Category:Nine Worthies (subject)

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The Nine Worthies are a Christian medieval list of nine good kings. Three of them are pagans (Hector, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar); three are Jews (Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus); and three are Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon). They were known with different names in different countries: the "Nine Good Heroes" (Neun Gute Helden) in Germany; or the Nine Valiants in France (Neuf Preux) and in Italy (Nove Prodi). A symmetrical (and more fluid) list of Nine Lady Worthies was occasionally added, including Esther, Judith, and Jael (or Deborah), and less frequently, other Jewish Heroines, such as Susanna, and Mariamne.

@2016 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan.

The Nine Worthies -- Overview

The Nine Worthies were first described in the early 14th-century romance Voeux du Paon (1312), by Jacques de Longuyon, and referred to by Dante Alighieri in his Comedia (Paradiso 18:28-48) (c.1321). Like in the case of the association of the Sibyls with the Jewish Prophets, the medieval myth of the Nine Worthies aimed to stress the foundations of Christianity in both Judaism and the Classical World. The three triads symbolized the three principal stages of Christian providential world History.

The earliest known artistic representation of the Nine Worthies is the late 14th-century carving "Neun Gute Helden" ("Nine Good Heroes") at the Altes Rathaus] in Cologne, Germany. The iconography did not distinguish them according to their relative antiquity or ethnicity, since the virtues of bravery and chivalry that they manifest were understood as timeless and universal.

The Nine Worthies were celebrated in the illustrations of the ms. of the Chevalier errant by Thomas III of Saluzzo, 1394 (now at the National Library of Paris, cod. 12559, fol.125). Their statues, carved in 1385-1396, still adorn the Schöner Brunnen (Beautiful Fountain) in Nuremberg, Germany.

The images were represented in an early 15th-century tapestry series, c.1400-10 (the surviving portrayals of King Arthur, Joshua, David, Hector, and Julius Caesar are now preserved at the Cloisters in New York, NY) and in the windows of the Rathaus at Lüneburg, Germany (1420). An anonymous fresco, painted around the same time (c. 1420), depicted them in the sala baronale of the Castello della Manta, Saluzzo, Italy.

Their coats of arms were presented in the illustrations of the Ingeram Codex in 1459 and in Wernigerode Armorial (c.1490).

In the 16th century, the Nine Worthies were represented in the engravings by Lucas van Leyden around 1525. The popularity of the Nine Worthies in Elizabethan England is attested by their many iconographic and literary representations. The Nine Worthies were mentioned by Shakespeare in two of his plays. In Love's Labour's Lost (1594) they are the protagonists of a masque that the comic characters of the play attempted to stage, with disastrous results. In Henry IV, part 2 (c.1598), Doll Tearsheet is so impressed by Falstaff's bravery in fighting Ancient Pistol that she says he is "as valorous as Hector of Troy, worth five of Agamemnon, and ten times better than the Nine Worthies." In 1598, the sculptures of the Nine Worthies spaced along the upper eastern façade on the exterior of the long gallery piers of Montacute House, South Somerset, England, and a frieze of the Nine Worthies was painted at the outset of the 17th century at North Mymms Place, Hertfordshire, an up-to-date house built by the Coningsby family, in 1599.

The fame of the Nine Worthies reached out to the 17th century. Miguel de Cervantes referred to them in Don Quixote (1605). So does the protagonist boast his bravery and compare himself to the ancient heroes: "I know that I may be not only those I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and even all the Nine Worthies, since my achievements surpass all that they have done all together and each of them on his own account."

In 1687 Robert Burton published in England a popular literary work celebrating the lives of the Nine Worthies; see The History of the Nine Worthies of the World (1687 Burton), novel. It was the swan song of the glorious medieval tradition. The memory of the Nine Worthies faded away in modern Europe, to be revived only in neo-medieval "reconstructions," such as the statues recreated by French theorist and architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1878) at the Château de Pierrefonds in France in 1867.

Among contemporary scholarly studies, the most notable is Der Topos der Nine Worthies in Literatur und bildender Kunst (The Topos of the Nine Worthies in Literature and Visual Arts / 1971 Schroeder), book.

External links

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The Lady Worthies -- Overview

The Lady Worthies Room at Pierrefonds Castle, Oise, France (1860-85)

Out of love of symmetry, the Middle Ages also produced the Nine Lady Worthies (Les Neuf Preuses, neun Heldinnen). Unlike the canon of the Nine Worthies, immutable, that of women experienced multiple variations and never really fixed. The first lists did not include any biblical characters. Only in the fifteenth century, the idea emerged to replace some of the earlier members with a Jewish triad, made of Esther, Judith and Jael (or Deborah).

In 1688, one year after completing his work on the Nine Worthies, Robert Burton published in England a companion book devoted to the Nine Lady Worthies, including Esther, Judith, Deborah, Susanna, and Mariamne.

The memory of the Nine Lady Worthies alos faded away in modern Europe, to be revived only in neo-medieval "reconstructions," such as the Worthies Room recreated by French theorist and architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1878) at the Château de Pierrefonds in France in 1867.