Origin
They were first described in the early fourteenth century, by Jacques de Longuyon in his Voeux du Paon (1312). Their selection, as Johan Huizinga pointed out, betrays a close connection with the romance genre of chivalry. Neatly divided into a triad of triads, these men were considered to be paragons of chivalry within their particular tradition: be it Pagan, Jewish, or Christian. Longuyon's choices soon became a common theme in the literature and art of the Middle Ages and earned a permanent place in the popular consciousness. The medieval "craving for symmetry" engendered female equivalents, the neuf preuses, who were sometimes added, though the women chosen varied. Eustache Deschamps selected "a group of rather bizarre heroines" selected from fiction and history, among them Penthesilea, Tomyris, Semiramis. Literature and suites of tapestry featured the full complement of eighteen, whose allegorical figures preceded King Henry VI of England in his triumphal royal entry to Paris, 1431. A "tenth worthy" was added by Deschamps, in the figure of Bertrand du Guesclin, the Breton knight to whom France owed recovery from the battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). Francis I of France still occasionally paraded himself at court dressed in the "antique mode" to identify himself also as one of the Neuf Preux.
Read more about this topic: Nine Worthies
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever re-creates man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)