When I was finishing the archival research for this project, I came across an eighteenth-century French manuscript in the British Library (London British Library MS Add. 25,351) containing copies of accounts of “funeral ceremonies, performed chiefly in the Netherlands, in honour of sovereigns and princes.”¹ Among the obsequies described in this collection are those of Isabel of Castile “faites en la ville de Bruxelles … par ordre de L’Archiduc Philippe son gendre” [performed in the city of Bruxelles … by order of her son-in-law the Archduke Philippe].² Because chapters of this book concern both Isabel of Castile and the Burgundian...

In 1946, in the aftermath of World War II in France, a curious pamphlet was published to mark the upcoming five-hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Colette of Corbie. The document, entitled Sainte Colette de Corbie et l’action catholique féminine française, first presents a brief biography of the saint. Then, however, it turns to its more immediate purpose of advancing a concerted postwar effort to return French women to the domestic sphere by holding up St. Colette as an example of ideal femininity. The politically active fifteenth-century virgin and traveling monastic reformer is stunningly transformed into a patroness of...

A chronicle relating the history of the house of Burgundy found in Paris, Bibliothèque Arsenal MS 3602 opens by foregrounding the Burgundian ancestry of the Frankish queen St. Clotilde: “Saincte Clotilde fut fille du roy de Bourgyne laquelle ayant epouse Clovis Roy de France fut cause que ledict clovis receut le sainct sacrement de baptesme et fut le premier roy de france Chrestien.” [St. Clothilde was the daughter of the king of Burgundy; having married King Clovis of France, she caused the said Clovis to receive the sacrament of baptism, and he was the first Christian king of France.]¹ This...

For St. Colette of Corbie, female spirituality provided symbolic capital with which she could advance her political aims within the Church and the Franciscan Order. Her holiness and that of her reformed nuns were also symbolic resources available to the Burgundian dukes and duchesses as they pursued the expansion of their territory and the consolidation of their authority. Margaret of York and her French contemporary Anne d’Orléans further demonstrate the ways in which religious patronage, devotional practices, and monastic reform could become an important mode of political action for women. In this chapter, we turn our attention to another, quite...

Juan Luis Vives vehemently believed that women were unfit for political participation, as we have already begun to see from our examination of Richard Hyrd’s English translation of the Instrucción de la mujer cristiana. Perhaps even more troubling to Vives, both socially and spiritually, than female political agency was female participation in military affairs. When Vives turns his attention to “arms and the woman,” he wonders, “qué tienen que hazer las armas con las doncellas” [what ought arms to have to do with young women], and goes on to say, quite severely:

Hágote saber que no es muy católico el...

Although Joan of Arc’s legacy shaped perceptions of Margaret of Anjou’s and Isabel of Castile’s reigns in dramatically different ways, both queens’ careers illustrate that gendered authority, religious authority, and political authority existed interwoven in an elaborate tapestry in which national and international affairs crossed as warp and woof. With the advent of the “Great Matter” of Henry VIII’s proposed divorce from Katherine of Aragon, the interface of gender, religion, and temporal authority became even more complex, as did the relationships of national and international politics.¹ Scholars often draw the dividing line between the Middle Ages and the early modern...

Elizabeth Barton spoke in support of an oppositional vision of divinely ordained political authority in England. She thus participated in the sort of intellectual exile that Edward Said attributes to the “nay-sayers,” to those “individuals at odds with their society.”¹ Although her prophecies were undercut by her (likely forced) recantation and her voice silenced in her execution, the exilic voice of opposition itself lived on, embodied in, among others, the members of the Brigittine community of Syon, a house with which Elizabeth Barton had important connections.² In the periods after the instatement of the Oath of Supremacy and the dissolution...

L. O. Aranye Fradenburg and Carla Freccero have argued, “we must see that positing the power of the past to disrupt and remake the present is not necessarily to adopt a naive continuism.”¹ In this study, we have seen the multiple, complex ways in which manifestations of medieval female spirituality disrupted and remade cultural meaning both in its own present and in the early modern period for which the Middle Ages generally stands as “the past.” We have also seen, however, the ways in which the Middle Ages were not simply “the past” for the early modern era, since medieval...