Chapter 5: The ‘Government of Women’: Delegating Power and Regency

Abstract

Despite (or because of) the exclusion of women from the French throne, the queen could temporarily rule in the event of her husband’s premature demise or during his absence. In reality, the female right to rule—which would later appear natural in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because the government of queen mothers appeared to have stretched back to ‘ancient times’—was first an occasional practice (the regency of Blanche of Castile, Saint Louis’s mother) before becoming the object of a gradual legal construction (in 1294, 1374 and 1407). Two queens acted as regents during the Late Middle Ages: Joan of Burgundy, while her husband Philip VI was away on military campaigns, and Isabeau of Bavaria, during her husband Charles VI’s bouts of madness. Historians have portrayed them as bad queens. They were stigmatized for having ruled and were inevitably considered as having been greedy, lusty and even traitresses to the ‘nation of France’.