Abstract
While the last medieval queens were rarely associated with the government, their role was valued in at least four domains: funerary, legal, ceremonial and normative. Reginal bodies were definitively included in the Abbey of Saint-Denis at a time when it had become necessary to assert the continuity of power and dynastic legitimacy. Regency laws (in 1374 and in 1407) gave the queen, if not governance of the kingdom, at least the tutelage of the children of France. The queen was also promoted ceremonially, within the framework of a monarchy that made itself publicly visible in order to conquer the people’s hearts. Political discourse reinforced this valorization. Having the power to influence the king, she was supposed to be the advocate and protector of her subjects. Like the Queen of Heaven, ‘mother of all Christianity, she was ‘the mother of the people’.
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Notes
- 1.
Amalie Fössel, ‘From the Consors Regni to the Koenigs Husfrouwe? Some Comments on the Decline of the Queens’ Power in the Medieval German Empire’, in Femmes de pouvoir, femmes politiques, eds. Éric Bousmar et al., 83–89.
- 2.
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 114.
- 3.
Didier Le Fur, Anne de Bretagne : miroir d’une reine, historiographie d’un mythe, (Paris: Guénégaud, 2000), 93.
- 4.
This also occurred in England: see John Carmi Parsons, ‘The Queen’s Intercession in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, eds. J. Carpenter and S.-B. Mac Lean (Urbana, 1995), 126–77.
- 5.
Bernard Barbiche, ‘La première régence de Catherine de Médicis (avril-juillet 1552)’, in Combattre, gouverner, écrire. Études réunies en l’honneur de Jean Chagniot (Paris: Commission française d’histoire militaire - Institut de stratégie comparée - Economica, 2003); Denis Crouzet, Le haut coeur de Catherine de Médicis : une raison politique aux temps de la Saint-Barthélemy (Paris: A. Michel, 2005).
- 6.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
- 7.
Isabelle Poutrin and Marie-Karine Schaub, eds., Femmes et pouvoir politique. Les princesses d’Europe, XV e -XVIII e siècle (Paris: Bréal, 2007), 57.
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Gaude-Ferragu, M. (2016). Conclusion. In: Queenship in Medieval France, 1300-1500. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93028-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93028-9_11
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