Despite the tools provided by recent studies of female authority in medieval and early modern Europe for examining how women of the past wielded influence, old narratives of female promiscuity, intriguing, incompetence, frivolity, and cupidity continue to circulate in the form of what we might think of as “throw­aways” in larger histories.

In what follows I focus on some of the throwaways that have been aimed at Isabeau of Bavaria to explore the perduring tendency to base assessments of women tangential to a larger study on outdated tropes from classic secondary sources.

In the previous chapter I discussed the need to take into account the specific­ity of Isabeau’s regency. In this chapter I focus on modern misogynistic descrip­tions of her—that she was obese, that she was dazed and confused, that she had an affair with Louis of Orleans, that she could not speak French—making the case for going to the primary sources and reading them critically and carefully when secondary sources resort to these old chestnuts in place of primary docu­mentation. The once-reviled Isabeau has been undergoing rehabilitation since at least the mid-twentieth century. Regarding some of the misogynistic anecdotes discussed here, however, their authors either ignore this scholarship in favor of secondary sources that are sometimes centuries old, or indicate that they are aware of at least some of the scholarship and cite it, but do not explain why they

reject the rest of it.¹ To be clear, I do not insist that there are always “correct” or “incorrect” interpretations of Isabeau’s career: although some interpretations are verifiable whereas others are clearly false, or, at least, unverifiable, the primary sources leave much to the imagination. Moreover, the war with which Isabeau is associated, the civil war between the Orleanists, or Armagnacs, and Burgundians, was long and the queen’s role in it relatively short; therefore the harm of relying on such anecdotes may seem negligeable. Still, I hope to make the point that historians have an obligation to encourage students and readers more generally to recognize emotionally compelling but misleading narratives for what they are. I am not suggesting that series like the Tudors, Versailles, or the Borgias, which capitalize on highly sexualized and/or stereotypical depictions of women should not be made. On the contrary. But different levels of accuracy are demanded for different genres. It is imperative that scholarly essays distinguish between black legend and information based on careful readings of primary sources.