Heraldic Narratives: Chivalry, Violence, and Nationalism in Late-Medieval England

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It is often assumed that journalism and its sinister shadow, fake news, are wholly modern inventions. In fact, during the Middle Ages heralds were sent by monarchs and nobles across Europe to attend important events such as battles, tournaments, and royal ceremonies in order to write eye-witness accounts. While these medieval reporters were equipped with diplomatic immunity and ostensibly ordered to record events objectively, like much of the press today heralds often spun narratives to glorify their patrons and legitimate their aggressions. Despite heralds' skill at crafting narratives and their influence as court publicists, literary scholars have long overlooked the English heraldic corpus, perhaps as it survives only in a challenging mishmash of Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin. My project takes up this understudied material and offers cultural historians new perspectives on late-medieval English heralds and their contribution to an earlier age of textual disinformation. By combining manuscript studies, literary analysis, and cultural history, I demonstrate that heraldic narratives are of vital importance to unpacking the entwined medieval discourses of chivalry, violence, and nationalism of which we are the inheritors. My exploration of heraldic literature's prominent role in the sacralization of chivalric violence sheds light on the harmful discourse of "noble violence" saturating modern media as well as the frequent appropriation of chivalric models by aggressive extremist groups. Heraldic texts moreover provide a new and useful lens through which to study the development of proto-nationalism during the Hundred Years War. For, while English heralds were deeply implicated in the origins of a violent narrative of English separatism, they remained multilingual officers of a European order of chivalry which in its very nature transcended national borders.