Froissart's gaps
Froissart begins his episode in St. Denis, some five miles north of Paris. It is noon on 20 August 1389, and Queen Isabeau of Bavaria and Duchess of Touraine Valentina Visconti are about to begin the procession south to the city.[189] Although Isabeau had married Charles VI in 1385, she has not yet been crowned because the king has only recently assumed personal rule of the kingdom.
The previous autumn in Reims on the return from warring in Flanders, he had called a meeting of his council, apparently planned beforehand because there seemed to be no pressing business to discuss. The rationale for the meeting, however, was quickly revealed by the cardinal of Laon, Pierre Aycelin de Montagu, who announced that the king, then twenty years old, no longer required the tutelage of his uncles and had decided to rule for himself.[190] A magnificent six-day celebration was then planned to mark this rite of passage. At the same time, Isabeau would be crowned and Valentina, newly married to the king’s brother and most intimate counselor, Louis, then duke of Touraine, would make her official entry.And yet, picking up the account of Isabeau’s entry and coronation at this point omits something crucial, something that scholars who rely on Froissart for evidence that Isabeau could not speak French miss. Let’s begin again, focusing on the information Froissart himself gives about his chronicle narration. In other words, let’s focus carefully on what the primary sources actually say.
On the twentieth day ofAugust in the year of our Lord 1389, writes Froissart, so many people were gathered inside and outside of Paris that it was a marvel to see.[191] They had flocked to watch Isabeau of Bavaria, queen since 1385 but not yet crowned, make her entry into the city. The six-day festivities were to be magnificent but also traditional.
As the chronicler Michel Pintoin, the Monk of Saint Denis, explains, King Charles had enlisted the esteemed Blanche, Duchess of Orleans, the kingdom’s expert on tradition, to peruse the manuscripts of Saint Denis for information on earlier entries and coronations.[192] Earlier in his chronicle Pintoin had related that Blanche had also been Isabeau’s first mentor in France, assuming charge of the girl when she arrived at the royal chateau of Creil just after her marriage.[193] Posthumous daughter of King Charles IV (r.1324-28) and his second wife, Jeanne d’Evreux, and married to Philip of Orleans, second son of King Philip VI (r. 1328-), Blanche took her duties seriously, as Froissart’s descriptions of the elaborate pageantry demonstrate.These descriptions are generally accepted as accurate, because Froissart explains that he was there, in person, to record the festival for posterity. Preceding his long narration of the entry and coronation, Froissart recounts that he had been
in Schoonhoven, in Holland, visiting his patron Guy of Blois, when he decided to return to France to record the events for his massive chronicle-in-progress.[194] Of the greatest significance for understanding his depiction of Isabeau, Froissart also reports his method for recording such an enormous, multi-faceted set of festivals. He explains that he returned to France for information on “the meeting that the French and English had held at Leulinghem [where Charles VI had declared his independence from his uncles] and also for the very noble festival that would be held in Paris for the entry of Queen Isabeau of France, who had not yet made her formal entrance.”[195] [196] His plan was to record in his chronicle things that he had personally witnessed: “I intended to write and register everything that I saw....”50 But no single human being could witness all of the events of such a festival with his own eyes; therefore, Froissart adds that he would also rely on things that he had been told first-hand: “had heard said about what had truly happened at the entry and the coming into Paris of the queen of France..”[197] In his recounting of the entry and coronation festivities, Froissart does not overtly differentiate between what he personally witnessed and what he only heard about from others. Froissart further gives the many pageants that performed for the procession as they made their way through Paris similarly detailed treatment. The pageants’ traditional iconography created parallels between the queen’s entry into Paris and the assumption of the Queen of heaven, he explains, enacting scenes from Virgin’s life.[198] Reinforcing the message of the pageants, the date of the festival’s opening draws a parallel between the queen’s entry into Paris and the Virgin’s into heaven: the octave Sunday of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, that is, that holy day’s octave Sunday. At the first gate into Paris on the road from Saint Denis, the Bastide, Froissart writes, young children dressed like angels sing melodiously against a starry sky. Alongside this celestial choir, an image of Our Lady holds a baby waving a toy made of a large nut. The sky is richly adorned with the arms of France and Bavaria.[199] A series of pageants is described in similar detail as we follow the queen and her entourage through the streets to the cathedral of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, we are told, all descend, the four dukes, the queen, the others riding on palfreys and in litters, and proceed into the cathedral for the coronation. But once the enormous party vanishes into the church, the flood of detail dries up. All in all, the chronicler uses over 1500 words to describe the procession through Paris. To the coronation, the reason for the procession and highlights of the festival, which went on for days, he allots fewer than one hundred. He does not mention the queen’s ritual anointing or any of the traditions that the duchess Blanche presumably had uncovered. He writes only that the queen of France was conducted and led into the church to the choir at the great altar, and there she knelt and prayed as she saw fit and offered four golden cloths and offered to the treasury of Notre-Dame the lovely crown that the angels had put on her head at the Gate to Paris, where she entered as described above, and immediately were readied messieurs Jehan de la Riviere and Jehan le Merchier who gave her one of the richest [crowns] that ever was and the bishop named above and the four aforementioned dukes put it on her head.[200] The summary description of the lengthy and magnificent anointing and coronation reveals that Froissart’s sources for the event were not eye-witnesses. This is not surprising. Had Froissart or his friends managed to crowd inside the cathedral, surely they would not have been among the select few near enough the altar to see the events. For this part of the festival he was working with hearsay. A similar move from a flood of detail to a brief mention occurs much later in Froissart’s descriptions of the gifts that the bourgeois of Paris presented to the king, the queen and, finally, Valentina, each in their own chambers at the Hotel Saint Pol. It is obvious that the chronicler either saw for himself or received copiously detailed eye-witness reports about what went on in the chambers of the king and Valentina. However, an examination of the order of events suggests that Froissart did not observe Isabeau receiving her gifts. According to Froissart’s description, some forty of the city’s most notable men carried litters with gifts through the city, arriving finally at the Hotel Saint Pol. In contrast, Froissart cannot have been present when Isabeau received her gifts. He enumerates the gifts given to Isabeau, which he would have seen being carried through the streets by the two men dressed like a bear and a unicorn, but he has nothing at all to say about the presentation of the gifts. This is easily explained: he was still in the king’s chambers, observing the events noted above when Isabeau accepted presents in her own chambers. He could not register the queen’s response to her gifts if he was not there. However, the presentation to Valentina is carefully detailed, like the king’s, and, once again, Froissart records the recipient’s response to the gifts.[203] This too is easily explained. By the time of the third presentation Froissart (or his eye-witness informant) had moved to Valentina’s chamber to hear her words. No one can know for certain how much of the festival Froissart observed. Still, the explanation that I propose here makes sense of the gaps in his narrative passed over in silence by those who attribute Isabeau’s apparent silence to an inability to speak French rather than Froissart’s whereabouts during the time that the queen received her presents. More definitive, however, my hypothesis resolves a contradiction in the last sentence of Froissart’s section on the entry and coronation, a contradiction that like the narrative gap has been passed over in silence by other readers of the gift-giving scene. 55 56 57 58 14: 17-20. 14: 19. 14: 20. 14: 25. My emphasis. Froissart himself, then, shows us that the queen could speak French: how did she manage to articulate her appreciation “grandly” on Friday if on Tuesday she was incapable of expressing herself in the language? Another fact that makes an inability to speak French improbable is that Isabeau served as a mediator between the warring princes. Such a job requires a delicate touch, a skill at diplomacy, which would be impossible without fluency in the language in which negotiations were being conducted. Frequently depicted mediating in chronicles, Isabeau has left traces of her words in documents that record moments from such negotiations. In a document created by the chancery but written as if in her own voice, she describes the procedures that she will employ for reinstating peace between Louis of Orleans and Philip of Burgundy, explaining that by common agreement, she will, as she sees fit, question, seek, and envision ways and manners by which she can find and keep the peace between them, and that she will advise the king on what transpires.[205] Nor is there any sign of a translator in her early years at the French court. When Isabeau first became queen of France she had only one German attendant, Catherine Fastavarin. As of 1396, she began to acquire ladies-in-waiting from Bavaria, but did she really live from 1385 until 1396 speaking only German with a single friend, and not learning French?[206] There is also the matter of Isabeau’s library. The queen’s accounts show that as of1387 she carried a leather-covered trunk with her to transport books in the vernacular (“livres et romans”) when she traveled; that she had her books repaired; and that as of 1393 she employed a librarian.[207] Are we to believe that this was all for show, that a woman who could not even speak French carried books in French with her when she traveled and tended to them so carefully? Why would she have gone to such lengths, especially since it would have been obvious to all if she really could not speak French? Understanding medieval women requires us to return to the primary sources, to re-read them from perspectives appropriate to the enterprise. It seems odd that, in a time of ever-more-easily accessed primary sources and awareness of long-held male biases in writing about women of the Middle Ages, narratives like those I have noted here, continue to circulate. It may be too much to ask that medieval Misogynistic Throwaways: Case of Isabeau of Bavaria | 65 historians examine the primary sources and recent scholarship on every woman they mention. I close, however, by suggesting that it would be useful to check up on secondary sources that deploy obviously misogynistic tropes, particularly in those sources—numerous in the case of Isabeau—that do not document their claims.