Abstract
In his Chronique Rimée, first circulated in northern France in the late thirteenth century, Philippe Mouskes described the spending habits of Jeanne, the countess of Flanders and Hainaut, during her husband’s twelve-year incarceration in Paris following the battle of Bouvines in 1214. According to Mouskes, Jeanne was so generous in her donations to religious communities that, upon his return in 1226, Ferrand found the county teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. As a result, Ferrand was forced to rescind many of the donations made by his imprudent and overly pious wife. Mouskes stated “tous les dons que la comtesse avait dounes fist resaisir, a son oes et a son plaisir.” [all of the gifts that the countess had given were taken back, for his use and for his pleasure.]1
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Notes
Penelope Johnson, “Agnes of Burgundy: An Eleventh-Century Woman as Monastic Patron,” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989): 93–104. According to Johnson, Agnes turned to religious patronage because more mainstream avenues of exercising power were denied her due to her sex.
Miriam Shadis discusses the permeability of the boundary between sacred and secular as well as the political significance of religious patronage in “Piety, Politics, and Power: The Patronage of Leonor of England and Her Daughters Berenguela of Léon and Blanche of Castile,” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 202–27, especially pp. 202–3.
See also Erin L. Jordan, Women, Power and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 84–85.
See Jacques Dalarun, “The Clerical Gaze,” in A History of Women in the West, Vol. 2. Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapish-Zuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 15–42, p. 42. Dalarun argues that by the thirteenth century, the voices of clerics were not the only ones being heard. Joined by an increasing number of secular authors, the ensuing message about women heard by society was much more discordant, reflecting a new ambivalence about gender.
Ronald N. Walpole, Philip é and the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947), p. 392. Until recently, many scholars believed that the author of the Chronique Rimeé was Philip of Ghent, bishop of Tournai until 1283. However, more recent investigation has debunked that assumption.
Walpole, Philip é, p. 410. Fiona Tolhurst cautions against the tendency to view medieval chronicles generally as objective historical records, particularly in regards to texts produced in the high Middle Ages. See Fiona Tolhurst, “The Great Divide?: History and Literary History as Partners in Medieval Mythography,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historique 30 (2004): 7–27, here p. 27.
See Carla Casagrande, “The Protected Women,” in A History of Women in the West, ed. Christiane Klapish-Zuber, vol. 2, pp. 70–104, especially p. 98. The appearance of Aristotle’s texts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries fostered a new, scientific understanding of the role of women, one that emphasized her fragile and malleable nature. JoAnn McNamara argues that in the high Middle Ages, gender replaced class as the “basic organizing principle” of society, further restricting options for noblewomen who were previously able to use family connections to transcend the limitations typically placed upon women. McNamara, “Women and Power through the Family Revisited,” in Gendering the Master Narrative, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 17–30, 22–23.
For the career of Baldwin IX, see R. L. Wolff, “Baldwin of Flanders and Hainaut, First Latin Emperor of Constantinople: His Life, Death and Resurrection, 1171–1225.” Speculum 27 (1952): 281–322.
For the fourth crusade more generally see Michael Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context (New York: Longman, 2003).
For Flanders during this period, see Thérèse de Hemptinne, “Viaanderen en Henegouwen onder de erfgenamen van de Boudewyns, 1070–1244,” Algemene geschiedenis der Nederlanden (Haarlem: 1982), p. 372–98;
David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (New York: Longman, 1986);
Gerard Sivery, Structures agraires et vie rurale dans le hainaut à la fin du Moyen Age (Lille: 1977).
Events on the continent more generally are discussed by Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993);
Jim Bradbury, Philip Augustus: King of France, 1180–1223 (New York: Longman, 1998);
Elizabeth M. Hallam and Judith Everard, Capetian France, 987–1328, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2001); and
Robert Henri Bautier, ed., La France de Philippe Auguste: le temps des mutations: actes du colloque international (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1982).
The tumultuous relationship between Flanders and France in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries is described in detail by John Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).
John Baldwin, “La décennie décisive: les années 1190–1203 dans le règne de Philippe Auguste,” Revue Historique 266 (1981): 311–37; and Speigel, Romancing the Past, p. 39.
Philip of Namur’s actions in regard to his nieces earned him the scorn of many of the Flemish people. According to terms of the treaty of Pont-de-l’Arche, which ceded control of the young heiresses to Philip of France, Philip of Namur was to marry the king’s daughter Marie, elevating his status at the expense of his nieces. For the complete text of the treaty, see H. F. Delaborde, Elie Berger, C. F. Brunei, and Charles Samaran, eds, Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, vol. 1 (Paris, 1916), nos. 1043, 1208, pp. 110–11. Ferrand of Portugal was the nephew of Mathilda, the widow of Philip of Alsace and dowager countess of Flanders.
Philip’s progress through the Flemish countryside is traced by Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 209. See also David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, p. 152. For a detailed account of the battle and its participants see Georges Duby, The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
Studies of several of these women are available, including Constance H. Berman and Mariam Shadis, “A Taste of the Feast: Reconsidering Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Female Descendants,” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 177–211;
Yannick Hillion, “La Bretagne et le Rivalité Capétians-Plantagenets. Un Exemple: La duchesse Constance (1186–1202),” Annales de Bretagne et du pays de l’Ouest 92 (1985): 111–44;
Erin L. Jordan, “The ‘Abduction’ of Ida of Boulogne: Assessing Female Agency in Thirteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 30 (2007): 1–20. The county of Flanders in particular was no stranger to women occupying positions of power in the decades preceding the rule of Jeanne and her sister and successor, Marguerite, including Sybile of Anjou, Mathilda of Portugal, Margaret of Hainaut, and Marie of Champagne.
For the countesses of Flanders between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, see Penelope Adair, “Countess Clemence: Her Power and Its Foundation,” in Queens, Regents and Potentates, ed. Theresa M. Vann (Dallas, TX: Academia Press, 1993), pp. 63–72; Nicholas, “Women as Rulers: Countesses Jeanne and Marguerite of Flanders (1212–78),” in Queens, Regents and Potentates, ed. Vann, pp. 73–89;
Nicholas, “Countesses as Rulers in Flanders,” in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, ed. Theodore Evergates (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 111–37; and Jordan, Women, Power and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages. Though most of Flanders’s countesses during this period accessed authority through marriage, three inherited in their own right, including Margaret, the daughter of Thierry of Alsace, and Jeanne and Marguerite, daughters of Baldwin IX.
Most notably Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977) and The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Discussions of this shift in inheritance practice generally include Jane Martindale, Status, Authority and Power: Aquitaine and France, 9th to 12th Centuries (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997);
Philippe Godding, “Le droit au service du patrimoine familial: les Pays-Bas Méridionaux (12e–18e siècles),” in Marriage, Property and Succession, ed. Lloyd Banfield (Berlin: Duncker and Humboldt, 1992), pp. 15–35;
J. C. Holt, “Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: The Heiress and the Alien,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985): 1–28; and
Jennifer Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500 (New York: Longman, 2002), pp. 4–5.
This view is perhaps most effectively articulated by Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple, “The Power of Women through the Family in Medieval Europe, 500–1100,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 83–101, p. 94. They argued that while women enjoyed considerable access to power during the more fluid, family-centered governance of the early Middle Ages, such access was curbed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the emergence of monarchical states and the bureaucratization of government. For example, in her study of countess Clemence of Flanders, Penelope Adair argues that Clemence enjoyed access to comital resources denied her successors, who found their agency circumscribed by the emergence of bureaucratic administration, accompanied by the establishment of public and private spheres. See Adair, “Countess Clemence,” pp. 63–64. In addition to looking before the twelfth century for examples of women exercising authority, authors in the volume, convinced they would find few “powerful” women after 1100, focused on redefining the terms and attempting to measure more ephemeral qualities like influence. However, as recent studies have shown, such shifts may not have occurred as uniformly as previously assumed, and may not have been as detrimental to women as we have tended to believe. See also Holt, “Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England,” 1–28, and Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, pp. 4–5.
While in England such fiefs and the offices associated with them were divided among all female heirs, they devolved intact to the eldest daughter on the continent, producing a potentially powerful woman. Linda Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage and Politics in England, 1225–1350 (New York, 2003), pp. 2–3;
Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics. 1211–1231 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 16. Jennifer Ward notes the regional differences that existed in medieval inheritance practices, and the ability of women to hold land as heiresses or as widows in a variety of places, including the Low Countries. See Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, p. 5. Scholars have begun to question the extent to which such changes actually occurred, revisiting in particular assumptions regarding the impact of such practices on women.
See, among others, Theodore Evergates, The Aristocracy in the County of Champage, 1100–1300 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Amy Livingstone, “Diversity and Continuity: Family Structure and Inheritance in the Chartrain, 1000–1200,” in Mondes de l’Ouest et villes du monde: Regards sur les sociétés médiévales, ed. Catherine Laurent, Bernard Merdrignac, and Daniel Pichot (Rennes), pp. 415–29;
Constance Bouchard, “The Structure of a Twelfth-Century French Family: The Lords of Seignelay,” Viator 10 (1979): 36–59;
Stephanie Christelow Moers, “The Division of Inheritance and Provision of Non-Inheriting Offspring among the Anglo-Norman Elite,” Medieval Prosopography 17 (1996): 3–44. A number of recent studies have challenged continued attempts to position these women at the margins of the political in the Middle Ages, arguing for a more complex view of their role in governance.
Such views are succinctly outlined by Kimberly A. LoPrete, “Gendering Viragos: Medieval Perceptions of Powerful Women,” in Victims or Viragos?, ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 17–38.
See also Frederic Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) and
Amy Livingstone, “Noblewomen’s Control of Property in Early Twelfth-Century Blois-Chartres,” Medieval Prosopography 18 (1995): 55–72.
Kimberly LoPrete discusses the problems associated with categorizing women as exceptional in “The Gender of Lordly Women: The Case of Adela of Blois,” in Pawns or Players? Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women, ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 90–110. For the dangers of assuming uniformity in past experience see Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women, p. 134.
Georges Duby, “Women and Power,” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas Bisson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 69–85, p. 74 and
Lois Huneycutt, “Female Succession and the Language of Power in the Writings of Twelfth-Century Churchmen,” in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 189–201.
While authority denoted the legitimate right to act, grounded in one’s possession of a feudal office or fief, power was a much more ephemeral concept, typically associated with the ability to impose one’s will upon others. Imposing a clear distinction between these two concepts allowed medieval society to reconcile prevailing notions of male dominance in the political realm with the realities of feudal governance. As long as the practices of primogeniture and patrilineage prevailed among the nobility, the presence of women in the public sphere was inevitable since fiefs passed to daughters in the absence of male heirs. However, although the right of women to inherit powerful feudal offices well into the thirteenth century frequently resulted in their ability to access authority, the extent to which these women wielded power has yet to be fully determined. See Jordan, Women, Power and Religious Patronage, pp. 21–24 and Helen Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005).
Léopold Devillers, ed., Cartulaire de l’Abbaye de Épinlieu (Mons, 1867), no. 2, p. 179.
Charles Mussely and Émile Molitor, eds., Cartulaire de l’ancienne église collégiale de Notre Dame de Courtrai (Gand, 1880), no. 47, 26 August 1219, p. 49; no. 48, October 1219, p. 50; no. 53, 2 July 1223, p. 53.
According to Jean Richard, there was a considerable element of truth to the rumors of Jeanne’s betrothal. Richard argues that negotiations between Jeanne and the count of Brittany had progressed to the point of securing a papal dispensation from the Pope. Louis sent his papal legate, Romanus Frangipani, to secure the revocation of the annulment, and confirmation of Jeanne’s marriage to Ferrand. See Jean Richard, Saint Louis: Crusader King of France, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 15.
The text of the treaty was published in Alexandre Teulet, Joseph de Laborde, Elie Berger, Henri-François Delaborde, eds., Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, vol. 2 (Paris, 1863–1909), no. 1762, p. 77. Jeanne and Ferrand promised to remain loyal vassals, providing military service when requested. In addition to the 50,000 livres, to be paid in two installments, they agreed to refrain from constructing any new fortresses south of the Escaut River. Jeanne spent several months touring her domains to collect the guarantees and funds stipulated by the treaty.
See Theo Luykx, Johanna van Constantinopel, Gravin van Vlaanderen en Henegouwen, haar Leven (1199/1200–1244), haar Revgeering (1205–1244), vooral in Vlaanderen (Antwerp: N.V. Standaard, 1946), pp. 259–60.
Maurice Vanhaeck, ed., Cartulaire de l’Abbaye de Marquette (Lille: S.I.L.I.C., 1937), no. 3 (1227), p. 7.
Léopold Van Hollebeke, ed., L’Abbaye de Nonnenbossche de l’ordre de St. Benoit, pres d’Ypres (1101–1796) (Bruges: Vandecasteele-Werbrouck, 1865), no. 43, 23 August 1228, p. 108;
Charles Piot, ed., Cartulaire de l’Abbaye Lename (Bruges: De Zuttere-van Kersschaver, 1881), no. 164, May 1228, p. 133;
Alphonse Wauters, ed., Table Chronologique des Chartes et Diplômes Imprimés concernant l’histoire de la Belgique (Brussels: Kiessling et Cie., 1903–12), no. 4 (1228), p. 71.
Édouard de Coussemaker, ed., Inventaire Analytique et Chronologique des Archives de la Chambre des Comptes à Lille (Lille: M. Quarré, 1865), no. 395, 1224, p. 173; no. 471, 1228, p. 197. A third charter, issued by the countess in 1233, after Ferrand’s death, directed the bailiffs of Gravelines to deliver payment of the rent promptly to the abbey, suggesting that the earlier instructions were being ignored; no. 203, 1233, p. 238.
For the impact of marital status on women’s experience, see Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women; Michel Parisse, ed., Veuves et veuvage dans le haut mojen age (Paris: Picard, 1993),
Emmanuelle Santinelli, Des femmes éplorées? Les veuves dans la société aristocratique du haut Moyen Age (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003) and
Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
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Jordan, E.L. (2010). Exploring the Limits of Female Largesse: The Power of Female Patrons in Thirteenth-Century Flanders and Hainaut. In: Earenfight, T. (eds) Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106017_9
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