Bastards in the Belgian Manuscript
Catherine Emerson
Have you ever met French, German or Dutch people who insist that they are bastards? Their fellow countrymen would put them away. Belgians, on the other hand, have elevated bastardy to a way of life while also downplaying some of the rather unpleasant aspects associated with nationalism.1
This observation is incidental to Piet van de Craen’s analysis of Belgian national sentiment, and so the author does not pause to explain what it is about bastardy that makes it a more attractive self-image for Belgians than for other nationalities. Of course, part of the explication is linguistic: a bâtard (or a bastaard) is not exactly the same thing as a bastard, as the particular example of the mongrel dog (chien bâtard or bastaardhond) illustrates. A Belgian who proudly proclaims bastardy as a national ideal is probably not referring to the associated ideas of illegitimacy and roguishness that the term would suggest in English, but rather to ideas of hybridity and liminality as suggested by its use in animal husbandry. Such ideas are perhaps better suited to Belgian national identities than to those of the other countries mentioned by Van de Craen. As a bilingual society in a Europe where nation-states define themselves with reference to national languages, Belgium is certainly a hybrid society. This is particularly true in Brussels, an officially bilingual territory in a country otherwise divided into monolingual regions. The adoption of the zinneke, or mongrel, as a symbol of Brussels, is testimony to this feeling that Brussels is a mixed society belonging to both of the national linguistic cultures and thereby distinct from each of
1. Piet van de Craen, ‘What, If Anything, Is a Belgian?’, Yale French Studies, 102 (2002), 24–33 (p. 24). IJFrS 13 (2013) 2 EMERSON
them. The biennial Zinneke Parade, which celebrates the artistic culture of Brussels, describes this relationship between the mongrel dog and the hybrid culture of the city on its website:
Zinneke désigne en bruxellois à la fois la petite Senne, la rivière qui contournait Bruxelles pour éviter des inondations et un chien bâtard qui parfois terminait son existence dans la Senne. Par extension, le Zinneke est celui qui a des origines multiples, symbole du caractère cosmopolite et multiculturel de Bruxelles.2
One of the ironies of this national self-image is that the association between the Belgian and the bastard appears to predate the foundation of Belgium as a nation-state in 1830. Or rather, the nationalists who argued in favour of a coherent and enduring Belgian nation selected a period dominated by bastards as one of the founding moments of the national past. Although Belgium emerged out of the nationalist movements of the early nineteenth century, its existence had always proved a challenge to nationalism because of the linguistic diversity of its people and the absence of a unified history.3 One response to this, famously espoused by the father of Belgian historiography Henri Pirenne in 1900, was to argue that the nation had been on a trajectory towards unification from the end of the classical period, gradually coming together politically and culturally.4 A key moment in this journey was the unification of the territories that were to become Belgium and the Netherlands under the government of the French Valois Dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century.5 Although the dukes of Burgundy did not govern a territory
2. Zinneken Parade, ‘Zinneke, c’est quoi?’ (2012)
that was identical to modern Belgium, the fact that their government gathered together many of the territories that later made up that country was considered significant by those seeking to argue that Belgium had a natural political and cultural existence. The policies pursued by the Valois dukes of Burgundy bolster an argument that Belgium is naturally unaligned to either France or Germany, since the dukes held territory from both overlords and at times were in confrontation with both. In this reading, therefore, contemporary Belgium is shaped by relations defined in the fifteenth century. Accepting for a moment that this is the case, we must recognize that the period was a particular moment in European history, distinct from the eras that preceded or followed it, and that this was particularly true when it came to the question of bastards. If Belgium is a country that accords bastardy a particular regard, the fifteenth century has been considered the golden age of the medieval bastard.6 In straight contravention of rules and laws that hindered children born outside of marriage from entering the church, Mikhaël Harsgor has noted an increasing tendency to appoint bastards to leading ecclesiastical positions from the late fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth century. This tendency was mirrored by a growing number of illegitimate sons receiving high office in royal and ducal governments, to the extent that by the second half of the fifteenth century, Harsgor documents on average one bastard a year rising to a position of temporal or spiritual authority in Burgundy and Northern France. Harsgor comments that this presence of bastards in the highest ranks of society is emblematic of a social tendency found throughout the aristocracy, and that many more bastards were appointed to more minor roles. In Valois Burgundy in particular the bastard sons of the
brusque transformation, passer sous le pouvoir d’une même dynastie, s’unir en une solide fédération monarchique et constituer, entre l’Allemagne et la France, cet État intermédiaire que les royaumes de Belgique et de Hollande représentent encore aujourd’hui sur la carte de l’Europe. Avec le début de la période bourguignonne se clôt la première partie de leur histoire et s’ouvre une ère nouvelle. Par la superposition de l’unité du souverain et du gouvernement à la multiplicité des régimes constitutionnels, elles sortent du moyen âge pour entrer dans l’époque moderne.’ 6. See Mikhaël Harsgor, ‘L’Essor des bâtards nobles au XVe siècle’, Revue Historique, 253 (1975), 319–54. 4 EMERSON
dukes were so prominent in leading the administration that the historian has referred to the region in the fifteenth century as ‘une véritable bâtardocratie’.7 The reasons for this development are complex. Firstly, it should be recognized that intolerance of children born outside of marriage was itself a change from an earlier position and that this change had been fostered by a church anxious to exert its own authority on the social customs of marriage.8 Thus, the social ascendancy of bastards is in inverse proportion to the proselytizing power of Christianity. Consequently, the Reformation sees a reduction in both the recorded number and social prominence of illegitimate children as heightened religious morality made such evidence of relationships outside marriage less acceptable.9 Secondly, we should recognize that in the fifteenth century, the acknowledgement of a bastard in a family did not, as one might think, represent a rejection of marriage and traditional family ties. On the contrary, bastards played a role in securing the influence of their family in a world where the nobility saw their status threatened by an ascendant urban bourgeoisie. Officially recognized by their fathers, bastard children frequently took their fathers’ name and arms and were, therefore, able to represent the family in dynastic marriages.10 Noble families were thus able to multiply their alliances beyond the
7. Harsgor, ‘L’Essor des bâtards nobles’, p. 341. 8. Henri Regnault, La Condition juridique du bâtard au moyen âge (Pont-Audemer: Lescuyer, 1922), pp. 1–3. 9. Niethard Bulst, ‘Illegitimate Kinder – viele oder wenige? Quantitative Aspekte der Illegitimität im spätmillelalterlichen Europa’, in Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, ed. by Ludwig Schmugge, Schriften des Historischen Koleggs Kolloquien, 29 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), pp. 21–39. On page twenty-seven, the author cites a figure of 1–3% of children born outside of marriage in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though he points out that there are problems with underrecording of the phenomenon due to failure of parents to report the circumstances of their child’s birth and also to infanticide. Jean Meyer suggests, however, that this low figure represents a real drop in the number of children born, since there is no corresponding growth in the number of abandoned children. See Jean Meyer, ‘Illegitimates and Foundlings in Pre- Industrial France’, in Bastardy and its Comparative History: Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformism in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America, Jamaica and Japan, ed. by Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith (Colchester: Edward Arnold, 1980), pp. 249–64. 10. Claude Grimmer, La Femme et le bâtard (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1983), p. 151. BASTARDS IN THE BELGIAN MANUSCRIPT 5
avenues which legitimate marriage afforded them. Bastards — that is, illegitimate children recognized by their fathers — became a social phenomenon of the upper classes:
Plus une famille se dit d’ancienne chevalerie, moins elle se limite dans le nombre de ses bâtards. Mieux, quand une famille accède à la noblesse, elle abandonne souvent ses principes bourgeois et, à l’imitation du groupe auquel elle veut s’intégrer, elle multiplie les enfants illégitimes.11
Nowhere was this truer than under the notoriously virile Philippe le Bon, third Valois duke of Burgundy. Not only did the duke have twenty-six bastards by his thirty-three known mistresses, but the eldest of his bastard sons, Cornille, received the pseudo-title ‘bastard de Bourgogne’.12 In fact, we might question whether the honorific was actually a spurious title at all. Certainly the appellation behaved like a genuine hereditary title: when Cornille was killed in 1452, his younger bastard brother Antoine assumed the title and became ‘bastard de Bourgogne’ in his turn. If fifteenth-century Burgundy is the origin of the Belgian nation, there might be reasons for this to be found, therefore, within the administrative culture of the state favouring self-identification as a bastard by removing the stigma of the status from the outset. We initially set aside objections to the nationalist reading of Belgium as unified under the dukes of Burgundy, but we should recognize that this nationalist interpretation — whether it is well-founded or not — resonates with a historiographical debate amongst scholars of fifteenth- century Burgundy as to whether the Valois administration constituted a separate Burgundian ‘state’, with its own culture and customs. Part of the problem is that the political significance of attributes of statehood, such as the power to mint money or to raise revenue, was not necessarily the same in the fifteenth century as it was even a century later, and
11. Grimmer, La Femme et le bâtard, p. 149. 12. Bulst, ‘Illegitimate Kinder – viele oder wenige?’, p. 35. 6 EMERSON
that in Valois Burgundy some, but not all, of those attributes can be identified. Richard Vaughan, the author of biographies of each of the four Valois dukes and of an overview of the question, Valois Burgundy, vacillated on the matter throughout his career and even in the course of that one book, placing the term ‘state’ in inverted commas in some places and accepting it without hesitation in others.13 Graeme Small points out that the separatist tendencies of the Valois dukes of Burgundy only really emerged late in the period, under Duke Philippe and his son Charles, and that for most of the period the Burgundian dukes were fully integrated into the politics of France.14 Georges Doutrepont, who was a firm believer in the existence of a Burgundian state, identified a separate cultural production that he termed ‘un État [...] dans l’État, une littérature bourguignonne’.15 This claim that there is an identifiable set of cultural practices belonging to the supposed Burgundian state (primarily literary for Doutrepont, musical for Vaughan but also present, for the latter, in material production such as manuscript illumination and tapestry weaving) bolsters the assertion that the Burgundian Low Countries were possessed of a separate cultural identity. Such a claim supports a reading whereby this separate political entity was the forerunner of a separate nation, namely Belgium. If it can be demonstrated that pre-Belgian culture at this period was distinctly different from that of either France or the Holy Roman Empire, then the natural existence of a place called Belgium is easier to prove, particularly if this cultural difference can be identified in an area where Belgium continues to differ from the countries around it. However, in making this argument, those interested in explaining Belgian origins tend to overlook the fact that the Burgundian Netherlands were only part of Valois Burgundy and that it is difficult to distinguish the cultural practices of the Burgundian Netherlands from those of the duchy and county of Burgundy. This 13. Richard Vaughan, Valois Burgundy (London: Allen Lane, 1975). 14. Graeme Small, Late Medieval France (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 17. 15. Georges Doutrepont, La Littérature française à la cours des ducs de Bourgogne: Philippe le Hardi, Jean sans Peur, Philippe le Bon, Charles le Temeraire (Paris: Champion, 1909), p. v. BASTARDS IN THE BELGIAN MANUSCRIPT 7
difficulty of distinction arises partly because the dukes fostered administrative uniformity where possible, and partly because there was a degree of mobility amongst administrators, greater or lesser according to their individual role, but especially in the case of those attached to the court, which was itself peripatetic.16 If Valois Burgundy had a particular cultural practice, it was not necessarily restricted to the Burgundian Netherlands and it might be quite difficult to determine that it was. Nevertheless, a practice prevalent in Valois Burgundy may have been a factor in shaping attitudes in the Belgian state that followed. The question of the treatment of bastards may be one such practice. Mikhaël Harsgor names late fifteenth-century Burgundy as a territory particularly marked by the public prominence of illegitimate members of the nobility, even in the context of a French culture marked by the presence of bastards in public life. Indeed, bastards seem to have been so prominent in the Burgundian court that its francophone scribes developed an abbreviation for the word.17 This is a significant development because it indicates the extent to which illegitimacy was prominent, talked about and officially recognized. For a word to have a consistent and widely-used abbreviation, it must itself be widely used. This particular abbreviation, which resembles a lower-case b with a wavy stroke crossing the ascender, qualifies on a number of counts. It is used by several scribes in both prose texts and administrative documents.18 Moreover, Antoine, Duke Philippe’s eldest surviving
16. Vaughan, Valois Burgundy, pp. 27, 83–90. 17. This paper will focus on appearances of the abbreviation in manuscripts written in French because these are the ones that are most familiar to me. I have, in fact, not encountered any Dutch-language texts that contain the precise abbreviation under discussion. It would be surprising, however, if scribes working in both languages did not use the same abbreviation and this area merits further investigation. 18. An example of the latter is the Liber authenticus sacratissimae utriusque sexus christifidelium confraternitatis septem dolorem beatae Mariae virginis nuncupatae, Brussels, Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, MS 3413, fol. 177v. This manuscript contains entries in both French and Dutch and the word bastard is abbreviated in both languages, although the abbreviation under discussion here is only present in the French text. As always, I am indebted to Susie Speakman Sutch for her generous sharing of information. 8 EMERSON
acknowledged illegitimate son, used it when he signed his name.19 So too did his younger half-brother Baudouin and other illegitimate nobles associated with the Burgundian court. The abbreviation, then, was not a way of avoiding the use of a taboo or unpleasant word, but a short form of an individual’s title, comparable to abbreviations of seigneur that appear in the same manuscripts. The short form of the word is not a sign of shame but of the necessity for brevity in a word that occurred frequently. Antoine would, in any case, have had no reason to conceal his paternity: his position within the Burgundian hierarchy was dependent upon it. He achieved his status because of who his father was and because his father had acknowledged him publicly. The same was true of other noble bastards of the period, and so we can regard the use of an abbreviation as the marker of a word used as a title, rather than a way of concealing any shame at illegitimate origins. The same abbreviation appears on the captions to the portraits throughout the famous ‘Receuil d’Arras’ where, significantly, the modern editor uses the abbreviations ‘b.’ for bâtard, ‘s.’ for seigneur, but does not abbreviate ‘baron’, ‘comte’ or ‘dame’ amongst this noble company.20 Widely discussed in the early years of the twentieth century by paleographers who struggled to interpret it on manuscripts from the personal libraries of illegitimate Burgundian noblemen, the abbreviation does not appear in paleographical textbooks that give lists of standard abbreviations. Such lists tend to concentrate on texts written in Latin rather than in the vernacular and are consciously incomplete: Jacques Stiennon explains that he gives his readers guidelines to deciphering manuscripts ‘[d]ans l’impossibilité d’embrasser la totalité des systèmes abbréviatifs’.21 However, there is another reason why paleographers do
19. Philippe Lauer, ‘Déchiffrement de l’ex-libris du Grand Bâtard de Bourgogne’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 84 (1923), 298–305. 20. Visages d’antan: Le Recueil d’Arras (XIVe–XVIe s.), ed. by Albert Châtelet with Jacques Paviot (Lathuile: Éditions du Gui, 2007). Examples of the abbreviation abound in this work, such as, for instance, fol. 97 (9–11), David de Bourgogne, évêque d’Utrecht or fol. 108 (10–1), Yolente, bastarde de Bourogne. Regrettably the modern editors have cropped some of these captions and so the abbreviation is not always visible. 21. Jacques Stiennon, Paléographie du Moyen Âge (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991), p. 148. BASTARDS IN THE BELGIAN MANUSCRIPT 9
not consider the bastard abbreviation and that is that it is rarely — if ever — found in fifteenth-century manuscripts of French origin.22 That an abbreviation for a word designating a social practice particularly prevalent in Valois Burgundy should occur overwhelmingly in manuscripts originating from Valois Burgundy is an indication of a divergence between French and Burgundian administrative cultures; an indication that reinforces an impression that France and Burgundy were developing along separate lines in the fifteenth century. A couple of examples should serve to illustrate the point. Le Bâtard de Bouillon is a late chanson de geste, the sole surviving manuscript of which has been dated to the middle of the fourteenth century.23 Dialectal features suggest that the scribe may have originated in Picardy on what is now the border between France and Belgium and that the manuscript subsequently passed through royal libraries first in the Low Countries and then in France. However, there is nothing to suggest that this was originally a Burgundian manuscript, and indeed the date is a little early for us to identify a separate Burgundian culture. Nevertheless, the text sheds some light on the way that the bastard abbreviation is used in later Burgundian manuscripts. The story of the deeds of the eponymous bastard necessarily requires the use of the word bastard — there are some 350 instances in the text, referring not only to the central figure himself but also to other illegitimate characters, most notably Baudouin de Sebourc’s thirty bastards. If it were the frequency with which the word occurs that prompts Burgundian scribes to seek an
22. Lauer quotes the example of Jean, bâtard de La Marche, who put his name to a document signed in Poitiers in April 1436. However, there are a number of reasons not to regard this as conclusive proof of the use of the particular abbreviation. Firstly, the manuscript cited, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Clairambault 640, does not contain an original document but a figured copy. Whilst it must be presumed that the original subscription resembled that which appears on fol. 143r, the scribe who copied it may have omitted significant features. The ‘J’ and the ‘b’ of the signature are combined, but the cross stroke stops at the stem which is shared by the two letters. It could plausibly be argued, therefore, that it properly belongs to the ‘J’ and is not part of the ‘b’ that stands for bâtard. 23. Le Bâtard de Bouillon: Chanson de geste, ed. by Robert Francis Cook (Geneva: Droz, 1972). 10 EMERSON
abbreviation for bastard then we might expect the scribe of Le Bâtard de Bouillon to have come up with a strategy for abbreviation, given the number of times he (or possibly she) was faced with writing the word out, particularly considering the constraints of the manuscript, written in two densely packed columns in lines of verse. And indeed, this is what the scribe has done. There are only six instances in the section of the manuscript containing Le Bâtard de Bouillon where the word ‘bastard’ (or lexical equivalents ‘bastars’ or ‘bastart’) appears in full. Everywhere else it is abbreviated. Significantly, however, the abbreviation is not that which was in current use in Burgundian administrative circles in the fifteenth century. Instead, the scribe ofLe Bâtard de Bouillon writes the first syllable of the word, followed by a flourish that, to modern eyes, resembles an apostrophe: ‘bast’’. This confirms that an abbreviation for bâtard emerges when the nature of the text requires it but that there was no standardized abbreviation for the word in Northern France in the mid-fourteenth century, the way that there was in Valois Burgundy from the mid-fifteenth century. Later French documents which contain mentions of bastards do not use the Burgundian abbreviation either, whether they are Latin acts of legitimation or vernacular accounts of incidents involving illegitimate nobles. A particularly interesting document in this regard is held in Paris, Archives Nationales, JJ 196, containing matters that came before the parlement and the conseil in the year 1469–70. A French document, then, produced at the time when the court of Burgundy was at its apogee and in the middle of Mikhaël Harsgor’s golden age of the bastard. In terms of documentary evidence, the golden age has left its mark. The record is full of petitions from illegitimate sons seeking legitimation. Unlike the other documents in the record, these petitions tend to be in Latin, where the medieval Latin word bastardus occasionally appears. Alongside these, the document contains a petition from one Guillaume, the bastard son of Jean de la Fontaine, who found himself in prison after becoming embroiled in an assault in the street, in addition the document contains a grant of land from Louis XI to Baudouin, Bâtard de Bourgogne, after the latter had left the service of Charles le Hardi to join the king’s BASTARDS IN THE BELGIAN MANUSCRIPT 11
entourage. In none of these documents is the word bastard abbreviated with the Burgundian abbreviation, although there are occasional punctual interventions involving, for example, the omission of the s or the dropping of the entire final syllable, along the lines that we see inLe Bâtard de Bouillon. JJ 196 is not unique: other French administrative records of the second half of the fifteenth century paint the same picture. There were a lot of bastards in French public life but the official administrative culture did not recognize them with an abbreviation the way that the Burgundian court did. The case of Baudouin, Bâtard de Bourgogne is particularly clear-cut. In his Burgundian ex-libris, the defector had abbreviated both ‘Bâtard’ and ‘Bourgogne’, using the standard abbreviations of the Burgundian administrative culture. In the French official documents, only ‘Bourgogne’ is abbreviated, using the same abbreviation. ‘Bourgogne’ is abbreviated the first time that it occurs in the text, demonstrating that the abbreviation was readily understood and used within the administrative culture of the French court. This is only to be expected: Burgundy was a major player in the politics of the region at the time. However, when someone like Baudouin switched his allegiance from Burgundy to France, he moved into an administrative culture where his status as a bastard had to be spelled out in full. A comparable evolution can be seen in the signature of Baudouin’s half- brother Antoine in documents signed after he entered the service of the French court following the death of Charles le Hardi.24 An original example is preserved in volume twenty of the Clairambault collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is a receipt, dated 24 January1488, signed by Antoine with his initial ‘a’ which is linked by a number of ligatures, including one resembling the cross stroke of the bastard abbreviation, to a following ‘b’ which forms the initial letter of ‘Bourgogne’, this
24. The last Valois duke of Burgundy is, as Jean-Marie Cauchies points out, more often known by the epithet ‘le Téméraire’, but this has a pejorative undertone which reflects continuing ambivalence on the part of metropolitan French historians. See Jean-Marie Cauchies, Louis XI et Charles le Hardi: De Péronne à Nancy 1468-1477: Le Conflit, Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, 8 (Brussels: De Boek, 1996), especially the section entitled ‘Charles de Bourgogne: Hardi ou téméraire?’, pp. 147–59. 12 EMERSON
word also being abbreviated.25 Philippe Lauer has argued that this, and a very similar subscription that Antoine made to another receipt in 1481, represent a signature in which the ‘b’ stands simultaneously for bâtard and Bourgogne.26 Lauer makes this argument on the basis that this is how Antoine is styled in the first line of the documents, but the shift in the way that Antoine deploys the abbreviated form of his name indicates once more that bâtard did not have an accepted abbreviation in France, and the word does not appear in an abbreviated form in the text of the document. This suggests that this ‘b’, whether it means bastard or Bourgogne or both, is seen as a personal mark, rather than a word whose meaning could be discerned independently of the very narrow context indicated by the signature at the bottom of a document. A generation earlier, a French fellow bastard, Jean, bâtard d’Orléans, appears to have adopted a similar practice regarding his signature. A series of documents that he signed, conserved in another Clairambault manuscript, 1122, suggest that around 1434 he adopted a signature incorporating abbreviation strokes after the ‘t’ of ‘bastard’ and the ‘l’ of ‘Orléans’.27 However, the word ‘bastard’ or ‘bastart’ invariably appears in full in the text, suggesting that the abbreviation is regarded as the mark of an individual. Moreover, it is a distinctly different abbreviation to that commonly found in Burgundian texts and a distinctively different way of using the abbreviation, where Burgundian documents will introduce it without this narrowly circumscribed context. Away from administrative documents, the same movement can be identified when contrasting the texts of Olivier de La Marche and Philippe de Commynes. Early pioneers of the genre of mémoires, both men began their career in the Burgundian court, where both seem to have been close to Charles le Hardi. However, in 1472, when La Marche was beginning work on his Mémoires d’Olivier de La Marche, Commynes left Charles’s service to join the court of Louis XI.28 It is 25. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Clairambault 20, no. 19. 26. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fonds français 26953, no. 19; Lauer, ‘Déchiffrement de l’ex-libris du Grand Bâtard de Bourgogne’, p. 303. 27. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Clairambault 1122, nos. 34–88. 28. For a discussion of Charles’s reaction to this event, see Richard Vaughan, Charles the BASTARDS IN THE BELGIAN MANUSCRIPT 13
implausible, therefore, that Commynes should ever have seen any of the text produced by his senior colleague. However, it seems likely that Commynes was aware of La Marche’s project and sought to emulate it to a certain extent. The way that the two writers define their work is strikingly similar, and Commynes’s mémoires open with the author’s early recollection of an incident in which La Marche was pushed to the foreground of Franco-Burgundian relations when he was alleged to have had a leading role in spreading the rumours that led to the arrest of the bâtard de Rubempré. By opening his mémoires with a description of these events, Commynes pays a discreet homage to Olivier de La Marche, but he also inadvertently gives us an insight into the different manuscript cultures of Burgundy and France.29 Of the six surviving complete manuscripts of Olivier de La Marche’s Mémoires, four contain the Burgundian bastard abbreviation. These manuscripts appear to be of Low Countries origin. La Marche remained with Charles le Hardi until the duke’s violent death on the battlefield, and stayed with his daughter and grandson thereafter, and his Mémoires were not available or read in France. The manuscripts themselves do not contain any early indications of ownership but all of the early references to La Marche’s Mémoires occur in a limited social circle surrounding Philippe le Beau, to whom the work was dedicated, his sister, Margaret of Austria, and his son Charles Quint.30 It is likely that the geographical reach of La Marche’s text was similar to that of George Chastelain’s Chronique, where early manuscript ownership can be identified and which, as Graeme Small has demonstrated, was read by a restricted circle of aristocrats in the Habsburg Netherlands.31 There are political reasons why this should have
Bold, rev. edition, (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 233–34. Jean Dufournet describes the way that it has subsequently been viewed very differently by historians writing from a French or a Belgian standpoint, Jean Dufournet, La Destruction des mythes dans les Mémoires de Ph. De Commynes’ (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 30. 29. For more on the relationship between Commynes and La Marche, see Catherine Emerson, Olivier de La Marche and the Rhetoric of Fifteenth-Century Historiography (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 104–08. 30. Alistair Millar, ‘Olivier de la Marche and the Court of Burgundy, 1425–1502’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 126–31. 31. Graeme Small, George Chastelain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy: Political and 14 EMERSON
been the case, as the Burgundian Netherlands became separated from France. The way that four different scribes of La Marche’s Mémoires use the abbreviation attests to a vibrant tradition where scribes are able to deploy the abbreviation intelligently: there are comparatively few instances where the same occurrence of the word is abbreviated in more than one manuscript, and no two manuscripts have abbreviated the word in exactly the same places. The abbreviation does not occur because of blind copying, then, but by conscious choice by scribes working in a specific social context. By contrast, the abbreviation does not seem to be present in manuscripts of Commynes’s Mémoires at all, even in instances where the scribe is an enthusiastic abbreviator and where it would have been useful to have an abbreviation for the word, it is written out in full. For example, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 5063, fol. 3r, shows the word ‘bastard’ split across two lines of text, despite there being clear evidence that the scribe was averse to this sort of presentation. We can, therefore, conclude that the culture of the French court to which Commynes moved, and in which his text subsequently circulated, did not know of or maybe did not accept the use of the Burgundian bastard abbreviation.32 What can we conclude from this evidence? We know that bastards were prominent in public life in France and the Burgundian territories in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and we have reason to believe that this was particularly the case in Burgundy. The manuscript evidence confirms this to the extent that an abbreviation for the word was thought necessary in this part of the world and not further south.
Historical Culture at Court in the Fifteenth Century (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 197–226. 32. Joël Blanchard, in his edition of Commynes’s Mémoires, gives an account of the eight surviving manuscripts of the work. Where early owners can be identified, they are closely associated with the French court or with Commynes’s own family, with the earliest circulation occurring amongst what Blanchard terms a ‘familiar few’. Blanchard suggests that this intimacy of circulation is a product of the personal character of the genre of mémoires itself, which is a further reason why the manuscript circulation of Commynes’s work is so separate from that of La Marche’s Mémoires. See Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. by Joël Blanchard, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 2007), I, xi–xxxviii. BASTARDS IN THE BELGIAN MANUSCRIPT 15
We might tentatively suggest that this points to a different administrative culture in the two territories. Not necessarily to a different Burgundian state, but at least to a Burgundian bureaucracy which differed in its daily practice from the French royal administration. Can we see in this divergent material culture the origins of the Belgian state? To claim that this is the case would be to ignore the contingencies of history that might have produced other outcomes, but we can safely say that in the fifteenth century, there was an administrative culture that existed in what is now Belgium that was at least partly French speaking and distinct in its practices from the French royal administration. The use of a single abbreviation is, of course, only a small example of this. It is, however, interesting that it should occur in relation to the figure of the bastard, a figure with distinct cultural associations in Belgium today. That is not to say that there is a linear relationship between the fifteenth- century noble bastard and projections of modern Belgian identity onto the mongrel dog. Nevertheless, it may have been easier for Belgians to elevate bastardy to a way of life because there was always a set of positive cultural associations that were not only available but also already distinct from similar presentations across the border in France. National University of Ireland, Galway