Narration as Commemoration: Writing the Chivalric Hero in Late Medieval Burgundian Historiography

Whilst modern historians have long acknowledged the importance of the immense body of historical writing that was produced at the court of late medieval Burgundy as a means of enhancing the cultural and political prestige of the Burgundian dukes themselves, their interest in these works is mainly limited to an assessment of the truth-value and political bias of the individual authors of such works, rather than to a discussion of the linguistic and stylistic means by which these authors created an effect of reality in their texts. Yet, these historical writings have received equally little attention from modern literary scholars who have likewise tended to ignore the ways in which authors working in the different sub-genres of medieval historiography developed particular narrative styles in order to achieve their own specific rhetorical and didactic purposes, whether they were writing as official chroniclers for the public at court, as memoirists offering their own personal view of historical events, as heralds producing meticulous records of blows exchanged in battle, or as biographers striving to turn the knights of the day into secular saints and heroes worthy of romance fiction.

The aim of the proposed research project is to remedy this deficiency in the scholarship by showing how modern theories of narrative, as developed by literary scholars, can elucidate the way in which medieval authors used writing as a means of recording the past. By analysing a range of historical works all relating the same events, it aims to enable historians to see precisely how such stylistic and narrative conventions determined the way in which a chronicler, memoirist, herald or biographer constructed his version of reality so as to convince the reader of the veracity of his account. The project will thus analyse how works from each of these four sub-genres - chronicle, memoirs, heraldic accounts and biography -depicted the life and chivalric deeds of Jacques de Lalaing (1420-53), the most famous Burgundian knight of this period, in order to make a range of different moral and didactic points. Adopting a linguistic/narratological approach to the study of medieval narratives, it will examine such issues as the relationship established between narrator and implied reader, the representation of narratorial voice in the text, the modes by which reported speech is incorporated into the narrator's account, and the manipulation of point of view through the shift between the narrator's and the characters' focalisation. As an important complement to this type of theoretical analysis, the project will also seek to establish the part played by the material nature of these texts in their reception by the reader: by consulting the original manuscripts of these works which are held in libraries in Paris and Brussels, it will examine such matters as the quality of paper or parchment used, the meticulousness of the handwriting, the quantity of authorial corrections in the case of autograph manuscripts, and the presence and quality of any illuminations.