A Virtuous Knight
Title Details

217 Pages

21.6 x 13.8 cm

1 b/w, 3 line illus.

Imprint: York Medieval Press

A Virtuous Knight

Defending Marshal Boucicaut (Jean II Le Meingre, 1366-1421)

by Craig Taylor

  • Description
  • Contents
  • Author
A radical re-interpretation of the chivalric biography of Boucicaut.

The Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre (1409) is one of the most famous chivalric biographies of the Middle Ages. It presents Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut (1366-1421), as an ideal knight and role model, and has frequently been seen by modern scholars as a last-ditch effort to defend traditional chivalric values that were supposedly in decline. Here, however, Craig Taylor argues that the biography is a much more complex and interesting text, fusing traditional notions of chivalry with the most fashionable new ideas in circulation at the French court at the start of the fifteenth century. Rather than a nostalgic criticism of contemporary knighthood, it should be seen as a showcase of the latest ideas on chivalry, written to renew the enthusiasm of the great French princes for a man who was in grave danger of falling out of favour: its purpose was to celebrate and to defend a beleaguered Boucicaut against his critics at the royal court, and to explain his actions as governor of Genoa, his failed crusading enterprises in the Eastern Mediterranean and his unsuccessful efforts to broker a solution to the Papal Schism.

CRAIG TAYLOR is a Reader in Medieval History at the University of York; he was Director of its Centre for Medieval Studies from 2010 to 2011 and from 2014 to 2017.
Introduction
The Life of Jean II Le Meingre dit Boucicaut [1366-1421]
The Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre
Defending the Marshal
A Flower of Knighthood
The Virtues, the Good Habits and the Good Disposition of the Marshal
Conclusion
Bibliography

Dr CRAIG TAYLOR is Reader in Medieval History at the University of York.

Hardcover

9781903153918

June 2019

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$105.00 / £70.00

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Ebook (EPDF)

9781787445611

June 2019

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Title Details

217 Pages

2.16 x 1.38 cm

1 b/w, 3 line illus.

Imprint: York Medieval Press