The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries saw the foundation of a profusion of new chivalric orders. The brainchildren of kings and princes throughout western Europe, these institutions took form during a period in which traditional concepts of chivalry came under increasing scrutiny and when the socio–economic position of members of the chivalric elite was similarly exposed. Developments in military strategy and technology, and the various pressures inflicted by catastrophes such as the Great Famine and repeated outbreaks of the Black Death, created a climate in which the value of knighthood and the status of nobility were called into question. Yet this also formed the environment in which some of the most celebrated medieval chivalric organisations came into being.

Such organisations were not replacements for crusading orders such as the Hospitallers (the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem), although the dissolution of the Templars (the Poor Fellow–Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon) in 1314 may have provided a context if not a direct motivation for their foundation. Crusading, of course, remained a highly lauded knightly endeavour and members of these new orders were among the most prominent of those who took part in expeditions to southern Spain, or who campaigned alongside the Teutonic Knights in eastern Europe, or who fought in the disastrous Nicopolis expedition (1396). But there is also no doubt that the nature of crusading evolved in the later middle ages and some aspects of its ethos began to be redirected in national interests. For example, the later stages of the Hundred Years War saw both England and France seek to exploit the idealism and propaganda of the crusade for their own ends. Joan of Arc seems to have viewed her own campaign in crusading terms. In her ‘Letter to the English’ (22 March 1429) Joan claimed she had ‘been sent here to drive [the English] out of France by God the King of Heaven’. Once that was accomplished, ‘the French will do the fairest deed that has ever been done for Christianity’ – they would recapture the Holy Land. In a similar fashion, propaganda circulated that portrayed the English as a chosen people akin to the children of Israel and in which kings such as Henry V (r. 1413–22) were compared to the Biblical monarchs David and Solomon.

Born into a kingdom where the king prohibited female inheritance, the eponymous heroine of the thirteenth–century Old French romance Silence was raised as a boy, much to the frustration of Nature and satisfaction of Nurture. Silence's education in masculine courtly behaviour and in the arts of war as her father's only heir was so successful that ‘He (sic) [became] … a valiant and noble knight;/ no king or count was ever better’ (‘Chevaliers est vallans et buens,/ Mellor n'engendra rois ne cuens’). Silence's true gender was only unmasked when he/she captured the prophet Merlin, who could only be seized if tricked by a woman. At the end of the tale, Nature recovered ‘her rights’ (‘sa droiture’) over Silence's body and restored her feminine appearance, whereupon Silence, who became known as Silentia rather than Silentius, abandoned her masculine knightly attire and married the king.

With its focus on violence, power and knighthood, chivalry appears first and foremost as a masculine social ideal in both medieval literature and life. Carrying arms and engaging personally in knightly forms of combat were male preserves; it was unnatural for women to participate in them. As Nature admonished Silence, before she reassumed her true gender:

Yet the centrality of aristocratic ladies to courtly life and lordship allowed women to participate in chivalric culture in ways that were not entirely divorced from those of their male kin. Although women often featured in romances as lovers or unattainable figures for whom aristocratic men performed various feats of arms, they also appeared as agents, rather than as purely passive recipients of male affection or admiration. This chapter considers how far chivalric practices, values and modes of conduct were gendered, and explores how far female experiences differed from those of men between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries. It adopts a broad definition of chivalry that encompasses the lifestyles and ideals of behaviour of those persons who belonged to the aristocracy. It also recognises that chivalric literature was interwoven with gendered ideas and stereotypes that reflected many of the tenets of elite society.

What was chivalric society? The answer to this question, like all such questions, will depend much on the audience to which it is being addressed and the perspectives from which it is being considered, from the social to the geographical, the chronological to the hierarchical, the military to the more narrowly political, the central to the local. Further clarification is required due to the fact that the emphasis in the title of this chapter is on the organisation of chivalric society, with the implication being that someone or something was doing the organising. This in turn begs the question of what he, they or it were actually organising chivalric society for. To prevent confusion from the outset, therefore, this chapter will be concerning itself with the monarchies of medieval Europe, specifically western and central Europe, for the reason that throughout this era they constituted the executive power most capable of organising chivalric society. This society, in turn, will be defined in its simplest and least contentious sense as the knights and those above them, bearing a panoply of noble titles, who might be considered as knights cloaked in supplementary regalia. The slight exception to this rule comes in the period from c. 1350 to 1450 when, in the later stages of vital chivalric society, many esquires were effectively accepted, by a process of osmosis and adaptation, into the evolving sense of what it meant to be chivalric. This is highlighted, for instance, by the fact that Geoffroi de Charny, the fourteenth–century author of the famous chivalric treatise Le Livre de Chevalerie, clearly saw fit to include all men–at–arms, and not only those actually dubbed to knighthood, among the chivalrous. As for what these knights and the broadly knightly were being organised for, it would be difficult and arguably unnecessary to look beyond the two primary purposes of war and government, with the various emphases on defence, security, territorial aggrandisement, regional administration and law and order which those terms imply. These basic terms of enquiry having been clarified from the outset, attention can thus be turned to the more interesting question of how the monarchies made, or attempted to make, chivalric society work for rather than against them.

At the heart of the various vitae of Cuthbert and Guthlac explored in this study lies the relationship of the saints with Creation which, I have argued, was fundamental to their role as saints. While sometimes regarded as only an allegorical signifier for heavenly ideas, Creation in these early vitae functioned in a much more complex and physical way. Sanctity was achieved and experienced within delineated portions of the Anglo-Saxon landscape. Though each text under consideration engages with Creation in different ways, their shared Augustinian/Bedan exegesis frames their saints’ interactions with Creation, and allows for a comparative analysis that lends the distinctions weight and colour. Given the constraints of space, this study necessarily excludes the later traditions of both saints. The findings outlined here, however, invite further analysis on the role of Creation within the later literary iterations of the Cuthbertine and Guthlacian cults, pointing the way for further study. I will consider briefly some of them below.

Saint Cuthbert's popularity continued throughout the medieval period, and the central role of the relationship between Cuthbert and Creation remained. This is evidenced, for example, in the late Old English poem Durham, which focuses on the city that by the time of the poem's composition was the resting place for both Cuthbert and his cult. While the poem has often been interpreted as an encomium urbis for the city, Helen Appleton has persuasively argued that though it utilises this form, Durham is better understood as focusing on Cuthbert himself. Durham opens with a description of the city that emphasises the physical landscape in which it resides, highlighting two distinct features that echo the depictions of Creation in the vitae of Cuthbert: first, with regard to the landscape itself, Durham is surrounded by water, an echo of both Lindisfarne and Farne; second, the waters, wooded hills, and dales are overflowing not simply with animate life, but specifically with wild animals that are part of the positive description.

SEVERAL of the items in Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86 provocatively insist on, or assume, the inevitability of conflict or competition between men and women, especially in the context of sexual and/or marital relationships. Within the composition of the manuscript as a whole, these texts weigh at least heavily enough to suggest that the Digby compiler-scribe was consciously interested in gender conflict as a literary theme. Some of these texts are explicitly presented as debates about gender or gendered experience, or else implicitly as contributions to such debates. Others are principally narratives, but narratives driven by the assumption that relationships between men and women are necessarily and universally mutually exploitative or antagonistic. Such narratives include The Four Wishes of Saint Martin (in French), Dame Sirith (in English) and the Lay of the Horn (in French). Digby 86 also contains two debate poems that focus specifically on gender and gendered perspectives: The Strife between Two Ladies (in French), which assesses the value (to women) of marital fidelity, and The Thrush and the Nightingale (in English), in which two birds play the part of advocates for and against women in general. In addition, there are several texts that present accounts of gendered experience that are so conspicuously one-sided as to seem to be relying on, or even implicitly contributing to, an ongoing debate about the nature of the relationship between men and women. These include texts like The Little Fable of the Jealous Man, The Lad Who Sided with Ladies and Damsels and The Life of a Lusty Lad (all in French). In this chapter, I offer brief characterisations of each of these texts (some of which deserve to be much better known than they are), emphasising in particular their shared intertextuality – by which I mean the sheer complexity of the ways in which they seem to borrow from each other or from a shared set of sources. This intertextuality is sometimes so pronounced as to suggest that each of these texts, whatever its particular literary form, was imagined as a contribution to a wider tradition of literary ‘talk’ about gender. A question I particularly try to answer here is: what social function(s) would such texts have served? And, correspondingly, what kind of audience/readership should their association in Digby 86 be taken to imply?

In contrast to the political and socio–cultural organisation of the chivalric elite, we know surprisingly little about how they organised themselves on the battlefield. Our sources provide very little insight. Indeed, if we were to believe the majority of our narrative sources then we might conclude that there was no organisation at all, and that knights fought as individual warriors. Certainly that is the picture painted in the epic and the romance. The heroes fight alone, against huge odds or in one–on–one encounters that seem more like tournament bouts than all–out war. Biographers and chroniclers have a similar approach, providing a broad–brush narrative of military actions, then focusing right down to the acts of individual figures. Simply put, the writers were not interested in the minutiae of military organisation any more than their audiences, for whom much of it would have been self–evident, their being part of the military elite. Moreover, the importance of the chivalric virtue of prouesse, with its focus on individual martial ability, pushed the writer and audience down the same line.

For much the same reason, the writings on chivalry – the treatises of the likes of Geoffrey de Charny, Honoré Bonet or Christine de Pizan – have little to say on the subject either. The individual warrior's worth, prowess and honour were their subject. Christine de Pizan, drawing heavily on the late Roman writer Vegetius, wrote about the virtues and skills of the commander, and of the strategy necessary in war (the importance of lines of supply, the need to retain the strategic initiative and the like), but has little use for Vegetius's extensive and detailed passages on the structure of armies and the units within them.

Historians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries will argue that whilst the narrative sources may be all but silent on the topic, the administrative records survive in numbers sufficient to develop a very strong understanding of how a medieval army functioned. From 1337 English royal armies, both field armies and garrison forces, were raised entirely by the use of contracts. These forces, paid by the crown, generated an enormous quantity of bureaucratic paperwork, from the initial indenture through regular muster rolls and restauro equorum valuations of horses for compensation purposes, to pardons and protections taken out at the onset of campaigns to try to protect the assets of those going to war.

EVERY HOUR CHIMES with a new example of ecological crisis: the warming oceans, the loss of biodiversity, and the rise of anti-environmental public policies. In response to our contemporary moment, the Humanities have begun to engage in earnest with questions of ecology. This present study seeks to bring medieval literature into dialogue with these issues, analysing medieval constructions and interpretations of the non-human world as expressed in literature, by considering them in their historical context. This approach highlights how medieval peoples actively reflected upon their own engagement with the non-human world, structured in great part by their theology and philosophy, and articulated them through the artistry of their literature.

Restoring Creation: the Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac engages with the growing interest throughout medieval scholarship in the environmental humanities, evidenced by the number of monographs published in the past few years on such topics, including Water in Medieval Literature by Albrecht Classen; Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination, by Heidi Estes; and Inhabited Spaces: Anglo-Saxon Constructions of Place, by Nicole G. Discenza. This engagement by medieval scholars is heartening, as the majority of the studies in the environmental humanities, in Estes's words, ‘dismiss or ignore the medieval, or misrepresent it in discussions of the modern’. This is most evident in the wider, and erroneous, conceptions of the negative role of the natural world in medieval literature, particularly in relation to ecocritical scholarship. For example, Timothy Morton, one of the leading ecocritical theorists, describes the natural world in medieval texts in negative and dismissive terms: ‘Nature, practically a synonym for evil in the Middle Ages, was considered the basis of social good by the Romantic Period.’ This oversimplification of medieval literature is unfortunate, to say the least, and fundamentally distorting, both for the project of literary analysis as a whole, and also for broader discussions in the environmental humanities. The negative vision of the relationship between medieval people and the natural world also appears in more popular arenas, as evidenced by the scholar and writer Alexandra Harris.

LE Romaunz Peres Aunfour coment il aprist et chaustia sun cher fiz belement is by far the longest item in Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86. Filling 23½ doublecolumned folios (art. 27; fols. 74va–97vb), its French verse couplets occupy about twice as much space as any of the volume's three other substantial items: a medical treatise in French prose (13 folios: The Letter of Hippocrates, art. 7; fols. 8v–15v, 17r–21r), a treatise on falconry in French prose (13½ folios: Le Medicinal des oiseaus, art. 19; fols. 49r–62r) and a saint's life in French verse (11½ folios: Wace's Miracles de seint Nicholas, art. 54; fols. 150ra–161ra). The volume's remaining items are mostly quite short, although a few occupy from five to eight folios. The decision to include this lengthy text in the manuscript reflects the considerable interest the writings of Petrus Alfonsi held for a late medieval Anglo-French audience. Its placement may also reflect the compiler's particular interest in linking the diverse texts included in the manuscript, which range from religious, scientific and instructive texts, to secular material that includes comic tales, narratives of adventure and risqué verse.

It is not surprising that the compiler of a miscellaneous manuscript would have been pleased to include some version of Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis in his book. Derived from Arabic, Hebrew and other Eastern sources, the early twelfthcentury Disciplina clericalis is the first framed story collection known to have been composed in Western Europe. As an assemblage of maxims, proverbs, moralisations and tales, it was both tremendously influential and widely circulated: at least seventy-six complete and partial copies of the Latin text survive, alongside two French verse translations (surviving in fourteen manuscripts), portions in French prose (surviving in seven manuscripts dated thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and versions in other languages. At least twenty-five Latin copies survive from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and eight French copies (including Digby) survive from the last third of the thirteenth century.

Judging from the contents of Digby 86, it seems possible that the more widely disseminated Latin Disciplina clericalis would not have suited the compiler's linguistic preferences, and that he actively sought a French verse version.

Jean II Le Meingre was buried in his family chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the basilica of Saint-Martin at Tours. The effigy presented him wearing a long robe marked with his coat of arms, a double-headed eagle with spread wings (‘D’azur à l’aigle bicéphale de gueles, becquée et membrée d’azur’). His epitaph declared that

His wife, Antoinette de Turenne, had also asked to be buried in this chapel in her will dated 10 April 1413. Her body was finally moved from the monastery of Notre-Dame du Carmel at Tours to join her husband in 1426, thanks to the efforts of her confessor and executor, Jean Manubier. Her effigy was placed alongside her husband, and her epitaph simply identified her as viscountess of Turenne and wife of ‘Jehan Bouciquaut’. But on 15 March 1562, the basilica was ransacked by soldiers in the service of the prince of Condé and Antoine de La Rochefoucauld, and the effigies upon the tombs of both Jean I and Jean II Le Meingre were mutilated. Then, in 1793, the basilica was transformed into a stable, and shortly afterwards it was demolished, so the only surviving record of his tomb now exists in the pages of an antiquarian notebook.

The couple were also commemorated in the splendid Boucicaut Hours. One illumination showed a young Boucicaut facing Antoinette as they both prayed to the crowned Madonna and the baby Jesus Christ above them. The marshal was dressed in armour, accompanied by an angel acting as his squire, thereby emphasizing both his martial identity and his service to God. The fact that husband and wife were depicted kneeling in front of one another and physically mirroring one another would suggest an equal and respectful relationship.

Writing a book on a living composer is a double-edged sword: for all the freedom granted by being the first person critically to assess much of the music comes the constant feeling of worry and guilt that you might get some valuable information wrong. Having no vast bibliography of secondary literature is both a blessing and a curse; there is certainly much less to read and absorb, to verify or contradict, but there are far fewer places to turn to for corroborating views or analyses. With the composer in question very much still alive and producing, there is always the possibility of contacting him for another interview, or for that key bit of information that has alluded you – whether he wants to respond or not. In short, writing this book is something of a voyage into the unknown, or the little known, with the ultimate hope being to end up somewhere of value and experience, for both the author and the wider musical world.

I first encountered James MacMillan's name before I had heard any of his music; it was during my undergraduate degree at Durham University in a workshop given by MacMillan's former tutor (and my soon-to-be tutor) John Casken. Casken informed the composition class that there was ‘little money in contemporary composition’ (a typically matter-of-fact statement from the then Head of Composition at Manchester University) and that the ‘only composer who made money from serious composition is James MacMillan’. Who was this James MacMillan who made all this money? How did he do it? I did not take the time to find out, but I remembered his name. I met him for the first time a few years later in Manchester, whilst I was studying with Casken; MacMillan was at the university on one of his visits to work with the BBC Philharmonic as part of his role as composer–conductor. During our brief meeting, I had a nosebleed and spent much of the time hiding behind a piano – an auspicious introduction.

I first encountered his music in any real fashion whilst working in a music shop in Oxford; here we were encouraged to listen to some of the CDs we were trying to sell, and I slowly made my way through all the contemporary music the shop stocked.

The Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre was written between 1406 and 1409, while Marshal Boucicaut was serving as governor of Genoa. Both the text and the surviving manuscript were completed in a hurry: the narrative stops abruptly in December 1408, empty pages were left in the manuscript for the story to be continued, and the programme of illuminations was never carried out. This would suggest that the biography as it survives today was written for an immediate and urgent purpose, that is to explain and to defend Boucicaut's actions as governor of Genoa to his most important audience, the princes of the blood at the French royal court.

The Livre des fais could not end with the usual account of the hero's death because Boucicaut was very much alive when his biography was completed. Without a report of the final moments of his life, the Livre des fais lacked the traditional opportunity to encapsulate the full meaning of his life. Therefore the author concluded the book with an extended review of the marshal's virtues and good habits, highlighting his supposed piety, charity, self-discipline, chastity, justice and eloquence, and emphasizing the vices like avarice and vainglory that he shunned. There was only a limited attempt to tie this discussion to the story of Boucicaut's life that had appeared in the narrative portion of the Livre des fais. The author preferred to illustrate the fourth part of the biography by comparing the marshal to the great heroes of Antiquity, recounting stories and anecdotes that underlined the lessons to be drawn from the example set by Boucicaut, while implicitly elevating the marshal to their glorious status. The principal source for this section was the recent French translation of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dictorum memorabilia libri novem. Given that one of the translators, Nicolas de Gonesse, was in service to Boucicaut in Genoa, it is reasonable to suppose that this learned cleric was heavily involved in the production of the Livre des fais. But the biography was certainly a collaboration between Gonesse and other members of the entourage of Boucicaut, and it is possible that this cleric was merely adding a gloss and commentary at the final stage of production to a more functional narrative authored by a layman like Jean d’Ony or Jean de Châteaumorand.