Isabella Of France Research Articles

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

Rumour and reputation management in fourteenth-century England: Isabella of France in text and image

ABSTRACT The extraordinary political actions of Queen Isabella of France between 1325 and 1330 provoked intense public discussion, partly as a result of deliberate efforts made by the queen, her allies and her opponents to influence public opinion through the dissemination of defamatory rumours. This essay explores the role of art and architecture in this process, discussing stained glass, manuscript illuminations and satirical protest badges. Analysis of the east window of the St Lucy Chapel of St Frideswide’s Priory, Oxford, in the context of local rumours and information sources suggests that even the most expensive, public, permanent and monumental artistic commissions could be drawn into more ephemeral political debates. Intersecting with defamatory political discourses from which the majority of chronicle accounts sought to keep a careful distance, these sources offer a new perspective on the norms of early fourteenth-century English political culture.

Madame Meed:Fauvel, Isabella, and the French Circumstances ofPiers Plowman

This essay returns to the uses of the Roman de Fauvel in Piers Plowman, in order to show the unusual depth of Langland’s engagement with that poem and Fauvel’s close association with Isabella of France, Edward II’s much-maligned widow - and in turn to claim that the figure of Meed begins in part as a topical satire on Isabella herself. In this and other ways, Meed epitomizes ‘topicality’. Yet the process of revising Piers Plowman (the essay argues) included increasing distance from any one topical meaning. The essay traces the literary and historical reputation of Isabella, and measures that against more immediate evidence of her resolutely pro-French patronage and cultural agenda in the realm of Essex and London to which the poet was probably connected. This context helps explain Langland’s response to the topical Fauvel, a surprising spur for his own assessments of literary value and his production of a unique selfreflective and philosophical satire.

Lisa Benz St. John. Three Medieval Queens: Queenship and the Crown in Fourteenth-Century England.

Lisa Benz St. John's excellent book is a meticulously researched, theoretically engaged comparative study of three queens-consort who reigned in early fourteenth- century England: Margaret of France (ca. 1279–1318), second wife of Edward I; Isabella of France (1295–1358), wife of Edward II; and Philippa of Hainault (ca. 1310 or 1315–1369), wife of Edward III. They lived in tumultuous times that witnessed war with Scotland and France, struggles with testy nobles, the rocky reign of Edward II, Isabella's coup, and Edward III's counter-coup. Through it all, these queens incrementally used the symbolic power of status, marriage, and motherhood to offset the disadvantages of gender and achieve, to varying degrees, considerable authority to administer estates and lands and sometimes to govern as regent. As a longitudinal study, this book resembles J. L. Laynesmith's The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1503 (2004) and Kavita Mudan Finn's The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440–1627 (2012), but it is strikingly different. Laynesmith focused on what it meant to be a queen and Finn analyzed narrative depictions of queens, but St. John looks at what queens actually did. Deeply rooted in archival material, this is a political history that interrogates some long-held notions of power and authority in the practice of queenship.

Queen Isabella of France and the Politics of the Taymouth Hours

The manuscript London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 13 is one of several devotional manuscripts associated with the artistic patronage of Queen Isabella of France, but the only one to date from the period of her effective regency government of England, ca. 1326–1330. Examining a selection of its image cycles, and principally the sequence concerned with the romance hero Beves of Hampton, the article argues for their potential to be read as pictorial allegories for and commentaries on political events in England during the years 1325–1330. Selected pictorial cycles in the Taymouth Hours form a coherent set of visual warnings on the dangers of masculine power and female attempts at its exercise. Sustained visual reference and commentary on the regency government inflected by existing, textual political discourses helps demonstrate the spiritual dangers of Isabella’s current or former political position ca. 1326–1330.

Isabella of France, Queen of England. A Postscript

Isabella of France, Queen of England. A Postscript

History, Typology and Homily: The Joseph Cycle in the Queen Mary Psalter

The Queen Mary Psalter is one of the most important English luxury devotional manuscripts of the first half of the fourteenth century. However, the impetus for and circumstances of the book's commission have until now remained an enigma. The starting point for this study is the discovery of a representation of the dovetopped virga--an element of the royal regalia depicted in several works associated with Plantagenet patronage--in the Joseph narrative in the Old Testament cycle at the beginning of the manuscript. The meaning and function of the dove-topped rod in other works in which it appears are analyzed. Then other iconographic choices made in the representation of the Joseph story are evaluated in light of some of the most urgent political concerns of the reign of Edward II, as recorded in contemporary chronicles. It is suggested that the Psalter was commissioned by Edward for his queen, Isabella of France, and that this "reconstituted" Joseph cycle functioned both as a commentary on Edward's fiscal and agricultural policies, and as an "anti-model" of conjugal fidelity for his wife.

The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms Fr. 13096

Probably made in 1313 for Isabella of France, the small but lavishly illustrated Apocalypse in Paris, Bibl. Nat. Fr. 13096 contains an unprecedented cycle of miniatures expressly designed for an unusual vernacular text and commentary. Along with similarly unique versions produced at the time in England, Isabella's French manuscript documents an important shift in the Gothic conception of the illustrated Apocalypse to a more intimately scaled, personalized devotional instrument of solitary meditation for aristocratic lay readers. Newly invented images transform the reading experience into a more introspective contemplation directed to the individual needs and tastes of one person praying alone within a private space.

The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS Fr. 13096

The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS Fr. 13096

Isabella of France, Queen of England 1308-1358, and the Late Medieval Cult of the Dead

Isabella of France, Queen of England 1308-1358, and the Late Medieval Cult of the Dead

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

Isabella of France

A note for London annalists: funeral of Isabella of France

A note for London annalists: funeral of Isabella of France