Perspectives on war: The textual and visual evidence of Burgundian prose romances
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At the court of Burgundy in the mid-fifteenth century, the question of the legitimacy of military conflicts that had long occupied the minds of legal scholars and theologians was still a pressing issue, especially in manuals of warfare such as Honorat Bovet’s L’Arbre des batailles ( The Tree of Battles) and Christine de Pizan’s Le livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie. In Burgundian prose romances that also played their part in the dissemination of just war theory for the benefit of a lay audience, these ideas are not presented in any systematic fashion but they are nonetheless integral to the definition of the romance hero as constructed both in and through the narrative. How, then, do these romances justify the wars fought by their heroes as well as the conduct that they adopt when performing their military deeds? How is this textual justification of war translated into visual terms in the images that so often accompanied the narrative in manuscripts containing these tales?
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