Royal Politics and the Textual Poetics of Sanctity in the Life of Isabelle of France
Considerable attention has been paid to a handful of women saints, headed by Hildegard of Bingen, Clare of Assisi, and Catherine of Siena, who form a medieval A-list not only because of their piety and importance to medieval religiosity but also because of the abundant literature by or about them. Archival sleuthing over the past few decades has brought to our attention many less well known saints and saintly women, some important mostly as a local cult saint and others of more widespread significance. To this list we can now add Isabelle of France (1225-70), the founder of Longchamp, a royal abbey for Franciscan women. Most of what we had known about Isabelle we got from other sources, obliquely, through the staggering volume of literature on her sainted brother King Louis IX. Thanks to Sean L. Field, we now get Isabelle directly, as told by Agnes of Harcourt, a Norman noblewoman who was Isabelle's lady-in-waiting at court and the third abbess of Longchamp. Field's scrupulous translation and edition has brought together two stylistically different but thematically related works by Agnes on Isabelle, her Life, written between 1282 and 1285, and a letter of 1282 describing Louis's patronage of the abbey. Isabelle was the literate, astute, pious, and strong-willed daughter of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile, who defied her mother's wishes when she resisted marriage to Conrad, son of the Emperor Frederick II, and chose instead the life of a non-cloistered virgin. To see Isabelle herself, situated at the center of her own Life and not filtered through her brother's, is to see clearly the interplay of the politics and poetics of sanctity.
The brief letter, probably written at the encouragement of Charles of Anjou, describes Louis's personal and financial involvement in the early years of the abbey which Field argues formed part of the documentation intended to advocate the canonization of Louis in the decades immediately following his death. Charles of Anjou's advocacy of the pope on behalf of his brother's canonization is well known, but Isabelle's role in this has gone unnoticed because these two key texts were long thought to be lost in the widespread destruction of archives during the French Revolution. Of the two texts, the Life of Isabelle, commissioned by Charles, is longer, more detailed, more captivating and provides biographical material and an account of miracles attributed to Isabelle. It opens up the private world of the royal family, with details on Blanche of Castile and her daughter-in-law, Marguerite of Provence, that will interest a wider range of scholars studying medieval France, women, religion, and queenship. Together, these texts prompt a range of questions that enrich and complicate our understanding of Capetian sanctity.
Field's strengths in his handling of the broad ecclesiastical, theological, and political contexts are clearly evident in the introduction, where he makes two provocative arguments. First, he claims that Agnes, a member of a prominent Norman noble family whose connections linked her to the royal court and high-ranking clerics, probably composed the earliest extant manuscript by a woman written in a prose French vernacular, just a wee bit earlier than her more well known contemporaries Marguerite of Oingt, Felipa of Porcellet, and Marguerite Porete. This argument, based on his careful textual analysis that takes into account the intricacies of medieval manuscript production and circulation, is sound. His edition includes both the Old French and a facing-page English translation, and extensive but not intrusive critical apparatus that will both open up the debate and silence some of his critics.
His second assertion is debatable, however. He argues that a woman who composed a hagiography about another woman was less interested in, or less likely to articulate, the sort of piety we have come to associate with thirteenth-century female piety: "Mysticism, visions, prophecies, and swooning raptures are conspicuous by their complete absence. No mention of Eucharisitic piety or concern for the souls in Purgatory is found here, and there comparatively little stress on a particularly bodily piety," and suggests that this "rare opportunity to see a medieval female 'saint' through the eyes of another woman should spark a reexamination of the nature of women's religious experiences in the thirteenth century" (22). To claim that there is something unique in the way in which Agnes wrote may well be true, but Field does not sufficiently support this claim. An equally plausible reading suggests that Isabelle's piety adhered closely to the Franciscan ideals of humility and poverty, and thus explains the lack of visions and swooning. A saint's life (or, in Isabelle's case, the life of a saintly person), and the resultant Life, were socially constructed, contingent on the various religious and social groupings in which they operated. All hagiographies vary from the conventional hagiographical trope, whether written by men or women, to give it authenticity. For example, Johannes of Magdeburg focused on Margaret the Lame's inner life; [[1]] Hugh of Floreffe, writing on Yvette of Huy, did not focus on virginity, mysticism, or physical spirituality.[[2]] The focus on mysticism, attention to the body and mortification, and visions varies according to the spirituality of each order--Franciscan, Cistercian, Victorine, Dominican, or Benedictine. By conflating, or merely ignoring, various hagiographical traditions, Field fails to account for how the composition of a text depends on concurrent developments in spirituality and how it varies over time and place, according to the audience (lay or clerical, the church hierarchy, members of the community), and purpose of the author (reform, education, preaching against heresy or heterodoxy).
The problem here is more than just the differences among various religious orders. The claim that the distinctive female voice explains the content of the Life is weakened by is Field's omission of an up-to-date, theoretically informed discussion of the implication of these texts for gender studies. Considering both the subject and the author of the Life, this is a peculiar thing to neglect. Hagiographies are not stable texts. The men and women who wrote and read saints' lives assigned specific meanings to the terms male and female, and to man and woman, and an understanding of the rhetorical strategies employed matters greatly. Thus, Field's assertion about the uniqueness of Agnes's Life of Isabelle needs to be supported by a more careful reading of recent scholarship on female sanctity and women authors. He cites edited collections of women writers by Peter Dronke (1982), Elizabeth Petroff (1986), Katharina Wilson (1984), and Bernard McGinn (1994), as well as monographs by Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg (1998), Suzanne Fonay Wemple (1981), and Joan Ferrante (1997), but neglects recent scholarship that directly addresses the relationship of gender and sanctity by posing important questions on what it meant to be a saint, or simply saint-like, in the Middle Ages [[3]]. Moreover, it has forced scholars to come to terms with key questions of voice and genre in the production and transmission of hagiographic texts. By failing to take note of, much less employ, the current literary approaches to the analysis of authorship, Field missed an opportunity to explore the textual constructions of forms of sanctity and gender roles presented by the juxtaposition of the letter on Louis IX with the Life of Isabelle in this edition.
The reading of these two texts hinges on the gendered dynamics of power--how politics and gender expectations shaped the pious expressions of Isabelle, her two brothers, her mother, and her sister-in-law that were subsequently transferred from the private realm to that of the public political sphere. Isabelle's power stemmed not only from her noble birth and great beauty, but also from her education and her immense wealth (20,000 pounds, or one-tenth the annual revenue of the French Crown, bequeathed to her from her father to do with as she pleased). Yet Agnes takes great pains to emphasize Isabelle's humility and gentleness, hallmarks of Franciscan piety, and it is humility that give the convent its name, the Abbey of the Humility of Our Lady. Isabelle is portrayed as far more subtle than her siblings and in-laws, as a woman who chose to obscure her pious donations to Longchamp under the cloak of Louis's ostentatious piety. Agnes portrays Isabelle and Louis as affectionate and emotionally close, each one the model of piety for the other. Charles of Anjou, on the other hand, comes off as a manipulator, the brother who used Isabelle's foundation at Longchamp and Louis's very generous public patronage of the abbey as proof of Louis's sanctity, hoping to improve his contentious relationship with the pope. In other words, Charles is depicted as reliant on his much more pious siblings to save his own soul, or perhaps just his worldly power.
Isabelle's humility notwithstanding, the letter on Louis and Longchamp is important to scholars of gender and piety because of what it tells us about Capetian sanctity and the role of royal women religious in thirteenth-century France. Agnes's handling of Isabelle's female relatives illuminates the dynamics of Capetian sanctity. There is an ambiguity and a tension between worldly wealth and piety throughout the Life, and women are key to the economics of sanctity. The ambiguous attitudes toward worldly wealth and the value of a relic that passes from owner to owner is richly illustrated in the story of the nightcap that Isabelle sewed with her own hands, that Louis wanted but did not get because Isabelle insisted on giving it to a poor woman, and that two noble nuns purchased from the poor woman so that the abbey could possess it. Furthermore, Isabelle's neither cloistered nor married state would have been precarious were it not for the protection afforded by her wealth, elevated status and proximity to the king. In other hands, such as those of her mother and Louis's wife, Marguerite of Provence, for example, this formidable power would have been exploited publicly.
Field's limited reading of how and why saints' lives were written and rewritten, the ways in which men and women read and misread them, merely hints at these and other possibilities for further research. Agnes of Harcourt's Life of Isabelle is ripe for further research on topics as diverse as the dynamics of the French royal family in the construction of a sainted king,[[4]] Capetian queenship and patronage of Longchamp,[[5]] strict claustration of women religious and its 1298 articulation in the papal bull "Periculoso,"[[6]] the role of royal women and a royal hagiographer in preserving dynastic memory,[[7]] and the gendered construction of rulership and the Capetian myth of the "royal touch."[[8]] In short, what would a gendered study of Capetian sanctity look like? Careful translations and editions such as Field's provide the starting point for such an investigation. Anyone seeking a more deeply considered analysis of gender awaits scholars more attentive to the dynamics of masculinity and femininity and holiness, and can turn to provocative essays in collections such as Gendering the Master Narrative,[[9]] Gender and Holiness,[[10]] Medieval Memories,[[11]] Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts[[12]] and Lynda Coon's monograph, Sacred Fictions.[[13]]
NOTES
[[1]] The Vita of Margaret the Lame: a thirteenth-century German recluse and mystic, by Friar Johannes, O.P. of Magdeburg, trans. by Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Tilman Lewis (Toronto: Peregrina, 2001).
[[2]] The Life of Yvette of Huy by Hugh of Floreffe, trans., with introduction and notes by Jo Ann McNamara (Toronto: Peregrina, 1999). [[3]] See, for instance, Caroline Walker Bynum, " . . . And Woman His Humanity: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages," in Gender and Religion, edited by Caroline Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 257-88; Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and Their Impact (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); John Kitchen, Saint's Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Pamela Klassen, "Writing the Lives of the Saints: Four Holy Women Tell Their Stories," Grail19 (1993): 11-39; Catherine Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives and Literary Culture, c. 1150-1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a concise overview of the field, see Katherine J. Lewis's review essay, "Gender and Sanctity in the Middle Ages," in Gender and History 12:3 (2000): 735-44.
[[4]] See William Chester Jordan, "Isabelle of France and Religious Devotion at the Court of Louis IX," in Capetian Women, edited by Kathleen Nolan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 209-23.
[[5]] Miriam Shadis, "Piety, Politics, and Power: The Patronage of Leonor of England and Her Daughters, Berenguela of Leon and Blanche of Castile," in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, edited by June Hall McCash (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 202-27.
[[6]] Elizabeth M. Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298-1545 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1997).
[[7]] Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1994); Gábor Klaniczay, "The Cinderella Effect: Late Medieval Female Sainthood in Central Europe and in Italy," East Central Europe/L'Europe du Centre Est 20-23 (1993-96): 52-62; Rose Walker, "Sancha, Urraca, and Elvira: The Virtues and Vices of Spanish Royal Women," Reading Medieval Studies 24 (1998): 113-38.
[[8]] See the essays in Capetian Women, edited by Kathleen Nolan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
[[9]] Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
[[10]] Samantha J. F. Riches and Sarah Salih, eds., Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002).
[[11]] Elisabeth Van Houts, ed., Medieval Memories: Men, Women, and the Past, 700-1300 (London: Longman, 2001).
[[12]] Sharon Farmer and Barbara Rosenwein, eds. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
[[13]] Lynda Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).