Mary Of Burgundy Research Articles

Mary of Burgundy Alive or Dead

Three depictions of Mary of Burgundy seated on horseback were made soon after the duchess’s death.The drawn copy of a lost work by Hugo van der goes commemorates the negotiations held in Trier in 1473 between frederick iii and Charles the Bold, when they made their first agreement on joining their children in marriage. The composition is strikingly reminiscent of the theme of The Meeting of the Three Living and the Three Dead; the high-born female rider arriving behind Maximilian is Mary of Burgundy, depicted after her death. The man confronting the riders with their mortality probably refers to Charles the Bold (d. 1477). The original work was likely to have been commissioned by Maximilian sometime between the death of the duchess and that of the painter, that is between March and December 1482.Like the drawing, the allegorical poem completed in 1483 by olivier de La Marche is a commemoration of the recently deceased dukes and duchess of the House of Burgundy. for the edition of the poem published by the Brethren of the Common Life in gouda, the drawing associated with Hugo van der goes was utilised to illustrate the chapter on the death of Mary of Burgundy.The protagonist of The Meeting of the Three Living and the Three Dead in the manuscript known as the “Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian of Austria” is Mary of Burgundy, who died in a riding accident. i refute all the arguments suggesting that the miniature preceded the duchess’s death. The double letters “M” on the harness of Mary’s horse (which are also found several other times in the book of hours) refer not only to the names of the ducal couple, but also to words associated with death. The miniature itself was probably commissioned by Maximilian, after his wife’s death. With its softer brushwork, the decorative frame around the miniature – as well as the entire recto of folio 221 – was probably made when the manuscript was in the possession of Margaret of Austria. The personification of Death differs from the verso in many respects (scale, background, style); iconographically it can be considered an afterthought. The green parrot and golden dove in the left margin are also afterthoughts. The two birds appear in the Épîtres de l’Amant vert (1505), the consolatory poem composed for Margaret by Jean Lemaire: one bird was the mother’s favourite, the other her daughter’s favourite; both ended their lives in the mouths of dogs (which had been barking on the verso of folio 220 for a few years before). Here and now, in the margin of the recto of folio 221, the birds representing the souls of mother and daughter are inhabitants of Paradise. The protagonist in the verso of folio 158 of the London rothschild Hours – the image is a copy of the Berlin Meeting – is the commissioner of the manuscript, and also the owner of the Berlin manuscript: Margaret of Austria, identifying with and commemorating her mother Mary of Burgundy. The depiction facing it in the recto of folio 159 alludes to the series of events (the two funerals) that followed the death of Margaret’s husband, Philibert ii, with a proleptic depiction of st. nicolas’s Church in Brou (their future common tomb). Besides the riding ladies, the illustrations of the office of the Dead in the Berlin and London Hours share numerous similarities.

Autumntide of the Middle Ages

Autumntide of the Middle Ages Jean McGarry (bio) Autumntide of the Middle Ages, by Johan Huizinga, edited by Anton van der Lem and Graeme Small, and translated by Diane Webb (Leiden University Press, 2020), 592 pp. Reading the newly translated Waning of the Middle Ages hit me like sudden death—not so much the dying part, as the instant review of a long life. Reabsorbing the antic contents of Huizinga’ s history (now entitled Autumntide) sparked a version of the search-and-recover expedition harkened by the sled called Rosebud, and the French cookie, Madeleine. The Dutchman’s freewheeling account of 14th and 15th-century France and the Low Countries, now richly seeded with full-color illuminations, rang bell after bell, until I realized that it was the key to almost every chapter of my own life. How could that be? It began nearly half a century ago, upon the purchase of The Waning of the Middle Ages, a yellow paperback, picked up probably at the Harvard Coop, in an effort to ground my senior project deciphering The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s infamous painting, whose fever-dream agonies and ecstasies papered many a dormitory wall. I was then a student in Social Relations, a department now deleted from the catalogue, but I was already halfway out the door, tiring of the likes of the turgid Talcott Parsons, the wild Thomas Szasz, and the witty David Reisman, and the possibility of edging toward greener pastures opened up in a single course, Fine Arts 13, Harvard’s year-long survey of art. And I had the brass—or maybe just the foolishness—to think that I could master the swarming history of the 14th and 15th centuries in a few months: and, in those countries whose borders were fluid, culture and politics devilishly complex, and where I had none of the historical background, and only one of the languages. If that weren’t brazen enough for a 21-year-old dilettante, then I’d add to the task a sweeping socio-psychological diagnosis of the artist and his times. And for the cherry on top, my first chapter was rendered in dramatic form, setting some of the characters: Philip the Bold, Philip the Good, Philip the Fair, along with Mary of Flanders, Mary of Burgundy, Mary of York—not to mention Charles the Bold and John the Fearless—as actors [End Page 127] in a talk fest, imagined and staged by me. When—truth be told—I could hardly keep them straight and separate from each other. Do I need to say that—in the eyes of my three or four faculty examiners—my opus fell sublimely flat? These were the days when Freud was no longer on the collegiate menu, so I hadn’t taken a single course, nor read a word. The first question at my thesis defense was what the father of psychoanalysis would have thought of HB. I floundered and fumbled, sitting before my inquisitors in the penthouse of William James Hall. How could I possibly know what Freud would have thought? Shame haunted me for years after this fiasco. I remember lying on the floor of my attic dorm room, wondering how I could go on living, let alone deposit the wreckage of this thesis in the library, a requirement for the degree. But, to my delight and astonishment, I have discovered—only half a century later—that Huizinga shares the blame for the collegiate debacle. He started it, with an account too brilliant, too confusing, too distracting, spiced with quotes from nutty clerics, poets, inquisitors, saints, and martyrs. He himself was burdened with too much reading—and too much imagination—to mount a clear structure for his opus. And now I know. I’m not saying his masterpiece reads like my thesis, but that its swarming, spinning, recycling, and all-too-expressionistic methods gave me license to forgo logic, coherence, factual reliability, you name it. I felt invited to do my thing, and sure enough, during my trial, one of the triune judges, who settled on my grade of “no distinction,” quipped that, perhaps, I was better off becoming a novelist. Although...

“Imaige A La Vierge Marie” The Hours of Mary Of Burgundy, Her Marriage, and Her Painter, Hugo Van Der Goes

AbstractThe Vienna Hours, illuminated by the artist known as the “Master of Mary of Burgundy”, was originally commissioned by Margaret of York. The later parts of the manuscript commemorate the love and marriage between Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian of Habsburg, and their (newborn or expected) child.The miniatures and texts in question convey the same idea expressed on several occasions by the official historian, Jean Molinet: in the Burgundian court, the duchess was venerated as the Virgin Mary (and in consequence of this, Maximilian – and Philip – came to be revered as the Saviour, and Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, as the Father). Underlying the tendency to identify Mary of Burgundy with the Virgin Mary was the situation of Burgundy and its heiress, which was understood by means of salvation-historical analogies. In the book of hours, the figures of the two Marys are conflated several times in a variety of ways (fols. 14v, 19v, 43v, 94v, 99v). The hymn in praise of the heavenly joys of the Virgin Mary, which is organically related to the frontispiece image, is thus (also) a chanted sequence for the eternal beatitude of the young bride. The painter conjured up the imaginary figure of Maximilian in the foreground of the two miniatures with window scenes, while the jewels in the border around the image of the Crucifixion scene allude to Margaret of York. These miniatures have a playful tone (as evidenced by the role-swapping between the Marys, the book-within-a-book, picture-within-a-picture, vision-within-a-vision, trompe l’oeil solutions, and the complex dialogue between objects, materials and locations).There are a number of factors supporting the argument that the miniatures, hitherto attributed to the Master of Mary of Burgundy, were illuminated by Hugo van der Goes, who was a resident of the Red Cloister at the time, and that he was commissioned by the Austrian Archduke. The date of 1478 is rendered likely by stylistic and biographical factors (the paintings Hugo made in the cloister, both before and after, his later illness, the visit of Maximilian, the birth of Philip the Handsome). It was also at this time that Jean Molinet wrote Le Chappellet des dames, which makes multiple comparisons between the duchess and the Virgin Mary, and whose imagery is often echoed in the folios of the Vienna Hours. It is possible that the first (co-)owner of the manuscript was Maximilian of Habsburg.

Guerre, charroi et corvées. Les abbayes brabançonnes et le pouvoir princier au bas Moyen Âge

During the 14th and 15th centuries, statute labour provided to the prince by the Brabantine abbeys witnessed significant modifications. Whereas ordinary labour duties were progressively limited in time and quantity, and largely replaced by a fixed sum of money, the Burgundian dukes of Brabant could not wage war without an increasingly significant number of chariots, horses and carters. Hence, as they offered an incredibly rich pool of resources, extraordinary transport labour duties of the abbeys were maintained, even if the ever-growing scale of warfare soon made even them insufficient. After having sought to maximise the output of the transport labour duties, Charles the Bold attempted to organise levies on a territorial, sovereign, basis, in order to respond to the increasing need of means for military transport. However, the fact that the duke tried to combine both sovereign and seigneurial rights led to severe discontent which erupted after his death when Mary of Burgundy had to make new concessions to the abbeys and accept further limitations to be put on the traditional extraordinary corvées.

Les apports de la longue durée pour l’étude du renouvellement des oligarchies municipales : la Loi de Bruxelles, du temps de Philippe le Bon à 1795

Philippe Guignet, The Long-Term Contribution to the Study of the Renewal of Municipal Oligarchies. The Brussels Town Council from the Time of Philip the Good up to 1795. In this paper, Ph. Guignet develops a serial approach to the social history of institutions. He scans the recruitment of the first member of the town council in Brussels. His survey deals with the period between the 1421 status that created a power divided into lineages and crafts and the fall of the town council old model in 1795. Ph. Guignet focuses on each century, then on each quarter of a century to highlight the oligarchic fluctuations giving rhythm to the different steps of this recruitment. He also implements a battery of statistical indicators such as indicators of central tendencies, dispersion parameters, concentration ratios. The decline of recruitment on a narrower base of families is undoubtedly significant in the xviith century and even more in the last century of the Old Regime. The author witnesses in Brussels an evolution he had already detected in the past, namely in other towns such as Mons and Tournai. However, considering the rate of power concentrated in the hands of a few families reveals a reality that is only apparently paradoxical. In Brussels, there have never been as many different families inside the municipal government as in the xvth century. However, when considering the recruitment of representatives of lineages at the time of Philip the Good, Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, we find a concentration of power held by the upper strata of the oligarchy. This concentration is as strong as in the three centuries of modern times and it may be even stronger. The political staff derived from the crafts is more numerous than the one coming from the lineages. However, the most notable oligarchic thrust must be seen among the dignitaries of corporations, especially in the xviiith century.

Le mécénat de Marie de Bourgogne : entre dévotion privée et nécessité politique

The patronage of Mary of Burgundy is not, at first sight, an obvious subject of study : she has rarely been considered as a serious patron and when she has, she is described as a very modest one. This view would appear to be justified when we compare Mary’s commissions with those of her ancestors, the dukes of Burgundy. However, although she added very few works to the enormous cultural heritage left to her by her ancestors, it is evident that the works she did commission expressed very clear political and cultural intentions on her part. “The greatest heiress in Europe” had to deal with attacks and intrigues from Louis XI as well as rioting from her own people right from the beginning of her unexpected rise to power in 1477. Acutely aware of the fact that she was the last descendant of the glorious house of Burgundy-Valois, as well as the weakness of her position as a woman, Mary sought suitable responses to the challenges she faced – not only military and diplomatic responses but also iconographical ones. Her desire to emphasise dynastic lineage, to create an image of a female sovereign that legitimized her succession and her power suo jure in order to assert her rights to Burgundian territories, as well as to impose her power on her uncontrollable subjects, all had a considerable influence on her resulting and carefully-considered cultural politics.

Los Inventarios de Carlos V y la familia imperial/The Inventories of Charles V and the Imperial Family

This publication is the fruit of a long-term research project to document the worldly goods of the most powerful dynasty in sixteenth-century Europe, the Habsburgs, centred round the crucial figure of the Emperor Charles V (1500-58). With his extraordinary lineage – son of Philip the Fair, Duke of Burgundy, and Joanna of Castile, grandson of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy and of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile – Charles embodies like no other historical figure the nexus of Burgundian, German and Spanish dynastic and territorial legacies, which helped to make the House of Austria the dominant pan-European power of this time, a key participant in almost all the major conflicts and political events of the sixteenth century. The research team, comprising leading scholars of their respective subjects, set out to transcribe and publish as many as possible of the surviving inventories of the moveable goods recorded as...

Jelle Haemers, For the Common Good. State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477-1482). Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)

Jelle Haemers, For the Common Good. State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477-1482). Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)

French pretensions to Valois Burgundy: history and polemic in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries

This article considers how the conflict from 1477 onwards between Louis XI and Mary of Burgundy,and their successors, over the succession of Charles the Bold changed perceptions of the historical relationship between Burgundian territories subject to the king of France, and the kingdom of France. It compares the attitudes reflected in diplomatic, polemical and historical texts produced from the early fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, whose authors were royal officers or servants: Jean de Montreuil, Jean Juvenal des Ursins, Noel de Fribois (before 1477) and Guillaume Cousinot, 'ung petit sommaire ... touchant ... le pays de Flandres' (Paris, BNF fr. 10131), Louis Le Blanc, the Rosier des Guerres and Nicole Gilles.

The Chronology and Political Significance of the Tomb of Mary of Burgundy

The tomb of Mary of Burgundy, the last Valois ruler of Burgundy, stands in its original site in the church of Notre Dame of Bruges. The date of this monument and the names of the artists who created it have been obscured in the past by an incomplete knowledge of the documentation for it. This essay provides transcriptions of newly discovered documents that detail the dates of construction and the personalities involved in the financing and execution of this project. The dating of the monument to a critical period in the rule of Mary's husband, Maximilian of Austria, leads to a reconsideration of the program of the tomb. The well-developed genealogies that are the great innovation of this monument are seen as a legitimization of Mary's status as the heir to the Burgundian patrimony, in the face of challenges to her right to inherit based on her gender.

The Master of Mary of Burgundy and His Colleagues: The State of Research and Questions of Method

The Master of Mary of Burgundy and His Colleagues: The State of Research and Questions of Method

The Master of Mary of Burgundy

The Master of Mary of Burgundy

The Master of Mary of Burgundy

The Master of Mary of Burgundy

Stories for Children: Mary of Burgundy

Stories for Children: Mary of Burgundy