Anne of Bohemia and the Making of Chaucer Andrew Taylor University o f Saskatchewan In 1382 the young Anne ofBohem;a a,c;ved ;n England to marry King Richard II as part ofan alliance designed to promote his imperial ambitions. 1 Poor-she brought no dowry and was accompanied by an impecunious train of courtiers who probably spoke as little English as she did-and by many accounts not beautiful, she was the object of scorn. As the Westminster chronicler remarked: De ista regina sic quidam scripsit metrice: Digna frui manna datur Anglis nobilis Anna; set scrutantibus verum videbatur non dari set pocius emi, nam non modicam pecuniam refundebat rex Anglie pro tantilla carnis porcione. [About this Queen somebody wrote the verse: Worthy to enjoy manna, To Englishmen is given the noble Anna; but to those with an eye for the facts it seemed that she represented a purchase rather than a gift, since the English king laid out no small sum for such a small piece of flesh.]2 From this unpromising beginning, Anne went on to exercise a notable influence in the kingdom, interceding with the king on numerous occa sions and gaining a reputation for prudence, charity, and the devout 1 Constantin Hofler discusses the diplomatic negotiations behind the marriage; "Anna van Luxemburg," Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historischen Classe, 20 (Vienna, 1871), pp. 89-240, esp. pp. 123-38. 2 L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, eds., The Westminster Chronicle, 1381-1394 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 24-25. I have used their translation except for the last line, which they soften to "to secure this tiny scrap ofhumanity." 95 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER reading of Scripture. She is one of the women Susan Bell terms "arbiters of lay piety and ambassadors of culture," while Agnes Strickland, in her history Queens of England, goes so far as to call Anne the first of "the nursing-mothers of the Reformation."3 This influential queen, Anne the Good or Anne the Wise as the chroniclers eventually called her, was also allegedly a patron of Chaucer's and is widely held responsible for im posing upon him the task of writing The Legend of Good Women as an amends for his depiction of Criseyde. It is the intersection of these two figures, the historical queen and the censorious patron figured in Alceste, the consort of the God of love, that is my topic. I wish to advance two arguments: first, that although we cannot have anything approaching di rect access to Anne, and although she herself could only exert her cul tural influence indirectly and through heavily predetermined social nar ratives, at the point of triangulation of these various formations there lay a real woman of significant cultural authority. The second is that the re pudiation of Anne and her authority has been closely tied to the con struction of Chaucer as a self-sufficient author. Since my second argu ment claims that the literary tradition denies the social conditions of its inception, I wish to begin by considering what we can know of the his torical Anne of Bohemia before turning to Chaucer's poems. One possible means of recapturing the cultural power of the histori cal Anne, or indeed of many other medieval women, would be to look for traces of the books they owned or commissioned. Thus Bell argues that while women writers in the Middle Ages are few and hard to find, "as readers of vernacular literature, as mothers in charge of childhood ed ucation, as literary patrons who commissioned books and translations, and as wives who married across cultural and geographical boundaries, women had a specific and unique influence."4 Recognizing this influence is not just a matter of doing fresh research; as Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski argue, it requires a reassessment of cultural authority itself along the lines of recent feminist scholarship, "which broadens the conventional understanding of power to include new forms of power and 3 Agnes Strickland,Lives ofthe Queens ofEngland, 2d ed., 6 vols. (London, 1880), 1:416. 4 Susan G. Bell, "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of...