The Queen’s Library: Image Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477–1514 by Cynthia J. Brown

Abstract

des rapports sociaux” (135). For Barjonet, such assessments underscore the fact that Schober did not abandon “toutes ses critiques de Zola après la réunification, malgré une approche littéraire moderne” (135). In West Germany, where social criticism was less prominent during the post-war period, scholars took more interest in structures and forms characteristic of Zola’s novels. Among French critics, on the other hand, the centenary of the writer’s birth prompted a reexamination of his letters and manuscripts. This renewed interest in Zola, reflected in works by Poulet, Bachelard, Sartre, Barthes, Butor, Deleuze, Picon, Mitterand, and Borie, established Zola’s role as a modern myth-maker. This study shows the extent to which literary interpretation was inseparable from society, politics, and history during the second half of the twentieth century. Since the end of the Cold War, few critics have claimed to possess a single, valid approach to finding meaning in texts, and Barjonet links the “timidité théorique” characteristic of literary scholarship today to “idéologues [qui] ont dévalorisé la notion de la vérité” so that “sa quête n’est pas à l’ordre du jour” (257). Barjonet’s volume on Zola provides an intricate examination of the ways in which literary criticism reflects the ideas of readers as much as the thoughts of writers. This intriguing work invites students and teachers of literature to consider the fundamental role that political and social forces play in our own reading and understanding of texts. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder BROWN, CYNTHIA J. The Queen’s Library: Image Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477–1514. Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8122-4282-9. Pp. xi + 384. $79.95. This study examines the images of women in the manuscripts and printed books associated with Anne of Brittany and her court. Focusing on non-devotional books, Brown considers the works produced for Anne’s court as “cultural artifacts [...] that provide insight into how women’s roles as political strategists and cultural figures were translated by and for those in their entourage and the world at large” (7). Her net cast widely to include a variety of texts, including descriptions of royal entries, political panegyrics, catalogues of famous women, and the account of Anne’s funeral, as well as their illustrations, she seeks “to uncover the potential conflict that surfaced in male-authored, male-illustrated works for and about women” (12). Brown’s detailed analysis of both texts and images in a constellation of texts, manuscripts, and books resists easy summarization; as a result, I only briefly touch on the chapters, each of which can be read profitably on its own, even as they contribute to her overall argument. The study begins with the narratives written and illustrated to celebrate the royal entries and weddings of Anne of Brittany, her cousin Anne de Foix, and her daughter Claude de France. The sumptuously illustrated manuscripts and books, commissioned in several cases by Anne herself, “consciously or unconsciously rearticulated and refashioned” the real-life celebrations, thereby doubly staging women of power as “women in performance” (20). Brown’s teasing out of the interplay between representation and allegory, performance and spectacle as centered on the figure of the queen provides an engaging and incisive opening to her study as a whole. The elements highlighted in this chapter—the importance of female Reviews 1027 personifications and the ambiguous place they created for the women so depicted, as well as the performative functions of both ceremonies and their commemorative books—are themes to which Brown returns throughout the volume. Chapter two considers personification more closely, exploring how male authors and artists sought and praised female patrons in texts such as La Vigne’s Ressource de la Chrestienté, Marot’s Voyage de Gênes, and de Seyssel’s Louenges du roy Loys XIIe de ce nom. Focusing on the female figures of Magesté Royalle in La Vigne’s text (intended to personify Charles VIII himself) and the mourning, violated city of Gênes in the copy of Marot’s text illustrated by Anne’s favorite artist, Jean Bourdichon, Brown explores the contradictory images of women of power...