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Conclusion: Gendering Sovereignty in Medieval France IN 1314 KING PHILIP IV THE FAIR had the wives of his three sons arrested on charges of adultery. Marguerite of Burgundy, wife of Prince Louis, king of Navarre and the future Louis X, and Blanche of Burgundy, wife of Charles, count of La Marche and the future Charles IV, were accused of having carried on a three-year liaison with two brothers, Philip and Gautier d'Aunay. Jeanne of Burgundy, wife of Philip, count of Poitiers and the future Philip V, was charged with having a complicitious knowledge of the affairs. The charges against Jeanne were dropped soon after they were made. Marguerite died in prison. Blanche continued to defend her innocence during seven years of imprisonment. She was repudiated by her husband Charles in 1322, the year of his accession to the throne, and she died in a convent in 1326. The two knights accused of being the lovers ofthe king's daughters-in-law were executed immediately after their arrest.l The adultery scandal during the last year of the reign of Philip the Fair also marks the chronological end-point of the representation of the courdy adulterous queen in medieval romances. This is not a causal relationship, but it is not an arbitrary one either. I began this study by citing the rumors that accused Eleanor of Aquitaine of adultery with her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Whatever Eleanor's relationship to the poetry of courdy love might have been, it is implausible to assert that she attempted to live according to the ethic offine amors. Nor did she invent the figure of the adulterous queen. Eleanor's relationship to twelfth-century literary representations of 172 Conclusion queenship and adultery is less direct and more subtle, as I have tried to suggest. Both fictional and nonfictional queens are defined by cultural ideas about sovereignty and its symbolic networks, about succession and royal dynasty, about women and power. As these ideas evolve over time they are negotiated in institutional changes like the gradual marginalization of queens from government in the Capetian monarchy, and they are debated in literary representations like romances . Narratives about adulterous queens recount in fictional form some of the most important negotiations in the evolution of queenship in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the importance of royal succession and the relative influence of the queen in her husband's court. Romances about adulterous queens from this period also participate in an increasingly expliCit definition of royal sovereignty as masculine. I return to the adultery scandal in Philip the Fair's court to explore this idea. Adulterous queens were well-known literary characters in the Middle Ages, but they did not appear in Capetian courts. The rumors about Eleanor of Aquitaine's liaison with her uncle were as close as any Capetian queen came to being accused of adultery. Until the fourteenth century, Capetian kings had enjoyed not only a long series of faithful wives, but also a long period of uninterrupted succession; they always had sons to inherit the throne. When Philip the Fair died, each of his three sons reigned in turn. None produced a surviving male heir, and in 1328 the Capetian throne passed to Philip VI of Valois. The discovery of the adultery of Philip the Fair's daughtersin -law thus directly precedes the end of the Capetian dynasty and it realizes the anxieties that underlie romance representations of adulterous queens: the discovery ofthe queen's adultery and the suspicion of a corrupted lineage. An examination of the end of the Capetian succession in the early fourteenth century may suggest why romance representations of courtly adulterous queens end with the Capetian dynasty. If romance queens can combine transgressive sexual pleasure and the privileges of queenship it is of course because they are fictional queens. Despite the rumors that followed Eleanor of Aquitaine 's visit to Antioch, nonfictional queens were in general models Gendering Sovereignty in Medieval France 173 of chastity, and if romance adulterous queens were part of a cultural debate on the nature of queenship, their place in this process depended on their fictional status. Once the uniquely fictional status of the adulterous queen is challenged, as in the accusations of adultery against two royal daughters-in-law, the representation of challenges to royal sovereignty in the form of fictions about the queen's sexual transgression is no longer possible. Romances composed after the adultery scandal in the last year of Philip IV's reign...

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