Confessors of arms: heralds and their texts in late medieval chivalric culture

Thesis

This thesis explores the multifaceted world of English, French, and Burgundian heralds from c. 1350 to 1550 and demonstrates that the study of heraldic texts can provide insightful new perspectives on chivalric culture and literature. By combining manuscript studies with literary analysis and cultural history, I establish a nuanced view of heralds’ practical and ideological roles within late medieval noble communities. In this discussion, I give special consideration to newly uncovered evidence of English heralds’ composition of fanciful tournament letters as well as to heralds’ recurrent claim that they were the very wellsprings of chivalry, without whom honourable deeds of arms were seldom done. I then apply these findings to reveal the cognitive dissonance necessary to many of the claims that heralds and other medieval writers made for chivalry, namely that it was a coherent, moral, and incorruptible set of values which justified the nobility’s power and rank. In reality, heralds’ strained efforts to systematize knightly ideals and codes of conduct in their corporate texts betray the extent to which the imperatives of chivalry were inherently contradictory and self-serving. The paradoxes of chivalric culture are neatly encapsulated within the heraldic oath itself, each surviving version of which centers on the same untenable promise to serve both a particular lord and the nobility at large on equal terms. Heraldic oaths equally enjoined heralds to act with the confidentiality of ‘confessors of arms’ and shed light on how the nobility came to appropriate the religious model of private confession to circumvent the obligations of honour and chivalry which ostensibly justified its pre-eminence. This discussion of chivalry’s ideological underpinnings then gives fruit to a new reading of the politics of privacy in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, evidencing how the insights provided by heraldic texts can illuminate the dynamics latent in broader chivalric literature, even in texts where heralds themselves are elided.

Authors: Wilson, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-dq1bdpyjz
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: heralds; middle ages; chivalric literature and culture; tournaments; oaths; privacy; Sir Thomas Malory; Le Morte Darthur
• Subjects: Medieval History; Medieval Literature; English Literature