This carefully researched study of falsely accused queens in late medieval literary and visual narratives offers new insights into the complex relationships between gender stereotypes, spiritual ideals, and political debates in the later Middle Ages. Black's primary goal is to investigate why stories of falsely accused queens, the noble victims of unjust persecution, were so popular during the later Middle Ages, and to explore the complex cultural work these tales might have performed for contemporary authors, artists, and audiences. She identifies two main types of the story--the "Empress of Rome tale", in which a woman is falsely accused of lechery and subsequently exiled, and the "Constance tale" (or "Maiden Without Hands"), in which a woman uses self-mutilation to avoid her father's unwanted sexual advances. By examining these stories in their immediate manuscript and cultural contexts, Black shows that tales of falsely accused queens participate in contemporary cultural debates on the nature of "woman" even as they provide valuable commentary on broader social and political injustices.
Chapter one deals with Gautier de Coinci's early thirteenth-century Miracles de Nostre Dame, in which we find the first vernacular version of the Empress of Rome story. Black shows that Gautier uses the tale to promote a model of female authority consistent with his own Benedictine worldview--one based on chastity, contempt for the world, and submission to male authority within the cloister. Yet by examining the illustrations accompanying the Miracles, Black reveals that even as Gautier's text promotes cloistered religious life, it also (and perhaps unwittingly) endorses spiritual authority for women living within the world, suggesting that female virtue is possible beyond the boundaries of the cloister. Chapter two turns to an investigation of Philippe de Remi's La Manekine, a thirteenth-century chanson d'aventure accompanied by sixteen miniatures, whose title derives from the Latin mancus (mutilated) and refers to the tale's heroine, who chops off her hand to avoid her father's sexual advances. Black reads the heroine's self-mutilation and efforts to avoid incest in the light of Philippe's immersion in thirteenth-century juridical culture and contemporary church-state debates over consanguinity and shows that La Manekine works to promote a new ideal of marriage, based on individual consent and spousal affection, and to suggest that exogamous marriages might effectively consolidate secular political authority and ensure legitimate succession. Chapter three turns to the complex relationship between literary and historical queens. Here Black focuses on Jehan Maillart's Roman du Comte d'Anjou (1316), reading the poem as a roman a clef meant to rehabilitate Joan of Burgundy, one of Philip the Fair's daughters-in- law, who had been imprisoned on charges of adultery. Chapter four is devoted to the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, a group of plays produced annually by the goldsmiths of Paris in the late fourteenth century. Black shows how performances that dramatize stories of wealthy queens brought low reflect class tensions that were at a height during this time. She argues further that the queen's suffering serves as a metaphor for human suffering more generally, particularly suffering that is brought about by the unjust actions of the ruling classes.
In chapters five and six, Black focuses on fourteenth- and fifteenth- century narratives of accused queens, with attention to such writers as Nicholas Trevet, Gower, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Hoccleve, each of whom draws on the persecuted queen legend for different social and political purposes. Trevet uses the Constance story in his Cronicles to construct a "saintly founding mother of British Christianity" who might be pleasing to his royal female patron, Mary of Woodstock, while Gower draws on the legend in his Confessio Amantis to offer a lesson in ethical self-governance for Richard II. In Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, the Constance legend provides an opportunity to expound on the benefits of human suffering. For Hoccleve, too, the tale of a suffering heroine becomes a means to explore the relationship between illness and spiritual depravity and between psychological and physical healing. Christine de Pizan uses the tale to more gendered ends, mobilizing the Florence of Rome tradition in her Book of the City of Ladies to counter misogynist stereotypes about weak and unchaste women that were prevalent in fifteenth-century England. Black's final chapter explores Jehan Wauquelin's prose version of La Belle Helene de Constantinople (1448), in which the Constance legend becomes a means to revive chivalric and crusading ideals at the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.
There is much in Black's book to admire. Her study covers a wide range of materials, both literary and visual, and throughout the book, one has a strong sense of being led through the complexities of different textual and historical traditions by an expert guide. Black is thoroughly attuned to even the subtlest shifts in legends of falsely accused queens and is thus able to offer convincing analyses of the ways in which these tales worked to counter gender stereotypes and to offer commentary on broader social problems such as abuses of royal power, discrepancies between rich and poor, and changing juridical systems that seemed at times both inexplicable and unfair. Although Black's book is a modest study and makes no grand claims for changing radically the ways in which medievalists think or the methodologies we employ, it nevertheless offers valuable and carefully researched insights into late medieval religion and politics. Anyone whose work intersects in any way with tales of falsely accused queens will benefit from this thorough and painstaking study.
Indeed, one might say that the book is, at times, a bit too painstaking. I would have been happier, for example, if Black had relegated the lengthy biographical discussions of various authors, as well as basic information on individual manuscripts and historical contexts to footnotes or woven this information into her analysis in a more seamless and less intrusive manner. The book also contains a number of small errors: Ethan Knapp's The Bureaucratic Muse was published by Pennsylvania State University Press, not University of Pennsylvania Press, while Peggy McCracken's The Romance of Adultery was published by University of Pennsylvania Press, not University of Philadelphia Press. These are all, however, minor quibbles that do not in the least diminish the accomplishment of a book that significantly expands our understanding of the ways in which legends of falsely accused queens, so popular in the later Middle Ages and so understudied by modern readers, may have spoken to medieval authors and audiences.