Between Brothers: Brotherhood and Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Cameron Wade Bradley IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ruth Mazo Karras July 2015 © Cameron Wade Bradley, 2015 Acknowledgements As with all serious labors, this study could not have been accomplished without considerable assistance from many quarters. My advisor, Ruth Karras, provided tireless support, encouragement, and invaluable guidance during the entire process. Through many meetings, responses to my late-night emails, and incisive comments on my work, she challenged me to think ever more deeply about my subject. Thank you for making me a better historian. I wish also to offer special thanks to Kathryn Reyerson, who enthusiastically fostered my professional development and gave perceptive and timely feedback on my dissertation. I am truly grateful for both their efforts as well as the suggestions given by the other members of my committee: Mary Franklin-Brown, Michael Lower, and Marguerite Ragnow. I would like to extend my thanks to Amy Livingstone, David Crouch, and Barbara Welke, who heard or read portions of this dissertation and offered helpful suggestions. To my fellow travelers Adam Blackler, Jesse Izzo, Basit Hammad Qureshi, Tiffany Vann Sprecher, Alexander Wisnoski, and Ann Zimo, I owe particular thanks. I am grateful for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and the unfailingly insightful critiques they offered on my work. Their fellowship, and the intellectual vibrancy of the wider community of scholars—medievalists and others—at the University of Minnesota made my graduate work there a rewarding experience. I wish also to recognize those whose influence helped bring me to this point: Katharine Dubois, who inspired me to take up a career in medieval history, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Martha Carlin, who saw me through the first stage of my graduate education and shepherded my initial foray into teaching. i As I worked through various portions of this dissertation, I benefited immensely from participation at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University and the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, as well as the colloquium on “Intersections of Power, Kinship, and Gender in the Middle Ages” and the Medieval and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Graduate Workshop, both hosted at the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to the attendees of each event for their comments. The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the Hella Mears Graduate Fellowship in European Studies, the Union Pacific Research Grant, and the Department of History at the University of Minnesota provided funding and opportunities to write that were critical to this project’s completion. Also essential to my work were several internet-based resources, chiefly The Online Froissart and its many high-quality transcriptions and manuscript facsimiles of Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, and the online repositories of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica) and the British Library, which hold facsimiles of several key manuscripts. I am thankful that such resources are available. A further note of appreciation goes to the archivists at the Archives nationales de France for their assistance in reproducing and sending a much-needed document. The staff of the Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota, and particularly those individuals employed in the Interlibrary Loan department, deserve special notice for their willingness to fulfill my many requests for reading material. I could not have completed this work about families without the backing of my own. I am grateful to Tom and Rosemary Lynch for their encouragement and trust, Heather Bradley for her many expressions of support, my son Wyatt for his tolerance of my too-frequent absences from playdates, and my wife Grace most of all. I could not ii have hoped for a better partner, in the adventure of this dissertation and in life. Finally, the unexpected loss of my younger brother was the spark that kindled this project. It is dedicated to his memory. iii Abstract Family relationships and responsibilities fundamentally shaped medieval life. This dissertation examines aristocratic brothers in order to understand how elite men negotiated the pressures of gender and kinship in the context of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). Brothers lived in the shadow of idealized brotherhood, which entailed loyalty, support, cooperation, and love. Yet a number of structural obstacles to harmony between brothers existed in the later Middle Ages, and perhaps most critically, brothers also were men—thus implicated within masculinity. The martial elites of this study were subject to what I call “chivalric masculinity,” a version that privileged prowess, honor, courage, reputation, and the pursuit of dominance through competition. Noble and royal brothers therefore stood at the intersection of essentially incompatible paradigms: peaceful and cooperative ideal brotherhood, and violent and competitive chivalric masculinity. Using both narrative and documentary sources, including the chronicles of Jean Froissart and Enguerrand de Monstrelet, wills, decrees, letters, legal proceedings, and accounting records, the dissertation explores case studies of brothers’ rivalries and alliances in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The primary geographical focus is France and England, but it also includes cases situated across Europe, with an in-depth analysis of the fifteenth-century Breton brothers François, Pierre, Gilles, and Tanguy. The dissertation argues that chivalric masculinity was a significant factor in relations between elite brothers. Masculinity shaped, steered, and constrained men’s behaviors, establishing the menu for the sorts of actions brothers—as men—could or iv should undertake. Brothers’ quarrels thus stemmed from the competitiveness of masculinity along with obvious catalysts such as vulnerable thrones, contestable inheritances, and the lure of prestige and influence. Secondly, it argues that some of the elements that drove brothers apart also could facilitate their cooperation. Rather than signal a failure of masculinity, fraternal cooperation indicates the presence of sufficiently compelling reasons to restrain the impetus to competition. The dissertation shows, thirdly, that despite many examples of fraternal strife, ideal brotherhood remained an important and influential paradigm in later medieval society. Even brothers who fought used its rhetoric in their quarrels, reinforcing its cultural weight even as they manipulated it to their own ends. v Table of Contents LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................1 Why Brothers? .........................................................................................................3 Masculinity, Chivalry, Chivalric Masculinity .......................................................11 Approaches and Methods .......................................................................................18 Chroniclers and Their Chronicles ..........................................................................24 Men Again? ............................................................................................................32 The Path Ahead ......................................................................................................37 On Transcriptions...................................................................................................39 Part I CHAPTER 1: BANDS OF BROTHERS: BROTHERHOOD IN THE MIDDLE AGES ..................41 Of Monks and Sermons: Brotherhood in Religious Context and Interpretation .............................................................................................43 Monastic Brotherhood in the Field: The Knights Templar ....................................52 Brotherhood at Work: Guilds and Confraternities .................................................56 “Like true brotherhood”: Brotherhood-in-Arms ....................................................63 Brotherhood in the Chronicles ...............................................................................71 CHAPTER 2: “BROTHER IN NAME ONLY”: CONFLICTS BETWEEN BROTHERS ................75 Games of Thrones ..................................................................................................77 Whose Land Is It, Anyway?...................................................................................91 Chasing Influence and Prestige ............................................................................110 Fighting Men and Manly Fighting: Chivalric Masculinity and Fraternal Conflict ...........................................................................................119 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................125 CHAPTER 3: TO DWELL IN UNITY: MOMENTS OF CONCORD BETWEEN BROTHERS ....128 Heralding Brotherhood: Brotherhood According to Froissart and Monstrelet ...............................................................................................130 Kings and Their Brothers .....................................................................................143 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................169