Guillaume De Machaut and the Forms of Pre-Humanism in Fourteenth-Century France
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CHAPTER TWO GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT AND THE FORMS OF Pre-HUMANISM IN Fourteenth-Century FRANCE Anne-Hélène Miller In the thirteenth-century’s Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun praised the civic honors once granted to Roman poets: Jadis li vaillant gentill home [. .] les philosophes honorerent. Aus poetes neïs donerent viles, jardins, leus honorables et maintes choses delitables Long ago, the brave noblemen [. .] used to honor the philosophers. They gave poets cities, gardens, places of honor, and many delightful things, lines 18689–18696.1 After Jean de Meun, and according to the classical model, later medieval French poets also sought greater public recognition for their writing. This aspiration is particularly perceptible among literati who demonstrated civic responsibility in their writings. In the context of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, and the papal presence in Avignon, fourteenth- century men and women of letters openly reacted in France to the emer- gence of new social classes, monetary values, urban centers of knowledge, and the secularization of patronage.2 Acutely sensitive to these irrevers- ible epistemological changes, vernacular poets, in particular, cultivated the moral and didactic purpose of their writings by drawing on a learned tradition long associated with the medieval clergy and intellectuals. Some medievalists see these developments beginning as early as the eleventh century when the cathedral schools revived the learning of 1 Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, volume III, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris, 1970). The translation is mine. 2 Alain de Libera, La Philosophie Médiévale (Paris, 1993), p. 420; Guy Beaujouan, “La prise de conscience de l’aptitude à innover (le tournant du milieu du 13e siècle),” Le Moyen âge et la science, Colloque, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris, 1991), pp. 5–14. 34 anne-hélène miller classical antiquity by combining intellectual and ethical learning to foster public service.3 In the thirteenth century, the universities perpetuated the curricula of these schools, and from its early days, the University of Paris remained associated with public service, forging its image as a recipient of ancient Greek and Roman traditions.4 During this period, writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Ovid, Saint Augustine, Boethius – all key references for the development of humanist thought – were translated into French. These authoritative works existed alongside a variety of translations of more recent works by John of Salisbury, Andreas Capellanus, and even Petrarch in Charles V’s royal library. Indeed, through a network of diplo- matic and intellectual exchanges, foreign texts progressively made their way to France, especially coming from Italian city-states through the court of Avignon.5 With its focus on the emulation and transmission of the clas- sical culture for political and practical purposes, rather than on recovering the original meaning and context of the classical texts, the vast program of translation under Charles V represented, in this respect, a form of French pre-humanism.6 While the nineteenth century coined the term “humanism” to define specifically the activities of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century authors concerned with political service as well as with genuine recovery of clas- sical letters, it was, in fact, in the fifteenth-century that the Italian word umanista came to designate a person who practiced the studia humani- tatis (studies of classical letters, especially rhetoric) with the aim of the full exploration of human identity and the preparation for moral leader- ship. The term also implied that, as humanists, these individuals took an interest in, even an exaltation of, the human person. Therefore, writers such as Laurent de Premierfait, Nicolas de Clamanges, Jean de Montreuil, 3 Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideas in Medieval Europe 950–1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 48–49. 4 Serge Lusignan, “L’université de Paris comme composante de l’identité nationale du royaume de France: étude sur le thème de la translatio studii,” in Identité régionale et conscience nationale en France et en Allemagne du Moyen Age à l’époque moderne, eds. J.M. Moeglin et R. Badel (Sigmaringen, 1997), pp. 59–72. 5 Franco Simone’s pioneering work, Il Rinascimento francese: Studi e ricerche (Torino, 1961); The French Renaissance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France, trans. Gaston Hall (London, 1969). See also Ezio Ornato, Jean Muret et ses amis Nicolas de Clamanges et Jean de Montreuil. Contribution à l’étude des rapports entre les humanistes de Paris et ceux d’Avignon (1394–1420) (Geneva, 1969) and Michael Hanly, “Courtiers and Poets: An International System of Literary Exchange in Late Fourteenth-Century Italy, France and England,” in Viator 28 (1997), 305–332. 6 Léopold Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, 2 Vols (Paris, 1907); Jeannine Quillet, Charles V, le roi lettré: Essai sur la philosophie politique d’un règne (Paris, 1984). .