in the necessary assertiveness to render them convincing, for the simple reason that Chaucer’s desire to write a pro-feminist treatise cannot be reconciled with the genre of the virgin-martyr narrative. Chaucer fails to grasp that what makes virgin-martyr narratives compelling (and presumably therefore of interest to Anne of Bohemia and other medieval women) is that virgins like Catherine of Alexandria and Cecilia exercise real agency in defying the patriarchal control of their pagan suitors. Instead of making his classical heroines impressive role models of female agency in the same way, Chaucer ends up producing a series of two-dimensional portrayals in which the women are simply idealized. The flawed nature of this humanist attempt to write what he thinks Anne would like to read would explain the frequent moments of 57 See, for example, Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley, 1994); Lisa Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, 1983).

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rhetorical occupatio where Chaucer’s narrator skips over the details of his source materials in a desperate attempt to reach the end of the story – as at the close of the Legend of Medea (“Wel can Ovyde hire letter in verse endyte,/ Which were as now to long for me to wryte,” lines 1677–78) or in the middle or at the end of the Legend of Dido: “I coude folwe, word for word, Virgile,/ But it wolde lasten al to longe while” (lines 1002–3); “But who wol al this letter have in mynde,/ Rede Ovyde, and in hym he shal it fynde” (lines 1366–67). In these repeated refrains the narrator starts to show the same signs of impatience with his “collaborative” project with Anne that he attributes to Aeneas in his relation to the passionate Dido. Aeneas’s wery craft (weary game or exploit) serves as a punning indicator of Chaucer’s own unsuccessful craft as a writer: This Eneas, that hath so depe yswore, Is wery of his craft withinne a throwe; The hote ernest is al overblowe. And pryvyly he doth his shipes dyghte, And shapeth hym to stele awey by nyghte. (lines 1285–89)

As Barbara K. Altmann and R. Barton Palmer point out, “Neither in the Aeneid nor in Ovid is there mention, as there is here, of Aeneas’s wearying of Dido’s company.”58 We can interpret Chaucer’s weariness as authorial projection onto his male protagonist that reflects his own frustration and impatience with a collaborative project that is clearly not working out: just as Aeneas is growing tired of Dido, so is Chaucer tiring of his humanist “collaboration” with Anne and eager to bring it to an end. There are similar moments in the Legend where Chaucer takes out his exasperation on his protagonists, even lashing out at the women whose lives he is supposed to be celebrating, as in this apostrophe in the middle of the Legend of Dido: O sely wemen, ful of innocence, Ful of pite, of trouthe and conscience, What maketh yow to men to truste so? Have ye swych routhe upon hyre feyned wo, And han swich olde ensaumples yow beforn? (lines 1253–57)

Such outbursts have often been read as expressions of Chaucerian irony, but there is really nothing ironic about them. Rather, they are an expression of Chaucer’s frustration at his inability to reconcile his pro-feminist humanist and more conservative medieval perspectives. At 58 For this point see, An Anthology of Medieval Love Poetry, p. 249 fn. 37.

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the heart of this tension is a fundamentally conflicted interpretation of women inherent in his classical sources – in particular the tension between Virgil’s sympathy for Aeneas and Ovid’s empathy with Dido in the Legend of Dido – and the kind of traditional medieval texts such as virgin-martyr narratives presumably favored by Queen Anne. In his attempt to please Alceste/Anne by writing an entirely positive account of the lives of classical women along Christian-hagiographic lines, Chaucer finds himself not only at loggerheads with his male auctores and sources but also with his imagined patron and collaborator, Anne. Like Chrétien’s Lancelot, Chaucer’s Legend was left unfinished. Is it possible that in both cases the reason behind the abandoned project was an abortive “collaboration” between the male poet and his female patron? Marie de Champagne’s well-known eagerness for a romance that would exalt the illicit love between Guinevere and Arthur’s favorite knight could not be reconciled with Chrétien’s status as a cleric obliged to observe the strict rules on marriage enforced by the medieval Church. It may well be that a similar conflict of interests lies at the heart of Chaucer’s Legend. For sure, Chaucer was not a cleric like Chrétien, but he did share a clerical ambivalence toward the female sex. How this ambivalence could be reconciled with pro-feminist humanism underlies the problem faced by Chaucer in his attempt to follow in the humanist footsteps of Machaut and Boccaccio. Chaucer abandoned his Legend not because he was bored with it but because he simply could not reconcile the contradictions apparent within his project – and within himself. In his conflicted resistance to his own project Chaucer starts to resemble the rebarbative Petrarch lashing out petulantly at Emperor Charles for not restoring the Roman Empire in Italy. The harmonious cooperation between patron and poet, master and servant, mutates from a relationship based on familiarity and collaboration to one based on tension and resentment. Just as Petrarch could not subordinate Emperor Charles to his own vision of a restored imperium, so Chaucer cannot assimilate Anne to his project of writing a humanist defense of classical women along the lines of Christian hagiography. The result is a work of fragmentation. Indeed, Chaucer’s unfinished Legend of Good Women recalls what William T. Rossiter – building upon the insights of the Italian scholar Mazzotta – has termed “Petrarch’s poetics of fragmentation.” Like Petrarch, Chaucer is torn between his humanist nostalgia for the golden age of Antiquity and the reality of the present; the result is a sense of dislocation between the ideal and the real linked to Petrarch’s sense of temporal as well as

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geographical “misero esilio” (“miserable exile”): “The sense of home, which, as we have seen, is geographically and temporally dislocated is as irretrievable or impossible as the perfect, unfragmentary totality; the essence of Petrarchan poetics is the desire for a telos which is always tantalizingly out of reach.”59 Chaucer shared with Petrarch a tripartite vision of history divided between a glorious antique past, an inglorious present, and a hopefully invigorated future.60 As we have seen, this tripartite model of human history is manifested in Petrarch’s letters to Emperor Charles. When Petrarch admonishes Charles to descend into Italy to unite the peninsula and free it from political chaos he is essentially differentiating between an idealized classical past and an inglorious reality of the present. Only through Charles’s imperial intervention can the glorious past be restored and an invigorated future assured. Petrarch’s massive investment in Italy’s past and future glory is inseparable from his obsession with his Luxembourg patron as the creator of that future. Analogously, Chaucer’s vision of a classical past inhabited by female martyrs is wholly contingent on his imagined literary relationship with Charles’s daughter, Anne of Bohemia. The tripartite model of human history sets Petrarch (and Chaucer) apart from the correlation of pagan and scriptural historicism developed by Augustine and used by Dante. In the words of Robert Edwards: Chaucerian antiquity is removed from the medieval universal histories that correlated events from pagan history with incidents in Jewish history from the Old Testament … Implicitly, Chaucer is the counter example to the claim that historical consciousness arises with the Renaissance and that no one in the Middle Ages could see the classical past as a conceptual whole.61

Chaucer cannot realize this glorious classical past in the Legend because it is at loggerheads with a medieval-Augustinian world view in which human beings – and women in particular – were deemed to have fallen from grace. Petrarch’s criticism of Charles is not simply based on the latter’s failure to unite Italy; it is predicated on an ideological discrepancy between Petrarch’s tripartite vision of human history and Charles’s Augustinian understanding of human history in which events from the pagan past correlated with incidents from Jewish history. Emperor Charles was 59 William T. Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch (Cambridge, 2010), p. 48. 60 Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, p. 54. 61 Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio, p. 4.

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deeply influenced by the thought of St Augustine from his youth, ideas which he probably passed on to his children (including Anne).62 Petrarch projects onto Charles a classical vision of the past and inevitably becomes bitter and disillusioned when the emperor fails to respond to his idealistic plan. Emperor Charles was determined not to make the same mistake as his grandfather, Emperor Henry VII, who had died in Italy trying to bring order to that troubled peninsula. Charles’s political shrewdness derived from his Augustinian understanding of human beings as deeply flawed and sinful: for him there was simply no classical golden age that separated the past from the present; hence a military intervention in Italy was not only misconceived: it was doomed to failure and catastrophe. In a similar fashion, in the Legend, Chaucer projects onto Charles’s daughter his own humanist ideal of a classical past in which men and women could be equal. This desire for unity with the classical past correlates with the Trojan fantasy of empire discussed earlier. By the late Middle Ages the idea of Trojan precedent represented a new historical consciousness that, in the words of Francis Ingledew, is “associated with an aristocratic and lay cultural environment, at odds with the biblically oriented Augustinian-Orosian paradigm, which instead of claiming birth in Troy, confessed birth in the fall.”63 But whereas Petrarch does not hesitate to scold the emperor for his political timidity in not uniting Italy, Chaucer’s resistance to Anne’s Augustinian piety is more oblique, manifested – as we shall see – in small but telling details in the narrative. It is important to emphasize that in both cases – in Petrarch’s letters to Emperor Charles and Chaucer’s composition of The Legend of the Good Women – the real struggle is not between the poet and his patron but within the writer himself. Ostensibly in epistolary dialogue with Emperor Charles, Petrarch is really arguing with himself: the classical humanist who aspires to restore the greatness that was Rome is in hopeless conflict with the dissatisfied medieval poet trapped within a fractured – and far from imperial – Italy. At every point in the narratives of the Legend we see evidence of a similar inner conflict between Chaucer’s humanism and Augustinianism. Chaucer desperately represses the latter in favor of his humanist project, 62 See Zdeněk Kalista, Karel IV. Jeho duchovní tvář (Prague, 2007), pp. 49–66. 63 Francis Ingledew, “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannaie,” Speculum 69 (1994), 665–704, at 666.

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only for the former to break through the surface of the narrative in the form of unconsciously anti-feminist imagery: the obscene image of the cleft (clyfte) repeated three times in the wall that separates Thisbe and Pyramus is an example of Chaucer’s growing frustration with a pro-feminist project that is not simply not cohering. Sheila Delaney has characterized such obscene moments as ironic, as if Chaucer were consciously mocking his own project. But Alastair Minnis is correct, I think, in rejecting this argument when he reminds us that insofar as Chaucer is writing his Legend for an (imagined) audience of court ladies (including the queen of England) he would hardly indulge in obscene puns about anal crevices.64 Yet it is hard to resist the discordant effect of the word, especially when it occurs three times. One way to make sense of the obscene punning here is to understand it as unconscious resistance to a humanistic project that he feels compelled to write against his will. In the story of Thisbe and Pyramus based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the fissure in the wall can be understood less as obscene sexual punning than as a fundamental metatextual crack in the narrative itself: This wal, which that bitwixe hem bothe stod, Was clove a-two, ryght from the cop adoun, Of olde tyme of his fundacioun; But yit this clyfte was so narw and lyte It nas nat sense, deere ynogh a myte. But what is that that love can nat espye? (lines 737–42)

Other moments in the Legend similarly attest to Chaucer’s sense of creative frustration as he strives to tell his tales of virtuous classical women. Consider, for example, the moment when Thisbe espies her dead lover killed by his own sword: Tysbe ryst up withouten noyse or bost, And saw hire wympel and his empty shethe, And ek his swerd that hym hath don to dethe. (lines 887–89)

As with the cracks in the Theban wall, the vaginal empty sheath (empty shethe) signals an emasculation that is the direct consequence of Chaucer’s inability to write a successful legendary of good women. In his eagerness to please the queen by writing a wholly idealizing account of classical heroines, the humanist courtier Chaucer unconsciously reverts to the more traditional medieval misogynist. This split between the courtly humanist 64 Oxford Guides to Chaucer, ed. Minnis et al., p. 343.

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and medieval misogynist is evidenced not only by his occasional apostrophes to “sely wemen” but also by the feminized behavior of his flawed male protagonists. When the exiled Aeneas begins to weep after relating to Dido the tragic fate of his natal city of Troy (1033) or Jason is described as “as coy as is a mayde” (line 1548) in his cunning plan to enamor Medea, their less-than-masculine conduct simply confirms Chaucer’s misogynist inclination to see their behavior as signs of female weakness and guile. We might conclude that Chaucer’s innately Augustinian vision of a fallen world (concomitant with a traditional medieval distrust of women) is fundamentally at loggerheads with his ardent desire to write a favorable work about women in the humanist tradition of Petrarch and Boccaccio. This frustration may even help to explain the cancelled reference to Anne in the G Prologue of the Legend. Usually seen as a discreet and tactful response to Anne’s death in 1394, this excision may equally be explained in terms of Chaucer’s unconscious desire to gain some artistic distance from a collaborative project doomed to failure by the internal conflicts within his own psyche.

“The Clerk’s Tale” It was only with The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer was able to overcome these structural problems by using his pilgrim narrators to displace his own contradictory investment in stories about women. “The Clerk’s Tale” and “The Man of Law’s Tale” both involve female protagonists (Griselda and Constance, respectively) who conform to the uxorial ideal of the passive, all-patient wife and mother. Both also include oblique compliments to Queen Anne as the Marian exemplar who kneels before her husband in order to intercede with him on behalf of his subjects. As is well known, “The Clerk’s Tale” is based on the very last story of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Chaucer probably did not know Boccaccio’s story but used Petrarch’s Latin version along with an anonymous French crib.65 There is an obvious compliment to Anne of Bohemia as the daughter of an emperor early on in Chaucer’s version where the Marquis, in response to his subjects’ request 65 For the Latin and French sources, see Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Atlantic Highlands, NJ), pp. 288–331 For a useful summary of Chaucer’s sources for “The Clerk’s Tale,” see Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, edited with an introduction and notes by Jill Mann (London, 2005), pp. 921–22.

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that he take a wife, agrees only on condition that he choose her of his own free will: Lat me allone in chesynge of my wyf – That charge upon my bak I wole endure. But I yow preye, and charge upon youre lyf, That wyf that I take, ye me assure To worshipe hire, whil that hir lyf may dure, In word and werk, both here and everywheere, As she an emperoures doghter weere. (lines 162–68) (my italics)

Here Chaucer’s oblique compliment to Anne recalls Richard Maidstone’s panegyric to Richard and Anne, known as the Concordia, where Anne is addressed during the procession through London as the “Famed offspring of a father born from Caesar’s line” (“Inclita Cesareo soboles propagate parente”) (line 431).66 Compared with Boccaccio and Petrarch’s versions and Maidstone’s largely political text, Chaucer intensifies the religious resonance of the tale by using the rhyme royal that he reserves for religious narratives. Jill Mann states that Griselda “images the patient suffering of God the Son, enduring the arbitrary cruelty of mankind with an unstinted love.”67 An instance of this religious allegorization of the story is the pointed comparison between Griselda and Christ born in a stable, a detail that is absent from the sources: Amonges thise povre folk ther dwelte a man Which that was holden povrest of hem alle; But hye God sometyme senden kan His grace into a litel oxes stalle; Janicula men of that throop hym calle. A doghter hadde he, fair ynogh to sighte, And Grisildis this yonge mayden highte. (lines 204–10)

A later compliment to Anne is the qualification that the Marquis’s choice of Griselda as his spouse made her more likely to be the daughter of an emperor than the poor daughter of a farmer, as if Chaucer were backtracking on his original humanist assertion of virtú – that true nobility does not distinguish between the high- and low-born – by reverting to a more traditional medieval assumption that virtue is, after all, an indicator

66 Maidstone, Concordia, pp. 72–73. 67 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Mann, pp. 921–22.

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of aristocratic birth. Here we are reminded that medieval social rank – like gender – is ultimately hierarchical: And shortly forth this tale for to chace, I seye that to this new markysesse God hath swich favour sent hire of his grace That it ne semed nat by liklynesse That she was born and fed in rudenesse, As in a cote or in an oxe-stalle, But norissed in an emperoures halle. (lines 393–99)

A compliment to Queen Anne as the daughter of an emperor is now inserted into a work that stresses woman as a humble Christian martyr rather than as a classical heroine. Clearly Chaucer is more comfortable with this standard hagiographic mode of humble woman than with his misplaced attempt to rewrite a pro-feminist humanist work along the lines of Boccaccio. If Griselda is tacitly compared with the humble Christ born in a manger, she is also modeled on the ideal of the Virgin Mary. Chaucer underscores this comparison between Griselda and the Virgin Mary by emphasizing his heroine’s humility and goodness, qualities that earned her the affection of her people (lines 406–12). Queen Anne was also known for her humility as exemplified by her intercessory role between her irate husband Richard II and the people of London in the staged reconciliation of 1392. Clearly the original readers of Chaucer’s tale were intended to recognize these compliments to Queen Anne. In the tale of humble Griselda, then, Chaucer refracts his ambivalent vision of women (and Anne of Bohemia) through the myriad voices of his pilgrims. The pious Clerk of Oxford provides the perfect hagiographic vehicle for Chaucer’s depiction of Griselda as a humble yet defiant woman in the mold of female virgin-martyr narratives. Having rehearsed Petrarch’s point that the story of Griselda is not exemplary of virtuous women but of true Christians, Chaucer goes on to insist that women these days could not rise to such moral standards anyway: “It were ful hard to fynde nowa-dayes/ In all a toun Grisildes three or two” (lines 1164–65). This golden-age topos is also a feature of female hagiography. In the Czech Legend of St Catherine of Alexandria (to which we shall turn in chapter 4) the anonymous clerical author reminds his audience that the virgin-martyr’s willingness to suffer pain and torture on behalf of her heavenly spouse, Christ, would not be found among women today: “I would not believe that a lady nowadays would be so devoted to her husband, and so faithful

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in her love, that she would withstand for him even a single blow endured by Saint Catherine, her mother’s delightful daughter.”68 However, in his “Lenvoy de Chaucer” (i.e. Chaucer’s conclusion to the tale), the narrator Chaucer appears to distance himself from the Clerk’s hagiographic mode by encouraging women not to submit to Griselda’s example: O noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence, Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille, Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille As of Grislidis pacient and kynde, Lest Chichevache yow swelwe in hire entraille! (lines 1183–88)

Here Chaucer successfully distinguishes his own “humanist” voice from that of the conventional Clerk. But there is of a course a difference between this tale and The Legend of Good Women: Chaucer is now free to be ironic at the expense of women (and Griselda), as his opening statement makes clear: Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience, And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille; For which I crie in open audience Ne wedded man so hardy be t’assaille His wyves pacience in trust to fynde Grisildis, for in certein he shal faille. (lines 1177–82)

“Grisilde is deed” in effect rehearses the Clerk’s opening sardonic statement that his auctor Petrarch is “now dead and nailed in his coffin”: I wol yow telle a tale, which that I Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, As preved by his words and his werk. He is now deed and nayled in his cheste; I prey to God so yeve his soule reste! Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete, Highte this clerk, whose rethorike sweete Enlumyned al Ytaillie of poetrie, As Lynyan dide of philosophie. (lines 26–34)

68 Thomas, Reading Women, p. 108.

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There is a palpable sense of relief in these lines, as if Chaucer is refracting his own skeptical voice through the Clerk’s assurance that Petrarch – like his fictional creation Griselde – is dead and buried. In short, the flawed ideals of Petrarch’s pro-feminist humanism can be finally abandoned in favor of a more traditional medieval view of women. Having begun on an ironic note, the tale now concludes on a similarly ironic reminder that we all die in the end – including the virtuous Griselda and her noble creator, Petrarch. But Chaucer does not have the last word; in most of the manuscripts the following stanza appears in the form of Harry Bailey chiming in with his own run-of-the-mill brand of misogyny: This worthy Clerk, whan ended was his tale, Ou Hooste seyde, and swoor, “By Goddes bones, Me were levere than a barel ale My wyf at hoom had herd this legende ones!” (lines 1212–15)

Striking here is the telling use of the word “legend.” What makes this “legend” of a virtuous woman so satisfactory – in distinction to the classical stories in The Legend of Good Women – is that Chaucer has finally found a narrative framework suitable to his conflicted attitude to women. No longer burdened by the need to repress his misogynistic instincts as in The Legend of Good Women, he can now refract his conflicted vision of women through the dialogism afforded by the voices (including his own narratorial voice) of the Canterbury pilgrims.

“The Man of Law’s Tale” Another of The Canterbury Tales which clearly seeks to compliment Queen Anne is “The Man of Law’s Tale.” The direct source for this tale was a section of a prose chronicle by the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Nicholas Trevet, whose Croniques was composed for Edward I’s daughter Mary of Woodstock, who was a nun at Amesbury abbey and who may have been inspired by the story of the devout heroine Constance, daughter of a powerful ruler.69 If Trevet intended to flatter Princess Mary, Chaucer went one better by comparing Constance (the daughter of the emperor of Rome) with Anne, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor. The praise of the Syrian merchants when they see Constance at the beginning of the tale ventriloquizes Chaucer’s own compliment to the queen of England: 69 For information on the source, see Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Mann, p. 864.

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This was the commune voys of every man – “Oure Emperour of Rome, god hym see, A doghter hath that, syn the world bigan, To rekene as wel hir goodnesse as beautee, Nas nevere swich another as is shee; I prey to god in honour hir susteene, And wolde she were of al Europe the queene.” (lines 155–61)

If the phrase “of al Europe the quene” (line 161) is meant to flatter Anne, it equally implies a compliment to Richard II, whose ambition to become Holy Roman Emperor was gathering momentum in the 1390s. Just as Anne is Chaucer’s mediating link with the great writers of the classical past (Virgil) and the humanist present (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio), so is she the dynastic nexus between Richard and the fulfillment of his imperial ambitions. Maidstone also compares Richard’s entry into London with a Roman emperor’s triumphus or adventus in line 200 (“Cesar”), a designation that is clearly linked with Anne’s own imperial pedigree. There is an obvious complimentary allusion to Anne in the reference to “Marie, I meene, doghter to Seint Anne” in line 641 of “The Man of Law’s Tale.” In his poem Concordia Maidstone also refers to Anne as the one “who bears the name of Mary’s mother” (“Matris christifere nomen sortita Marie”) (line 433). Anne was devoted to the cult of Christ’s grandmother, which was more popular in Europe than in England. Shortly after her marriage in 1383 she won approval from Pope Urban for the cult to be solemnly observed in England. So strong was the queen’s identification with her holy namesake that she was buried on St Anne’s day in 1394.70 Crucial to these compliments is the conventional alignment of Anne with traditional wifely (and motherly) patience in the case of Griselda, and with Christian humility in the case of Constance. In presenting this unthreatening ideal of womanhood Chaucer was not only highlighting Anne’s well-known uxorial qualities of obedience to her spouse; he was implicitly affirming Richard’s patriarchal status as her all-powerful husband. Indeed, it is difficult not to read the following passage in praise of Constance as a deliberate encomium to the queen of England: In hire is heigh beautee, withoute pride, Yowthe, withoute grenehede or folye; To alle hire werkes vertu is hir gyde; Humblesse hath slayn in hire al tirannye. 70 Saul, Richard II, p. 324.

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She is mirour of alle curteisye; Hir herte is verray chambre of hoolynesse, Hir hand, ministre of fredam for almesse. (lines 162–68)

The conventional sentiments expressed here recall the Latin epitaph titled Femina Famosa engraved on Queen Anne’s tomb at Westminster, with its emphasis on her generosity in giving alms: She gave nourishment to the sick, going to them on foot, however far off; What she concealed from the king, she extended to the poor. She wished to visit the ill, those enduring childbirth, And she did so poorly dressed: often she went about this way.71

The court panegyrist’s qualification “quod regem latuit” (“that she concealed from her husband”) has no apparent relevance to the life of Anne of Bohemia and probably alludes to the hagiography of Anne’s saintly ancestor, St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31). Elizabeth was a Franciscan tertiary who was canonized soon after her death at the age of twenty-four in 1235. A royal princess and the wife of the margrave of Thuringia, Elizabeth dressed as a beggar and fed the poor with victuals cleverly concealed from her husband, as we see in a panel painting by Theodoricus of Prague among other saints venerated by Charles IV in the chapel of the Holy Cross in Karlstein castle (fig. 14). The intertextual allusion to Elizabeth of Hungary is revealing in implying a tension between the compliant uxorial spouse Griselda and the autonomous Elizabeth of Hungary who defies her husband’s commands in order to serve the needs of the poor. Another example of defiant women are the Amazons discussed by Nancy Bradley Warren in her subtle reading of the “Knight’s Tale” and The Legend of Good Women.72 This tension between female humility and female defiance is also a feature of the virgin-martyr narrative, which requires the sponsa Christi to be humble to God’s will and yet to reject her earthly suitors in favor of her celestial bridegroom. This combination of humility and defiance was also characteristic of Anne of Bohemia’s ancestor Agnes of Prague, whose desire to become a Franciscan nun led her to reject the hand in marriage of Emperor Frederick II, as we shall see in chapter 4. 71 “Hec dedit ergotis victum, peditando remotis;/ Quod regem latuit pauperibus patuit./ Visere languentes voluit, partum pacientes,/ Et male vestita: sepe meavit ita.” Van Dussen, From England to Bohemia, p. 131 (Latin) and p. 138 (English translation). 72 Warren, “‘Old Stories’ and Amazons.”

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Fig. 14  St Elizabeth of Hungary. Chapel of the Holy Cross, Karlstein castle, Czech Republic

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However, the multi-narratorial framework of The Canterbury Tales allows Chaucer to overcome this tension by refracting his own conflicted vision of women through the voices of his pilgrims. In “The Man of Law’s Tale” the pilgrim-narrator’s idealization of Constance as the perfect Christian woman is the inevitable corollary of his condemnation of the Sultaness and Hermengyld, the pagan mother of King Alla of Northumbria, as perfidious women. As Howard Bloch famously pointed out, the courtly tendency to idealize women is invariably the flipside of the need to denigrate them.73 The pilgrim-narrator’s apostrophe to the devious Sultaness recalls the Prioress’s invective against the perfidious Jewish murderers of the little clergeon in “The Prioress’s Tale”: O Sowdanesse, roote of iniquitee! Virago, thou Semyrame the secounde! O serpent under femynynytee, Lik to the serpent depe in helle ybounde! O feyned womman, al that may confounde Vertu and innocence, thurgh thy malice, Is bred in thee, as nest of every vice! (lines 358–64)

These are, of course, conventional anti-feminist tropes, just as the Prioress articulates standard Christian anti-Judaic vitriol in her tale. The point is that Chaucer can include these vicious apostrophes without incriminating himself in the charge of misogyny – precisely the sin of which he was deemed guilty in presenting Criseyde in a negative light. In short, Chaucer can safely hide behind the voices of his pilgrim narrators while assuming the persona of the amused and disinterested observer of human prejudices.

73 See R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, 1991).

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3 Scandals at Court: Pride and Penitence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthur Since the 1980s the critical understanding of the Middle English alliterative courtly romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has undergone a remarkable reassessment: previously seen as the work of a provincial author writing in the obscurity of the north-west Midlands of England, it is now generally regarded as the sophisticated creation of a cosmopolitan courtier-poet working for a London-based audience of Cheshire retainers attached to the glamorous court of Richard II. In a ground-breaking study (1983), the historian Michael J. Bennett argued that the localized milieu of the poet’s native region could not have provided him with a suitable audience for cosmopolitan texts such as Sir Gawain and Pearl, which survive in the same small manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x.1 Following Gervase Mathew’s claim in his book, The Court of Richard II (1968), Bennett suggests that this modest codex (which includes crudely drawn illustrations) was probably a copy of a de luxe manuscript that originated at the royal court. There are, however, important dissenters to Bennett’s hypothesis. Thorlac Turville-Petre finds no evidence to suggest that the works of the Gawain poet might have been known or appreciated in London.2 But Turville-Petre’s argument depends on an anachronistic binary that implicitly equates a London-based author like Chaucer with “nation” and a provincial poet like the Gawain poet with “region.” It is perhaps more accurate to characterize Chaucer as a London poet who happened 1 Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983). 2 See Thorlac Turville-Petre, “The Pearl-Poet in his ‘Fayre Regioun,’” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. A.J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford, 1997), pp. 276–94.

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to have cosmopolitan aspirations. The same may be said for the Gawain poet: regional by origin (and dialect), he was far from regional in his tastes, reading, and temperament. The nation/region binary fails to take into account the mobile and itinerant nature of the international court that provides the context for the poem’s composition and performance. Emperor Charles IV’s court traveled regularly between his principal residence at the Hradčany in Prague, his country seat at Karlstein castle (located 35 kilometers from Prague), and his third palace, at Tangermünde in Brandenburg.3 These examples of the domicilium principale all combined the function of palace and place of worship, revealing the extent to which the pious emperor needed to worship wherever he was residing. The palace at Tangermünde on the Elbe included a chapel dedicated to St John the Evangelist, consecrated in the spring of 1377 by the archbishop of Magdeburg, while Karlstein castle contained as many as three different chapels.4 Richard II emulated the imperial court’s itinerant practices with the intention of establishing his own credentials as an emperor of Great Britain. These “gyrations” through the wider realm required the court to be temporarily based in cities like Chester, York, Lichfield, and Dublin, usually with an impressive entourage of nobles and bishops.5 The mobile nature of the Ricardian court is exemplified by the castle of Hautdesert, where Gawain finds refuge on Christmas Eve from the bitter winter weather. As Petre-Turville himself points out: [Hautdesert] is provincial only in its geographical location. In other respects, it is a second Camelot, built to the most fashionable design and inhabited by the most elegant knights and ladies. Remote from the center of culture though these courtiers may be, there is nothing rude or unpolished about their manners, the description of which as “Frenkysch fare” (1116) locates them within an international code of courtly behavior.6

Given the peripatetic nature of the international court, there was no simple distinction to be drawn in the later Middle Ages between national and regional cultures. That the Ricardian court traveled as far afield as Ireland reflected Richard’s desire to be emperor of the British Isles. It is intriguing to recall that Sir John Stanley, to whose entourage the Gawain 3 See Jiří Fajt, Dlouhý Stín Císaře Karla IV. (Prague, 2015), pp. 46–47. 4 See Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1440 (New Haven, 1995). 5 Saul, Richard II, p. 334. 6 Turville-Petre, “The Pearl-Poet,”, p. 288.

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poet probably belonged, was the king’s lieutenant in Ireland in the 1380s. After being dismissed from the position by the Appellants, Stanley returned to England in 1388; but in July 1389 he was reappointed for a term of three years.7 It is interesting to speculate whether the author of Sir Gawain went to Ireland in Stanley’s entourage, where he may have heard some oral version of the Irish tale. Perhaps his Arthurian romance may even have received a viva voce performance in Dublin or in some other Irish setting where Stanley and his men were based. The earliest known version of the beheading game that features so prominently in fit 1 of the poem finds an intriguing analogue in the Irish tale Bricriu’s Feast (ca. 1100).8 It is possible that this motif would have been especially acknowledged and appreciated if the romance was performed in Ireland. Of course, this can only remain speculation, but the more important point is that the setting and themes of the poem correlate closely with the peripatetic nature of the court (and audience) for which it was probably composed. Just as the court moved between the capital (the seat of government) and the regions, so did literature for which it was intended oscillate between the imagined, fanciful world of courtly romance and the precise topography of geographical space. It is striking that the journey undertaken by Sir Gawain after he departs the international milieu of Camelot and Logres (with its powerful associations with Chrétien’s French romances) crosses through Wales, including Holyhead, where, according to legend, the Welsh virgin martyr Winifred was beheaded. Antiquarian interest in pre-Christian British legend, such as the story of St Winifred, is effortlessly fused into the Arthurian world of French romance: Now rides this renk thurgh the ryalme of Logres – Sir Gawan on Godes halve, thagh him no game thoghte: Oft ledeles alone he lenges on nightes, There he fonde not him before the fare that he liked; Had he no fere bot his fole by frithes and downes, Ne no gome bot God by gate with to carpe, Til that he neghed ful negh into the north Wales. All the iles of Anglesay on lyft half he holdes, And fares over the fordes by the forlondes, 7 Saul, Richard II, p. 275. 8 See Elisabeth Brewer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 2. See also Elisabeth Brewer, “Sources I: The Sources of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 243–55, at p. 245.

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Over at the Holy Hed, til he had eft bonke In the wyldrenesse of Wyrale; woned there bot lyte That other God other gome with good herte loved. (lines 691–702) (Now he rides in his array through the realm of Logres, Sir Gawain, God knows, though it gave him small joy! All alone must he lodge through many a long night Where the food that he fancied was far from his plate; He had no mate but his mount, over mountain and plain, Nor man to say his mind to but almighty God, Till he wandered well-nigh into North Wales. All the islands of Anglesey he holds on his left, And follows, as he fares, the fords by the coast, Comes over at Holy Head, and enters next The Wilderness of Wirral – few were within That had great good will toward man or God.)

There is an analogous oscillation between the imaginary world of romance and topographical realism in Guillaume de Machaut’s La Prise d’Alixandre. In the course of the work, Pierre de Lusignan, king of Cyprus and Jerusalem, undertakes a journey to the Bohemian court of Charles IV to gather support for a crusade to the Holy Land. He meets with Emperor Charles in Prague, where he is lavishly received. The description of the castle (which intriguingly recalls Karlstein rather than the Prague castle) mediates between the factual world of chronicle and the fanciful world of courtly romance: “The emperor led him into his castle,/ Carved into the rocks by the chisel” (“Il le mena en son chastel/ sus roche taillie a sisel”) (lines 1122–23). There follows a highly romanticized encounter with the empress and her ladies, who are likened to goddesses: There they found the empress, Which brightened both their spirits Because among her personal retinue She was accompanied by Many high born and noble women God save their bodies and souls! – Who were so attired And so very richly provided with Great beauty, with precious things They seemed goddesses, everyone.9 9 “La trouverent lempereris/ Quelle avoit en sa compaingnie/ Dont elle estoit acompaingnie/Maintes riches et nobles dames/ Dont dieus gart les les corps et les ames/

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The interior of the castle is compared with an earthly paradise in which multiple musical instruments are playing: There he was joyfully received, Honored, served and looked after By the women, in both word and deed, And so he thought this paradise itself. Nor did he ever wish to be Anywhere but in this earthly heaven. Instruments of all kinds were playing.10

Following their sumptuous reception in Prague, Pierre and his retinue travel to Cracow for a conference of rulers to plan a crusade to the Holy Land. Suddenly the narrative mode switches from the idealized world of romance to the realistic, precise topography of central Europe in which real places are referenced, as in Sir Gawain’s progress from the fanciful setting of Logres through North Wales and the Wirral: This done, they departed from Prague. Now I’ll describe their route. They rode through Bohemia for three days and then proceeded to Breslau, to Liegnitz, To Neustadt, to Schweidnitz, Kosten, Kaliz, Bythorn, Golgau, Baranow they passed through; from there they came to Cracow.11

Machaut had long since left Bohemia by the time he was writing this (his last) work in Rheims. But the mystique of Karlstein as a combination of royal residence and imperial church may have been known to him from the reports of others. It is possible that Richard II had also heard of Karlstein through reports brought to him by diplomats such as Sir Simon Burley who spent time in Prague negotiating the royal marriage, as well Qui estoient si acesmees/ Ei si tres richement parees/ De grans biautes de grans richesses/ Que toutes sambloient deesses” (1123–32). 10 “La fu liement receus/ Honnourez – servis- et veus/ Fu delles en fais et en dis/ Que ce li sambloit paradis/ Nailleurs ne vosist jamais estre/ Fors en ce paradis terrestre/ La avoit de tous instruments” (1133–39). 11 “Ce fait de prague se partirent/ or diray quel chemin il firent/ par mi behaingne chevauchierent/ .iii. journees et puis alerent/ a bresselau a linguenise/a mustat a suedenisse/ cousten. calix. bruton glagouve/ passerent, et par basenouve/ de la en cracoe arriverent” (1267–75).

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as by members of his wife’s Bohemian entourage.12 As we shall see in the next chapter, Karlstein may have provided the model for the refurbishment of Westminster Hall, combining the function of a palace and church.

Pride and Penitence in the Arthurian Romance In this chapter I am interested to explore how the poem navigates between praise and admiration for the Ricardian court culture and moral scruples about its hubristic drawbacks. This was a dilemma for clerks enlisted to celebrate courtly values but also required through their training to teach moral values of humility and charity. Of course, this balance was not always easy to achieve, and the Gawain poet struggles to reconcile what Jill Mann has termed the “esthetic” and “ethical” dimensions of the poem.13 Although courtly works often tried to have it both ways, a close attention to detail suggests that Sir Gawain, like many vernacular romances, reveals the subtle tensions between the celebration and critique of courtly chivalric life. We witness a similar tension in other post-Chrétien courtly European romances such as Hartmann von Aue’s German adaptations of the French originals. Whereas Chrétien’s Eric et Enide tends to excuse, if not justify, Enide’s behavior, Hartmann’s Erek says explicitly that she too is at fault. In the words of one critic, Hartmann “conceives of the hero and his bride as neglecting, in their ardour of their love, their duties toward courtly society, and this leads to their estrangement.”14 An even more moral foundation for events is apparent in Hartmann’s second Arthurian romance, Iwein, based on Chrétien’s Yvain, but more freely adapted than Erek. This tension can be partly explained by the paradoxical nature of the Ricardian court and the international culture to which it belonged. Richard II’s intense personal piety coexisted with an immense love of worldly display and luxury. We see the same combination of piety and luxury in the court art of Richard’s brother-in-law, King Wenceslas IV, as in the German 12 For the plausible theory that Richard might have heard about the Prague court of Charles IV and his son Wenceslas IV from Sir Simon Burley, see Bennett, “Richard II in the Mirror of Christendom,” p. 266. 13 Jill Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009), 231–65. 14 See Hendricus Sparnaay, “Hartmann von Aue and His Successors,” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 430–42, at p. 434.

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Bible he commissioned in the 1390s. In the margins of the Bible Wenceslas is shown naked and attended by scantily clad female bath attendants. Between his legs protrudes a very phallic-looking oak bush with which he is presumably going to be beaten by the ladies. How the artist of the Bible was able to reconcile the sacred content of the Scriptures with the sexually explicit is precisely the challenge facing the Gawain poet as a Ricardian courtier. The desire to make his religious ideals as a cleric dovetail with his desire to entertain as a courtier posed a profound challenge for the Gawain poet. The bedroom scenes in fit 3 are a crucial example of the moral problem for the author precisely because Sir Gawain cannot commit adultery with another man’s wife. At the same time, his intention in these scenes is to amuse the audience with the sexual dalliance on clear display between the beautiful lady and the naked Gawain pinned in his bed. As we shall explore later, Sir Gawain’s entanglement with Bertilak’s wife may allude (in reverse) to Robert de Vere’s scandalous affair with Agnes Lancecrona, Queen Anne’s Bohemian countrywoman. De Vere caused an uproar when he abandoned his royal wife (the king’s cousin) for the low-born foreigner. Although the poet intended the parallel between Richard’s favorite and Arthur’s beloved nephew as a compliment, Gawain’s moral weaknesses inevitably reflected on the real-life situation of de Vere at the court of Richard II. The Bohemian scandal posed a challenge to the Gawain poet in his desire to reconcile a celebration of court life with his own moral training as a clerk. A similar ambivalence toward the mores of the Luxembourg court of Wenceslas IV characterizes the so-called New Council (Nová rada) (ca. 1394) by the Bohemian nobleman Smil Flaška of Pardubice, nephew of Ernest of Pardubice, archbishop of Prague during the reign of Emperor Charles. This allegorical work consists of a series of counsels offered by various animals to the Lion King (usually identified with Wenceslas IV). On the one hand, the New Council appears to be a traditional “mirror for princes” in its encouragement to Wenceslas to rule in a wise fashion. On the other hand, certain counsels are undeniably ambiguous and even satirical in painting a portrait of a court that had lost its moral compass. The vainglorious Peacock, for example, encourages the king to indulge in fashionable clothing and lavish tournaments: You ought to dress, king, bright and bold and deck yourself in purest gold. To make your court a joyous place

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is surely not a king’s disgrace: dancing, jousts, and tournaments, and ladies swathed in ornaments; let all these sights your heart elate.15

The final speech in the poem – that of the Swan – places the emphasis on the need for penance and forgiveness. Symbolic of Christ, the Swan seeks to bring harmony not only to the council of animals gathered to advise the Lion King, but also a discursive closure to the internal ambivalence and tensions within the poem itself. The courtly fashion denigrated by the Czech writer Smil in the speech of the Peacock became part of the Ricardian court after Queen Anne’s arrival in England. There are clear references to gowns in “the Bohemian style” (modo Boem) in the livery rolls of the great wardrobe. Saul opines that “the fact that they were singled out for mention suggests that they were seen as out of the ordinary”;16 but that simply reinforces the point that people noticed the new sartorial trends because they were fashionable. In his Confessio Amantis John Gower also mentions the “new fashion of Bohemia” (“the newe guise of Beawme”) in his description of the court of Richard II: I sih wher lusty Youthe tho, As he which was a Capitein, Tofore alle other upon the plein Stod with his route wel begon, Here hevedes kempt, and therupon Garlandes noght of colour, Some of the of lef, some of the flour, And some of the grete Perles were; The newe guise of Beawme there, With sondri thinges wel devised, I sih, wherof thei ben queintised. (8, 2462–72)

Like the Czech writer Smil, several English writers also expressed moral concern at the excesses of the Ricardian court. The anonymous author of Richard the Redeless, written shortly after the end of Richard II’s rule, personifies pride as a knight (Sir Pride) and reserves particular

15 Quoted from Alfred Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (Minneapolis, 1998), p. 130. 16 Saul, Richard II, p. 348 fn. 76.

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condemnation for the extreme fashions that foreigners brought into the country, such as the slashed sleeves (“dagges”) and German coats (“Duche cotis”): For wolde they blame the burnes that broughte newe gysis, And dryve out the dagges and all the Duche cotis, And sette hem aside and scorne of hem telle, And let hem pleye in the porche and presse non ynnere, Ne no proude peniles with his peynte sleve. (3, 192–96)17

Chaucer’s Parson similarly lists excesses in courtly attire under the rubric of pride and seems to have in mind the foreign fashions imported into England by Anne of Bohemia’s entourage: “As to the first synne, that is in superfluitee of clothynge, which that maketh it so deere, to harm of the peple;/ nat oonly the cost of embrowdynge, the degise endentynge or barynge, ownydnge, palynge, wyndynge or bendynge, and semblable wast of clooth in vanitee” (X, 416–17).18 In stark contrast to such clerical disapproval the Gawain poet celebrates courtly fashion, as can be appreciated by his elaborate and detailed descriptions of the Green Knight’s and Sir Gawain’s clothing. But even he cannot totally escape moral reservations concerning the threat posed by pride to the moral integrity of the Arthurian court. We can ascribe this ambivalence to the poet’s own liminal status within a court where piety and pleasure existed in equal measure. Dazzled by the foreign excesses of Richard’s court, the author cannot free himself entirely from the ethical concerns that preoccupy Chaucer’s Parson. As Nicholas Watson has pointed out with reference to the Pearl poet (probably the same person as the Gawain poet), the writer’s relationship with the audience is both deferential and authoritative, suggesting that he was a courtier and a cleric, eager to please and flatter his courtly audience while pointing out its moral deficiencies.19 It is this moral concern with pride that is clearly apparent in Cleanness, another work by the same author: “As for bobaunce and bolnande pryde/ Throly in the develes throte many

17 Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. James M. Dean (TEAMS, 2000), p. 40. 18 Quoted in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, 1987), p. 300. 19 Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, pp. 293–313 at p. 299.

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thrynges bylive” (“Bragging and boasting and overbearing pride thrust many in throngs down the throat of the Devil”) (179–80).20

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight A key to the Ricardian origins of the poem might be, ironically, the modest regional manuscript in which it has been transmitted. Unusual about the Cotton Nero manuscript in which Sir Gawain has survived is the number of illustrations it contains (more full-page than survive in any other Middle English manuscript) and the way they draw directly on the subject-matter of the poems.21 But equally striking is the full-page dimension of these illustrations. We find similar full-page pictures in the Bohemian de luxe manuscript of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, probably made for the court of Wenceslas IV around 1400, making it roughly contemporary with the far less sophisticated Cotton Nero manuscript (figs. 15 and 16). The British Library Mandeville manuscript has no text and consists of twenty-eight images which were originally unbound. These images were based on the first thirteen chapters of the Czech translation of the German version of The Travels. It is reasonable to assume that these images were originally intended to accompany the Czech translation, on which the artist depended for his knowledge of the story. We can assume that the completed compilation of the Bohemian manuscript would have resembled the layout of the illustrations in the Cotton Nero manuscript. The illustrations in the Cotton Nero manuscript were added somewhat later than the text and were probably commissioned by the original or a later owner. Whoever this person was, he may have been familiar with the de luxe manuscript tradition of using full-page illustrations, as exemplified by the British Library Mandeville. Perhaps he had had exposure to such precious books in his capacity as a courtier and perpetuated the tradition when he returned home to the north-west Midlands after the collapse of the Ricardian regime. The subtle synthesis of insular and cosmopolitan elements is also characteristic of the poem itself. The opening lines of Sir Gawain celebrate the 20 Quotations are from The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London, 2014); modern English translations are from The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, trans. Marie Borroff (New York, 2011). 21 See A.S.G. Edwards, “The Manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, pp. 197–219, at p. 210.

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Fig. 15  The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Bohemian ca. 1400. British Library Add MS 24189, f. 3v

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Fig. 16  The Green Knight beheaded by Sir Gawain. British Library Cotton Nero A.x, f. 94v.

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heroic Trojan origins of Britain along the lines established by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain: Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye, The burgh brittended and brent to brondes and askes, The tulk that the trammes of tresoun there wroghte Was tried for his trecherye, the truest on erthe. (lines 1–4) (Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy, The walls breached and burnt down to brands and ashes, The knight that had knotted the nets of deceit Was impeached for his perfidy, proven most true.)

The double theme of deceit and perfidy, practiced by Antenor of Troy who collaborated with the Greeks, sets the stage for the tension between “blisse” (joy) and “blunder” (trouble) that will characterize both the foundation of Britain and the Arthurian tale itself: On mony bonkes ful brode Bretayn he settes With wynne, Where werre and wrake and wonder By sythes has wont thereinne, And oft both blisse and blunder Ful skete has skyfted synne. (lines 14–19) (On many broad hills and high Britain he sets, Most fair, Where war and wrack and wonder By shifts have sojourned there, And bliss by turns with blunder In that land’s lot had share.)

The poem’s attempt to reconcile the heroic ideals of chivalry with the moral threat to its integrity is already apparent in the tension between the alliterating words “werre” and “wrack” and “blysse” and “blunder.” As D.W. Robertson wrote, England’s Trojan origins “provided inspiration, but also served as a warning for the English.”22 As Sylvia Federico points out, “the Trojans were considered a noble society but, they also were considered lecherous and traitorous; their ultimate defeat was but the natural result of their unnatural desires.”23 As we shall see, anxieties about “unnatural desires” – in particular the accusations of sodomitical relations between Richard II and his favorite, Robert de Vere – haunts the poem even as it 22 D.W. Robertson, Chaucer’s London (New York, 1968), p. 3. 23 Federico, New Troy, p. 2.

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celebrates chivalric and courtly values. Medieval ambivalence toward Troy as the source of heroic origins but also the progenitor of moral destruction is reflected in the poem’s similar ambivalence toward the court of Richard II as a site of courtly splendor and potential moral decline. By the second strophe the topic shifts to King Arthur and the glamorous world of the French courtly romance established by Chrétien de Troyes and his continuators: This kyng lay at Camylot upon Cristmasse, With mony luflyche lord, ledes of the beste, Rekenly of the Round Table all tho rich brether, With rich revel aright and rechlesse mirthes. (lines 37–40) (This king lay at Camelot at Christmastide; Many good knights and gay his guests were there, Arrayed of the Round Table rightful brothers, With feasting and fellowship and carefree mirth.)

This fusion of the British-Galfridian and the French-Chrétien modes of Arthurian narrative lends weight to the likelihood that Sir Gawain was written for the Ricardian court or – at the very least – a combination of cosmopolitan merchants and Ricardian knights based in London.24 Richard II was known for his interest in the foundations of British history and even commissioned a history of Britain from Brutus to his own day (Corpus Christi, Cambridge, MS. 251),25 and we can assume that this interest was shared by his Cheshire affinity. At the same time this affinity was Francophile and international in its tastes. The insular and continental dimensions of Arthurian romance were not mutually exclusive but integral to the international court ethos. Jill Mann perceives in the poem an analogous synthesis between the poem’s aesthetic focus on the luxurious lifestyle of the court – including armor, clothing, jewels, and fabrics – and its ethical preoccupation with knightly virtue and chastity, exemplified by the eponymous Gawain. This synthesis was most likely intended to appeal to a group of Cheshire knights attached to the court of Richard II. As Michael Bennett has demonstrated, the Cheshire men recruited to serve at the royal court were not rustics but sophisticates – men like Sir Richard Cradock, who took Froissart’s presentation copy of his book into safe-keeping after King 24 See Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford, 1995), 191–92. 25 Bennett, Richard II, p. 42.

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Richard perused it, and the clerk John Macclesfield, who owned a collection of biblical and historical works.26 These local Cheshire courtiers with international experience and learning were probably the first readers or auditors of Sir Gawain. Like Richard and Anne of Bohemia, these men were at once pious and erudite – hence the poem’s ethical concern with worldly pride as well as its aesthetic investment in courtly splendor. In the first two fits the aesthetic dimension of the international court culture is prominently on display. The green accoutrements of the Green Knight in fit 1 clearly identify him not as an outsider to the sophisticated world of the international court culture but as one of its members. The color green is itself significant in this regard. Often equated with nature and even negatively with the Devil,27 green was also the color of high fashion in the later Middle Ages. The scene of “January” in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry foregrounds a courtier dressed in green, the same color as three elegantly dressed ladies out riding in the scene of “May” from the same manuscript (fig. 17). In the mural paintings in the Chapel of the Virgin Mary in Karlstein castle Charles IV is shown wearing a greenlined robe etched with green parrots and matching green stockings as he receives two thorns of the Crown of Thorns from the French dauphin. In the next panel Charles receives a fragment of the Holy Sponge from Ludovico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, who is dressed in a bright green robe with matching shoes and stockings (fig. 18). Charles and his guests depicted in these murals display the latest fashion of the international court culture. Like Charles, the Green Knight also sports a green outfit embroidered with butterflies and birds: And all his vesture verayly was clene verdure, Both the barres of his belt and other blythe stones, That were richly rayled in his aray clene Aboute himself and his sadel upon silk werkes, – That were to tor for to telle of trifles the halve That were enbrawded above, with bryddes and flyes, With gay gaudi of grene, the gold aye in-myddes (lines 161–67).28 (And all his vesture verily was verdant green; Both the bosses on his belt and other bright gems 26 See Michael J. Bennett, “The Historical Background,” in A Companion to the GawainPoet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, pp. 71–90, at p. 84. 27 See Derek Brewer, “The Colour Green,” in A Companion to the Gawain Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, pp. 181–90. 28 The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Putter and Stokes.

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Fig. 17  May. From Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 65/1284, f. 5v

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Fig. 18  The Passion relic triptych. Chapel of the Virgin Mary, Karlstein castle, Czech Republic That were richly ranged on his raiment noble About himself and his saddle, set upon silk, That to tell half the trifles would tax my wits, The butterflies and birds embroidered thereon In green of the gayest, with many a gold thread.)

Green is also the color of choice of the God of Love and his consort Alceste in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women: Yclothed was this mighty god of Love In silk, enbrouded ful of grene greves, In-with a fret of rede rose-leves, The freshest syn the world was first bygonne … And by the hand he held this noble quene Crowned with whit and clothed al in grene, So womanly, so benigne, and so meke… (F, lines 226–29, 241–43)

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The description of Sir Gawain’s arming in fit 2, as he prepares to leave Camelot for the Green Chapel, also points to the influence of Bohemian high fashion. Like Charles’s robe in the mural paintings at Karlstein castle, Gawain’s surcoat is embroidered with “parrots depicted among periwinkles” (“as papejays paynted perving bitwene”, 611), in addition to turtle-doves and trueloves.29 The periwinkle features in the right-hand panel of the Wilton Diptych among the cut flowers scattered at the feet of the Virgin and Child and was one of the devices associated with Richard’s deceased spouse, Anne. In the Czech prose dispute Tkadleček (The Little Weaver), Misfortune includes the periwinkle (barvínek) among the courtly flowers which cannot escape his vengeful scythe: “The clover, the ivy, the juniper, the periwinkle, which is the leader in all conceived favor, cannot hide from us” (“Tut’ dětelík, ni břečtan, ni chvojka, ni barvínek, jenž jest všie počaté milosti vuodce, nám se neskryje”).30 Love knots were the device of Wenceslas IV and, as such, feature in the margins of the Golden Bull of Charles IV commissioned by his son around 1400.31 They also feature on the chasework on Anne of Bohemia’s tomb effigy at Westminster abbey.32 The combination of armor and high fashion in the description of Gawain’s arming recalls Parler’s exquisite statue of St Wenceslas in the chapel of St Wenceslas in St Vitus cathedral in Prague (fig. 19). Like Gawain’s hourson, the saint’s surcoat is decorated with trueloves. The statue dates from about the same period as Sir Gawain and both reflect the sophisticated fashion of the international court culture. Like his Bohemian father-in-law and the Valois kings, Richard II was also fond of magnificent attire. By the 1390s, “Richard and the French were vying with each other in the splendor of their courts”.33 This rivalry reached its climax at the conference held at Ardres in 1396 to negotiate a marriage between Richard and Isabelle of Valois. As Nigel Saul points out, the purpose of the conference was to ratify the terms of the marriage alliance between France and England negotiated in Paris in March; but 29 Truelove are quadrifoliate flowers now commonly called “herb Paris.” See Putter (ed.), The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Putter and Stokes, p. 296, fn. 612a. 30 Tkadleček: Hádka milence s Neštěstím (Prague, 1974), p. 140. 31 See the illustration (figure 84.2) in Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, ed. Barbara Drake Boehm and Jiří Fajt (New Haven, 2005), p. 221. 32 Duffy, Royal Tombs, p.  171. For an illustration of the chasework on Anne’s robe (including her devise of the chained ostrich and her and Richard’s crowned initials), see p. 167. 33 Saul, Richard II, p. 353.

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Fig. 19  Peter Parler: Statue of St Wenceslas in the chapel of St Wenceslas, St Vitus cathedral, Prague (1370s)

the series of encounters between the two courts quickly turned into “a game of one-upmanship.”34 Not only were lavish gifts exchanged; Richard managed to upstage King Charles by wearing different costumes: while Charles showed up dressed in the same red robe as on the previous day, Richard had changed into a magnificent gown of white velvet and red sleeves.35 The splendor of the New Year celebrations at the Arthurian court in fit 1 of Sir Gawain reflects the extravagant court of Anne and Richard in the 1380s and their continental counterparts in Valois Paris and Luxembourg Prague. In fact, the description of the festivities at Arthur’s court is remarkably similar to the scene of January in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, where we see the duke surrounded by his courtiers and servants. 34 Saul, Richard II, p. 353. 35 Saul, Richard II, p. 354.

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The giving of gifts, as mentioned in the poem (line 66), was a New Year ritual at the French court and the gifts were known as étrennes. A munificent example of such a present is the “Göldenes Rossl” given by Isabel of Bavaria to her husband, Charles VI, at New Year 1404/5. Sumptuous food was also an essential part of the international court. Richard was interested in fine cooking; and his cookery book The Forme of Cury has survived. The prologue of this book states that Richard is considered “the best and ryallest vyander of all Christian Kings”.36 The importance of choice exotic cuisine and ostentatious presentation is reflected in the description of the banquet at which Arthur refuses to be served before he has heard a marvelous tale of adventure: Dayntyes driven therewith of ful dere metes, Foysoun of the fresch, and on so fele disches That pine to fynde the place the peple before For to sette the sylveren that sere sewes holden On clothe. (lines 120–25) (There dainties were dealt out, dishes rare, Choice fare to choose, on chargers so many That scarce was there space to set before the people The service of silver, with sundry meats, On cloth.)

This is the world of the de luxe manuscripts commissioned by European royal patrons. The most famous of these is Les Grandes Chroniques de France, made for King Charles V of France between 1370 and 1379. The banquet scene, including tablecloths and golden dishes, shows the French king lavishly entertaining Emperor Charles IV and his son Wenceslas during the imperial state visit to France in the winter of 1377–78 (fig. 20). In his detailed study of the description of armor in Sir Gawain and the Cotton Nero manuscript, Michael Lacy has discerned close similarities between the armor in the Grandes Chroniques miniatures and the Cotton Nero manuscript, suggesting that the artist had a close knowledge of not only late fourteenth-century armor but perhaps also the illuminated de luxe manuscripts of the international court culture.37 Lavish food and entertainment are also characteristic of Lord Bertilak’s household, where Sir Gawain receives refuge and hospitality on Christmas 36 Mathew, The Court of Richard II, p. 23. 37 See Michael Lacy, “Armour I,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, pp. 165–73.

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Fig. 20  A banquet scene from Les Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (1375–80). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. français 2813, f. 473v

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Eve. This hospitality is described as “frenkysch fare” (“French behavior”) (line 1116), another gesture to the international court culture common to Camelot and Hautdesert. In his gloss on this phrase, Ad Putter highlights its possible ambiguity, since it is used in other texts to denote sarcasm and even hostility.38 As Putter suggests, the term as used in Sir Gawain may not be antagonistic in the same way, but it might at least have resonated in an ambiguous fashion in connoting the kind of arrogance highlighted (however obliquely) elsewhere in the poem. At all events, the opulence and decadence of Richard’s court became a cause for disapproval among some contemporary English observers. The monk of Evesham described the king as a great carouser who stayed up late at night drinking with his companions. At a Christmas feast in 1386 Richard allegedly allowed the earl of Suffolk “to recline at table dressed not in the normal noble attire but in a toga.”39 So effete was the court deemed to be that Walsingham wrote disparagingly of the Ricardian courtiers as “more knights of Venus than of Bellona, worthier n chamber than in field, sharper in tongue than in lance.”40 Richard was also accused of being effeminate. Much of this negative criticism must have been Lancastrian prejudice. Richard’s alleged effeminacy raised prurient suspicions about his sexuality: was the king chaste out of religious zeal or because he was sexually attracted to men? The startling intervention of the mysterious Green Knight during the Christmas celebrations at Camelot and his subsequent upbraiding of Arthur’s court as effete and cowardly highlights the gulf between what the Ricardian court purported to be and how it was perceived by many of its detractors and critics: “‘What, is this Arthures house,’ quoth the hathel thenne,/ That al the rous rennes of thurgh ryalmes so mony?” (“‘What is this Arthur’s house,’ said the horseman then, “Whose fame is so fair in realms far and wide?”) (lines 309–10). Failing to get an immediate reaction from the shocked courtiers, the Green Knight proceeds to dismiss the young knights of the Arthurian court as “berdlesse childer” (“beardless children”) (line 280), a reference perhaps to the youthful court of Richard II in the mid-1380s. Jill Mann argues that the author seeks to close the gap between the unflattering perception of the Ricardian court as effeminate and his own desire to present it as healthily heterosexual. Referring to the curious 38 The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Putter and Stokes,p. 698. 39 Bennett, Richard II, p. 23. 40 Quoted in Bennett, Richard II, p. 23

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emphasis on the pleasures of heterosexual intercourse in Cleanness, which most scholars attribute to the same author as Sir Gawain, Mann opines: “The message that Cleanness speaks on behalf of these elegant courtiers is: ‘We are feminized but not effeminate.’”41 The desire to make the same distinction may be said to undergird Sir Gawain: the kisses exchanged between Sir Gawain and Lord Bertilak are as far removed from the specter of homosexuality as a physical relationship between Gawain and Bertilak’s wife. According to Mann, the romance draws a line under these homosexual prohibitions in its attempt to reconcile a courtly vision of the world with a more conservative clerical perspective. But, as Carolyn Dinshaw suggests in an important essay on the poem, the writer deflects the audience’s attention away from the kisses between two men, only to raise the specter of same-sex intimacy.42 If Gawain had succumbed to the blandishments of Bertilak’s wife, he would logically have been required to have sex with Sir Bertilak in fulfilment of their prior agreement that they share their winnings at the end of each of three days. The humorous subtext of illicit heterosexual relations is thus never far from the deeper anxiety of illicit homosexual acts. As Mann and Dinshaw both point out, what the Gawain poet may be reacting to here – somewhat defensively for sure – is Richard II’s reputation in some critical quarters not only as an effeminate king but also as a possibly homosexual one. Unlike his father, Edward the Black Prince, and his grandfather, Edward III, Richard was uninterested in pursuing military glory in France and actively sought peace in the face of opposition from the Lords Appellant. Moreover, his intimate friendship with his favorite courtier, Robert de Vere, ninth earl of Oxford (1363–93), appears to have aroused scandal even during the king’s lifetime, although some of the gossip may have been a posthumous blackening of his reputation after his usurpation by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. The chronicler Walsingham clearly implies that Richard enjoyed sexual relations with de Vere: “The king was very devoted to him, and greatly respected and loved him, but not without the ignominy of an unpure relationship” (“[rex] tantum afficiebatur eidem, tantum coluit et amauit eundem, non sine nota, prout fertur, familiaritatis obscene”).43 41 Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” p. 239. 42 Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss is just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–26. 43 Quoted by Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” 240 fn. 29.

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Notwithstanding these slurs on his sexuality, de Vere enjoyed the reputation of a womanizer.44 A case in point is his infamous abduction of Queen Anne’s Bohemian lady-in-waiting Agnes Lancecrona, the daughter of a saddler. The affair was especially scandalous, since de Vere had until recently been married to a grand-daughter of Edward III and King Richard’s first cousin, Philippa de Coucy, whom he discarded in favor of Agnes, much to the chagrin of the king’s uncles. The Westminster chronicler makes it clear that de Vere was also acting against the wishes of Queen Anne: When she had eventually been thus repudiated, this Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, to his everlasting disgrace and reproach committed the iniquity of taking to wife a Bohemian chamber-woman of the queen’s, named Lancecron, and this in face of the queen’s unremitting protest.45

Ann Astell has discerned several hidden allusions to de Vere in Sir Gawain, suggesting a flattering parallel between him and Sir Gawain. Following Astell, Mann points out that Gawain’s pentangle resembles de Vere’s heraldic arms of a five-pointed star (“mullet”).46 Astell has also proposed that Sir Gawain contains several encoded references to the affair between de Vere and Agnes Lancecrona, including puns on their names.47 An interesting allusion to de Vere is the unusual use of the word “duke” in the comment that it would have been better to make Gawain a duke rather than send him off to the Green Chapel (“Warloker to have wroght had more wyt bene/ and have dight yonder a duk to have worthed,” lines 674–75). In December 1385 Richard created de Vere marquess of Dublin, and in October of the following year duke of Ireland, with the lordship of Ireland attached to him for life.48 Richard’s lavish use of ducal titles was probably influenced by his vision of himself as an emperor rather than a mere king. This would help to explain his fascination with Ireland; Nigel Saul points out, “it is possible that Richard saw his dominions much as the Angevins had seen theirs, as a loose ‘empire’ of principalities, duchies and 44 Saul, Richard II, p. 121. 45 “Qua tandem sic repudiat dictus Robertus de Veer dux Hybernie quandam mulierem Boemicam de camera domine regine, Lancecronam vocatam, regina semper reclamante sibi in conjugem nepharie copulavit in sui ipsius scandalum et opprobrium sempiternum.” The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. Hector and Harvey, pp. 188–91. 46 Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” pp. 240–41; Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, 1999), p. 125. 47 Astell, Political Allegory, pp. 126 and 129. 48 Saul, Richard II, p. 182.

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lordships.”49 When Philippe de Mézières addressed Richard in his Epistre of 1395 as “King of Great Britain,” he was acknowledging Richard’s vision of himself as ruler of all the British Isles.50 Such encoded allusions were intended to flatter the Ricardian court by drawing a parallel between Gawain and de Vere, but at the same time they strike a subtle note of warning against chivalric pride. As Ad Putter points out, the passage echoes the anti-war spirit of the alliterative The Destruction of Troy where Achilles condemns war as a waste of life in a foolish cause.51 As Bennett suggests, the patron of The Destruction of Troy may well have been a Cheshire man in royal service.52 The author of the work was also a northerner – Master John Clerk of Whalley. As James Simpson has shown, the alliterative Destruction of Troy represented an anti-imperial and anti-war alternative tradition to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s militaristic and pro-imperial Historia regum Britanniae.53 The dovetailing of an antiwar sentiment and a courtly compliment to de Vere in Sir Gawain may seem odd, but it is entirely consistent with a cleric writing for a court that advocated peace rather than war. During de Vere’s ascendancy at the Ricardian court peace with France was the official policy of the government, if not that of the Appellant opposition. The rising tensions between the king’s pro-French affinity and the prowar sentiments of the Appellants motivated de Vere to recruit Cheshire men into the king’s service. In so doing he forged links with local soldiers such as Sir John Stanley, the probable patron of the Gawain poet.54 Stanley served as de Vere’s lieutenant in Ireland.55 It was Sir John’s brother William Stanley of Wirral who abducted Agnes Lancecrona from Berkhamstead on de Vere’s orders and delivered her to Chester castle, where the earl had set up his household in 1387.56 William Stanley was probably known to

49 Saul Richard II, 292. 50 See Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II: A Plea Made in 1395 for Peace between England and France, intro. and trans. G.W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1976). 51 See footnote in The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Putter and Stokes pp. 655–56. 52 Bennett, “The Historical Background,” p. 79. 53 See James Simpson, “The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Speculum 73 (1998), 397–423. 54 John M. Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (Gainesville, 2012), p. 4. 55 After de Vere’s fall, Stanley returned to England in 1388 but the Appellants reappointed him the king’s lieutenant in Ireland for three years in 1389. See Saul, Richard II, p. 275. 56 Bennett, “The Historical Background,” p. 83.

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the author of Sir Gawain, who, according to some scholars, may have been attached to the Stanley household as a clerk or confessor.57 The fact that it was William Stanley who abducted Agnes to Chester castle provides a suggestive real-life subtext to Sir Gawain in which a scene of seduction takes place in a remote but sophisticated castle. William’s home, the Wirral, significantly looms large in the poem as the setting for Gawain’s winter wanderings before he comes upon Bertilak’s fairy-tale castle of Hautdesert. John Bowers has proposed that Chester castle may have served as the model for the luxurious Hautdesert, since de Vere filled his citadel with “furniture, tapestries, and other finery.”58 According to Gervase Mathew, de Vere also owned a splendid bed with blue hangings embroidered in gold fleur-de-lys and with owls that was valued at ₤68.59 No doubt, it was this very bed in which de Vere welcomed Agnes upon her arrival in Chester. And perhaps it also served as the model for the luxurious bed in which Sir Gawain encounters the lovely wife of Lord Bertilak. Michael Thompson has proposed Beeston castle in Cheshire as the most likely inspiration for Hautdesert: “From the top of its rock Beeston castle dominates the Cheshire plain and was no doubt familiar to the poet and his readers.”60 But we must be careful not to take real-life locations like Beeston and Chester castles as exclusive inspirations for Hautdesert. It is typical of the poet’s descriptive technique to blur the distinction between the real and the ideal, the provincial and the international. The literary landscape of French Arthurian romance (Logres) coexists with a local, recognizably English topography. The same is true of the description of Hautdesert. The realistic attention to architectural detail and the surrounding deer park is fused with the ethereal structures glimpsed in de luxe French manuscripts such as the castle in “October” from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (fig. 21): Chalk-white chymnees there chese he inoghe Upon bastel-roves that blenked ful white: So mony pinacle paynted was powdered aywhere, Among the castel carneles clambred so thikke, That pared out of paper purely hit semed. (lines 798–802) (Chalk-white chimneys over chambers high

57 Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, p. 234. 58 Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet, p. 4. 59 Mathew, The Court of Richard II, p. 19. 60 Michael Thompson, “Castles.” In a Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, pp. 119–30, at p. 122.

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Fig. 21  October. From Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1410–16). Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 65/1284, f. 10v.

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Gleamed in gay array upon gables and roofs; The pinnacles in panoply, pointing in air, So vied there for his view that verily it seemed A castle cut of paper for a king’s feast.)

As Ad Putter points out, the comparison of Hautdesert’s delicate and elongated architecture with paper cut-outs suggests the author’s familiarity with paper model castles as decorative coverings for dishes at court banquets.61 It is intriguing that this example of courtly decoration also crops up in Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale” where “bake-metes and dish-metes ... peynted and castelled with papir” (X.445) are condemned as wasteful displays.62 The description of Balthasar’s banquet in Cleanness also includes paper coverings. Here such details also seem to connote courtly excess and pride: Burnes berande the bredes upon brode skeles, That were of sylveren sight, and sewes therewith (Lyfte logges thereover, and on loft corven, Pared out of paper, and poynted of golde). (lines 1405–8) (Men bore in the meats on immense platters That were of solid silver, with sauces to sup; Palaces with pinnacles, of paper cut fine, Were contrived to grace the table – the tips were of gold.)

Characteristic of the international court culture is the author’s lack of interest in depicting scenes of war and conflict. We are told that Sir Gawain undergoes many chivalrous adventures in the course of his winter journey to the Green Chapel – battles against serpents, wolves, wild men, boars, and giants (lines 720–23), but these are presented as a mere conventional romance backdrop to the real drama, which is Gawain’s all-too-human struggle with the severe winter of northern England: For werre wrathed him not so much that wynter was worse, When the colde cler water for the cloudes schadden And fres ere hit falle myght to the fale erthe. (lines 726–28) (And if the wars were unwelcome, the winter was worse, When the cold clear rains rushed from the clouds And froze before they could fall to the frosty earth.)

61 See The Works of the Gawain Poet, p. 669. 62 The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Putter and Stokes, p. 669.

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Even after Gawain has left the comfortable world of Camelot, he retains the refined sensibility that characterized the Ricardian court and Ricardian courtiers like Robert de Vere. This is not a world of cowardice but of privilege that makes the winter far worse than the threats posed by the wild terrain. Jill Mann has argued that Sir Gawain should not be read as a roman à clef, with Gawain himself as a covert stand-in for de Vere, and that simply “assigning him the pentangle as his heraldic blazon might have been a graceful way of associating Richard’s beloved friend (or perhaps his memory) with the romance’s virtues.”63 But there may be more to Mann’s insight than a passing heraldic allusion. In medieval literature historical figures like Richard II and de Vere are frequently disguised as fictional characters – whether with the intention of flattering them as chivalric heroes (like Alexander the Great and King Arthur) or criticizing them for their pride and hubris (we shall see an example of this in the Alliterative Morte in the second half of this chapter). The use of historical figures to flatter real-life patrons is typical of the international court culture in particular. As we saw in the previous chapter, Machaut compliments Bonne of Luxembourg in the allegorical guise of Bonneurté (a pun on Bonne’s name) in Le jugement dou roy de Navarre. Writing at the royal court of Prague in the thirteenth century, the German romancer Ulrich von Etzenbach flatters the warrior King Přemysl Ottokar II by tacitly comparing him with Alexander the Great. If the audience of Sir Gawain saw in King Arthur and his nephew Sir Gawain a chivalric prototype for Richard II and his favorite, de Vere, this would, of course, have been intended primarily as a compliment. But Gawain’s susceptibility to worldly pleasures and the blandishments of Bertilak’s wife also underscore the threat posed by pride in chivalric society. For many observers, de Vere was guilty of pride when it came to his extra-marital affair with Agnes Lancecrona. The poem may well have been written as a backward glance at de Vere’s glamorous but short-lived ascendancy at the court of Richard II, intended both to compliment the king and his favorite by equating them with the heroes of the Round Table while also serving as a morality tale on the dangers inherent in courtly chivalric pride. According to Walsingham, Richard approved the illicit match between de Vere and Agnes because a friar in the former’s household cast a 63 Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” p. 241.

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maleficium (spell) on the king.64 If Bertilak’s mysterious wife was indeed a cipher for Agnes Lancecrona, this would be consistent with Walsingham’s hostile assumption that Agnes used magic to ensnare de Vere (and Richard) into marrying her.65 This association of Agnes with witchcraft would also help to explain the role of the sorceress Morgan le Fay – the aged companion of Bertilak’s wife – in Sir Gawain. At the end of the poem the reader is informed that Arthur’s half-sister (and thus Gawain’s own aunt) was the instigator of the entire plot and that she used magical arts to transform Bertilak into the Green Knight: “Thurgh myght of Morgue la Faye that in my house lenges / And quoyntyse of clergye, by craftes wel lerned, / The maystres of Merlin, mony has taken” (“Through the might of Morgan le Fay, that lodges at my house,/ By subtleties of science and sorcerers’ arts,/ the mistress of Merlin, she has caught many a man”) (lines 2446–48). Sir Bertilak then goes on to explain that Morgan’s motivation was to punish the pride and arrogance (“sorquydrye”, line 2457) of the Arthurian court. We shall return to this enigmatic ending later. It was on de Vere’s orders that Agnes was abducted to Chester castle by two of the duke’s retainers. But in Sir Gawain this scenario is inverted to make Bertilak’s wife the seductress and the personification of luxuria. This vice was the focus of a great deal of social commentary and criticism of court life in England and France in the later Middle Ages, which usually singled out women as the perpetrators. Some scholars have even suggested that the figure of Lady Meed in Piers Plowman reflects Edward III’s ambitious mistress, Alice Perrers.66 In his Prophecies of John Bridlington the friar John Erghome disapprovingly alludes to the king’s affair with Alice by referring to the biblical stories of Samson and Delilah and David and Bathsheba.67 The same biblical anti-feminism animates Gawain’s bitter outburst against women at the end of the poem: Bot hit is no ferly thagh a fol madde, And thurgh wyles of wymmen be wonnen to sorwe. For so was Adam in erde with one bigyled, And Salomon with fele sere; and Samson eftsones – 64 Astell, Political Allegory, p. 191 fn. 86. 65 Astell, Political Allegory, p. 129. 66 See M. Giancarlo, “Piers Plowman, Parliament and the Public Voice,” Yearbook of Langland Studies xvii (2003), 135–74. 67 See C.D. Fletcher, “Corruption at Court: Crisis and the Theme of Luxuria in England and France, c. 1340–1422,” in The Court as Stage: England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed. S. Gunn and A. Janse (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 28–38.

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Dalyda dalt him his wyrde – and David thereafter Was blended with Barsabe, that much bale tholed. (lines 2414–19) (But if a dullard should dote, deem it no wonder, And through the wiles of a woman be wooed into sorrow, For so was Adam by one, when the world began, And Solomon by many more, and Samson the mighty – Delilah was his doom, and David thereafter Was beguiled by Bathsheba and bore much distress.)

In the Hebrew Bible (2 Samuel 11), David espies Bathsheba bathing and orders her to be brought to him for his sexual gratification. He then arranges for her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to be sent into the thick of battle and killed. Gawain’s rant is typical of medieval misogyny in inverting the story to make Bathsheba the guilty party and King David her victim.68 Writing in 1371–72, Geoffrey de la Tour Landry similarly portrays Bathsheba as a seductress and implies that she staged the encounter with David. If Sir Gawain was indeed written with Richard’s court in mind, the flattering parallel between the king’s favorite, de Vere, and Gawain of Arthurian legend would have been perfectly appropriate. However, this was all the more reason to highlight the moral dangers inherent in the Lancecrona affair. This might explain the fact that the real-life scenario of de Vere abducting Agnes to his castle at Chester is inverted in the bedroom scene in Sir Gawain when Bertilak’s wife threatens to take Gawain a prisoner in her castle by tying him to his bed: “Good moroun, Sir Gawan,” sayd that gay lady; “Ye are a sleper unslye, that man may slyde hider. Now are ye tan as tite! Bot true us may schape, I schal bynde yow in your bed, that be ye ful trayste.” (lines 1208–11) (“Good morning, Sir Gawain,” said that gay lady, “A slack sleeper you are, to let one slip in! Now you are taken in a trice – a truce we must make, Or I shall bind you in your bed, of that be assured.”)

The motif of the knight as the lady’s prisoner is part of the stock-intrade of courtly love dating back to the troubadours and trouvères of the twelfth century. In his love lyric “Ausi conme unicorne sui” (“I am like the unicorn”) the trouvère Thibaut IV, count of Champagne and king of 68 See Deirdre Jackson, Medieval Woman (London, 2015), p. 22.

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Navarre (1201–53), a grandson of Marie de Champagne, compares the male lover to a prisoner held captive by Love (Amors): My lady, when I stood before you And saw you for the first time, My heart went leaping so That it stayed with you when I took my leave. Then it was led, an unransomed captive, into the precious prison whose columns are made of desire, whose gates are of beautiful sight, and whose chains, of good hope.69

The Troubadour conceit of love as a prison became a commonplace of late medieval courtly literature as exemplified by the influential dream allegory the Roman de la Rose. No doubt it was this later iteration of the motif that influenced Chaucer’s treatment of the conjoined themes of incarceration and love in “The Knight’s Tale,” where the protagonists Palamon and Arcite not only are imprisoned by the tyrant Theseus but are also held in amorous thrall to the beautiful Emily, sister of the Amazonian Queen Hippolyta. Froissart also wrote the Prison amoureuse for a real-life prisoner, his patron Wenceslas of Brabant.70 The poem concerns a prince who is captured and imprisoned by Pride, another courtly instance of the threat posed by superbia to the chivalric ideal. We find a late medieval visual treatment of the knight as the lady’s prisoner in the margins of the Golden Bull of Charles IV where the king is trapped in his own monogram “W” like a captive lover (fig. 22). On the second morning of Lady Bertilak’s attempt to seduce Sir Gawain the metaphor shifts from the woman as captor to the woman as teacher: “Yet I kende yow of kyssyng” (“I taught you how to kiss”) (line 1489). Notwithstanding the light-hearted tone, there is a dangerous hint of religious transgression in this metaphor. In 1 Corinthians 11 St Paul explicitly states that women should not be allowed to teach or preach; and 69 “Dame, quant je devant vos fui/ Et je vos vi premierement,/Mes cuers aloit si tresaillant/ Qu’il vos remest quant je m’en mui./ Lors fu menés sanz raençon/ En la douce chartre en prison,/ Dont li piler sont de talent/Et li huis sont de biau veoir/ Et li anel de bon espoir.” Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology of Poems and Melodies, ed. Samuel N. Rosenberg, Margaret Switten, and Gérard Le Vot (New York, 1998), p. 308. 70 For the literary motif of love as a prison in “The Knight’s Tale” and in French literature of Chaucer’s time, see Turner, Chaucer, pp. 85–88.

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Fig. 22  The Golden Bull of Charles IV, State Library, Vienna, Cod. Vind. 338 title-page

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the medieval Church took the prohibition very seriously. At the time that Sir Gawain was being written the controversial question of women’s right to preach had flared up in connection with the Lollard followers of Wyclif. Some of Richard’s chamber knights, like Sir John Clanvowe, Sir Richard Stury, and Sir Lewis Clifford were known to have Wycliffite sympathies.71 To what extent the religious beliefs of the chamber knights, whom Richard inherited from his father the Black Prince’s household, were shared by the king himself is difficult to say. As Nigel Saul states, “Richard’s relative indifference to matters of religious conformity appears to have been overcome in the course of the mid- to late 1380s.”72 If Sir Gawain was written during the period of Richard’s laxity toward heresy, it would help to explain the poem’s anxiety about the pride inherent in heretical beliefs at the Ricardian court. It is possible that in some circles at least the orthodox Queen Anne was herself tainted with a Lollard brush, since Wyclif himself had used the example of her trilingual Gospels to affirm the justification for translating the Vulgate into English. Wyclif states that to call the queen a heretic for possessing a vernacular Bible would be indeed “diabolical pride” (luciferina superbia).73 But this did not prevent monastic and clerical critics of the court from drawing that very conclusion, and Wyclif ’s remark perhaps implies that the equation of Anne with heresy had been made by some observers. Following the mock-beheading scene, Bertilak grants Sir Gawain absolution for his sins in a manner that may also have been seen to replicate the pride of the Lollard knights in appropriating the rights of the clergy to dispense absolution: “Thou art confessed so clene, beknowen of thy mysses, And has the penaunce apert of point of myn egge, I holde thee polysed of that plight and pured as clene As thou hades never forfeted, syn thou was first borne.” (lines 2391–94) (“You are so fully confessed, your failings made known, And bear the plain penance of the point of my blade, I hold you polished as a pearl, as pure and as bright As you had lived free of fault since first you were born.”)

71 Saul, Richard II, pp. 297–98. 72 Saul, Richard II, p. 300. 73 John Wyclif’s Polemical Works in Latin, ed. R. Buddensieg, 2 vols. (London, 1883), vol. 1, p. 168. See also Anne Hudson, The Premature Revolution: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1985), p. 30.

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According to Richard Rex, Wyclif believed that “even when it is useful, confession can be made just as well to a lay person or to God.”74 Wyclif maintained that there was no need to confess to a priest, since “priests nor anyone else can tell who is predestined, and thus who is truly contrite.”75 In the eyes of the Church the denial of the priest’s authority was nothing less than diabolical pride. In granting absolution to Sir Gawain, Lord Bertilak is not only usurping the power and authority of the priest to hear confession and grant absolution; as a layman he seems to be mimicking Lollard belief that the laity was as equally qualified as the priest to hear confession and grant absolution. The suspicion of heretical pride might also be suggested by Bertilak’s odd name (“Bertelak de Hautdesert,” line 2445). Ad Putter opines that the name likely derives from Old French Bertolais/Bertelak, who appears in the Lancelot as Arthur’s adversary and who figures as Bertelak in the Middle English Merlin.76 At the same time the unusual nature of the name might also have conjured up to its initial live audience the alien sound of the Bohemian names of some of Queen Anne’s compatriots.77 Furthermore, it is worth noting the demonic connotations of the Green Chapel. When Sir Gawain first sees it, he imagines the Devil saying matins at midnight (lines 2186–88); he then goes on to state that it is the Devil (“the Fend”) that has lured him to the site (lines 2193–94). The Chapel’s connotations of evil recall the demonization of the Lollard heresy by the Catholic Church. At the Council of Constance in 1415 Wyclif was condemned as a heresiarch, the founder of a new and dangerous heresy, and Jan Hus, his Bohemian follower, was burned at the stake. The alleged real-life setting for the Green Chapel, a rock crevice known locally in Staffordshire as “Lud’s Church,” was an illicit meeting place for Lollards in the fifteenth century.78 If this association of the site with Wycliffite heresy was already known to the Gawain poet and his audience in the late fourteenth century, it reinforces the theory that the Green Chapel had sinister and heretical connotations for the original audience. 74 Richard Rex, The Lollards (London, 2002), p. 47. 75 Rex, The Lollards, p. 47. 76 See The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Putter and Stokes, p. 759. 77 The ending of Bertilak’s name is a common suffix of Czech names such as the nineteenth-century composer Dvořák (“courtier”). 78 The original name was probably “Lollards’ Church.” See Ralph Elliott, “Landscape and Geography,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 105–17, at pp. 116–17.

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The threat of heresy even casts a shadow over Sir Gawain, who briefly betrays the Virgin Mary by trusting more in the talisman of the green girdle than in his own shield emblazoned with her protective image. The Wycliffites were well known for their opposition to the veneration of the saints, including the Blessed Virgin Mary. Gawain’s punishment for overlooking his heavenly patroness is to undergo an ordeal which exposes his all-too-human frailty. On one level, the poet seems to suggest that Gawain’s crime is not as serious as it seems, and Sir Bertilak bears out that impression by laughing off the whole incident and inviting Gawain back to Hautdesert. But Sir Bertilak is not the poet. Gawain’s humiliation cannot be assuaged by Sir Bertilak’s avuncular dismissal. Indeed, his levity seems only to make things worse; and Gawain returns to Camelot a chastened, penitential knight. By the end of the poem Sir Gawain must pay the price for succumbing to the Lady’s blandishments and accepting her green girdle. His humiliation in the final scene, when the entire plot is exposed by Sir Bertilak, alias the Green Knight, signals the moral dangers of the female body and extra-marital sex, a warning that members of the poem’s audience – especially if they were looking back at the doomed career of Robert de Vere – could not have totally ignored. The author of Sir Gawain treats the conjoined themes of pride and penitence obliquely in the knowledge that he must exercise due caution in critiquing the values of the Ricardian court. If the flawed Sir Gawain is a cipher for Robert de Vere, it follows that the young King Arthur is a cipher for Richard II. While both characters are presented in a largely positive light, they nevertheless fall short of the moral ideals exemplified by the Round Table. To this extent the court of Richard II is presented in a somewhat ambiguous light, reckless and brave, but also immature and susceptible to pride. In laying the chastisement of the Arthurian court at the door of Morgan le Fay, the poet seems to be presenting us with a red herring. But the denouement in fact recalls Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of the tainted conception of Arthur. Whereas in Geoffrey of Monmouth Merlin enabled Uther Pendragon’s illicit seduction of Igerna by allowing him to shape-shift into Gorlois, in Sir Gawain Arthur’s half-sister Morgan Le Fay does the same thing by turning Lord Bertilak into the Green Knight. In the first scenario Arthur is conceived by magic, and in the second his court is humiliated through magic. Just as King Arthur can be seen as a cipher for Richard II (and Sir Gawain for de Vere), so the vengeful Morgan can be understood as a smoke-screen for the author’s own moral strictures. Just

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as the poet implicitly attributes de Vere’s abduction of Agnes to female cunning by inverting the gender dynamic in his plot, so the denouement of his poem allows the Gawain poet to camouflage his own moral inclination to condemn the pride of the Ricardian court by attributing it to the female character of Morgan le Fay.

The Alliterative Morte Arthur In November 1395 Richard II’s favorite, Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, who had died as a result of a hunting accident near Louvain two years earlier, was brought back to England for a formal burial at Earl’s Colne (the mausoleum of the de Vere family). The distraught Richard ordered the coffin to be opened so that he could gaze one last time on the features of his beloved friend and place precious gold rings on his fingers.79 A possible allusion to this macabre scene is the culminating episode in the Alliterative Morte when King Arthur similarly reacts with uncontrolled grief to the death of his nephew, Sir Gawain. I suggest that the author evokes these feelings in the powerful episode of Arthur opening the dead Gawain’s helmet and kissing him, just as Richard ordered de Vere’s coffin to be unsealed: Then gliftis the gud king and glopyns in herte, Gronys full grisely with gretande teris, Knelis down to the cors and kaught it in armes, Kastys upe his umbrere and kysses hym sone; Lokes on his eye-liddis that lowkkid were faire, His lippis like to the lede and his lire falowede. (lines 3949–54)80 (The Sovereign stared, stricken with horror; He groaned with grief and wept great tears. Then he knelt to the corpse and clasped his comrade, Cast up his visor and quickly kissed him, Looked at his eyelids which were locked shut And at his lead-like lips and lifeless white face.)81

As far as I am aware no one has as yet proposed that King Arthur’s distress at witnessing the sight of his dead nephew Gawain may have reminded the contemporary audience of the Alliterative Morte of the grief 79 Bennett, Richard II, p. 71. 80 Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, ed. Mary Hamel (New York, 1984). 81 The Death of Arthur: A New Verse Translation by Simon Armitage (New York), pp. 269– 71. Subsequent modern citations of the Alliterative Morte refer to this translation.

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displayed by Richard at de Vere’s funeral. The author of Alliterative Morte makes it clear that Arthur is so distraught that he kisses Gawain’s face repeatedly: Then swetes the swete kynge and in swoun fallis, Swafres up swiftly, and swetly hym kysses Till his burliche berde was blowdy berown, Alls he had bestes birtenede and broghte owt of life. (lines 3969–72) (Then the sweet King swayed and fell in a swoon, Then staggered and stood and stooped to kiss him, Till his noble beard was bright with blood, As if he had bent to butcher a beast.)

So intense and unrestrained is Arthur’s grief at witnessing the dead Gawain that he earns the reprimand of his knights for wringing his hands and weeping like a woman (line 3978). This kind of passionate and feminized behavior was precisely what observers like the chronicler Thomas Walsingham found so troubling about Richard’s relationship with de Vere; and one senses a hint of criticism in this passage. Arthur similarly treats Sir Gawain as a martyr, scooping up his blood with his own hands and pouring it into his helmet as if it were a sacred relic (lines 3993–96). Then he orders the body to be embalmed and buried with masses and lights (lines 4006–10), recalling the similar reverence shown by Richard to de Vere’s embalmed corpse at his burial. So, is the tragic fate of Arthur depicted in the Alliterative Morte a reflection of the reign of King Richard II? Before Mary Hamel published her definitive edition of the Alliterative Morte, most scholars assumed that Arthur’s invasion of Europe reflected Edward III’s conquests in France.82 There is no doubt that Arthur and Edward both repudiate a foreign ruler’s demand for tribute as their casus belli; but it has to be remembered that Edward III was victorious in France and retained his English throne, whereas Arthur (like Richard II) loses his. In an important article on the dating of the poem Larry Benson has argued that the Alliterative Morte can be understood as a meditation on the fall of Richard II in 1399 and therefore should be dated no earlier than 1400.83 More recently, scholars 82 See, for example, J.L.N. O’Loughlin, “English Alliterative Romances,” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 520–27, at p. 523. 83 Larry D. Benson, “The Date of the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” in Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein, ed. Jess B. Bessinger Jr. and Robert R. Raymo (New York, 1976), pp. 19–40.

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such as Christine Chrism and Patricia DeMarco have concurred with this later dating and see the tragic figure of Arthur and his Round Table as a reflection of Richard II’s disastrous rule.84 While Chism sees the poem as a reflection of Richard’s ruinous friendships with de Vere and Michael de la Pole, DeMarco sees the rift between King Arthur and his knights as shedding light on Richard’s inability to control the Lords Appellant.85 If the author of the Alliterative Morte had Richard II in mind as the prototype for the self-destructively ambitious Richard II, he was not alone among his contemporaries in painting Richard in a critical light. In the words of Michael Bennett, “in the continuation of his Vox clamantis, John Gower presented the three senior Appellants as political martyrs, and looked to Henry [Bolingbroke] very much for the deliverance of the kingdom.”86 Thomas Walsingham and the anonymous author of Richard the Redeless also presented Henry’s government in terms of deliverance from tyranny, waste, and corruption. At the beginning of Passus I the narrator of Richard the Redeless lists several accusations against Richard: greed and waste (I.3–8); fiscal deceit, treachery, and theft, along with heavy taxation and the extravagance of the court (I.11–18). This is not to argue that the author of the Alliterative Morte sided with Bolingbroke and the cause of the Appellants, as Gower, Walsingham, and the author of Richard the Redeless apparently did. Rather, it is to see the tragic fall of King Arthur in the Alliterative Morte as reflecting the political climate in England in the wake of Richard’s deposition and death. The Alliterative Morte was probably written in the years following Richard’s murder in 1400; and its pessimism seems to mirror the turbulent mood of the country following Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the crown. But, as Lee Patterson has stated in his brilliantly nuanced essay on the poem, there is no simple distinction to be made between the past and the present, history and myth: We inevitably call to mind the futile concluding gestures of other heroes – men such as Bryhtnoth and Beowulf, Siegfried and Njal, Turnus and Achilles. These are men whom history failed, whose time never came, and for whom only a fierce nobility made their situation endurable. The Morte Arthure is a poem that supplicates the past in order to speak to the present, 84 Christine Chism, “Friendly Fire: The Disastrous Politics of Friendship in the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” Arthuriana 20.2 (2010), 66–88. 85 Patricia DeMarco, “An Arthur for the Ricardian Age: Crown, Nobility, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” Speculum 8.2 (2005), 464–93. 86 Bennett, “Henry of Bolingbroke and the Revolution of 1399,” p. 18.

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and in its conclusion it achieves an almost incantatory power by which to measure tragic failure.87

In the Alliterative Morte the fates of King Arthur and Richard II intersect in their lack of legitimate issue; their only claim to fame is the mythic genealogy from which they derive. Like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur, Richard claimed his descent from Brutus of Troy: Thus endes King Arthur, as auctores allege, That was of Ectores kin, the kinge son of Troy And of Sir Priamous, the prince, praised in erthe; Fro thethen brought the Bretons all his bold elders Into Bretayn the brode, as the Brut telles. (lines 4342–46) (And so ended King Arthur, so the annals state, Who was of Hector’s kin, the King of Troy’s son, And of Sir Priam the Prince, praised the world over; From there the Britons brought his bold forebears Into Britain the Greater, as the Book of Brutus tells.)

These elegiac lines link Arthur back to his Trojan ancestry and, in so doing, recall Richard’s ideological identification with Troy as explored in the previous chapter. The claim made for Arthur’s Trojan origins recalls the famous opening section of Sir Gawain in which Arthur’s appearance at Camelot is foreshadowed by the heroic account of Brutus of Troy’s conquest of Britain. Richard, as we have seen, was deeply interested in ancient British history and commissioned a history of Britain from its Trojan foundation until his own reign. In fact, there are several similarities between Richard and Arthur in the poem. For example, Arthur is often described as dressed in fashionable clothing, much as Richard was given to extravagant attire: Then rises the rich king and raght on his weedes, A red acton of rose, the richest of flowres, A pesan and a paunson and a pris girdle; And on he hentes a hood of scarlet full rich, A pavis pillion-hat that pight was full fair With perry of the Orient and precious stones (lines 3456–62) (Then the King arose and reached for his robes, A jacket of red roses, that most royal flower, Then neck armor and body armor and a beautiful belt, 87 Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, 1987), p. 229.

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And he hauled a hood of vivid scarlet on his head And a hat from the Orient of the highest order, Studded with pearls and precious stones.)

Like Richard, one of Arthur’s failings is his readiness to accept at face value the flattery of his close advisers. After he awakens from his first dream (the fight between the Dragon and the Bear), the king’s wise men are eager to assure him that he represents the victorious Dragon, an interpretation which the troubled King accepts, although the dream is ambiguous and can be seen to foreshadow Arthur’s ultimate tragic showdown with the traitor Mordred. Although the wise men identify Arthur with the Dragon (presumably on the grounds that the dragon is the traditional emblem of Wales), it could also be argued that the Bear signifies Arthur, since “bear” in Old Welsh is arto, the folkloric etymology of Arthur being a combination of two Welsh words arto (bear) and wiros (man).88 More importantly, it is clear that the wise men are flattering Arthur. In accepting their interpretation, the king already reveals the sin of pride (superbia) that will doom him in the end. Richard II’s close advisers were frequently criticized on account of excessive influence on the king. Many of these were clerics, including the Dominican friars and royal confessors Alexander Bache and Thomas Rushook, who were even seen to shape foreign policy.89 Interestingly, Arthur’s advisers are described as “the cunningest of clergy under Christ knowen” (line 809), suggesting that the author is alluding to the negative and baneful influence of these clerical advisers. Another of Arthur’s failings is his poor judgment in appointing his nephew Mordred keeper of the kingdom in the king’s absence. Richard also showed poor judgment in appointing his uncle, Edmund duke of York, as keeper of the kingdom during his Irish expedition. York had wavered in his loyalty to Richard and ultimately defected to Henry of Derby.90 It is significant that Mordred begs Arthur not to appoint him as his regent, preferring to accompany him in his wars, but Arthur obstinately refuses. Although I concur with Benson’s later dating of the poem, I differ with his claim that Richard should be equated with Mordred. Rather, I am inclined to agree with Hamel that the tragic figure of Arthur is meant to

88 See the essay on King Arthur in The Anglo-Saxon World, ed. Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan (New Haven, 2015), p. 64. 89 Saul, Richard II, pp. 320–21. 90 Saul, Richard II, pp. 400–1.

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evoke the fate of Richard II.91 Benson also dwells on Arthur’s European conquest, but it is possible to read the conquest of Rome as a veiled reference to Richard’s ill-advised second expedition to Ireland, undertaken in 1399, soon after his seizure of Bolingbroke’s Lancastrian inheritance. The confiscation of the Lancastrian estates and his rapid departure for Ireland left Richard and his kingdom vulnerable to Bolingbroke’s subsequent invasion. Richard drew up his will at Westminster on April 16, 1399, before departing for his Irish campaign. The king bequeathed large amounts of money to his faithful followers: to the duke of Surrey 10,000 marks, the duke of Exeter 3,000 marks, and the duke of Albermarle and the earl of Wiltshire 2,000 marks each.92 Interestingly, the Alliterative Morte makes a great deal of the fortunes amassed by Arthur as mentioned in his will: “Take here my testament of tresoure full huge;/ As I trayste appon thee, betraye thowe me neuer” (lines 668–69). As Bennett has shown, Richard’s will was marked by anxiety and apprehension. Like Richard before he set off for Ireland in 1399, Arthur is full of foreboding even before he hears news of Mordred’s treachery. Typical of medieval narratives, this sense of dread assumes the form of a predictive dream: Thane this comlyche kinge, as cronicles tellys, Bownnys brathely to bede with a blythe herte; Of he slynges with sleghte and slakes his gyrdill, And fore slewthe of slomowre on a slepe fallis. Bot by ane aftyre mydnyghte all his mode changede; He mett in the morne-while full meruaylous dremes. (lines 3218–23) (Then the courteous King, as the chronicles record, Went at once to his bed with a happy heart, And did not dally in undressing and undoing his girdle, And for lack of sleep slipped swiftly into slumber. But in the hour after midnight his mood altered, For as morning drew near he met with a nightmare.)

Just as Arthur is informed of Mordred’s usurpation and rushes back to Britain, so Richard was forced to abandon his campaign in Ireland and return to England to defend his kingdom against Bolingbroke’s invasion. Both Arthur in the Alliterative Morte and Richard are similar in entertaining unrealistic imperial fantasies of European domination, Arthur 91 Hamel, Morte Arthure, p. 58. 92 Bennett, Richard II, p. 147.

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in dreaming of taking Lucius’s Roman crown and Richard in aspiring to become Holy Roman Emperor in respect of his wife, Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and half-sister of the king of the Romans Wenceslas IV. From the very beginning of the Alliterative Morte the hostility between Lucius and Arthur is framed as a rivalry for power, reflecting the real-life rivalry between Richard II and his brother-in-law Wenceslas. Arthur tells Sir Cador that it is not he who owes tribute to the Emperor Lucius but the other way around, citing the fact that his own ancestors were emperors.93 Wenceslas was unpopular among the electors in the empire and was deposed as king of the Romans in 1400. He was also tainted with accusations of heresy on account of his support for the Hussites, the Bohemian followers of John Wyclif. In what may be a topical allusion to Wenceslas’s initial support for the Hussite heresy, the Alliterative Morte refers to Lucius as “the false heretik that Emperour him calles/ That occupies in errour the Empire of Rome” (“And the empty heretic who calls himself Emperor,/ who rules without right the Empire of Rome”) (lines 1307–8). An important part of the rivalry between Richard and Wenceslas was their shared identification with Troy, which was frequently a site of ideological appropriation by medieval rulers. Clearly, dynastic rivalry was a major factor at these courts as kings and emperors sought to outstrip each other in the prestige and power of their palaces, churches, and cities.94 In the last years of his reign this ambition seems to have gone to Richard’s head as he sought to replace his discredited brother-in-law Wenceslas. In 1397 there was a flurry of diplomatic activity between England and the Holy Roman Empire as Richard made concrete moves to replace his Wenceslas. On May 30 the king received a report concerning the ceremony where Rupert of Bavaria, count palatine of the Rhine, had become his vassal at Oppenheim. In late June of the same year Hugh Hervorst, archdeacon of Cologne, arrived in England; and on July 7, in complementary ceremonies at Westminster and Godesburg, Frederick, archbishop of Cologne, performed homage to Richard in return for an annual pension of one thousand pounds.95

93 Hamel, Morte Arthure, pp. 275–85. 94 See David Rollason, The Power of Place: Rulers and their Palaces, Landscapes, Cities, and Holy Places (Princeton, 2016). 95 See Bennett, Richard II, p. .90

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Following these diplomatic successes, Richard moved against the Lords Appellant by inviting Gloucester, Warwick, and Arundel to a feast on July 10. Here he intended to arrest all three men on charges of treason, but the ruse failed, since only one of the men (Gloucester) showed up. Richard was outwardly cordial to his guest, but by the end of the dinner his mood had changed, rather as Fortune’s mood shifted from positive to hostile in Arthur’s second dream in Alliterative Morte. Gloucester was arrested and sent to the Tower of London, while measures were taken to secure Arundel and Warwick. In moving so ruthlessly against his former opponents, Richard was not only taking delayed revenge against the men who had humiliated him at the Merciless Parliament in 1388; he was also reacting to foreign criticism that he was not the master of his own house and therefore unqualified to become Holy Roman Emperor. The coup against the leading Appellants was intended to demonstrate to the imperial electors that Richard was not only in control of his own kingdom but equally capable of proving a strong and decisive emperor in contrast to the inept and indecisive Wenceslas. In a sense, therefore, Richard’s imperial fantasies led him to pursue domestic policies that merely confirmed his reputation for tyranny in the eyes of many of his subjects. Visual evidence of his continental ambitions in the 1390s is provided by the illuminated Liber Regalis, the coronation book commissioned by him around 1382 (shortly after his marriage to Anne). But art historian Paul Binski has suggested a later date for the Liber Regalis – the late 1390s – when Richard began an aggressive campaign to be elected Holy Roman Emperor (see fig. 36). Binski has proposed that the book may have actually been intended to circulate among the electors on the Continent in order to enhance Richard’s claim to the imperial crown.96 Certainly the Bohemian style of the illustrations – in particular the mannerist style of the elongated figures and their curious, claw-like hands which recall contemporary Bohemian manuscript illumination and wall painting such as the magnificent German Bible of Wenceslas IV, the Golden Bull of 1400, and the mulier amicta motif from the Apocalypse cycle at Karlstein castle – suggest that Richard deliberately commissioned Bohemian artists to illustrate the book. If Richard intended the book to circulate on the Continent, as Binksi hypothesizes, it would have made sense to have it illustrated by Bohemian, rather than English, artists. 96 Paul Binski, “The Liber Regalis: Its Date and European Context,” in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 233–46 at p. 246.

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The Alliterative Morte emphasizes the tragic end of Richard’s reign in the guise of the collapse of King Arthur’s Round Table and the king’s betrayal by Mordred. Arthur here serves as a typical example of a king who overreaches himself and falls prey to the vicissitudes of Fortune’s Wheel. But he also falls victim to his own pride and arrogance (surquidrie), as the sage makes clear in his interpretation of Arthur’s second dream: “Freke,” says the philosopher, “thy fortune is passed. For thou shall find her thy fo; fraist when thee likes! Thou art the highest, I hete thee forsooth; Challenge now when thou will, thou cheves no more! Thou has shed much blood and shalkes destroyed, Sakeles, in surquidrie, in sere kings lands; Shrive thee of thy shame and shape for thine end.” (lines 3394–400) (“Sir,” said the sage, “your good fortune has ceased, You shall find her your foe, no matter how you fight. You sway at the summit, I swear it is so, So challenge as you may, you will never achieve more. You have shed much blood, butchered many beings, Killed civilians out of vanity through vast kingdoms. Now shuck off your shame and shape yourself for death.)

The sage then goes on to cite the examples of the heroes of the classical and biblical past who also fell prey to Fortune: Take keep yet of other kings, and cast in thine herte, That were conquerours kidd, and crowned in erthe. The eldest was Alexander that all the world louted, The other Ector of Troy, the chivalrous gome; The third Julius Cesar, that giaunt was holden, In eche journee gentle, ajudged with lordes. (lines 3406–11) (And heed in your heart what happened to those kings Who were called Conquerors and crowned on this earth. The most ancient was Alexander, bowed to by all, Then Hector of Troy, that hero of high honor. The third Julius Caesar, judged a just warrior, In battle the boldest said his brothers in arms.)

The tragic fate of historical figures like Richard II inevitably colored the depiction of romance heroes like Alexander the Great and King Arthur. In the words of Mary Hamel: “No other work of the first decade of the fifteenth century seems to reverberate quite so much with the shock of Richard II’s fall and Henry IV’s usurpation; no other work comments

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so subtly on human pride and self-destructiveness without taking sides or making political statements.”97 Clearly the Alliterative Morte was not a direct product of the Ricardian court like Sir Gawain but, rather, looked back at it from a distance in a somewhat critical light. A curious hybrid of epic and romance, the Alliterative Morte is a work of profound ambivalence in its inability to reconcile its celebration of military heroism with the disastrous consequences of chivalric pride. Probably written a few years earlier for the youthful Ricardian court of the 1380s – and thus long before Richard’s fall from power – Sir Gawain is a very different work. Yet it too, as we have seen, reveals a degree of ambivalence toward courtly chivalric culture. Behind the glamorous façade of the Arthurian (and Ricardian) court depicted in fit 1 lurks the ever-present threat of worldly pride symbolized by Gawain’s susceptibility to the blandishments of Lord Bertilak’s wife and his readiness in moments of danger to overlook his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

97 Hamel, Morte Arthure, p. x.

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4 Pearl in its Setting: Piety and Politics at the Luxembourg and Ricardian Courts Like the Valois kings of France, the late medieval Přemyslid and Luxembourg rulers of Bohemia consciously appropriated sacred language and imagery in order to enhance their prestige as kings and as emperors. This chapter will argue that Richard II cultivated a similar model of sacral kingship that has no immediate precedent in his own (Plantagenet) family and that can be partly attributed to his Bohemian wife’s cultural and political mediation at the English court. An important component of Richard’s sacral model of kingship was his apparent identification with Christ as reflected in the art he commissioned and the court propaganda he sponsored. As we shall see, the famous Westminster full-length portrait displays pronounced Christ-like features as scholars have already noted.1 We shall also find other iconographic evidence of Richard’s self-stylization as alter Christus. In presenting himself as the heavenly bridegroom Richard was not only enhancing the sacral nature of his kingship, he was also identifying politically with the Luxembourg imperial family of Anne of Bohemia. In his desire to succeed her father as Holy Roman Emperor in the 1390s, Richard increasingly used Christological motifs to present himself as Emperor Charles’s true successor. Insofar as Charles IV cultivated his own image as alter Christus, we can plausibly claim that Richard was identifying both with Christ and with Charles. In this way, Richard conflated the religious and political dimensions in his kingship, a strategy that cannot be reduced, as some scholars have claimed, to simple psychological narcissism. As we shall see, piety and politics were deeply interrelated ideological features of kingly power and prestige at both the Luxembourg and Ricardian courts.

1 Saul, Richard II, p. 238.

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Agnes of Prague and Kunigunde, Abbess of the St George Convent in Prague Barbara Newman’s theory of the “crossover” between the secular and the sacred provides a valuable hermeneutical tool for understanding the evolution of these courtly discourses in late medieval European culture.2 According to Newman, premodern readers understood “sacred” and “secular” not as opposing points on a continuum but as what she terms a state of “double judgment” whereby transcendental truths could be understood through paradox or inversion. This process began in the twelfth century and is exemplified by Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romance Lancelot (Le Chevalier de la Charrette) and Clemence of Barking’s Anglo-Norman Life of St Catherine. It reached its most audacious articulation in the two late medieval vernacular works to be considered in this chapter: the Czech verse Legend of St Catherine and Pearl. As we shall see, the merging of secular and sacred motifs was also a feature of the courtly visual arts in England and Bohemia. Crucial to an understanding of the phenomenon of the crossover between the sacred and the secular is the creative role of clerks as writers in the European courts of the high and later Middle Ages. Frequently trained in universities like Oxford, Paris, and Bologna, these clerics inevitably gravitated toward the royal courts of Europe, where they could find gainful employment as writers of romances and devotional works for a lay audience. The Dominican and Franciscan friars played an especially important role in cultivating piety among royal and aristocratic women and frequently became lectors and confessors of European kings and nobles. A famous example of a royal woman inspired by the Franciscan ideal of poverty is St Agnes of Prague (1211–82), daughter of King Přemysl Ottokar I of Bohemia and Queen Constance of Hungary. Agnes gave up her wealth and founded the first Franciscan house north of the Alps in Prague. Nothing exemplifies more powerfully the complex interrelation of piety and politics in the Middle Ages than the life of this saintly princess, who was canonized in 1989. In 1219 the German Emperor Fredrick II approached King Ottokar, hoping to engage his son, Henry, to Agnes, who was only a child of eight. The Bohemian king was delighted at the prospect of marrying his daughter into the imperial family, but the plan went 2 Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame, 2013).

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awry when the duke of Austria, Leopold VI, sought a papal dispensation to nullify the engagement in order to betroth his own daughter, Margaret, to the emperor’s son. When Emperor Frederick agreed and married his son to Leopold’s daughter, King Ottokar was angry enough to wage war against his Austrian rival. When Ottokar died in 1230 Emperor Frederick asked his son and successor, Wenceslas I, for Agnes’s hand for himself. By this time Agnes, no doubt weary of being a pawn in an international marriage game, decided not to marry at all and recruited the support of Pope Gregory IX for her decision to become a religious woman. Keen to thwart his German nemesis, the pope accepted Agnes into the religious life. Surprisingly, perhaps, both Wenceslas and Emperor Frederick bowed to Agnes’s decision not to marry.3 But this was not the end of Agnes’s fight for independence from male control. In her struggle to achieve a Franciscan rule for women in the face of papal opposition, Agnes received the support of Clare of Assisi, who sent her several letters in Latin. Unfortunately, Agnes’s letters to Clare are lost, but four letters from Clare to Agnes survive.4 What has survived of Agnes’s is her richly illuminated book of hours, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (MS 739).5 Probably given to Agnes when she was a child of six by her aunt Kunigunde, margravine of Moravia, the book is written in Latin with Middle High German rubrics (and even a German prayer), suggesting that Agnes, or whoever owned the book, was at least bilingual.6 As we shall see later in this chapter, bilingualism and even trilingualism became the norm among male and female members of the Bohemian royal family, a phenomenon that helps to explain Anne of Bohemia’s extraordinary multilingualism a century after Agnes’s death. The Franciscans and Dominicans were also instrumental in writing vernacular works in response to a growing demand from an increasingly literate laity, and particularly from noble and royal women who lacked a 3 See Joan Mueller, Clare of Assisi, Agnes of Prague, and the Struggle for a Franciscan Rule for Women (University Park, PA, 2006), pp. 53–54. 4 For the four letters sent from Clare to Agnes of Prague, see Francis and Clare of Assisi: Selected Writings, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady (New York, pp. 2006), 80–97. For St Agnes’s life and legend, see Helena Soukupová, Svatá Anežka Česká: Život a Legenda (Prague, 2015). 5 See Meta Harrsen, Cursus Sanctae Marie (New York, 1937). 6 See Alfred Thomas, “Between Court and Cloister: Royal Patronage and Nuns’ Literacy in Medieval East-Central Europe,” in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 207–21, at p. 212.

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knowledge of Latin. A good example of this kind of vernacular writing intended for women is an Anglo-Norman chronicle written around 1334 by the Dominican and Oxford scholar Nicholas Trevet at the request of Mary of Woodstock, daughter of Edward I, who was a nun at Amesbury abbey. The work survives in five manuscripts from the middle of the fourteenth century, including a luxury volume for a rich patron.7 A Dominican friar may also have written Ancrene Wisse (a guide for anchoresses), an English work composed between 1221 and 1250 for three noble ladies who had decided to retreat from the world and lead a life of spiritual seclusion in the west Midlands, near the Welsh border.8 Section seven of the treatise (titled “Love”) assumes the form of an allegory of Christ’s love for the Church/Soul couched in affective language drawn from the Canticum Canticorum. More specifically, the Soul is allegorized as a hard-hearted lady and the incarnate Christ as a knight who seeks to deliver her from her enemies (the Devil). In this way the author uses French romance material to make the religious allegory more appealing and exciting to his female readers. The narrative arc of the Lady’s/Soul’s separation from the knight Christ and their eventual reunification recalls the plot of French chivalric romance that developed in the twelfth century. In Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot or Le chevalier de la charrette, written in the third quarter of the twelfth century, Queen Guinevere is abducted from the court of King Arthur by a villainous knight and is eventually rescued by Sir Lancelot after a series of adventures which include Lancelot having to cross a sword bridge which wounds his hands and feet. Here the religious allegory draws upon romance motifs to make its religious message more appealing to its female reader (Marie de Champagne). Conversely, the imagery of wounding and bleeding associated with Lancelot’s attempt to reach his lady and deliver her from bondage is clearly drawn from the passion narrative in the Gospels. Sometimes the crossover is made quite explicit, as when King Bademagu promises to heal Lancelot’s wounds with the “oil of the Three Marys,” an allusion to the scene of the visitatio sepulchri when the Three Marys visit Christ’s tomb in order to anoint his body with unguents. Indeed, as Newman points out, the entire plot of Lancelot and its cast of 7 Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), p. 72. 8 For the theory of Dominican authorship, see Bella Millett, “Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions,” Medium Aevum 61 (1992), 206–228; also Yoko Wada, “What is Ancrene Wisse?” in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge), pp. 1–28, at p. 23.

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characters can be understood in terms of religious allegory: “Meleagant represents Satan, while the unexpectedly gracious Bademagu is God the Father – opposing yet still loving his rebel son. Lancelot clearly emerges as a Christ figure when he crosses the sword bridge, acquiring the stigmata.”9 A similar depiction of Christ as a knight protective of and devoted to his lady informs the Latin parable De strenuo milite (The Brave Knight), one of several devotional treatises contained in The Passional of Abbess Kunigunde compiled for Princess Kunigunde (Czech: Kunhuta) (1265–1321), the eldest daughter of King Přemysl Ottokar II of Bohemia and abbess of the St George convent in Prague. The author of this miscellany was Kolda of Koldice, lector at the court of Kunigunde’s brother King Wenceslas II, and a Dominican friar. In the frontispiece of the beautifully illuminated manuscript Kolda is depicted kneeling before the abbess and presenting her with the book which she presumably commissioned, alongside the principal scribe of the manuscript, named Beneš. Kunigunde sits surrounded by her sister nuns and enthroned, while angels hold a crown above her head in what was clearly intended to recall the Coronation of the Virgin motif. At least two of the works in the codex were composed by Kolda. In De strenuo milite Christ is allegorized as a brave knight who delivers his Lady (the Soul) from the torments of a low-born thief (latro degener), i.e. the Devil, whom he slays before being reunited with his betrothed: Once a noble man, captivated with the beauty of a maiden, became betrothed to her and gave her a pledge of his devotion. But before he could lead her into the marriage chamber, a low-born thief deceived and dishonored his betrothed; and fettering her with strong ropes, he threw her into a dark prison and cruelly bound her eyes so that she could not see her beloved. Then that noble knight, who came from royal stock, not forgetting his love for his betrothed, set out to a distant land in order to find his lost beloved and to see where he might be able to discover her. And thus he lived for 32 years in exile, seeking his missing beloved through many struggles and battles and through manifold adventures. During these battles and adventures he used many instruments of war in order to liberate her for whose love he had so passionately struggled. And when he had fought many battles, having finally descended into the deepest prison, he discovered his lost betrothed in the darkness; and, releasing her, he

9 Newman, Medieval Crossover, p. 61.

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immediately led her out and restored her to her former glory and made her the sharer of his kingdom.10

The parable was originally intended for a male monastic audience, since it addresses its readers as fratres mei (“my brothers”); but it was probably known to Kunigunde orally as a preaching exemplum before being revised for her devotional use by Kolda.11 The six accompanying illustrations in the codex – which depict the relationship between Christ and the Soul in the affective terms of the courtly wooing of a lady, her abduction and imprisonment by a low-born thief, the knight’s slaying of the traitor, and the eventual reunion of the lovers – were clearly intended for Kunigunde as the patroness of the codex. Before becoming abbess of the St George convent in Prague, Kunigunde had been married to the Polish Duke Boleslaw II of Masovia, but later divorced him and returned to her natal city. It is tempting to see the Lady’s enforced separation from her betrothed at the beginning of the parable as an allegory of the princess’s unhappy experience in an arranged dynastic marriage, and her eventual reunification with the chivalric Christ as an allegory of her happy fate as a nun in the Prague convent. The low-born thief who abducts the Lady and imprisons her in the parable of The Brave Knight is a variant of the vicious interloper (lauzengier) who betrays the ideal love between the knight and his lady in Provençal love poetry. By the time that Kolda wrote his parable secular German love poetry (Minnesang) had long been a feature of the Prague court. Indeed, German poets had been active at the royal court of Prague since the reign of Kunigunde’s father, King Přemysl Ottokar II. These guest poets were recruited not only to entertain their royal patrons but also to legitimate the latter’s power and to celebrate their glorious achievements in peace and war.12 One of these panegyrists was Ulrich von Etzenbach, who composed a lengthy romance of Alexander the Great which flatteringly compared the warrior King Přemysl with the classical hero.

10 Quoted from Thomas, Reading Women, p. 39. 11 See Flora Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Jane H.M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (London and Toronto, 1993), pp. 204–29, at p. 207. 12 See Hans-Joachim Behr, Literatur als Machtlegitimation. Studien zur Funktion der deutschsprachigen Dichtung am böhmischen Königshof im 13. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1989).

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The illuminations in Kunigunde’s Passional attest to the crossover of sacred and secular elements at the court of her brother, King Wenceslas II. In fact, we might even speak of a symbiosis between the convent and the court.13 As Gabor Klaniczay has pointed out, “The royal ladies of the Bohemian court especially were known for ending their lives in a monastery.”14 This is true both of Wenceslas’s sister Kunigunde and of his second wife, Elizabeth Rejčka, who, after the king’s death, retired to a convent in Brno where she became an important patron of devotional manuscripts now housed in the State Library in Vienna. As Klaniczay has claimed, Bohemian royal women were actively encouraged to aspire to holiness; and this aspiration in turn gave considerable political prestige to the royal house, which could claim so many saintly women among its ranks. Holy princesses were thus seen as the mediating nexus between the royal-imperial family on earth and the Holy Family in heaven. Anne of Bohemia would become the apotheosis of this mediating role between the earthly ruler and God and one that would strengthen King’s Richard claim to absolute power. The convent of St George (located within the precincts of the Prague castle) became an important center of devotional writing and manuscript production under Wenceslas’s sister. A major feature of Kunigunde’s piety was the cult of Christ’s Passion. This theme finds powerful expression in the depiction of the Arma Christi (10r) from her Passional, including such motifs of the Veronica and the vaginal-like wound at the center. The wound in Christ’s side later reoccurs in a full-page illumination in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg (f. 331), the earliest example of such a motif in French devotional art. It seems likely that Bonne’s own devotion to the cult of Christ’s Passion was influenced by her Slavic ancestors, including her brother Charles and her great aunt Kunigunde, who was still alive when Bonne was living in Prague before leaving for the French court to marry the heir to the French throne at the age of six. Bonne’s Bohemian origins, and in particular the religious influence of the Prague court, has been generally overlooked in attempts to understand her devotional practice.15 13 See Thomas, “Between Court and Cloister.” 14 Gabor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, trans. Eva Palmai (Cambridge, 2000), p. 208. 15 See Margaret M. Manion, “Women, Art and Devotion: Three French Fourteenth-Century Royal Prayer Books,” in The Art of the Book: Its Place in Medieval Worship, ed. Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir (Exeter, 1998), pp. 21–66, at p. 38.

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Fig. 23  The Mystical Embrace from the Passional of Abbess Kunigunde. Prague, National Library of the Czech Republic, MS XIV. A. 17, f. 16v.

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We encounter a similar fusion of erotic and mystical motifs in a Czech elevation prayer from Kunigunde’s Latin prayer book where Christ – mysteriously present in the Eucharist – is described as a beautiful lover in language also indebted to the Song of Songs. The intensely affective quality of the language is characteristic of the Dominican strategy to appeal to the female reader by presenting Christ as a beautiful lover. Typical also is the attempt to explicate the mystery of the Eucharist (Christ simultaneously present in the wafer and in heaven) in terms that would be have been deemed accessible to a female reader untrained in the niceties of theology. Here Christ emerges as a coy lover hidden in the bread.16 The most striking visual example of this symbiosis between court and cloister is the beautiful image of the “Mystical Embrace” in which the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary embrace like lovers (fig. 23). Kunigunde’s brother, King Wenceslas II (1278–1305), emulated his father’s practice of inviting German poets to his court, which soon became a major center of patronage and poetry. But whereas Přemysl had been interested in using secular genres like the chivalric romance and panegyric poems to enhance his political profile within the German empire, Wenceslas cultivated religious epic and lyric poetry to enhance a more sacral ideal of kingship. This set the ideological precedent for the rule of his grandson, Emperor Charles IV. Important both for Wenceslas and Charles was the hagiographic romance. Exemplary of this crossover genre is the romance Wilhelm von Wenden, whose eponymous hero combines the attributes of a brave knight with the holiness of a saint. If Alexander was intended to evoke the military hero Přemysl Ottokar II, the devout prince of the Slavs, Wilhelm, was clearly intended to compliment his pious son and successor Wenceslas. This allegorical identification of Wenceslas with Wilhelm is borne out by the play on the name of Wilhelm’s wife, Bene, a Latin translation of the name of Wenceslas’s German consort, Guta of Habsburg.17 This fusion of sacred and secular elements was characteristic of the Prague court of Wenceslas, himself a poet who composed three courtly love poems, including a dawn poem, now extant in the Manesse Codex.18 This famous manuscript depicts King Wenceslas as a generous patron of the 16 Nejstarší česká duchovní lyrika, ed. Antonin Škarka (Prague, 1949), lines 76–81. 17 See the introduction to the Czech translation of Wilhelm von Wenden: Oldřich z Etzenbachu, Vilém ze země Slovanů: Epos z konce přemyslovského věku, trans. Dana Dvořáčková-Malá (Prague, 2015), p. 7. 18 See Dana Dvořáčková-Malá, Královský Dvůr Václava II. (Prague, 2011), p. 166.

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Fig. 24  Wenceslas II of Bohemia from the Manesse Codex (1305–40). University of Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. f. 10r.

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arts dispensing largesse to a troupe of court jongleurs and musicians (fig. 24). Another German poet who seems to have spent the early part of his career in Prague, where he may have written his great mystical poem Marienspruch, was Heinrich von Meissen, known as Der Frauenlob because of his praise of women.19 Frauenlob’s Marian poem weaves together biblical elements from the Song of Songs and the Book of Revelation with lyrical courtly love motifs. It is impossible to prove whether Frauenlob’s poem was written in Prague, but its audacious fusion of eroticism and mysticism is certainly characteristic of the heady crossover of the secular and the sacred at the court of Wenceslas II.20

The Court of Charles IV and the Czech Legend of St Catherine of Alexandria The intensely religious atmosphere of the court of Wenceslas II was inherited and taken further by his pious grandson Emperor Charles IV. As we saw in chapter 1, Charles had already been exposed to the religiosity of the Valois court as a young man in Paris; but the court of his Přemyslid ancestors intensified his mystical inclinations even further. A key example of this fusion of mysticism and high courtliness is the Czech Legend of St Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1360–75), probably commissioned by the emperor for the imperial court. The earliest versions of the legend of this virgin-martyr stress Catherine’s role as a teacher and exponent of Christian teaching. But in later adaptations, both in Latin and in the vernacular, we find an emphasis on Catherine’s mystic marriage to Christ based on a venerable tradition of mystic marriage in Christian thought and art.21 One of the earliest vernacular lives of St Catherine is Clemence of Barking’s twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Life of St Catherine. This version is significant not only because it was written by a woman but because it was intended for an aristocratic female audience of nuns at the royal nunnery of Barking near London. As Barbara Newman points out, Clemence draws upon Thomas of Britain’s romance Tristran in Maxencius’s speech 19 See Christoph März, Frauenlobs Marienleich: Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Monodie (Erlangen, 1987), p. 59. 20 Barbara Newman, Frauenlob’s Song of Songs (University Park, PA, 2006). 21 See Carolyn Diskant Muir, Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms: The Mystic Marriage in Northern Renaissance Art (Turnhout, 2012), p. 2.

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after his wife has converted to Christianity under Catherine’s influence. Maxencius is presented as a self-pitying lover in the romance tradition: Alas, what good is my love to me now When all I get from it is pain? In great sadness I shall lead my life When I lose you, fair friend, For you alone were my delight, And I yours.22

The inclusion of Thomas of Britain’s courtly intertext in a hagiographic context was no doubt intended to contrast Christ’s true sacred love for Catherine with the debased secular (and ultimately selfish) love that characterizes the doomed lovers Tristan and Iseult. We might even characterize Clemence’s hagiography as a kind of anti-Tristan. By the time that we come to the Czech Legend of St Catherine, written in the second half of the fourteenth century, the hagiographer’s negative attitude to the romance genre has been transformed into a purely positive identification between the courtly lover and the sacred figure. The Czech version begins with Catherine’s childhood at her father’s court. The emphasis is placed on her education and extraordinary erudition. After her father’s death, Catherine’s mother is keen to arrange a prestigious marriage for her daughter. The emperor sends his ambassadors to woo the princess, but she obstinately refuses to marry him, or anyone else for that matter, claiming that no man on earth is sufficiently worthy of her great beauty and learning (the original reader of this saint’s life may have detected a real-life parallel to Agnes of Prague, who had turned down the hand of the Emperor Frederick II). Catherine’s mother takes her to a hermit in the wilderness outside Alexandria in the hope that he will make the young woman see sense. Ironically, the hermit encourages Catherine’s defiance by introducing her to the Christian faith. He gives her an image of the Virgin Mary and Christ which she takes home, hidden in the sleeve of her gown. When dinner is over at court, and everybody has fallen asleep, Catherine takes out the beautiful painting and places it before her: “Not sparing both her hands, she struck her breast with them, wept bitter tears, and eagerly implored the Virgin not to delay, but kindly to reveal 22 “Las, que me valt ore m’amur,/ Quant n’i receif el que dulur./ En grant tristur ­demenrai ma vie,/ Quant jo vus perdrai, bele amie/ Kar sule esteies mun delit,/ Et jeo le ten …” Quoted in Newman, Medieval Crossover, p. 39.

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her beloved son.”23 Exhausted from her prayers, Catherine collapses on the floor and has the first of two dream visions. This episode is interesting because it sheds light on the practice of personal piety in late medieval court culture and the importance attached to the veneration of religious images to encourage devotion. It has been suggested that the famous Wilton Diptych was intended for the personal devotions of Richard II, even that it was based on a vision that the king had experienced.24 Rather like Richard in the Wilton Diptych looking at the Virgin and Child in a flowery meadow, Catherine finds herself in a locus amoenus where she sees the Virgin Mary and a beautiful Christ Child with “curls curved like gold rings.” The beautiful blossoming meadow resembles the bucolic landscape of the author’s native Moravia more than the actual setting of Cyprus, and is a good example of how medieval poets and artists visualized the East in terms of their own cultural experience (another example is the depiction of Constantinople as a Bohemian town in the British Library Mandeville manuscript discussed in chapter 1): At that moment she had a wondrous, lovely and vivid vision. She dreamed that she was sleeping in a long and wide, perfect and pleasurable meadow. It gleamed with fresh summer grass and was in full, gorgeous bloom. She had never in her life seen more beautiful or wondrously delightful clearings and meadows. Among those precious sights was enthroned Mary, that radiant maiden, whose mother is St Anne, holding her precious one, Christ, her dear little son, and loving him most fervently. Above his dear little shoulders his white neck shone as white lily gleams from the most radiant love. And his desirable hair shone immaculately as pure, precious gold glints more preciously than any other gold. In his hair, falling over his shoulders, curls curved like gold rings wrought beyond belief.25

Mary’s mother, St Anne, is not mentioned in the Latin source, and the reference to her reflects the growing cult of Christ’s grandmother in central European art of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. There is a fine example of the so-called “Anna Selbdritt” in the Carmelite monastery in Střehom where Christ and Mary kiss like lovers and Christ

23 Thomas, Reading Women, p. 105. 24 See Caroline Barron’s introduction in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 9–17, at p. 12. 25 Thomas, Reading Women, pp. 105–6.

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has tightly coiled golden curls, similar to the description in the Czech Legend of St Catherine.26 In the second vision Catherine is betrothed to Christ, who now assumes the guise of a grown-up, beautiful courtly lover who sings an epithalamium to his beloved in a sweet voice. Catherine’s willingness to suffer the same fate as Christ signals her complete identification with her lover, which the Czech author conveys in terms of the love potion accidentally drunk by Tristan and Isolde on the sea voyage from Ireland to Cornwall. In an extraordinary tour de force, the description of Catherine’s flagellation at the hands of her pagan tormentors intermingles sadomasochistic pleasure with spiritual rapture, gruesome wounds with an aesthetic courtly code of color symbolism: “The precious drink of Isolde had previously been given to her when, in her dreams, she was betrothed to Tristan, who is the lord of all things, above whom none is more powerful.”27 The positive association of the love potion motif with the mystical bond between Catherine and Christ is clearly indebted to Gottfried von Strassburg’s courtly romance Tristan (ca. 1210). Gottfried’s work was already known in fourteenth-century Bohemia; indeed, this unfinished masterpiece was completed in the 1290s by Heinrich von Freiberg, who dedicated his continuation to the Bohemian magnate Raimund von Lichtenberg. In contrast to Clemence of Barking’s negative comparison of the self-pitying Maxencius with the forlorn lover Tristan, Gottfried’s Tristan exemplifies the harmonious crossover between the secular and the sacred in depicting Tristan as a martyr of love. In the famous prologue to his work, Gottfried characterizes the love of his heroes as the sacred preserve of “noble hearts” (edele herzen) and compares their love with the miraculous sacramental bread of the Eucharist.28 The quasi-sacred “love of noble hearts” is a sign that the theme of fin’ amor in the Anglo-Norman Life of St Catherine had lost its negative associations. Just as Chrétien’s Lancelot suffers the stigmata as he crosses the Sword Bridge, so Gottfried’s Tristan – suffering from a poisoned wound 26 For a reproduction of this painting see Jan Klípa, Ymago de praga: Desková malba ve Střední Evropě 1400–1430 (Prague, 2012). 27 Thomas, Reading Women, p. 109. 28 “This is the bread to all noble hearts./ With this, their death lives on./ We read their life, we read their death/,And to us this is sweet as bread./ Their death, their death, are our bread. Thus lives their life, thus lives their death./ Thus they live still and yet are dead,/ And their death is the bread of the living.” Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, trans. A.T. Hatto (Harmondsworth, 2004).

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Fig. 25  Master Theodoric: Portrait of St Catherine in the chapel of the Holy Cross, Karlstein castle

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after his fight to the death with the Irish Duke Morold – is likened to a Christ-like martyr. The apotheosis of this sacralization of love is the church-like Cave of Lovers where Tristan and Isolde are able to make love on a crystal bed akin to an altar (Tristan, line 261). The radical transformation from Clemence’s anti-Tristan to Gottfried’s pro-courtly Tristan may be explained by their different audiences: Clemence’s legend was written for an audience of nuns, whereas Gottfried’s romance and the Czech verse Legend of St Catherine were composed for a courtly audience. As we have seen Kolda was a member of the Dominican order who served as court lector to Wenceslas II; and it seems likely that the author of the Czech Legend of St Catherine was also a Dominican member of the imperial entourage commissioned to write a hagiographic legend of the emperor’s favorite saint. Charles had won a significant battle in Italy on St Catherine’s feast day (November 25, 1332) and he remained devoted to her cult for the rest of his life. Images of the virgin-martyr loom large in his private oratory and among the panoply of saints painted by the court artist Theodoric in the chapel of the Holy Cross at Karlstein castle (fig. 25). The court of Emperor Charles IV provides a fitting context for the commissioning and reception of the Czech Legend of St Catherine. Its fusion of courtly love and erotic mysticism corresponds closely to the heady atmosphere of the Caroline court. Karlstein castle, located 35 kilometers from Prague, where the emperor deposited his regalia and his precious collection of Passion relics, combines the function of palace and church in a similar fashion. The Czech medievalist Jan Vilikovský has suggested that the setting of the jeweled hall in Catherine’s first mystical vision of Christ may have been based on the interior of the emperor’s private chapel at Karlstein castle, with semi-precious stones covering all four walls.29 Vilikovský also notes the poem’s visual, painterly quality, pointing out the poet’s exhortation at the end of the legend that whoever depicted scenes from Catherine’s life on the walls of their houses or in illuminated books would receive the saint’s special protection.30 Whichever came first – the Czech Legend of St Catherine or the imperial chapel at Karlstein – is perhaps less important than the fact that both were inspired by the biblical account of the bejeweled Celestial Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation: 29 Jan Vilikovský, Písemnictví českého středověku (Prague, 1948), pp. 176–200, at p. 186. 30 “Fulfill me this wish: those who have my sufferings painted on the walls of their house, illuminated in a book, or faithfully write about my life, please grant them what they deserve.” Thomas, Reading Women, p. 110.

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That maiden, faultless and of great renown, truly found herself in a hall more beautiful than anyone living had ever seen. It contained wondrous wonders fashioned from the richest material: the floor was made of beryls, the walls from diamonds set in gold, many windows were fashioned from emeralds and sapphires, and instead of glass, were glazed with precious stones: hyacinths, rubies, turquoises, carnelians, spines set in ivory; there were jaspers, chalcedons, topazes, garnets, olivines, amethysts, and pearls, all most beautifully cast and assembled.31

Emperor Charles commissioned scenes from the Apocalypse in the chapel of the Virgin Mary in Karlstein castle. The features of the Woman Clothed in the Sun (mulier amicta sole) resemble his third wife, Anne of Schweidnitz, further identifying the imperial family on earth with the Holy Family in heaven. As the mother of the future emperor (Wenceslas IV), Anne is deliberately identified with the Virgin Mary, the mother of the Savior. In the Morgan Diptych of the Three Magi (now in the Morgan Library in New York) Emperor Charles’s features are clearly apparent in the face of the second king (his red robe embossed with golden imperial eagles) as he stands behind the first, kneeling king. As we shall now explore, Richard II encouraged the same association of himself with Christ and his consort, Anne, with the Virgin Mary in order to enhance the sacral as well as temporal nature of his kingship.

Pearl in its Setting: The Court Art of Richard II The marriage of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia was the dynastic fulfilment of an Anglo-Bohemian alliance created by the papal schism of 1377 that resulted in a French pope in Avignon and an Italian pope in Rome. The Valois monarchy supported the French pontiff, while England and Bohemia lined up behind the Roman Pope Urban. The royal marriage was a political triumph for Richard II and brought great prestige to the Plantagenet family. The marriage was also a personal success: Richard clearly loved Anne and enjoyed a deeply companionate relationship with her. Whether the marriage was also actively sexual remains unclear. A recently discovered letter written by Anne to her half-brother Wenceslas, king of Bohemia and king of the Romans, suggests that in the early stages

31 Thomas, Reading Women, p. 106.

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of their marriage at least Anne and Richard had tried to conceive a child.32 The wording of the letter is somewhat vague and Kristen Geaman’s designation of the letter as “personal” misses the point that this was in fact a quasi-official communication between the queen of England and the emperor-designate intended to present events in a diplomatic rather than a truthful light. The letter’s intimation that Anne was grieved (dolentes) at her lack of success in producing a royal heir reveals little except that the couple wanted to have a child, and provides no intimate details as to why that was not the case. Professor Geaman, who discovered the letter, states that “the grammar is odd but the meaning is quite clear” and concludes that the “marriage was consummated, not chaste.” In fact, the meaning of the letter is not at all clear and there is no evidence that the marriage was actively sexual, merely that it had not produced offspring. There might have been other reasons why Richard and Anne had no children: infertility on Anne’s part, impotence on Richard’s part, even the king’s alleged homosexuality may have been an impediment (see previous chapter). More important for our purposes than the ultimately unknowable secrets of the royal marriage-bed is that Richard not only loved Anne in a manner untypical of late medieval royal marriages but he regarded her as the embodiment of imperial power and prestige. Richard’s personal affection for Anne was inseparable from his political ambitions; and Anne loomed large in his dynastic vision as a future Holy Roman Emperor, just as her female ancestors had played an important role in Charles IV’s quest for the imperial crown. As we shall see in this section, Anne achieves an apotheosis in the guise of the pearl maiden in the poem Pearl, written, I argue, as an elegy on her death in 1394. Combining love poem and elegy, Pearl was a fitting poetic tribute to the memory of Anne as Richard’s beloved spouse. Anne’s descent from a long line of holy Bohemian princesses and royal martyrs helped to enhance the sacral dimension of Richard’s kingship. A telling example of Richard’s appropriation of Anne’s imperial family in the interests of his own dynastic prestige is the funeral mass he held to honor the memory of her mother, Empress Elizabeth of Pomerania, in St Paul’s cathedral on June 12, 1393. Not satisfied with a memorial mass, Richard also ordered the construction of an imperial shrine in St Paul’s: “and a very unusual imperial shrine, the like of which had nowhere been seen before 32 See Kristen l. Geaman, “A Personal Letter Written by Anne of Bohemia,” English Historical Review, CXXVII 534 (2013), 1086–94.

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in the church of St Paul, was also put up there at the king’s expense” (“Ubi eciam regiis sumptibus erectum fuit imperiale feretrum valde curiosum quale in ecclesia Sancti Pauli nusquam antea fuit visum”).33 Clearly, Richard was not simply paying his respects to his deceased mother-in-law; he was crucially using her status as Holy Roman Empress to bolster his own imperial credentials and ambitions. Scholars and historians have tended to focus on Richard’s devotion to his own Anglo-Saxon ancestors: Edward the Confessor, whose shrine in Westminster abbey he visited frequently and enlarged, and King Edmund the Martyr; but it is important to remember that Richard’s ambitions were not restricted to his own Plantagenet and Anglo-Saxon forebears. There is some circumstantial evidence that he deliberately emulated Anne’s holy ancestors in order to strengthen his claim to the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Prominent among Anne’s Bohemian ancestors were the proto-martyr St Ludmila (860–921) and her grandson St Wenceslas (907–29). Ludmila and Wenceslas were the first Christian martyrs among the Slavs, and the cult of St Wenceslas soon spread beyond the borders of Bohemia and, after the translation of his relics in 932, quickly received ecclesiastical approval. As a result, St Wenceslas also became the first Slavic sovereign to be canonized. By the end of the tenth century Latin accounts of his martyrdom were composed in Bavaria, Mantuaria, and Montcassino; and an account was also written in Old Church Slavonic in Bohemia around 940.34 All these hagiographies emphasize the fact that Wenceslas was a Christian martyr murdered by his pagan brother Boleslav, although the historical context suggests that the murders of Wenceslas and his grandmother seven years earlier were part of a larger power struggle within the Bohemian royal family. The cult of these early Bohemian martyrs achieved its propagandistic zenith in the reign of Emperor Charles IV, who himself wrote a Latin life of Wenceslas that was intended to be incorporated into the Bohemian church liturgy.35 The emperor’s motivation for intensifying these cults was not just religious and personal but also political and strategic. Charles wanted to strengthen the Luxembourg position on the Bohemian throne, as well as his own eligibility to be elected Holy Roman Emperor, by appealing to 33 The Westminster Chronicle, ed. Hector and Harvey, pp. 516–17. 34 Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 11. 35 For the Latin text, see Anton Blaschka, Die St. Wenzelslegende Kaiser Karl IV., Einleitung/Texte/Kommentare (Prague, 1934), pp. 61–80.

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the holy pedigree of his Slavic ancestors Wenceslas and Ludmila. Charles was duly crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1355. It seems likely that Richard II sought a Plantagenet equivalent to the martyred St Wenceslas in the guise of his great-grandfather Edward II who had been murdered in 1327. Important as they were for Richard, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr were remote AngloSaxon ancestors, so he needed a holy martyr among his more recent forebears in order to reinforce his claim to the imperial crown. Given Richard’s imperial ambitions it made sense for him to encourage the cult of his great-grandfather. In the summer of 1390 he assembled an eminent group of bishops and canon lawyers at Gloucester to consider reports of miracles at Edward’s tomb in the cathedral there.36 His desire to reinvent Edward II as a holy martyr may have been modeled on the example of St Wenceslas, Charles IV’s ancestor, who had also been murdered in political circumstances.37

Westminster Hall and Karlstein Castle Like Emperor Charles, Richard II emphasized the sacral dimension of his kingship in ways that distinguished him from his martial predecessor, Edward III, and his more pragmatic successor, Henry IV. Exemplary of the sacral vision of Richard’s kingship is his rebuilding of Westminster Hall (originally built by William II Rufus) to create an impressive space that made it resemble a church. As Christopher Wilson affirms, “There can be little doubt that for Richard II the primary purpose of both the arches and the angels was the same as that of the church-derived elements of the north front: to invest the building most representative of the royal house (in both the genealogical and architectural senses) with celestial resonances appropriate to its status as a principal site of the ceremonial of sacral kingship”.38 Westminster Hall was clearly influenced by the model of the French court in Paris, which boasted the most important royal hall in Europe: La Grand’ Salle in the Palais de la Cité erected by Philip IV (1285–1314). In 1384 Richard complained to Parliament that his household would be 36 Bennett, “Richard II and the Wider Realm,” p. 194. 37 J.M. Theilmann, ‘Political Canonization and Political Symbolism in Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 29.3 (1990), 241–66, at p. 257. 38 Wilson, “Rulers, Artificers and Shoppers,” p. 59.

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Fig. 26  Statue of an Anglo-Saxon king commissioned by Richard II for Westminster Hall (1395)

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shamed by that of Charles VI of France if the two monarchs were to meet to ratify the peace treaty between France and England.39 A year later, in 1385, Richard commissioned thirteen statues, representing each English king from Edward the Confessor’s reign to his own, for the reconstructed Westminster Hall.40 In the 1390s these statues were placed in individual niches, where they have remained ever since. The kings’ crowns were originally gilded and their robes were painted emerald green and crimson (fig. 26). The inserted statues of Richard’s royal ancestors would have enhanced the impression of a great church, since statues of kings had long been an architectural feature of cathedrals, like the west façade of Exeter cathedral. Indeed, the new north façade that Richard added to Westminster Hall recalls cathedrals of the period. In the words of David Rollason: “As he presided over a ceremonial feast in the hall, it was as if he [Richard] was presiding over a reflection of the heavenly court of God”.41 During his coronation feast household officers mounted on war horses patrolled the hall, providing an interesting echo of the intervention of the Green Knight at the beginning of Sir Gawain.42 Richard’s decision to rebuild Westminster Hall as a combination of banqueting hall and church was likely inspired by Karlstein castle. The statues may even have been intended to emulate the Genealogy Murals in Karlstein castle which depicted the Luxembourg ancestors all the way back to Noah, Aeneas of Troy, and Charlemagne; the period when Richard commissioned the statues was precisely the time that he was beginning his campaign to be elected Holy Roman Emperor. The intention was probably that the figures should resemble an altarpiece, thereby emphasizing the quasi-divine status of the king seated on his marble throne below. This deliberate merging of the secular elements of a royal hall with the sacred function of a church probably reflected Richard’s attempt to emulate the sacral kingship of his wife’s father as well as his Valois counterparts.

39 See Christopher Wilson, “Rulers, Artificers and Shoppers: Richard II’s Remodelling of Westminster Hall, 1393–99,” in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 33–59. 40 Wilson, “Rulers, Artificers and Shoppers,” p. 53. 41 Rollason, The Power of Place, p. 40. 42 Wilson, “Rulers, Artificers and Shoppers,” p. 36.

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Imago Christi: The Ruler as Christ An important component of Richard’s political ambition was, in Nigel Saul’s words,” his intense self-preoccupation with his self-image”.43 More images of Richard II survive than of any other English ruler before Henry VIII. Some of these images are now lost, such as the statues of the king and queen which, on Richard’s orders, were placed above the gate to London Bridge in 1393.44 These statues recall the still extant statues of Charles IV and his son Wenceslas IV on the tower on the Old Town side of the Charles Bridge in Prague (fig. 27).45 Built in the late 1370s and 1380s by Peter Parler, this tower was intended as a triumphal arch along the lines of ancient Rome and was part of the Luxembourg transformation of Prague to reflect the family’s imperial status. It seems likely that Richard intended the tower at the end of London Bridge to serve a similar propagandistic

Fig. 27  Peter Parler: Statues of St Vitus flanked by Emperor Charles IV and Wenceslas IV on the Old Town tower, Prague (1370–80s) 43 Saul, Richard II, p. 450. 44 Saul, Richard II, p. 450 fn. 59. 45 See Royt, The Prague of Charles IV, pp. 116–19.

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function to enhance his imperial aspirations. The inclusion of Anne’s statue alongside Richard’s was crucial to this plan. In the second half of the fourteenth century European rulers “began developing an interest in individualized, naturalistic representations of themselves”.46 To this extent Richard was not innovating but following a trend. Emperor Charles IV commissioned a portrait of himself at Feltre in Italy in 1354, and John II of France and his sons commissioned portraits of themselves in the 1360s and after. According to Saul, “Richard encouraged the making and circulation of representations of himself,” and he attributes this primarily to the influence of Charles V of France: “The many successes he enjoyed against the English owed less to his prowess in arms than the recovery of his subjects’ confidence and the restoration of his monarchy’s prestige”.47 This is also true of Emperor Charles IV, who restored the prestige of Bohemia after years of neglect by his father, John of Luxembourg. Charles IV also resembled his nephew Charles V in preferring the power of the arts to the prowess of arms. And he too favored self-representations to enhance the prestige of his rule as king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor. In fact, there are about sixty images of the emperor still surviving in Bohemia and in Europe.48 In this capacity, Emperor Charles saw himself as a priest-king in the tradition of the Old Testament Melchizedek.49 Moreover, Charles perpetuated the ancient tradition of the king as Vicarius Christi. His collection of the relics of the Passion “created a direct link between Christ and Charles and intensified to an exceptional degree his authority as king and emperor.”50 Mid-fourteenth-century Prague became a focal point for the cult of the Passion of Christ; and a special holiday was established there on the Friday following Easter to celebrate the Holy Relics – the Holy Spear with which Christ’s side was punctured and the Holy Nails used to pin Him to the cross.51 The Czech cult of the Passion is reflected in the illustrations from the Bohemian manuscript of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (ca. 1400), now in the British Library. Dating from the reign of Wenceslas IV and probably commissioned for the latter’s court, the British Library 46 Saul, Richard II, p. 450. 47 Saul, Richard II, p. 350. 48 Rosario, Art and Propaganda, p. xv. 49 Rosario, Art and Propaganda, p. 96. 50 See Josef Krása, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: A Manuscript in the British Library, trans. Peter Kussi (New York, 1983), p. 24. 51 Krása, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, p. 23.

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Mandeville manuscript bears witness to the intense piety of the Luxembourg court. The artist based his twenty-eight paintings on the first thirteen chapters of the Czech translation of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville by Laurence of Březová.52 These were presumably intended to accompany a planned de luxe copy of the Czech version of the Travels. Never completed, the manuscript may have been commissioned either by the king himself or by one of his leading courtiers. The twenty-eight grisaille pictures that survive (and later were bound together) include three scenes of Christ wearing different crowns of thorns (in the Garden of Gethsemane, before the High Priest Caiaphas, and before Pontius Pilate) and one scene of King Louis IX of France receiving the crown in a crystal reliquary case. The importance placed on the Passion relics in the Mandeville manuscript is hardly coincidental, for, as we have seen, the Bohemian cult of the Passion reached its high point during the late Luxembourg period. Emperor Charles was a particularly zealous collector of holy relics, and he attached enormous importance to their religious and ideological significance. In 1356, during a meeting with the French dauphin (the future Charles V) in Metz, Charles received a gift of two thorns from the Crown of Thorns;53 and in 1354 a relic of the Holy Sponge was presented to the him by Ludovico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua as he was en route to Rome for his coronation there.54 These important events are commemorated in the first two mural panels in the chapel of Our Lady in Karlstein castle, culminating in a third panel of Emperor Charles placing the precious relics in a reliquary on an altar, further reinforcing his sacerdotal role as priest-king (fig. 28). Richard II’s identification with Christ was motivated by the same desire for spiritual as well as temporal authority. The analogy between divine and imperial majesty originated in the early Christian Church following Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in AD 313 and was endorsed by early Christian apologists like Eusebius. The famous mosaic in the church of Santa Maria dell’ Ammiraglio in Palermo, Sicily, shows the first Sicilian 52 In the chapter on the memorable sites of Cyprus the Czech translator replaces the reference to Barnabas the Apostle, the patron saint of Cyprus, with St Barbara, the patron saint of his own hometown in Bohemia. This change is reproduced in panel 23 of the British Library manuscript, where we see St Barbara holding her attribute (the tower in which she was imprisoned by her father). 53 See František Kavka, Karel IV. Historie života velkého vladaře (Prague, 1998), p. 214. 54 See František Fišer, Karlštejn: Vzájemné vztahy tří karlštejnských kaplí (Kostelní Vydrží, 1996), pp. 144–46.

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Fig. 28  Emperor Charles places the relics of the Passion in a reliquary. Church of the Virgin Mary, Karlstein castle, Czech Republic

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king, Roger II, being crowned by Christ. As David Abulafia observes, “the identity of features between the king and Christ is no coincidence, for the king is seen to be Christ’s representative on earth.”55 We see a similar image of Richard as Christ in majesty in the famous Westminster abbey portrait, which depicts the king with long hair, crowned, and enthroned as he faces the viewer in a dramatic and powerful assertion of his spiritual and temporal authority. The Westminster portrait presents the king facing the spectator in a hieratic full-frontal pose reminiscent of Byzantine icons of Christ Pantocrator. His features also resemble contemporary depictions of Christ’s Passion. Indeed, they suggest an intriguing resemblance to the Veronica – the image of Christ imprinted on the sudarium (face cloth) held by St Veronica as Christ processed to Calvary. The earliest panel paintings of the Veronica north of the Alps were commissioned ca. 1350 by Emperor Charles IV, who self-consciously emulated all things Roman.56 The fame of these Bohemian icons persisted throughout the Middle Ages. Yet, as Jeffrey Hamburger has pointed out, “images of the Holy Face appear to have enjoyed a vogue in Bohemia already from the thirteenth century.”57 Early Bohemian examples of the Veronica are to be found in the church of the Assumption in Police nad Metují (ca. 1304–6) and among the Arma Christi in the previously discussed Passional of Abbess Kunigunde (dated 1321). Another Veronica image adorns The Breviary of the Grand Master Leo, commissioned for Leo, Grand Master of the Order of the Cross in Prague, ca. 1356. All these examples suggest that devotion to the Veronica among the Bohemian aristocracy dates back to the cult’s origins in the early thirteenth century.58 Two Veronica panel paintings survive from the Luxembourg court, the first in St Vitus cathedral in Prague, the second formerly in the church of St Mary Magdalen in Wroclaw (Vratislav) but now in the Museum of Medieval Art in Warsaw. Both paintings originally belonged to Anne of Bohemia’s brother Sigismund, who gave one to the church in Wroclaw, the other to the St Vitus cathedral, after assuming the Bohemian throne in 1436. Both paintings date from around 1400 and were perhaps modelled

55 Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 12. 56 See Jeffrey H. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998), p. 373. 57 Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, p. 373. 58 Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, p. 374.

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on an original painting brought by Charles IV from Rome in 1368.59 It is possible that a third copy was made for Anne of Bohemia and taken to England upon her marriage to Richard in 1382. The presence of a Veronica panel painting at the court of Richard II would certainly help to explain the striking similarity between Richard’s mournful features in the Westminster portrait and the features of Christ in the Silesian and Bohemian paintings. Richard saw himself as a martyr of the Lords Appellant, who had humiliated him and stripped him of his friends, and most likely identified with the sufferings of Christ on the way to Calvary. It is of interest that the halo of the Christ Child in the Wilton Diptych is inscribed with the symbols of the Passion – the Crown of Thorns and the Three Nails, thus reinforcing Richard’s identification with the suffering Christ.60 The Westminster abbey portrait was also intended to enhance Richard’s political ambitions. It was commissioned around 1390, shortly before his campaign to be elected Holy Roman Emperor gained momentum. His intention was to replace his brother-in-law Wenceslas IV, whose gradual loss of support among the German princes in the empire eventually led to his deposition as King of the Romans in 1400, ironically the same year in which Richard himself was murdered. Reinforcing this ambition are the presence of imperial eagles alternating with sunbursts (Richard’s device) along the four sides of the gilded frame of the portrait.

The Wilton Diptych The supreme expression of Richard’s quasi-divine status is the beautiful moveable altarpiece known as the Wilton Diptych, commissioned around 1396/97 (fig. 29). As Dillian Gordon has remarked, the painting is among the most-studied paintings in the history of European art; yet it also remains one of the most enigmatic.61 It is this enigmatic quality that makes it consistent with the international court culture (sometimes known as International Gothic) where indirection and allusion were cultivated in both art and literature. Like the poem Pearl – to which we shall presently turn – the painting seems to pose more questions than it answers. And like the highly sophisticated Pearl, the Wilton Diptych “creates a tantalizing 59 See Klípa, Ymago de praga, pp. 24–27. See p. 24 for illustrations of the Vratislav and Prague images. 60 Dillian Gordon, “The Wilton Diptych: An Introduction,” in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 19–26, at p. 19. 61 Gordon, “The Wilton Diptych,” p. 19.

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dichotomy between reality and artificiality.”62 Another similarity between the painting and the poem, as we shall see, is the number of allusions to Anne’s memory encoded in them, both presumably made after the Queen’s untimely death in June 1394. In fact, the Wilton Diptych is sprinkled with iconographic and heraldic references to Anne. On the left side of the panel Richard II kneels before the Blessed Virgin and Child, who stand in a flowery meadow surrounded by eleven angels. The king is depicted as an adolescent, perhaps intended to represent him at the time of his marriage to Anne.63 His robe is embroidered with white harts and imperial eagles similar in design to those on the painted ceiling of the Great Hospital in Norwich. Several of the flowers under the Virgin’s feet on the other side of the panel – such as the peony, daisy, and periwinkle – can be identified with the memory of Richard’s beloved spouse and, more generally, with the international court culture she represented.64 On the rear of the panel a white hart (Richard’s device) lies on a bed of rosemary, which was one of Anne’s personal devices, with ferns in the background – another of her emblems (fig. 30). On the left panel of the diptych Richard is accompanied by two Anglo-Saxon kings, Edmund the Martyr and Edward the Confessor, and his patronal saint, John the Baptist. As Katherine Lewis has pointed out, what these three figures had in common was their reputation for virginity as well as holiness.65 By the time the panel was commissioned (ca. 1396), Richard had decided “to rewrite his marriage to Anne as having been a jointly heroic exercise in chastity.”66 Richard’s intensified devotion to the virgin King Edward the Confessor was an expression of his own espousal of sacral kingship. Significant here is the connection between his identification with the virgin king and the “rewriting” of his relationship with Anne as a chaste marriage. Seen together, they reinforce the likelihood that Richard was reinventing himself at this time as a virgin king, and perhaps also as a sacerdotal king for political and dynastic reasons. 62 Gordon, The Wilton Diptych, (London, 2015), p. 109. 63 The youthful appearance of the king in the painting has invited a great deal of speculation, one theory being that it was meant to depict him aged ten, at the age of his coronation. See Gordon, “The Wilton Diptych,” p. 22. 64 See Celia Fisher, “A Study of the Plants and Flowers in the Wilton Diptych.” In The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 155–63. 65 Katherine Lewis, “Becoming a Virgin King: Richard II and Edward the Confessor,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Sam Riches and Sarah Salih (New York, 2002), pp. 86–100. 66 Lewis, “Becoming a Virgin King,” p. 95.

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Fig. 29  The Wilton Diptych (ca. 1395–99) Court of Richard II B.indd 160

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Fig. 30  Coat of arms of Richard II and white hart resting on a bed of rosemary, one of Queen Anne’s devices. Reverse of the Wilton Diptych

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Crucial here is not only Richard’s identification with his father-inlaw Charles’s sacerdotal image, but also Charles’s identification with the Three Magi in painted scenes of the Nativity. The inclusion of Richard in a triad of kings resembles the similar incorporation of Charles IV among the Three Magi in the Morgan Diptych discussed earlier.67 It also recalls the Adoration of the Magi fresco painted by Master Theodoric in the north-eastern window embrasure in the chapel of the Holy Cross in Karlstein castle (before 1367), where the emperor is clearly recognizable as the third king. Richard’s identification with Christ also featured in the court spectacles he sponsored. In the 1392 tableau of the City of London the actor playing John the Baptist pointed to Richard as he passed, saying “Agnus et Ecce Dei” (“Behold the Lamb of God”).68 John the Baptist is prominent as one of Richard’s patronal saints in the left panel of the Wilton Diptych as he places his hand on the kneeling king’s shoulder (fig. 31). We glimpse a similar protective gesture in an illuminated manuscript now in the Royal Library of Brussels in Belgium (MS. 11060–1), where John the Baptist touches his namesake John, duke of Berry as the latter kneels before the Virgin and Child.69 An even more striking similarity to the Wilton Diptych is the votive panel of Archbishop Jan Očko of Vlaším in Prague (1370s) where Charles IV’s patron saint, Wenceslas, rests his hand on the emperor’s shoulder as Charles kneels in veneration of the Virgin Mary (fig. 32). Equally important is the symbolic presence of Anne of Bohemia on the right panel of the Wilton Diptych, where the Virgin Mary holds the Christ Child surrounded by eleven courtier-like angels (fig. 33). Dillian Gordon has suggested that the figure of the Virgin and Child recalls the “beautiful style” of Bohemian sculpture and may have actually been modeled on a statue of the Virgin once in the possession of Queen Anne (fig. 34).70 Here secular and sacred forms of love merge as the king venerates both the Virgin Mary and the memory of his beloved spouse in the guise of the statue she once owned. The eleven angels who surround the Virgin are dressed in the same blue color as the Queen of Heaven. They also sport Richard’s personal badge of the white hart on their gowns. The angels thus 67 See Olga Pujmanová, “Portraits of Kings Depicted as Magi in Bohemian Painting,” in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 247–66. 68 See Gordon, The Wilton Diptych, p. 88. 69 For a color reproduction of this manuscript, see Gordon, The Wilton Diptych, p. 113. 70 See Gordon, Making and Meaning.

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become heavenly equivalents of Richard’s liveried servants and chamber knights, further demonstrating the late medieval blurring of piety and politics. As Katherine Lewis has suggested, these angels might also be interpreted as Richard and Anne’s “spiritual off-spring.”71 This theory is strengthened if we accept that the figure of the Virgin Mary in the panel not only resembles a Bohemian statue once in the queen’s possession but, more significantly, functions as a stand-in for Anne herself.

Fig. 31  Richard II kneeling before the Virgin and Child. Wilton Diptych (detail)

71 Lewis, “Becoming a Virgin King,” p. 90.

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Fig. 32  Votive panel of Archbishop Jan Očko of Vlaším (1370s), National Gallery, Prague

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Fig. 33  The Virgin and Child surrounded by angels. Wilton Diptych (detail)

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Fig. 34  Krumlov Madonna. Bohemian ca. 1400. Kunsthistorsiches Museum, Vienna

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The Wilton Diptych presents a vision of the court of heaven that was central to the ideology of the Ricardian court. As James Simpson points out, “the painter has subtly colonized the court of heaven.”72 This “colonization” is exemplified by the flag of St George held by an attendant angel, the tiny image of England as an island in the flag’s orb, as well as the aforementioned Ricardian badges worn by the angels in the right-hand panel. As we have seen, the image of heaven as a splendid court is also true of the Luxembourg court as exemplified by the jeweled hall in the second vision of Catherine in the Czech Legend of her life quoted earlier. We find the same conceit in the visual arts of the Bohemian court of Charles IV. In an Annunciation scene from the Missal of Chancellor John of Středa (after 1364), the Angel Gabriel bends his knee and delivers a sealed letter to the Blessed Virgin like a courtier bringing news of the Annunciation from the heavenly court.

The apotheosis of Anne of Bohemia: Pearl The crossover between the secular and the sacred characterized by the court art of Charles IV and Richard II would explain the peculiar fusion of love poetry and religious allegory in Pearl. The curious blend of consolatio and courtly love motifs suggests that the poem was most likely written by a cleric for a bereaved courtly audience. Following Bowers, Stanbury has even proposed that Pearl was composed as an elegy on the death of Queen Anne who died on June 7, 1394.73 This royal context may help to explain the presence of courtly love discourse and imagery in the poem and the subtle fusion of elegy and love poetry: Alas, I lest her in an erbere: Thurgh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot. I dewyne, foldolked, of luf-daungere Of that privy perle withouten spot. (I, 9–12) (Alas! In an arbor green I lost that dove; She slipped from me to earthen plot. I lament, grief-stricken by frustrated love, For that precious pearl without a spot.)

72 James Simpson, “Richard II,” in A New Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Chichester, 2019), pp. 359–77, at p. 360. 73 See the introduction to Pearl, ed. Sarah Stanbury (Kalamazoo, 2001), p. 16.

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Queen Anne was buried several weeks later, on August 3, 1394, the feast day of St Anne. As John Bowers has proposed, the date of her funeral in Westminster abbey may illuminate the reference to August as the seasonal setting of the poem’s beginning: To that spot that I in speche expoun I entred in that erber grene, In Augoste in a high sesoun, When corne is corven with crokes kene. (37–40) (At that spot that I in speech expound, I entered in that arbor green, In August, when a holy time came round. When corn is cut with sickles keen.)

August 1 also marked the church feast of Lammas, when the first fruits of the new harvest were offered up in thanksgiving. The word is derived from a compound of Old English forms of the words loaf and mass: in the early English Church, the bread consecrated in the Eucharistic service was made from the first grain harvested that year, called the “first fruits.” The 144,000 maidens, in whose company the dreamer sees the pearl maiden, were also considered “first fruits,” since they were the first Christian martyrs.74 It is significant in this connection that Margarethe (Margaret), the fictional wife of the Plowman Johannes in The Plowman of Bohemia (ca. 1400), dies on August 1, reinforcing the likelihood that she, like the pearl maiden, is intended as a religious metaphor of virtue and purity.75 Margaret’s status as a treasure is confirmed by the fact that the first letter of her name (M) is the twelfth in the alphabet, which recalls the passage in the New Testament (Matthew 13: 44–46) where Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to hidden treasure and a pearl (margarita).76 A beautiful Bohemian example of this fashionable use of a margeurite motif is the Czech courtly love lyric “The Letter M,” with its tension between a Marian poem and a secular love poem:

74 The Gawain Poet, trans. Borroff, pp. 160–61. 75 For a comparison of Pearl and Der Ackermann, see Nigel Palmer, “Der Autor und seine Geliebte. Literarische Fiktion und Autobiographie im ‘Ackermann aus Böhmen’ des Johannes von Tepl,” in Autor und Autorschaft im Mittelalter. Kolloquium Meissen 1995, ed. Elizabeth Andresen, Jens Haustein, Anne Simon and Peter Strohschneider (Tubingen, 1998), pp. 299–322. 76 Palmer, “Der Autor und seine Geliebte,” pp.  303–4, 307–10; Chinca, “Horizons of Loss,” p. 172.

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For creatures all beneath the sun I do not care, The rose makes other flowers none I here declare. None else on earth shall ever be Whom I would serve with constancy In joy and bliss. Sole my beloved letter M That can reward and can condemn My master is.77

Another important date in the Church calendar was August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary as well as the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin. This feast might also be significant in linking Queen Anne with the figure of the Virgin. The painted tester above the double tomb of Anne and Richard in Westminster abbey depicts Christ crowning the Virgin, thus forming a kind of reflection or mirror image of the recumbent royal effigies below. The Latin poem “Nobis natura florem,” written as an elegy on the death of Anne of Bohemia in June 1394, draws upon the Song of Songs 2.1 (“ego flos campi et lilium convalium”) to emphasize the parallel between Anne and the Virgin Mary: Nature brought forth a flower for us, Which now, behold, falls withered in death. It flowered in the kingdom which is said to be Bohemia. The flower of the field of which we write was Anna: Happy the place which can beget such a happy bud, About which all the kingdoms sing.78

The floral image associated with Anne in this elegy and in the meadow in the Wilton Diptych finds a striking resonance with the description of the grave mound where the pearl maiden is buried at the opening of Pearl: That spot of spyces mot nedes sprede There such rychess to rot is runne. Blomes blayke and blue and rede 77 “The Letter M,” trans. Karel Brušák, in Czech Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, volume 1 (Ann Arbor, 1973), p. 37. 78 “Nobis natura florem produxit ad ortum,/ Qui modo in morte marcidus ecce cadit./ Floruit in regno quod dicitur esse Boemum./ Flos campi de quo scribimus Anna fuit:/ Felix ille locus tam felix gignere germen/ Qui potuit, de quo singular regna canunt” (1–6). Quoted in van Dussen, From England to Bohemia, p. 131 and p. 139.

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There schines ful schyr agayns the sunne. Flour and fruyt may not be fede There hit doun drof in moldes dunne. (lines 25–30) (That spot with spice must spring and spread Where riches rotted in narrow room; Blossoms white and blue and red Lift now alight in blaze of noon; Flower and fruit could never fade Where pearl plunged deep in earthen tomb.)

Among the flowers growing in the green garden are peonies: “Gilofre, gyngure and gromyloun,/ And pyonys powdered aye bitwene” (lines 43–44) (“Gillyflower and ginger on every side/ And peonies peerless blooming between”). Peonies are also sprinkled in the flowery meadow beneath the feet of the Virgin Mary in the Wilton Diptych, and appear to be one of Queen Anne’s personal devices. Reinforcing the possibility that the opening stanzas of Pearl may allude to the funeral of Queen Anne is the curious use of the heraldic word powdered (“scattered”) in line 44 to describe the flowers and spices on the grassy mound in which the pearl maiden lies buried. One year after Anne’s death, in 1395, Richard commissioned a splendid double tomb for himself and his wife, including two lifelike effigies “powdered” with their personal badges.79 In contrast to Edward III’s tomb-chest, which was lined with figures of his many offspring, Richard’s tomb was to be studded with figures of saints. The incorporation of saints rather than children was clearly intended to stress the royal couple’s childlessness and Richard’s vision of his court as heavenly rather than earthly.80 It is this vision of the heavenly court that is paramount in Pearl, making the poem perfectly congruent with the court art of Richard II. The prevalence of spice and flower imagery in the poem would also illuminate the double role of the dreamer as a father figure bereft of his daughter and as a courtly lover deprived of his beloved lady. Analogous works such as Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, written as an occasional poem on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt, and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, commissioned by King John the Good of France to commemorate the death his wife, Bonne of Luxembourg, in 1349, might have provided the Pearl poet with a model that combines the 79 Thomas, A Blessed Shore, p. 54. 80 See Phillip Lindley, “Absolutism and Regal Image in Ricardian Sculpture,” in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, pp. 61–83.

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functions of elegy and courtly compliment. Remede and Pearl are both examples of the dream vision; and both articulate the love of a social inferior for his lost lady. Remede locates the lover’s loss in a natural setting near a castle where his services are engaged, whereas Pearl describes the Dreamer’s loss in a herb garden. Machaut’s distraught lover flees to the park at Hesdin (Bonne of Luxembourg’s castle) and stumbles along in unknown terrain as if trespassing in the grounds of a castle, while the Dreamer awakes in a flowery meadow. It was probably while in King John’s service that Machaut visited the estate at Hesdin where Bonne of Luxembourg maintained a household for her husband, the heir to the French throne. Although Pearl does not specify a precise topographical setting, the Dreamer resembles Machaut’s forlorn lover mourning his lady.81 Before he encounters the pearl maiden on the other side of the river, the Dreamer finds himself in a beautiful, idealized landscape of indigo-colored tree trunks and silver-burnished leaves (lines 73–84). The references to fragrant fruit trees and multi-colored birds with iridescent wings (lines 85–95) are characteristic of the medieval motif of the Earthly Paradise located in the East and find an intriguing visual parallel in the scene of Seth at the Gates of Paradise in the Bohemian Travels of Sir John Mandeville dating from around the same time as our English poem (fig. 35). In general, the imagery in Pearl has much in common with the visual arts of the international court culture. As Felicity Riddy has pointed out, the description of the pearl maiden’s face as white as ivory (line 178) and her clothing adorned with pearls “seems to emanate from the aristocratic taste for white enameling en ronde bosse which is such a striking new feature of the de luxe works of art of the end of the fourteenth century.”82 Examples of such exquisite artifacts are the “Goldenes Rössl” (Little Golden Horse); a reliquary given by Isabel of Bavaria to her husband, Charles VI, as a New Year’s gift in 1404; and the Dunstable Swan, a livery badge made around 1400 in the form of a swan of white-enameled gold, now in the British Museum. The ivory features of the pearl maiden also recall the figures in the Liber Regalis which, as Gervase Mathew has discerned, are “opalescent, for white is painted above green and then tinted with pink”83 (fig. 36). 81 Thomas, A Blessed Shore, pp. 52–53. 82 See Felicity Riddy, “Jewels in Pearl,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, pp. 143–55, at p. 148. 83 Mathew, The Court of Richard II, p. 40.

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Fig. 35  Seth at the Gates of Paradise. Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Bohemian, ca. 1400), British Library Add. 24189, f. 13r

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Fig. 36  Coronation of a king and queen. Liber Regalis, Westminster Abbey Library

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When the Dreamer first sees her on the other side of the river, the pearl maiden is wearing the fashionable attire of the international court culture: a flowing robe with long, hanging sleeves (with lappes large, 201) trimmed with a double row of pearls. The illustrator of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript has reproduced the pearl maiden’s dress quite accurately, suggesting that he – like the author of the poem – was familiar with the international court fashion of the time. There is in fact a striking similarity between the dress of the pearl maiden in the Cotton Nero manuscript and the Bohemian style of dress worn by a crowned lady in an ink drawing on parchment from Prague (ca. 1410), now in the Louvre in Paris. The drawing depicts three noblewomen in different attire; the lady on the left is crowned and wears a dress which combines several features of the pearl maiden’s depicted in the manuscript: a high collar, a belt fastened high around the waist and long, flowing sleeves bordered with fur (fig. 37).84 Given the similarity between the Bohemian and English drawings, it is likely that the illustrator of the Cotton Nero manuscript had some exposure to court dress, or perhaps to fashion books which were current at this time. Befitting her role as a bride of Christ, the pearl maiden’s hair is worn loose and uncovered (unlapped) (line 214).85 Only young, unmarried girls – and brides and queens – wore their hair loose. All other adult women (wives and religious) wore hair-coverings. As Ad Putter states: “The girl’s uncovered hair is thus consonant both with the age of innocence and maidenhood at which she died and with the royal and bridal status into which she has therefore been translated.”86 But the loosely worn hair could also refer to the pearl maiden’s status as a queen in life as well as in heaven. It is notable that Anne of Bohemia wears her hair loose and flowing down her shoulders in her tomb effigy at Westminster abbey and in the Liber Regalis. She wears it long but plaited in the illuminated “R” in the Shrewsbury charter which shows the queen interceding with her husband on behalf of the citizens of Shrewsbury. There is some stylistic evidence that the Shrewsbury miniature was painted by a Bohemian artist. Since the likeness of Richard is consistent with that in the Book of Statutes, it is 84 See the illustration in Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, ed. Boehm and Fajt, p. 276 (fig. 117.1). 85 In the image in the manuscript, however, the pearl maiden wears her hair up and braided. 86 The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Putter and Stokes, p. 418.

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Fig. 37  The Dreamer meets the pearl maiden. British Library Cotton Nero A.x, f. 42r (1375–1400)

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reasonable to assume that the miniature of Anne is also a likeness of sorts and that she would have worn her hair loose in public appearances. Consonant with her virginal status as sponsa Christi, the pearl maiden also wears a beautiful crown encrusted entirely with pearls: A pyght coroune yet wer that gyrle, Of marjorys and non other stone, High pynacled of cler white perle, Wyth flurted flowres perfet upon. (lines 205–8) (Her priceless crown with pearls alone Was set, in fashion fit and fair; High pinnacles upon it shone, And florets carved with craft and care.)

Surmounted with ornamentally carved flowers (flurted flowres), the crown bears a striking resemblance to the crown once owned by Anne of Bohemia and probably brought with her to England from Prague (now in Munich). The intricate design of Anne’s crown, complete with golden leaves sprouting from the sides of the alternating high and low stems, gives it an organic appearance, as if the goldsmith were attempting to emulate nature itself. The resulting synthesis of nature and artifice corresponds to the tension between the depiction of the natural and artificial world that characterizes the other-world landscape of the Dreamer’s vision in Pearl: Dubbed were all tho downes sides With crystal clyffes so clere of kynde; Holtwodes bryght aboute hem bides, Of boles as blue as ble of ynde; As burnist sylver the lef on slydes, That thik con trylle on uch a tynde. (lines 73–78) (Embellished were those hills in view With crystal cliffs as clear as day And groves of trees with boles as blue As indigo silks of rich assay; The leaves, like silver burnished new, Slide rustling rife on every spray.)

Anne’s crown consists of twelve detachable stems that could be packed away to make the entire artifact moveable; each one is marked with a tiny Roman numeral.87 The number of stems probably refers to the twelve 87 See Dickens, “Monarchy and Cultural Revival,” pp. 8–31, at p. 8.

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gemstones in the description of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. In addition to pearls, the crown also includes several other precious stones (sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds), just as the Heavenly Jerusalem is studded with precious stones.88 We find the same description of precious gems in Pearl where the pearl maiden resides in a courtly heaven with Christ and His virgins: As John the apostel hit saw with sight, I saw that city of gret renoun: Jerusalem so new and ryally dight, As hit was lyght fro the heven adoun. The burgh was all of brende gold bryght, As glemande glasse burnist broun, With gentyl gemmes anunder pyght: With bantels twelve on basyng boun, The fundementes twelve of rich tenoun; Uch tablement was a serlepes stone, As derely devises this ilk toun In Apokalypce the apostel John. (lines 985–95) (As John the apostle saw it of old I saw the city beyond the stream, Jerusalem the new and fair to behold, Sent down from heaven by power supreme. The streets were paved with precious gold, As flawless pure as glass agleam, Based on bright gems of worth untold, Foundation stones twelvefold in team; And set is series without a seam, Each level was a single stone, As he beheld it in sacred dream In Apocalypse, the apostle John.)

As we saw earlier, the Book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse) formed the biblical model for the jeweled hall in which Christ and Catherine are betrothed in the Czech Legend of St Catherine. The Czech poet may have been familiar with the wall paintings of the Apocalypse in Karlstein castle – or the other way around. More significant is the way text and image share 88 See the description in the catalogue of the Schatzkammer der Residenz München (Garten und Seen, 1970), 3rd edn (item 16: Krone einer englischen Königin). The crown came to Munich as part of the dowry of Blanche of Lancaster, daughter of Henry IV, when she married Ludwig III of Bavaria in 1401.

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the same iconography drawn from the Book of Revelation. Nor was this iconography peculiar to the Bohemian court. Both Pearl and the Czech Legend of St Catherine are similar in using imagery of precious gems from the Apocalypse as a setting in which to place the virginal pearl maiden and St Catherine; and both take the form of dream visions. The correlation between precious gems and virginity was nothing new, of course, but it is intriguing that the English and Bohemian poems deploy the same biblical iconography of the Celestial Jerusalem. Although it is unlikely that the Pearl poet would have had direct knowledge of the Bohemian depictions of the Apocalypse, he would have been cognizant of the fashion for apocalyptic themes and imagery at the Ricardian court; and it is plausible that the shared iconography owed something to the presence of Anne as a cultural intercessor between her native Bohemia and her adopted England. If Pearl was written as an elegy on her death in 1394, this would make the apocalyptic iconography all the more appropriate, since it would have been understood as a compliment to the dead queen’s memory. As Sarah Stanbury succinctly puts it: “The New Jerusalem would be an entirely fitting housing for her [Anne’s] imperial soul. A favorite image for aristocratic patrons, Pearl’s New Jerusalem, one might speculate, was strategically chosen to link not only this world with eternity, but also England with Bohemia and a royal international lineage.”89 At all events, it is highly likely that the Pearl poet was familiar with illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts, and perhaps also with the painted depictions in the chapter house of Westminster abbey.90 The Pearl poet may also have been familiar with Richard Maidstone’s Latin panegyric Concordia, an account of Richard and Anne of Bohemia’s triumphal entry into London to mark the occasion of Richard’s reconciliation with his capital city in 1392. As John Bowers has pointed out, Maidstone’s poem is suffused with the language of the Song of Songs. Moreover, the pageant described by Maidstone itself drew upon the Book of Revelation with a tableau vivant of the Heavenly Jerusalem arranged with choirs of singing angels.91 As Nigel Saul has suggested, courtly iconography and political ideology dovetail in this sumptuous pageant: “The general aim appears to have been to present London in the role of the New Jerusalem. Richard, like Christ at the Second Coming, was entering his 89 Pearl, ed. Stanbury, p. 16. 90 See Riddy, “Jewels in Pearl”, p. 145. 91 Bowers, The Politics of Pearl, pp. 31–32.

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kingdom for the second time …This was a portrayal of which he would have approved: as his surviving iconography shows, he was given to seeing himself in Christ-like terms.”92 The celestial procession of Christ and the virgins in Pearl also recalls Richard’s triumphal entry into London accompanied by Queen Anne and her ladies in 1392: Right as the maynful mone con rise Ere then the day-glem drive al doun, So sodenly on a wonder wyse I was ware of a prosessyoun. (1093–96) (As the great moon begins to shine While lingers still the light of day, So in those ramparts crystalline I saw a procession wend its way.)

The celestial evocation of the pearl maiden also resonates with the idealized description of Queen Anne in Maidstone’s poem. The Queen is covered from head to toe with gleaming gems (“Ad capud a planta; nil nisi gemma patet”) (line 125) such as carbuncle, adamant, and beryl, making her apiece with the celestial Jerusalem that forms the backdrop to the procession. Richard and Anne’s entry into London is also reminiscent of Emperor Charles IV’s pre-coronation procession through Prague from the castle (Hradčany) in the western extremity of the city to Vyšehrad in the south in 1355. As David Rollason has pointed out, Charles’s city planning of Prague was intended to enhance his regality by employing it as an elaborate stage set for his coronation. The London equivalent to Prague’s processional route across the Charles Bridge between the Castle and Vyšehrad was Cheapside, a thoroughfare much broader in the Middle Ages than now, which was also used as a ceremonial route for the coronation of English kings as they processed from the Tower of London to Westminster abbey.93 Cheapside was the principal setting for Richard’s triumphal Christ-like entry into London in 1392. Just as the royal processions through Prague and London were intended to emulate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, so the description of Christ and his maidens entering the Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl evokes the royal processions of the Ricardian and Luxembourg courts. The heavenly and earthly courts mirror each other, the one reinforcing the 92 Saul, Richard II, p. 343. 93 Rollason, The Power of Place, p. 216.

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legitimacy of the other. This was especially true of Richard, whose childless marriage was probably based on the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is no accident that the tester above their tombs at Westminster abbey depicts the Coronation of the Virgin flanked by angels holding up Richard’s and Anne’s coats of arms. It is hardly coincidental that the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem as a splendid earthly court should loom so large in the art and literature commissioned by Richard II and Charles IV. Richard deployed the imagery of Christ’s Second Coming to emphasize his own semi-divine rule, just as Emperor Charles saw himself as alter Christus. In the imagery of the Apocalypse in Pearl and the Czech Legend of St Catherine the devotional economics of salvation and the ideological interests of late medieval rulership converge. We find the same confluence of piety and politics in the Apocalypse tapestry made for Louis, duke of Anjou between 1377 and 1382, now in the Château d’Angers in France. The eschatological themes of the Apocalypse tapestry served a political as well as a religious purpose for its Valois patrons: Louis of Anjou commissioned the tapestries during the Hundred Years’ War in order to bolster the French cause against the English

Fig. 38  The Apocalypse tapestry, Angers, France (1377–82)

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by associating France’s recovery from military disaster with the ultimate triumph of good over evil at the end of time (fig. 38).94 The Last Judgment is also the theme of the Holy Thorn reliquary commissioned by John, duke of Berry around 1400. This luxurious reliquary made of gold and pearls houses the duke’s collection of thorns from the Crown of Thorns, originally purchased by Louis IX (St Louis) from the emperor of Byzantium. The reliquary depicts the Last Judgment: at the base, angels sound trumpets from the tops of golden castle walls while souls emerge from coffins on the green-enameled hill above.95 This luxurious relic represents the perfect fusion of the heavenly and earthy courts and, as such, provides a powerful visual analogue to the English poem Pearl. We might even go so far as to conclude that the relic and the poem – one French, the other English – were forged from the same international court culture. In both works politics and piety dovetail to proclaim the sacral nature of Valois and Plantagenet rule. Further evidence of the popularity of the Apocalypse around 1400 are the stained-glass panels in the east window of York minster, commissioned around 1405 and completed three years later. The link between York minster and the Ricardian court was Richard Scrope (ca. 1350–1405), a close associate of the king’s who was enthroned as archbishop of York in 1398. In the summer of 1405 Scrope put himself at the head of a rebel army against the rule of Henry IV. The rebellion failed and the archbishop was beheaded on June 8, 1405. The east window was not completed until three years later, but its theme of the Last Days before the Second Coming of Christ must have resonated with the citizens of York as they faced a terrible retribution from the new king – fortunately, one that never happened.96 The Last Judgment is also the theme of the mosaic on the façade of the St Vitus cathedral in Prague, where Emperor Charles and his third wife, Anne of Schweidnitz, kneel before the triumphant risen Christ amid the salvation and damnation of human souls (fig. 39). The triumph of Christ over the Anti-Christ is deployed in the political interests of the imperial ruler’s triumph over heresy, which Charles opposed in his territories but which was to be unleashed in the years after 94 See Francis Muel, The Tapestry of the Apocalypse at Angers: Front and Back (Nantes, 1996). 95 Porras, Art of the Northern Renaissance, p. 25. 96 See Sarah Brown, Apocalypse: The Great East Window of York Minster (London, 2014), pp. 12–13.

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Fig. 39  Mosaic of the Last Judgment, St Vitus cathedral, Prague

his death in his kingdom of Bohemia.97 Richard also saw himself as the extirpator of heresy, as is evidenced by the explicit wording of the epitaph on his tomb at Westminster abbey: “He crushed heretics and laid low their friends” (“Obruit hereticos et eorum stravit amicos”).98 After he returned from his expedition to Ireland in 1395, Richard was presented with a de luxe copy of a treatise refuting the twelve heresies of the Lollards by the Dominican friar Roger Dymock (Trinity Hall MS 17). It is perhaps significant in this connection that the Czech Legend of St Catherine of Alexandria may also have been written by a Dominican friar for the court of Charles IV. A major reason for the popularity of this saint among the Dominicans was her ability to refute the religious errors of the pagan sages, whom she ultimately converts to Christianity. This ideological function was deemed especially important in an era of rampant heresy and would explain Catherine’s popularity with the orthodox Emperor Charles. The same is perhaps true of the pearl maiden, who manifests many of the same qualities as Catherine of Alexandria. When she instructs the naïve dreamer in the dangers of worldly pride and seeks to bring him 97 See Richard Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Liverpool, 1979). 98 Duffy, Royal Tombs, p. 171.

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to the truth of Christian teaching, her strident manner evokes St Catherine berating the pagan Emperor Maxencius: “Jueler,” sayd that gemme clene, “Wy bourde ye men? So mad ye be. Thre wordes has thou spoken at ene; Unavysed, forsothe, were alle thre.” (lines 289–92) (“Jeweler,” said that gem at this, “Such mockery comes of mortal pride! Most ill-advised your answer is And errors grave your thoughts misguide.”)

From their prominent position in the court of heaven St Catherine and the pearl maiden emerge not only as virginal brides of Christ but also as articulate spokeswomen for the teachings of the Catholic Church at a time of religious and political turmoil. It is significant that in chapter 12 of his spiritual autobiography Emperor Charles IV interprets the pearl in Matthew, 13: 45–46 as a symbol not of the kingdom of God (as in the Gospels) but of the law of God.99 This change of emphasis is entirely consistent with Charles’s desire to unite divine and temporal authority under his own imperial rule and to impose religious orthodoxy within the Holy Roman Empire. In his later years Richard II also demonstrated his commitment to orthodox teaching by seeking to punish heretics within his kingdom. Both St Catherine and the pearl maiden can be seen to personify not only virginal purity as brides of Christ but also the authority of the Church. Set against the backdrop of the papal schism, which lasted from 1378 to 1417, the composition of these Czech and English poems may be said to reflect the need for the temporal power (in particular the emperor) to assert its influence and power in the face of burgeoning heresy. Significantly, this period of crisis in Church authority saw the emergence of several influential women mystics like St Bridget of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe – strong women whose orthodox voices proclaimed hope and unity at a time of religious division. It is no coincidence that the central female figures of the Czech Legend of St Catherine and the Middle English Pearl are also articulate, strong women who instruct wayward men and seek to bring them to the truth of Christian teaching. In upholding 99 “Circa quam parabolam primum notandum est, quod margarita gemma est mundissima, clari coloris et sine ulla macula, et ideo in hac parabola mistico intellectu legi debet, in qua multa bona, munda et clara ac immaculata opera contintetur, non immerito potest similari.” Vita Karoli Quarti, p. 106.

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and articulating the sacral power and prestige of the Christian rulers for whom these texts were presumably written, Catherine of Alexandria and the pearl maiden personify the convergence of the secular and sacred, the political and pious dimensions of the international court culture.

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Conclusion: The End of the Ricardian Court Culture

The funeral of Richard II at the Dominican friary of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire in March 1400 marked not only the end of the king’s life but also the symbolic end of the international court culture he embodied. Richard’s own clearly stated desire to be buried at Westminster abbey next to his first consort, Anne of Bohemia, was ignored in favor of a more obscure location. His burial in the highly visible royal mausoleum at Westminster would have represented too great a threat to the new Lancastrian regime. Instead, a memorial service, attended by the new King Henry IV, was held at St Paul’s cathedral with Richard’s body clearly on display. The objective of this compromise arrangement was to kill two birds with one stone – to fulfil the pragmatic need to display the former king’s corpse so that rumors of his survival could be eliminated (as far as possible), while denying Richard’s own desire to be reunited with his deceased wife (the double tomb commissioned by him was already in place and other aspects of the king’s regality, such as his full-length portrait, were already on display). Although it was possible to remove his portrait from the abbey it would have been difficult – if not impossible – to move the double tomb, which had been completed by this time. The result, as Joel Burden, states was a “classic fudged affair.”1 The desire to suppress the memory of Richard’s rule implied by such a fudge was particular not only to the dead king’s obsequies but also to the international court culture over which he had presided. Sundering Richard’s earthly remains from those of his wife was perhaps the most symbolically effective way of suppressing the memory of the international 1 Joel Burden, “How Do You Bury a Deposed King? The Funeral of Richard II and the Establishment of the Lancastrian Dynasty,” in Dodds and Biggs (eds.) Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs (York, 2003), pp. 35–53.

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court culture they represented. As this book has argued, it was Richard’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia that allowed the international court culture to flourish in England. But there was always internal resistance to that culture, principally from the pro-war party and the Appellants. As we saw in chapter 1, attempts to dismantle the international culture had begun as early as 1386–88 when the Lords Appellant (of whom Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, was a junior member) purged the Ricardian court, executed some of the king’s adherents (including his former tutor, Simon Burley), and exiled others such as his favorite Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford. During this period, known as the Merciless Parliament, Queen Anne’s Bohemian entourage was drastically reduced and several of them were forced to return home, including Anne’s maid of honor Agnes Lancecrona, with whom de Vere had scandalously eloped in 1386. Purging the court of these unwanted foreign elements was not only a political coup, it was also a cultural assault on Richard’s Francophone and international proclivities. Politics, power, and literature are never very far apart in any age, but they especially converge in moments of crisis like 1388, and 1399–1400 when Richard was deposed and murdered. It is important to emphasize here the ongoing resistance to Richard’s international court throughout his reign precisely because this resistance originated at the same source: the Lords Appellant were clearly hostile not only to Richard but to everything he represented – his advocacy of peace with France, his Franco-Bohemian wife, and her extensive entourage. When Anne kneeled for hours before Gloucester to appeal for the life of the king’s former chamberlain, Sir Simon Burley, she was unsuccessful, and Burley was duly beheaded on Tower Hill.2 The intention – and no doubt the effect – of this incident was both to frighten and to humiliate the king, and it is something he neither forgot nor forgave. Toward the end of his reign he wrought a terrible revenge on the Lords Appellant. It is significant in this context to consider Richard’s identification with Christ in the court art he commissioned both before and after Anne’s death in 1394, as discussed in chapter 4. If we take the king’s staged reconciliation with the city of London in 1392, Richard presents himself entering his kingdom like Christ triumphantly entering the New Jerusalem. Here he was emulating both the resurrected Christ and Emperor Charles, whose triumphant progress through Prague from the castle over the Charles Bridge to the Old Town was modeled both on Roman triumphs 2 Saul, Richard II, p. 96.

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and on Christ’s Resurrection. After Anne’s death, Richard’s Christological self-representation seems to have shifted from the positive model of the resurrected Christ to the suffering Christ on the way to Calvary. We glimpse this darker image in the Westminster portrait commissioned around 1395, and to some extent in the Wilton Diptych. As is frequently pointed out, Anne appears to have exercised a stabilizing influence on Richard. Moreover, she may have encouraged him to identify with her father’s positive image as a triumphant Christ. The magnates’ resistance to Richard’s vengeance crystallized around Bolingbroke’s rebellion when he returned to England from exile in 1399. As we saw in chapter 1, even before Richard’s surrender and deposition, his badge of the White Hart had been removed from the gateway of Warwick castle. This process of removing all evidence of his legacy – both political and cultural – continued into Henry IV’s reign. As Paul Strohm has argued, Richard’s death in 1400 was hardly the end of the matter: not only did Henry IV face continued resistance to his new rule from Richard’s supporters in the years following his usurpation of the crown; he also had to contend with the spectral survival of Richard – both in the reincarnated form of imposters and, more seriously still, in the very illegitimacy of his own usurpation. Exemplifying Kantorowicz’s thesis of the king’s two bodies – one physical and temporal, the other disembodied and sacral – Richard survived his murder at Pontefract to haunt his successors in the political form of his own legitimacy.3 The suppression of the legacy of Richard’s international court culture was, I have argued, concomitant with the suppression of the memory of Anne of Bohemia. When Henry IV married his daughter Blanche of Castile to Ludwig III of the Palatine in 1401 he sent Anne’s crown as part of her dowry. Physical objects encode memories – pleasant or unpleasant – of those who leave them behind when they die. Unconscious or not, Henry’s decision to get rid of the crown suggests that he was keen to relinquish the material objects associated with the memory of Richard’s queen. But Henry was not alone in this process of cultural forgetting. Unwittingly perhaps, Chaucer colluded with the Lancastrian regime by removing the reference to the queen in the revised (G) prologue of The Legend of Good Women. This deletion has usually been explained as a sensitive gesture following the queen’s death. But, as chapter 2 argued, there may be a deeper motivation at work in the suppression of Anne’s memory: was 3 Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 102–3.

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Chaucer canceling not only the queen’s name but everything she represented? Was Chaucer’s ambivalence toward his own project in the Legend a reflection of his ambivalence toward the international court culture Anne represented? Chapter 2 argued that a close reading of the Legend reveals the subtle tensions within Chaucer’s engagement with his project. Deleting the allusion to the queen in the G prologue may be explained in terms of Chaucer’s inability to fulfill his humanistic project to present classical women as martyrs of love. By removing the compliment to Anne perhaps Chaucer was not being diplomatic but self-serving: the desire to please the queen – perhaps even attract her attention – had failed; and with it had ended Chaucer’s fictional engagement with the queen of his imagination. Yet many other allusions to Anne remained fossilized in his work, such as the complimentary reference to her initial in Troilus and Criseyde and the repeated allusion to her as the daughter of an emperor in “The Clerk’s Tale” and “The Man of Law’s Tale” (chapter 2). Chaucer’s posthumous reinvention as the Lancastrian laureate poet helped to facilitate the effacement of these compliments – so successfully in fact that Anne’s importance as Chaucer’s imagined or real patron has been largely overlooked, especially among historians and art historians. The conclusion one comes to, then, is that Chaucer was never fully at ease with the international court culture. On some level he resisted its ideological aim, which was to elevate the ruler and patron at all costs. The turning point – what Paul Strohm calls the break-through for Chaucer – is The Canterbury Tales, in which Chaucer was able to displace his own reservations about the Ricardian court culture by attributing them to his Canterbury narrators. Chapter 3 argued that a similar ambivalence toward the mores of the court is at work in Sir Gawain, where the author’s obvious love of courtly display and luxury exists in a state of tension with his moral scruples about the threat of pride and arrogance. The way this tension is played out in the plot of Sir Gawain is the seduction scenario in fit 3, where the real-life abduction of Agnes Lancecrona by Robert de Vere is reversed to make the Lady the seducer of Gawain. This inversion is not simply a misogynistic reflex on the author’s part; it allows him to compliment de Vere while exonerating him – at least in the fictional world of the romance – of the accusation that he abandoned his wife for another woman (the Bohemian Agnes). The major biographer of Richard II, Nigel Saul, has found little evidence for Anne’s cultural influence, and Amanda Simpson, the most

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important art historian to treat the connections between English and Bohemian art in this period, does not seem to have found Anne and her Bohemian entourage a source of great creative interaction with the English court. If historians and art historians like Saul and Simpson have failed to find much evidence of Anne’s cultural significance, literary historians like David Wallace, Andrew Taylor, and Sarah Stanbury have been more inclined to take Anne seriously.4 It is interesting to speculate on this methodological discrepancy. Historians and art historians tend to employ an empiricist and positivist method in assessing their evidence. Dealing with works of literary invention, literary historians are required to acknowledge the importance of the human imagination as well as the historical context that brought works of literature into being. Even if Queen Anne never actually commissioned any work from Chaucer (her knowledge of English remains a moot point here), this did not prevent Chaucer from imagining her as his patron. But imagining Anne as his patron was surely based on Chaucer’s knowledge of her learning and literacy as well as that of her highly educated family. As we have seen in chapter 2, Chaucer would have been fully aware of Anne’s illustrious pedigree as the daughter and grand-daughter of famous patrons of vernacular writing. The binary between history/fact and imagination breaks down in a way that historians and art historians often fail to realize. It has been my approach to steer a delicate course between history and imagination by reading the works of Chaucer and the Gawain poet in the framework of the international court culture personified by Anne of Bohemia and her husband, Richard II. The tension between the real and the fanciful is especially true of the international court culture, which required discretion from writers like Chaucer and Machaut, whose modest social origins made direct reference to royal patrons a balancing act between boldness and caution, flattery, and humility. The delicate relation of the real to the imagined is especially relevant to the poem Pearl and, to a lesser extent, to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I have argued that both texts are products of the court of Richard II and even allude to the leading players in that world (Richard II and his favorite Robert de Vere, Anne of Bohemia and her maid Agnes Lancecrona who eloped with 4 See Andrew Taylor, “Anne of Bohemia and the Making of Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), 95–119; David Wallace, “Anne of Bohemia: Queen of England and Chaucer’s Emperice,” Litteraria Pragensia 5.9 (1995), 1–16. See Sarah Stanbury’s valuable introduction to her edition of Pearl.

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de Vere). The sheer indirection and caution with which the anonymous poet approaches this world is perhaps indicative of the extent to which he was part of it. Chaucer seems have been bolder in his compliments to Queen Anne, but that might also suggest, paradoxically perhaps, that he was more in the margins of the court than the Gawain/Pearl poet. This study has tried to tease out some of these allusions – not only to bring Anne into cultural prominence but also to place the historical Chaucer and the Gawain/Pearl poet back into the court culture to which they belonged. That Chaucer saw himself as marginal and perhaps even resented the popularity of alliterative poetry at the court of Richard II is suggested by the famous words in the prologue to “The Parson’s Tale”: But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man; I kan nat geste ‘rum, ram, ruf ’ by lettre, Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre. (lines 40–42)

These words have often been cited as the hauteur of a London-based poet toward a remote and distinctively provincial culture, but the truth might be the other way round: speaking through the mouth-piece of the Parson before he launches into his “mirye tale in prose” (line 946) Chaucer may well be articulating his own frustrated sense of marginalization at a court where the alliterative works of the Gawain poet held fashionable sway. Chaucer’s first readers may have been his male friends and associates like Gower and Strode, as Paul Strohm has demonstrated, but this did not prevent him from imagining a more illustrious audience, including King Richard II and his consort.5 It is difficult not to conclude, based on the numerous allusions and compliments to Anne sprinkled through his oeuvre from the early Parliament of Fowls to The Legend of Good Women and The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer never ceased to have Anne in mind as his ideal reader even if – perhaps especially if – his compliments never actually reached the queen. One of the defining features of the international court culture was its pro-feminist animus and the central role of women both as patrons and as consumers. Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Machaut all wrote with women patrons and readers in mind: Boccaccio dedicated his De Claris mulieribus to a Neapolitan countess; Petrarch wrote his De laudibus feminarum for the Empress Anne; while Machaut was clearly composing his Jugement dou roy de Navarre with Bonne of Luxembourg in mind. Anne of Bohemia’s 5 For Chaucer’s audience see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA, 1989).

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uncle, Wenceslas of Brabant, and his wife were so concerned to include as many ladies as possible at the tournament held at their court in Brussels in 1377 that ducal letters were sent to recruit female participants from the surrounding province.6 By the beginning of the fifteenth century the strength of pro-feminism at the European courts enabled a female writer, Christine de Pizan, to emerge as a champion and defender of women’s rights.7 Christine was born in 1384, the daughter of an astrologer at the French court of Charles VI. Shortly after 1405 all her existing works were collected in a beautiful illuminated manuscript probably intended for Louis of Orléans; after he was murdered it was acquired by John, duke of Berry.8 Chaucer was caught up in all this pro-feminist enthusiasm, but one is left wondering how much of it was motivated by his genuine enthusiasm for women and how much of it was simply the desire to be part of a sophisticated international club of writers. Chaucer was clearly using Anne of Bohemia to play the role of humanist and feminist. But the role did not come naturally to him; the tension between Chaucer the courtier and Chaucer the misogynist becomes highly apparent in The Legend of Good Women; and only in The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer able to side-step the predicament by speaking through the narrative voices of his pilgrims, in effect displacing his conflicted relation to women onto characters like the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and the Clerk of Oxford. The second half of this book has argued – controversially perhaps – that the obscurity of the Gawain poet’s identity can partly be explained by the Lancastrian desire to suppress the memory of the international court culture. Of course, such attempts were never completely successful. The famous Westminster portrait of Richard II has survived, as have the Wilton Diptych and the double tomb of Richard and Anne in Westminster abbey. But these survivals may have more to do with Henry V’s decision to reinter Richard’s remains at Westminster in a desire to forget the internecine conflicts of his father’s reign. Here, memory and forgetting have a dialectical relation to each other: in order to “forget” the divisive legacy of Henry IV’s reign, Henry V was required to “remember” the reign of his father’s predecessor by having Richard reburied in the central location of 6 Vale, The Princely Court, p. 198. 7 See Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender (Cambridge, 1999). 8 See Marcel Thomas, The Golden Age: Manuscript Painting at the Time of Jean, Duc de Berry (London, 1979), 74.

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Westminster abbey. In so doing, Henry V was not merely conforming to Richard’s own wishes as expressed in his will of April 1399; he was bringing closure to a period of political instability that spanned the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. The fate of the Cotton Nero manuscript offers a curious analogue to that of Richard’s earthly remains. Just as the dead king was initially consigned to semi-oblivion in the obscurity of King’s Langley, so was the manuscript containing the works of a major Ricardian poet forced to languish far from the capital where those works may well have been written. The history of the manuscript’s provenance is obscure, but its location in the north of England centuries before it was placed in the British Library in the nineteenth century oddly replicates the fate of Richard himself. Although the manuscript may have been owned by – and made for – the Stanley family of Staffordshire and Cheshire, the earliest reference to it occurs in a list of manuscripts made before 1614 by a Yorkshire book collector, Henry Savile of Banke. By 1621 it had passed into the hands of the distinguished antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, whence it derives its current name.9 The fact that the works of the Gawain poet survive in a small, undistinguished, and provincial manuscript is a fortunate accident of history, but also a telling indicator that it was perhaps preceded by a lost or destroyed manuscript of a more de luxe and courtly nature. The unusual full-page illustrations that accompany the texts may have been added later, but their size has attracted much interest and puzzlement. They certainly recall the full-length images in the Bohemian version of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville extant in the British Library. Is it possible that the illustrations in the Cotton Nero manuscript were in fact modeled on the example of courtly manuscripts such as the British Library Mandeville? The fact that all four works are contained in one volume also suggests that the manuscript may be a copy of a lost presentation copy that was given to a noble or royal patron. The main problem we face in linking the works of the Gawain poet to the court of Richard II is the lack of overt evidence. Whereas Chaucer references Anne of Bohemia several times in his oeuvre – suggesting that he at least imagined himself in some sort of relation to the queen and her court – and Gower tells us that he met Richard II on the Thames, where he was encouraged to write his Confessio Amantis – there is no equivalent indication in the works of the Gawain poet that he was actually commissioned 9 See A.S.G. Edwards, “The Manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x,” p. 198.

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to write for the royal couple or wrote with them in mind. Yet, as chapters 3 and 4 have sought to demonstrate, Sir Gawain and Pearl betray many more courtly features than either Chaucer or Gower. The sheer attention to the details of courtly attire and style in both works argues for an author who formed part of the international court culture. In the case of Sir Gawain this fascination with the luxury of the international court is not always easy to reconcile with the poet’s moralistic training as a clerk. This tension becomes particularly acute in the bedroom scenes of Sir Gawain, where Sir Gawain is presented as the victim of a female seduction scene that has its literary and biblical origins in the Old Testament narrative of Potiphar’s wife attempting to rape Joseph. In Pearl the tension between clerical and courtly writer is less apparent, partly because the central female character – the pearl maiden – exercises her authority in the other world and partly because the author is writing in the hagiographic vein of the virgin-martyr tradition in which women transcend torture and death to become triumphant embodiments of Christian truth. In Pearl the Heavenly Jerusalem that forms the aesthetic and religious centerpiece of the poem is intended to reflect the royal court. They are linked by a shared ideological vision of the king as a Christ-like figure and his kingship as a sacral as well as temporal office. The central location of the pearl maiden in the heavenly court mirrors the prominence of Anne of Bohemia at the court of Richard II. If Pearl was specifically written as an elegy on the death of Anne of Bohemia in 1394, this links the anonymous poet not only to the memory of the queen but also to the international court culture she represented. It was perhaps the Pearl poet’s proximity to the queen and her court that doomed him to oblivion in the years after Anne’s and Richard’s deaths. Chaucer emerged to fill this vacuum as the laureate poet of the new Lancastrian regime. It is hardly a coincidence that Chaucer’s apotheosis in the Troilus frontispiece should coexist with the defacement of Richard’s features. In this famous image Chaucer is not only invented as the great English poet, he is also transformed into a young, handsome courtier – not unlike, in fact, the king whose features have been defaced. In a curious case of transference, Chaucer has not only replaced Richard, he has been reincarnated as Richard’s double – a curious act of remembering and forgetting of a lost culture, one that was more glamorous and cosmopolitan than the nationalist one that succeeded it. The de luxe manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde was decorated at the very beginning of the fifteenth century. Striking about the frontispiece is its synthesis of international and English elements: the elegant castle is

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Fig. 40  The Sherborne Missal. British Library Add MS 74236 (early fifteenth century), Trinity Sunday f. 276

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reminiscent of the buildings which are found in the background of many of the manuscripts commissioned for John, duke of Berry; the landscape with its deep rocks recalls Italianate models; and the prominence of women in the foreground attests to the pro-feminism of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. The borders, however, are typically English, suggesting a synthesis of native and international styles that characterizes the subtle blend of French and English romance elements that we find in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Another English manuscript that combines native English with Continental influences is the Sherborne Missal, which was probably executed at the Benedictine abbey of Saint Mary of Sherborne in Dorsetshire. The missal shows obvious stylistic similarities to the Bible of Wenceslas IV and perhaps also to the Rhineland school of painting (fig. 40). These foreign influences were made possible by the marriage of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia, who brought with her highly trained scribes and illuminators from her native Prague. It is possible that a Bohemian illuminator worked on the missal after the collapse of the Ricardian court. The Troilus frontispiece was originally to have been embellished with a great number of paintings, for which the scribe had left the necessary space on the designated pages; but for some reason the project was never completed. It seems likely that the fate of the unfinished manuscript coincided with the reigns of Henry IV or Henry V. The usurpation thus marked a cultural as well as a political rupture with the past. But the unfinished nature of the Troilus manuscript also reflects the shift from Ricardian fantasies of empire to Lancastrian realities of conquest. As Sylvia Federico states, “[Trojan] fantasies of empire took ideological precedence over actual military attempts at imperial conquest between 1380 and 1415.”10 The shift from Ricardian fantasy to Lancastrian reality really began not in 1415 (with Henry V’s victory over France at the battle of Agincourt) but with the reign of Henry IV. As Michael Bennett has pointed out, Henry was very different from his glamorous predecessor: Henry clearly did not enjoy his kingship. The gallant knight of the 1390s became in the following decade a sort of “leper king”. For all his chivalric reputation and his real qualities of mind, he found himself diplomatically isolated and without the means to maintain an honourable court. He eschewed ceremonial display and showed no inclination to maintain that carapace of regal splendor that Richard had assembled. His style of kingship doubtless reflected his personality and circumstances, including 10 Federico, New Troy, p. xv.

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increasing financial stringency. It was also a political statement, an implicit contrast between Richard’s lofty concept of monarchy and his own. It is particularly noteworthy that he neglected the sacral dimension of his kingship.11

Henry’s more sober approach to statecraft is reflected in the bureaucratic nature of the writers and clerks who surrounded him. With Chaucer dead and the Gawain poet no longer active at the royal court, the emphasis shifted from courtly entertainment to the need to legitimate the new Lancastrian regime. As Jenni Nuttall has convincingly demonstrated, “the post-1399 works of Hoccleve, Scogan and Gower, the political poems in Oxford, Bodelian Library MS Digby 102, and the anonymous poems Richard the Redeless, Mom and the Sothsegger and Crowned King reflect and seek to reconfigure the linguistic and political environment in which they were written.”12 In some ways this is also true for Chaucer and the Gawain poet, who helped to propagate Richard II’s very different vision of his kingship. Whereas The Legend of Good Women and Pearl were Ricardian in their celebration of womanhood, “these [later] texts can be properly described as Lancastrian literature, both chronologically and culturally, because all of them respond in some way to Henry’s accession and its impact on political debate.”13 In short, court literature became more inward looking and introspective, seeking to legitimate the new regime’s credentials rather than to embrace the larger cultural world of Continental courts. The role and influence of women like Bonne of Luxembourg and Anne of Bohemia, so characteristic of the international court culture, gave way to a very different set of male-centered concerns and a dependence on traditional institutions that Richard had undermined. As Juliet Barker has pointed out, “The weakness of Henry’s claim to legitimate kingship also made him dependent on those very institutions and policies which Richard had decided were an impediment to his rule: the magnates, parliament and the war with France.”14 In the same year that Richard was murdered, his brother-in-law Wenceslas IV, who had been his rival in the 1390s but also a fellow patron of the arts and book lover, was deposed as king of the Romans, ending his dream of succeeding his father, Charles, as Holy Roman Emperor. With

11 Michael Bennett, “Henry of Bolingbroke and the Revolution of 1399,” p. 30. 12 Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, p. 4. 13 Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, p. 4. 14 Juliet Barker, 1381. The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Cambridge, MA, 2014), p. 410.

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Richard dead and Wenceslas discredited (he remained as king of Bohemia), the imperial title passed to the latter’s younger brother, Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437). Wenceslas continued to patronize the arts but the international prestige of the Prague court was a thing of the past. Even after Wenceslas’s death in 1419 Sigismund was unable to be crowned King of Bohemia because the Hussite nobility, who effectively ruled the country, could not forgive him for breaking his promise of safe-conduct to Jan Hus; when the reformer appeared to answer charges of heresy at the Council of Constance, Sigismund had him arrested, thrown into jail, and put on trial. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415. During his imprisonment in Constance he had sent eloquent letters in Czech to his followers in Bohemia, including influential noblemen. Sigismund paid the price for his bad faith by being denied the throne of Bohemia until 1436, when he was eventually crowned in Prague. For fifteen years he was an emperor in exile from his regnal territories and his imperial capital, whose university and court had lost their international luster. Rather like the Lancastrian literature of Henry IV’s court, fifteenth-century writing in Czech ceased to be outward looking and cosmopolitan and became increasingly preoccupied with the internal political and religious situation in Bohemia. Courtly works of Czech literature like the anonymous Legend of St Catherine, probably written for the court of Charles IV, and the imperial political concerns of the New Council (ca. 1394) by Smil Flaška of Pardubice, gave way to works of a more tendentious and politically introspective nature. The increasingly polarized nature of Bohemian society – divided between Hus’s supporters and traditional wing of the Catholic Church – are reflected in dialogic works like The Dispute between Prague and Kutná Hora, the former an allegorical representation of the reform movement, the latter of Catholic orthodoxy.15 As a consequence of the religious upheavals in Bohemia and the deposition of Wenceslas IV as king of the Romans, the court of Prague ceased to be the cultural and political epicenter of the international court culture. As David Wallace has importantly explored, the Luxembourg court of Emperor Charles IV and his son Wenceslas IV had formed a crucial conduit between Italy and England in the reign of Richard II, perhaps facilitating Chaucer’s access to Italian manuscripts by Petrarch and Dante. As we have seen, the leading courtiers of the Prague court, like Chancellor John of Středa and Archbishop Ernest of Pardubice, were eager collectors of humanist 15 Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia, 144–46.

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books by Petrarch and Boccaccio, thus providing a valuable link between Chaucer’s London and the northern Italian city states. This Bohemian– English–Italian nexus may also help to explain the Pearl poet’s access to works by Dante and Boccaccio. Although the Plantagenet–Luxembourg alliance was revived during the reign of Henry V when the English king invited Sigismund to England and collaborated with the emperor to end the Hussite–Lollard heresy at the Council of Constance, the international court culture that had characterized the Anglo-Bohemian alliance during the reign of Richard II was a thing of the past. The situation in France was equally discouraging. The great bibliophile Valois, Charles V, had died in 1380 and was succeeded by his son Charles VI (r. 1380–20), whose mental instability made him unfit for office. The power vacuum created by the king’s intermittent bouts of madness was filled by his relatives, and a struggle ensued between the duke of Burgundy, the leader of the Burgundian party, and the king’s younger brother Louis of Orléans, the leader of the Armagnacs. An already inflamed situation became even worse when John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, ordered the murder of his rival, Louis of Orleans, in 1407. The two parties were now at loggerheads and France was torn apart by civil war.16 Henry V of England, who had ambitions to reclaim the duchy of Normandy annexed by King Philippe-Auguste of France two centuries earlier in 1204, exploited the divisive situation and invaded France. Henry’s famous victory over the French (actually the Armagnacs, since the Burgundian party remained neutral) at Agincourt in 1415 rendered a devastating blow to the international court culture and the cultural links that had been forged in the late fourteenth century between England, France, and Bohemia. Of all the great bibliophiles of the age only Charles V’s brother, John, duke of Berry, remained active as a patron of the arts. His famous Book of Hours, known as Les Très Riches Heures, was made between 1410 and 1416, but its greatness owed more to the past than to the future. That other great patron of the arts and book collector, Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, had died in 1402. For sure, beautiful illuminated manuscripts were still being commissioned for English patrons in the early fifteenth century. A fine example is the Bedford Book of Hours, commissioned by John of Lancaster, third son of Henry IV of England, who became duke of Bedford in 1414 and 16 See Juliet Barker, Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, 1417–1450 (Cambridge, MA, 2009).

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regent of the kingdoms of England and France after the death of his older brother, Henry V, in 1422.17 Bedford’s taste for French manuscripts was no doubt encouraged by his role as regent of France, which required him to spend long periods away from England. His Francophile tastes may also owe a great deal to his marriage in 1423 to Anne of Burgundy. The Bedford Book of Hours was most probably commissioned for Parisian use to celebrate that marriage. In fact, it was only in the reign of Henry VIII that England was to again witness a court culture that came anywhere near the splendor of the Ricardian court. In both cases imperial fantasies were the driving force behind the creation of a munificent court culture that was intended to rival and outstrip those of the French kings and Holy Roman Emperors. Both monarchs commissioned more portraits of themselves than any English ruler up to Henry’s reign; and their obsession with their regal image was part and parcel of their shared ambition to become major players on the European political stage. Richard II’s spectacular meeting with Charles VI of France in Ardres in 1395 – the prologue to his marriage to Charles’s daughter, Isabelle of Valois – anticipated the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold of 1520 when Henry VIII met with Francis I of France on the same space. As Nigel Saul has suggested, the Field of the Cloth of Gold pageant may even have been modeled on the earlier meeting between Richard and Charles.18 As we have seen, Richard’s imperial ambitions were fueled by his status as the son-in-law of the Emperor Charles IV of Bohemia, while Henry VIII’s imperial ambitions were fed by Emperor Maximilian I’s inconsequential talk of adopting Henry as his son and resigning his title.19 But, for Henry VIII, the term “imperial crown” was also a means to justify his claim to have sole jurisdiction in matters ecclesiastical and secular in his own kingdom. In drafting the Act of Restraint of Appeals (1533), which transferred ecclesiastical authority from the pope to the king, Henry’s henchman Thomas Cromwell drew up the medieval justification of imperial power provided by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae with King Arthur as the supreme exemplar of imperial authority.20 It is 17 See Janet Backhouse, The Bedford Hours (London, 1990). 18 Saul, Richard II, pp. 320–21. 19 See Neville Williams, “The Tudors: Three Contrasts in Personality,” in The Courts of Europe, ed. Dickens, pp. 147–67, at p. 156. 20 See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (New York, 2018), p. 144: “By divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire.”

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hardly a coincidence that Geoffrey’s foundational myth of Troy should loom so large in the political myth-making around Richard II, including Maidstone’s Concordia and the opening section of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. With the decline of the courts of Prague, London, and Paris, the epicenter of cosmopolitan activity shifted from the Valois, Luxembourg, and Plantagenet families to the princely courts of Burgundy and the northern Italian city states of Florence, Milan, Mantua, and Ferrara. It is no coincidence that what has been termed the Renaissance “new art” (ars nova) of the fifteenth century developed in Flanders and Florence rather than in the kingdoms of England, France, and Bohemia.21 The chivalric culture of France and Burgundy had been adopted at the northern Italian courts in the fourteenth century, and it was here that the tradition continued to flourish well into the fifteenth century. By the mid- to late fifteenth century Burgundy, under Philip the Good (d. 1477), had eclipsed in splendor and sophistication all other non-Italian courts of Europe. A cadet branch of the Valois family, the dukes of Burgundy inherited the sophistication not only of the French court but also of the Luxembourg courts of Wenceslas of Brabant at Brussels and Emperor Charles IV at Prague: Philip the Bold (d. 1404), duke of Burgundy, was the son of Bonne of Luxembourg and John II of France. The importance of this Luxembourg pedigree is often overlooked; as we have seen in this study, Bonne of Luxembourg commissioned beautiful manuscripts and was the patron of the great French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut. Johan Huizinga has famously characterized the fifteenth century as “the autumn” of the Middle Ages, but, as C.A.J. Armstrong has pointed out, “about the Burgundian court in particular, there was little that could be called autumnal; on the contrary it was enjoying a blazingly hot summer. It was opulent, ostentatious, self-confident.”22 The confidence of the Burgundian court was such that, in the aftermath of the catastrophic death of Charles the Bold at the battle of Nancy in 1477, the Burgundian council acted with complete self-assurance

21 See Shirley Neilsen Blum, The New Art of the Fifteenth Century: Faith and Art in Florence and the Netherlands (New York, 2015). 22 See C.A.J. Armstrong, “The Golden Age of Burgundy: Dukes that Outdid Kings,” in The Courts of Europe, ed. Dickens, pp. 55–75). See also Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996). This new translation from the original Dutch restores the original title of Huizinga’s classic work, which was formerly translated as The Waning of the Middle Ages.

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in negotiating with Maximilian of Habsburg for the hand of Charles’s daughter and heiress, Mary of Burgundy (d. 1482). It is hardly coincidental that the court of Burgundy gave rise to the great fifteenth-century prose adaptations of the Arthurian courtly romances of Chrétien de Troyes. These were “transmuted,” rather than translated, to reflect the tastes of the Burgundian audience. In the prose Erec, for example, tournaments are described at length, reflecting perhaps Duke Philip the Good’s interest in using jousts to mark significant occasions.23 Emblematic of the Franco-Burgundian influence at the Italian courts of the fifteenth century are the Arthurian murals in the Gonzaga place of Mantua executed by the early Renaissance artist Pisanello. Library inventories and correspondence attest that tales of chivalry were read and enjoyed by the Gonzaga, Este, and Visconti rulers of northern Italy. In Mantua in 1407, sixty-seven volumes in French could be found among the 392 manuscripts owned by Gianfrancesco, including seventeen Arthurian prose romances. The presence of chivalric texts in the Este library in 1436 was proportionately similar, and interest in chivalry was also pronounced at the Visconti court of Milan.24 The fact that England, France, and Bohemia were now engaged in war rather than cultivating peace inevitably undermined the international framework in which these courts had been linked in the late fourteenth century. England became mired in the long-term attempt to dominate France from 1415 to 1450, which required an enormous investment in money and men. Hussite Bohemia waged incessant warfare against its Catholic enemies within and beyond the kingdom. Henry V has traditionally been lionized as a great king and soldier, but his territorial ambitions did not survive him: under his weak and ineffectual son Henry VI the conquest of France did not last. Furthermore, England succumbed to a ruinous civil war – actually a series of intermittent fights between the nobility – that was not resolved fully until the triumphant emergence of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. It was only in the second half of the fifteenth century that Bohemia began to emerge from the divisive religious politics of the Hussite revolution when the leading Bohemian nobleman George of Poděbrady ascended the throne. Only with the second reign of Edward 23 See the introduction to Chrétien de Troyes in Prose: The Burgundian Erec and Cligés, trans. Joan Tasker Grimbert and Carol J. Chase (Cambridge, 2011), p. 5. 24 See Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (London, 2001), p. 55.

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IV in the 1470s did England start to recover from the crises of Henry’s VI’s rule. It is significant that Edward IV’s court was influenced by the art and architecture of Burgundy, to where the English king had been exiled for six months from 1470 to 1471. In particular, St George’s chapel at Windsor shows the influence of Burgundian court architecture: the royal pew at Windsor was clearly modeled on the Gruuthuse oratory in Bruges.25 Artists and poets were adjusting to the declining fortunes of the international court cultures even in the final years of the fourteenth century. Chaucer’s deleted reference to Anne of Bohemia from the revised G prologue of his Legend of Good Women was highly indicative of this decline. The deletion is usually explained as Chaucer’s sensitive reaction to the queen’s untimely death in 1394, but it can actually be seen as expedient and self-serving rather than tactful and diplomatic. As Derek Pearsall has proposed: “One could represent his life, and its importance in his writings, as that of a time-serving opportunist and placeman, who pictured his own pliability in all that he saw.”26 To have retained the compliment to the queen after her death would not only have been tactless on Chaucer’s part; it would have prevented him from seeking Lancastrian patronage in the future. Evidently Chaucer did not consider Anne’s husband as a potential patron or he would have left the compliment to her intact. As chapter 2 has argued, the cancelled allusion to Anne effectively released Chaucer from an imagined collaborative project that had singularly failed. Chaucer’s future work would be focused on the massive compilation of The Canterbury Tales, a significant shift away from his earlier courtly works. Another example of authorial “forgetting” was John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which was, as the poet himself asserts, commissioned by Richard II during a chance encounter on the river Thames. But this royal honor did not prevent Gower from dedicating his work to Richard’s rival, Henry Bolingbroke, in the 1390s – even before the latter usurped the throne as Henry IV. The episode of meeting Richard on his barge and Richard’s suggestion that Gower write “som newe thing” (line 51) was not deleted but remained fossilized in the text. It is not clear why Gower chose to switch his literary allegiance from Richard to Bolingbroke, since the former was still at the height of his powers when the rededication took place. But, living in dangerous and uncertain times, medieval poets like Chaucer and Gower could be as fickle and ruthless as the princes they served. Such 25 Armstrong, “The Golden Age of Burgundy,” p. 56. 26 Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 8.

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self-serving tactics were an inevitable corollary of the treacherous and mutable world of the court. Poets like Chaucer and Gower who placed self-interest above factional loyalty were more likely to survive and prosper under the new regime than those whose allegiance bound them to the old order. This may explain the fate not only of a factional writer like Thomas Usk, who, along with Sir Simon Burley, the king’s former chamberlain, fell prey to the court purge of 1386; it may also explain the fate of the Gawain poet’s writings, which have survived in a modest provincial codex. Were it not for the fortuitous survival of this modest manuscript in the British Library, these great works of English literature would also have passed into oblivion – along with the international court culture that engendered them.

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Index Adeliza of Louvain, Queen of England 15 Aeneas of Troy  62–64, 71–72, 76, 152 Alexander the Great  16, 113, 129, 136 Alighieri, Dante  30, 32, 49–50, 73, 81, 197–98 Paradiso 50 Purgatorio 32 Allegory  33, 55, 67, 108, 114, 116, 134, 135, 136, 167 Alliterative Morte Arthur  24, 85, 113, 121–30 Alps  21, 132, 157 Amesbury Abbey  80, 134 Ancrene Wisse 134 Andrew the Chaplain  69 On Love 69 Anne of Bohemia, Queen of England  xv–xvi, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 28–30, 34, 35, 40, 45–50, 54, 60–61, 63–66, 69–70, 72–73, 76, 78, 80, 82, 91–92, 99, 108, 118, 119, 127, 131, 133, 137, 147, 157–58, 161, 162, 167, 169–70, 174, 178, 179, 185–93, 190, 195–96, 202 Burial of  168 Crown of  2, 3, 38, 176 Death of  167 Entourage of  7, 30, 35, 57, 90, 93, 186, 189 Marriage of  xv, 7, 18 Tomb of  3, 4, 82, 102 Anne of Burgundy  199 Anne of Schweidnitz  147, 181 Angevin court  33, 59 Anti-semitism  29, 56, 57, 73, 84

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Apocalypse  43, 128, 147, 177–78, 180–81 Apocalypse Tapestry  180 Arma Christi  23, 57, 137, 157 Arthurian court  41, 93, 103, 106, 114, 120, 201 Arundel, Richard Fitzalan, fourth earl of  8, 68, 128 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury 5 Auchinleck Manuscript  17 Austria  18, 33, 133 Avignon  26, 147 Bache, Alexander  125 Bavaria  3, 13, 104, 127, 149, 171 Beauneveu, André  38 Bedford Book of Hours  198–99 Benoit de Sainte-Maure  61 Roman de Troie 61 Blanche of Castile  187 Blanche of Lancaster  3, 29, 170, 177 Blessed Virgin Mary  40, 67, 68, 78, 102, 120, 130, 139, 142–43, 147, 159, 162–63, 166, 169–70, 180 Boccaccio, Giovanni  30, 50, 61, 64, 72, 76–78, 81, 190, 195, 198 Decameron 76 De mulieribus claris 50 Il Filostrato  61, 65 Teseida   50 Bohemia  xvi, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16–17, 19, 23, 26–28, 32, 38, 51, 89, 92, 131, 132, 144, 147, 149, 154, 157, 169, 178, 182, 197, 198, 200, 201 Boleslaw II of Masovia  136

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Bolingbroke, Henry  1–2, 4, 8, 107, 123, 126, 186, 187, 202 See also Henry IV, King of England Bonne of Luxembourg  10, 18, 19, 23, 33, 46–48, 52, 54–58, 65, 69, 113, 137, 170, 171, 190, 196, 200 Book of Revelation  141, 146, 177–78, Brabant  xvi, 9, 10, 52 Bricriu’s Feast 87 Britain  28, 62, 86, 97–98, 109, 124, 126 British Library  2, 23, 25, 31, 85, 94, 95, 96, 143, 154, 155, 172, 175, 192, 194, 203 Brussels (court of)  10, 162, 191, 200 Brutus of Troy  28, 30, 41, 62, 124 Burghers of Calais  68 Burgundy  62, 200, 201, 202 Burley, Sir Simon  7–8, 68, 89, 186, 203 Byzantium  22–23, 181 Canticum Canticorum 134 Casimir the Great of Poland  40 Champagne  32, 33, 68 Chapel of St Wenceslas, Karlstein Castle  23–24, 102–3 Chapel of the Blessed Virgin, Karlstein Castle  23, 147 Chapel of the Holy Cross (or Passion), Karlstein Castle  23, 82–83, 145, 146, 162 Chapel of the Virgin Mary, Karlstein Castle  99, 100, 101, 155 Charlemagne  63, 152 Charles Bridge, Prague  27, 153, 179, 186, Charles I, King of England  2, 3 Charles IV, King of France  19 Charles V, King of France  9, 10, 13, 18, 23–24, 28, 35, 38, 40, 43, 62, 104–5, 154, 198 Charles VI, King of France  58, 104, 152, 171, 191, 198, 199 Charles the Bold, King of France  200 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor  xv, 7, 9, 13, 16, 17, 19n.52, 26, 27, 32, 33, 35–36, 38–39, 40, 43, 63, 69, 73, 82,

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86, 88, 90n.12, 99, 102, 104, 116, 117, 127, 131, 139, 141–50, 153–54, 156, 157–58, 162, 167, 179–80, 182–83, 197, 199, 200 See also Golden Bull See also Patronage Vita Caroli Quarti  26 Chaucer, Geoffrey  xv, xvi, 6, 8–12, 19–20, 24, 29–31, 34, 38, 40–41, 43–50, 54, 58–85, 93, 112, 116, 170, 187–93, 196–98, 202–3 “The Clerk’s Tale”  76–80, 188 “The Knight’s Tale”  50, 63, 65, 82, 116 “The Man of Law’s Tale”  76, 80–84, 188 “The Parson’s Tale”  112, 190 “The Prioress’s Tale”  84 “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”  60, 191 The Book of the Duchess  29, 170 The Canterbury Tales  63, 76, 80, 84, 188, 190, 191, 202 The Legend of Good Women 10–11, 33–34, 46–48, 50, 60–61, 65–76, 79–80, 82, 101, 187–88, 190–91, 196, 202 The Parliament of Fowls  58–60, 66, 190 Troilus and Criseyde  6–7, 10–11, 29, 40, 47, 49–50, 60–66, 69–70, 88, 193, 195 Cheshire  31, 85, 98, 99, 109, 110, 192 Chester  31, 86, 110, 115 Chester Castle  109, 110, 114 Chrétien de Troyes  30, 68–69, 72, 87, 90, 98, 144 Eric et Enide 90 Le Chevalier de la Charrette  72, 132, 134 Yvain 90 Christianity  6, 23, 142, 155, 182 Martyrdom  68–70, 72–73, 78, 82, 87, 122, 123, 141, 144, 146, 148, 150, 158–59, 168, 188, 193 Christine de Pizan  191 Cicero 44

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index De amicitia 44 Clanvowe, Sir John  66, 118 Boke of Cupid 66 Clemence of Barking  132, 141, 144 Life of St Catherine  132, 144 Clifford, Sir Lewis  118 Codex Heidelbergensis  63 Cologne  26, 38, 127 Constance, Queen of Hungary  132 Constantinople  23–25, 143 Convent of St George, Prague  132, 135–37 Cotton Nero A. x manuscript  31, 85, 94, 96, 104, 174, 175, 192 Cotton, Sir Robert  192 Council of Constance  6, 119, 197, 198 Cracow  13, 89 Cradock, Sir Richard  98 Crécy  8, 12, 13, 54 Cromwell, Thomas  199 Dalimil Chronicle 60 Decembrio, Uberto  26 Deschamps, Eustace  12, 30 Rondeau 12 Dominican Friary of King’s Langley  4, 185 Dublin 86–87 Durbuy Castle  44, 55 Dymock, Roger  182 Dynter, Edmund de  63 Edmund the Martyr  72, 132, 134 Edward I, King of England  15 Edward II, King of England  150 Edward III, King of England  8–9, 12, 15, 17–18, 20, 24, 53, 68, 107–8, 114, 122, 150, 170 Edward IV, King of England  202 Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince  8, 12, 107, 118 Edward the Confessor  40, 149–50, 152, 159 Eleanor of Aquitaine  59, 68, 69 Eleanor of Castile  15

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Eleanor of Provence  15 Elizabeth of Bohemia  15 Elizabeth of Pomerania, Empress  148 Eltham Manor  30, 46, 48, 66, 69 England  xv, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 56, 58, 61, 62, 66, 75, 80, 81, 85, 87, 92, 93, 97, 102, 112, 114, 121, 126, 127, 132, 147, 158, 152, 158, 167, 176, 192, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 Epic  20, 24, 61, 130, 139 Erghome, John  114 Prophecies of John Bridlington 114 Ernest of Pardubice, archbishop of Prague  51, 91, 197 Eusebius 155 Florence  48, 50, 200 France  xvi, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 18, 19, 23, 32, 56, 62, 102, 104, 107, 109, 114, 122, 131, 152, 180, 181, 186, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201 Francis I, King of France  199 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Emperor  35, 36, 82, 142 De Arte Venandi cum Avibus 36 Friedrich von Meissen  58 Froissart, Jean  17, 18, 30, 33, 46, 52–54, 67, 68, 98, 116 Chroniques 52 La prison amoureuse  33, 54 Méliador  52, 53 Gawain Poet  xv, xvi, 11, 20, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93 Cleanness  93–94, 107, 112 Pearl  3, 11, 30, 31, 66, 85, 93, 131, 132, 147–50, 158, 167–84 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 11, 31, 40, 41, 62, 65–110, 113–21, 124, 130, 152, 188–89, 192, 195, 200 Girard d’Orléans  33 Gender Misogyny  47–48, 65, 75–76, 80, 84, 115, 140, 188, 191

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Gender (continued) Proto-feminism  191, 195 Women as Readers  10, 69, 134, 139, 190 See also Patronage Geoffrey de la Tour Landry  115 Geoffrey of Monmouth  30, 41, 62, 97, 109, 120, 124, 199 Historia regum Britanniae  30, 41, 62, 74, 97, 109, 199 George of Poděbrady  201 Germany  xvi, 13, 36, 38, 53, 63 Golden Bull of Charles IV (1400)  40, 102, 116, 117, 128 “Goldenes Rössl”  164, 171 Gonzaga, Ludovico, Marquis of Mantua 155 Gottfried von Strassburg  144 Tristan 144 Gower, John  xv, 15, 20, 29, 44–49, 92, 123, 190, 192–93, 196, 202–3 Vox clamantis 123 Confessio Amantis  44–46, 92, 192, 202 Gruuthuse Oratory, Bruges  202 Guido de Colonne  61 Historia Destructionis Troiae 61 Guillaume de Machaut   10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 30, 32, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52 La Prise d’Alixandre  12, 13, 43 Le jugement dou roy de Navarre 44, 45, 46, 47 Le jugement du roy dou Behaingne 10, 43, 45, 46, 47, 55, 57 Remede de Fortune 170 Guta of Habsburg  139 Guy of Warwick  17 Hartmann von Aue  90 Erek 90 Iwein 90 Heinrich von Freiberg  144 Heinrich von Meissen (Der Frauenlob)  16, 141 Marienspruch 141 Henry I, King of England  15

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Henry III, King of England  15 Henry IV, King of England  2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 129, 150, 177, 181, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 195, 197, 198, 202 See also Bolingbroke, Henry Henry of Derby (later Henry IV)  125 Henry V, King of England  5, 6, 20, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199, 201 Henry VI, King of England  201 Henry VIII, King of England  153, 199 Henry VII of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor  15, 32, 36, 49, 51, 74 Hervorst, Hugh, Archdeacon of Cologne 127 Historia destructionis Troiae 61 History of the World (Czech translation) 28-29 Hoccleve, Thomas  196 Holy Relics  20, 22, 23, 101, 122, 146, 149, 154–56, 181 Homer  15, 16 Hornyk, Nicholas  7 Hradčany (Prague Castle)  86, 179 Hundred Years War  18, 180 Hus, Jan  119, 197 Imperialism And art 34–41 See also Patronage See also Visual Arts, Imago Christi See also Wilton Diptych Bohemian  xvi, 12, 13, 23, 26–27, 31–33, 36, 50–51, 62–63, 72, 73–74, 89, 104, 127, 131–32, 139, 147–49, 158, 197 British  xvi, 6, 14, 15, 26, 31, 34–41, 62–64, 74, 81, 86, 89, 108–9, 126, 128, 131–32, 137, 148–50, 158, 183–84, 195, 199–200 See also Troy Ireland  1, 86, 87, 108, 109, 126, 144, 182 Isabelle of Bavaria  104, 171, 199 Isabelle of Valois  102, 199 Italy  xvi, 32, 49, 50, 51, 63, 68, 72, 73, 74, 146, 154, 197, 201

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index Jan Očko of Vlaším, Archbishop of Prague  162, 164 Jean de Marville  38 Jeanne of Brabant  10 Jerusalem  88, 146, 177, 178, 179, 180, 186, 193 Jesus Christ  20, 56, 57, 67, 77–78, 81, 92, 102, 125, 131, 134–37, 139, 141–44, 146–47, 153–59, 162, 163, 169, 174, 177–84, 186–87, 193 Jean le Noir  14 Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg 14, 19, 137 Johann von Neustein  13 Johannes von Tepl  67 Der Ackermann aus Böhmen 67 John II, King of France  13, 18, 51, 54, 167, 170, 197 John of Brabant  63 John of Gaunt  1, 170 John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford  198 John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia  10, 12, 13, 15, 24, 32, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 58, 63, 154 John of Středa  13, 51, 167, 197 See also Johann von Neustein John the Baptist  159, 162 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy 198 John the Good See under King John II of France John, duke of Berry  28, 43, 99–100, 103, 110–11, 162, 181, 191, 195, 198 John of Eisemberk  28 John, duke of Normandy See under John II, King of France Julian of Norwich  183 Karlstein Castle  13, 22, 23, 82, 83, 86, 99, 101, 102, 128, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152, 155, 156, 162, 172 Kempe, Margery  183 King’s Langley  4, 5, 185, 192 Kolda of Koldice  135, 136, 146 De strenuo milite  135–36

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Kunigunde of Hohenstaufen  16 Kunigunde, Abbess of the St George Convent, Prague  23, 57, 132–33, 135–39 La Sainte-Chapelle  20, 21, 22, 23 Lady Bonneurté  46, 48, 49, 58 Langland, William  20 Piers Plowman 114 Lancecrona, Agnes  11, 91, 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 186, 188, 189 Laurence of Březová  28, 29, 155 Legend of St Catherine of Alexandria 69, 78, 132, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 197 Leo, Grand Master of the Order of the Cross 157 Leo, King of Armenia  9 Leopold VI, duke of Austria  133 Les Grandes Chroniques de France 62, 104, 105 Liber Regalis  36, 128, 171, 173, 174 Limbourg Brothers  43 Les Très Riches Heures  43, 99, 100, 103, 110, 111, 198 Lobdewe, Bernard  7 Lollard heresy  118, 119, 182, 198 Lollius 62 London  1, 11, 17, 23, 26, 30, 31, 36, 37, 44, 45, 47, 59, 60, 62, 64, 77, 78, 81, 85, 98, 128, 141, 153, 162, 179, 186, 190, 198, 200 Lords Appellant  7, 68, 107, 123, 128, 158, 186 Louis IX, St, King of France  20, 23, 155, 181 Louis d’Orléans  12 Ludwig III, duke of Bavaria  3, 187 Luxembourg  xvi, 1, 8, 9 Luxembourg Genealogy Murals  13, 63 Lydgate, John  61 Fall of Princes 61 Lyric  10, 18, 48, 52, 115, 139, 141, 168 Macclesfield, John  99

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Maidstone, Richard  44, 64, 65, 77, 81, 178, 179, 200 Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie  44, 64, 77, 81, 178, 200 Mandeville, Sir John The Travels of Sir John Mandeville 23, 25, 29, 94, 95, 143, 154–55, 171, 172, 192 Manesse Codex  32, 139, 140 Mantua  13, 200, 201 Margaret of Teschen  30 Margrave of Thuringia  82 Marie de Champagne, Countess  68, 69, 72, 116, 134 Marignola, Giovanni  27 Mary of Burgundy  201 Mary of Woodstock  80, 134 Master John Clerk of Whalley  109 Matthew of Arras  26 Maximilian I, Emperor  199, 201 Maximilian of Habsburg See under Maximilian I, Emperor Meditationes Vitae Christi 27 Méliador  18, 52–53 Merciless Parliament  7, 68, 128, 186 Merlin 119 Michael de la Pole  123 Milan  49, 51, 200, 201 Minnesang 136 Mom and the Sothsegger 196 Montano of Arezzo  33 Moravia  xvi, 13, 133, 143 Morgan Diptych  40, 147, 162 Munich  3, 13, 176, 177 Naples  8, 33, 50 New York  18, 19, 40, 133, 147 “Nobis natura florem,”  169 Norwich  15, 159 Great Hospital, Norwich  14, 15, 63, 159 Old Town, Prague  153, 186 Ovid  61, 69, 71, 72, 75 Metamorphoses 75

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Oxford  16, 66, 78, 132, 134, 191, 196 Oxford, Robert de Vere, ninth earl of  107, 121, 186 Paris  10, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 28, 30, 102, 103, 132, 141, 150, 174 Paris, Matthew  36 Parler, Peter  26, 33, 38, 39, 102, 103, 153 Patronage  12, 13, 18, 28, 31, 32, 38, 43, 48, 53, 54, 58, 104, 109, 113, 134, 136, 178, 188–89, 192, 198 Anne of Bohemia as Imagined Patron  10, 45–49, 54, 58–61, 64–70, 72, 188–89, 202 Of Bonne of Luxembourg  46, 48–49, 52, 54–58, 69, 200 Of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor   10, 18, 27–28, 35, 39, 43–44, 46, 47, 49, 55, 72–74 Of Charles V, King of France  35, 43, 104 Of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia  10, 18, 45, 46, 47 Of the Luxembourg Dynasty  8–34, 43–44, 47, 49–51, 53, 136, 137 Of Richard II, King of England  9, 10, 35, 44–45, 53, 192 Of the Valois Dynasty  9, 18, 32, 43, 180, 198 Of Wenceslas IV, King of Bohemia  28, 196–97 Of Wenceslas of Bohemia, duke of Luxembourg and Brabant  10, 18, 33, 52, 53, 54, 116 Women as patrons  45, 49, 58, 68–69, 72, 136, 137, 190–91 Perrers, Alice  114 Petrarch, Francesco  xv, 12, 13, 17, 30, 32, 46, 49, 50, 51, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 190 Bucolicum carmen  12 De laudibus feminarum  190 Phébus, Gaston Count of Foix  32 Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy  200 Philip IV (the Fair), King of France  33

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index Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy 200 Philippa de Coucy  108 Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England  17, 53 Philippe de Mézières  109 Epistre 109 Philippe-Auguste, King of France  198 Pierpont Morgan Library, New York  133, 147 Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus  12, 80 Pierre Roger de Fécamp (Pope Clement VI) 20 Plantagenet Family  xvi, 12, 13, 17, 53, 65, 131, 147, 149, 150, 181, 198, 200 Poitiers (battle of)  8, 12 Pope Gregory IX  133 Prague  xv, 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 32, 38, 39, 50, 89, 113, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 146, 153, 154, 157, 162, 164, 174, 176, 179, 181, 182, 186, 195, 197, 200 Prague Castle  88, 137, 186 Prague court  10, 16, 29, 32, 50, 90, 136, 157, 139, 197, 200 Přemysl Ottokar I, King of Bohemia  132, 133 Přemysl Ottokar II, King of Bohemia  16, 32, 113, 135–36, 139 Přibík Pulkava z Radenína  27 Princess Kunigunde See under Kunigunde, Abbess of the St George Convent, Prague Quest de Saint Grael 17 Raimund von Lichtenburg  144 Rejčka, Elizabeth (widow of King Wenceslas II)  137 Richard II, King of England  xv–xvi, 1–2, 6–7, 8, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 24, 36, 37, 38, 44, 47, 53, 58, 60, 62, 63, 67, 68, 78, 81, 85–86, 90, 92, 97–98, 102, 107, 113, 120–30, 131,

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143, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155, 159, 161, 163, 167, 173, 180, 183, 188–90, 192, 196–200, 202 Court of  9, 20, 24, 29, 32, 38, 45n.7, 46, 85–86, 91, 92, 98, 106, 113, 120, 158, 167, 170, 189, 109, 192–93 Funeral of  185 Marriage of  xv, 69, 147, 189, 195 Portrait of  36–38, 40, 131, 157, 158, 185, 187, 191, 199 Sexuality of  106–8, 148 Tomb of  3, 4, 15, 38 Usurpation of  5, 8, 107, 123, 126, 129, 187, 195 See also Patronage See also Plantagenet Family See also Visual Arts, Imago Christi See also Wilton Diptych Richard the Redeless  92, 93, 123, 196 Rienzo, Cola di  17, 32 River Thames, London  5, 44, 192, 202 Roger II, King of  157 Roman de la Rose  30, 54, 58, 116 Romance  11, 24, 53, 59, 65, 68, 69, 87, 89, 112, 129, 130, 132, 132, 139, 142, 146, 188 Arthurian romance  18, 30, 41, 52–53, 59, 87, 90–130, 132 British  11, 17, 29, 30, 31, 41, 47, 61, 63, 141, 195 Chivalric  11, 30, 52, 53, 139 French  17, 18, 29, 30, 41, 53, 61, 87–88, 98, 110, 134 German  16, 24, 59, 113, 136, 144 Rome  22, 26, 51, 62, 80–81, 126–27, 147, 150, 153, 155, 158 Rupert of Bavaria  127 Rushook, Thomas  125 Salisbury, Sir John  8 Savile, Henry of Banke  192 Shakespeare, William  2 Richard II 2 Sheen Manor  69, 30, 46, 48, 66 Sherborne Missal  194–95

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index

Sigismund of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor  5, 6, 157, 197–98 Sir Simon de Felbrigg  30 Sluter, Claus  38 Smil Flaška of Pardubice  91–92, 197 New Council 91–92 St Agnes of Prague  82, 132–33, 142 St Anne  81, 143, 168 St Augustine  20, 73, 74 St Bridget of Sweden  183 St Catherine of Alexandria  70, 141, 145, 146, 178, 183 St Cecilia  70 St Clare of Assisi  133 St Elizabeth of Hungary  82–83 St George  5, 6, 167, 202 St George Convent, Prague  132, 135–37 St George’s Chapel, Windsor  202 St John the Evangelist  86 St Ludmila  149–50 St Margaret of Antioch  70 St Paul’s Cathedral, London  148, 185 St Veronica  157 St Vitus Cathedral, Prague  23–24, 26–27, 33, 38–39, 102–3, 153, 157, 181–82 St Winifred  87 St Thomas Aquinas  20 Staffordshire  119, 192 Stanley, Sir John  31, 86–87, 109 Stanley, William (of Wirral)  109–10 State Library, Vienna  28, 117, 137 Střehom 143 Stury, Sir Richard  118 Tandariáš and Floribella 59 The Breviary of the Grand Master Leo 157 The Dispute between Prague and Kutná Hora 197 The Forme of Cury 104 The Passional of Abbess Kunigunde 57, 135, 138 The Plowman of Bohemia 168

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The Westminster Chronicle  7, 108, 149 Theodoric of Prague (court painter to Charles IV)  145, 146, 82 Thibaut IV, King of Navarre  115–16 Thibaut IV, count of Champagne See under Thibaut IV, King of Navarre Thomas of Britain  141–42 Tristran  141–42 Tower of London, London  1, 17, 128, 179 Trevet, Nicholas  80, 134 Croniques 80 Troy  44–45, 61–65, 74, 76, 97–98, 124, 127, 129, 200 Ulrich von Etzenbach  16, 113, 136 Usk, Thomas  66, 203 The Testament of Love 66 Valois  xvi, 9, 10, 20 Valois Court, Paris  10, 19, 20, 28, 30, 103, 141, 150 Virgil  61, 71, 72, 81 Visconti, Giangaleazzo, duke of Milan  28, 198 Visual Arts  xv, xvi, 2, 3, 4, 9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 28, 32, 33, 34–41, 43, 49, 67, 90, 91, 104, 128, 131, 132, 137, 141, 143, 171, 174, 180, 188–89, 196, 200, 202 Architecture  18, 21, 22, 27, 36, 112, 202 Court art of Richard II 147–52, 170, 186 See also Wilton Diptych Illuminations  18, 19, 25, 28, 33, 40, 43, 54, 56, 95, 96, 100, 104, 105, 111, 117, 128, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 146, 162, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 191, 194, 198 Imago Christi  153–58, 186 Painting  2, 3, 23, 34, 36, 40, 82, 83, 91, 99, 101, 102, 123, 145, 156, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 182 Portrait  33, 37, 91, 145, 154, 199

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index See also Richard II, King of England Sculpture  36, 40, 162, 170 Statues  35, 38, 39, 40, 102, 103, 151–54, 162–63, 166 Tapestry  43, 180–81 Wace Roman de Brut 59 Wales  1, 31, 87–89, 125, 134 Walsingham, Thomas  106–7, 113–14, 122–23 Wenceslas I, St, duke of Bohemia  102, 103, 149, 150, 162 Wenceslas I, King of Bohemia  16, 133 Wenceslas II, King of Bohemia  16, 32, 135, 137, 139, 140–41, 146 Wenceslas III, King of Bohemia  15–16 Wenceslas IV, King of Bohemia  10, 28, 32, 40, 63, 65, 90, 91, 94, 102, 127–28, 147, 153–54, 158, 195–97

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Wenceslas of Bohemia, duke of Luxembourg and Brabant  10, 18, 33, 52, 53, 54, 116, 191, 200 West Midlands  31, 85, 94, 134 Westminster  5, 30, 36, 82, 108, 126–27, 131, 185, 191 Westminster Abbey  4–5, 15, 36–38, 40, 82, 102, 149, 157–58, 168–69, 173, 174, 178–80, 182, 185, 187, 191, 192 Westminster Hall  90, 150–52 Wilhelm von Wenden 139 Wilton Diptych  15, 35, 38, 40, 67, 102, 143, 158–67, 169, 170, 187, 191, 195–97 Wirral  88–89, 110 Wolfram von Eschenbach  28 Willehalm 28 Wurmser, Nicholas of Strasbourg  23 Wyclif, John  16, 28, 118, 119, 127 York  1, 15, 31, 86, 125, 181

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