The Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre is one of the most famous chivalric biographies of the middle ages. Written in 1409, it presented the controversial figure of Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut (1366– 1421), as a chivalric hero and role model. It is an important and, at times, unique source for the study of the history of warfare and crusading, as well as French, Italian and papal politics at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It also offers an important case-study through which to explore the complex and energetic debates surrounding knighthood in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, themes that I first addressed from a broader perspective in a monograph entitled Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France During the Hundred Years War (2013).

I first began to look more closely at the Livre des fais while collaborating with Jane Taylor on an English translation of the text. Up to that point, my understanding and appreciation of this text was framed by the excellent work of Denis Lalande who had first edited the text in 1985 and then published an important modern biography of Boucicaut (Jean II le Meingre, dit Le Boucicault (1366–1421): étude d’une biographie héroïque) three years later. The more closely that I read and studied the Livre des fais, the more dissatisfied I became with recent debates regarding the identity of the author, and hence the position of this text between aristocratic and learned clerical cultures, as well as the scholarly consensus that the biography championed a conservative, nostalgic vision of chivalry at a time of mounting crisis for the French aristocracy.

In this book, I argue that the Livre des fais was a collaborative effort between the famous scholar Nicolas de Gonesse and the lay companions of Boucicaut, including most notably the squire named Jean d’Ony. Their efforts were directed firmly at the goal of defending the reputation of the beleaguered marshal, rather than offering wider statements about the state of the French aristocracy in the year 1409. Above all the biography set out detailed explanations for his failure to force the two rival popes to meet to bring an end to the Schism, to save Pisa from falling into the hands of the Florentines, for military defeats at the hands of the Turks and the Venetians, and for the degenerating situation in Genoa.

THE main scribe's enthusiasm for conspicuous verse-form and rhyme is noted throughout Marilyn Corrie's doctoral study of Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86. It may be manifested in his choice of text: La Besturne highlights rhyme and metre in its exuberant overturning of conventional expectations of versification, as does La Vie de un vallet amerous, while thirty-seven of the fifty lines of Les Deus Chevalers torz ke plederent a Roume end with the word tort (and the remaining lines end in words which assonate with tort). The Latin prayer Regina clemencie Maria vocata (art. 55iii) is structured by rhyme with groups of twenty or eighteen lines ending on the same disyllable. It perhaps also motivates some of the idiosyncratic rewritings and conflations that Corrie so meticulously identifies. The scribe adds a stanza from Le Vers de la mort to La Complainte de Jerusalem possibly because both share the same verse-form. Such attention to form is demonstrated not only in his choices and in his copying, but also in aspects of his mise en texte and mise en page. Quires xxii–xxvi are notable for the exuberance of his wavy red tie-lines extending into the margins. Introducing the manuscript's facsimile, Judith Tschann and Malcolm Parkes observe that the scribe ‘inserted braces to indicate the rhythmic structures of stanzas’, but go no further in explaining what forms are thus articulated.

This chapter dwells at more length on the thought processes that lie behind the Digby scribe's enthusiastic use of red tie-lines, as well as other types of scribal recognition of form, comparing the scribe's behaviour with that of others both near and somewhat further afield. A clutch of West Midland manuscripts relatively close in time and geography share some of their contents with Digby 86 and offer a sample against which to assess his practice. The Trinity manuscript is a trilingual miscellany of religious texts copied c. 1255–60 by at least nine scribes whose English dialects place them in Herefordshire (though one was from Arras in France); it has been associated with the nearby Worcester Franciscans or with one of the Benedictine houses in the area.