The Concept of True Nobility at the Burgundian Court

Abstract

The view of the fifteenth century as an age of transition rather than as a period of decline, even in northern Europe, has made considerable progress in recent years, but there is still much to be learned about the various means by which the transition took place, especially how it came about in the minds of men. Too often investigations in this direction have been limited by the practice of studying the intellectual life of a given period almost exclusively through what men wrote rather than through what they read or what they saw about them. Besides this, sufficient importance has not always been given to the international and multilingual nature of the culture in the more civilized parts of Europe during both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.