Abstract
In the early fourteenth century, the kingdoms of England and France were in conflict over the issue of women’s power to transmit heritable rule in their own right. The disposition of France’s throne hung in the balance. In 1316, Philip of Poitiers, the brother of the reigning king Louis X and future Philip V of France set out to disinherit his infant niece, Jeanne, of the French throne, setting the stage for eventual conflict with England.1 From 987, with the establishment of the Capetian monarchy until the death of Louis X in 1316, no French king had failed before to provide a son who survived his father’s death. The question of female eligibility for the throne had thus never been broached, giving Philip an opportunity to argue for the exclusion of women from succession, yet no clear precedent from which to base that argument. In the absence of a legal precedent, Philip cast about for a way to invalidate Jeanne’s claim to the throne.
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Notes
Sarah Hanley, “Identity Politics and Rulership in France: Female Political Place and the Fraudulent Salic Law in Christine de Pizan and Jean de Montreuil,” in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. Michael Wolfe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 79 [78–94].
Jules Viard, ed., Les Grandes Chroniques de France, 10 vols. (Paris: Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1920–1955), 8: 297–298.
The complicated nature of this statement can be demonstrated by the text and commentary of De secretis mulierum, where the text notes that “every human being who is naturally conceived is generated from the seed of the father and the menses of the mother, according to all philosophers and medical authorities. And I say ‘medical authorities’ because Aristotle did not believe that the father’s seed was part of the substance of the fetus, but rather that the fetus proceeded from the menses alone … The doctors, on the other hand, believe that the fetus is made up of male and female seed together.” Here, the text first asserts directly that fathers contribute seed and mothers menses, which is not identified as seed, and then an elabo-ration explains a further distinction between an Aristotelian position, which corresponds to the original statement and a “medical” position, that allows both women and men seed. Commentator A wades into this controversy by acknowledging it but reframing the medical position as one that grants male seed more power because it grants it physical status as matter, ignoring the status of the female contribution as seed, continuing to refer to it as menses: “The medical authorities say the opposite, however, because man is made from the most noble material, and thus the male seed must enter the fetus materially, because the female menses is a superfluity of the second digestion and the male seed is better cooked and digested. Therefore it is necessary that it enter into the matter and substance of the fetus, for it is seen that sometimes the fetus resembles the father in genitals and in other ways, and this would be impossible if sperm were not incorporated materially.” Helen Rodnite Lemay, trans., Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 63–64.
John Milton Potter, “The Development and Significance of the Salic Law of the French,” English Historical Review 53 (1937): 236 [235–253].
Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 248.
Edward’s claim followed the seizure of his lands in Gascony by Philip VI. Thus, while the content of the argument was genealogical, the motive was territorial. See Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c.1300—c.1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 10.
The feudal, rather than genealogical basis of the war is insistently, even testily affirmed by historians of the Hundred Years War, who often appear as if still fighting a rearguard action against the longevity of the genealog-ical propaganda surrounding the Hundred Years War. For two examples, see E. Perroy, The Hundred Years War (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1951), p. 69; and Allmand, Hundred Years War, p. 10.
For example. S. J. Payling notes: “It is surprisingly difficult to find among the families chronicled examples of cases in which the heir general was largely, if not entirely, disinherited in favour of a male collateral, whether by an earlier settlement in tail male or an ad hoc settlement”: S. J. Payling, “Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England,” Economic History Review 45 (1992): 59 [51–73].
J. C. Holt, Colonial England 1066–1215 (London: Hambledon Press, 1997), p. 247.
David Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 10.
Sarah Hanley, “Mapping Rulership in the French Body Politic: Political Identity, Public Law and the King’s One Body,” Historical Reflections/ Reflexions Historiques 23.2 (1997): 136 [129–149].
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Maternity and Monstrosity: Reproductive Biology in the Roman de Mélusine,” in Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 104 [100–124].
Sue Niebrzydowski, “Monstrous (M)othering: The Representation of the Sowdanesse in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 202 [196–207].
Margo Hendricks, “Monstrosity and the Mercurial Female Imagination,” in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 96 [95–103].
Brian Lawn, ed., The Prose Salernitan Questions (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1979, B35, p. 19 and P80, pp. 236–237. See also discussions in MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger,” p. 8, and Kelly, “Domestication of the Marvelous in the Melusine Romances,” pp. 39–40 [3–24].
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© 2014 Angela Florschuetz
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Florschuetz, A. (2014). “A Mooder He Hath, but Fader Hath He Noon”: Maternal Transmission and Fatherless Sons: The Man of Law’s Tale . In: Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343499_4
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