Among the classical myths that were given new life in the Renaissance, the voyage of the Argonauts and the conquest of the Golden Fleece held pride of place. When as far back as 1429 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, instituted the order of the Golden Fleece, he was deliberately invoking mythological patronage to promote a spiritual ideal, exalt the loftiest virtues of chivalry and consolidate his personal power. This gave rise to numerous reworkings of Jason's adventures in honour of the house of Burgundy, such as Raoul Lefèvre's Proheme de l'istoire de Jason (c. 1460), translated by Caxton in 1477, and the elaborate devices installed at the Château de Hesdin, which Caxton, in the prologue to his translation, proudly claimed to have seen. After the death of Philip's son Charles the Bold, the Golden Fleece passed on to his son-in-law Maximilian of Hapsburg, and was eventually handed down to his great-grandson Charles V: the Emperor's visit to London in June 1522 occasioned what seems to have been the first use of classical mythology in an English pageant.

Besides glorifying both chivalric principles and supreme power, first ducal then imperial, the story of Jason soon came to be used, in a new historical context, to lend mythic aura to the discoverers of America.