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

人们经常认为，新闻业及其邪恶的影子--假新闻--完全是现代的发明。事实上，在中世纪，欧洲各地的君主和贵族派使者参加重要的活动，如战斗、锦标赛和皇家仪式，以便写下目击者的描述。虽然这些中世纪的记者拥有外交豁免权，表面上被命令客观地记录事件，但就像今天的许多媒体一样，预言者经常编造故事来美化他们的赞助人，并为他们的侵略辩护。尽管传令者在编造叙事方面很有技巧，而且他们作为宫廷公关人员也很有影响力，但文学学者们长期以来一直忽视了英语纹章语料库，也许是因为它只存在于中世纪英语、盎格鲁-诺曼语和拉丁语的混合中，具有挑战性。我的项目采用了这一未被研究的材料，并为文化历史学家提供了关于中世纪晚期英语使者的新视角，以及他们对早期文字虚假信息的贡献。通过结合手稿研究、文学分析和文化史，我证明纹章叙事对于解开交织在一起的中世纪关于骑士精神、暴力和民族主义的话语至关重要，我们是这些话语的继承者。我对纹章文学在骑士暴力神圣化中的突出作用的探索，揭示了充斥着现代媒体的“高尚暴力”的有害话语，以及咄咄逼人的极端主义团体频繁窃取骑士模式。纹章学文本还提供了一个新的有用的视角来研究百年战争期间原民族主义的发展。因为，尽管英国使者深深地卷入了英国分离主义暴力叙事的起源，但他们仍然是欧洲骑士秩序的多语种官员，这种秩序本质上是超越国界的。

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.