АНТИАНГЛИЙСКИЕ ПРОПАГАНДИСТСКИЕ СОЧИНЕНИЯ И КНИЖНАЯ КУЛЬТУРА ФРАНЦИИ В ПЕРВОЙ ПОЛОВИНЕ XV В.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of such historical source as the anti-English propaganda treatises created in France in the first half of the 15 th century. Their emergence was caused by the political and event environment of that period – the resumed Hundred Years War, the civil war of Armagnacs and Bourguignon, the “occupation” of Normandy by the English, the split of the kingdom into several independent parts, the treaty of Troyes on the unification of England and France into the “dual monarchy”. The authors of the treatises are generally government employees: secretaries and notaries of the French kings, members of Parliaments (in Paris and Poitiers), the Chamber of Accounts in Bourges and other institutions of power. Being the conductors of “official” ideologies due to the positions held, they completely shared those ideas and convictions which were stated in their works – a circumstance which was rigidly taken into account when analyzing such a phenomenon as “propaganda”. The audience of polemists was presented by all sectors of society, and the treatises had a wide circulation. The proof of that conjecture, apart from the direct reference to the public to whom the treatises were addressed, is the language of those works, their style and form, the existence of stereotypic images. The treatises are considered as the instrument of propaganda in the context of book culture development in France of that period of time.