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Military, Institutional and Discursive Competence As Seen by Burgundian Court Historians, C. 1470–C. 1500 When Olivier De La M

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Military, Institutional and Discursive Competence As Seen by Burgundian Court Historians, C. 1470–C. 1500 When Olivier De La M CHAPTER ONE MILITARY, INSTITUTIONAL AND DISCURSIVE COMPETENCE AS SEEN BY BURGUNDIAN COURT HISTORIANS, C. 1470–C. 1500 When Olivier de La Marche penned what was to become for the following generations the most widely read work of Burgundian court literature, Le chevalier délibéré, his theme was the transient nature of earthly life and not at all politics.1 Nevertheless, the long poem about the ageing narra- tor’s encounter with mortality contains numerous references to aspects of political success. In the Cemetery of Fresh Memory, the knight sees many graves of his contemporaries who were once deemed great. Their great- ness, for the most part, came from noble status and military honour, but not exclusively. Some of them had been high functionaries of the ducal administration and distinguished themselves by competent management of affairs of state and by their charitable foundations.2 Others were brilliant financiers, which allowed them to rest entombed cheek by jowl with kings and dukes of their time.3 In the Cemetery of Fresh Memory, La Marche assembles the collective model of political competence of his age. Intellectual Context: The Ideal Model of Good Governance in the Burgundian Netherlands The teleological view of history as a process of formation and develop- ment of nation-states, which, despite multiple critiques, continues to shape much of the output of contemporary historical research, has always endorsed the view that the short-lived rise of Burgundy as a European 1 On the literary and cultural significance of Le chevalier délibéré, see Susie Sutch, ‘La réception du Chevalier délibéré d’Olivier de La Marche au XVe et XVIe siècle’, Moyen fran- cais, 57–58, 2006, pp. 335–350. 2 See e.g. the description of the ‘tomb’ of Chancellor Rolin: ‘Je rencontray en mon chemin/ Ung cercueil de grant artifice/ Ou fut le chancellier Rolin/ Son tiltre qui fut en latin/ Le mons- troit parfait en justice/ Sumptueulx fut en edifice/ Hospitaulx & moustiers fonda . .’. Olivier de La Marche, Le chevalier délibéré, Part III (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24320/24320-8 .txt, last visited 10.10.2008). 3 Those were Cosimo de Medici and Jacques Coeur. Ibid. 22 chapter one power came to an end in 1477, with the death of Charles the Bold.4 That school of thought also postulated that the dukes of Burgundy had failed to develop a unified national consciousness in their lands, and that the attempts of some Burgundian functionaries and writers to provide Charles the Bold with an ideology that would emancipate him as a sovereign in his own right remained of little consequence. This approach truncated the development of Burgundian ideology of sovereignty by drawing the bal- ance not later than 1477, relegated some important texts produced after this date to the role of sentimental afterthoughts on a bygone era, and discarded the intellectual heritage of Burgundian court functionaries as an example of an unsuccessful ideology of nation building.5 Another approach, represented above all by recent works of intellectual history produced in Belgium, the Netherlands and elsewhere, offers a re- evaluation of the political ideas generated in the ­Burgundian-Netherlandish milieu. It stresses the innovative potential of the institutional and politi- cal thought of the ducal functionaries,6 traces the incremental develop- ment of the Burgundian-Netherlandish political elite through interactions of the court and civic society,7 and detects a strain of nascent national consciousness or at least a sense of distinct ‘Burgundian’ political identity initiated by the ducal ideology in the Low Countries.8 For this school of thought, 1477 is not the year of great rupture. The big change comes earlier, with the decisive break away from a concept of Burgundy as a spin-off of French royal house to a self-sufficient concept of sovereignty endorsed by Charles the Bold and his higher officers in the 1470ies. The development 4 Richard Vaughan, in Charles the Bold: the Last Valois Duke of Burgundy (London, 1973) represents this point of view par exellence. 5 This view is endorsed in the standard works of Richard Vaughan on the Valois dukes of Burgundy and in his other works, e.g. Richard Vaughan, ‘Hue de Lannoy and the Ques- tion of the Burgundian State’, in: R. Schneider (ed.), Das spätmittelalterliche Königtum im europäischen Vergleich (Sigmaringen, 1987), p. 336: ‘Of course, this was no incipient national consciousness; just a hotch-potch of myths’. For a more recent reiteration of this view, see Michael Zingel, Frankreich, das Reich, und Burgund im Urteil der burgundischen Historiographie (Sigmaringen, 1995). 6 Arjo J. Vanderjagt, ‘Qui sa vertu anoblist’. The Concepts of Noblesse and Chose Publique in Burgundian Political Thought (Groningen, 1981); Jan Dumolyn, ‘Justice, Equity and Com- mon Good. The State Ideology of the Councillors of the Burgundian Dukes’, in: D’Arcy. J. D. Boulton and Jan R. Veenstra (eds.), The Ideology of Burgundy, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 145 (Leiden/Boston, 2006), pp. 1–20. 7 Andrew Brown and Graeme Small, Court and Civic Society in the Burgundian Low Countries, c. 1420–1530 (Manchester, 2007). 8 Jan R. Veenstra, ‘ “Le prince qui se veult faire de nouvel roy”: the Literature and Ideol- ogy of Burgundian Self-Determination’, in: Boulton and Veenstra, The Ideology of Burgundy (see n. 6)..
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