The Appeal to Historical Experience
The programs of Figures 67 and 68 could certainly recall to their primary audience the formative historical experiences of the present regime. Oresme's selection of the themes of sedition and demagoguery as they affect kingdoms, and not the other systems of government, reflects a conscious attempt to raise associations with contemporary political events. To be sure, the miniatures do not permit specific identification of the ruler as either king or tyrant. Indeed, Oresme may have intended that the distinction remain ambiguous in view of Aristotle's discussion in the Politics (Book V, Chs. 21 and 22) on the corruption of monarchy and its transformation to tyranny.[12] The banquet scenes emphasize the dangers to rulers of secret plots or conspiracies. Oresme may be alluding to Aristotle's statement that rulers tend to be corrupted by excessive wealth.[13] Accumulations of riches and honors invite the envy of subjects and are the source of sedition. Aristotle further points out that in hereditary monarchies kings may indulge themselves in bodily pleasures at the expense of their responsibilities to their people:
T. Mes es royalmes qui sunt selon lignage, ovec les choses qui sunt dictes il convient mettre une autre cause de corruption. Et est ceste: que pluseurs telz roys sunt faiz de legier contemptibles et despitablez. (T. But in hereditary kingdoms, in addition to things already mentioned, it is necessary to set out another cause of corruption. And it is this: that several such kings readily merit contempt and scorn.) G. Pource que il vivent trop delicieusement et sunt negligens si comme il fut dit ou .xxii.e chapitre. (G. That is because they live too much for pleasure and are negligent, as was stated in the twenty-second chapter.)[14]
Perhaps certain features of the upper left scene of Figures 67 and 68 allude to the types of excessive expenditure that corrupt and endanger hereditary kingdoms. In Figure 67 particularly, the elaborate feast, gold curtain, and musicians indicate such dangers. Figure 68, however, may depict another type of threat to hereditary kingdoms. There the companion of the royal couple wears a mantle whose distinctive fur strips indicate a member of the royal family.[15] In a gloss at the beginning of Chapter 24, Oresme mentions sedition provoked by a person already taking part in government: "Si comme quant aucuns du lignage du roy ou autres grans seigneurs de son royalme funt conspirations contre lui" (As when some persons of the king's lineage or other great lords of his kingdom conspire against him).[16]
Figure 69
A Royal Banquet. Avis au roys.
Charles V and his counsellors were personally aware of the dangers of sedition fomented by a close relative. During the political crisis of 1358–60, Charles's brother-in-law, Charles of Navarre, known as the Bad, contested the regent's claim to the throne.[17] In 1356 the alliance of Etienne Marcel with Charles the Bad almost cost the regent his future throne and his life.[18] Furthermore, in the context of Sedition apperte the scene of a demagogue addressing his troops might well recall to Charles V the plots of Etienne Marcel and Charles the Bad. As a way of updating the definition of a demagogue in the glossary, Oresme cites as an example the earlier fourteenth-century bourgeois leader, Jacques d'Artevelde.[19]
The immediacy of historical recollection offered in Figures 67 and 68 to its primary audience may have formed part of Oresme's strategy in designing the program of Book V. While the total visual structure of the illustrations contains novel elements, individual sections rely on standard iconographic types. For example, the banquet scene of the upper left is familiar from a wide variety of medieval secular and religious visual and textual sources, including a miniature from the Morgan Avis au roys (Fig. 69). The scene of the demagogue addressing the troops adopts the Roman iconographic theme of adlocutio .[20]
In addition to the dimension of historical experience, Oresme's program for the illustrations of Book V incorporates another didactic level. Oresme refers in several glosses to Aristotle's discussion in the Rhetoric of anger and hate as motives for the overthrow of kingdoms and tyrannies.[21] Oresme thus may have intended
Figures 67 and 68 as a warning to his readers to avoid such patterns of dangerous conduct and expenditure. He may also have expected that these themes of threats to political stability would lead his politically aware readers to connect the most relevant message of Book V to those advanced in the previous two books of the Politiques . Oresme's predilection for visual emphasis of the dangers to the health of the body politic conforms to the warnings in Aristotle's text. Yet the unified but varied treatment of the theme in three successive illustrations reveals also the translator's personal preoccupation with these subjects, evident in early writings such as the De moneta . In terms of the metaphor of the pathology of the body politic, the overthrow of a regime corresponds to its death. Charles V and his counsellors could not have remained indifferent to such a dramatic outcome as the one examined in Book V. If some implications of these textual and visual interweavings may have escaped his readers, Oresme's oral explications could have knit together the threads.