Antoine de La Sale

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Antoine de La Sale (* around 1385 in Provence , † around 1460 in Châtelet-sur-Oise ) was a French writer of the early Renaissance .

Life

La Sale came from a family of the lower Provencal nobility: his father was the mercenary leader Bernardon de la Salle , his mother was Perrinette Damendel, Bernadon's lover; Bernardon de Serres was his half-brother. He spent most of his life in the service of princes. So he was initially a page with Duke Ludwig II of Anjou († 1417) and served this around 1415 as a military; later he belonged (as secretary?) to the entourage of Ludwig's son, Duke Ludwig III. († 1434), whom he accompanied on many trips. 1429/30 he held a higher military and administrative post in Arles . In 1434 he was appointed tutor of Jean de Calabre, the eldest son of Duke René I of Anjou . For his princely pupil he began to write all sorts of edifying, instructive and / or entertaining stories, which he summarized in 1441 under the humorous title La Salade . In 1438 he accompanied Duke René on his journey to Naples, where he took possession of the royal crown that had been offered to him. In 1448 La Sale left the service of the Anjous and switched to that of a Burgundian grandee, Louis of Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, by whom he was appointed educator of his sons. For them, too, he wrote didactically intended narrative texts, which he summarized in 1451 under the title La Sale . As a follower of Ludwig, he came into contact with the magnificent court of the rich and powerful Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy .

reception

At the age of around 70, La Sale completed his main work in 1456: the not-too-long historical novel Le petit Jehan de Saintré . The work, the action of which takes place in the mid-14th century, reports relatively realistically (compared to the often fairytale-like conventional chivalric novels of the time) and with a clear ironic distance of the narrator the career of an initially rather poor young aristocrat who rose to become a respected knight : Jehan came to the royal court as a squire at the age of 13 and fell in love with a rich young widow, who protected him, raised him and provided him with money. After he has been knighted and has proven himself in tournaments at both French and foreign courts, she is finally introduced to the arts of love. When he sets out on a long journey to the distant imperial court of his own accord, the lady retreats to her property, offended, where she soon succumbs to the courtship of a rich and stately bourgeois priest. Jehan encounters this on his return and is shamefully defeated by him twice in a wrestling match. Carelessly, the opponent also engages in a fight with knightly weapons, where Jehan in turn can defeat and humiliate him. Then he takes revenge on the lady by making known her unsuitable relationship with the bourgeois priest at court. The latter, however, quickly recovered from his wounds, continues his relationship.

La Sales Saintré is now considered one of the best and most interesting literary texts of its time, and indeed the first modern novel; Apparently, however, it was not until the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries that it became more widespread in printed editions, which were probably read by a predominantly middle-class public.

La Sale spent the last years of his life in Châtelet-sur-Oise. Here he wrote the consolation book Le Reconfort de Madame de Fresne in 1457/58 for a lady who had lost her son . In 1459 he completed another didactic work: Des anciens tournois et faicts d'armes ("Of former tournaments and deeds of arms "), a kind of textbook on heraldry and court ceremonies.

The satire Les quinze joyes du mariage and the collection of novels Cent nouvelles nouvelles in the style of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone , which were sometimes ascribed to him, are most likely not by him.

Works (selection)

  • Vicious monks and nuns: erot. Erzählungen , Heyne, ISBN 3-453-50153-5
  • The fifteen joys of marriage and their continuation. The sixteenth joy of marriage . Translated from Central France. and with an after. by Claudia Probst. Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-931659-49-6 (published anonymously)
  • The hundred new novellas. 2 volumes, Munich: Georg Müller 1907

literature

(Further literature, however not in German, can be found in the catalog of the Bonn University Library.)
  • Giuseppe A. Brunelli: Antoine de La Sale . Peloriotana, Messina 1962.
  • Fernand Désonay: Antoine de La Sale, aventureux et pédagogue. Essai de biographie critique . Droz, Liège 1940.
  • Sylvie Lefèvre: Antoine de la Sale. La fabrication de l'oeuvre et de l'écrivain. Traité des anciens et des nouveaux tournois (Publications romanes et françaises; vol. 238). Droz, Genève 2006, ISBN 2-600-01008-4 .
  • Joseph Nève: Antoine de la Salle. Sa vie et ses ouvrages. D'Après des documents inédits . Slatkine, Geneva, 1975 (reprint of Paris 1903 edition).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME La Sale, Antoine de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH around 1385
PLACE OF BIRTH Provence
DATE OF DEATH around 1460
Place of death Châtelet-sur-Oise