UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Iconography of Queenship: Sacred Music and Female Exemplarity in Late Medieval Britain Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vs062zv Author Gower, Gillian Lucinda Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Iconography of Queenship: Sacred Music and Female Exemplarity in Late Medieval Britain A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology by Gillian Lucinda Gower 2016 © Copyright by Gillian Lucinda Gower 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Iconography of Queenship: Sacred Music and Female Exemplarity in Late Medieval Britain by Gillian Lucinda Gower Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Elizabeth Randell Upton, Chair This dissertation investigates the relational, representative, and most importantly, constitutive functions of sacred music composed on behalf of and at the behest of British queen- consorts during the later Middle Ages. I argue that the sequences, conductus, and motets discussed herein were composed with the express purpose of constituting and reifying normative gender roles for medieval queen-consorts. Although not every paraliturgical work in the English ii repertory may be classified as such, I argue that those works that feature female exemplars— model women who exemplified the traits, behaviors, and beliefs desired by the medieval Christian hegemony—should be reassessed in light of their historical and cultural moments. These liminal works, neither liturgical nor secular in tone, operate similarly to visual icons in order to create vivid images of exemplary women saints or Biblical figures to which queen- consorts were both implicitly as well as explicitly compared. The Iconography of Queenship is organized into four chapters, each of which examines an occasional musical work and seeks to situate it within its own unique historical moment. In addition, each chapter poses a specific historiographical problem and seeks to answer it through an analysis of the occasional work. Broadly speaking, the first two chapters are concerned with establishing continuity between Jewish and Christian traditions of exemplarity, while the latter two chapters address the convention of name parallelism, by which women were aligned with the saints that shared their given names. The dissertation traces the development of late medieval exemplarity in music as the roster of female exemplars available to illustrate model queenship continued to expand, ultimately minimizing the Hebrew matriarchs in favor of constructed saints such as Katherine of Alexandria and Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. This research reveals hitherto unobserved thematic links and practical connections between English paraliturigcal works. By interrogating the historicity of these occasional pieces, I demonstrate that medieval sacred music had multivocal and multivalent available meanings beyond the purely devotional. iii The dissertation of Gillian Lucinda Gower is approved. Robert W. Fink Matthew N. Fisher Tamara Judith-Marie Levitz Elizabeth Randell Upton, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... v List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... ix List of Musical Examples ............................................................................................................. x List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ xi List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. xiii Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... xv Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………xviii INTRODUCTION: “I syng of a maiden” ......................................................................................... 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Background ................................................................................................................................. 4 The sacred and the profane ....................................................................................................... 13 Liturgy and paraliturgy ............................................................................................................. 15 Interpretative communities ....................................................................................................... 16 Interpretation and intertextuality .............................................................................................. 18 Royal institutions, royal programs ............................................................................................ 20 Music and Pageantry ................................................................................................................. 25 Gender and Patronage ............................................................................................................... 26 Queenship studies ..................................................................................................................... 29 Exemplarity ............................................................................................................................... 33 Medieval Misogyny .................................................................................................................. 37 Recent scholarship on medieval English music ........................................................................ 43 Outline of the study ................................................................................................................... 52 A note on editions, translations, and orthography .................................................................... 56 v CHAPTER ONE: Paradisi porta: Locating the Origins of Female Exemplarity in British Sacred Music ................................................................................................................... 57 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 57 Why not Mary? ......................................................................................................................... 58 Royal marriage in the Middle Ages .......................................................................................... 61 Marital ritual and spectacle ................................................................................................. 63 Medieval Mariology: a brief primer ..................................................................................... 65 Thesis and Antithesis: The Second Eve .................................................................................... 66 The hymns of Ephrem the Syrian .......................................................................................... 72 Mary in the British Isles ....................................................................................................... 76 Esther and Judith: the first queenly exemplars ......................................................................... 77 Queenship and gender before the Norman Conquest ............................................................... 81 The Eve-Mary antithesis in music ............................................................................................ 86 Jezebels and Eves ...................................................................................................................... 88 Mary in insular vernacular song ........................................................................................ 100 The Ave-Eva antithesis in the English motet tradition ........................................................... 103 Maria regina anglie ................................................................................................................ 108 Case study: The Scottish sequence Ex te lux oritur ................................................................ 110 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 119 CHAPTER TWO: The Leopard and the Lily: Collective Memory and Intercession at the Court of Edward III ..................................................................................................... 121 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 121 Historicizing medieval intercession ........................................................................................ 126 Historiography and Propaganda .............................................................................................. 129 Froissart’s “most gentle Queen” ............................................................................................. 132 Intercession