The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria by Tracy Adams (review)

REVIEWS 221 Tracy Adams, The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 2010) xxvi + 338 pp. Tracy Adams’s lengthy revision of the life of the medieval French queen Isabeau of Bavaria (1371–1435), wife of King Charles VI (1368–1422), constitutes the most recent addition to the six earlier books published in The Johns Hopkins University Press series on “Rethinking Theory,” edited by Stephen G. Nichols and Victor E. Taylor. Tracey Adams’s volume is the product of the author’s interest in confuting Queen Isabeau’s distorted reputation, understanding the tenacity of the queen’s disgraceful representation in subsequent French histories, and articulating a new, coherent interpretation that places Isabeau within the tradition of queenly regents. Although her subject has been widely misunderstood through a misogynist point of view, Adams significantly neglects to employ theories of gender throughout, preferring instead closereadings and contextual analysis to craft her new interpretation. While not a biography , the present work has two main goals: firstly, to describe, explain, and refute what the author calls Isabeau’s “black legend,” a posthumous historical fabulation built up over centuries attributing numerous evils to the queen. These included adulterous liaisons at court, capricious greed, extravagance and cupidity, and a reprehensible, inconstant loyalty to her adopted country: all characteristics which, Adams argues, later historians conveniently exploited in their French nation-building projects. The author’s re-readings of contemporaneous chronicles, charters, and literary texts, combined with her ability to make transparent the various concerns of four centuries of French historiography (and Isabeau’s appearance in each), satisfyingly discloses the real purpose behind the construction and embrace of the queen’s “black legend,” while likewise preventing it from being mistaken for historical truth. As Adams sheds real light on a hidden female life from the past, she also thoroughly dismantles the machinery within the minds of her readers allowing interpretations to be taken at face value. For this reason above all others Adams’s technically proficient work warrants a place in a series devoted to rethinking theoretical models and approaches. The book’s second goal is to replace the debunked “black legend” with an alternative. Having revised the reading of the French-Bavarian queen’s actions through careful readings of relevant texts (all of which are included in the original and in translation), Adams argues for a simple alternative—that Queen Isabeau’s role in the French court and in its feuds is best understood as a “mediator queen,” whose dual purpose was to protect the dauphin(s) of France and to mediate between her husband, the erratically lucid Charles VI, and two of the most powerful and ambitious members of his court, the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy, heads of the antagonistic Armagnac and the Burgundian parties, respectively. The book’s introduction provides a clear outline to the following eight chapters, each acting as a building block to resuscitate Queen Isabeau’s stained reputation. Chapter 1, “Isabeau of Bavaria: Her Life,” is Adams’s attempt to recontextualize Isabeau’s ascension to the French throne within the larger political landscape of fourteenth-century Europe. Early on in their marriage, Isabeau had to deal with her husband’s episodic madness, a condition that disabled him for significant periods of time and prevented him from ruling consistently. The ongoing feud between the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy, and Charles REVIEWS 222 VI’s increasing incapacitation, created an unusual role for Queen Isabeau. In 1402, Adams writes, Isabeau became a mediator by the king’s ordinance, and her role was enlarged a year later when she was required to act as a coregent when Charles VI was “absent” from his office due to his condition. Chapter 2, “Isabeau of Bavaria: Her Afterlife,” considers Queen Isabeau’s tenacious “black legend” through the lens of Pierre Nora’s conception of lieux de mémoire , arguing that the queen came to serve “from the very beginning as a repoussoir against which to construct French identity, and thus the created meaning of her career has always been more significant that the truth” (39). Queen Isabeau of Bavaria as a progenitor of Marie-Antoinette and as the foil to prophetic...