STRATEGIC IMAGINATIONS Women and the Gender of Sovereignty in European Culture STRATEGIC IMAGINATIONS WOMEN AND THE GENDER OF SOVEREIGNTY IN EUROPEAN CULTURE EDITED BY ANKE GILLEIR AND AUDE DEFURNE Leuven University Press This book was published with the support of KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access Published in 2020 by Leuven University Press / Presses Universitaires de Louvain / Universitaire Pers Leuven. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium). Selection and editorial matter © Anke Gilleir and Aude Defurne, 2020 Individual chapters © The respective authors, 2020 This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative 4.0 Licence. Attribution should include the following information: Anke Gilleir and Aude Defurne (eds.), Strategic Imaginations: Women and the Gender of Sovereignty in European Culture. Leuven, Leuven University Press. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ISBN 978 94 6270 247 9 (Paperback) ISBN 978 94 6166 350 4 (ePDF) ISBN 978 94 6166 351 1 (ePUB) https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461663504 D/2020/1869/55 NUR: 694 Layout: Coco Bookmedia, Amersfoort Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover illustration: Marcel Dzama The queen [La reina], 2011 Polyester resin, fiberglass, plaster, steel, and motor 104 1/2 x 38 inches 265.4 x 96.5 cm © Marcel Dzama. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner TABLE OF CONTENTS ON GENDER, SOVEREIGNTY AND IMAGINATION 7 An Introduction Anke Gilleir PART 1: REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE SOVEREIGNTY 27 CAMILLA AND CANDACIS 29 Literary Imaginations of Female Sovereignty in German Romances of the Late Twelfth Century Ann-Kathrin Deininger and Jasmin Leuchtenberg ROYAL HOUSEWIVES AND FEMALE TYRANTS 61 Gender and Sovereignty in Works by Benedikte Naubert and Luise Mühlbach Elisabeth Krimmer OF MAIDENS AND VIRGINS, OR, SPARKING MILITARY ALLIANCE 85 The Affective Politics of the Pristine Female Body Maha El Hissy 6 STRATEGIC IMAGINATIONS RELATIONAL AUTHORITY AND FEMALE SOVEREIGNTY 109 Fanny Burney’s Early Court Journals and Letters Beatrijs Vanacker THE SOUND OF SOVEREIGNTY 135 Royal Vocal Strategies in the Victorian House of Lords Josephine Hoegaerts PART 2: PLACES AND SPACES OF POWER 157 THE QUEEN FROM THE SOUTH 159 Eleanor of Aquitaine as a Political Strategist and Lawmaker Ayaal Herdam and David J. Smallwood THE SPACES OF FEMALE SOVEREIGNTY IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN 181 Maria Cristina Quintero FRENCH ARISTOCRAT AND POLISH QUEEN 201 Maria Kazimiera d’Arquien Sobieska’s Strategies of Power (1674–1698) Jarosław Pietrzak BECOMING BRITISH 229 The Role of the Hanoverian Queen Consort Joanna Marschner TAMING THE SOVEREIGN 255 Princess Charlotte of Wales and the Rhetoric of Gender Virginia McKendry DISCOURSES OF SOVEREIGNTY AS AN OBSTACLE TO WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE? 291 An Essay in Comparative History Marnix Beyen ABOUT THE AUTHORS 307 ON GENDER, SOVEREIGNTY AND IMAGINATION 7 ON GENDER, SOVEREIGNTY AND IMAGINATION An Introduction Anke Gilleir ‘Too bad, your royal Highness, that you were not a man so that you might have entered the battlefield in public, instead of, as a woman, having to concern yourself with trifles that lead to nothing’.1 A cynical courtier speaks to a princess whose talent and ambition would have made her the best political leader of their time, had not the rules of sex and gender barred her from the pinnacles of power. The princess in question is a historical figure, Maria Antonia, electress of Saxony; the scene is set in mid-eighteenth-century Dresden, capital of baroque culture and intact absolutism. The rhetoric of gender that drives women from the main stage of power to the sphere of the trivial sounds familiar, perhaps too familiar. Scholars versed in the history of political power in Europe and particularly in the relationship between men, women and power will frown at such an express public-versus-private statement in a courtly setting. It is more reminiscent of the gendered discourse of modern European society than of the mechanisms of rule from the Ancien Régime. Indeed, the scene between the princess and the courtier comes from a nineteenth-century German historical novel, Amely Bölte’s 1860 Maria Antonia, oder Dresden vor hundert Jahren. In her – well documented – novel, Bölte, who was a prolific writer, feminist and democrat, stages a woman who belonged to the core elite of pre-modern rule. Considering the writer’s political affinities, the book bears an interesting ambiguity: while the female protagonist embodies political sovereignty in the most 8 ANKE GILLEIR convincing manner, the system of autocratic power in which she lives is shown as deficient and outdated.2 How can it be explained that a liberal woman writer produces a nine-hundred-page story about female agency in a setting that is alien to her own period of surging demands for democracy? In order to give a plausible answer, it is worth recalling Joan Kelly’s iconic essay, ‘Did Women have a Renaissance’, in which she points out that historical phases that are standardly regarded as major steps in the process of human emancipation yield a different image when looked at through the gender lens. Indeed, Amély Bölte’s 1860 novel seems to indicate just that: while the governing assumption of the story is that absolute sovereignty leads to ruin, it also shows the image of a woman whose true talent for rule and politics is wasted by a deeply profound and omnipresent gender prejudice. Rather than conveying a conservative message, the novel invites its readers to acknowledge the inconsistency of their own time, in which the ‘public battlefield’ of politics simultaneously reverberated the cry for popular sovereignty and the systematic exclusion of women. The problem Amélie Bölte’s novel signals has been researched extensively by prominent historians, who have revealed the paradox of the French Revolution (and all those that followed in its footsteps), emphatically proclaiming universal rights while energetically denying women access to collective hegemony.3 As female political leadership often still has an awkward undertone today, one could conclude that the emphatic exclusion of women from rule in modernity has had a lasting mark, yet the situation is somewhat more complicated. The awkwardness about women and power is much more venerable than modern politics and reaches back to the beginnings of reflection on power and community in European culture, a dark undercurrent that, paradoxically, became a tsunami when consensus grew that all subjects should participate in the governance of society.4 This book explores the longue durée scepticism of female leadership and the way female leaders dealt with this essentially gendered imagination of sovereignty. We understand sovereignty in the strict political sense, relating to the exercise of authority or participation in the process of state government. The word ‘sovereignty’ can be used in different contexts with multiple connotations. George Bataille, for example, defines sovereignty as a superior state of mind aloof from the world of practice, labour and fear of death, while its mainstream use in political thought implies the ability to wield power. But already Bataille’s non-political concept reveals how difficult it is to separate ‘life’ and ‘power’, even more so from the point ON GENDER, SOVEREIGNTY AND IMAGINATION 9 of view of gender. The historical example of sovereignty Bataille had in mind when coining his idea of superiority over the laws of physical life was that of absolute monarchy and its exuberantly baroque defiance of mortality. In the case of women rulers, whose bodies functioned as vessels for the procreation of the elite species of that sovereign rule, defying bodily existence and ‘labour’ was, to put it mildly, a somewhat different situation in that same culture of glamorous decorum. As this book shows, no matter how political sovereignty reached for the transcendental, the laws of gravitation always seemed to weigh upon women rulers. The history of female rule is a rich field of study that has provided pertinent insights. In the introduction to their 2019 volume Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, which bears the revealing subtitle Moving beyond the exceptionalist debate, Tanner, Gathagan and Huneycutt even express a certain weariness about the fact that ‘after three decades of historical advocacy, producing and teaching excellent books and articles’ on medieval women in positions of authority, these are still routinely presented as ‘exceptions to the rule’.5 The distortion they diagnose is caused, among other reasons, by the fact that experiences of power that do not meet modern assumptions often remain unrecognized, that medieval paradigms of power, in fact, varied greatly, and that women’s control and influence was at play in nearly every aspect of the medieval world.6 In her recent A Companion to Global Queenship (2018), Elena Woodacre underscores this state of the art, adding that research of female leadership across broad ranges of time and space has amply revealed that ‘no matter what societal framework they operated under, women could be equally effective administrators, patrons, and leaders as their male counterparts’.7 Against the backdrop of this recent historical scholarship and its fascinating findings, this book is a communicating vessel, acknowledging the importance of context and difference, yet recognizing and underscoring the endless repetition of the cycle of gendered rule. This needs some preliminary additional remarks. The fact that women did act as sovereign leaders throughout history and that, upon closer