Medieval Women and War

Female Roles in the Old French Tradition

Sophie Harwood

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350150409
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia dell'Europa medievale

For the first time, Sophie Harwood uses the Old French tradition as a lens through which to examine women and warfare from the 12th to the 14th centuries. The result is a skilled analysis of gender roles in the medieval era, and a heightened awareness of how important literary texts are to our understanding of the historical period in which they circulated. Medieval Women and War examines both the text and illustrations of over 30 Old French manuscripts to highlight the ways in many of the texts differ from their traditionally assumed (usually classical) sources. Structured around five pivotal female types – women cited as causes for violence, women as victims of violence, women as ancillaries to warriors, women as warriors themselves, and women as political influences – this important book unpicks gendered boundaries to shed new light on the social, political and military structures of warfare as well as adding nuance to current debates on womanhood in the middle ages.

1

Reading texts through the manuscript tradition, 1150–1400

Before we look at the ways in which women and war are presented in the romans d’antiquité in particular, we need to explore the values and uses of these texts in general. Troie is currently extant in thirty manuscripts, the oldest being a late twelfth-century copy produced in Venice and the most recent being a late fourteenth-century copy produced in Bologna.¹ Enéas can be found in nine manuscripts; the oldest is an Italian copy that was produced between 1190 and 1225, while the most recent was produced in England at the end of fourteenth century. Thèbes is only extant in five manuscripts, the oldest being a Parisian copy from the end of the thirteenth century while the most recent is the same late fourteenth-century copy that was produced in England and in which we also find the latest copy of Enéas. We must be cognizant of the fact that the reasons for which the texts were first composed in the mid-twelfth century as compared to the reasons for which later manuscript copies were commissioned at the end of the fourteenth century are unlikely to be the same. The historical landscape in which the romans began their journey was not the same one in which they finished, and the people with whom they came into contact were from different geographic locations, different social classes, and had different interests and political allegiances. All of these affect the ways the texts were used. By looking at the original composition of the romans and then tracing them through their later manuscripts and illustrations, we can gain a better understanding of how the topic of women and war was received or interpreted within their folios.

A question of patronage

Current consensus is that the romans poets were writing at the court of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, either under their patronage or with the intention of obtaining it.² Eleanor married Henry II in 1152, after the annulment of her fifteen-year marriage to Louis VII of France. She had been duchess of Aquitaine in her own right since 1137 (and would remain so until her death in 1204) and became queen consort of England from 1154 to 1189. Benoît addresses a ‘[r]iche dame de riche rei’ (powerful lady of a powerful king, l. 13468) in Troie who is probably Eleanor, as the epithet of ‘riche rei’ is usually associated with Henry II.³ There is also a simple lack of plausible alternatives for this ‘dame’: Eleanor of Castile, Joan of Sicily, Margaret of France, Marie de Champagne, Alice of Blois and Adele of Champagne have all been considered but ultimately rejected as other options.⁴ Elizabeth A. R. Brown attempted to minimize Eleanor’s role as a patron by suggesting that Eleanor was ‘far more concerned with the realities of political life than with matters cultural and intellectual’, but her study of Eleanor’s political life focused on the latter half of her life (from the 1170s onwards) rather than the earlier part, during which the romans were composed (between 1150 and 1165).⁵ Even Karen M. Broadhurst’s more recent study, which sought to challenge the scholarly opinion concerning Henry and Eleanor as famed patrons of literature, conceded that the case for Eleanor is still the most appropriate.⁶

The passage containing the ‘riche dame’ dedication is actually omitted from eleven of the Troie manuscripts, and in the mid-thirteenth-century MS P3 it is even reassigned to the Virgin Mary:⁷

Riche fille de riche rei,	Powerful daughter of a powerful king,
De vos nasquié tote leece	from you all joy was born the day of the
Le jor de la Nativité:	Nativity: you are the daughter and
Vos fustes fille et mere Dé.	mother of God.
(Troie, ll. 13467–70)^8

It has been suggested that the dedication was omitted in certain manuscripts because it was ‘a puzzle’ to scribes.⁹ However, it is equally possible that these omissions were made precisely because the ‘dame’ was indeed Eleanor: following the decline in her reputation after her death in 1204, and the fact that the majority of manuscripts still extant today were produced after this date in territories outside of the Plantagent realm, later copyists may simply have wanted to remove any association with her from the text.¹⁰ This would also explain why we do not find any dedication in the prologue or epilogue, where we would usually expect to find dedications; they may have more easily been omitted by later scribes on the lookout for such dedications. In fact, the ‘riche dame’ allusion that is still extant in sixteen manuscripts could have slipped past scribes who would just not have expected a dedication in the middle of the text.

One explanation for why we do not have physical evidence linking Eleanor to the romans is because we only have one roman manuscript (the late twelfth-century MS M) that was produced during her lifetime. The only possible patron portrait of Eleanor that is actually in existence today is in a twelfth-century psalter (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 76.F.13).¹¹ If there were more extant twelfth-century manuscript copies of the romans then perhaps we could expect a higher chance of further patron portraits of Eleanor. A key barrier to establishing more definitive links between Eleanor and the romans is therefore not a lack of probability, but a lack of original documents contemporaneous with her lifetime. A manuscript of Troie that was produced while she was still alive, MS M, was specifically commissioned for or by Geoffrey of Villehardouin;¹² Geoffrey was a knight and chronicler who had participated in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04), and more significantly for our purposes, he was Marshal of Champagne from 1185 to 1199 at the time that Marie de Champagne, Eleanor’s daughter by her first marriage, was countess consort and regent of Champagne. Although the manuscript was made in Italy, Geoffrey may have commissioned a copy of this particular text not just for its content (which no doubt was of particularly pertinent interest to a knight and chronicler) but also for its connections between its patrons and his Champenois lieges. The romans are sometimes linked to the court of Champagne in other manuscript exemplars when they are bound or copied together with works associated with Marie de Champagne: for example, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, one of Marie’s most well-known patroness, appear in four of the thirteenth-century French romans manuscripts (MSS P2, P5, P8 and P12). In MS P2, which was produced in Champagne, we find a portrait of Marie de Champagne as the manuscript’s sole illustration. We therefore see the romans linked to Champagne in two ways: firstly, through this association of Chrétien’s texts with the romans in at least four codices, and secondly, through MS M, which contains only Troie and yet was commissioned by someone deeply connected to the Champenois court. If the romans were indeed produced at Eleanor’s court, then this link takes on a familial form that evokes the mother-daughter relationship between Eleanor and Marie, a relationship about which much has been written, and which suggests that these texts were connected not just on the basis of their narratives, but on the basis of their patrons, too.¹³

Benoît is also linked with Henry and Eleanor through his connection to Robert Wace, another poet with an undisputed position at their court: his Roman de Brut (c. 1150–55) was composed for Eleanor while Henry commissioned his Roman de Rou (c. 1160–75).¹⁴ The Rou links to another of Benoît’s works, the Chronique des Ducs de Normandie (c. 1180), as the former ends with a complaint that the completion of the narrative is to be done by ‘Maistre Beneeit’ (Master Benoît, l. 11419) and that a previously promised financial reward from a ‘reis’ (king, l. 11425) has subsequently been denied to him.¹⁵ Benoît’s Chronique picks up from where Wace ended the Rou and makes a direct allusion to Henry: ‘Par le buen rei Henri’ (by the good king, Henry, l. 32062).¹⁶ As the Rou is narratively connected to the Chronique, so Wace’s Brut is connected to the three romans as it narrates the story of Aeneas’s descendant Brutus, his founding of Britain and the resulting kings of Britain. The manuscript evidence shows that they were often seen in the same tradition: five of the romans manuscripts also contain the Brut.¹⁷ Indeed, of all the other texts with which the romans are collected, the Brut is the one that most commonly recurs. That two writers were working on such interwoven subject matters suggests that they were working under the same influence or in the same place and is indicative of shared patronage, even if a question mark must still remain over such a hypothesis. At the least we can say that Benoît must have been confident that Troie would come to the attention of Henry and Eleanor and it was written under so-called prospective patronage, that is the speculative dedication of a text to an influential person in the hope of attracting a future reward, commission or favour.¹⁸ If the consequence was that Benoît was subsequently given the commission of the Chronique (at the expense of Wace) then this was an effective strategy.

Some evidence exists for linking Eleanor to Thèbes, too. In the description of Adrastus’s daughters, Argia and Deiphyle, the poet writes, ‘Mieus vaut lor ris et lor baisiers | Que ne fait Londres ne Peitiers’ (their smiles and kisses are worth more than either London or Poitiers, ll. 971–72).¹⁹ Reto Roberto Bezzola first highlighted the link between this couplet and Eleanor: ‘Cette comparaison, qui réunit les deux capitales d’Aliénor dans un même vers, deux villes qui, pour d’autres que la reine d’Angleterre et comtesse de Poitiers n’avaient absolument rien de commun, ne saurait être un simple hasard’ (this comparison, that unites Eleanor’s two capital cities within the same verse, two cities that for anyone other than the Queen of England and the Countess of Poitiers would have absolutely nothing in common, cannot simply be coincidence).²⁰ However, this allusion appears in only one (the late thirteenth-century MS G) out of the five extant Thèbes manuscripts.²¹ Furthermore, the quality and accuracy of MS G has been called into question by one of its editors.²² The allusion to London and Poitiers in this copy is probably an addition by the scribe and could provide clues as to who commissioned this particular copy of Thèbes, the identity of whom is currently unknown. In fact, if London and Poitiers are used as a metaphor for Eleanor, then this couplet is actually an insult, for it essentially judges her as worth less than these two women. Combined with the fact that this manuscript also contains additional misogynistic passages, omits one of Priam’s daughters, omits Cassandra’s speeches and dates to a time when Eleanor’s reputation was suffering, perhaps all we can conclude is that this particular manuscript was copied by or commissioned for someone with a rather low view of certain women.²³

Eleanor and Henry would have been drawn to these narratives because of the authority they helped to give to the Plantagenet right to England’s throne – the legitimacy of which was frequently challenged during the twelfth century. This concern for the power and rightfulness of the Plantagenet dynasty would have been important not just to Henry, but to Eleanor too. During the time of the romans’ composition, she gave birth to six of the eight c...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the text
• Abbreviations and sigils
• Introduction
• 1 Reading texts through the manuscript tradition, 1150–1400
• 2 Women as reasons for war
• 3 Women as victims of war
• 4 Women as ancillaries in war
• 5 Women as warriors in war
• 6 Women as diplomats in war
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Catalogue of manuscripts
• Appendix 2: Manuscript illustrations of women
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint