#historian: liliane dulac

[richmond-rex]

Ok, let me talk about Henry VII’s commission of the printing and translation of Christine de Pizan’s Faits d’armes et de Chevalerie, as it was a decision that went far beyond his respect for the artist’s work or his own ideals of chivalry. Analysing Caxton’s epilogue, we see that King Henry wished Pizan’s book to be easily accessible to his English subjects so that every man involved in a war — captains, soldiers, assistants, etc — would know how to conduct themselves during battles and military operations. Considering the year of his commission (1489), Henry was preparing for a campaign to prevent Brittany’s annexation, and it seems the king was concerned about establishing rules for his army’s just conduct in war: ‘all manner of men’ should know how to behave according to the king’s wishes. Indeed, Henry ordered the printing of his Statutes of War before the English departed for the campaign in France in 1492, a document concerning the rules the royal army should uphold.

As discussed by Buschinger in her article Le Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie de Christine de Pizan et ses adaptations anglaise et haut-alémanique, Caxton’s English translation of Faits d’armes followed the same principle expressed in Henry VII’s decision to have the statutes of his first three parliaments printed in English instead of Law-French in 1490, so that ‘alle Englissmen’ could read them. In those actions, we see “a precursor of the constitutional principle that every citizen is expected to know the law of the land.”

Something equally remarkable about Henry’s commission of the translation of Faits d’armes is that “le roi anglais Henri VII en a commandé une traduction … tout en sachant qu'une femme en était l'auteur”; that is, Henry knew full well that Fait d’arms had been written by a woman and didn’t seem to mind that fact — Caxton dutifully included Pizan’s name in his translation, whereas the French tried to circumvent the author’s identity and gender by omitting it from their own copies. Caxton’s translation of Faits d’armes might have been the first military treatise published in the English language, but the copy Caxton based his translation on was King Henry’s own — contrary to other French copies circulating in England at the time, his copy was rather ‘anti-anglaise’ as it contained Pizan’s retelling of the assassination of the French emissaries (in reality, only imprisoned) by John of Gaunt’s orders in 1367. Apparently, Henry VII was neither afraid to promulgate a feminine critique of men’s behaviour in war nor was he shy about having his country’s past war crimes be known. 

Le Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie de Christine de Pizan et ses adaptations anglaise et haut-alémanique. Buschinger, Danielle (2011). In: Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

William Caxton and early printing in England. Hellinga, Lotte (2010).

Le livre des faits d'armes et de chevalerie: une critique féminine cachée de la chevalerie? Dulac, Liliane • Richards, Earl Jeffrey. (2016) - In: Une femme et la guerre à la fin du Moyen Âge