Abstract
The manmade mirabilia of the late Middle Ages have deep conceptual roots but also a complicated genealogy in practice, commanding a central role in courtly image-projection, technical showmanship, and experiential communication. These marvels were the ideological tools of a privileged elite, but enabled by a crafts-class whose perspective on their creations has been lost among the threads of discourse that bring the lost mechanicalia of the period down to us.
Perfore pe vertue magnificencia hath pe name of workes and of facio, makynge. Magnificus is cleped as it were magna faciens, makynge and doynge grete thinges.
—De Regimine Principum, I. ii1
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Notes
Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 5.
Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good (London: Boydell, 1970; 2002) see esp. Chapter 5, detailing the extent of Valois might projected through magnificent display.
Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 250; Vale cites Thomas Da Costa Kaufman’s work on the interpenetration of court life and urban culture, in Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. pp. 51–73.
Brunetto Latini, The Book of the Treasure (Li Livres dou Tresor), trans. Spurgeon Baldwin and Paul Barrette (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 162–3.
E. R. Chamberlin, The Count of Virtue; Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965).
Anthony Emery, “Late-Medieval Houses as an Expression of Social Status,” Historical Research 78, 200 (May 2005): 151–2.
Daniel Hahn, The Tower Menagerie (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), pp. 61–2.
R. H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), p. 144, suggests that Burley specifically tutored Richard on the importance of magnificence.
For other sources on Giles of Rome’s influence upon Richard’s ideas of kingship, see Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 249–50
see Nigel Saul, “The Kingship of Richard II,” in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. Goodman and Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 44–6.
For a discussion of the difficulties in ascertaining specific theoretical allegiances in Richard’s political practice, see John M. Theilmann, “Caught between Political Theory and Political Practice: ‘The Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II,’” in History of Political Thought 24, 4 (Winter 2004): 606–9.
The context of mid-fourteenth-century doctrines of magnificence is outlined in A. D. Fraser Jenkins, “Cosimo d’Medici’s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 162–70
and Louis Green, “Galvano Fiamma, Azzone Visconti, and the Revival of the Classical Theory of Magnificence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 98–113; see Green, 98 ft.nt. 2 for the shifts in the use of the doctrine under fifteenth-century humanism.
For a summary of Visconti identity-projection and political commerce with Richard’s court, see David Wallace, “Chaucer and Lombardy,” in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Ralph A. Griffiths, “The King’s Court during the Wars of the Roses: Continuities in an Age of Discontinuities,” in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, ed. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (London: Oxford, 1991), pp. 41–67; Griffiths conditionally acknowledges the possibility that the shift began with Edward, but firmly acknowledges the role of Richard II in the development of courtly display, pp. 56–7.
Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, ed. S. Solente, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1936–40).
Claire Richter Sherman, “Representations of Charles V of France (1338–1380) as a Wise Ruler,” Medievalia et Humanstica NS. 2 (1971): 83–96 (84–6)
Donal Byrne, “Rex Imago Dei: Charles V of France and the Livre des propiétés des choses,” Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981): 97–113. Byrne emphasizes the degree to which Charles’s patronage of manuscript production was meant to capitalize on the political value of the king’s ownership, rather than the specific content of the books.
Anne Danieul-Cormier, Wise and Foolish Kings: The First House of the Valois, 1328–1498 (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 142; for details on the Visconti library at Pavia, see chapter 3 in this book.
For discussion of the nature and implications of augury heads, see Kevin LeGrandeur, “The Talking Brass Head as a Symbol of Dangerous Knowledge in ‘Friar Bacon’ and in ‘Alphonsus, King of Aragon,’” English Studies 5 (1999): 408–12.
Joan Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), pp. 116–39.
Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics, and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 270–1.
Francis Palgrave, ed., Antient Kalendars and Inventories of the Treasury of His Majesty’s Exchequer, 3 vols. (London: Record Commn., 1836), pp. iii, 309–61; Saul, Richard II, p. 354.
Patricia J. Eberle, “The Politics of Courtly Style at the Court of Richard II,” in The Spirit of the Court, ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 178
Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 22–7 et passim.
Richard Maidstone, Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), trans. A. G. Rigg, ed. David Carlson (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003): Appendix 3, p. 109.
Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 8.
Gordon Kipling, “Richard II’s ‘Sumptuous Pageants’ and the Idea of the Civic Triumph,” in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 88.
T. F. Reddaway, The Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 1327–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), p. 40.
Eilert Ekwall, “Introduction Chapter V: The Subsidies and the London Population: 3: Wards and Occupations,” Two Early London Subsidy Rolls (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1951), pp. 81–7.
Caroline M. Barron, “William Langland: A London Poet,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 96–7.
Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Berekeley, 1984), p. 11.
James D. Stokes, “Processional Entertainments in Villages and Small Towns,” in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, LUDUS 5 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta, 2001) p. 241, my emphasis.
George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (London, Methuen & Co. 1908), p. 116.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 93.
Gaunt’s commission was titled Processus factus ad coronacionem domini Regis Anglie Ricardi secundi post conquestam anno regni sui primo, ed. L. G. W. Legg as English Coronation Records (London, 1901); for full details of Richard’s investment in the text, as well as the textual history, see Patricia J. Eberle, “Richard II and the Literary Arts,” in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. Goodman and Gillespie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 234; and Saul, Richard II, p. 364, ft. nt. 130.
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© 2007 Scott Lightsey
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Lightsey, S. (2007). By Angel’s Hand: “Piers Plowman” and London’s Crowning Gesture. In: Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605640_2
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