How reliable are La Marche's Memoires of the fifteenth-century Burgundian court? Examination of key issues proves their validity.

This book provides an analytical overview of the vast range of historiography which was produced in western Europe over a thousand-year period between c.400 and c.1500. Concentrating on the general principles of classical rhetoric central to the language of this writing, alongside the more familiar traditions of ancient history, biblical exegesis and patristic theology, this survey introduces the conceptual sophistication and semantic rigour with which medieval authors could approach their narratives of past and present events, and the diversity of ends to which this history could then be put. By providing a close reading of some of the historians who put these linguistic principles and strategies into practice (from Augustine and Orosius through Otto of Freising and William of Malmesbury to Machiavelli and Guicciardini), it traces and questions some of the key methodological changes that characterise the function and purpose of the western historiographical tradition in this formative period of its development.

The first extensive study of the depiction of the armour in the Thun-Hohenstein Album against the vibrant artistic and cultural contexts that created it. In late medieval and early modern Europe, armour was more than a defensive technology for war or knightly sport. Its diverse types formed a complex visual language. Luxury armour was fitted precisely to a wearer's body, and its memorable details declared his status. Empty armour could evoke an owner's physical presence, prompting recollection of knightly personae, glittering pageantry, and impressive feats of arms. Its mnemonic power persisted long after the battle had ended, the trumpets had gone silent, and the dust had settled in the tournament arena. Previously believed to contain preliminary designs sketched by master armourers, the Thun-Hohenstein album is a bound collection of drawings by professional book painters depicting some of the most artistically and technologically innovative armours of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like a paper version of the princely armories that first formed during the 1500s, the album's images offered rich sites of meaning and memory. Their organization within the codex suggests the images' significance to their compiler. At the same time, the composition and details allow the reader to trace the transmission of recognizable armours, and the memories they embodied, from the anvil to the page. This book is the first to examine the album, and the armor it depicts, in their vibrant artistic and cultural context. In five thematic chapters, it moves from case studies of these drawings to explore the album's complex intersections with the genres of martial history, material culture, and literature. It also reveals the album's participation in cultures of remembrance that carried mythic, knightly personae constructed around powerful Habsburg princes forward in time from the Middle Ages into the early modern era, from the courts of the Holy Roman Empire to emerging urban audiences.

An examination of sixteenth-century quest narratives, focussing on their conscious use of a medieval tradition to hold a mirror up to contemporary culture. Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblemof shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals. Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's Faerie Queene but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime and William Goodyear's Voyage of the Wandering Knight, the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal Pèlerinage de la vie humaine was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed overthe next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maître Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Université de Lausanne

European and English courtly culture and history reappraised through the prism of the court as theatre. In the past half-century, court history has lost the air of frivolity that once relegated it to the margins of serious historical study and has rightfully taken a central part in the study of European states and societies in the age of personal monarchy. Yet it has been approached from so many different angles and appropriated to so many different models that it can be hard to put all our new understandings together to achieve a proper perspective on the functions of the court as a whole. This collection of essays uses the idea of the court as a stage for social and political interaction to re-integrate different styles of court history, focusing on courts in England and the Low Countries from the age of Richard II and Albert of Bavaria to that of Elizabeth I and Philip II. Themes studied include the relationship between court politics and cultural change, the social and political functions of court office-holding, the military, judicial and propagandist roles of the court, the economic relationships between courts and cities and the wider social and political significance of court rituals and traditions.

This volume is an introduction to the fifteenth century through chronicles and personal recollections of a diverse group of its French- and English-speaking writers. It revisits some of the principal events and personalities of that era through anecdotes illustrating interpersonal behavior. It examines how writers evaluated the conduct of their contemporaries and how some of their pessimistic conclusions may have contributed to the reputation for decadence of their century.