Introduction

Abstract

Abstract In the depiction of September for the Très riches heures du due de Berry, the château of Saumur towers like a fairy-tale castle over peasants harvesting the vines in the fields below. The castle is still there, restored in the 1930s by using die Très riches heures as a model, but through this image we travel into a very different world. Part of a sumptuous work commissioned by a powerful royal prince at a time when France was virtually at its lowest point of chaos and depression in the late Middle Ages, it is a profoundly ambiguous scene. Apparently all is still and the world is in order and harmony. Yet this was a period which saw a deep structural crisis which swept across French society, accompanied by war and destruction. The period covered by this book saw the last crusades led by a king of France, the destruction of the most serious heresy to face the Western Church in the Middle Ages, the foundation of the University of Paris, the building of the cathedral of Amiens, the music of the ars nova in the age of Guillaume de Machault and of Guillaume Dufay at the court of Burgundy, and the unique if brief public career of Jeanne d’Arc.