5 - Charny's Career and Writings: A Revised Understanding

Summary

The Circumstances of the Livre's Composition

The exact circumstances of the Livre's composition will almost certainly never be known; any suggestions of how, when and where Charny wrote it can only be speculative. The general consensus has been that he wrote all three works that are attributed to him – the Livre, the Demandes and the Livre de Chevalerie – sometime between the Company of the Star's foundation in October 1351 and its demise following the disastrous battle of Mauron in late August 1352, a span of just ten months. Here the Livre de Chevalerie's inclusion in this time period can be quickly discounted, for the simple reason that, as will be discussed later in this chapter, it is very unlikely that Charny was its author. Even so, Charny's heavy military commitments, in particular the recapture of the fortress of Guînes, combined with his year in, year out seigneurial responsibilities, make his composing even the Livre and Demandes during this same period improbable.

Taylor has suggested that because the Livre ‘so realistically describes the hardships of a knight's voyage overseas’ Charny most likely wrote it shortly after his return from Smyrna. This initially seems a reasonable suggestion, as the poem's vivid autobiographical vignettes, insofar as they can be matched to known happenings in Charny's career, all relate to events that date no later than his return home from Smyrna around mid-1345. The fact that the vignettes end half-way through the poem, at line 1058, might therefore suggest a two-stage composition, with the first stage, i.e. up to line 1058, written about 1345 on Charny's return from his memorable journey, and the second stage, with its ‘Advice and Warnings’ perhaps reflecting his experiences as a royal councillor and diplomat in the period 1347–9, written in 1351–2 at the time of the Company of the Star's foundation.

However, it might equally be argued that – quite aside from life's more powerful episodes lingering in the memory for decades – any such chronological thinking fails to take proper account of the Livre's fundamental purpose. This was not to provide a sequential autobiography.