The Queen's Library: Image-Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477-1514

Chapter Four. Famous Women in Mourning: Trials and Tribulations

c h a p t e r f o u r Famous Women in Mourning: Trials and Tribulations Many of the famous women depicted in word and image in the works of Giovanni Boccaccio, Antoine Dufour, and Jean Marot included women in mourning, widows and females who, grieving at the loss or departure of their loved ones, often withdrew from society or even resorted to suicide. The verbal and visual images of women in mourning in books belonging to Anne of Brittany and her cohorts, however, derived not only from literary topoi, but also from historical realities. The French queen greatly grieved over the death of her children and her first husband, as we learned above. We will also discover her presence in other books of sorrow eulogizing the demise of court figures. Anne of France became one of the most famous royal widows following the death of her husband, Pierre, duke of Bourbon, in 1503. Like her, Louise of Savoy was a prominent court widow who never remarried following the death of her husband Charles, count of Angoulême, in 1496. Both figured prominently among the widowed participants in Anne of Brittany’s and Claude of France’s Parisian entries in 1504 and 1517, as we learned above in Chapter 1. It was Margaret of Austria who experienced widowhood more often and perhaps even more grievously than her contemporaries, for she lost two husbands (Juan of Castille in 1497 and Philibert of Savoy in 1504) and was abandoned by another, Charles VIII himself, to whom she had been engaged since she was a child, when he married Anne of Brittany in 1491. Unlike the French queen whose widowhood lasted just a few months, but like Anne of France and Louise of Savoy, Margaret of Austria chose to remain a widow the rest of her life. Building upon the notion that the literary reconstruction of famous 182 chapter four women is repeatedly expressed through images of grief, Chapter 4 analyzes the verbal and visual portraits of women in Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s popular translation of Ovid’s Heroides, Les XXI Epistres d’Ovide, and Anne of Brittany ’s portrayal as a grieving woman awaiting the return of her husband in Macé de Villebresme’s translation of Fausto Andrelini’s Epistre . . . en laquelle Anne, tres vertueuse royne de France . . . exhorte de son retour . . . le roy de France. Jean Lemaire de Belges too dedicated three works to Anne of Brittany, Le Temple d’Honneur et de Vertus, La Plainte du Désiré, and Les Épîtres de l’amant vert, that implicate the French queen in his texts of sorrow. But Lemaire, ever concerned about procuring long-term patronage, integrates into some of these same writings allusions to Margaret of Austria, who also figures as protagonist in works about her own grief. Analyses of this corpus of works associated with Anne and Margaret foregrounds a discussion of the extent to which the imagery of sorrow associated with the French queen and her contemporaries defined and often confined women at the dawn of the Renaissance. Just as the contemporary fascination with illustrated stories about women of antiquity resulted in parallels drawn between females of power, such as Anne of Brittany, Louise of Savoy, and Claude of France, by French translators, authors, and illustrators examined in earlier chapters, so too comparisons between contemporary women of rank and Ovid’s heroines inspired writers and artists. In one case, the French queen herself entered the realm of literary fiction. While these analogies obviously aimed to flatter the female dedicatee, with artists vying for her attention in order to obtain her patronage , oftentimes these ostensibly laudatory works also implicitly promoted long-held male-constructed images of women as vulnerable, powerless, and excessively emotional individuals. Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s Translation of the Heroides: Court Activity Illuminated A few years after Charles VIII received a copy of Vérard’s 1493 edition of the anonymous translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, the Nobles et cleres dames (see Chapter 3), Octovien de Saint-Gelais presented him with the translation of another work about famous women, the XXI Epistres d’Ovide. According to Saint-Gelais in the prologue of this work, Charles VIII’s request that he write something for him inspired the author to undertake the translation of Ovid’s Heroides:1 183 Famous Women in Mourning En ensuyuant ma primeraine intencion a...