Topical Texts and their Afterlives in the Late Middle Ages
This session (Canadian Society of Medievalists, Congress 2019, June 3-5, Vancouver) examines the ‘afterlives’ – that is, the later reception – of late medieval written works addressing topical matters. The explosion of manuscript production and copying in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries not only encouraged the literate to use written communication to spread their thoughts on current affairs, it also promoted the continued reception of the resultant texts in a wider variety of contexts and over longer periods. However popular or niche at the time of writing, such topical texts could more readily find new audiences and new meanings in the late medieval environment. The creative editing, extraction, and compiling of texts helped in the process of shifting and even transforming meaning across different places and times, rendering texts that were once topical more universal, or indeed pointedly relevant to later affairs and concerns. Seen from another aspect such processes also expanded the afterlives of issues that had been long been set aside, with answers to new problems being shaped by those derived in very different contexts.
Kristin Bourassa and Justin Sturgeon will explore the fifteenth-century manuscript afterlife of Philippe de Mézières’ Songe du viel pelerin, a political allegory completed in 1389 for King Charles VI of France and offering topical advice on contemporary political concerns such as the king’s recent coming of age and declaration of personal rule, the Great Western Schism, and the late fourteenth-century crusading movement. The Songe was later copied for members of the secular and religious elite, in manuscripts adapted both textually and visually for their owners and for their new historical context. Eight of the nine surviving manuscripts date to the mid- to late-fifteenth century, demonstrating revived interest in a book whose understandings of authority, power, and counsel were deeply embedded in the historical context of its original production. This interdisciplinary paper (drawing on the perspectives of art history, history and literature) explores how political texts were adapted for later audiences through a case study of the manuscript owned by Louis de Crussol, a royal counsellor active during the reigns of Charles VII and Louis XI.
Robert Shaw will explore the afterlife of the Orationarium in vita Christi et de suffragiis sanctorum, a work written in the 1380s by Pierre Pocquet, a French Celestine monk and strident activist for Observant reform. An unedited text that is little know by modern readers, this expansive vita Christi was written not only against the background of the author’s efforts to enhance French Celestine observance, but also in the midst of the Great Western Schism, a matter which thoroughly exercised the author and greatly shaped his reflections on morality and reform. While it reached some very influential readers in Pocquet’s own lifetime, including among the laity, it arguably found its peak of popularity among monastic reformers of other orders in the mid to late fifteenth century, with audiences in monasteries as far away as Italy and Bohemia. Through a close reading of the manuscript evidence, this paper will explore how later reformers received reflections that were steeped in the context of the late fourteenth century, and through this, how the atmosphere of the Schism, so critical to the formation of Observant energies, could continue to influence ideas regarding monastic life a century after the fact.
To complete this session, we seek one further paper addressing similar themes. We are open to papers looking at the ongoing reception of topical texts written at any time in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in any part of Europe. Please contact Kristin Bourassa at kristin@sdu.dk by January 14, 2019.
