Performing the Nation: The Play Performed at the Great Feast in Christine de Pizan's Biography of Charles V

Summary

This study examines Christine de Pizan's description of the ceremonials surrounding the 1378 visit to Paris of Emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg. These events figure in her 1404 biography of Charles V, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, hereafter referred to as Charles V. The ceremonials included a short play put on for the Emperor by Charles V at the Great Feast held in his honor. In Christine's version of the events, the play, which depicts French princes of the blood working together in a common Christian effort, can be considered to be a mise en abyme of the “staging techniques” characteristic of the exercise of royal power by Charles V. Charles had exhibited such techniques in several ways that I will consider here; first, by having the play produced; second, by having a description of the play included in his own official copy of Les Grandes Chroniques de France, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 2813. The description of the Emperor's visit in this copy, where it is illustrated by eighteen miniatures, is the most densely illuminated segment of text in the entire book. A splendid miniature in this segment is the often-reproduced miniature of the play, whose heraldry makes allusion to Jean de Berry and Philippe le Hardi, Charles V's brothers. Whereas MS 2813 has an extensive iconographic cycle, no such cycle was present in any known manuscript of Christine's biography. If the play's exemplary function is suggested by the miniature found in MS 2813 and by several lines in the text, its exemplary function in Charles V is indicated by variations on those same lines showing that Christine adapts Charles's earlier use of the play as a powerful tool in order to meet the political needs of her own time. My findings support Anne Hedeman's claims that the relatively unadorned tracts of people such as Jean Gerson and Christine became the true successors of the political program outlined in Charles V's copies of Les Grandes Chroniques.

In her Charles V Christine resurrects Charles's use of the play, performed a quarter of a century earlier, as an example of princes’ collaboration in a common Christian effort, thereby evoking problems facing contemporary France, problems that she implicitly calls upon Jean de Berry to help solve.