Book review: Medieval French Nobles

This is another book by the author of the one on peasant life which I republished last week. The two complement each other and draw upon material from the same French regions and era..

"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble": Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

Constance Brittain Bouchard.    

Cornell UP  2017

A valuable and insightful study

This is a book I would thoroughly recommend, and indeed have done to friends.

I have to disagree with another Amazon reviewer Cebes “Useful but flawed study” who criticises it for not offering a simple model of aristocratic life in the period. The point surely that Bouchard is making is that it was a society that was complex and changing, and that generalisations are difficult if not dangerous.

As a work it offers a synthesis of many studies referenced in the footnotes, and is of great value as a bibliographic guide.

 

There is a great deal that is covered and discussed in a relatively short and very readable book. The life of the medieval nobility is opened out and unpacked in a way which is accessible to the modern reader, enhancing and enriching one’s understanding of the past.

I think it has a wider application than just the area the author predominantly concentrates on of Champagne and Burgundy. It is applicable to much of western Europe in the period and indeed for later centuries.

A book that is valuable for the general reader, for students, and for academics looking for pointers with research.

Posted on Amazon  24.3.2023

Book review: Medieval French Peasants,

Negotiation and Resistance: Peasant Agency in High Medieval France

Constance Brittain Bouchard   Cornell UP  2022

Insightful and Informative 

This as a book I would recommend very highly to anyone looking both at the history of France in the period and at the life of medieval peasants in general.

This is very much a source based study, and Constance Bouchard, having edited several of them for publication, clearly knows the sources very well.

She makes a strong case for the peasants

hiding in plain sight in the cartularies that survive from the monastic houses, and that if we look at such records we will find them. I am sure that the lessons and insights she offers mutatis mutandis can be applied to other parts of France or Western Europe. Thus England had a different history in regard to serfdom in the same period, but what the book argues could still be used profitably as an insight when looking at English conditions as revealed in manorial court rolls and other records

Yes, peasant life was doubtless often hard, but what Bouchard shows are real peasants, not the archetypes created by historians and social theorists centuries later without reference to the archival evidence. These real peasants showed very considerable vitality in defending and negotiating their best interests. They emerge as lively and resilient, not downtrodden victims.

This readable, humane study which makes medieval people step out of the shadows for at least a few minutes as flesh and blood and not just theories or statistics, is of great value for the general reader, for students and for academics looking for pointers with their research. It is a book which in a relatively short format reveals a lot in an accessible, thoughtful, and informative way.

Posted on Amazon  25.3.2023

Medieval French Society

Several of my recent posts have touched upon the subject of medieval France and today my eye was caught by a short article about the work of a Norwegian-based historian who specialises in French medieval history. In particular she is interested in the position of women in French society at the time. Although the article is quite short, it is a good summary of her thinking and an indicator of emerging trends in our understanding of medieval French life. Her linkage of French institutions of power and the public life of women is valuable and for all the discussion which concentrate on things like the Salic Law women at all levels did play a prominent part in the life of the country.

Long after the formidable Merovingian Queens great heiresses such as those cited in the article, and others like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Jeanne of Champagne-Navarre, Mahaut of Artois, Mary of Burgundy, and Anne of Brittany as well as royal consorts like Blanche of Castile, Yolanda of Aragon and Claude of France were prominent and often decisive makers of history. Their significance in France is arguably greater than in neighbouring realms, and was accepted in a way that the Empress Matilda was not to be in England. I would agree with the argument that women were influential at all levels of society, if less well recorded. At that lower level Marie de France in the twelfth century and Christine de Pisan in the fifteenth century were, by being mould-breaking literary figures, women who did ensure their subsequent fame. From the peasantry Jeanne d’Arc may well have been unique and certainly unprecedented in her achievement, but she was an immensely significant figure in the history of France. Like Marguerite Porrete more than a century earlier she went to the stake, but contemporaries attempts to obliterate them failed. If you like your historical fiction tough and menacing then Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings are replete with women with agency…Queen Isabella’s career in England, like Queen Margaret of Anjou later on, may well reflect their French heritage.

The article is from Medievalists.net and can be seen at French women had more power in the Middle Ages than after the Revolution