Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies

Illuminated Manuscripts and the First French Humanists

Anne D. Hedeman

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780268202262
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Visual Translation breaks new ground in the study of French manuscripts, contributing to the fields of French humanism, textual translation, and the reception of the classical tradition in the first half of the fifteenth century.

While the prominence and quality of illustrations in French manuscripts have attracted attention, their images have rarely been studied systematically as components of humanist translation. Anne D. Hedeman fills this gap by studying the humanist book production closely supervised by Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Lebègue for courtly Parisian audiences in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Hedeman explores how visual translation works in a series of unusually densely illuminated manuscripts associated with Laurent and Lebègue circa 1404–54. These manuscripts cover both Latin texts, such as Statius's Thebiad and Achilleid, Terence's Comedies, and Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline and Jurguthine War, and French translations of Cicero's De senectute, Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium and Decameron, and Bruni's De bello Punico primo. Illuminations constitute a significant part of these manuscripts' textual apparatus, which helped shape access to and interpretation of the texts for a French audience. Hedeman considers them as a group and reveals Laurent's and Lebègue's growing understanding of visual rhetoric and its ability to visually translate texts originating in a culture removed in time or geography for medieval readers who sought to understand them. The book discusses what happens when the visual cycles so carefully devised in collaboration with libraries and artists by Laurent and Lebègue escaped their control in a process of normalization. With over 180 color images, this major reference book will appeal to students and scholars of French, comparative literature, art history, history of the book, and translation studies.

CHAPTER 1

Noble Leisure and French Humanism

Beginning in the fourteenth century during the reigns of the Valois kings, French humanism and translation were associated, and they flourished with the active support of King Charles V, who reigned from 1364 to 1380.¹ At its inception, French humanism was enriched by contacts made by its practitioners in Avignon with Petrarch and the papal chancellery.² The connections that scholars made in Italy and deepened through personal correspondence and participation in diplomatic missions continued to influence the graduates and students of the Collège de Navarre in Paris who filled the royal chancellery during the early fifteenth century. Scholars such as Gilbert Ouy, Ezio Ornato, and Carla Bozzolo describe French humanists of the early fifteenth century as motivated by a desire to rival contemporary Italian authors in written expression (which they suggested often manifested a kind of French nationalism) and to collect and study manuscripts of the classics, thus contributing to a French revival of the antique past that often presented it in the image of the French present.³

The network of humanists in Paris was a close-knit community that included graduates of the Collège de Navarre, such as Jean de Montreuil, Nicolas de Clamanges, Jean Gerson, and Jean Courtecuisse, as well as notaries and secretaries with different backgrounds such as Gontier Col, Laurent de Premierfait, and Jean Lebègue. They had diverse relations to each other and to members of the nobility. For instance, Jean de Montreuil, Col, Laurent de Premierfait, and Lebègue were royal and ducal notaries. Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col were also members of the Cour amoureuse, a literary society, founded in 1401 by Dukes Louis of Bourbon and Philip the Bold of Burgundy and headed by King Charles VI, that brought together a cross section of nobility, clerics, and bourgeoisie.⁴ They participated actively, along with Pierre Col, Jean Gerson, and Christine de Pizan, in the literary debate surrounding the Roman de la Rose, known in part through dossiers given to Queen Isabeau of Bavaria and Duke John of Berry, among others.⁵ Manuscripts annotated by Gontier Col and Jean Lebègue attest that they were avid fans of Laurent de Premierfait. The surviving manuscripts of Jean de Montreuil’s letter collection, also annotated by Lebègue, reveal Jean’s classical knowledge.⁶ He peppers his letters with classical references to such authors as Cicero, Virgil, Sallust, Terence, Valerius Maximus, Seneca, Horace, and others. Even more important, Jean de Montreuil’s letters offer insight into the relationships between Col, Laurent de Premierfait, Jean de Montreuil, and other humanists.

Ornato’s analysis of the letter collections shows how Jean de Montreuil was part of a community that read and discussed classical texts.⁷ His letters describe how he obtained books from contacts in Italy and shared them and other manuscripts with colleagues. For instance, in his correspondence with Gontier Col (letter 38), Jean de Montreuil describes a dream in which Terence appeared and told Jean to study his comedies, as Col and Pierre Mahac were doing. Jean also writes Col (letter 120) in 1400 or 1401 to tell him that he had read the Roman de la Rose at Col’s suggestion and loved it. He writes an unknown correspondent (letter 90), to ask to borrow a Latin copy of Augustine’s City of God.

Sometime between 1401 and 1403 Jean de Montreuil wrote a particularly rich series of letters involving rare texts procured from Italy. The first (letter 125) was a letter of introduction sent with Guillaume de Tigonville to a scholarly Italian friend, Jacopo, in which Jean asked what Jacopo had accomplished in the monastery of Cluny and reminded him to transcribe a manuscript of Plautus and to procure a manuscript of Cicero in Bologna. Shortly thereafter (letter 126) Jean thanked Jacopo for sending him the copy of Plautus. In a third letter (letter 157) Jean observed that one of his unknown correspondent’s copyists had just transcribed a manuscript of Livy owned by Jean. Further, he informed that person that he had received rare works from Italy that were unavailable in France, even in a college; these included Cato’s Censorinus, Varro’s De Agricultura, Vitruvius’s De Architectura, and Plautus. Jean offered to make them available to copy. Because Jean ended his letter by asking the addressee to help speed payment of two hundred francs reserved for him by the Duke of Berry, Ornato speculated that this letter may have gone to Martin Gouge, who had classical interests and was the duke’s treasurer and counselor.⁸

François Avril suggested that two Latin manuscripts painted by Virgil Master illuminators around 1405 may be copies made after those mentioned in Jean de Montreuil’s correspondence because they contain several of the rare texts that Jean procured. One combines Vitruvius’s De Architectura, Cato’s De Rustica, and Varro’s Res Rustica (BML Plut. 30.10) and the second contains Plautus’s Comedies (BnF Ms. lat. 7890).⁹ Marie-Hélène Tesnière speculated that Jean de Montreuil could equally well have addressed this offer of access to Jacques Courau, treasurer and maître d’hotel to Duke John of Berry, rather than to Martin Gouge.¹⁰ Courau had given a French translation of Valerius Maximus painted by Virgil Master illuminators (BnF Ms. fr. 282) to John of Berry in January 1402. He also owned a Latin manuscript of Virgil’s works transcribed by Pierre de l’Ormel in 1403 (BML Med. Palat. 69) that also was painted by Virgil Master illuminators. Since the same scribe and artists that produced Courau’s Virgil manuscript wrote and decorated Plautus’s Comedies (BnF Ms. lat. 7890), Tesnière suggests that Courau may have been the scholar whom Jean de Montreuil addressed.

While we will never know with certainty the identity of Jean de Montreuil’s noble French reader with interest in classical texts, the precious survival of his letters gives insight into the moment in the early fifteenth century when early French humanists began to promote the classical heritage more broadly to the nobility and the powerful, perhaps in order to counter their ignorance or apathy. In the same letter that had offered the noble Frenchman access to rare classical texts, Jean de Montreuil expressed a wish that other nobles had been as interested as his correspondent in Livy and the other historiographers and authors because then a great portion of Livy and the works of other learned and venerable writers would not be lost. He wrote that talented literate men leaned toward pursuing active and earthly things in such a way that they scorn and reject contemplative things, which Virgil calls “noble leisure,” with the result that modern men had no passion to pursue books from antiquity.¹¹ Jean referred at the end of the letter to his correspondent’s shared pleasure in reading works that were among the oldest in Latin literature.

Two among the group of humanists in early fifteenth-century Paris—Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Lebègue—were deeply involved in the production of illuminated manuscripts designed to expand the nobility’s cultural exposure to both Latin classics and contemporary Italian literature, thereby combating the phenomenon that Jean de Montreuil described. They are ideal candidates for exploring the complex relationship between the culture of humanist members of the French chancellery and manuscript illumination at the moment when classical texts were being transcribed and painted with an eye toward capturing the attention of new readers.

The elite audiences for books produced by Laurent and Lebègue differed from the clerics and scholars in Avignon and Paris who were the first French humanists. When Laurent and Lebègue broadened the circle of humanist readers to include Dukes John of Berry, Louis of Bourbon, John the Fearless of Burgundy, Louis of Orléans, Louis’s sons Charles of Orléans and John of Angoulême, and possibly Dauphin Louis of Guyenne, they had to take into account the differing levels of Latin literacy of the princes of the blood. An anecdote from the memoirs of Bonaccorso Pitti offers some insight into the state of the French elite’s grasp of Latin at the turn of the fifteenth century.¹² Pitti was sent on an embassy to Paris in 1397, during which he met with King Charles VI and his council in the presence of the chancellor Arnaud de Corbie and other prelates. One of the Italians who accompanied Pitti gave an eloquent speech in Latin asking Charles VI to support the Florentines in their struggle against Milan. Pitti was astonished that the plea seemed to fall on deaf ears, even though the members of the council and other lords had asked for written copies of the discourse. After receiving nothing but vague responses for two months, he concluded that the chancellor and prelates in attendance understood the Latin speech but had not translated it fully for the others. He wrote that neither the king nor his dukes understood Latin, and that although the king’s brother, Louis, Duke of Orléans, did, he probably did not help because it would have aided the Florentine cause and Louis was a partisan of the Duke of Milan. Having come to this realization, Pitti gave a French speech at a subsequent meeting with the king and his council in which he reiterated their request and reminded Charles VI of his prior promises for support. According to Pitti, once the Italians left the room, Charles reprimanded his chancellor and the others who had not fully translated the Latin speech. When the Italians returned, the French chancellor acknowledged that the king would live up to his promise to support the Florentines.

If Pitti’s memoir is accurate, King Charles VI and the adult princes of the blood (with the exception of Louis of Orléans) did not comprehend complex Latin rhetoric, even in writing. It may be, however, that they were more literate than he thought if, like Louis of Orléans, they did not wish to support Florence against Milan. For instance, Laurent’s description of Duke Louis of Bourbon’s court in the prologue to his translation of Cicero’s De amicitia suggests that Louis’s court, like his brother-inlaw Charles V’s, was a bilingual or even trilingual environment: “And because your court and presence . . . for necessary and honest reasons attract many men of diverse social positions and from foreign countries, some of whom read and understand the French language and others Latin . . . ” [Et pour ce que a vostre court et presence . . . accourent et surviennent tant pour necessaires et pour honnestes causes plusieurs hommes de divers estas et d’estranges pais, dont les aucuns lisent et entendent le langaige François et les autres le latin . . .].¹³ Marie-Pierre Laffitte categorized the Latin books of law and of classical authors described in an inventory of 1474 as having belonged to Louis of Bourbon as “astonishing in an otherwise traditional aristocratic library” [détonnent dans une bibliothèque aristocratique par ailleurs traditionalle].¹⁴ At the very least, princes of the blood must have had the sort of passive Latin literacy that would allow them to recite by rote the content of prayer books or function at the mass. However, even if they understood or could read medieval Latin, most would probably have needed help when faced with the Latin employed in classical texts, even those that were commonly used in the schools.¹⁵

This situation began to change in the younger generation, which included Louis’s sons, Charles of Orléans and John of Angoulême, and possibly Louis of Guyenne. In their youth, they had been given numerous books in Latin by their tutor and others.¹⁶ A cluster of educational books used in the first decade of the fifteenth century by Nicolas Garbet, the tutor for the three sons of Louis of Orléans and Valentina Visconti, suggests how important facility in Latin was becoming in the education of young nobles. Three manuscripts are associated with Louis and Valentine’s sons and with Garbet: Sallust’s Conspiracy of Catiline (BnF Ms. lat. 9684) decorated with a frontispiece (fig. 1.1) representing Sallust was given to Louis of Orléans by Lebègue and subsequently used for study by his sons Charles of Orléans and John of Angoulême and annotated by them and their tutor; Sallust’s Jugurthine War (BnF Ms. lat. 5747) was transcribed and annotated by Garbet and decorated with a frontispiece (fig. 1.2) that has been identified as the brothers Charles of Orléans, John of Angoulême, and Philip, Count of Vertus, speaking with a king, but more likely represents Sallust’s King Micipsa interacting with his sons Adherbal and Hiempsal and nephew Jugurtha; and a copy of Terence’s Comedies (BnF Ms. lat. 7917), transcribed and annotated by Garbet, belonged to Charles of Orléans.¹⁷ Although this copy of the Comedies was never illustrated, it contained blank spaces for pictures at the begin...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Principles and Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Noble Leisure and French Humanism
• Part 1 Illustrating the Past In Latin Texts
• Part 2 Illumination In French Translations
• Part 3 The Cycles Escape
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index