International
Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes,
Paris
Symposium 2007 Abstracts
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Symposium Program
Recalling Peace in a Time of War: History and Ritual during the War of the Armagnacs and Burgundians (1407-35)
Tim Pollack-Lagushenko, Wright State University
Throughout the reign of Charles VI, most Frenchmen believed that normal governance had been deeply perturbed and that monstrous events and actions drove the realm farther from its natural state of peace. Such consciousness demanded action, so, during the nearly two decades of the War of the Armagnacs and Burgundians, thousands of Frenchmen used violence, historical writing and ritual displays to urge an end to the “maudite guerre” and a return to what they remembered as the normal order of politics and social life. Like most medieval innovators, fifteenth-century partisans attempted to alter lived realities by urging reform, restoration and a return to a happier, more perfect and natural time. Despite these attempts, most modern historians believe that these efforts at restoration and reformation failed; rather than re-creating the kingdom of good King Charles V, fifteenth-century Frenchmen constructed the France of Charles VII, which, armed with such crucial new institutions as the standing army (compagnies d’ordonnance) and permanent taxation (the taille), insisted on unprecedented forms of territoriality, sovereignty, and political absolutism.
This paper will focus on historical writing and ritual processions during the Wars of the Armagnacs and Burgundians in order to explore Pierre Nora’s apposition between history and the milieu de mémoire. Fifteenth-century historians, such as Jean Lefèvre, looked back to key murders during the early part of the century in order to begin or anchor their accounts of their own time. Even later in the fifteenth century, a member of the Burgundian household could express remarkable historical consciousness when, while pointing at the punctured skull of the murdered John the Fearless, he asserted that “this is the hole through which the English entered France.” Alongside such efforts at analysis, which spoke of causal relationships between past events and present realities, many fifteenth-century Frenchmen confronted unprecedented disasters by using ritual displays, especially processions, to remove war, misgovernment, rebels and other enemies from the realm. Using consular deliberations, I will show how urban classes negotiated the tensions between early forms of historical consciousness and traditional forms of ritual. This study will clarify how attempts at restorative action that was anchored in memory nevertheless propelled French society into rapid and irreversible set of political and institutional innovation.