Abstract
The court chronicler George Chastelain developed a complex language to express the interests of his patron, the Burgundian Duke Philip the Good (and, later, Charles the Bold), in establishing increased independence from the French crown. Because the duke was legally beholden to the crown by vassalage, this involved crafting a lexical strategy in which the French king was diminished, even as the ideal of French kingship remained intact, and even glorified, and is suggestive of the two-bodies theory of medieval jurisprudence. Chastelain’s strategy can be discerned in specific words and phrases that he uses in conjunction with the French crown; it can also be seen in his reformulation of the traditional organological metaphor of state. In general, this effort was an attempt to address the question of power and legitimacy indirectly, through the tenets of the res publica, without tarnishing the image of French kingship itself.
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