GUILLAUME BUDÉ, *AUTEUR FRANÇAIS: MEDIEVALISM AND HUMANISM IN THE INSTITUTION DU PRINCE* (1519)

ANTHONY J. BRUDER

UTRECHT UNIVERSITY, UTRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS

a.j.bruder@uu.nl

*Medievalism 'avant la lettre'? A new methodological departure*

In recent years, problems of literary-historical periodization have begun to exercise early modern studies in earnest.<fnref n="1" /> That early modern studies in particular should be concerned by periodization is not surprising: the arbitrariness of our cultural chronology is quickly exposed by any concerted effort to locate the dividing line between the medieval and the early modern. Finding such a line has been likened to solving a sorites paradox, which asks at what point a heap of sand from which grains are removed one by one ceases to be a heap.<fnref n="2" /> Perceived as emerging from out of this amorphous boundary zone, the early modern is thus framed as a period vexed by its immediate past. Among the most notable manifestations of this vexation is Renaissance humanism and its cult of classicism, which expressed a desire to break with the recent past and to reconnect with antiquity. To what extent Renaissance humanism truly achieved as radical a break as it liked to claim has long been the subject of research, with scholars pointing out that the charged rhetoric of a barbarian dark ages preceding the 'rebirth of letters' was often disin genuous at best.<fnref n="3" /> Paintaking research over many decades has brought to light the manifold points of continuity and contact between the intellectual culture of the later Middle Ages and that of Renaissance humanism.<fnref n="4" />

Nevertheless, while there was continuity there was also undeniably change.
To focus on France: in many important respects French culture in 1550 was not

<footnote n="1">¹ See Jennifer Summit and David Wallace, 'Rethinking Periodization', *Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies*, 37 (2007), 447–51; Nigel Smith, 'Early Modern Studies and Scholarly Territoriality', *Critical Quarterly*, 52 (2010), 1–11; and Helen Cooper, 'The Origins of the Early Modern', *Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies*, 13 (2013), 133–37.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² See Ben Hutchinson, *Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 54.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ See Wallace K. Ferguson, *The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation* (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), esp. ‘The Later Humanist Tradition and the Crystallization of Concepts’, pp. 59–77; and Colin Burrow, ‘Petrarchan Transformations’, in *Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 139–68 (pp. 139–43). See also Coen Maas, “Covered in the Thickest Darkness of Forgetfulness”: Humanist Commonplaces and the Defence of Medievalism in Janus Dousa’s Metrical History (1599), in *Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production*, ed. by Alicia C. Montoya, Sophie van Romburgh, and Wim van Anrooij (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 329–45.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ See for example Paul Oskar Kristeller, *Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning: Three Essays*, ed. and trans. by Edward P. Mahoney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).</footnote>
what it had been in 1450. Looking just at the vernacular literary production of courtly circles, by the mid-sixteenth century an earlier poetic style characterized by a distinctive brand of allegory — gardens populated with the personifications of virtues, vices, nature, and the psyche beloved of courtly mainstays such as the *Roman de la Rose* or the *Livre des échecs amoureux* — had largely been replaced by an erudite culture of intricate intertextual references to classical mythology. Evidence suggests that this change was not only perceived at the time, but also interpreted as progress: emancipation from the 'ignorance de noz majeurs' to use Joachim Du Bellay's phrase from his programmatic *Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoysse* of 1549, a manifesto for abandoning native literary traditions in favour of conscious classicizing.<fnref n="5" /> In other words, by the mid-sixteenth century, humanistically trained writers associated with the royal court such as Du Bellay conceived the culture-world of the recent past as a homogeneous unit to be cut off and repudiated in favour of a distinctly 'modern' culture. Over time this idea would develop into a distinction perhaps more readily recognizable to us today between the medieval and the modern, characteristic of high culture as a whole during the era of French classicism.<fnref n="6" />

This narrative of rejection, so forcefully expressed in the works of prominent French Renaissance poets such as Du Bellay and the early works of Pierre de Ronsard, has encouraged scholars to take these sixteenth-century voices at their word and make them speak for French culture as a whole.<fnref n="7" /> This approach lays the question of periodization — what is medieval, what is Renaissance — somewhat uneasily to bed, because it claims to rely on testimony from the era itself of a dramatic break. As the editors of a special issue of *Yale French Studies* assert, the *Deffence* represents for contemporary scholarship 'the symbolic dividing line between France's two Renaissances', the first grounded in the neo-Latin culture of Erasmus and the second flourishing under the aegis of vernacular Pléiade poetics.<fnref n="8" /> While there is truth to this two-stage schema, it remains ultimately unsatisfying, limiting as it does the interest of students of French literature in the pre-Pléiade

<footnote n="5">⁵ Joachim Du Bellay, *La Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoysse*, ed. by Jean-Charles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 1, iii. Much recent work on the crystallization of a national vernacular literature both as a concept and a reality in sixteenth-century France has been done by Paul Cohen. See for example 'L'Imaginaire d'une langue nationale: l'État, les langues et l'invention du mythe de l'ordonnance de Villers-Cotterets à l'époque moderne en France', *Histoire épistémologie langage*, 25 (2003), 19-69. A classic overview is given by Peter Rickard in 'Progress and Prestige in the Sixteenth Century', in *A History of the French Language* (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 81-99. See also the recent work of Katie Chenoweth, *The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ See Nathan Edelman, *Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages* (New York: King's Crown Press, 1946). For the perception of cultural change, see *Charting Change in France around 1540*, ed. by Marian Rothstein (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006); and Samuel Kinser, 'Ideas of Temporal Change and Cultural Process in France, 1470-1535', in *Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron*, ed. by Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1971), pp. 703-55.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ ['W]riters and poets during the sixteenth century viewed the medieval poetic and scholastic traditions of their forebears unfavorably and were consciously engaged in an effort to replace them'; Jessica DeVos and Bruce Hayes, Preface to *The Construction of a National Vernacular Literature in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Edwin M. Duval*, ed. by Jessica DeVos and Bruce Hayes (= special issue, *Yale French Studies*, 134 (2019)), pp. 1-8 (p. 1).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ DeVos and Hayes, Preface to *The Construction of a National Vernacular Literature in the Renaissance*, ed. by DeVos and Hayes, p. 2.</footnote>
moment of the earlier French Renaissance. The present article seeks to offer a
more accessible way into that period. A fruitful way of doing so is offered by the
methodological insights of medievalism studies, since the vernacular works of the
French Renaissance can often be simultaneously disdainful of and yet beholden to
the literary traditions of the native past.

Medievalism studies has been characterized as the critical consciousness of medieval studies.<fnref n="9" /> Its key insight is that our ideas of the Middle Ages are always already a construct, the product of responses to a past designated *a priori* as ‘medieval’. Its founding figure, Leslie J. Workman, defined medievalism as the ‘process of creating the Middle Ages’, a process which itself may be traced historically.<fnref n="10" /> The importance of this process to nineteenth-century French literature has long been the subject of research.<fnref n="11" /> Breaking with the traditional chronology of medievalism as a predominantly nineteenth-century phenomenon, however, studies of medievalism in early modern France date to the early years of Workman’s journal, *Studies in Medievalism*, with a special issue devoted to early modern France in 1987.<fnref n="12" /> More recently, renewed interest in tracing the process of creating the Middle Ages in the early modern period resulted in the edited volume, *Early Modern Medievalisms*, which explores ‘a very large range of early modern attitudes, conscious as well as unconscious, towards what we today would term the medieval’.<fnref n="13" /> The editors’ emphasis on working with our modern-day perception of the medieval in order to appreciate early modern uses of the recent past is essential to avoiding the pitfall of anachronism. While it may be argued that medievalism has no place in the sixteenth century, unaware as it was of our modern concept of the medieval, not to use our modern terminology ‘would be to sustain the reproduction of a certain kind of past, while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that can name the past differently’.<fnref n="14" /> Our present awareness of the medieval as the result of a process is just such an analysis which can be productively applied to the French Renaissance, as the current article argues and my recent work further suggests.<fnref n="15" />

This article argues that reading the literature of the early sixteenth century
with an eye for medievalism opens up new avenues of interpretation. It focuses
on Guillaume Budé, often billed as the father of French humanism, who despite
his foundational place in French culture rarely wrote in the language, preferring

<footnote n="9">⁹ See David Matthews, ‘Conclusion: Against a Synthesis: Medievalism, Cultural Studies, and Antidisciplinarity’, in *Medievalism: A Critical History* (Cambridge: Brewer, 2015), pp. 165–82.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Quoted in Matthews, *Medievalism*, p. 7; original emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ See *La Fabrique du Moyen Âge au XIXe siècle: représentations du Moyen Âge dans la culture et la littérature françaises du XIXe siècle*, ed. by Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Pierre Glaudes, and Bertrand Vibert (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² *Medievalism in France 1500-1750*, ed. by Heather Arden (= special issue, *Studies in Medievalism*, 3.1 (1987)).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Alicia C. Montoya, Sophie van Romburgh, and Wim van Anrooij, 'Introduction: Questioning Early Modern Medievalisms', in *Early Modern Medievalisms*, ed. by Montoya, Van Romburgh, and Van Anrooij (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 1–15 (p. 3); original emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Geraldine Heng, *The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ See for example Anthony J. Bruder, *Recovering the Medieval in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet’s ‘Veilles ou observations’* (Geneva: Droz, 2024).</footnote>
Latin and Greek.<fnref n="16" /> As such, he has traditionally been dismissed from serious treatment as a French author. The great Budé scholar of the twentieth century, Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie, asserted that ‘Budé est un auteur néolatin, non un auteur français’ and that his French style ‘manque d’aisance’.<fnref n="17" /> The present article rejects both this dichotomy and value judgement. It studies his *Institution du prince* (a collection of anecdotes related to kingship presented to François Ier in 1519) in the context of French literary culture of the time It argues that the *Institution* encapsulates an instance of the sixteenth-century medievalizing process manifesting in Budé’s attempt to introduce humanist culture into the French court.<fnref n="18" /> This reading reveals Budé’s skill in manipulating literary French as it existed in the early sixteenth century, thus undermining the received perception among scholars that Budé was a clumsy and unpractised writer in French. By re-engaging seriously with Budé as a vernacular prose stylist, emphasizing his creative use of the generic standards of contemporary courtly French, we actually come closer to the favourable reception of the *Institution* among his contemporaries, including Étienne Dolet, Guillaume Des Autels, and Du Bellay himself.<fnref n="19" />

Budé's struggles to make humanism both appealing to the king and valued by the court as a whole have received ample attention.<fnref n="20" /> Yet surprisingly little has been paid to the actual literary and material techniques Budé employed to achieve this goal in the vernacular — the only language most of his target audience would have been literate in. Attention to these techniques will show how what Gilbert Gadoffre called Budé's 'révolution culturelle' was in fact deeply beholden for its initial success to the native, traditional forms that humanism claimed to reject.<fnref n="21" /> By contrasting the text and material support of the *Institution du prince* as preserved in the original presentation copy (Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, MS 5103) with the style and form of Budé's contemporaneous Latin works, I argue that Budé chose to employ nativist forms to make his humanist message more relatable for an audience still in thrall to a courtly-chivalric culture. These forms include Budé's choice of commissioning the presentation copy of the *Institution* in a distinctly courtly manuscript layout and script, as well as his authorial choice of drawing on a traditional courtly-chivalric lexis. I further argue that Budé identified a structural affinity between the thought-worlds of humanist and contemporary French

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Budé's place in French culture is summarized in Patrick Boucheron's preface, ""Chorus disciplinarum", ou l'art de lire comme principe d'hospitalité: note sur Guillaume Budé et le Collège de France", in *Les Noces de philologie et de Guillaume Budé: un humaniste et son œuvre à la Renaissance*, ed. by Christine Bénévent, Romain Menini, and Luigi-Alberto Sanchi (Paris: École des Chartes, 2021), pp. 5-9.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Guillaume Budé, *Summaire et építome du livre De asse*, ed. by Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie and Luigi-Alberto Sanchi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008), pp. xi, xviii.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ The present article builds on Gilbert Gadoffre, *La Révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes: Guillaume Budé et François Ier* (Geneva: Droz, 1997).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Étienne Dolet, *La Maniere de bien traduire d'une langue en autre* (Lyon: Dolet, 1540), p. 4; Guillaume Des Autels, *Replique aux furieuses defenses de Louis Meigret* (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1551), p. 73; Du Bellay, *La Deffence*, II, ii.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ For example, Gadoffre, *La Révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes*, and *Les Noces de philologie et de Guillaume Budé*, ed. by Bénévent, Menini, and Sanchi.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Gadoffre, *La Révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes*.</footnote>
courtly cultures in their predilection for allegory, a cognitive and literary mode which both cultures employed but with important stylistic differences. I suggest in conclusion that it was precisely through the process of repurposing nativist forms to acclimatize the French court to humanist ideas that a gap came to open up in the consciousness of writers such as Budé, between what was native and traditional, and what was foreign and modern: a gap in which a nascent consciousness of the medieval could take root.

## Material medievalism: Paris, Arsenal, MS 5103

The *Institution du prince* is a collection of proverbs and historical anecdotes drawn mostly from the Old Testament on the one hand and Plutarch’s *Lives* on the other.<fnref n="22" /> These excerpts, translated and glossed by Budé, aim at cultivating a moral outlook and the love of learning in a monarch.<fnref n="23" /> With the *Institution*, Budé sought to introduce the humanist ideal of the learned prince into François Ier’s practice of kingship at his court.<fnref n="24" /> By repeatedly emphasizing the importance of studying ‘bonne lettres’ to the cultivation of ‘humanité’, and by offering exempla of studiousness drawn from the lives of model princes from Artaxerxes down to Pompey, the *Institution* has been read as an opening move in Budé’s career as the leading spokesperson for humanism at the court of François Ier.<fnref n="25" /> Budé wrote this text in 1518/19 and it enjoyed a certain popularity over the next three decades. Circulating in at least nine manuscripts in two distinct versions (a long and a short text), it was printed posthumously in multiple editions across France from 1544 to 1548, during which time the title *Institution du prince* was definitively associated with the text.<fnref n="26" /> This complex transmission and the many variants detected between manuscripts and printed editions makes talking about a definitive text difficult. For present purposes, however, we are extremely fortunate to have access to the original presentation copy commissioned by the author in 1519 as a gift to the king, currently conserved at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris as MS 5103.<fnref n="27" />

<footnote n="22">²² Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie, ‘Guillaume Budé, prosateur français: à propos de l’*Institution du prince*’, in *Prose et prosateurs de la Renaissance: mélanges offerts à M. le Professeur Robert Aulotte* (Paris: SEDES, 1988), pp. 39–47 (p. 43). One-third of the *Institution du prince* (fols 2–35) draws on the Solomonic books of the Old Testament, while the rest (fols 36–118) draws on Plutarch’s *Lives*.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ On the hortatory rhetoric of exempla in the *Institution du prince*, see Timothy Hampton, *Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 31–47. For the relation between this text and the ‘mirrors for princes’ genre, see Béréngère Basset and Christine Bénévent, ‘Les Apophtegmes de Plutarque et la tradition des miroirs du prince au xviᵉ siècle: l’exemple de l’*Institution du prince* de Guillaume Budé’, *Littératures classiques*, 84 (2014), 63–96.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ James J. Supple, “‘Nobilium culpa iacent literae’: Guillaume Budé and the Education of the French ‘Noblesse d’Épée’”, in *Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani*, ed. by I. D. McFarlane (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 399–407.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ A career described in Gadoffe, *La Révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes*, and dramatized by Budé himself in his 1532 dialogue, *De philologia*.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ The manuscripts were discovered and described by Guy Gueudet in ‘Guillaume Budé, parrain d’*Encyclopédie*, ou le vrai texte de l’*Institution du prince*’, in *Le Génie de la forme: mélanges de langue et littérature offerts à Jean Mourot* (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1982), pp. 87–96. For the printed editions, see Christine Bénévent and Malcom Walsby, ‘Les Premières Éditions imprimées de l’*Institution du prince* de Guillaume Budé: une histoire à réécrire’, *Histoire et civilisation du livre*, 11 (2015), 239–75.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Guillaume Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, MS 5103, <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55008562q>.</footnote>
Focusing exclusively on MS 5103 allows us to consider the influence of its immediate context on the genesis of the *Institution*.

This context makes it certain, for example, that when Budé sat down to compose a collection of edifying princely *exempla* for François Ier, print publication was not at the forefront of his mind. In writing the *Institution du prince* Budé was not addressing the international audience of humanist intellectuals whose discourse, conducted through letters and printed texts in Latin, was starting to be known as the *res publica literaria*, but rather the far more restricted world of the French court. Indeed, the material evidence of MS 5103 suggests that particular care was taken to give the humanist message of the *Institution* a nativist feel. It is well known that humanists went to great lengths to make their works appealing to their hoped-for courtly patrons, expending ingenuity and resources to produce beautiful presentation copies overflowing with paratextual panegyrics. What is less commonly noted, however, is that such techniques were not always sufficient. More important perhaps for the successful delivery of the humanist message at this transitional stage between traditional and humanistic culture was an author's ability to camouflage a work and make it seem already familiar. Early modern book history reveals the importance of such familiarity — or the lack of it — to the commercial and cultural success of new books.<fnref n="28" /> From the beginning, printed books had been designed to mimic contemporary manuscripts, with features such as columns of text and script (roman or black letter) long holding on to their association with specific genres (twin columns of black letter for vernacular romances for example, and single columns of roman letter for classical Latin or humanist works). The book history of humanism at the court of François Ier further reveals the extent to which over-hasty innovation could have a negative effect on the spread of new ideas.

There is no doubt that François Ier had been primed to be receptive to the humanist culture of the Italian Renaissance. His mother, Louise de Savoie, had ensured that he received a humanist education by appointing François Demoulins de Rochefort as one of his early tutors. Demoulins was a prolific scribe and pioneered the use of the humanist roman letter — or antiqua — script for the composition of vernacular texts, many of which were dedicated to the young François.<fnref n="29" /> A classic example, created at the French court at exactly the same time as MS 5103, is Demoulins’s *Commentaires de la guerre gallique*.<fnref n="30" /> This vernacular work stages a question-and-answer dialogue between the young prince François and Julius Caesar, and is executed in an antiqua script, proudly trumpeting thereby the ideology of the new learning. Demoulins pioneered the use of antiqua for the vernacular in his manuscripts, beginning with his *Traité des vertus* of 1509.<fnref n="31" /> Nevertheless

<footnote n="28">²⁸ See Andrew Pettegree, *The Book in the Renaissance* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Pettegree, *The Book in the Renaissance*, pp. 185–87.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ The manuscript is in three volumes, conserved separately: London, British Library, MS Harley 6205; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 13429; and Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 764/1139.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ See Henri-Jean Martin, 'Politique et typographie: le triomphe de la lettre romaine en France et ses conséquences', in *La Naissance du livre moderne (XIVe–XVIIe siècles): mise en page et mise en texte du livre français*, ed. by Henri-Jean Martin (Paris: Cercle de la Librairie, 2000), pp. 162–223 (pp. 186–87).</footnote>
his adoption of roman script for the vernacular remained an isolated case at court: his works were neither copied nor printed and did not affect vernacular printing, which for the most part continue to use gothic or ‘black letter’ until the 1540s.<fnref n="32" /> This poor reception may be tellingly contrasted with the nine manuscript copies and multiple printed editions of the *Institution du prince*. Roman letter at the court of François Ier has thus been interpreted as a sort of code limited to the humanist avant garde.<fnref n="33" />

Perhaps mindful of Demoulins’s experience, Budé opted for a familiar native script when commissioning the presentation copy of the *Institution du prince*. Budé was far from averse to the antiqua script; prior to the *Institution* Budé had already published numerous works, all in Latin and all printed in roman letter. Budé was thus fully conversant with and committed to roman letter as the textual face of humanism. The manuscript of the *Institution* however is in a semi-cursive gothic hand known as bastard secretary, the standard script for deluxe books in France from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century.<fnref n="34" /> This was a script with strong national connotations in the world of the French court of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.<fnref n="35" /> Anyone eager to avoid alienating the court would certainly have opted for this traditional script, even if — as is the case with Budé and the *Institution* — the author’s goal was to introduce new cultural ideas to that environment. Given Budé’s preference for roman letter in his printed humanist works in Latin, and given the failure of Demoulins’s roman-letter vernacular manuscripts to kickstart a humanist culture at the court of François Ier, it is conceivable that Budé felt that an older, traditional, native script would give the *Institution* greater staying power among the same audience. In its choice of script, MS 5103 has more in common with a third contemporary manuscript commissioned for the king, this time a *Roman de la Rose* dating from 1525.<fnref n="36" /> The vernacular content is here perfectly matched with a traditional gothic script of the *bâtarde* family. The use of a gothic script for MS 5103 may also suggest a view to circulation within the court more broadly.<fnref n="37" /> Even if François himself had been readied to receive texts in humanist script because he had had Demoulins as a childhood tutor, others at court may not have been so receptive. Budé had his sights set on the *noblesse d’épée* as a whole, many of whom were still hostile to humanism, viewing it as an Italianate affectation.<fnref n="38" /> The script of MS 5103 would have associated

<footnote n="32">³² The earliest vernacular text to be printed in roman letter was a French translation of Platina’s history of the papacy: Bartholomæus de Platina Sacchi, *Les Genealogies faitz et gestes des sainctz Peres Papes, Empereurs, & Roys de Frace* (Paris: Galliot Du Pré, 1519). Alongside Geofroy Tory, Du Pré experimented with roman-letter printing in the vernacular for the next two decades. The new fashion only definitively took hold however with the publication of the French *Amadis* from 1540 onwards. See Bruder, ‘Continuity, Rupture and Recovery in French Renaissance Literary Culture, 1530–1550’, in *Recovering the Medieval in the French Renaissance*, pp. 81–128.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Martin, ‘Politique et typographie’, p. 190.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Michelle P. Brown, *A Guide to Western Historical Scripts: From Antiquity to 1600* (London: British Library, 1993), script no. 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ *La Naissance du livre moderne*, ed. by Martin, p. 162.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.948, <https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/145641>.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ See La Garanderie, ‘Guillaume Budé, prosateur français’, p. 42.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ See Supple, ‘Nobilium culpa iacent literae’, pp. 399–407; and Gadoffre, Introduction to *La Révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes*, pp. 13–41.</footnote>
Budé's message not with a foreign cultural import but with a familiar native tradition, thus making it more palatable.<fnref n="39" />

*Literary medievalism: a courtly-chivalric lexical field*

One reason scholars have tended to judge Budé's French harshly appears to derive from a too-hasty acceptance of Budé's self-deprecation at the start of the *Institution du prince*. In offering his book to the king, Budé openly rejects any title to praise on literary grounds: 'non pas que je pense ledit livre estre a estimer [...] pour grande propriété et elegance de langaige françoys, car de ce ne me puis je à droit venter ne ne vouldroye.'<fnref n="40" /> This statement should not be taken at face value, however, but rather as a rhetorical ploy of the *captatio benevolentiae*: a stylized expression of self-abasement designed to flatter a dedicatee and make them more receptive to a work offered as a gift. There is nothing distinctively humanist about opening a work in this fashion; rather, the *captatio* is a standard feature of medieval literary texts dedicated to a powerful patron.<fnref n="41" /> As this section will argue, the text of the *Institution* is in many respects grounded in deeply traditional rhetorical forms, not just structurally (such as beginning with the self-abasement typical of the medieval *captatio*) but also at the level of lexis. For, while introducing neologisms and turning the French language to the discussion of novel frames of reference, such as the anecdotes of antique princes found in Plutarch, the language of the *Institution* frequently employs what may be termed a courtly-chivalric idiom.

A pertinent example is Budé's portrayal of the ancient Persian king Artaxerxes II as a relatable feudal lord, a *gran seigneur*, described as 'rempli tant par nature que par exercice de toute courtoisie et benignité royalle':

> la liberalité des grans seigneurs et magnanimes ne consiste pas seulement en donner grans dons et de gross estimation et valeur [...], mais aussi en acceptant [...] par une prompte humanité et benignité courtoise dons et presens de petite estime.<fnref n="42" />

Budé's repetition of 'courtoisie' and his use of terms such as 'grans seigneurs' draws on the lexis of a vernacular feudal court culture. And as the juxtaposition of the resoundingly humanist phrase 'prompte humanité' with its courtly analogue 'benignité courtoise' suggests, Budé builds on the amalgamation of Christian and pagan wisdom in the *Institution du prince* by attempting to unite humanist and courtly values. Addressing François directly, Budé explicitly draws an analogy between feudalism and the humanist culture of patronage he hopes to transmit to the court: by rewarding scholars (such as himself), 'ferez poetes et orateurs comme

<footnote n="39">³⁹ George Steiner has argued that in making conscious use of lexical archaisms when translating, 'The foreign text is felt to be not so much an import from abroad (suspect by definition) as it is an element out of one's native past'; George Steiner, *After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 347.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fols 4t-v.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ See Ernst Robert Curtius, *European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages*, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), Chapters 5.3, topics of affected modesty, and 5.4, topics of the exordium.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fols 2v-3r.</footnote>
vous faictes contes et ducs'.<fnref n="43" /> A useful term for encapsulating Budé's general thrust is 'synthesis': synthesis between two pasts, Christian and pagan (King Solomon and King Artaxerxes), and the synthesis between two presents: Italian humanism and French courtly culture.

Budé continues to deploy a courtly-chivalric lexis in rendering the exemplary deeds of ancient princes presented in the *Institution du prince* for François's emulation. The language of knighthood features prominently for example in Budé's accounts of battles of the Roman republican era. Of the war between Rome and Pyrrhus (third century BCE), armies on both sides are described as 'chevalereux';<fnref n="44" /> the term is used again of the second-century BCE consul Caecilius Metellus, while single combat for a Roman soldier or 'chevalier' is considered suitably knightly ('chevalereuse').<fnref n="45" /> The dictator Sulla (first century BCE) is similarly praised for his 'vertu chevalereuse et prouesse'.<fnref n="46" /> Pompey, the contemporary and rival of Julius Caesar, is repeatedly described in terms befitting a chivalric hero: 'Pompee le grant [...] se porta moult chevalereusement' and is 'estimé guerroyeur preux, chevalereux et victorieux', a man 'remply de preudhommie'.<fnref n="47" /> This vocabulary of chivalry, of *preudhommie* and *prouesse*, is redolent of the language of the prose vernacular romances so closely associated with the cultural world of the fifteenth-century French courts. From the mid-1400s, patrons among the French and Burgundian aristocracy began commissioning a spate of prose reworkings of the medieval corpus of chivalric epics in verse: the *chansons de geste* and Arthurian romances.<fnref n="48" /> These prose texts became some of the earliest vernacular works to be printed in the luxury editions of Antoine Vérard and helped create the taste for chivalric romance in the sixteenth century which culminated in the *Amadis* publishing phenomenon.<fnref n="49" /> François Ier was an avid reader of these romances; an inventory of his personal travelling library drawn up the year before the *Institution* reveals that the king liked to have chivalric adventure stories near to hand wherever he happened to be.<fnref n="50" /> Just as the *bâtarde* family of gothic scripts held strong nativist connotations at the French court c. 1500, so too did this courtly-chivalric vernacular idiom, since both had been developed and cultivated concurrently through

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 5v.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 75v.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 80r. Note also a reference to dubbing on the field of battle ('donner chevalerie'), fol. 81r.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 84r.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fols 86v, 89v, 95v. Note also the description of Alexander the Great's enemy, 'Porus le grant et chevalereux roy d[']Inde'; Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 101v.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ The major study on this topic remains Georges Doutrepont, *Les Mises en prose des épopées et des romans chevaleresques du XIVe au XVe siècle* (Brussels: Palais des académies, 1939).</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ See Jane Taylor, *Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance France: From Manuscript to Printed Book* (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), p. 150.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ See Michael Heath, 'The Education of a Christian Prince: Erasmus, Budé, Rabelais — and Ogier le Danois', in *Humanism and Letters in the Age of François Ier*, ed. by Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1996), pp. 41–54 (p. 47).</footnote>
French (or francophile, in the case of medieval Burgundy) aristocratic patronage over the preceding centuries.

It could be argued of course that, in using words such as ‘chevalier’ and ‘preudhommie’ to describe ancient princes, Budé was constrained by the lexis of his time, finding no other words in his contemporary French to convey the warrior ethos of antiquity. This conclusion is rendered less probable however when we consider Budé’s obvious facility for neologisms elsewhere in the *Institution du prince*. Examples include the word ‘musegetes’ (fol. 5v), a striking neologism encountered in the opening pages, a calque from the ancient Greek meaning ‘leader of the Muses’, an epithet associated in antiquity with Apollo and Hercules. Other such loanwords, all still rare in the French of 1519, include ‘copieuse’ (fol. 9r), redolent of the contemporary Erasmian aesthetic of literary *copia*, along with ‘facunde’ and ‘eloquence’ (fol. 22r) among others.<fnref n="51" /> ‘Eloquence’ is a case in point since Budé is perfectly aware of a vernacular periphrasis, ‘beau parler’ (fol. 23v), and feels the need to provide his use of the word ‘eloquence’ with an elaborate gloss: ‘une science qui peult honnestement haultement et suffisamment parler de toutes choses [...] en manière que les escoutans s’en esmerveillent.’<fnref n="52" />

Therefore, if Budé chooses to use a courtly-chivalric lexis in certain contexts, this may be interpreted as a matter of stylistic choice. Neologisms are always risky, and especially in the sixteenth century could spark fierce controversy.<fnref n="53" /> Budé’s fellow humanist Étienne Dolet for example would write in his *Maniere de bien traduire* (1540) that when translating from ancient languages into French, ‘il te fault garder d’usurper mots [...] peu usités par le passé’.<fnref n="54" /> Even Dolet however was willing to admit that neologisms might be necessary *in extremis*: ‘n’entends pas, que je dye, que le traducteur s’abstienne totallement de mots, qui sont hors de l’usage commun [...]. Mais cela se doibt faire a l’extreme nécessité.’<fnref n="55" /> And Dolet himself even praised Budé as a model translator.<fnref n="56" /> Furthermore, given the didactic purpose of the *Institution du prince*, Budé’s stylistic choice to draw on the courtly-chivalric idiom was probably motivated by the Horatian dictum that authors should blend utility with pleasure.<fnref n="57" /> Budé himself echoes Horace’s advice:

> peu de gens sont qui ayant bonnes conceptions et fantasies et les saichent bien dire et rediger par escript en manière qu’les auditeurs ou lecteurs y prennent plaisir, et que leurs livres ayant telle grace d’eloquence qu’ilz puissent durer long temps. Les aucuns ont eu avec l’excellence d’entendement la faculté et industrie de bien mectre par escript en sorte qu’ilz persuadent aux hommes de croyre ce qu’ilz ont escript en leurs livres ou d’y prandre grant plaisir.<fnref n="58" />

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Also note ‘fantasies’, fol. 8v; ‘ingenieux’, fol. 13r; ‘censeur’, fol. 44v; ‘phare’, fol. 46r; ‘excogiter’, fol. 76v.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 22r. Compare the laconic definition given twenty years later in Robert Estienne's *Dictionarium latinogalicum* of 1538: 'le scavoir de bien parler' (s.v. 'eloquentia').</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ See Olivier Halévy, 'Expression poétique et invention lexicale: les adjectifs forgés par composition (1549-1555)', in *Vocabulaire et création poétique dans les jeunes années de la Pléiade* (1547-1555), ed. by Marie-Dominique Legrand and Keith Cameron (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013), pp. 279-92.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Dolet, *La Maniere de bien traduire*, p. 14.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Dolet, *La Maniere de bien traduire*, p. 14.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Dolet, *La Maniere de bien traduire*, p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ 'Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci'; Horace, *Ars poetica*, l. 343.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 8v.</footnote>
Budé in turn presents ancient history to the king as a source of both learning and pleasure: records of ‘les choses dignes de memoire du temps passé’ are beneficial to readers ‘pour le plaisir qu’on peut prandre a le [sic] scâvair, et l’amendement qui en peut venir a ceulx qui ont besoing de l’entendre’.<fnref n="59" /> Indeed, throughout the *Institution*, Budé presents the classics to François as primarily a source of vivid military anecdotes which he himself is uniquely qualified to translate into the king’s French for his enjoyment and edification.

Budé’s nativist lexical choices also colour the imagery he uses to discuss key aspects of humanist intellectual culture. For example, when impressing upon his audience the worth of historical knowledge, Budé can draw on both humanist and scholastic commonplaces. Budé begins his praise of history by translating Cicero’s famous lines, calling it ‘temoing des temps, lumière de verité, vie de la memoire, maistresse de la vie humaine, et messagiere de l’antiquité’.<fnref n="60" /> Later on, however, Budé uses the scholastic metaphor for history as a mirror, perhaps more familiar to his audience. He praises the records of the past ‘par lesquelles histoires on voit quasy comme en ung mirouer les choses passées commes les presentes’.<fnref n="61" /> This specular metaphor for history is post-classical and Christian, with influential roots in St Augustine and St Gregory the Great.<fnref n="62" /> It was famously associated with the *Speculum historiale*, a universal history which formed the most popular part of the *Speculum maius*, a thirteenth-century scholastic encyclopaedia by Vincent de Beauvais. Translated into French under royal patronage in the 1330s, this work was popular at the French court; it was still being recopied with rich illustrations of Vincent seated before the eponymous ‘mirror of history’ just decades before Budé’s *Institution du prince*, and had already been printed by Antoine Vérard.<fnref n="63" />

Thus, coupled with the use of nativist scribal conventions described in the previous section, the language of the *Institution du prince* further reveals Budé as a go-between, a *truchement* between two culture-worlds coexisting at the turn of the century: the world of humanism, which existed in Greek and Latin, was written in roman letter, and drew on the commonplaces in the classical authors; and that of the French court, which used the vernacular written in a distinctive gothic script, and drew on a traditional corpus of native literary and scriptural references. The French of the *Institution* may thus be less about vernacular ‘illustration’ — in the sense of contributing to the illustriousness of the French language in opposition to Latin — than it is about making humanism in a deeper sense the ‘language’ of the French royal court. In presenting the martial valour of the ancients and the

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 10r.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 15v. See Cicero, *De oratore*, II, 36: 'Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis' [For history is time's witness, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, and the messenger of antiquity]; my translation.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 25r.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² See Sister Ritamary Bradley, 'Backgrounds of the Title *Speculum* in Mediaeval Literature', *Speculum*, 29 (1954), 100–15.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ See for example London, BL, MS Royal 14 E.i, vol. 1, fol. 3r, c. 1479–80, <https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=5587>; and Mattia Cavagna, ‘Un miroir de l’évolution du français: la transmission du Miroir historial du xivᵉ au xviᵉ siècles’, in *Rythmes d’évolution du français médiéval*, 11: *Observations d’après quelques textes de savoir*, ed. by Yoan Boudes and others (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2019), pp. 29–76.</footnote>
practical uses of history via a familiar nativist lexis, Budé accommodates the main-
stays of a foreign humanist culture to the expectations of the vernacular culture
of the royal court. This accommodation or negotiation between two coexisting
culture-worlds is also enacted through a slightly different technique: the packaging
of humanist concepts in the conventions of courtly allegory.

*Bridging the divide: humanist and courtly allegoresis*

Allegory is usually discussed as a literary technique, a kind of intellectual fable in which ‘the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas’.<fnref n="64" /> As a species of extended metaphor, it is characterized above all by the personification as proper nouns of the common nouns used to designate mental and emotional abstractions (Love, Hate, Greed, etc.).<fnref n="65" /> Allegory of this kind became characteristic of art and criticism in both Latin and the vernacular throughout the Middle Ages.<fnref n="66" /> Allegories, however, are more than poetic ornaments: they are the expression or product of a worldview described as ‘the allegorical mindset’, an epistemology which we can term more concisely allegoresis: the view that not only texts (the world of culture) but also nature (the world as a whole) speak of something other than themselves.<fnref n="67" /> Allegoresis was a common feature of intellectual cultures in pre-modern Europe. This article suggests however that its style — the ways in which allegories were constructed, presented, and functioned — differed significantly between humanist and courtly cultures at the time Budé was writing the *Institution du prince*. It argues that in this text, and above all through its allegory of Lady Philology, Budé combined humanist and courtly traditions of allegoresis to bridge the divide between these two cultures: to deliver the message of Renaissance humanism in the language of courtly French allegory.

An important distinction between humanist and courtly allegoresis is their referential base. Humanist allegories are a fundamentally more erudite phenomenon than their courtly cousins. Drawing for their material on a vast corpus of classical texts and artefacts painstakingly systematized by antiquarians and mythographers beginning with Boccaccio's *Genealogia deorum*, humanist allegories depend upon a scholarly knowledge of sources and contexts.<fnref n="68" /> The world of reference is antique

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Northrop Frye, ‘Allegory’, in *The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics*, ed. by Alex Preminger and others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 12–13 (p. 12a).</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ See Bernard Dupriez, ‘Allégorie’, in *Gradus: les procédés littéraires* (Paris: 10/18, 1984), pp. 29–31.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ See C. S. Lewis, 'Allegory', in *The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 44–111.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Ancient Greek ἀλληγορία, from ἀλλος [other] + ἀγορεύω [I speak]. The term 'allegoresis' is often limited to discussions of allegory as hermeneutic method, for example in Frye, 'Allegory', p. 12a. In using it to refer to an outlook or *Weltanschauung*, I build on Davide Del Bello, *Forgotten Paths: Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset* (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ For a historical survey of humanist allegoresis, see Don Cameron Allen, *Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance* (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), especially ‘The Allegorical Interpretation of the Renaissance Mythographers’, pp. 201–47. See also Ann Moss, *Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Philip Ford, ‘Conrad Gesner et le fabuleux manteau’, *Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance*, 47 (1985), 305–20; and Jean Seznec, ‘La Science mythologique au xviᵉ siècle’, in *La Survivance des dieux antiques: essai sur le rôle de la tradition mythologique dans l’humanisme et dans l’art de la Renaissance* (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), pp. 186–222.</footnote>
and textual, and humanist allegoresis evolved as a hermeneutic for extricating meaning from the fragmentary relics of an alien civilization, before later forming the basis of the learned games of a rich Renaissance culture of emblems. Courtly allegoresis, however, drew on a more limited canon of late antique works as precursors for an allegorical mindset turned towards the inner life of human beings and the outer world of nature.<fnref n="69" /> Among the earliest and most influential instances of this courtly allegory in the vernacular is the thirteenth-century courtly dream poem, the *Roman de la Rose*, begun by Guillaume de Lorris and continued by Jean de Meung. Here common nouns designating facets of courtly love (courtesy, delight, beauty, etc.) and the forces of nature (genius, nature, time) become proper nouns embodied in contemporary garb to resemble courtiers as they would have looked at the time of writing.<fnref n="70" /> The popularity of the *Rose* (attested by the nearly 150 extant manuscripts) exerted an immense influence on the vernacular culture of medieval Europe, and made the allegoresis of courtly culture a distinctive characteristic of literature in French.<fnref n="71" /> At the time that Budé composed the *Institution*, allegory in the tradition of the *Rose* was a kind of second nature to courtiers raised on a diet of vernacular literature in which the *Rose* and its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century imitations loomed large.<fnref n="72" /> Given its prominence in both courtly and humanist literary culture, the allegorical mode may thus have appeared to Budé as a potential metalanguage for conveying humanist ideals to a courtly audience. That Budé’s allegoresis in the *Institution* is more beholden to the vernacular and courtly allegory familiar to his audience than to contemporary humanist traditions is strongly suggested by both the iconographical and textual treatment of ‘philologie’ in MS 5103.

Budé’s use of the vernacular word ‘philologie’ is always as a proper noun rather than a common noun. This has not previously been stressed and remains a source of confusion when discussing Budean philology. Perhaps surprisingly, Budé never used the French word ‘philologie’ in a disciplinary sense, and whether ‘philologia’ in his Latin works carried such a meaning remains unlikely.<fnref n="73" /> Rather, in both Latin and French, ‘philologia’/‘philologie’ represents for Budé the passionate inclination to study, and is embodied as a sort of Diana: a paragon of chastity and an avid huntress. ‘Philologie’ in the *Institution du prince* is always a proper noun, ‘une dame qui s’appelle Philologie’, and represents the spirit of studiousness, ‘amour des bonnes

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ These texts include such fourth- and fifth-century works as Prudentius’s *Psychomachia* and the commentary on Cicero’s *Somnium Scipionis* by Macrobius.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ See for example the descriptions of the virtues and vices of courtly love in the *Roman de la Rose*, ed. by Félix Lecoy, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 1965–70), ll. 140–461 and 992–1277.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ The *Rose* was associated with a French literary sensibility as early as Petrarch; see his critique of the *Rose* in his *Epistolae metricae*, III, 30, excerpt translated as ‘The *Roman de la Rose*, in *Petrarch: A Humanist among Princes. An Anthology of Petrarch’s Letters and of Selections from His Other Works*, ed. and trans. by David Thompson (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 42–43.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² For the place of the *Rose* in later medieval French literature, Pierre-Yves Badel, *Le ‘Roman de la Rose’ au XIVᵉ siècle: étude de la réception de l’œuvre* (Geneva: Droz, 1980).</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ See Marie-Rose Logan, ‘Gulielmus Budaeus’ Philological Imagination’, *MLN*, 118 (2003), 1140–51.</footnote>
lettres et inclination à l'estude, lesquelles lettres les anciens ont appellees humaines'.<fnref n="74" /> It is worth noting that 'philologie' as a common noun denoting a scholarly discipline had already begun to be used in French by the time of the *Institution*. In the *Temple de bonne renommée* of Jean Bouchet (1516), for example, 'philologie' is listed as one of 'plusieurs savoirs' or scholarly disciplines, such as 'geographie' or 'science historiale'.<fnref n="75" /> And it is in relation to this sense of the word 'philologie', as a common noun denoting a discipline, that Rabelais can describe Homer as the 'paragon de tous philologes'.<fnref n="76" /> By contrast with contemporary humanist use in the vernacular, therefore, the *denotata* of Budé's 'philologie' differ sharply.

Budé's usage of the word 'Philologie' as a proper noun designating an allegorical female character rather than a common noun referring to a scholarly discipline was a conservative use of this still uncommon word, in keeping with the word's limited history in French up to that point.<fnref n="77" /> It first entered the French language in the last quarter of the fourteenth century in the translation of Augustine's *City of God* by Raoul de Presles. In his commentary on Augustine's discussion of the pagan pantheon (Book 4, Chapter 11), Raoul glossed Augustine's reference to the Roman god Mercury with a reference to the late antique encyclopaedia, Martianus Capella's *De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii*, which presents the process of study as an allegorical marriage between Mercury and a woman named Philology, which Raoul spells 'Philosogie': 'et pour ce Philosogie vault autant en son intrepretacion comme estude ou amour de raison'.<fnref n="78" /> The 'philologie' of the *Institution du prince* is thus arguably a late product of a long medieval tradition of vernacular allegory at the French court.

The allegory of Philology is made immediately apparent to readers of MS 5103 by the iconography of the frontispiece tableau (see Figure 1). While the iconography of the seven liberal arts originating in the lavish allegories found in the *De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii* formed a rich vein in medieval art, it appears that 'Lady Philology' was left out of this tradition, leaving Budé with latitude to direct her portrayal.<fnref n="79" /> That Budé was involved in the design of the opening miniature has been noted by scholars, who draw attention in particular to the coins which adorn Philology's dress in the lower compartment, advertising Budé's celebrated *De asse et partibus eius*.<fnref n="80" /> The fact that

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fols 34r, 34v.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Jean Bouchet, *Le Temple de bonne renommée* (Paris: Galliot Du Pré, 1516), fol. 64r.</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ François Rabelais, *Gargantua*, ed. by Ruth Calder, M. A. Screech, and V. L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1970), p. 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ See *Trésor de la langue française informatisé*, <http://atilf.atilf.fr>, s.v. 'philologie'.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ St Augustine, *La Cité de Dieu*, trans. by Raoul de Presles, ed. by Olivier Bertrand and others (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013–21), vol. 1, pt 2 (2015), p. 120.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ See the 'Bibliographical Survey of the Seven Liberal Arts in Medieval and Renaissance Iconography', in William H. Stahl and Richard Johnson with E. L. Burge, *Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts*, 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 245–49. Budé was a close reader of Capella, heavily annotating his own copy; see Virginie Leroux, 'Guillaume Budé lecteur de Martianus Capella', in *Les Noces de philologie et de Guillaume Budé*, ed. by Bénévent, Menini, and Sanchi, pp. 189–200.</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Myra D. Orth, *Renaissance Manuscripts: The Sixteenth Century*, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 2015), 11, 'Catalogue', no. 20, p. 92.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1 Guillaume Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, MS 5103, fol. iv. Budé at work on the *Institution*, flanked by Mercury and Lady Philology. He then presents the finished work to the king with Lady Philology acting as his herald or squire.</figcaption></figure>

Philology here also appears ready to go hunting has previously been explained simply as a ploy to gain the king's attention, but this is not necessarily the case. The falcon and what, from its size, appears to be a whippet seem appropriate allegorical emblems of philological activity: both are closely associated with vigilance, observation, and
attention to detail, since both hunt primarily by sight (the whippet is a breed of sight hound, as opposed to a scent hound). The personification of Philology as a huntress (*Philologia venatrix*) was dear to Budé; in a celebrated extended metaphor in Book 2 of his 1532 treatise, *De philologia*, Budé compares his experience of laboriously teaching himself Greek to tracking a cunning wild animal.<fnref n="81" /> This metaphor is spun out into a full-blown digression on the art of hunting, later separated from the rest of the work and translated by Louis Le Roy for François’s grandson, Charles IX, as the *Traité de la vénerie*.<fnref n="82" /> As the illustration to MS 5103 shows, philology and hunting were already closely associated ideas for Budé more than a decade before the *De philologia*.

A further feature not previously noted is the influence of the iconographical tradition of the *Roman de la Rose* on Budé’s portrayal of Philology. Unlike in Capella’s allegory, Philology in the *Institution du prince* is the consort not of Mercury but of ‘tout homme mercurial’, in other words any man with a ‘naturelle aptitude à eloquence’.<fnref n="83" /> This conjugal metaphor describing the relation between a scholar and his studies was key to what has been termed Budé’s ‘philological imagination’, reappearing as it does in his humanist correspondence and in the *De philologia*.<fnref n="84" /> His biographer Louis Le Roy nods to this relationship when he records that even on his wedding day Budé spent at least three hours studying, shut up with his philology.<fnref n="85" /> In his letters and dialogues however Budé describes Philology as an essentially chaste conjugal companion. In the *Institution*, the chastity of Philology is emphasized iconographically. In the allegorical tableau Philology wears the habit of a Benedictine nun, which on its own may already seem ample evidence of a chaste character. However, the intended association between Philology and chastity is strengthened in light of the traditional iconography of an allegorical character from the *Roman de la Rose*, Abstinence Contrainte, who in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts was portrayed as a Benedictine nun carrying a book.<fnref n="86" />

Once we are attuned to their presence, the *Institution du prince* appears teeming with courtly allegorical personifications. Unlike traditional courtly allegories, however, Budé’s characters represent not elements of the lover’s psyche or natural forces, but rather the cultural co-ordinates of the humanist apprehension of reality. Budé uses the language of courtly allegory to showcase the intellectual disciplines and cultural symbols at the heart of the humanist movement. Humanism’s

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ ‘[I]l m’était venu à l’esprit [...] d’entreprendre de suivre les traces obscures et déjà presque effacées de cette bête sauvage’; Guillaume Budé, *Philologie / De philologia*, ed. and trans. Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2001), p. 174.</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² Guillaume Budé, *Philologie*, p. xxix.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fols 34r–v.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Logan, ‘Gulielmus Budaeus’ Philological Imagination’.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ ‘Nuptiarum etiam die, qui est laetitiae et hilaritati dicatus, minimum tres horas studuisse, commemorant’ [They recall that even on his wedding day, a day set apart for pleasure and good cheer, he studied for at least three hours]; Loys Le Roy, *G. Budei viri clarissim[i] vita* (Paris: Jean de Roigny, 1540), p. 16; my translation.</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ See for example the illustrations in New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.948, fol. 118r, and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 19153, fols 74r, 85v.</footnote>
philological ethos is bodied forth as Lady Philology, while elsewhere in the text History ('Histoire') is similarly embodied as 'une grande maistresse'.<fnref n="87" /> Further on, Budé uses the language of courtly allegory to discuss antique religion. In a digression, Budé describes how Venus is accompanied by 'Amour' as well 'ung truchement qui s'appelle Langaige, et un courtier qui s'appelle Suada, cest a dire grace de persuader'.<fnref n="88" /> Alongside her *truchement* and her courtier, 'dame Venus' is also attended by 'ses damoyselles d'honneur, qui sont mes dames de la Grace et Faveur du monde'.<fnref n="89" /> A further allegorical figure, 'dame Nature', famously associated in the French vernacular tradition with Jean de Meung's continuation of the *Rose*, also appears in the final pages of the *Institution*.<fnref n="90" /> In the text as a whole, however, Budé's allegorical characters only make fleeting appearances; rather than functioning as autonomous characters within a narrative framework comparable for example to the cast of allegorical characters in the *Rose*, they are limited to being rhetorical embellishments. Nevertheless, by evoking the atmosphere of courtly allegory, they serve Budé's purpose of acclimatizing his courtly audience to the humanist message.

This exploration of Budé's facility with the repertoire of courtly allegory argues in favour of seeing the author of the *Institution du prince* as creatively engaging both textually and iconographically with the literary tradition of the courtly culture he sought to influence. The literary and iconographical evidence gathered together in this section demonstrates that Budé's Lady Philology as she appears in the *Institution* is beholden both in her physical manifestation and her textual presentation to native courtly traditions. Philologie in the *Institution* may therefore be said to play a role comparable to that of Amour who guides the dreamer in the *Rose*, or Nature who plays a similar role in the anonymous fourteenth-century *Livre des échecs amoureux*.

## Conclusion

Budé today, like much of the past, is often met backwards: our first encounter is with the image of his life and works as it stood at his death, and as it was formed by posterity. But Budé was not always the humanist scholar we meet with in his erudite neo-Latin tomes. As a youth he would have read in his father's library; Jean Budé's collection was notably short on Greek and Roman authors (only some moral works by Seneca are recorded) but was rich in a different body of classics, the intellectual furnishing of late-medieval French civilization: the church fathers, the scholastics, and both French and Latin works of leading figures of fifteenth-century culture such as Alain Chartier, Nicolas de Clamanges, and Jean Gerson, as well as a copy of the Old French translation of Boethius's *Consolation of*

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 15r.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fols 83v–84r.</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 84r.</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Budé, *De l'institution du prince*, fol. 115v.</footnote>
*Philosophy* (attributed at the time to Jean de Meung).<fnref n="91" /> This was the world of cultural references in which Budé grew up. His turn towards Italian humanism came relatively late, in an almost conversion-like decision as a young man to dedicate himself to learning ancient Greek. Budé thus not only drove the cultural revolution described by Gadoffre, but also lived it personally. The *Institution du prince* as preserved in MS 5103 is an eloquent witness to a transitional moment in the life of French court culture, and could perhaps only have been composed by one such as Budé who had already lived the transition in themselves.

In his analysis of the *Institution du prince* as a document of political history, its twentieth-century editor, Claude Bontems, wrote that, ‘Aucune œuvre du début du xviᵉ siècle ne peut être détachée, analysée en dehors des idées politiques du Moyen Âge.’<fnref n="92" /> *Mutatis mutandis*, the same can be said about Budé’s treatise as an early work of French Renaissance humanism and its connections with the cultural idiom of the medieval court. Budé’s decision to commission his presentation manuscript of the *Institution* in a traditional nativist script, coupled with his courtly and chivalric lexical choices and the courtly garb of his allegoresis all bespeak a conscious effort of negotiation and acclimatization at the interface between two cultures. At a time when a nascent conception of national culture in France was still closely intertwined with the cultural life of the court, it was more important than ever to couch the translation of a foreign culture-world in a familiar, domestic, internalized language. The present analysis of the *Institution* as it was presented to the king reveals Budé as an author highly attuned to the organic relation between power and culture not only in Latin but also in the vernacular.<fnref n="93" /> This suggests that as a French author Budé navigated a dual consciousness between a Latinate humanism experienced as novel and modern on the one hand, and a native vernacular episteme on the other. Each of these was expressed not only through its own language — Latin or the vernacular — but also through a whole attendant cultural code or style. By working to bring humanist ideas into the French court through accessible native forms, Budé experienced an essentially ironic distance between past and present. This experience and its expression through French literature — such as in the *Institution* — is thus a short episode in what has been described as ‘the breaking away of the present from the medieval past’.<fnref n="94" />

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ See Arthur Tilley, *The Dawn of the French Renaissance* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918); and H. Omont, ‘Notice sur les collections de manuscrits de Jean et Guillaume Budé’, *Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile de France*, 12 (1885), 100–13.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² Claude Bontems, ‘L’*Institution du prince* de Guillaume Budé’, in *Le Prince dans la France des XVIᵉ et XVIIᵉ siècles*, ed. by Claude Bontems, Léon-Pierre Raybaud, and Jean-Pierre Brancourt (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), pp. 1–140 (p. 2).</footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ Claude Longeon has noted this attunement as a defining characteristic of Budé's humanism: 'l'idée budéenne des relations organiques entre culture et pouvoir'; Claude Longeon, 'Étienne Pasquier critique littéraire', in *Hommes et livres de la Renaissance: choix des principaux articles publiés par Claude Longeon (1941-1989)*, ed. by Bernard Yon and Arlette Gaucher (Saint-Étienne: Institut Claude Longeon, 1990), pp. 157–65 (p. 163).</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Russell A. Fraser, *The Dark Ages and the Age of Gold* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. vii.</footnote>
This article has sought to demonstrate that a reading informed by medievalism studies can offer a fresh perspective on a problem of the early French Renaissance, namely the significance of the vernacular works of neo-Latin humanists and Budé's status as a French author. His right to be studied as one, this article has argued, lies less in how much he wrote in that language than in how deeply he had internalized its literary and cultural codes, and how successfully he was able to deploy them when the context demanded it. In the (perhaps unexpected) words of Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie, 'Comme on voit, il reste encore un vaste champ de recherche sur le "Budé français"!'<fnref n="95" />

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ La Garanderie, 'Guillaume Budé, prosateur français', p. 41.</footnote>