From the issue dated June 22, 2001
That's So Bourgeois
A Literary Scholar Plumbs Medieval Conduct Book for Clues to Middle-Class Identity
By PETER MONAGHAN
Chalon-sur-Saône, France
Karl Marx – or the filmmaker Luis Buñuel – would have found just as much to scoff at in 15th- and 16th-century Burgundy as in the modern world.
It was then that, here as in other parts of Europe, the bourgeoisie developed its discreet charms – its fixation on appearance, respectability, and upward mobility; its determination to handle its own affairs; and its acquisitiveness. Not to mention, its determination to keep up with Jean and Jeanne next door.
To come into existence at all, the bourgeoisie needed bourgs, or fortified towns, to be the bourgeoisie of. In the late Middle Ages, the number and size of those had increased, as feudalism began to cede to urbanism and a money economy. The towns, which had been scrappy commercial clusters within feudal holdings, started to exert themselves in the 13th century as independent entities, political forces, and economic engines. Educated movers and shakers reaped the rewards of a nascent capitalism, tangible and intangible, and fostered the institution of the university so that their sons could learn to do the same. By the 15th century, the bourgeoisie had blossomed as a full-fledged class.
"I'm trying to capture what it was like to live all that," says Kathleen M. Ashley, a professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. The energetic scholar has slowed down long enough to have lunch at a rôtisserie just off the town square of Chalon-sur-Saône, a thriving small city in the heart of Burgundy. With its cross-timbered medieval houses that lean into the square in front of the Gothic Cathedral of St. Vincent, the town retains much of the look it had during the Middle Ages – although, of course, these days cafes claim much of the pavement.
It's not a bad spot to study how the bourgeoisie got its stripes. Using a quasi-ethnographic approach, the literary scholar has turned historian, poring over documents from everyday life that have in most cases gone virtually unexamined for centuries – marriage contracts, wills, letters, church registers, inquisition records, the copious minutes of town councils.
Ms. Ashley is not the first scholar to note that a distinctive bourgeois frame of mind and way of life arose at the end of the Middle Ages. She has found, however, a fresh portal into the way of life that arose in the early modern era: a "conduct book" owned by three families of this region who in the 15th and 16th centuries were linked by marriage, business, and religious practices.
Conduct books – somewhat like modern-day etiquette manuals by Emily Post and Miss Manners – were self-help guides dating from medieval times that early modern, urbanite wannabes, particularly women, still looked to for guidance on comportment. Ms. Ashley was studying medieval biblical "mystery plays" when she stumbled on a footnote that mentioned an unfamiliar conduct book, Miroir des bonnes femmes (Mirror of Good Women). The two complete manuscripts of the work, in Paris and Dijon, had been little studied and never edited for publication in a modern edition.
Looking at the volume in Dijon, the medieval seat of the dukes of Burgundy, Ms. Ashley made a compelling discovery. From 1406 to the late 1500's, as the conduct book was passed back and forth between members of the three families, its owners had inscribed their names in every available blank space. That unusual evidence aroused the detective in her.
"I found out on that first afternoon that they had lived in the 16th century in Chalon, less than an hour by freeway south of Dijon," recalls Ms. Ashley, clearly pleased that her curiosity led her into the bailiwick of historians. "I realized that these figures who were anonymous to history all belonged to the same class" – the emerging bourgeois elite.
She began to see that through the owners of the Miroir – the families Beaumont, Thésut, and Grozelier – she could write a history of their period and the class into which they had climbed.
She is now at work on just such a history, having recently completed a translation into English of the Miroir, with a study of its recorded owners and their families. (She is preparing the work for submission to publishers.)
The period and phenomenon she is studying have been relatively overlooked. Many French and American scholars focus on the pitched religious battles of the 16th century that followed the Reformation, whose Francophone headquarters were just across the Jura mountains, in Geneva. However, relatively little other work is being done on the period between the end of the reign of the dukes of Burgundy, in 1477, and the late 17th century.
Research on the rise of the bourgeoisie has been slow in coming until recently, in part due to the difficulty of figuring out what the everyday documents of the period say. "Reading the hands in this period is much more difficult than reading earlier or later material," says Ms. Ashley.
Visit the archives with her, and you can see what she means. The bourgeois elites were keen on paper – or vellum – trails, but the records of the towns, while often well-organized according to such categories as town administration, financial transactions, and military and judicial affairs, are generally written in devilishly difficult, idiosyncratic hands, and spelled according to the whims of individual clerks.
Fortunately for Ms. Ashley, she is being assisted in the daunting task of muddling through the documents by her companion and research collaborator, Jack Reuter, a lecturer in English at Southern Maine. For him, the task of divining meaning from scrawled scripts as foreign as hieroglyphics is relieved by his pleasure in such curiosities as doodles in the margins and the inclusion of successive words of an Ave Maria between items of town minutes.
"Look at this, it's extraordinary," Mr. Reuter exclaims repeatedly as he leans over the documents.
In Dijon, Ms. Ashley and Mr. Reuter forage through the vast holdings of the Côte-d'Or departmental archives. In Burgundy's wine capital, Beaune, they find town registers from the 13th century through the 20th stacked on shelves in a 17th-century convent that now houses the town's archives. In Chalon, the 30-foot-high shelves in a public library sway with thousands of rare and antique books.
It's a researcher's dream, not least because the archives are surrounded by ... well, Burgundy. En route to Chalon from Ms. Ashley's and Mr. Reuter's rented cottage, one passes through lush fields of grain and sunflower crops and then the centuries-old Forest of Demigny. On surrounding hills are the sprawling terraced vineyards of the Côte-d'Or. Through it all runs the Saone River, a key avenue of trade even before the Romans conquered the Gauls in the first century B.C.
It would be more than 1,000 years, after the rise and fall of Roman settlements, before French towns and cities would spring from the fields, and eventually swell to populations of 50,000 or more. The oldest document in the Beaune archives is la charte d'affranchissement, the town charter of 1203. Peering at it, Mr. Reuter says, "Liberties is something the later documents harp on all the time – what we would call privileges – along with being a free person."
Leading the quest for liberties were the increasing numbers of wealthy citizens who were not nobles. The men of the families Ms. Ashley is studying were "educated paper-pushers," as she says – town councilmen and mayors who often stepped into positions with regional and national bureaucracies, such as the monarchy's tax-raising agencies.
Their wealth produced and profited from new financial systems set up to transact property and titles. "In the late 15th and 16th centuries," notes Ms. Ashley, "the bourgeois elites bought up more and more lands from decaying aristrocrats who couldn't afford them any longer." The nouveau riche also assumed highfalutin nomenclature – seigneur (lord of the manor) of this place or that, eschevin (alderman), saige, maistre. Says Ms. Ashley: "They were creating new validation and new social prestige through their manipulation of titles."
There lies a paradox, she believes. Many bourgeoisie aspired to the appurtenances of the aristocracy even while "developing a sense of themselves as a class." It was not until the 17th and 18th centuries that the middle class rejected aristocratic values – ultimately, of course, in revolution.
Ms. Ashley finds the medieval bourgeoisie's yearning for validation echoed in the continued use of conduct books, many of which had been written in the 13th and 14th centuries by Franciscan friars who wanted to communicate good conduct to the new urban, secular classes.
While modern scholars have generally cast them as texts with which men disciplined or inculcated dutiful behavior in their women, in fact, Ms. Ashley argues, "these books were really about how you comport yourself and raise the status of your family." They offered a wide variety of advice on good behavior – for example, how model citizens should eat and dress – and often emphasized a combination of honor and gentility. A particular emphasis of the Miroir, for example, was how women could shield themselves from malicious gossip.
"They describe how a woman is not only to manage a house – her domestic roles – but also how she is to appear in the larger picture of the family," Mr. Reuter jumps in to note. Conduct books fundamentally were about visibility in small, closed urban spaces.
"My argument," continues Ms. Ashley, "is that it's in the middle class that female behavior becomes the marker for family reputation, whereas in the richer class, you have books of conduct addressed to the prince and the male, and it's the male deeds that are the markers for the families." Among the bourgeois elites, the political actors were all male, but women commonly took part in transactions of property and donations to churches. Contracts were signed by both husband and wife, and widows could enter into contracts independent of their families.
But the Dijon manuscript of the Miroir des bonnes femmes, as Ms. Ashley discusses in her contribution to a volume she just co-edited, Medieval Conduct (University of Minnesota Press), had both female and male owners, suggesting that conduct books might have served a broader purpose – to model good behavior for whole households as wealth boosted the numbers of servants.
"They're really all about performance. That's my reading," says Ms. Ashley, echoing the subject of her book on medieval performance. Their use was part of "working out a new ideological position."
Of course, the Beaumonts, Thesuts, and Grozeliers were too busy to reflect on their own ideology. The men, for example, if not out making money, might well be in the chambers of the town council, serving as eschevins and deliberating such issues as how to man and finance the garrison, what tolls to institute on the river, even what essay questions to set, in Latin, for the exams of the young men of the town.
In towns then, as today, the citizens debated such questions even as strife, war, and pestilence stalked the land.
Plagues, the scourge of Europe throughout the Middle Ages and the early-modern era, constantly threatened. But even in death, the bourgeois were intent on keeping up appearances: "If you look at last testaments," laughs Ms. Ashley, "they're micromanaging their funerals: There should be 20 young girls in white, and 20 guys in black; they should do this, and they'll be paid that ... "
Whatever happened, it was noted in town records, in fat logs or on sheets bundled into portfolios. "You can really get a sense of personalities from the materials," says Ms. Ashley.
Long ago, her subjects became "my families," and she began to differentiate among them. She is revivifying bustling laymen, high-level jurists, poetry-writing humanists, and strong women who married richer and richer as husbands died off. Always, the lives of her three families are buffeted and framed by larger developments. "It was a time of a lot of tension," she says. In Beaune in the late 16th century, for example, one Grozelier turned Protestant. Then there was hell to pay! Not only family members but also "the canons at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Beaune are on the case, trying to get this guy not to follow the Geneva protocols when he baptizes his daughter," says Ms. Ashley. The convert's sister, particularly disgusted, specified in her will that her wealth should pass to her nieces and nephews, but that her turncoat brother and his wife would not get their hands on it.
Ms. Ashley's research also reveals that the forebears of some contemporary aristocrats fudged their way to tax-free nobility in the 16th century. Louis de Thésut, while mayor of Chalon, managed in 1586 to obtain letters of nobility from the King, as a reward for sycophancy. The eschevins of Chalon were indignant, probably envious. Ten years later, they still squabbled over whether Louis's brother, Francois, should go up to the Parliament in Dijon as a nobleman or mere middle-class stiff.
In the 17th century, the monarchy empowered a national monitor of claims to nobility. "Of course, cynically," says Ms. Ashley, "whoever could pay him off, did, and he would create bogus credentials."
The social climbing that Ms. Ashley documents may not sit well with locals. "This is a society, at least in Burgundy, obsessed with family history," she says.
Still, it's not as if they're going to lose their titles or privileges now, and they're well beyond worrying what the Miroir des bonnes femmes, or Emily Post, would say about it all.
Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
