Books: Marshal Boucicaut

The Chivalric Biography of Boucicaut, Jean II le Meingre translated by Craig Taylor & Jane H.M. Taylor

First English translation of the chivalric biography of one of France's leading figures of the middle ages.

Jean le Meingre, Maréchal Boucicaut (1364-1421), was the very flower of chivalry. From his earliest years at the royal court in Paris, he distinguished himself in knightly pursuits: sorties against seditious French nobles, ceremonial jousts against the English enemy, crusading in Tunisia and Prussia, the composition of courtly verses, and the establishment of a chivalric order for the defence of ladies, the Order of the Enterprise of the White Lady of the Green Shield. He was named Marshal of France at the age of only 27.

His chivalric biography, finished in 1409, is one of the most important accounts of the life of a knight from the Middle Ages. Whilst full of praise, it is also highly partisan and carefully selective; it glosses over the darker, much less successful, side of his career - in particular his participation in the catastrophic Nicopolis crusade (1396) and his governorship of Genoa, which came to an end shortly after the completion of the biography, when a rebellion forced him to leave the city, five years before his capture at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and death in England in 1421.

This first English translation makes available to a wider audience a text that sheds light on the history of France, on crusading in Prussia and the Mediterranean, and on the complicated politics of Italy and the papacy during the Great Schism. It is a highly important contribution to our understanding of chivalric mentalities and attitudes in late-medieval France. It is presented with an introduction and notes.

A Virtuous Knight: Defending Marshal Boucicaut (Jean II Le Meingre, 1366-1421) by Craig Taylor

A radical re-interpretation of the chivalric biography of Boucicaut.

The Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre (1409) is one of the most famous chivalric biographies of the Middle Ages. It presents Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut (1366-1421), as an ideal knight and role model, and has frequently been seen by modern scholars as a last-ditch effort to defend traditional chivalric values that were supposedly in decline. 

Here, however, Craig Taylor argues that the biography is a much more complex and interesting text, fusing traditional notions of chivalry with the most fashionable new ideas in circulation at the French court at the start of the fifteenth century. Rather than a nostalgic criticism of contemporary knighthood, it should be seen as a showcase of the latest ideas on chivalry, written to renew the enthusiasm of the great French princes for a man who was in grave danger of falling out of favour: its purpose was to celebrate and to defend a beleaguered Boucicaut against his critics at the royal court, and to explain his actions as governor of Genoa, his failed crusading enterprises in the Eastern Mediterranean and his unsuccessful efforts to broker a solution to the Papal Schism.