Martin Le Franc

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Martin le Franc (* around 1410 ; † 1461 ) was a French author and cleric .

Life

Martin le Franc was born in the Aumale county in Normandy . He studied in Paris, where he obtained the degree of Magister Artium, with which the right was acquired to hold positions in the church (benefices). In 1435 he was present in Arras in an unknown capacity , when the peace treaty between Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy and the young English King Henry VI. was signed, who also had himself crowned King of France in 1431. A little later, Le Franc took part in the Council of Basel (1431-48) , also in a role that cannot be specified , and was active in the service of the Duke of Savoy . When he was elected antipope Felix V by the council in 1439 , Le Franc advanced to his apostolic protonotary and secretary. Thanks to his close relationship with Felix, he could additionally several canons -Pfründen and deaneries cumulate: 1443 in Lausanne, 1444 in Turin and in Geneva. When Felix resigned from his office in 1449, all of the posts and benefices he had been given were confirmed by Pope Nicholas V , so that Le Franc was able to preserve his good fortune. However, he remained in the service of Savoy and was appointed "maître de requêtes" by the new duke, Ludwig I. In 1459 he took over the administration of the Novalese Abbey and was perhaps also its abbot a short time before his death.

Works

The most important work of Martin le Francs is Le Champion des Dames (= the fighter for women). It comprises 24384 verses, was written between 1441 and 1442 and is dedicated to Duke Philip the Good. It tells of the noble deeds of numerous women in history, including Joan of Arc . In addition, Le Franc argues passionately against corruption and the extravagance of the aristocracy. However, it was also pointed out that the champion contained the basically misogynistic description of a witch's sabbath. The work contains the first documented representation of a flying witch.

The apparently cool reception of the champion at the Burgundian court disappointed Le Franc, as he complains in a lengthy poem ( Complainte du livre "Le Champion des Dames" a maistre Martin Le Franc son acteur = lament of the book "Le Ch. D. D. D. “To its author M. Le F.). Perhaps to compensate him, Duke Philip commissioned him a few years later (1447) to write a new work, the Estrif de Fortune et Vertu , a moralizing argument between the goddess of fate Fortuna and Virtus, the "virtue". The work, written in prose, into which numerous passages have been inserted in verse form, was written between 1447 and 1448, presumably mostly in Lausanne.

In the history of music, Le Franc is known for the expression «la contenance angloise». This means the typical, sweet-sounding tone of contemporary English music, as composed, for example, by John Dunstaple . This style of music had a great influence on the Burgundian school as long as Burgundy was allied with England.

literature

  • Alphonse Bayot: Martin Le Franc, L'Estrif De Fortune Et De Vertu . Croy de Chimay, Brussels 1928
  • Martin Le Franc: The Trial of Womankind: A Rhyming Translation of Book IV of the Fifteenth-Century Le Champion des Dames. Ed. Steven Millen Taylor. McFarland, Jefferson NC 2005, ISBN 978-0-7864-2240-1
  • Arthur Piaget: Martin le Franc, prévot de Lausanne . Paradigme, 1993, ISBN 2-86878-094-6
  • Oskar Roth: Studies on the "Estrif de Fortune et Vertu" by Martin Le Franc . Lang, Bern 1970
  • Hermann Josef Sieben: Fathers of the Church, Ecclesial Thinking from the Beginning to Modern Times . Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-70423-0
  • Reinhard Strohm: Guillaume du Fay, Martin Le Franc and the humanistic legend of music ; Amadeus Verlag, Winterthur 2007 ( New Year's Gazette of the Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft Zürich , 192); ISBN 978-3-905075-15-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georg Modestin, Kathrin Utz Tremp : On the late medieval witch hunt in today's western Switzerland . A research report , online journal zeitenblicke , ISSN  1619-0459 .
  2. ↑ http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=5955
personal data
SURNAME Martin Le Franc
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Martin le Franc
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author and cleric
DATE OF BIRTH around 1410
DATE OF DEATH 1461