Heraldic Narratives: Chivalry, Violence, and Nationalism in Late-Medieval England

纹章叙事：中世纪晚期英格兰的骑士精神、暴力和民族主义

• 批准号: 2744379
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2744379
• 关键词: Heraldic; Narratives; Chivalry; Violence; Nationalism

It is often assumed that journalism and its sinister shadow, fake news, are wholly modern inventions. In fact, during the Middle Ages heralds were sent by monarchs and nobles across Europe to attend important events such as battles, tournaments, and royal ceremonies in order to write eye-witness accounts. While these medieval reporters were equipped with diplomatic immunity and ostensibly ordered to record events objectively, like much of the press today heralds often spun narratives to glorify their patrons and legitimate their aggressions. Despite heralds' skill at crafting narratives and their influence as court publicists, literary scholars have long overlooked the English heraldic corpus, perhaps as it survives only in a challenging mishmash of Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin. My project takes up this understudied material and offers cultural historians new perspectives on late-medieval English heralds and their contribution to an earlier age of textual disinformation. By combining manuscript studies, literary analysis, and cultural history, I demonstrate that heraldic narratives are of vital importance to unpacking the entwined medieval discourses of chivalry, violence, and nationalism of which we are the inheritors. My exploration of heraldic literature's prominent role in the sacralization of chivalric violence sheds light on the harmful discourse of "noble violence" saturating modern media as well as the frequent appropriation of chivalric models by aggressive extremist groups. Heraldic texts moreover provide a new and useful lens through which to study the development of proto-nationalism during the Hundred Years War. For, while English heralds were deeply implicated in the origins of a violent narrative of English separatism, they remained multilingual officers of a European order of chivalry which in its very nature transcended national borders.

人们常常认为新闻业及其邪恶的影子——假新闻——完全是现代发明。事实上，在中世纪，欧洲各地的君主和贵族派出传令官前往参加战争、锦标赛和皇家仪式等重要活动，以便撰写目击证词。虽然这些中世纪的记者拥有外交豁免权，表面上被命令客观地记录事件，但就像今天的许多媒体一样，他们经常编造故事来美化他们的赞助人并合法化他们的侵略行为。尽管纹章官拥有精心编造叙事的技巧以及他们作为宫廷公关人员的影响力，但文学学者长期以来一直忽视英语纹章语料库，也许是因为它只能在中古英语、盎格鲁-诺曼语和拉丁语的挑战性大杂烩中生存下来。我的项目采用了这些未被充分研究的材料，为文化历史学家提供了关于中世纪晚期英国先驱者及其对早期文本虚假信息的贡献的新视角。通过结合手稿研究、文学分析和文化史，我证明纹章叙事对于解开我们作为继承者的骑士精神、暴力和民族主义相互交织的中世纪话语至关重要。我对纹章文学在骑士暴力神圣化中的突出作用的探索，揭示了现代媒体中充斥着的“高贵暴力”的有害话语，以及侵略性极端主义团体对骑士模式的频繁挪用。此外，纹章文本还为研究百年战争期间原始民族主义的发展提供了一个新的、有用的视角。因为，尽管英国传令官深深地卷入了英国分离主义暴力叙述的起源，但他们仍然是欧洲骑士团的多语言官员，而这种骑士团的本质超越了国界。