Medieval France. An Encyclopedia

graphic organic metaphor for “wearing the pants in the family.” Here, though, the metaphor provides the pretext for physical pun ...

usually provided additional amenities in the form of display rooms and housing for visiting merchants. Taxation was an important ...

Huvelin, Paul. Essai historique sur le droit des foires et des marchés. Paris: Rousseau, 1897. Laurent, Henri. “Droits des foire ...

What we would call family life for a high-medieval French aristocrat was centered on the hereditary castle, which was both a def ...

greater wealth also made for larger households, since the rich could afford to keep more servants and apprentices. Most urban in ...

that the parents of the bride and groom undertook at the formation of a new marriage. The bride brought to the marriage a dowry ...

next year’s planting, pushing them into even more dire consequences and true famine in the following year if sufficient seed had ...

servants). Farces combine dramatic simplicity with brevity to create a rich variety of easily recognizable character types. Amon ...

and its resources, making it go from bad to worse. In this caustic satire, the playwright presents the powerful as malicious foo ...

FAUSTUS OF RIEZ (d. ca. 495). British monk of Lérins, bishop of Riez in Provence from ca. 458. Exiled by the Arian Visigoth king ...

FAUVEL, LIVRES DE . An allegorical verse satire (3,280 octosyllabic lines) representing the horse Fauvel, harbinger of the Antic ...

transform the moral satire into a festive admonitio, or speculum principis, a work intended to instruct the prince. Nancy F.Rega ...

The simplest surviving fauxbourdon settings, such as those by Binchois, may reflect the sort of polyphony extemporized by 15th-c ...

FÉCAMP . A Benedictine abbey on the English Channel in the diocese of Rouen, Fécamp was originally founded as a house for nuns i ...

FERRAND OF PORTUGAL (1188–1233). Ferrand of Portugal became count of Flanders and Hainaut when he married the young Jeanne de Co ...

FET DES ROMAINS . Written ca. 1213/14 by an anonymous, probably Parisian, author, the Fet des Romains is a compilation of Roman ...

FEUDAL AIDS . In a feudal relationship, the vassal normally owed his lord “aid and counsel.” The first of these originally meant ...

fief. In the 13th century, a tax called the “fifth penny,” or quint, often was assessed whenever fiefs were alienated to nonnobl ...

In its narrow, fief-holding sense, feudalism emerged in 11th-century France as a set of private arrangements that filled a void ...

Against this view of feudal obligations, we have the different formulation of Fulbert of Chartres (1020), who wrote in purely ne ...