Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy 9780520928787

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Preface
List of Illustrations
1. The First Clue
2. Christine de Pizan
3. Queen Elizabeth's Tapestries
4. Tapestry Production in the Early Renaissance
5. Margaret of Austria and the Tournai Tapestries
6. Anne of Brittany's "Cite des dames"
7. An Eight-Panel French Set
8. The "Cietie of Dammys" in Scotland
9. The "Citie of Ladies" at the English Court
10. Christine de Pizan's Legacy to the Renaissance
Appendix A. The Dimensions of the City of Ladies Tapestries
Appendix B. Dramatis Personae
Appendix C. Chronology of Events
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

A H M A N S O N F I N E

T H E

A H M A N S O N

ARTS

•

M U R P H Y I M P R I N T

F O U N D A T I O N

has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of F R A N K L I N

D.

M U R P H Y

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Sonia H. Evers Renaissance Studies Fund of the University of California Press Associates.

T H E LOST T A P E S T R I E S OF T H E CITY OF LADIES

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T H E LOST T A P E S T R I E S O F T H E CITY OF LADIES C H R I S T I N E DE P I Z A N ' S R E N A I S S A N C E

SUSAN GROAG BELL

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON

LEGACY

University of California Press Berkeley a n d Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2 0 0 4 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bell, Susan G. The lost tapestries of the City of ladies : Christine de Pizan's Renaissance legacy / Susan Groag Bell, p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references a n d index. I S B N 0-520-23410-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Tapestry, Renaissance.

2. Christine, de Pisan,

ca. 1364—ca. 1431. Livre de la cite des d a m e s — Illustrations.

3. W o m e n in art.

Kings a n d rulers—Art patronage. NK3007.B44

4. E u r o p e — I. Title.

2005

746.394'o9'o24—dc22

2004011382

Manufactured in the United States of America 13

12

10

9

11 8

10 7

6

09 5

08 4

07

06

05

04

3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the m i n i m u m requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 3 9 . 4 8 - 1 9 9 2 ( R 1 9 9 7 ) (Permanence of Paper).®

For my parents Friedrich and Edith Louise Groag who were responsible for all that is lovable in me, and especially for my mother, who would have been intrigued by Christine de Pizan

CONTENTS

Preface / ix List of Illustrations / xv 1.

The First Clue

1

2.

Christine de Pizan

9

3.

Queen Elizabeth's Tapestries

32

4.

Tapestry Production in the Early Renaissance

43

5.

Margaret of Austria and the Tournai Tapestries

72

6.

Anne of Brittany's "Cite des dames"

96

7.

An Eight-Panel French Set

113

8.

The "Cietie of Dammys" in Scotland

124

9.

The "Citie of Ladies" at the English Court

139

Christine de Pizan's Legacy to the Renaissance

149

10.

Appendix A. The Dimensions of the City of Ladies Tapestries / 165 Appendix B. Dramatis Personae / 171 Appendix C. Chronology of Events / 179 Notes / 185 Selected Bibliography / 225 Index / 241

PREFACE

IN THE LATE FOURTEENTH CENTURY, SOME SIXTY YEARS BEFORE THE

invention of printing, a young woman named Christine de Pizan (c. 1364— c. 1430) began to write poetry. In the years that followed she became the celebrated author of many volumes of both verse and prose, which the royal families of her day collected in their libraries. A hundred years after her death, however, the manuscripts of her works seemed to disappear into these libraries, and her fame along with them. This book is the result of a thirty-year search that began with the discovery of a set of tapestries called the "Citie of Ladies" in the inventory of Henry VIII's household treasures taken at his death in 1547. The tapestries appeared to be based on Christine de Pizan's popular early-fifteenth-century manuscript, "Le livre de la cite des dames" (1405), a historical treatise celebrating the virtues and accomplishments of women. The tapestries were probably created sometime in the late fifteenth century, decades after Christine de Pizan died. Perhaps, then, Christine's well-loved manuscripts had not been entirely forgotten but had been transformed into precious woven hangings mounted on the walls of Renaissance monarchs. And so began my quest for the original tapestries based on the Book of the City of Ladies. It soon became clear, however, that the significance of these tap-

IX

estries extended well beyond the simple fact that Henry VIII had owned such a set. As I pursued these elusive weavings—weavings created at a time when Flemish tapestries were at their most renowned—I uncovered evidence that Christine de Pizan's ideas had continued to exert substantial cultural, aesthetic, and political influence for about two centuries after her death. In addition, hitherto unsuspected connections among royal patrons of Renaissance art began to emerge more clearly. I was gradually able to identify a group of early modern kings, queens, and queens regent who apparently owned manuscripts of the City ofLadies and in some cases tapestries based on it as well. That such a network existed not only lends new importance to Christine de Pizan's work but also points the way to a more sophisticated understanding of the cultural uses to which the art of tapestry weaving was put during the Renaissance. My intention here is to explore the facts surrounding the existence of these tapestries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While I am not involved with theoretical discussions of patronage, I am extremely interested in those who owned City ofLadies tapestries—in why these particular patrons of art would have wanted to possess such a set of hangings, in whether they were acquainted with Christine de Pizan's works, and in what their relationship to one another may have been. My concern lies in particular with the impact of Christine de Pizan's ideas on an unexpected newly discovered later Renaissance audience, not merely connoisseurs, patrons, and owners of tapestries but also ordinary people who for one reason or another found themselves connected to royal households. The presence of this audience, I argue, appreciably widens the circle of those who were familiar with Christine's work, whether because they were literate or because they listened to books read aloud. As far as is possible for a historian whose expertise in tapestry remains limited, I also speculate about the design of these long-lost works of art. Contemplating the world of Renaissance tapestry, one begins to wonder how much the people who lived in the presence of these exquisite woven hangings knew about the stories the images told. How much did they understand of the underlying allegories and possible morals or of the intricacies of the craft that produced these magnificent artifacts? How often and how seriously do

X

PREFACE

we look at the paintings we hang on our own walls? How much, then, can we really know of the thoughts of Renaissance owners regarding their treasures? Unfortunately, no letters or other documents have come down to us that might provide explicit answers to such questions. On the basis of evidence such as inventories, accounts, and records of gifts, however, a historian can often infer a surprising amount. I hope that my descriptions, in the pages to follow, of the tapestries themselves and of the cultural circumstances under which they were created will, at least to some extent, bring the world of the City ofLadies to life in the reader's imagination. I have had many helpers on this long road. Some of them may by now have forgotten their contribution, but I have not. My friends and colleagues Judith Brown, Anna Davin, Natalie Zemon Davis, Edith Gelles, Christie Junkerman, Karen Offen, the late Nancy Roelker, Gabrielle Spiegel, and Randy Starn encouraged this project from the very beginning. Liliane Dulac and Earl Jeffrey Richards, together with Barbara Altman, Angus Kennedy, James Laidlaw, Christine Reno, Elisabeth Schreiner, Margarete Zimmerman, and many other members of the Christine de Pizan Society, did likewise and offered innumerable nuggets of advice, large and small. Carolyn Lougee Chappell provided invaluable aid as I attempted to sort out the dimensions of the various sets of City of Ladies tapestries. Allison Heisch helped me to decipher the handwritten script of some especially intractable inventories. Barbara Gelpi, Sheila ffolliott, Carolyn Lougee Chappell, and Marilyn Yalom read the entire manuscript in its early stages, and I remain grateful for their comments. Thanks are due as well to Thomas P. Campbell and Adolfo Cavallo of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; Anna Bennett of the Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco; M. Bafcop, director of the City Museum of Mechelen; Monique Blanc of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; Ada H. Logan of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Marguerite Debae, of the National Library of Belgium, Brussels; Guy Delmarcel, of the Catholic University of Louvain; Wendy Hefford, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Richard Hewlings of "English Heritage," London; and Jeff Payne, registrar of the Hearst Collection at San Simeon, California. The staff, particularly Devana Pavlik, at the

PREFACE

XI

British Library, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the libraries of the Courtauld Gallery and the Public Record Office in London, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Archives Nationales in Paris, and the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels, all of whom made this project possible, also made it exciting. I am indebted as well to the interlibrary loan department of the Stanford University Library, and particularly to Sonia Moss, who patiently and successfully pursued the clues I offered her, no matter how unpromising. Travel grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Marilyn Yalom Research Fund at Stanford University made extended research visits abroad possible. The staff and the visiting and affiliated scholars of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, my intellectual home since 1978, offered advice, criticism, and patient encouragement during the many years of research and writing. I also thank the five anonymous readers for the University of California Press: two of them, Sarah Hanley and Earl Jeffrey Richards, divulged their names, but all provided immensely helpful and deeply appreciated advice. Stephanie Fay, Fine Arts Editor of the University of California Press, was quick to see the possibilities of my original manuscript and made many valuable suggestions that eventually brought about its metamorphosis into the present book. Without the stringent and creative copyediting by Pamela MacFarland Holway, this would have been a very different book. Sharlette Visaya worked hard and intelligently to check innumerable elusive library references. Among the many friends who apparently never tired of hearing about my latest discoveries and disasters, Louise Freund, Margaret Furbush, Laura Mayhall, and Elizabeth Roden deserve special mention. Iris Litt and her husband, Victor Vaughan, drove me endlessly around French chateaux in search of tapestries that they claim to have seen with new eyes since first hearing about my quest. Ann Roper aided me in the complex and at times frustrating task of collecting illustrations; she was also patiently resourceful in locating answers to problems when I was abroad and unable to consult my books and notes. Fi-

XII

PREFACE

nally, I am indebted to Rosalind K. Marshall, whose wisdom helped me put a stop to the writing of this book, and to Peter Stansky, who is convinced that a City of Ladies tapestry panel lurks behind every corner of most museum walls. S U S A N GROAG BELL PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map Western Europe and Britain c. 1500 / frontispiece Plates (following page 42)

I. An illumination from a fifteenth-century manuscript of "Le livre de la cite des dames" that shows Christine de Pizan greeting the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven and two queens entering the City of Ladies. II. Christine de Pizan presenting her collected works to the French queen, Isabel of Bavaria, as depicted in a 1413 manuscript of "Le livre de la cite des dames." III. The Amazons, led by Queen Penthesilea, fighting against the Greeks, as illustrated in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Christine de Pizan's "Le livre de la mutacion de fortune." IV. The battle between the Amazons and the Greeks, from an elevenpanel set of tapestries created in Tournai between 1475 and 1490 and later owned by Henry VII. V. "A Mon Seuil Desir" ("To My Only Desire"), the sixth and final panel of the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, woven in the southern Netherlands between 1480 and 1490.

XV

VI.

Esther as she learns of Hainan's plot to murder the Jews. Brussels Tapestry, early sixteenth century.

VII.

A detail from a set of tapestries illustrating the legend of Our Lady of Sablon, produced around 1516, that shows Margaret of Austria, with her nieces and nephew, Ferdinand, kneeling before the altar of the Virgin in the Church of Notre-Dame de Sablon in Brussels.

VTII. An illumination from a manuscript, c. 1460, of "Le livre de la cite des dames" showing Christine de Pizan and Lady Reason surveying the terrain as they prepare to begin constructing the City of Ladies. Figures

1.

A miniature from a 1413 manuscript depicting Christine and her riding party visiting Poissy. / 18

2.

Panel painting of Princess Elizabeth of England, reading (aged c.14). / 34

3.

Ceres, goddess of corn and harvests; according to Christine, the inventor of agriculture and agricultural tools. / 47

4.

Moses and the burning bush, detail of a tapestry entitled The Fulfillment of the Prophesies at the Birth of Christ, c. 1500. / 53

5.

Original drawing of 1465—70 for tapestry (reproduced in plate IV) of Trojan War battle between the Amazons and the Greeks. / 55

6.

Deer hunt from fifteenth-century Devonshire hunting tapestries. / 56

7.

"The Unicorn Is Killed and Brought to the Castle," from the tapestry set The Hunt of the Unicorn, an allegory of the Passion of Christ (1495-1505). / 58

8.

Les bucherons, or the woodcutters, detail from a late-fifteenth-century Tournai Tapestry. / 59

9.

"Departing for the Hunt in March," a panel from a set of tapestries titled The Hunts ofMaximilian (1528—33). /

10.

60

"View of Jerusalem," detail of "The Descent from the Cross," one of the panels of the Passion of Christ series (c. 1520). / 63

ILLUSTRATIONS

ii. Anne de France, dame de Beaujeu. Detail, oil on wood panel, c. 1493, attributed to the Master of Moulins. / j6 12. Margaret of Austria while regent of the Netherlands. Portrait in oil by Bernard van Orley, Margaret's court painter, c. 1518. / 83 13. Miniature, c. 1460, depicting the three allegorical virtues, Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice, as they appear to Christine in her dream of the City of Ladies. / 91 14. Miniature, c. 1460, showing aristocratic and bourgeois women standing on the drawbridge leading into the City of Ladies. / 93 15. Manuscript illumination showing Anne of Brittany's court poet, Jean Marot, presenting her with a copy of his Voyage de genes (1507). / 102

16. Louise of Savoy while regent of France. Drawing, School of Clouet, c. 1524—26. / 116 17. Mary of Guise, queen and later regent of Scotland. Oil on panel, attributed to Corneille de Lyon, c. 1537. / 128

ILLUSTRATIONS

XVII

CHAPTER ONE T H E FIRST CLUE

IN 1 9 9 9 THE NEW BRITISH LIBRARY IN L O N D O N M O U N T E D A F A S C I -

nating permanent exhibit: a replica of a medieval study, with a life-size figure representing Christine de Pizan (c. 1364—c. 1430) at work. She holds a quill pen in one hand and a penknife, for sharpening the quill, in the other. Beside her desk is a shelf containing numerous volumes together with other writing utensils. A window looks out onto a brilliant landscape reminiscent of a fifteenth-century Flemish painting. What is striking about this installation is that, rather than choose a monk to illustrate the life of a medieval scribe as they might have done thirty years earlier, the administrators of the British Library chose Christine de Pizan. Three decades of activity on the part of medievalists have brought this long-neglected author to the notice not only of scholars but to some extent of the general public as well.1 In the early 1970s, however, when I was engaged in research for an article about Christine de Pizan's relation to the humanist tradition, little was known about this fascinating woman. Although it has since received much attention, Le livre de la cite des dames, or The Book of the City ofLadies, completed in 1405, was not in print in any language but existed only in some twenty-five French manuscripts dating to the fifteenth century. A French critical edition had not yet appeared, and the modern English translation was a dozen years in the fu-

ture. In the midst of my efforts to decipher a microfilm of one of these fifteenthcentury manuscripts housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, I had the good fortune to be introduced to a tapestry historian who was interested in my work. She recalled having come across the phrase "City of Ladies" in one of the major histories of tapestry. This was soon tracked down to W. G. Thomson's History of Tapestry: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, first published in 1906. In his massive volume Thomson reproduces portions of an inventory of the royal treasures of Henry VIII taken at the king's death in 1547. Included in the list are the "sixpeces," or six panels, of a work of tapestry called the "Citie of Ladies," which is catalogued among the contents of the "Lady Elizabeth['s] Guarderobe." I quickly realized that the Lady Elizabeth was none other than the future Queen Elizabeth I, fourteen years old when the inventory was made. What, then, were these tapestries, and how had they arrived in Elizabeth's garde-robe, or storeroom? They must surely have been based on the Book of the City of Ladies, which was the only other such title in existence in the sixteenth century. Precisely what relation might they have had to Christine de Pizan? What might it have meant that Christine's protofeminist ideas, writ large, had at one point been hanging on Henry VTII's castle walls? What role did tapestries play in the cultural life of royal courts at this time? And could the Lady Elizabeth's tapestries possibly have survived? During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries woven tapestries were among the most precious treasures owned by aristocratic families and by royalty throughout Europe and Britain. Kings, queens, and regents, as well as prelates of the church, vied with one another to possess original designs or copies of these magnificent wall hangings. Tapestries symbolized wealth and power. But their beauty could be appreciated by high and low alike, for they were not only displayed in palaces but often hung along streets and from balconies at times of celebration. After the sixteenth century, the production of Flemish tapestries gradually declined, but the art of tapestry weaving has never altogether lost its artistic appeal. In the late nineteenth century, William Morris became fascinated by these intricate weavings and set about producing tapestries for clients of his well-known workshop. More recently, Henry Moore had the plea-

2

THE FIRST CLUE

sure of seeing the massive figures of his wartime "shelter drawings" beautifully reproduced in woven hangings.2 My original quest was for a very large set of sixteenth-century tapestries. However, I soon became at least as interested—perhaps more—in the patrons who owned them and in their relationship to the author on whose ideas the tapestries were based. My discovery, I realized, offered evidence that Christine de Pizan's ideas remained current more than a hundred years after her death, enmeshed in a complex cultural and political world. More than merely a detective pursuing the clues to unravel a mystery, I became a microhistorian, for whom the entry in Henry VIII's inventory represented what Carlo Ginzburg has called "the root of an evidential paradigm."3 In writing about something "totally forgotten" that one has "never actually seen," the historian Edward Muir explains, one must follow a "combination of evidential rigor and openness to creative proofs." I was indeed working with what Muir calls "a kind of historical uncertainty principle,"4 in which it would be necessary to weigh possibilities to arrive at probabilities. In other words, my search would lead me deep into the realm of possible historical circumstances and events, and I hoped to be able to sift out the most likely of these in seeking answers to my questions. However, before I could address the specific issues surrounding the set of tapestries housed in the Lady Elizabeth's garderobe, a number of broader historical areas would have to be investigated. These included the history of tapestry, about which I knew very little, as well as the subject of Renaissance art patronage. I would also need to renew my acquaintance with the biographical details of Queen Elizabeth's life, especially those concerning her childhood, and to consult some of the manuscripts and printed books contained in the royal English libraries, including copies of Christine de Pizan's works, to determine whether the young princess was familiar with the Book ofthe City ofLadies or with its author. I was keenly aware of the importance of the dissemination of literary works, particularly of the significance of the ownership of manuscripts and books during this period. I had thought about women as book owners at the time when manuscripts began to be overtaken by early printed books.5 Could tapestries

THE FIRST CLUE

3

also have been important for the diffusion of knowledge and of religious and secular literature? Might they have mattered especially among women and those attached to royal courts, people who, in contrast to the members of monastic and scholastic communities, were not highly literate? As names like Anne of France, Anne of Brittany, Louise of Savoy, Margaret of Austria, and Anne Boleyn appeared again and again in the literature on artistic patronage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I gradually recognized an emerging cultural network among the women of Renaissance royal families. Could brides from such families, who brought to their husband's domain specific ideas and artistic styles in the form of books, also have brought them in the form of tapestries? What were the ideals and the realities of queenship in this period? Christine de Pizan had much to say on this topic. Was it possible that the Princess Elizabeth was influenced by Christine's work? Such questions about the potential sociopolitical and cultural ramifications of the City ofLadies tapestries crystallized in my mind during the decades of my search. Apart from immersing myself in the literature of tapestry and of Tudor history, my first step was to ascertain whether the Lady Elizabeth's tapestries still existed in the royal English collections, now scattered among royal residences such as Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Greenwich Palace, Hampton Court, and the Queen's Gallery in London. Unfortunately, a letter of 3 April 1993 from Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, director of the royal collections, disabused me of any such hope. I subsequently discussed my discovery with the curators of textiles in numerous museums and visited or corresponded with tapestry experts throughout Europe and the United States. I have studied photographs of unidentified fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tapestries, notably those in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Art and History in Brussels. I have scrutinized a set of microfiches that describe remnants of tapestries preserved in the Hearst Collection in the United States.6 I have stood or sat for hours, absorbing the beauty of originals hanging on walls of museums, chateaux, castles, and stately homes that display wall hangings of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. I have followed false trails to collections in St. Petersburg, and I have read countless books and articles about the art and history of tapestry. But, alas, in the almost thirty years since I first came

4

THE FIRST CLUE

across a reference to them, I have not found the original tapestries, or even a small part of any of the six panels. Reluctantly I must conclude that in all likelihood the tapestries have vanished, as have so many other splendid artifacts from the past. More than most other artworks, tapestries have been undervalued and underprotected. Their fragility makes them vulnerable to heat, damp, light, dust, and mice, and to the greed of human scavengers who covet their gold and silver threads. The correct preservation of tapestries requires that they be stored or hung in places where the lighting, whether natural or artificial, is low, and where they will not be exposed to heat—that is, under conditions closely similar to those of a medieval castle. Reconstruction of torn or damaged parts of these weavings must be carried out very delicately, using natural vegetable dyes not unlike those in use centuries ago. In the days of the great dukes of Burgundy, tapissiers were employed at the French court to care for these treasured hangings, but later generations, failing to appreciate their beauty and ignorant of their worth, frequently mistreated them. Ancient tapestries were sometimes used as coverings—the Apocalypse tapestry now at Angers, for example, which served to protect trees in the orangery of the Abbaye de St. Serge from the cold.7 Of the 213 tapestries present in 1551 in the collection of Francis I of France, only three still exist, now preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the Vatican, and in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.8 Toward the close of the French Revolution, the Directorate ordered that all tapestries belonging to the Crown be burned so that their gilt threads might be recovered. Out of the twenty-five hundred items of tapestry that Henry VIII owned, only thirty (barely over 1 percent) survive now—an equally dismal, if equally pertinent, figure.9 Long before I came to understand this sad state of affairs, however, I went to the British Library in London to interrogate my original clue: the holograph manuscript of the inventory taken at Henry VIII's death.10 Every historian knows how essential it is to consult the original manuscript rather than a reprint, to say nothing of a paraphrase or an extract. Even the manuscript in the British Library could be full of errors, depending on how carefully the various scribes worked. In addition, because Henry VIII's collection was so enor-

THE FIRST CLUE

5

mous, the list of his treasures must have been compiled by a number of different inventory takers, some of whom may not have been overly concerned with accuracy. Even so, this manuscript offers a great deal more information than the extracts reprinted in Thomson's History ofTapestry. The original inventory reveals that the six pieces of tapestry collectively called the "Citie of Ladies" were among the "stuff delivered to the Lady Elizabeth her grace, daughter to our late Soveraigne lorde King Henry the Eight and sister to our soveraigne Lorde that now is kinge Edwarde the sixte." A notation in the inventory further indicates that this "stuff" was delivered to Elizabeth's storeroom "towardes the furniture of her howse."11 That the tapestries were among the "stuff" delivered to Elizabeth's storeroom suggests that other items were earmarked for her from among her father's possessions as well. Moreover, evidently the Lady Elizabeth would occupy not merely her own quarters in one of the palaces of her brother, the new king, but a separate establishment, "her howse." Perhaps most important, however, the manuscript in the British Library specifies the dimensions of the set of tapestries. Each of the six panels was a rectangle roughly eight by five meters, making the combined area covered by the six tapestry panels very large indeed.12 To hang the entire set of the City ofLadies tapestries would require a room or hall of state with a perimeter of nearly fifty meters. It would be useful, I thought, to compare the dimensions of these tapestries to those of others in Henry VIII's collection. Naturally, I also wondered why this particular set of tapestries had been set aside for the Lady Elizabeth. Before I could hope to answer such a question, I would need to learn all I could about Elizabeth's life, her youth in particular, and about the cultural and political milieu into which she was born. Princess Elizabeth was Henry VIII's second daughter. In 1485 her grandfather, Henry Tudor founded an English dynasty by settling the bloody feuds between the house of York, whose emblem was a red rose, and the house of Lancaster, symbolized by a white rose. Known as the Wars of the Roses, these struggles had torn the country apart for the past three decades. They came to an end when Henry, the Lancastrian contender for the throne, defeated and killed Richard III, who in 1483 had usurped the throne of his young nephew,

6

THE FIRST CLUE

Edward V, the son of the Yorkist monarch Edward IV. Henry Tudor, now Henry VII, subsequently married Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, thereby uniting the two houses. Both Henry VII and his son, Henry VIII, were determined to avoid further civil strife and to consolidate their power by pursuing bold marriage alliances and establishing a firm line of male descendants. But they did not succeed. Henry VIFs older son, Arthur, died at age fifteen, and Henry VIII's six marriages produced only two daughters and finally one son, Edward, who died in early adolescence. In an effort to fulfill his goal of allying the Tudors with the Spanish Crown, Henry VII had arranged for his firstborn son, Arthur, to marry Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the "kings" of Aragon and Castile. When Arthur died during the first year of his marriage, Henry VII refused to abandon his Spanish policy, and Arthur's fifteen-year-old widow, Catherine of Aragon, soon became affianced to his remaining son, the future Henry VEIL Of Henry VIII's three children, the eldest, Princess Mary, was the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Henry determined to divorce Catherine, however, when it became clear that she was unable to produce the desired son and heir. The difficulties of a royal divorce in the early sixteenth century were so complex that Henry broke away from the Catholic Church of Rome and proclaimed himself head of the Church of England in order to set Catherine aside. He did so with the intention of marrying the radiant and clever Anne Boleyn, hoping that she would bear the son whom Catherine, despite innumerable pregnancies, had failed to provide. As Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn became the mother of Princess Elizabeth but unfortunately failed to produce the longedfor future prince. Trumped-up charges of adultery and treason provided Henry with an excuse for executing his Queen Anne so that he could marry again. The third of Henry's six wives, Jane Seymour, bore the long-awaited male heir, Edward, but died of puerperal fever twelve days after his birth. Henry's subsequent three marriages produced no other children. Although Elizabeth was only three years old when her mother was beheaded, the event must surely have left its mark on her, possibly later instilling in her a resolve to remain in charge of her own destiny. Growing up, Elizabeth

THE FIRST CLUE

7

watched her father's wives come and go—four of them in eleven years. She eventually became fondly attached to her last stepmother, Catherine Parr, with whom she was living when her father died and the "Citie of Ladies" tapestries were set aside for her own "howse." Why might Elizabeth have wanted to possess these particular tapestries? Perhaps the key lay in the ideas expressed in Christine de Pizan's book.

8

THE FIRST CLUE

C H A P T E R TWO C H R I S T I N E DE P I Z A N

AS A F I G U R E OF THE EARLY R E N A I S S A N C E , C H R I S T I N E DE PIZAN

(c. 1364—c. 1430) was unparalleled. She was not only a female author but a lay woman who, as a widowed mother of three, supported herself and her family with her pen. She moved in the circles of the French court, yet her intellectual life lay in the world of scholars. Over the years she produced some thirty separate books, essays, and volumes of poetry and counted among her patrons some of the most renowned figures of the fifteenth century. Christine's husband died when she was twenty-five years old. During the Middle Ages, a widow was expected to keep up the family's business, whether it was agriculture or urban trade. From her earliest youth, a girl was often prepared to work in her family's occupation, or later trained by her husband in his. She might also be sent as a child to receive such training in other family households. But however she came by her knowledge, an adult woman was typically conversant with agriculture, viniculture, and textile production, as well as medicinal materials and their application. Often, even a widow of the aristocracy, rather than retire to a nunnery immediately following the death of her husband, continued to administer the family landholdings. In short, women tended to take full part in the production of life's necessities and, hav-

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ing reached middle age, were often in charge of domestic production either jointly with their husbands or as widows. Almost all writers and scholars were unmarried men. Although nuns cloistered behind convent walls might devote themselves to study, only men earned their living by scholarship. In Christine's world, it was men, predominantly unmarried clerics, who delivered university lectures (to audiences composed of other men) and led debates on topics ranging from theology, philosophy, and astrology to law and medicine. Educated men might become secretaries and scribes, or they might write history, poetry, or social criticism. But almost never did women participate in such activities. Even present intense scholarship on women's history has found only a handful of medieval women who were known in the male world of medieval scholars. As is well known, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a turbulent time, mingling "blood and roses," in the evocative phrase of the cultural historian Johan Huizinga. The Hundred Years' War, peasant revolts, the ravages of the Black Death—all took their place beside festive tournaments, ballads of courtly love, and the slowly decaying traditions of chivalry. This was also the time of the so-called Babylonian captivity, when the popes deserted Rome for Avignon, and the Great Schism that ensued within the Church after Gregory XI's efforts to return the papacy to Rome resulted in two competing lines of papal succession. But if these were centuries of upheaval, they were equally an era of critical thought and individual daring. In England, John Wycliffe (1324—84), and in Bohemia, Jan Hus (1373—1415)—the two most influential heretics to precede Luther—challenged the thinking not only of the clergy but of a whole cross section of nobility and peasants. Their aim was to bring society closer to the original Christian truth by translating the Bible into the vernacular and likewise preaching in their native tongue. Their ideas posed such a threat to the authority of an already divided and unstable church that Wycliffe was forced to give up all activity, while Hus was burned at the stake during the Council of Constance in 1415. William of Occam, perhaps the most original late medieval philosopher, formulated principles of logic with which to assail Christian dogma. In the sphere of faith, as opposed to reason, the teachings of St. Francis stressed compassion and

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instilled a new awareness of the natural world, visible in the paintings of Giotto and in Petrarch's poetry. Christine de Pizan was a part of this world, swept up by the latest ideas in art and poetry and yet deeply attached to her Christian faith. As a widow seeking an outlet for her sorrows, she initially became a poet but turned eventually to scholarly pursuits, motivated above all else by a sheer love of learning. She became a social critic of her time, in part because she felt that women were treated unjustly. Her own relatively short but evidently happy marriage made her eager to prove wrong those who satirized wives as shrews and women in general as faithless hussies. In her later years she devoted herself to writing books that drew on her wide-ranging studies. With the possible exception of Hildegard von Bingen two centuries earlier, never before in medieval times had a woman within or without the cloister written so prolifically and with such authority. Christine was born in Venice, probably in 1364. Her maternal grandfather was a Venetian councillor. Because of the position in Venice of her mother's family, Tommaso, Christine's father, moved there when her parents married. Tommaso hailed from Pizzano, near the distinguished university town of Bologna, where he had studied medicine and where he lectured on astrology, a subject closely allied to medical science in his day.1 Soon after Christine's birth her father was invited to become the personal physician and astrologer to Charles V, of the royal Valois dynasty of France. The choice between this position and a similar one at the Hungarian court was difficult, but Paris, with its famous university and the intellectually stimulating environment that prevailed at the court of Charles V, proved the more persuasive. Tommaso therefore resigned his position in Venice and traveled to Paris, leaving his family to follow a few years later, in 1369. As a child of four orfive,Christine arrived in Paris with her mother and various other relatives who depended on the generosity of her father. She remembered being introduced to the king shortly after the family settled into the comfortable house that Charles V provided for his new physician. There, in the shadow of the French court, she grew up in comparative ease and luxury. Christine had childhood memories of foreign ambassadors, visitors to the French court, being entertained at her home. Her Venetian grandfather pre-

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sumably used his ambassadors' travels to Paris to keep abreast of his daughter's family. The diplomats Christine encountered during her formative years no doubt had some influence on her future career. But their significance pales in comparison with two other influences. The first of these was Christine's father, Tommaso da Pizzano (who called himself de Pizan when in France). His studies of the new humanist philosophers had made him an independent thinker. He believed, for example, that education would do girls more good than harm and therefore encouraged his daughter to become familiar with books. Like many fathers who would have preferred a son, Tommaso threw his energies into educating his daughter faute de mieux, as Christine herself later remembered. Christine was not unique in being taught to read. Most girls of aristocratic households were taught the rudiments of reading, but it was more likely that they would use this knowledge to peruse prayer books, psalters, and bibles.2 Equally important to Christine's future as a scholar was her access to the magnificent library of King Charles V. His collection, which eventually formed the nucleus of the first national library of France, took up one of the towers of the fourteenth-century Louvre. It boasted an impressive array of manuscripts— twelve hundred volumes covering all the great Western authors: Greek philosophers and poets, Roman writers of the Republic and Empire, the church fathers, contemporary mystics, and poets such as Dante and Petrarch. Being exposed to these authors at an early age assuredly helped to sharpen Christine's later desire to pursue a life of serious study. During a dream conversation with one of the three symbolic characters who persuade her to compose the Book ofthe City of Ladies, Christine recalls the attitude of her parents toward her childhood education. Here Lady Droiture reminds Christine: Your father, the savant and philosopher, was not of the opinion that women are diminished by learning; thus when he saw you take an interest in letters, as you know, he was delighted. But the opinion of your mother, who wanted to occupy you only with the domestic matters common to women, was the cause of the obstacles and the reason why your learning was not pushed further or perfected during your childhood. . . . I gather, however . . . that you have

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gained a great treasure from the few droplets of knowledge which you have garnered according to your natural inclination, in spite of your mother's attempts to hinder your learning.3 Throughout her writings Christine stressed that she owed to her father her early interest in books and scholarship. It was he who had made possible her knowledge of the king's library in the Louvre when she was a young girl, and it was he who later drew her into the circle of his conversations, a privilege certainly unusual for women. As she grew older, however, Christine also became aware how necessary it was for women to be conversant with the domestic skills championed by her mother, and she often emphasized that women's domestic work was not to be denigrated. In 1379, when she was fifteen—the conventional age for marriage among the aristocracy—Christine married a young Frenchman, Etienne de Castel. Again, her father showed unusual qualities, for it appears that Christine was allowed to marry for love, rather than being obliged, as was customary at the time, to take a husband for reasons of family interest. Although Etienne de Castel was not wealthy, he was of noble birth, and he was intelligent, charming, and full of promise. His father, who died before Etienne's marriage to Christine, had been among the hundreds of people in service at the French court. Etienne himself had been fortunate to win an appointment as a royal secretary—a lifelong position that brought with it diplomatic and court favors and was consequently highly sought after. Ten apparently happy years of marriage followed, during which Etienne and Christine had three children: a daughter and two sons. The primary source of sadness during Christine's married life seems to have been Etienne's occasional absences when he was obliged to accompany the king on official journeys. O n e of Christine's most famous poems describes her wedding night and her husband's gentleness both as a man and as a lover. Personal themes were unusual in medieval poetry, and this ballad is doubly so, inasmuch as it extols conjugal happiness. "Doulce chose est que mariage, je le puis bien par moy preuver," she sang (How sweet a thing is marriage, I can personally attest). 4 Many of her later poems, although written in the courtly love tradition and thus sup-

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posedly depicting a married woman yearning for her lover, are surely a reflection of Christine's yearning for her absent husband. Throughout her marriage Christine lived near the splendor of the royal court. Shortly after her marriage, however, in 1380, Charles V died, and his twelve-year-old son, Charles VI, came to the throne. Charles V had taken a keen interest in the building of his palaces and in the acquisition of artistic treasures, including his splendid collection of books. But on his death the congenial atmosphere of the court changed, and Tommaso da Pizzano and his family lost their favored position. Although Tommaso still received certain monies from the royal treasury, these came irregularly and were much diminished. His medical and astrological advice seems to have been rejected, and, to add to his troubles, Tommaso also lost his health. In the meanwhile, the family had grown. Various other Italian dependents had arrived, hoping to benefit from the privileged position of the da Pizzano family at the French court. Christine occasionally referred in her writings to her father's too willing generosity, which was, perhaps, responsible for the difficulties in which Tommaso's widow and children found themselves after his death. Yet his generosity arose from a nature liberal in other respects, one that made him the father of a very remarkable woman. When he died, in about 1385, the burden of support for his entire menage fell to Etienne de Castel. Luckily, the young man's position at the French court was assured, and, as Christine later wrote in an autobiographical work, Vavision-Christine {Christines Vision), he became a wise and prudent head of the household.5 But this state of affairs was not to last. In 1389 Christine's life was shattered by disaster. While on a visit to Beauvais with Charles VI, Etienne succumbed to an infection and died. His widow never completely recovered from the shock or from the aftermath of loneliness and the misery of being plunged unprotected into a hostile world. The grief of these months runs through her early poetry and surfaces in various guises in her later, more serious, political and social criticism. This was the moment when Christine changed, as she metaphorically put it, "into a man." She now had to support not only her children but a number of other family members, including her invalid mother, her brothers, and a

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niece. In her later writing, she deplored the failure of the many husbands who, because they do not entrust wives with knowledge of their business affairs, can leave unhappy widows at the mercy of their debtors. This is exactly what happened to Christine, who was destined to spend almost fourteen years after Etienne's death in litigation proceedings. She was shunted from court to court, where she was required to appear in person, all in order to keep what rightfully belonged to her and her children. Her debtors had no qualms about lying, and they distorted the truth to such an extent that instead of inheriting the estates that were her due, Christine was forced to sell some of her prized possessions in order to pay legal costs. She even became physically ill at one point from her long periods ofwaiting in the drafty anterooms of the law courts. Worse still, as a woman defending her own case, she became the butt of jokes among lawyers and clerks. The insults and brutal treatment that the distraught widow suffered at the hands of the narrow male professional world in which she suddenly found herself left their mark. Her later advice to other widows was to invest in the best lawyer they could find, someone who could perform all the unpleasant work a legal case can entail and who would probably meet with more success than she had herself. Better still, she advised, a wife should have a firm grasp of her husband's business and financial affairs so that she will be able to handle them competently on her own. Some of her most moving poetry stems from this difficult period. Almost immediately after Etienne's death she wrote, "Je s u i s veuve, seulette et noir vetue" (I am a widow, alone and clad in black), a poem whose simplicity captures the poignancy of her mood. It was followed over the next six years by a variety of ballads, many of them on the subject of the loneliness of her widowhood: "Seulette suis et seulette veux etre" (I am alone, and alone I wish to remain), for example, and "Com' turtre suis, sans pair, toute seulette" (Like the mourning dove I am now all alone).6 Her talent soon brought her work to the notice of possible patrons, and she was encouraged to add to her verses until she had produced the conventional fourteenth-century "One Hundred Ballads," which appeared as a collection in 1399. After a time, however, her readers tired of her mournful themes, and so to please them she resolved to write love poems that were more cheerful. But, as she herself confirmed in one

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such poem, her heart was obviously not in it. Gone was the spontaneity of her descriptions both of her married happiness and its abrupt loss. At the same time, although there is no evidence that she wrote from personal experience, some of her later love poetry is interesting for its appreciation of the dangers of clandestine love affairs from the woman's point of view. In the estimation of one critic, "Christine shocked her public with her realistic and practical approach."7 Christine's patrons included the young Charles VI of France, as well as Richard II of England. Henry IV of England also offered his patronage, which she refused as she considered him a usurper, while Galeazzo Visconti, the duke of Milan, invited Christine to return to her native country, where she would enjoy his patronage at the court of Milan. But she preferred to remain in France. No doubt her connection with the French court was one reason the widowed poet did not lack for benefactors. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume that patrons were interested in her simply because of her social position. Christine herself was modest enough to attribute her success to the novelty of being a woman writer. This fact assuredly lent a certain piquancy to her personal position, although the intrinsic merit of her work appealed to her readers as well. Gradually Christine's family concerns began to lighten. She made the acquaintance of the earl of Salisbury, who was in France to arrange the marriage of Princess Isabelle and Richard II of England (whose first wife, Anne of Bohemia, died in 1394) and took an interest in Christine's older son, Jean. In 1397 he took the boy, then thirteen, back to England with him to be educated with his own son of the same age. A number of Christine's works, sent to him out of gratitude for his kindness, were later found in his library. In the eighteenth century a romance was woven around the story of Salisbury's relationship with Christine. The French writer Jean Marie-Louis Coupe pieced together odd phrases from her works to invent this fiction, by which Horace Walpole, among others, was taken in. Although Salisbury may very well have been attracted to this courageous and sensitive woman, neither the evidence of her own words in later autobiographical writing nor the tone of her love poetry at the time

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suggests that her heart was seriously involved. The following account is found in Christine's autobiography: Around the time when the French King's daughter was married to King Richard of England, a noble count named Salisbury came from there to France. And since this gracious knight loved poems and was himself a courteous poet, after what he had seen of my poems, he begged me so that I agreed—albeit unwillingly—that my oldest son, a very clever and charming child of thirteen, might go with him to England to be a companion to one of his own sons of the same age; for this said count conducted himself quite nobly and generously toward my child and promised more for the future. I believe he would not have disappointed in these matters since he was powerful enough to bring them about; certainly, the promises he made me were not revealed to be lies. But that woman (or adverse Fortune) who so often injured me did not intend to suffer this benefit long; as every one knew, not long thereafter she brought the cruel pestilence against the said King Richard in the aforesaid country of England, because of which, the good count was later most unjustly beheaded for his great loyalty to his rightful lord.8 It is noteworthy that Christine never again became romantically involved, nor did she decide to remarry during the remaining forty-five years of her long life after her husband's death. Sometime during this period, perhaps in 1398, Christine put her eldest child, her daughter, into a Dominican convent, the Royal Priory of Saint-Louis of Poissy. Even though Christine did not especially wish to cloister her daughter, she was led to this decision partly out of piety and partly out of convenience, in accordance with the custom of the time: "Your first fruit, if it be a girl—dedicate to God and to his service," she wrote. 9 But it would be wrong to leap to the conclusion that Christine's decision was motivated largely by self-interest, namely, a desire to find a simple way out of the financial predicament posed by having to look after, and provide a dowry for, a marriageable daughter. Convents also expected dowries, and these were sometimes just as extravagant—consisting of furniture, initiation feasts, and generous gifts to the foundation—as those provided for worldly marriages. It is likely that Chris -

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FIGURE 1. Riding party: Christine, second figure from the right, visiting Poissy. Miniature. By permission of the British Library, London. MS Harley443i, fol. 81,1413.

tine's connection with the French court, including her standing as an author patronized by the court, gave her an advantage when it came to placing her daughter in this particularly lovely convent to which women members of the French royal family often retired. Le dit de Poissy (The Tale ofPoissy), written in 1400, is one of her most delightful longer poems. In it Christine describes a horseback ride through the countryside and the woods of St. Germain on a sunny spring Monday in late April of 1400, when she and some companions rode the six miles out from Paris to visit her daughter (see fig. i).The activities of the nuns, as well as the Late Gothic buildings, the artwork, and the splendid gardens of the convent are sketched in evocative detail, as, for example, in her description of the sweetly scented table linens. Christine clearly felt she had left her daughter in the most pleasant of surroundings. Furthermore, the peaceful tenor of convent life would protect the young girl from the turbulence of a world that had not been altogether kind to her mother. So it was that about nine years after her husband's death, when Christine was thirty-four years old, she began to make a new life for herself. Two of her children were reasonably well taken care of (it is not clear what happened to her younger son), although she still seems to have been responsible for her mother and occasionally for her brothers and nieces. Christine now decided that the poetry she had written so far lacked the depth with which it might be imbued as the result of serious study. Here, in a manner reminiscent of Dante's Divine Comedy, is her own description of the steps she would take: Thus, at that time, when I arrived at a certain natural degree of maturity, I looked at all the past adventures behind me and saw the end of all things ahead—just like a man who has passed a perilous place and reviews his steps with wonder, swearing never to return but to persevere with only the best. Thus considering the world full of perilous woe, and there being finally only one Good, which is to discover the truth, I was led toward the road where my own nature and humor inclined—that is, to knowledge and the love of study. . . . And so, like a child when it is first introduced to the ABC, I devoted myself to the ancient histories, from the beginning of the world, the history of the Hebrews, of the Assyrians, and the principal rulers proceeding from one to the next, to the Romans, the Franks, the Bretons, and then to various other historians; and after

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this to the analytical sciences, but only to those I could understand in the time I had available. Then I settled into the books of the poets.10 Almost greedily, Christine devoted herself to the books that remained in her father's library, the bailiffs having depleted it at the time of her greatest need. In addition, perhaps she still had access to the royal library—although it, too, had become somewhat less opulent, owing to Charles VI's tendency to distribute its contents as gifts. As a third source, she had a friend in Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris, who had access to a magnificent library and may have given her advice on what to read and on how to locate specific books. Christine was fluent in French and Italian, but she was enough of an early Renaissance humanist to consider her education lacking because she could not read Greek. She revived the little Latin she had learned from her husband and father, however, which served her adequately enough, particularly since most of the ancient authorities she consulted had at this point been translated into French. Her mother tongue proved useful, especially for her work on Dante, but Christine wrote entirely in the French vernacular of her adopted country. The books whose learned contents Christine now studied prompted her serious works, which date from the long poem L'epistre au dieu d'Amours (Epistle to the God of Love), written in 1399. The authors who shaped Christine's thought ranged across many centuries and many disciplines. Included among them were Homer, Aristotle, Galen, Avicenna, Chrysostom, Virgil, Ovid, Catulus, Juvenal, Boethius, Apaleus, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, and Dante. Dante, who wrote in the Italian vernacular, made an immediate impression on Christine. Recognized as the second French author to cite him, she can be credited with introducing him to the French reading public in her Epistle to the God of Love, in which she paraphrased much of the thought of the Divine Comedy.11 With the Epistle, Christine's first serious work, she immediately became embroiled in controversy. Two best-sellers of the fourteenth century were Le roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose), primarily the work of Jean de Meun, and Ovid's Art of Love, both of which her poem attacked as "unjust to women." She disentangled the allegorical web of the Romance of the Rose to expose the

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slur on her sex that underlay the poem's pious posture and its defense of chivalry. Equally, she saw the denigration of women in the wiles and schemes with which Ovid surrounds the art of love, all of which have but one end in view—the fall of a virtuous woman. As Christine recognized, these authors, de Meun in particular, believed that women were only too ready to submit to men and that female aloofness was no more than a ruse adopted with that very end in view. To the general agreement among men with the ideas expressed in these books, and to the question why women were so often accused of evil, Christine replied simply that these books were not written by women. She thus embarked on a defense of women that she developed in a number of her major works: Le dit de la rose (The Tale of the Rose, 1402), Le livre de la cite des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405), and Le livre des trois vertus (The Book of Three Virtues, 1405). In fact, what began purely as a defensive maneuver culminated, with the Book of Three Virtues, in a practical guidebook on morality, in which Christine advises women how to make the best of their lives. The Book of the City of Ladies was written specifically to counter the work of Matheolus, a follower of Jean de Meun, who, in his Lamentations, launched a veritable tirade of hatred against women. As Christine observes, Those who attack women because of their own vices are men who spent their youths in dissolution and enjoyed the love of many different women . . . now regret their past follies and the dissolute life they led. But Nature, which allows the will of the heart to put into effect what the powerful appetite desires, has grown cold in them. Therefore they are pained when they see that their "good times" have now passed them by, and it seems to them that the young who are now what they once were are on top of the world. They do not know how to overcome their sadness except by attacking women, hoping to make women less attractive to other men. Everywhere one sees such old men speak obscenely and dishonestly, just as you can fully see with Matheolus who himself confesses that he was an impotent old man filled with desire.12 The popularity of the Lamentations spurred Christine to action, in which she had the support of at least two men, her friends Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the university, and the gallant Marechal de Boucicaut. Matheolus had, for

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example, gone so far as to argue that women were forever barred from Paradise, for, on the final Day of Judgment and the Resurrection, it would be necessary to return to Adam his borrowed rib. Christine countered this argument by pointing out that not only had God, after all, chosen a woman to be the mother of his son, but he had decided to dispense with a human father altogether. Her opinion of Matheolus's Lamentations is clear from her comment in the Book of the City ofLadies that the work "had a bad name anyway and was intended as a satire."13 Christine's attack on clerics like Jean de Meun and Matheolus infuriated several of the royal secretaries, particularly Gontier Col and Jean de Montreuil. In an epistolary quarrel that became known as the "Querelle de la Rose," they fought back by equating Christine with heretics and Jews.14 So powerful was Christine's challenge to male prerogative, according to the historian Sarah Hanley, that it provoked Jean de Montreuil into forging a document that claimed to be an ancient "Salic law," which forbade women to become sovereign rulers of France.15 In the presentation of her material, Christine to some degree adhered to traditional literary models. The Book of the City of Ladies, for example, much like Plutarch's Lives of Men and Women and Boccacio's Famous Women, lists female historical figures who were great rulers, warriors, scientists, or faithful wives. The Book ofThree Virtues follows in a long line of moral guidebooks, which have their basis in early Christian thought. Her allegories—for she, like most late medieval writers, embedded her ideas in the most complex of allegories— have aflavorvery much her own, however, one characterized by common sense and the occasional touch of asperity. Aware that she alone held the balance against a host of masculine writers and an even larger number of masculine readers, she found it advisable to write from her practical knowledge of everyday matters and to keep a firm grip on her emotions. A great deal of scholarly ink has been expended on the question whether Christine was a feminist—whether she was the first feminist, whether she was the first French feminist or Italian feminist, and so on. Many of her ideas do anticipate twentieth-century feminist ideals. Christine wanted women to have the same access to education as men; she argued that men had from time

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immemorial treated women unjustly; she objected to men's trivializing of women's domestic work; she believed women could administer and rule just as well as, if not better than, men; and she thought that women were wise in preferring peace to war. But as a woman of the fifteenth century, she could not grasp the crux of modern feminism—that is, the overthrow of the entire patriarchal edifice—nor, of course, could she envision an organized women's movement. Moreover, even though Christine was aware that a famous woman academician, known as Novella, had been a professor of law at Thomas de Pizan's University at Bologna—Christine tells her story in the Book ofthe City of Ladies—she did not expect that women would, as a matter of routine, sit on government councils or in the law courts or universities. Christine emphasized the importance of education for women because, in her view, even a woman who is already intelligent and virtuous will improve as the result of learning: "From Aristotle, we know that the mind governs the body, and what thing is more beautiful than knowledge—and what more ugly than ignorance, which is unbecoming to mankind? This point I once made to a man who reproved my desire for knowledge, who said that it does not suit a woman to have learning, and that of those there are very few. And I said to him that it suits a man even less to be ignorant, and that of those there are many."16 Nevertheless, in the Book ofThree Virtues, composed shortly after the Book ofthe City of Ladies, Christine argued that the education of girls and boys should not be identical. They differ in their capacity and interests, she observed; moreover, they will hardly occupy equal positions in the world. Similarly, while Christine sought justice for her sex, to whom injury had been done by such books as the Romance ofthe Rose, she did not demand radical reforms or extensive changes to the status quo. She was aware, it seems, of the danger of overplaying her hand and thereby antagonizing her opponents, who, if provoked, would only renew their attacks on her sex. She was not about to fall into the same error as Matheolus, whose personal troubles, including an unsatisfactory marriage, had caused him to draw his literary sword against an entire sex. Thus Christine was careful to admit, in the Epistle to the God of Love, that certain women were indeed deserving of censure, although there were

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many more who should be admired. She was, moreover, personally acquainted with a number of men who respected feminine intellect and capability—men such as her father, Jean Gerson, and Marechal de Boucicaut. Another of her great admirers was Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. He had secured a position for Christine's son, young Jean de Castel, at the Burgundian court when Jean returned from England and where he remained during the successive dukedoms ofJohn the Fearless and Philip the Good. On New Year's Day, 1404, Christine presented Philip the Bold with a long poem, Le livre de la mutation de fortune {The Book of the Vagaries ofFortune), which had taken her four years to compose. Intended as a history of all ages, the poem ends with a discussion of important contemporary issues such as the Great Schism within the church, war with Spain, and the general failure to achieve peace. Philip was so favorably impressed with this work that he commissioned Christine to write a biography of his brother, the late Charles V of France. This work, Le livre desfais et bonnes moeurs du sage roy Charles V(The Book of Deeds and Customs of the Wise King Charles V), is still cited by historians as one of the main sources on Charles V and his times.17 Christine treated the third estate, that is, the well-to-do bourgeoisie, as an essential promoter of stable government, able to facilitate an understanding between the aristocracy, on the one hand, and peasants and urban workers, on the other. Over the years Christine presented many of her books to the various dukes of Burgundy and received generous compensation for them. But though Burgundy was largely allied with England during the period of the Hundred Years' War, her first loyalty was always to France. Sadly, in 1392, Charles V's heir, Charles VI, began to suffer from recurring bouts of mental illness, which rendered him incompetent to govern. His wife, the notorious Isabel of Bavaria—who has the distinction of being one of the most unpopular French queens in history—subsequently consorted with his brother Louis, due d'Orleans, who had from 1388 functioned as Charles VI's advisor. When Louis was murdered, however, in 1407, Isabel became regent of France in lieu of her ailing husband. In this capacity, she did little to prevent the intermittent chaos into which the country was plunged by the various competing factions that fought or plotted ceaselessly for the French

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throne. In the meanwhile, the English, to whom Isabel was sympathetic, took advantage of the internal confusion to step in whenever France was at her weakest. Owing to her early connection with the French court, Christine could follow political affairs at a high social level. She was a staunch supporter of the French cause, and thus she did what she could to rally the degenerate French court. She wrote letters to Queen Isabel, for example, begging her to bestir herself in the interests of peace and urging her to remember that she would soon have to account to the Almighty for the manner in which she had carried out her royal duties. Thus she ought constantly to set a good example to her subjects and bring all her influence to bear in an effort to secure the country's welfare and foster a lasting peace. As she reminds Isabel in a letter written in 1405: Alas, great lady, if pity, charity, clemency, and benignity are not to be found in a great princess, where then can they be expected? As these virtues are a natural part of the feminine condition they should rightfully abound in a noble lady, inasmuch as she receives a greater gift from God, so it is to be expected that a noble princess or lady should be the means of bringing about a treaty of peace.18 "What crowned Queen of France—dost sleep?" she later cried in her "Lamentations sur les maux de la France" ("Lamentations on the Woes of France," 1410). 19 Her letters often stress the plight of widows, mothers, and orphans, for it is they who suffer most in the aftermath of war. In attempting to sway a leader's policies, Christine succeeded no better than other writers throughout the centuries. But she demonstrated a sound political awareness, and she showed herself courageous in directing the queen to awaken to her sense of duty and leadership. When in 1429 Joan of Arc appeared almost magically out of the fields to bring hope to a despondent and demoralized nation, Christine's joy inspired her to one final burst of poetry after a silence of some ten years. Her long poem Le ditie dejehanne dArc (The Poem of Joan of Arc, 1429), written in 1429, shortly before her death, revealed some of the same spirit that drove her attack on the author of the Romance of the Rose:

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Behold, what honor to our sex plainly beloved of God See, this great ancient people fleeing the land, is safe and rescued by a woman where men have failed.20 In spite of Christine's many efforts on behalf of peace, such as her letters to Queen Isabel and her trilogy Le livre de la paix (The Booh of Peace, 1412—13), she was also a creature of her time, and thus she believed in that beguiling notion, the "just war." She expounded this theory—by which the church approved the most appalling slaughter as long as it was carried out against the enemies of "true" religion, or of king and country—in apparent harmony with her many antiwar compositions. Her thoughts on the rationale for war and the proper conduct of warfare found their most extended expression in Le livre desfais d'armes et de chevalerie (The Book of Battles and Military Arts), a treatise written in 1410, just a few years before the Book of Peace. The book on military arts is of interest partly because of its immediate, and sustained, popularity. At least nine manuscript copies are still preserved in libraries. The first English printer, William Caxton, was ordered by Henry VII to translate the work and then print an English version. The result was the Book ofFayettes ofArmes and ofChyualrye, as Caxton wrote in the epilogue of his translation on 14 July 1490, which was advertised as an essential book for every gentleman born to arms. 2 1 The work, which was still being studied a generation later, is based mainly on the military tactics of the popular fifthcentury Roman writer Vegetius, although Christine added some astute observations that later commentators appreciated. 22 The Book of Battles andMilitary Arts has nonetheless been called the weakest of Christine's works on the grounds that, in writing about the intricacies of warfare, she was essentially out of her depth. That she was able to write about the subject well enough to have her work translated, copied in numerous manuscript and printed editions, and sought after by the libraries of the ruling houses of the greatest enemies of France, however, suggests that her grasp of military strategy was not altogether deficient.

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Thefifteenyears between 1399 and 1414, from the time Christine was thirtyfive to the time she wasfifty,were her most productive. In addition to the works already mentioned, she wrote a number of others on subjects broadly pertaining to morality and history. But it is the Book ofthe City ofLadies with which I will principally be concerned. Christine begins by describing how, after long hours of study, she decided to relax by reading something relatively light. Having picked up a copy of Matheolus's Lamentations, which she had heard was a book that discussed respect for women, she was surprised to find it just the opposite and, after perusing it, felt quite despondent. Christine employed the conventional medieval literary trope of a dream vision to explain how she came to write her book. She describes how, with her elbow on the arm of the chair and her chin in her hand, she dreamed that she was visited by three female figures, whom she calls Dame Raison, Dame Droiture, and Dame Justice—Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice.23 It is particularly interesting that Christine should have chosen to have her allegorical figures incarnate qualities such as reason, rectitude, and justice, rather than resorting to the usual feminine ideals of patience, humility, modesty, prudence, and so forth. In building her defense of women against the slander of men, she was clearly determined to demonstrate that women can possess virtues not normally associated with their sex and femininity. The three femalefigures,who in fifteenth-century illuminations are depicted as crowned queens or elegant aristocratic ladies, tell Christine that she must not brood over these insults to women but must rather find a way to provide women with a secure place where they will be safe from such painful attacks, a city "where no one will reside except all ladies of fame and women worthy of praise"—a city built allegorically in the form of a book that she, Christine, would write.24 The "city of ladies" is the result. In good fourteenth-century manner, the "city of ladies" is described in a double allegory. The stones of which the city is built represent the books Christine has read, while they also symbolize the women who inhabit it. Once completed and inhabited, the city is the book itself. In constructing her Utopian city, Christine not only looks to the future but reaches into the past, as well as into her own imagination.

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Like other Utopias Christine's is a "city of the mind," but, uniquely, it is eternal because she is writing (or rewriting) history. Her city and those who dwell in it are intended to remain forever in the minds of women to give them selfconfidence, so that they will not fall into Christine's own error of believing the insults of men and then despairing of their own goodness, their own capabilities and strength. The book is divided into three parts. In Part One, Reason, with her mirror symbolizing both "reflection on history" and "self-awareness," assists Christine in building the city wall. While the wall is being constructed, Reason describes each of its "stones": women known for their political or military accomplishments, as well as women famed for their learning or for certain specialized skills (including women who built cities). In Part Two, Rectitude, with her symbolic ruler, helps Christine to fashion the buildings within the city, encouraging her to "re-measure," and thus reinterpret, history. During the work of construction, she tells the stories of visionary women and women who offer prophecies, such as the ten sybils, and of women who exemplify the ideals of filial and marital love or whose actions illustrate virtues such as chastity, faithfulness, or generosity. Finally, in Part Three, Justice, with her golden vessel out of which a proper portion is meted out to each individual, offers help in imbuing the city with Christian principles. She invites the Virgin Mary, as the Heavenly Queen, to become the empress of the city, with her entourage of women saints and martyrs who help to populate its highest towers. A manuscript of "Le livre de la cite des dames" now in Munich's Bayerische Staatsbibliothek contains a beautiful illustration of this scene that shows a group of ladies, including the Queen of Heaven, with her crown and her baby in her arms, making their entrance into the city (see plate I). 25 The building stones, as I have already mentioned, are all women—some historical, some mythical—whose stories Christine came upon in her reading. She draws extensively on Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women), as well as his Decameron. She also borrowed from Vincent de Beauvais's Speculum historiale (The Mirror of History); Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, for her stories of saints; and Augustine's City of God, for her description of certain historical and legendary figures and for her title. While

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she availed herself freely of the work of male authors, in so doing she often revised or reinterpreted what they had to say. One of Christine's most important sources, Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, appeared in Latin in 1355. The work follows in the tradition of Plutarch's lives of men and women, except that Boccaccio wrote solely in praise of women, cleverly dedicating his book to an Italian patron, the countess of Altavilla. A French translation by Laurent le Premierfait was available by 1401, with which Christine was probably familiar. In fact, she has often been accused of simply copying Boccaccio's stories, but it does not require a particularly close reading to see where she deliberately turned him on his head, rewriting the stories or reinterpreting them to exclude everything that did not suit her. Perhaps the most drastic example of this is the story of Medea. In the usual telling, Medea is deserted by her husband, Jason, who is eager to marry another woman. In a fury of revenge, Medea poisons the new wife and then murders her own children, those Jason fathered. Christine's version of the story is strikingly different. "In learning, Medea surpassed and exceeded all women; it was thanks to her art that Jason won the Golden Fleece," she wrote. "She was very beautiful, with a noble and upright heart." After Jason deserted her, "she turned despondent, nor did her heart ever again feel goodness and joy." There is no mention of poisoning or of the murder of children.26 Another example is the story of Semiramis, who serves allegorically as the foundation stone of the city wall. According to Christine, Semiramis was the powerful queen of Assyria, best remembered as the builder of Babylon and its famous hanging gardens. After the death of her husband, Ninus, the widowed Queen Semiramis governed the kingdoms ofAssyria and Babylon and marched at the head of her army to subjugate Ethiopia and India. Semiramis married her own son (also called Ninus). Most writers, including Boccaccio, have balked at the incest perpetrated by the Assyrian queen. Boccaccio tells the usual story of her sexual excesses (which Christine omits), insisting that Semiramis was so lascivious that she was unable to resist taking her own son as her lover once he was grown. Whereas in Boccaccio, Semiramis and Ninus are lovers, in Christine's version, and her version only, Semiramis purposefully marries her son. Christine also tackles the issue of incest head-on: "But this lady did nothing

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to excuse herself for this great mistake because at this time there was still no written law, and people lived according to the law of Nature, where all people were allowed to do whatever came into their hearts without sinning." 2 7 In the assessment of the literary critic Maureen Quilligan, the male authors who wrote about Semiramis viewed her as an instance of what Quilligan calls the "primal scandal of female shame." But for Christine, Semiramis lived at a time before men thought to write what have become the patriarchal laws of our society. In her view Semiramis therefore acted autonomously and represents perfect freedom. 28 A final, though less dramatic, contrast can be found in Christine's rewriting or reinterpretation of the story of the Roman poet Cornificia. Christine uses the tale to underscore her own point that if girls were taught equally with boys they would do better, since their wit is sharper: "Just as women have more delicate bodies than men, weaker and less able to perform many tasks, so do they have minds that are freer and sharper whenever they apply themselves." Christine wrote with some bitterness that Cornificia's parents sent her to school with her brother "as a mockery or a joke." Whereas Boccaccio claims merely that Cornificia was "equal in glory to her brother," Christine tells us that "the little girl frequented school with such marvelous talent that she soon felt the sweet taste of knowledge so much so that she surpassed her brother" (my emphasis). 2 9 All in all, Christine describes, or at least mentions, almost two hundred women in the Book of the City of Ladies. By drawing attention to a large number of women whose stories clearly run contrary to the views of well-known misogynist authors, Christine not only answered these authors but gave her women readers ammunition for future use against similar arguments. Perhaps even more important, she armed herself against her own despair. And while she wrote that the walls of this city would be closed to women who lack virtue, her realistic understanding of human nature induced her to include a few women who were not entirely virtuous. If I were asked to name one characteristic that these exemplary women have in common, I would suggest self-sufficiency. They are strong and independent, and in their valor and their ideas they are far from traditional and often

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extremely original—which, as in the story of Semiramis, Christine usually explains by reference to a different historical context. The Pizan scholar Christine Reno interprets the quality that I call "self-sufficiency" as the "transcendental ideal" of virginity. Reno views the Book of the City of Ladies as a stout Christian text, which it certainly is. She acknowledges, however, that Christine "transforms virginity into a metaphorical rather than literal concept," whereby virginity can represent "freedom from any sort of involvement with men that might hamper women's pursuit of their particular goals."30 It is important to keep such ideals in mind when we think about the women who later read and felt the influence of this fascinating book. The Book ofthe City of Ladies was one of the most popular of Christine's works during the fifteenth century. Twenty-five fifteenth-century manuscript copies still survive; some of them are splendidly illustrated. Some of these manuscripts are now believed to have been written in Christine's own hand, as it appears her husband taught her a fine secretary's hand with which she supported herself for several years as a scribe.31 Like most authors, Christine presented several, sometimes many, copies of her works to as many patrons as possible. The finest of her manuscripts of "Le livre de la cite des dames" went to her three most distinguished patrons: Queen Isabel of France, Jean of France, due de Berry (one of Charles V's brothers), and John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. Such manuscripts were traditionally illustrated, on one of the the first few folios, by the kneeling figure of the author literally offering a copy of the volume to a sumptuously robed patron. Among other things, this was a particularly cunning method of ensuring payment. The illustration that appears in the manuscript presented to Queen Isabel (see plate II) shows Christine kneeling before the queen, who is surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting in her beautifully appointed bedroom. The scene is enhanced by the usual fifteenth-century small dogs, and—of greater interest from my standpoint—fleur-de-lys tapestries are suspended from small nails around the walls.

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CHAPTER THREE QUEEN ELIZABETH'S TAPESTRIES

THE CITY OF LADIES

TAPESTRIES H O U S E D IN THE LADY ELIZABETH'S

garderobe in 1547 were not the only form in which Christine de Pizan's works existed in early Renaissance England. We know that a number of Christine de Pizan manuscripts had been in England during the century before Elizabeth's birth. These included a magnificent manuscript of Christine's military treatise "Le livre des faits d'armes et de chevalerie," presented as a wedding gift to Margaret of Anjou, the queen of Henry VI, in 1445. The English printer William Caxton may have based his 1498 edition of the Book ofFayettes ofArmes and ofChyualrye on this manuscript, which he translated at the request of Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII. The royal library of the Tudors also contained several manuscript copies of Christine's "Epistre d'Othea," a collection of Homeric stories inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which Christine's creation, the goddess Othea, counsels Hector on the conduct appropriate to a knight. Of greatest interest to me, however, were two manuscripts of "Le livre de la cite des dames."1 One of these manuscripts may have belonged to Richard, the third duke of York, who in 1436—37 and again in 1441—45 had served as lieutenant governor and commander of the English forces in France. This manuscript is particularly significant for being close to the English translation by Bryan Anslay, the Boke

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of the Cyte ofLady es, which was printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521. According to the Short Title Catalog (STC), a reference produced by the British Library that contains records for works printed in any language in England or its dependencies from 1473 through 1800, onlyfivecopies of this Tudor translation now survive: one in the British Library; a second, incomplete, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; a third in King's College, Cambridge; a fourth at Longleat, the seat of the marquis of Bath; and a fifth at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C.2 One noteworthy feature ofAnslay's English translation is that neither he nor Pepwell bothered to put Christine de Pizan's name on the title page or the cover of the book. Such an omission was common at the time. Female authors, regarded as not credible, could acceptably be disposed of simply by dropping their names from printed works. It was more diplomatic, more politic, and almost certainly more lucrative to publish works on warfare and chivalry, or those teaching etiquette and morals, under the name of a male author.3 Bryan Anslay served at the court of Henry VIII, while his son, also named Bryan, a contemporary of Elizabeth (he died in 1604, just ayear after she did), was a pensioner at her court. It is thus not impossible that the queen knew son or father or both, and the younger Anslay might even have spoken to her about the Boke of the Cyte ofLadyes and the ideas it contained. As a child and young woman, Elizabeth had been given the most advanced education possible for a Renaissance princess. She spoke and wrote French and Italian as well as English. She also knew Latin and Greek and, as queen, occasionally communicated with foreign ambassadors by making speeches in Latin, the lingua franca of the day. After her father's death, while she was living with her widowed stepmother, Catherine Parr, in the King's Manor in Chelsea, Elizabeth requested that the famous Cambridge scholar Roger Ascham become her tutor. Ascham was deeply impressed by the erudition of his royal pupil and considered her his "brightest star." As the historian David Starkey writes in Elizabeth: Apprenticeship, the princess's household, "with its central mission to educate its young mistress and its close connections with St. John's, Cambridge, was genuinely a university extension college."4 (See fig. 2.) That the queen had a work or works by a specific author in her library is

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FIGURE 2. Princess Elizabeth of England, reading (aged c. 14). Panel painting, artist unknown. The Royal Collection, London. Copyright 2002 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

no guarantee that she knew them well—or at all. Elizabeth's own writings nowhere mention Christine de Pizan or any of her works. Because the queen's knowledge of written and spoken French was much admired in her day, however, and her appetite for learning is beyond doubt, it would not be presumptuous to assume that she was familiar with Christine's French manuscripts in the royal library. While Elizabeth I is not known for her concern for women simply because they were women, she was clearly concerned with her own potential or actual status as queen. Even when she was still quite young, Elizabeth was aware of her position in the Tudor line of succession. As J. J. Mcintosh has argued, Elizabeth's household was essentially a "campaign headquarters" long before she became queen.5 She understood that in order to reign effectively she would have to overcome the reluctance of the public, to say nothing of other contenders for the throne. After all, she would be a female monarch, and one considered illegitimate by those who did not recognize Henry's marriage to her mother, Anne Boleyn, as legal. A book that extolled the virtues of women, and especially of powerful female rulers, and furnished numerous historical examples of women famed for their political accomplishments or military victories should therefore have held considerable interest. Moreover, a number of its stories would have bolstered Elizabeth's position whenever privy councils and members of Parliament importuned her to marry. The drama of Henry VIII's marital exploits—surrounding his efforts to establish a firm hold on the crown by producing a male heir—had not been lost on either of his daughters. But each as a reigning queen chose her own way of dealing with the problem: Mary by struggling throughout her married life to produce a child; Elizabeth by never marrying at all. As she played one suitor against another, Elizabeth, a shrewd politician, insisted that she was married to her realm, to the frustration of those around her. Throughout her reign, the production of a male heir was high on the parliamentary agenda, as was the desire for a masculine head of state. Elizabeth, on one of the numberless occasions when concerns about her unmarried state were broached, advised Parliament: "I must confess my own mislike so much to strive against the matter, as if I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm—whereby my private person might

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be little set by—I would not forsake the single state to march with the greatest monarch of the world."6 And in a probably apocryphal story, when her privy council badgered her once too often about marrying, she replied acerbically: "Had I been born crested instead of cleft, ye would not address me thus."7 The Book ofthe City of Ladies tells the stories of numerous women saints who refused to marry. It seems unlikely that Elizabeth I of England would have identified with a saint, but Christine's work offers other examples of clever, virtuous, and highly successful women leaders who declined to marry. One of these was Nicaula, empress of Ethiopia and of the kingdoms of Arabia and Egypt. Nicaulawas "profoundly learned in allfieldsof knowledge, and she had so lofty a heart that she did not deign to marry, nor did she desire that any man be at her side." She governed, wrote Christine, "with wonderful prudence" and "instituted laws of far-reaching justice for governing her people."8 Another determined leader was the Roman Sempronia, whom Christine praised for her subtlety of mind and her powers of persuasion. She could "make any man act boldly and forcefully" and "all those who heard her speak follow her, if she wished."9 Christine also greatly admired the skill and intelligence of the Amazons, to whose courageous exploits she devoted several chapters of her book. The warrior queen Synoppe, for example, "had such a great and lofty heart, that not for a day in her life did she deign to couple with a man, but remained a virgin her entire lifetime." She also "revenged her mother," who had died in battle.10 In reading of Synoppe's revenge, one cannot but be reminded of the death of Elizabeth's own mother, whose beheading must surely have aroused some turbulent emotions in her daughter. From circa 1575 Elizabeth owned a magnificent locket ring that opened to show a profile portrait of herself as queen and in the ring's opposite half a likeness ofAnne Boleyn dressed in the fashion of her youth with a French hood and a jeweled square neckline. When closed this large ring is covered with table cut rubies, diamonds, and pearls. As David Starkey suggests, Elizabeth's ownership of this ring "provides evidence that she publicly acknowledged her mother," an acknowledgment for which we have no other testament.11 Although we do not know the methods and reasons for the distribution of Henry's tapestries in his children's garderobes—and we should remember that

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the large bulk of his tapestries were hanging or stored in his vast number of palaces—these particular sets in Mary's and Elizabeth's garderobes may have been selected by the princesses themselves. Each of Henry VIII's three children had a long list of treasures, described as "stuff," delivered to their respective garderobes at their father's death. Having seen the list of Elizabeth's possessions, I was curious to discover what "stuff" had gone to her siblings. Surprisingly, the ten-year-old Edward—but not Henry's older daughter, Mary—had also received what the inventory described as "sixpeces of Tapestry of the citie of ladies."12 My first thought was that this set of tapestries and Elizabeth's must be one and the same and that the inventory takers had simply made a mistake. But then I noticed that the dimensions of the panels differed slightly and that Edward's set was "lyned" whereas Elizabeth's apparently was not. Moreover, the fourth panel of Edward's set was described as "mener then the rest," that is, in less perfect condition than the others. No such notation appears in the description of Elizabeth's set. Remembering how common it was for a number of tapestries to illustrate the same subject matter, I was satisfied that both Elizabeth and her young brother, now King Edward VI, possessed a set of City of Ladies tapestries, stowed away in their separate garderobes. Even if it was not unusual for the same topic to be illustrated in various tapestries, one might perhaps have expected the two daughters to have been interested in this particular subject rather than the ten-year-old son. Among the possessions of the twenty-four-year-old sister, Mary, were twenty-eight items of tapestry, including a scene of a "woman in childbed" and another depicting the "destruction of children under Herod." Elizabeth's tapestry collection, comprising thirteen items, was only about half the size of Mary's. The City of Ladies tapestries and four pieces of a tapestry depicting the tasks of Hercules stand out as the only ones telling a story. The remainder mostly showed "verdures" or greenery, scenes of gardens, hunting, and hawking, or an assortment of birds and beasts. When I first learned of the City of Ladies tapestries stored in Elizabeth's garderobe, I imagined them hanging on the walls—a notion I quickly abandoned when I consulted the original inventory in the British Library and realized how remarkably large this set of tapestries was. Although it was not clear

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in which of Henry's many palaces Elizabeth's garderobe was located, I suspected it might have been Hampton Court. I subsequently wasted some time trying to understand why such large and valuable tapestries would have been stored in what one major study of Tudor palaces defines as a lavatory or toilet.13 Indeed, the Beefeater guides at Hampton Court explained authoritatively that in Tudor times lavatories were called "garderobes." Yet I knew that in European palaces of the late Middles Ages and early Renaissance garderobes were used for storing precious objects such as artistic treasures and books, the famous Mediciguardaroba being a case in point. The duke of Urbino, renowned for his patronage of great artists, likewise used his guardaroba for the safekeeping of important paintings, 14 while the duke of Savoy's garderobe functioned as a storage library. In fact, a 1498 inventory of the manuscripts housed in the "garde roube basse," or lower garderobe, at the Savoy ducal castle at Chambery lists five manuscripts of Christine de Pizan's works, including one of "Le livre de la cite des dames." 15 The relationship in meaning between garderobe and wardrobe is neatly illustrated in a poem by Andre de la Vigne, written in 1514 following the death of Anne of Brittany: A LA GARDE-ROBE

Trop piteuse et povre garde-robe, Pleure ton deul, regrette ta maistresse. Puisqu'a present n'a plus en garde-robe Habillement de la royne et duchesse. TO THE GARDE-ROBE

Most piteous and sad garderobe, cry for your sorrow and the loss of your mistress. As now you are deprived of all the clothing of your queen and duchess.16 Even today, in European theaters, museums, and other public places visitors leave their coats in the "garderobe," namely, the cloakroom. According to both the Dictionnaire deVancienfrancais of the Librairie Larousse and the multivolume Grand Larousse, &garderobe is an alcove, an armoire, or a chaise per-

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cee, or closes tool—that is, a chamber pot enclosed in a stool or box.17 The third meaning is clearly a euphemism, like "bathroom" or the English "water closet." It thus seems safe to assume that English garderobes were storerooms rather than places where the denizens of royal households relieved themselves. All the same, these storerooms were surely not large enough that multiple huge lengths of tapestry could be hung from their walls. Presumably under the supervision of the royal tapissier, precious tapestries were rolled up before being stored. As the manuscript of the inventory makes clear, the "stuff" delivered to Elizabeth's garderobe was awaiting further removal to a new place of residence. During her youth Elizabeth moved back and forth between the palaces of Greenwich, where she was born; Hatfield, her own favorite; and Hampton Court, where she lived comfortably and on friendly terms with her father's last wife, Catherine Parr, while Henry was still alive. After he died, Elizabeth remained with his widow at the King's Manor in Chelsea. During her sister Mary's reign, from 1553 to 1558, she was often at Hatfield, although for a while she was more or less a prisoner at the small palace at Woodstock, near Oxford, owing to fears of her potential popularity among Protestant subjects. But by the age of twenty-five she had returned to Hatfield. There, on the morning of 17 November 1558, a group of privy councillors, accompanied by her loyal supporter, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, brought her Mary's ring as a sign that the queen was dead, thereby announcing Elizabeth's own accession to the throne. Despite the cold of the morning, the young queen was reported to have received this announcement when reading the Bible in Greek under an old oak tree in the grounds of Hatfield Palace. As part of my search for Elizabeth's set of tapestries I made the journey from London to Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, now a splendid Jacobean construction built by Robert Cecil, the son of Elizabeth's chief minister, William Cecil. The archivist, in his comfortable library tucked away in the basement of the great house, confirmed that no records whatsoever remained at Hatfield from the days when Elizabeth had inhabited the original house. During the Tudor period the original structure was known as the Royal Palace of Hatfield. Only one wing of this grand old fifteenth-century palace survives in the

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grounds of the Jacobean house. The Old Palace, as it is now called, with its ancient soft red-brick exterior and its intricately vaulted ship roof of oak and chestnut, was carefully restored by the fourth marquis of Salisbury, also a descendant of Elizabeth's chief minister. In this lovely old building, set in the midst of an exquisite series of gardens, with their famous yew hedges and the stunning Holly Walk, it is possible to lose one's sense of the twentieth century and imagine encountering the young Elizabeth. Here, in an assembly hall that still survives in the Old Palace, the young queen held her first council of state, stressing in her speech before her lords and advisers both her divine right, and her right as a woman, to govern. She reminded her audience of the monarch's two bodies, the natural human body and the abstract body politic, which passes from one monarch to the next. "I am but one body naturally considered," she declared, "though by His permission a body politic to govern."18 The hall she used for this first meeting of state is large enough to accommodate the six panels of the City of Ladies tapestries, and I would like to think of them hanging there on that occasion. "Any tapestries?" I asked the Hatfield archivist. Oh yes, there are tapestries, very famous tapestries: The Four Seasons, made by Ralph Sheldon in Warwickshire about 1611 and probably the finest English tapestries of their period. But the tapestries I was looking for were probably Flemish and were certainly made before the middle of the sixteenth century, and there the archivist could not help me. He knew nothing of what Elizabeth might have brought with her as a young girl, although he drew my attention to the most famous Elizabethan portraits of the queen, the Rainbow portrait and the Ermine portrait, both of which are now given pride of place at Hatfield. The latter portrays the queen with a small ermine, symbol of purity and virginity—two important themes in representations of Elizabeth—sitting up on her arm, sporting a gold collar in the shape of a crown.19 Evidently, no City of Ladies tapestries survived at Hatfield. Apart from the question of their eventual fate, there were other puzzles to solve in connection with Elizabeth's set of tapestries. How, for example, had they come into Henry VTII's possession in the first place, and was there a par-

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ticular reason he might have wanted to acquire a set of City of Ladies tapestries? I decided to devote myself to these questions and to defer the problem of what happened to these tapestries during and after Elizabeth's reign. Henry VIII's father, Henry VII, was himself a keen collector of tapestries. One or both of the City ofLadies sets later found among Henry VIII's possessions may thus originally have been in his father's collection. But no such tapestries are mentioned in the wills or financial records of either Henry VII or his wife, Elizabeth of York.20 It seemed more likely, then, that Henry VIII had acquired the tapestries himself. As we know, Henry VII had arranged the betrothal of young Prince Henry to Catherine of Aragon after his firstborn, Prince Arthur, her husband of five months, died in 1503. But Henry VII and Catherine's father, Ferdinand of Aragon, bickered and bartered endlessly about Catherine's dowry while the poor young woman languished in poverty and loneliness in England.21 Finally, in 1509, Henry VII died, wherepon the dashing Prince Hal, as he was known, succeeded to the throne. Shortly thereafter, he married his widowed sister-in-law, Catherine, six years his senior. As part of their political maneuvering, the two fathers, Henry VII and Ferdinand, had agreed to support each other against their common enemy, France. Once married to Ferdinand's daughter, Henry VIII continued this policy. A daring and adventurous young king, Henry VIII, at twenty-two, was eager to display his military prowess by reconquering the Burgundian territories of France. In 1513 he therefore decided to lead a campaign against France. His immediate ally was the Habsburg monarch Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, whose son, Philip, was married to Ferdinand's daughter and Catherine of Aragon's sister—Juana (later known as Juana la Loca or Juana the Mad). Thus, for the moment, the Habsburg-Tudor connection was a built-in part of the English-Spanish alliance. With the intention of conquering at least a part of France—his ultimate ambition was the French crown itself—Henry rode off to Dover, from where he would set sail for Flanders. He was accompanied on the first leg of his journey by his tearful queen, Catherine, who was concerned for his safety in battle. He designated her as regent while he was out of the country, and she took

QUEEN ELIZABETH'S TAPESTRIES

41

her duties seriously to the point of coping with the renewed warfare that arose between the English and the Scots. Henry and his army of eleven thousand men made a magnificent, and daunting, display. They so frightened the French troops that, on 16 August 1513, Henry claimed his first victory, without the loss of a single man, at Therouanne, in what later became known as the Battle of the Spurs. About a month later, on 24 September, English and imperial troops marched into another Flemish city, Tournai. I had come thus far in reading about Henry VIII when I realized that here he was in the heart of Flanders and at the very time when Flemish tapestries ranked as the most sought-after artistic treasures. He was not only in Flanders but in Tournai, a town that in 1513 was at the height of its renown for tapestry production. I thus began to look for a connection between his visit to that city and the tapestries for which the town was justly famed. Almost at once I made a significant discovery. Henry was welcomed with great fanfare in Tournai. His official hosts were the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I, and Maximilian's daughter, the Flemish regent, Margaret ofAustria. Margaret had traveled to Tournai from her court at Mechelen to greet Henry, and she too was warmly received by the citizens of Tournai. According to long-standing tradition, when a reigning monarch— or, in this case, an appointed regent—arrived in a city, the occasion was marked by the presentation of a splendid gift, typically of the region's most outstanding product.22 During Henry's triumphant entry into Tournai, the town presented to his royal hostess, Margaret, a magnificent gift of Flemish tapestry: a six-panel set depicting the City ofLadies. I now knew of the existence of three sets of City ofLadies tapestries during the sixteenth century, one of which was clearly an example of Flemish tapestry at the height of its glory. Before continuing to pursue the English side of the equation, I decided to learn more about late medieval tapestry production in general and, in particular, about the gift Margaret of Austria had received from Tournai.

42

QUEEN ELIZABETH'S TAPESTRIES

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