Putting Ancient History in a Medieval Text: the Second Part of Honoré Bonet’s Chivalric Manual L’arbre des batailles

Abstract

As the title of the renowned book by the French churchman Honoré Bonet (Bouvet) suggests, the work belongs to a group of military handbooks of knighthood which was popular in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.3 However, the Reverend Bonet gives neither any detailed instructions nor overview of battlefield tactics, as they are traditionally understood in terms of arrangements of infantry troops or dispositions of cavalry; the author is equally uninterested in giving technical details of what war strategy should look like.4 For a long time all these military issues were the traditional subject matter of many manuals written in antiquity (especially in the Hellenistic epoch and the times of the Roman Empire) and later, and also in the medieval Eastern Roman Empire.