UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/25n6t2gq Author Torres, Sara Victoria Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Sara Victoria Torres 2014 © Copyright by Sara Victoria Torres 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia by Sara Victoria Torres Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Christine Chism, Co-chair Professor Lowell Gallagher, Co-chair My dissertation, “Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia,” traces the legacy of dynastic internationalism in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early-seventeenth centuries. I argue that the situated tactics of courtly literature use genealogical and geographical paradigms to redefine national sovereignty. Before the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, before the divorce trials of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in the 1530s, a rich and complex network of dynastic, economic, and political alliances existed between medieval England and the Iberian kingdoms. The marriages of John of Gaunt’s two daughters to the Castilian and Portuguese kings created a legacy of Anglo-Iberian cultural exchange ii that is evident in the literature and manuscript culture of both England and Iberia. Because England, Castile, and Portugal all saw the rise of new dynastic lines at the end of the fourteenth century, the subsequent literature produced at their courts is preoccupied with issues of genealogy, just rule, and political consent. Dynastic foundation narratives compensate for the uncertainties of succession by evoking the longue durée of national histories—of Trojan diaspora narratives, of Roman rule, of apostolic foundation—and situating them within universalizing historical modes. At the same time, they reconfigure national space and geography in fantasies of imperial mapping that spatialize their genealogical (re)constructions. The dynastic internationalism characterizing late medieval royal marriages contributes to emerging discourses of the nation and sets the stage for the imperial rivalries between England and Iberia during the Renaissance era. Within this Anglo-Iberian context, my dissertation tracks an understudied aspect of the legacy of Lancastrian kingship: its claims to the throne of Castile and the multiple Iberian marriages that materialize those claims as they shape late medieval and early modern international historiography. In the early stages of Lancastrian rule, the prestige of foreign kingship reinforced Lancastrian claims to England, claims which in turn fueled political ambitions in France. In the process, English and Iberian historiographies become entangled. I argue that common dynastic descent is mobilized as an alternative way of understanding national relations, thus positioning the consanguinity of royal houses against cultural, linguistic and religious difference—the international claims of dynastic affinity over the specifically national ones of the polity. In both cases, the political fantasy of a moment of dynastic origins reinforces political theories that render the “king’s body” as proximate to the nation, while at the same time destabilizing the relationship between the monarch and the polity. iii My first and second chapters explore how manuscripts produced within the Lancastrian sphere of influence reflect dynastic circuits of power and engage in the construction of cultural legacies that serve to articulate royal power. My first chapter, “Translating Authority in the Confessio Amantis and O Livro do Amante,” argues that Gower positions himself within a legacy of poetic genealogy and political counsel that is synchronous with the imperial lineages of the poem’s exemplary narratives. The poem conceives of lineage in ethical terms, and thus the interplay between Gower’s evocations of translatio studii and translatio imperii is fundamental to his narrated mechanisms of political descent. Under the patronage of Philippa of Lancaster, the Confessio Amantis is translated into both Portuguese and Castilian, and within these material conditions of book production the political discourse of counsel is linked closely to the performance of queenship. In its Portuguese rendering, then, queen and poet are linked to the practice of just rule in a imagined textual community at once focused on the spiritual, intellectual, and physical regulation of the king and also on the wider readership of those encompassed within the bounds of “common weal.” The second chapter, “Mapping Dynastic Sovereignty in Lancastrian Manuscripts: Margaret of Anjou’s Shrewsbury Book and the Burghley Polychronicon,” traces how the figure of Charlemagne, as a dynastic trope, embodies English ambitions to the throne of France during the so-called Lancastrian “Dual Monarchy.” By focusing on two manuscripts created under Lancastrian patronage—one by John Talbot for Margaret of Anjou, and one by Thomas Mull, I trace both the changes in valence of references to Charlemagne as well as to the political geographies of his narrative traditions. While Talbot’s Shrewsbury Book consolidates a Lancastrian French perspective on the cultural negotiations of the Dual Monarchy by assembling a collection of French-language texts, the Burghley Polychronicon compiles various English documents and historical texts to convey a particularly Lancastrian vision of sovereign history and cultural boundaries. iv My third and fourth chapters focus on early modern texts that commemorate the House of Lancaster’s genealogical ties to Iberia in order to inscribe contemporary imperial rivalries into larger dynastic histories. The fourth chapter, “Epic Afterlives: The Lusiads and Historical Legacy,” argues that the inclusion of the mid-fifteenth century Portuguese chivalric romance “The Twelve of England” into the great Portuguese epic, Luís Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, links Vasco da Gama’s voyage and subsequent Portuguese expansionism to specific historical moments of national and dynastic foundation narrated in the epic. Within the Lusiads, the Portuguese knight Magriço features in the Twelve of England story as the embodiment of chivalric valor. Chivalry, embodied in the martial valor of crusades and of tournaments, is recovered as a facet of a collective national past and deployed in the celebration of the heroic exploits of the explorer-protagonist Vasco da Gama. This ideological and cultural continuity models a relation between king and knight that is replicated in that of King Manuel and da Gama, whose voyage Camões describes using both epic conventions and romance modalities. However, the metatextual figure of Magriço also embodies the motif of belatedness that runs through the larger poem—a sense of temporal delay that resonates with the poem’s larger celebration of contemporaneity and serves to glorify the “late” arrival of the Portuguese onto the imperial stage of Europe. The fourth and final chapter, “‘La antigua emulación de estas coronas’: Habsburg Patrons, English Dynastic Memory and the Spanish Match of 1623,” explores how the proposed marriage between Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales and María of Austria, sister of Philip IV of Spain, offered political and religious writers new ways of inflecting dynastic history, as well as the chance to imagine alternative genealogies—spiritual, literary, imperial—for inscribing the union within each kingdom’s history. By contrasting two textual productions—a manuscript created by the exiled Syon nuns in Lisbon for the Habsburg monarchs, which links the legitimizing religious patronage of Henry V of England to Philip II of Spain, and the journalistic v relaciones of Andrés Almansa y Mendoza, which record Charles’s visit to Madrid in the language of a chivalric romance—I argue that English and Spanish political subjects represented the infanta as a figure at once responsible for ensuring dynastic continuity and one around whom other, gendered, paradigms of descent could coalesce. In an era in which rich cultures of reading were driven by both the creation and circulation of manuscripts and printed books and ephemera, a comparative study of these historical sources offers insights into how manuscript and print sources record and appeal to royal history and the diplomatic maneuvering that helps shape it. In showing how Lancastrian nationalism functions in a larger world, my project resituates and frames the work of recent Lancastrian scholars such as Paul Strohm and Maura Nolan. I join Elizabeth Salter, Kathy Lavezzo, Ardis Butterfield, and David Wallace in demonstrating that English national claims cannot be realized except in an international frame. Furthermore, by discussing the legacy of the marriages of John of Gaunt within a larger context of Anglo-Iberian cultural exchange extending temporally from the High Middle Ages to the seventeenth-century marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza, my project foregrounds Early