Bearing the unbearable, sharing the joy
Courtly education for men and women of the time consisted of two incompatible ethical frameworks mandating two different personae with two sets of practices. As morality became increasingly detached from religion from the twelfth century on, even theologians assumed that, in addition to “salvific” virtue, a parallel type ordered morals in political and social activity.[484] Noble men and women would have developed salvific virtue, which prized Augustinian-style self-abasement, with the aid of their confessors.
They would have acquired the second, which demanded minute attention to rank and worldly goods, by observing courtiers steeped in such works as Denis Foulechat’s translation of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, itself an “adaptation of a Ciceronian rhetorical ethics.”[485]Two guides for female comportment to which Louise and Marguerite would have had access, Christine de Pizan’s Livre des trois vertus and Anne of France’s Enseignements a sa fille, which owes much to Christine’s work, undertake to resolve the tension between the ethical frameworks and their personae. These guidebooks, I suggest, describe the development of the two personae within the still larger framework of the virtuous habitus.
The guidebooks deal specifically with creating effective courtly personae, Christine devoting sections of her text to worldly prudence (“prudence mon- daine”) and justified hypocrisy (“juste hypocrisie”), where she praises the “sense and prudence of the wise woman who knows how to dissimulate wisely (“dis- simuler saigement....”).[486] Anne instructs her readers to maintain an impassive, docile face with “eyes to observe all and see nothing, ears to hear all and know nothing, a tongue to answer everyone without emitting a prejudicial word.”[487]
And yet, both guidebooks are also deeply invested in creating a female subject who admits her helplessness vis-a-vis worldly matters and abandons herself to divine will.
Each emphasizes in its opening chapters the need constantly to be aware of God’s watchful eye. Christine’s narrator goads her reader: “And you, who are a simple little woman, who has no strength, power or authority except given to you by others, do you think that you can dominate and surmount the world at will?”[488] Anne’s narrator issues a similar warning: ““[H]ave faith in absolutely nothing: not in the intelligence, strength or discernment that you believe yourself to have; rather, live in great fear and always be on your guard so that you will not be fooled..”[489]The notion of habitus clarifies how the guidebooks understand the relationship between the two personae. Originating in the Aristotelian hexis (the term of course has been made famous by Pierre Bourdieu, who uses it to explain how modern social classes reproduce themselves at the individual level, but I am interested here in its medieval usage), the term habitus for medieval thinkers referred to an individual’s tendency to act in good or evil ways such that the individual became virtuous or evil. Thus habits and innate disposition (one’s predominant humors in medieval thinking) stood in a reciprocal relationship: the repetition of good or evil deeds affected one’s innate disposition. The notion can thus be productively compared to Reddy’s “emotives,” to which I referred in my opening paragraphs. For Reddy, emotion occurs when “an array of loosely linked thought material is activated, simultaneously, and translated by the subject into a socially-produced form of expression. But, most pertinent here, these forms of expression, emotives, are “self-altering,” that is, they both translate the mass of thought material and modify the speaker, the speaker taking on the emotion that she describes.[490]
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Ambrose, Augustine, and other of the Church Fathers refer to habitus, but Aquinas gives it a detailed examination in the Summa Theologica, placing a long section devoted to it (ST 1a2ae, 49—89) just after an analysis of the passions (ST 1a2ae, 22—48).[491] Passions are of the body, but, in humans, subject to reason.
However, reason’s control is not absolute, because, being of the body, the passions are incited by organic conditions and may arrive suddenly and intensely (ST 1a2ae, 24). Aquinas then turns to how passions are modulated by reason in a discussion of what he calls habitus, the acquired disposition through which an individual processes passions. Drawing on Aristotle, he explains that habitus, developed through repetition, integrates passions and reason (ST 1a2ae, 51, especially article 2).Although Christine and Anne advocate the development of two separate personae, their mandates that the lady obey God and acknowledge her own essential weakness come first in their instructions. Through regular, heartfelt devotion, the lady will develop a virtuous habitus, so that even when enacting courtly norms of rank and engaging in politics, she will safely process the passions that come with court life; she will integrate reason and passion, to take up Aquinas’s formula.[492] To return to Louise and Marguerite, then, it is not accurate to imagine their double personae as an exterior courtly attitude masking a frightened interior, as I noted earlier. The personae, as Christine and Anne demonstrate, are interdependent, exerting checks on each other, although enacted at different times in different situations. Thus they both move between inner and outer, all the more so given “premodern beliefs that the body was filled with moving currents of air in the bloodstream, that the air taken within the body became part of the stuff of consciousness,” in other words, that bodies were not tightly contained.[493] I will return to this point.
The purpose of the formidable political persona that I have been describing is evident, and, although much could be said about how certain words and gestures might create the confidence necessary to act, in what remains I have space only to briefly discuss the fearful persona. As I have just suggested, this persona was central to the ethics of court life that Christine and Anne propose.
But to fully appreciate this persona’s emotional purpose, it is necessary to turn from Reddy, for whom bodies are bounded (an individual’s emotions remain within him orher) to Teresa Brennan. Affective piety of the late Middle Ages prized compassion, redistributing grief through figures like the Virgin at the foot of the cross or the suffering Christ: affects have an “energetic dimension,” writes Brennan, and “they can enhance or deplete.”[494] The transmission of affect “was once conscious to some degree in Europe (we do not know how far) but is now (generally) unconscious there and throughout the West,” she explains.[495] Our ancestors sensed that “complex human affects are communicated by chemical and electrical entrainment....”[496]
Keeping Reddy’s emotives and Brennan’s transfer of affect in mind, I turn back to Marguerite, first, to a particularly rich set of letters between her and Briponnet composed during the difficult months in spring of 1524. Marguerite, describing the burdensome tasks that she had assumed because of Louise’s illness, employs the emotives of religious devotion, writing that “all these things that I know to be naturally unbearable to me without any aid, the Almighty carried them without my feeling it in flesh or spirit.[497] It is not important here to make a convincing case for the reality of affective transmission: what matters is that Marguerite is not writing metaphorically. She and Briponnet believe that pain can be shared, in this case through prayer, and thus mitigated, or, to put it another way, that what we would think of as agency can be dispersed among different subjects. Briponnet responds by reinforcing Marguerite’s idea: “We are relieved of our great tribulations only through conformity to the will of the Almighty. Mere flesh and blood are incapable of bearing the things that He who carries all for us makes us bear joyfully, carrying our sins and even ourselves..”[498] Later he writes that “[s]harpness of infirmity is bearable for the one who has suffered all, carrying and bearing through his mercy our falls and stumblings, having carried all for us, but still suffering with us (“compatissant) in our infirmity.”[499]
To return now to the points that early modern bodies were filled with moving air and that innate disposition was conceived of as humoral, the transfer of affect is effected in part by means of the humors.
Marguerite’s language reveals her hope of heating her cold, dark humors so that she will eventually be able to transcend earthly cares. Early in their correspondence she had marvelled that Briponnet and Master Michel’s letters had opened her eyes, turning her towardMarguerite of Navarre, Louise of Savoy and Intimacy | 143 the light, and she begs that they continue to write to her so that her “poor frozen heart, dead with the cold, might feel the spark of love and be consumed by it and burn to a cinder.”[500] She refers to her frozen heart in a number of letters. The burning love that Marguerite seeks, I suggest, is the literal heat, transmitted to her through the letters, which, according to humoral theory, could transform cold, dark, and negative melancholy to a positive version, white and natural bile (“candida bilis et naturalis”).[501] Such fiery love, in turn, had the capacity to generate a vision of true wisdom.
In a more mundane context, Louise and Marguerite speak literally when they note the material effects of good and bad news on their bodies, which transferred emotion in a “two-way, inward and outward movement.”[502] Louise expresses her reciprocal transmission of emotion with her captured son through the imagery of a single heart: they share, through their love, one heart, one will, and one thought.[503] Mother and daughter send the newly captured king a joint letter supplicating that the letter presented to Franpois be “received with the affection (“afecyon”) — meaning here a literal movement of the soul — that they send him with all their hearts.[504] A more everyday way of expressing the transmission was to describe the physical results of good news. In a letter begging the king that if God gives her the grace to be able to journey to Spain to see him he let her know what she should do and whom she should bring, Marguerite assures her brother that although Louise had been assailed by gout and cares the day before, the pleasure (“aise”) that hope of his release had vanquished the pain so that it was just bit of inflammation.
Louise was so happy that Marguerite had no complaints to pass on (“que je ne la plains de nul mal”).[505] In December of the same year, Marguerite, then in Madrid, writes to the king that she had received a letter from Louise with the news that although her gout had been very bad news of the king’s good health had completely cured her of all pain.[506]Marguerite expresses her understanding of how emotion works—as affective transmission and as humorally based—in the verse letter of 1530 to Louise to which I referred above. In the first lines of the poem, she assumes her fearful
persona, ruefully remarking on the futility of the letter that she is composing and hoping that her mother will not be offended by her, Marguerite’s, descriptions of her immense joy at the homecoming. Such description is unnecessary, she writes: Louise already recognizes Marguerite’s happiness because they share the emotion. It is written in Louise’s flesh, indeed, engraved on the tablets of her heart (“Ce que partez escript en vostre chair... grave sur les tables /De vostre cueur”). Marguerite thus contents herself with reproducing, although in a fainter version, her mother’s experience, explaining that she simply reiterates what is already manifest elsewhere. Although her letter adds nothing new to the happy occasion, which properly belongs to Louise, a thin line of smoke issuing from the great flame of joy (“yssant de la grant flamme de ceste joye”) in Marguerite’s heart, via the ‘tube’ that is her pen, bears witness to the contents of her burning heart.[507] Although the smoke — her writing — disperses quickly in the wind, the fire in her heart causes her to live by, in, and for Louise.[508] Marguerite “burns” in response to the shared joy, and, although she does not speak explicitly of the humors, we can imagine that when thus heated the black bile that had held her in a negative state of melancholy became yellow, thereby transforming her melancholy into a positive state. The ardent Marguerite shares her family’s joy even though physically distant. Louise has her grandsons before her very eyes.[509] Others have described the joy written on Louise’s face, but only Marguerite senses the liqueur that flows through her mother’s veins, intoxicating her.[510] Marguerite and Louise share a mutual will, so much that Fortune, vanquished by the mother, comes after the daughter; in other words, Fortune has been foiled by Louise’s joy and so prevents Marguerite from joining the family reunion, from being in the one place she longs to be.[511]
The royal family drew upon the image of the royal Trinity to glorify the king and authorize Louise and Marguerite’s political activity on his behalf. But they also used the image among themselves to express their love for each other. Louise’s attachment to her son has been compared unfavorably at times to her feelings for her daughter.[512] And yet, the mother willingly shared her own glory by making her daughter an integral part of royal family politics, something that she
Marguerite of Navarre, Louise of Savoy and Intimacy | 145 did not need to do.[513] The pay-off for this inclusion can be gleaned by returning to the image of the Trinity. As Richard of St. Victor had once explained in a treatise on the Holy Trinity to which evangelical author Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples devoted a commentary in 1519, perfect love shows itself not just in reciprocal love between two, but also in the shared love of two for another.[514] Louise and Marguerite, as I hope to have shown, were each other’s pillars of support, their mutual desire to support Francois strengthening their own relationship. In their intense attention to their own and each other’s weakness and their avowals of dependency, they shared their burdens and joys, engaging in a “perfect love” that heartened them until Louise’s death in 1532. To return to my opening paragraph, Marguerite’s anxious persona was anything but a mere epistolary convention. It was a central element in a sustaining emotional regime.