. In contrast to classical and medieval Greco-Latin tradition and to subsequent development of the genre from the Renaissance on, French medieval secular biography is relatively poor. It appears as if the luxuriant growth of hagiography has stifled the urge to describe nonsaintly lives. Furthermore, it is difficult to distinguish, particularly in the earlier period, between the specifically biographic and the more general historical, didactic, and moral writing that might include biographical accounts of heroes who, today at least, are not considered saints. It can be said that until the end of the 14th century collections of the lives of famous persons belonged chiefly if not exclusively to the clerical—i.e., Latin—tradition. The beginning of this medieval, christianized tradition probably can be traced back to St. Jerome’s De viris illustribus (ca. 342–420).
The same applies to individual biographies. There is hardly anything in French literature of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries that could be compared with the properly biographical Vita Karoli magni imperatoris by Einhard (ca. 770–840). But many elements of this monument of secular biography, with its conscious imitation of Suetonius and wealth of details about both the public and private life of the emperor, were either directly or indirectly “borrowed” in such immensely popular works as the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (Latin version ca. 1140; seven Old French translations in the course of the 13th c.). Pseudo-Turpin’s account was incorporated into the Grandes chroniques de France by the monks of Saint-Denis. By 1274, most of this great historical compilation was translated into French. Philippe Mouskés’s Chronique rimée (continued to 1243) devotes almost a third of its 31,256 lines to the life and deeds of Charlemagne. He takes his material from an Old French version of Pseudo-Turpin, as well as from the less authentic chansons de geste. Dealing with these forms of Charlemagne’s biography, we must be mindful that there might have been an important hagiographic element contributing to its popularity, for Charlemagne was formally canonized.
Similar problems of genre are encountered in another work that, from a modern point of view, should certainly be qualified as biographical Jean de Joinville’s Histoire (or Vie) de saint Louis. Asked (ca. 1309) to write a memorandum on the life of the saintly king to serve in the canonization process, Joinville (1225–1317) composed a lively account of his companion, which is also the first serious autobiography in French, since Jean talks interestingly and abundantly about his own life.
In the Occitan domain, there is a curious biographical subgenre. The 13th-century vidas are usually brief prose notes on troubadours’ lives preceding the poems of a given troubadour, often paraphrasing information culled from the poems. About a hundred such biographies have come down to us, all but two anonymous.
The 15th century witnessed the development of the secular biography proper. There is no doubt that the impetus came, at least in part, from the immense success of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–60). The purpose of this collection of lives of men and women from Adam to such contemporaries as Charles I of Anjou or Philippa of Catania is moral as well as biographical. As the casus of the title indicates, Boccaccio wished to offer a moral commentary on the fickleness of Fortune. The immensely popular De casibus was translated by Laurent de Premierfait at the beginning of the 15th century as Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, further contributing to the popularity of the biographic-moral genre.
In 1405, Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1430) composed in prose her Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405), containing a long “catalogue” of illustrious ladies of all epochs. Christine was inspired by Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (completed after 1362). Her book, again, is not a pure biography (if such a thing exists) but chiefly a defense of women from misogynous attacks. Christine also wrote the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (1404), in which she uses historical sources and court documents as well as personal reminiscences. The main purpose is not so much historical as biographicopanegyric. Largely panegyrical also is the Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, composed anonymously between 1407 and 1409, during the life of the protagonist. This lengthy prose panygeric has occasionally been attributed to Christine de Pizan, but this identification is generally rejected. The main purpose of this biography seems to be to exalt the chivalric ideal of the times.
The century ends with a far more realistic portraiture of Louis XI and other nobles in the Mémoires (completed in 1498) by Philippe de Commynes. The realism and vivacity of the biographical elements in this work foreshadow the triumph of biography during the Renaissance.
Christine de Pizan. The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards. New York: Persea, 1982. [La Cité des Dames still awaits a modern critical edition.]
Egan, Margarita, trans. The Vidas of the Troubadours. New York: Garland, 1984.
Joinville, Jean de. Vie de saint Louis, ed. Noel L.Corbett. Sherbrook: Naaman, 1977.
Lalande, Denis, ed. Le livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut. Geneva: Droz, 1985.
Laurent de Premierfait. Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes. Book I, Translated from Boccaccio, ed. Patricia May Gathercole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. [The whole of Des cas still awaits a critical edition.]
This is the complete article, containing 919 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
