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  • Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442) Family and Power: The Reverse of the Tapestry by Zita Eva Rohr
  • Jason stoessel
Rohr, Zita Eva, Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442) Family and Power: The Reverse of the Tapestry (Queenship and Power), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; hardback; pp. 284; 1 map, 2 tables; R.R.P. AU$129.95; ISBN 9781137499127.

Like many a reader, my introduction to Yolande of Aragon came about in all too common a way: as the queen of Louis II of Anjou, King of Sicily and Duke of Anjou. Even in the histories of Alfred Colville and, more recently, Marcelle-Renée Reynauld, one can recognise Yolande’s integral role in French royal and dynastic politics during the tumultuous early fifteenth century. Unlike previous histories, Zita Rohr’s welcome contribution foregrounds the duchess–queen. Given her focus on political networks, the author distances herself from earlier feminist historians, aligning more closely with Theresa Earenfight and others who emphasise the importance of contextualising [End Page 165] medieval women in relation to contemporary men and institutions that exercised various forms of power, à la Michel Foucault (p. 10).

Rohr’s book is divided into five chapters, which are framed by an Introduction and brief Conclusion. The first chapter concerns the first twenty years of the Infanta’s life in the Aragonese court of her Francophile parents, Joan I of Aragon and Violant of Bar. The first part of the chapter focuses on the politics of Yolande’s marriage to Louis II of Anjou in 1400.

In moving from political history to the cultural milieu in which Yolande was raised, Rohr stumbles – unfortunately, since the task of this review has fallen to a music historian with an interest in political history – into a minefield, by basing her argument on an out-of-date hypothesis that the famous Codex Chantilly, a source of polyphonic songs with several strongly political texts, hailed from the court of Aragon. Rohr is not alone in succumbing to the pitfalls of this source: Malcolm Vale has accepted another earlier and equally out-of-date guess that it was from the court of Gaston Febus, Count of Foix.

Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of Rohr’s discussion is her misrepresentation of the views of musicologists like Maricarmen Gomez, who, in both print and personal communications, has affirmed that this manuscript cannot be from the court of Aragon or its environs, despite the fact that it contains several songs that can be linked to its personalities. Such is the methodological error of placing too great an emphasis upon the repertory of a manuscript while ignoring scribal and physical contingencies, not to mention Francesca Manzari’s important discovery – reported in Recercare, 22 (2010) – that the line drawings in this manuscript are close to those by illuminators working in the court of Pope Boniface IX. On a slightly personal note, despite assertions to the contrary (p. 41), I have never stated that this manuscript was transported to France after its manufacture in Italy, most likely in Florence. The Machaut Ferrell-Voguë manuscript, which Lawrence Earp has revealed Violant of Bar borrowed from Gaston Febus, along with surviving sources from Barcelona and the very songs in Codex Chantilly, provide a better indication of musical interests of the Aragonese court of Joan and Violant.

Chapter 2 concerns the period of Yolande’s marriage to Louis (1400–17) and is largely devoted to the well-known political intrigues rife between members of the French nobility, especially the assassination of Louis of Orleans and an increasingly ill and burdened Louis II in the last years of his life. French royal politics, rather than Yolande, is the dominant thread here. Only in Chapter 3 does the dowager-queen become the protagonist in shoring up support for her son-in-law, the dauphin, Charles VII, and her son, Louis III, in the years around Louis II’s death. This includes the remarkable period from 1423 when Yolande was Louis III’s viceroy. The following chapter centres upon Yolande’s patronage of Joan of Arc as an instrument [End Page 166] in restoring the French crown to Charles VII. The final chapter focuses on Yolande’s instrumentality in...

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