Jitske Jasperse’s book, based on her dissertation defended in 2013, is an important contribution to the study of female rulership in the Middle Ages. Both elite women’s exercise of power and material culture are burgeoning fields of research and Jasperse successfully applies their concepts and methodologies in her study of Matilda Plantagenet (1156-89). Eldest daughter of King Henry II of England (1133-89) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204), Matilda became duchess of Saxony and Bavaria when she married Henry the Lion (1131/1135-95) in 1168.
While Matilda and the artefacts connected to her are at the centre of the book, it also includes a number of her female relatives. These not only encompass her younger sisters Leonor (1162-1214), Queen of Castile, and Joanna (1164-99), first Queen of Sicily and later Countess of Toulouse, but also, if less frequently, Matilda’s mother, her paternal grandmother Empress Matilda (d. 1167), and her half-sisters Marie (1145-98), Countess of Champagne, and Alix (1150-95), Countess of Blois.
Across about 120 pages of text, Jasperse sets out to investigate how these women were empowered by material culture and performed power through objects. Understanding objects as agentic tools both communicating prestige and wealth and forging connections between people, she argues for their central role in the negotiation of power. The ability to take action and affect one’s own life and that of others in symbolic and practical ways is also at the heart of her very definition of power. Through material culture, elite women like Matilda, Jasperse contends, could “create, activate, manipulate, and promote their present ambitions and promote the future of their dynasties” (12).
As she highlights, a focus on material culture is especially important since the women and their impact have generally been little documented in written sources; their objects, however, have been. Jasperse therefore utilizes not only surviving artefacts like coins, seals, miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, and textiles, but also written evidence on objects in Pipe Rolls, chronicles, and wills. The volume is innovatively structured according to these different material objects, which Jasperse analyses through a combination of perspectives from art history, history, sphragistics, numismatics, and manuscript studies. Throughout, a number of full-colour, high-resolution illustrations portray both objects and manuscripts.
The book has a loose chronological outline as its first chapter begins with Matilda’s journey from England to Saxony for her nuptials with Henry in 1168. Here, Jasperse interweaves the stations on the travel route, including the marriage ceremony, with different objects, their materials, and functions. Besides Matilda, this chapter traces the journeys of her sisters Joanna and Leonor, and offers a short comparison with their grandmother. Bridal tours, Jasperse suggests, were “a first step in the performance of power of royal daughters” (18), a phase in which they learned about the importance of the display and gifting of objects for promoting status and forging relationships. She does not overestimate the agency of royal daughters during this time, however, pointing towards the “empowering” roles of their parents equipping them with luxury items, their father in particular, and the objects themselves instead. The chapter’s main sources of evidence are the Pipe Rolls, which record expenditures concerning England, and chronicles containing descriptions of material culture during civic entries and on wedding days. Since these documents are often sparse regarding the materials, colours, or the places of origin of objects, Jasperse combines them with visual sources, such as seals and psalter miniatures, to reconstruct what items such as vestments might have looked like. This combination of sources proves successful. Nevertheless, the analysis would have benefitted from a more thorough discussion of how to reconstruct material culture from written records and of the different source types, their similarities, differences, and specific narratives in relation to objects.
The second chapter, focusing on coins and seals, begins with an introduction to its source base and the possibilities and limitations of interpretation. Jasperse turns first towards a silver coin issued by Henry the Lion which bears a representation of him and Matilda. Arguing against an interpretation of the bracteate as a means to commemorate their wedding, she instead places it in the context of Henry’s departure for crusade in January 1172. According to her nuanced discussion of iconography, models, and historical context, the sceptre in Matilda’s hand speaks to her function as a co- ruler who also wielded authority during Henry’s absence--a message that the ducal couple might have wished to convey to people in northern Saxony specifically, where the hoard of coins was found. The second part of the chapter studies the seals that have survived for Matilda’s mother, sisters and half-sisters. By contrast, no seal of Matilda exists, which is attributed to the fact that English and French noblewomen sealed documents more often than German ones in the twelfth century. As Jasperse demonstrates, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s seal served as an iconographic model to her daughters who also emphasized the connection to their father, marking their royal status as daughters of a king in the seals’ legends. Again, Jasperse is careful in her estimation of how much ability to actually exercise power we can deduce from coins and seals, weighing them against largely missing written evidence and considering their use. This makes her interpretations of these “mighty objects, expressing present authority in terms of kinship and heritage” (62) all the more persuasive.
A psalter and a gospel book, both undated and commissioned from the Benedictine monks at Helmarshausen, take centre stage in chapter 3. Rather than ascribing the commission to Henry only, Jasperse sees both manuscripts as a product of cooperation between the ducal couple with regard to commissioning, gifting, and the fashioning of their identity as powerful and pious rulers. As on the bracteate, Matilda and Henry are portrayed together once in the psalter and twice in the gospel book, and the focus of the analysis is on these illuminations. The psalter, here dated to between 1168 and 1173, presents the couple at the foot of the crucified Christ in miniature and, visually inserting duke and duchess into the biblical narrative of Crucifixion and Resurrection, certainly served as a luxurious tool of personal devotion. Maybe it also helped the couple to identify with Constantine and Helena or, in Matilda’s case, with Mary Magdalen; its representation of the Holy Sepulchre may have commemorated Henry’s journey to the Holy Land, as Jasperse tentatively suggests. The gospel book donated to the church of St Blaise in Brunswick depicts Matilda and Henry as donors of the book and as recipients of the crowns of eternal life. Jasperse’s dating of the manuscript strongly hinges upon the second illumination. Whereas parents and grandparents are included in the coronation scene, children are absent although “crucial to the preservation of the Guelph dynasty” (88), leading her to conclude that the gospel book was either made and donated as a supplication for an heir or out of gratitude that an heir had been born. Taken together with a dedicatory poem that emphasizes Matilda’s duty to bear offspring, she therefore dates the book to between 1172, the year of Matilda’s first pregnancy, and 1176, the birth year of their first son. In both portrayals in the gospel book, Jasperse claims convincingly, Matilda’s presence next to her husband, the allusions to her ancestry and motherhood, held political relevance in a document that was intended to manifest and commemorate splendour and religious belief. As the daughter of a king and a (future) mother, she was an important, suitable partner to a duke whose imperial descent, too, was visualized. Matilda played an equally “crucial role in the communication and preservation of fame and memory” (90).
The last chapter investigates donations of textiles by Matilda and her sisters Leonor and Joanne to religious institutions, mainly drawing on references in written sources but also on a few material remains. Here, Jasperse builds on two lines of art historical and historical scholarship to advance her argument. First, she understands women as “makers,” highlighting their active participation in the making of textiles regardless of whether we can pinpoint their exact contribution as “patrons and facilitators, producers and artists, owners and recipients” (13, Therese Martin). Second, she takes up the notion that the gifting of liturgical textiles not only helped establish or secure relationships with the clergy but also allowed women to gain symbolic access to liturgical spaces from which they were usually excluded. In addition, she offers new interpretations for two of her case studies in particular. Focusing on Matilda, Jasperse utilizes a chapter book of Hildesheim Cathedral compiled in 1191/1194 which documents donations of vestments and vessels. In this case, she might have downplayed the involvement of Henry who is mentioned in the donation entry, too; still, Matilda’s name is given first, and only she is referred to as “ecclesie nostre devotissima” (93) and also recorded in the Cathedral chapter’s necrology. Again, the evidence is too sparse to provide details regarding the appearance of the gifts--as is the case for the donation of wall hangings to Toulousain churches in a copy of Joanna’s will also tackled in this chapter. But Jasperse persuasively situates the Hildesheim donation in a specific political context and interprets it as a peace offering (by Matilda) aimed at smoothing tensions between Henry and the Hildesheim episcopacy. She also connects it with another instance of Matilda offering vestments to Bishop Ulrich of Halberstadt during territorial conflicts as recorded in the chronicle by Arnold of Lübeck. Perhaps, Jasperse speculates, the dalmatic of red samite adorned with golden lions and preserved in Halberstadt Cathedral is this particular vestment. By contrast, for Matilda’s sister Leonor, surviving textiles can securely be attributed to the queen of Castile due to an inscription, although it remains uncertain when they arrived at their current destination at San Isidoro in León. Like Matilda, Leonor was a maker but, Jasperse contends, she did not produce the silk stole and silk maniple herself in 1197, as has been suggested by previous scholarship. For Jasperse, the complex tablet structure of the vestments points to the work of an experienced professional weaver, maybe female, with specialized equipment. Seeking to manifest the commemoration of a powerful donor and her family, the inscriptions in metal thread evoked the memory of Leonor as daughter of the long-deceased King Henry of England while the heraldic devices of castles linked her to Castile and her husband, King Alfonso VIII (1155-1214).
By way of conclusion, a short epilogue summarizes key findings and looks at how Matilda and her sisters Joanna and Leonor were remembered by family members and religious institutions. Both during and after their lives, Jasperse emphasizes, the women held important places in the making of dynastic identity and memory, most of all through material culture connecting families across time and space. She also highlights the role of the ruling couple and its joint performance of status and power through objects, which is a recurrent theme throughout the book. Here, this aspect could have been developed even further in terms of methodological framework since it seems crucial for the understanding of how both material culture as such and the performance of power as indicated through objects were gendered.
Despite some minor criticisms, the book impresses with its pointed, easy-to-read presentation and its combination of different objects and perspectives that help insert noble women as active participants into discussions of how power was performed during the twelfth century. Readers seeking a full-fledged biography of Matilda or her female relatives should look elsewhere first, but those interested in gendered approaches to material culture and power will have much to discover. While the chapters do have connections, they could easily be read on their own. One of the strong points of the book is that it draws on a wealth of international research. It includes not only English-language but also German, Spanish, and to a lesser extent, French scholarship. Unfortunately, the select bibliography at the end does not fully mirror this. However, references can be gleaned from the footnotes which also contain useful links to digital representations or online editions of the source material cited. Most importantly, Jasperse is not afraid to put forward a carefully argued thesis and thus presents thought-provoking suggestions for further discussion. Her book underscores the great potential for studying material culture through both material remains and objects documented in written sources.