Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (review) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The American Historical Review, 2005
Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France has a dual goal. Methodologically, it attempts to integrate the study of gender into our understanding of high politics by demonstrating that gender performance and prevalent notions about femininity and masculinity shaped the French monarchy's ability to wield power. As Katherine Crawford states, she hopes to explicate "how gendered assumptions allowed certain political moments to happen" (5). In addition, she seeks to rethink French political history by illustrating the surprising strength, malleability, and influence of France's repeated regencies: "Paradoxically, weakness and instability allowed regents to create new practices that strengthened the monarchy" (7). Ultimately, Crawford aims to intertwine these two levels of analysis and illustrate the centrality of gender politics to the construction of the French state. Ambitious in scope, the book spans the Old Regime monarchy from the 1560s until the Revolution and explores the regencies of three queen mothers (Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria), one male cousin (Philippe d'Orléans), and one not-quite-regent (Marie-Antoinette). Crawford takes as her point of departure a fascinating characteristic of regencies that emerges from late medieval politics. At moments when the king was a minor, male relatives were suspected of wanting to increase their own powers or perhaps even bring about the king's demise so that they could inherit the throne themselves. The queen mother, meanwhile, had a weak position as a woman and a foreigner, but, as Crawford argues, her feminine weakness could be a strength. According to the Salic law, no woman could inherit the throne. Thus, a female regent had little reason to plot against the king's interests. She had no hope of gaining his crown; on the contrary, he was her only route to power. At the same time, she might be able to use the
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563
2018
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483—1563 explores the ways in which a range of women “ as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage “ wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female auth...
Women, Gender and Lordship in France, c.1050–1250
History Compass, 2007
Arguing that scholars should follow methods of analysis developed by historians of women in the early Middle Ages and must confront problems in the so-called 'Duby thesis', this article shows how anachronistic analytical categories and insufficient source criticism have masked our appreciation of the extensive political activities of non-royal aristocratic women in France during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Emphasising the domestic context of lordship and political action in this period, as well as the multivalence of gender as an explanatory category, it reveals strong continuities between women's powers in the early and central Middle Ages and shows that female lords were a routine and acceptable part of the medieval French political scene.
Anne de France: art et pouvoir en 1500 (review).pdf
H-FRANCE, 2016
Thierry Crépin-Leblond and Monique Chatenet, eds., Anne de France: art et pouvoir en 1500: actes du colloque organisé par Moulins, Ville d'art et d'histoire, le 30 et 31 mars 2012. Paris: Picard, 2014. 221 pp. Illustrations, plans, genealogical tables, bibliography. 69.00€ (pb). ISBN 978-2-7084-0962-0. Review by Nicola Courtright, Amherst College. Anne de France: Art et pouvoir en 1500, acts of a colloquium that took place in Moulins in March 2012, edited by Thierry Crépin-Leblond and Monique Chatenet, contains relatively brief but invaluable chapters stocked with new information and original interpretations. It is divided in two: the first half is dedicated to studies about Anne of France, daughter of Louis XI and sister of his son Charles VIII, and the other half to her patronage and that of other notable, politically active noblewomen-regents and queens-influenced by Anne circa 1500. Throughout the entire volume, the authors seek to indicate ways in which these women's acts and patronage of art and architecture exhibit some kind of political authority. They unearth documents, explore the visual valence of objects and architecture, and examine literary texts to argue that Anne of France, Margaret of Austria, and Anne of Brittany played a significant role in the history of Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A major strength of this collection is how authors are deeply engaged with drilling down into the documents to find new material to apply to the questions they pose or offer new interpretations of little-known material. Finding and interpreting documentation of events and patronage that is closely associated with these women and their effect upon the practice of rule, upon political events, and upon the symbolic expression of royal authority is especially valuable because, as is well known, figuring out the nature of women's power, even that of queens, depends upon archival records that are missing or just plain silent. Near-contemporary chroniclers insist upon Anne's importance in shaping policy and influencing the direction of the kingdom, but it was difficult for Anne of France to act with authority when she had none that was explicitly given to her in the way a king habitually received his right to rule in France: divine appointment through male inheritance. In France, owing to the sixth-century Salic Law compiled under Clovis, women were not allowed to rule in their own right, but given political upheavals, kings' early deaths or mental illness, female regency in the name of an underage son often came to be regarded as a necessary course of action. Queen regents, based on their intimate relationship with their sons, were charged with the dauphin's tutelage and guardianship. Already Blanche of Castile had become regent after her husband Louis VIII's death in 1226, and the kingdom was in the care of the widowed regent even after their son Louis IX came of age.[1] Blanche essentially acted as a sovereign in multiple capacities as regent during her son's minority and again when he went on a crusade in 1248. In recent decades, scholars have pointed out that the Salic law, which excluded women from royal succession by the alteration of a clause from the ancient Lex Salica in a 1413 transcription of the text, actually permitted the queen regent to assume a paradoxical kind of authority to head the realm in the name of her son, for she gained no personal advantage when her spouse died, and could be a faithful advocate for the claims of her son and for him alone; she could not usurp him.[2]
The King’s Two Daughters: Isabelle of France, and the University of Paris, fille du roy
Born in 1354 and 1363 respectively, products of the University of Paris and more particularly of the Collège de Navarre, 1 the royal secretary and diplomat Jean de Montreuil and his contemporary Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, emerged from the same intellectual and social milieu. They were both ardent defenders of the kingdom of France and the Valois dynasty, politically engaged public intellectuals who used their writings to meet the combined threats of external and civil war, to safeguard the authority of the king, and to shape and proclaim a distinctly French national identity. Montreuil and Gerson also situated themselves on the same side of the Armagnac-Bourguignon conflict that divided France in the years following the 1407 assassination of Louis d'Orléans. Indeed, Jean de Montreuil would be among those massacred during the Burgundian takeover of Paris in 1418, from which Jean Gerson, busy at the Council of Constance, was fortuitously absent. Although the nature of their textual production differs, Montreuil and Gerson both employ the language and categories of gender and sexuality, particularly as they relate to real and The present essay draws upon material that I develop further in my monograph entitled Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France.
The Queen's Reflection: French Consorts as a Mirror of French History
The Routledge Handbook of French History, 2024
The dynastic imperative of any hereditary king is to provide healthy sons who can perpetuate his family into future generations. But men being unable to give birth, the responsibility for producing heirs naturally falls upon the monarchs’ wives. French kings sought spouses for themselves and their heirs from across the royalty and nobility of Europe. Viewed separately, these women span a remarkable range, but when considered together, they reflect larger developments in domestic and international politics and provide a window into how a decentralized, factious medieval kingdom evolved into one of the most powerful and influential states of modern Europe.