Preface

Summary

This book is the fruit of a fortuitous, and fortunate, conversation between the two of us at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in May 2014. Jane Taylor and Robert L. Krueger had just published a translation of Antoine de La Sale's Le Petit Jehan de Saintré (Philadelphia, 2014), and that naturally led us to discuss other late medieval French texts that deserved to be opened up to a wider audience. Within just a few minutes, we had agreed to collaborate on a translation of the early fifteenth-century chivalric biography of Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut, marshal of France.

This anonymous biography remains little used by Anglophone scholars, despite its fundamental importance as a source for chivalric culture, the study of France and Italy during the age of the Great Schism, the history of late medieval crusading and what modern scholars often refer to as ‖vernacular humanism‗ – that is to say the impact of classical learning on vernacular writing and lay society. The biography recounts the life of Boucicaut from his youthful chivalric exploits to his crusading adventures in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. It also offers a great deal of unique evidence regarding the politics of Italy in the first decade of the fifteenth century when Boucicaut was governor of Genoa and deeply involved in the rivalries between the great city-states and the attempts to resolve the Papal Schism. The final book of the biography steps back from the narrative account to offer the lessons to be learnt from the example of Boucicaut, and hence a thorough dissection of political leadership and knighthood comparable with better known chivalric manuals and mirrors for princes.

The biography of Boucicaut was most recently edited in 1985 by Denis Lalande in Le livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, mareschal de France et gouverneur de Jennes (Geneva, 1985), and Lalande also published a scholarly biography of Boucicaut three years later. We have translated that edition but revised the scholarly apparatus that Lalande offered, correcting, where necessary, and developing his identification of geographical locations, individuals and especially the sources used by the biographer.