Records of entries were kept in guild and town registers, royal chanceries, and
parlements, as well as occasionally in chronicles. They are among the best sources for
street theater, public art and rhetoric, and popular culture generally. Entries flourished in
France and throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages because the bonnes villes and
fledgling royal administrations found them useful ways of defining a state tradition and
for establishing a record of political relations. The discourse of the entry ceremony
affirmed peace and law; it sought to eclipse the horror of military conquest and sacking.
Towns and officials staged them to give form to actions before the ruler and to place their
acts securely into the public laws and history of France.
Lawrence M.Bryant
[See also: CORONATION/CONSECRATION OF KINGS; PROCESSION]
Bryant, Lawrence M. The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics,
Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance. Geneva: Droz, 1986.
Coulet, Noel. “Les entrées solennelles en Provence au XIVe siècle.” Ethnologie française
7(1977):68–86.
Guenée, Bernard, and Françoise Lehoux. Les entrées royales françaises de 1388 à 1515. Paris:
CNRS, 1968.
ERIUGENA, JOHANNES SCOTTUS
(810–877). Little is known about the life of this Irish scholar who taught the liberal arts at
the court of Charles the Bald in and around Laon in northern France. Although the earlier
view of Eriugena as a lonely genius in a barren period has recently been modified, the
wealth of his erudition and his remarkable knowledge of Greek make him stand out
among his Carolingian contemporaries.
Eriugena first emerges as a participant in the controversy surrounding predestination
in 850–51. In his campaign against the monk Gottschalk of Orbais, archbishop Hincmar
of Reims asked Eriugena to refute Gottschalk’s doctrine of double predestination (to
eternal life and to eternal death), which the latter claimed to be the true Augustinian
teaching. Eriugena, who is not known to have been a monk or priest, wrote De divina
praedestinatione in compliance with Hincmar’s request. Instead of advocating Hincmar’s
view of a single predestination, however, Eriugena argues that predestination is nothing
more than God’s eternal knowledge, and that humans have freedom of choice even after
the Fall. After the condemnation of his views at the councils of Valence (855) and
Langres (859), Eriugena never returned to the arena of ecclesiastical politics.
For Eriugena’s next assignment, Charles the Bald ordered a new translation be made
of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Greek texts of this 6th-century
Syrian mystic, who was identified with St. Denis, patron of the Franks, had become
available through a codex donated by the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer to
Louis the Pious in 827. Through his reading and translation of Pseudo-Dionysius,
Eriugena was introduced to certain features of Greek theology, such as the unfolding of
the universe according to procession and return and the methods of negative and
affirmative theology, which he subsequently incorporated into his own thinking. He also
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