Assembly of Ladies
A dream vision (written c.1475?) of 756 lines in rhyme royal (see versification). Its appearance in Thynne's edition of Chaucer (1532) is the only reason for its attribution to Chaucer ...
ballade
Strictly a poem consisting of one or more triplets of seven‐ or (afterwards) eight‐lined stanzas, each ending with the same line as refrain, and usually an envoy addressed to a prince or his ...
cento
[sen-toh]A written composition made up of fragments taken from other writers. This may be a prose composition, but the term is applied most often to poem that is made up of lines from other poems. ...
Charles V
(1337–80)King of France (1364–80). He earned his nickname from his intellectual pursuits which included book-collecting and artistic patronage, his religious piety, and his cautious adoption of ...
courtesy Books
A book that gives advice to aspiring young courtiers in etiquette and other aspects of behaviour expected at royal or noble courts. This kind of work—sometimes written in verse—first became popular ...
courts
Traditionally the power base of a prince and the refuge for courtiers, took on what is now judged their characteristic form during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable ...
dit
A type of poem that began to appear in the late 13th c. and remained popular into the 15th. It was not a strictly defined genre. Poems identified as dits ...
exemplum
(plural-pla)A short tale used as an example to illustrate a moral point, usually in a sermon or other didactic work. The form was cultivated in the late Middle Ages, for instance in Robert Mannyng of ...
formes fixes
Fixed patterns of text and tune—strophic with refrain—in courtly and popular French dance-songs (13th–14th centuries), which developed into the principal forms of 14th–15th-century French lyric ...
Italian Influences
A balance‐sheet of literary exchange over some seven centuries would doubtless show that Italy's debt to France began earlier, and was the greater, but between the 14th and the end ...
Jean de Meun
(d. 1305).Best known as continuator of the Roman de la Rose (c. 1270–8), Jean de Meun was also an important translator. Still surviving are his renditions of the De ...
Jean le Charlier de Gerson
(1363–1429).French churchman and spiritual writer. All his life he was concerned for a true reform of the Church by a renewal of the spirit of prayer and sacrifice. He ...
Johannes Andreae
(c.1270–1348)Born at Rifredo near Florence, Johannes Andreae (Giovanni di Andrea) died of plague at Bologna. He studied theology, canon law (he was received as doctor “despite himself” between 1296 ...
John of Montreuil
(1354–1418)John of Montreuil (Jean Charlin, in Latin Johannes de Monsterio Sicco, de Monsterolio), French Humanist, was born at Monthureux-le-Sec (Vosges) in 1354 and died at Paris in 1418. ...
La Querelle des Femmes
In its narrow sense, this term refers to a genre of writing in Latin and French in which the superiority of one or the other sex is proposed. The earliest ...
Matheolus
A cleric from Boulogne wrote in Latin his Lamentationes towards the end of the 13th c. A fiercely anti-feminist work, it was later translated into French (and answered) by Jean ...
military arts
It is a myth that military science was not studied or practised in the MA. Merely recounting the intricate manoeuvres directed by William I ‘the Conqueror’ on the battlefield of ...
Military Manuals
Some classical Greek and Roman military writings were known to medieval Europeans, as were Byzantine works advising on the training and deployment of armies on campaigns, the logistics of supply ...
Mirrors of Princes
The writings known as Mirrors of Princes correspond to a whole series of didactic works usually intended for Kings or future kings, to whom they set out a teaching on ...
patronage, literary
GreekLiterary patronage in Greece is associated chiefly with autocratic rulers (though in Classical Athens the choregia was a kind of democratization of the patronage principle). The tyrants of ...
