The Flower of Chivalry

Having just purchased a second book with this byline and contemplating a third title, my curiosity was piqued - how many other medieval warriors bore this title - who were these knights who were the epitome of the chivalric code.

William Marshall

William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke (1146 or 1147 – 14 May 1219), also called William the Marshal, was an Anglo-Norman soldier and statesman. He served five English kings – Henry II, his sons The "Young King" Henry, Richard I, John, and John's son Henry III.

Further reading:

William Marshal, the Flower of Chivalry by Georges Duby

The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, Power Behind Five English Thrones by Thomas Asbridge

William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire 1147–1219 by David Crouch

William Marshal, Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England by Sidney Painter

Bertrand Du Guesclin

Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320 – 13 July 1380), nicknamed "The Eagle of Brittany" or "The Black Dog of Brocéliande", was a Breton knight and French military commander during the Hundred Years' War. He was Constable of France from 1370 to his death. Well known for his Fabian strategy, he took part in six pitched battles and won the four in which he held command.

Further reading:

The Flower of Chivalry: Bertrand Du Guesclin and the Hundred Years War by Richard Vernier 

Chevalier Bayard

Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (1473 – 30 April 1524) was a French soldier, generally known as the Chevalier de Bayard. Throughout the centuries since his death, he has been known as "the knight without fear and beyond reproach" (le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche). He himself however, preferred the name given him by his contemporaries for his gaiety and kindness, "le bon chevalier", or "the good knight". 

Further reading: 

The Chevalier Bayard by Samuel Shellabarger

The Story of the Chevalier Bayard by E Walford 

William Douglas

Sir William Douglas, Lord of Liddesdale (circa. 1300-k.1353) was also known as the Knight of Liddesdale and the Flower of Chivalry. He was a Scottish nobleman and soldier active during the Second War of Scottish Independence. 

Further reading: 

Border Fury: England and Scotland at War 1296-1568. by John Sadler 

The Black Douglases by Michael Brown 

Chronica Gentis Scotorum, by John of Fordun 

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (30 November 1554 – 17 October 1586) was an English poet, courtier, scholar, and soldier, who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. 

Further reading

Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney by Fulke Grevile

Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet by Katherine Duncan-Jones

Henry V, King of England

Henry V (9 August 1386 – 31 August 1422) was King of England from 1413 until his death at the age of 36 in 1422. He was the second English monarch who came from the House of Lancaster.

Further reading:

Henry V, Flower of Chivalry by Craig David Taylor

The Life and times of Henry V by P Earle

Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England by Juliet Barker

Edward, the Black Prince

Edward of Woodstock KG (15 June 1330 – 8 June 1376), called the Black Prince, was the eldest son of King Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, and the father of King Richard II of England. He was the first Duke of Cornwall (from 1337), the Prince of Wales (from 1343) and the Prince of Aquitaine (1362–72). Edward has been referred to as the Flower of English Chivalry

Further reading:

Edward the Black Prince: Power in Medieval Europe. by David Green

Roland

Roland (died 15 August 778) was a Frankish military leader under Charlemagne who became one of the principal figures in the literary cycle known as the Matter of France. The historical Roland was military governor of the Breton March, responsible for defending Francia's frontier against the Bretons. 

Further reading:

The Song of Roland 

Wikipedia - The Song of Roland

The Song of Roland by Dorothy Leigh Sayers

Don Quixote of La Mancha

The story follows the adventures of a hidalgo named Mr. Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. 

Fearing he is dead, Sancho Panza laments Don Quixote: "Oh flower of chivalry, that with one blow of a stick hast ended the course of thy well-spent life! Oh pride of thy race, honour and glory of all La Mancha, nay, of all the world, that for want of thee will be full of evil-doers, no longer in fear of punishment for their misdeeds!

Further reading

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

Don Quixote of La Mancha

And finally we come to: 

Jean II Le Meingre

Jean II Le Maingre, called Boucicaut (August 28, 1366 — June 21, 1421) was Marshal of France and a knight renowned for his military skill - 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. 

Further reading

The Chivalric Biography of Boucicaut, Jean II Le Meingre by Craig David Taylor

A Corresponding Renaissance

Author Lisa Kaborycha talks about her book "A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650" at Oxford University Press Blog.

Writing letters was a quintessential part of everyday life in the Renaissance. The ability to write elegant, expressive, persuasive letters was a highly-prized skill. Beyond a practical necessity, letter writing was considered a high art. The Renaissance art of epistolarity, specifically the humanist penchant for modeling personal letters after those of Cicero, has been well documented. Less examined is what it meant for Renaissance individuals to publish their personal letters for all to read.  Renaissance women participated in this publishing phenomenon, demonstrating a willingness to share their innermost thoughts and to expose intimate details of their lives to the broader reading public. 

read rest of article her @ OUP Blog - Italian Women & 16th Century Social Media

The Fellowship of the Book: Manutius & Bembo

The figure of Aldus Manutius, the “Michelangelo of the Book,” is inseparable from the city where he produced his most important innovations: Venice, the principal printing centre of the Renaissance. 

Aldus’ most notable relationship with Venice, though, emerges through his fellowship with the intellectual and polygraph Pietro Bembo. Whereas Manutius revolutionized printing and reading, Bembo revolutionized the Italian literary language and canon. 

Manutius and Bembo’s partnership was particularly successful mainly because it benefited both sides equally. Bembo owed Manutius his first steps in the literary arena, since Aldus published his first texts – the scientific treatise De Aetna and the dialogue Gli Asolani– and entrusted Bembo with the critical edition of Dante’s and Petrarch’s immortal masterpieces. For the De Aetna, Manutius decided to use a new italic typeface, and commissioned it to his trusted punchcutter Francesco Griffo: in 1495-96, thus, the Bembo typeface was born. 

read entire article - The Fellowship of the Book by Elisa Mondolo here @ SFU Library Special Collections & Rare Books

Books: Holocaust History

From History News Network, comes two books tackling controversial characters from modern history.

The Devil's Diary

New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Wittman is the author of The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich. As an FBI agent and then a private consultant specialized in recovering artifacts of historic significance, he first learned of the diary his new book is about in 2001, when the chief archivist for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum contacted him to say that someone was trying to sell it for upwards of a million dollars. 

The diary is as significant an artifact as any that Henry or I had found in our careers. It is a priceless historical artifact, and at a time when fewer and fewer witnesses to the Holocaust survive to tell their stories, it is a powerful reminder of the cataclysmic perils of a hateful and misguided ideology like Alfred Rosenberg’s.

read more here @ History News Network

The Pharmacist of Auschwitz?

Interview with author Patricia Posner whose book The Pharmacist of Auschwitz? details the life of Victor Capesius, the Nazi who was the chief pharmacist and co-worker of Dr Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

Capesius, on the other hand, is typical of many SS officers who were involved in terrible crimes at Auschwitz but sailed under the radar for a long time. He was one of the small cogs that allowed the Nazi killing machinery to work so efficiently.  Capesius is the quintessential ordinary man who becomes capable of extraordinary crimes, the concept that historian Hannah Arendt coined as the “banality of evil.”

read interview here @ History News Network

Tsundoku - Book Hoarding

Book hoarding is a well-documented habit.  In fact, most literary types are pretty proud of the practice, steadfast in their desire to stuff shelves to maximum capacity. They’re not looking to stop hoarding, because parting with pieces of carefully curated piles is hard and stopping yourself from buying the next Strand staff pick is even harder. 

The desire to buy more books than you can physically read in one human lifetime is actually so universal, there’s a specific word for it: tsundoku. Defined as the stockpiling of books that will never be consumed, the term is a Japanese portmanteau of sorts, combining the words “tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”), “oku” (meaning “to leave for a while”) and “doku” (meaning “to read”).

Speaking of addictions ― the term “bibliomania” emerged in England around the same time as “tsundoku.” Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an English cleric and bibliographer, wrote Bibliomania, or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance in the 1800s, outlining a fictional “neurosis” that prompted those suffering from it to obsessively collect books of all sorts. 

Bibliomania has a dark past, documented more as a pseudo-illness that inspired real fear than a harmless knack for acquiring books we won’t have time to read. “Some collectors spent their entire fortunes to build their personal libraries,” Lauren Young wrote for Atlas Obscura. “While it was never medically classified, people in the 1800s truly feared bibliomania.” 

Read entire article here @ Huffington Post

Movie: The Last Duel

One of my favourite books is set to become a movie - Eric Jager's The Last Duel.

From IF dot com dot au:

Shaun Grant has been set to adapt the Eric Jager novel The Last Duel for Jeff Robinov’s Studio 8. Francis Lawrence (Hunger Games: Mockingjay) is to direct with Erwin Stoff producing. Set in France,The Last Duel is the true story of a duel in 1386 between knights Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris. It was the final duel sanctioned by the French government, ruled at the time by King Charles VI.  Grant scripted the Justin Kurzel-directed Australian film Snowtown, a chronicle of the fact-based Snowtown murders. He also wrote Berlin Syndrome, an adaptation of the psychological thriller novel by Melanie Joosten that Cate Shortland will direct this summer.  

Read more @ Hroarr - What Really Happened at the Last Duel - Part 1 & Part 2 by Ariella Elema

Mongols in the Islamic World

Peter Jackson, emeritus professor of medieval history at Keele University, came out with his magisterial The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410 in 2005, detailing the epic clash between the forces of 13th century Christendom and the waves of Mongol invasion threatening to engulf it. The standard account of that invasion has been the stuff of films and historical melodrama for 600 years: the brutish Mongols slaughtered whole populations of city and countryside with comprehensive gusto, sparing an assortment of accountants and clerks to run the administrative tasks to which they themselves were indifferent. The signature of the great Mongol warlord, Genghis Khan, was one of ruthless bloodshed.

In his earlier book, Jackson sought to add nuance to that standard account, using a wide array of sources to reinforce a more balanced picture of what might at first seem the least-reclaimable item in all of human history – the conquering Mongol horde. And his deeply impressive new book, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion, continues that reclamation process, following the forces of Genghis Khan as they enter and overrun Central Asia in the early 13th century, quickly conquering virtually all Muslim territories east of Syria. Present-day Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan – huge tracts of Western Asia fell under Mongol domination in the years that followed.

Read entire review of Mongols & the Islamic World

Read also review of Mongols & the West

Death of a She Devil by Fay Weldon

When Fay Weldon introduced Ruth Patchett in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, 34 years ago, she created one of literature’s greatest monsters. Deserted by callous husband Bobbo for the simpering romance novelist Mary Fisher, ugly doormat Ruth remakes herself as the She Devil and has her revenge on the adulterers. Her punisher’s progress takes her through every circle of society, from underclass to judiciary, from family to clergy, until finally she is surgically transformed into “an impossible male fantasy made flesh” – even losing six inches of leg to become desirably petite. At the close of the book, with Bobbo broken and Mary dead, Ruth’s triumph is complete.

In Death of a She Devil, Bobbo is in effect Ruth’s prisoner, ancient and confined to bed, from where he rants his misogyny and sexually assaults his nurse. Meanwhile, Mary haunts the lighthouse, indulging in some light poltergeist activities and narrating the political machinations within the institute. An ambitious young woman named Valerie Valeria has plans to replace the She Devil, and Ruth’s freakishly beautiful grandson Tyler seems like the perfect vehicle for her schemes.

read more here @ the Guardian

New Fiction: The City Of Brass

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles. 

S.A. Chakraborty's debut novel, The City of Brass, is an epic historical fantasy about con-artist, Nahri, who strikes up a friendship with “a fiery djinn prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father’s corrupt regime. But, in a world where loyalty is a magical bond and grievances last for millennia, she soon learns that working with the enemy – even to make peace – can have deadly consequences.”

read an excerpt here @ Gizmondo Australia or visit S.A Chakraborty's website