The Queen’s Library: Image-Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477–1514 (review)

Cynthia J. Brown demonstrates her magisterial command of the ‘politics of the page’ (p. 285) in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century France. Taking Anne of Brittany as its fulcrum, and neatly framed by chapters on the twice queen of France’s royal entries and on her obsequies and memorialization, Brown’s study examines the culture of book production for elite women, including Anne’s contemporaries (such as Anne de Foix, Louise de Savoy, and Margaret of Austria) and successors, notably her daughter Claude. Mobilizing a truly interdisciplinary range of critical tools to analyse these books’ texts and paratexts, she makes a rigorous and deeply contextualized case for the complex negotiations and political stakes at play in the verbal and visual representation of such women. As a result, Brown is able to explore key tensions concerning ‘the real, perceived, and projected image of women of power’ (p. 13). Interpretative puzzles are probed with particular flexibility, concerning, for example, a mysterious figure in an illustration (p. 285) or relations between material form and audience (pp. 203–04). No assumption goes unchallenged. In its examination of entry ceremonials for Anne of Brittany, Anne de Foix, and Claude of France, Chapter 1 examines how historical evidence of the occasions as well as festival books commemorating them cast high-ranked women as ‘agents of [male] propaganda’ (p. 61); combinations of political and religious symbolism generated ‘performative codes’ (p. 61) to be played out as guides to expected moral conduct. Chapter 2 develops the role of ‘books in performance’ (p. 305) and of allegorical symbolism to explore the dynamics of patronage relationships with male authors and artists. Female personification allegory is identified as a significant device for representing sexual and political tensions at court, notably, in Jean Marot’s Voyage de Gênes, between the king and queen and their conflicting interests. Another form of literary reconstruction is the focus of Chapter 3: the ‘famous women’ topos. By tracing the portrayal of famous and infamous women through French translations of, and responses to, Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, Brown uncovers ambivalence in conceptions of women of power, reflecting contemporary court debates about female vices and virtues. Tensions in male reconstitutions of elite women are pursued in Chapter 4 through the particular topos of women in mourning, whose use and popularity seemed to promote female vulnerability and dependence. Chapter 5 turns from mourning by women to mourning for them in its analysis of how final verbal and visual tributes are extremely rich resources of cultural signification: for example, for revealing a gendered codification of grief, or changing dynamics in poet–patroness relationships. The volume is tremendously well illustrated, both visually and textually, and complemented, in an appendix, by an updated catalogue of Anne of Brittany’s library. Brown’s dexterous unpicking of ‘contradictions and ambiguities concerning the representation of late medieval women of power in French books written for and about them’ (p. 88) is of considerable interest to scholars of late medieval and early Renaissance court culture: historians, art historians, and bibliographers, as well as literary specialists.