Emotions, Race, Gender and Crusading in Fifteenth-Century Burgundian Prose Epics and Chronicles

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The crusade plans of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy (r. 1419-1467) were central to his court's culture; they were a means of asserting the power of the ever-expanding state of Burgundy, which was a key centre of literary and artistic production in late-medieval Europe. Philip, himself born when his father was on crusade in Nicopolis in 1396, was influenced by models of ethical and political conduct in lavishly illustrated prose reworkings (updated versions) of earlier verse epics and romances. Unlike in earlier centuries, women no longer participated in crusades, yet, paradoxically, crusading in this later period was often more inspired by "courtly love" than religious fervour: at the Banquet of the Pheasant of 1454, men publicly took crusading oaths in front of women, in response to a female personification of the Holy Church threatened by a "Saracen", signifying Constantinople which had just fallen to the Ottoman Turks.While some prose romances and chronicles have recently been readdressed by scholars, later prose epics remain neglected concerning text/image relations and emotions. In recent years, medievalists have paid more attention to the History of Emotions, but it has yet to be applied fully to Burgundy, especially in terms of chivalric masculinity. Studies of crusading sources employing critical race theory are only just emerging and, while literary scholars have addressed race, religion, and gender in several earlier French verse epics, an intersectional study covering later prose reworkings of epic material is long overdue.The thesis will address the following issues:How crusader emotions are depicted in text and image in illuminated manuscripts;How text and image depict emotional attitudes to gender or race and how they would have been interpreted in their historical context;How literary or artistic traditions and crusading influenced depictions of emotion in relation to race and gender identities;How evolving ideals of chivalric masculinity and crusader motivation appear in sources containing historical models for crusading or cross-cultural relations.The study will, therefore, analyse depictions of emotions concerning Muslim and Burgundian "racial-religious" and gender identities at the court of Philip the Good through selected manuscripts of three neglected prose epics and an epic-based prose chronicle:The anonymous Fierabras, ante 1410; Belle Hélène de Constantinople, 1448; Renaut de Montauban, ante 1462; Croniques et Conquestes de Charlemaine, 1458. The thesis will draw on modern gender and critical race theory in order to analyse how crusading emotions (e.g. pride, fear, anger, and hatred etc.) are represented through facial expressions, clothing and settings in images, how emotions are expressed in written terminology, and how performative emotional displays intertwine with crusader spirituality. It will also analyse how far Barbara Rosenwein's influential concept of emotional communities applies to the sources. It will employ Rosenwein's method of quantitative analysis of emotion terms, studying their gendered and "racialised" distribution in order to compare the texts under study. These data will be nuanced and contextualised by close literary analysis of the texts and examination of the etymologies of Middle French emotion terms. Furthermore, the thesis will consider the influence of earlier verse epics and chronicles on fifteenth-century Burgundian writers and audiences, examining how depictions of emotions vary between gender and "racial-religious" identities and how these depictions feed into the construction of performative, emotional crusading ideologies.This project will make an original contribution to the fields of medieval French literature, the History of Emotions, art history, and gender and critical race studies by examining manuscripts almost entirely neglected by critics and thus providing new insight into life at the court of Philip the Good.