The Object of Queens in Late Medieval English Romance
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Malaya Journal of Matematik, Vol. S, No. 2, 3729-3734, 2020 https://doi.org/10.26637/MJM0S20/0967 Royal materials: The object of queens in late medieval English romance G. Ramesh1 and E. Rekha2 Abstract As historicist as it is materialist, my dissertation both reads the fictional queens portrayed in romance against the fraught positioning of historical queens such as Isabella of France, Anne of Bohemia and Margaret of Anjou, and traces the ambivalent function in late medieval English society of objects including the sacring-bell, the Lollard bible and the royal sword. Merging the traditionally historicist field queenship studies with typically postmodern fields like thing theory and sound theory, I investigate how queens in late medieval romances coopt, queer and reconfigure material objects of masculine power. Each chapter examines a literary queen typically dismissed by subject-oriented ontologies as insubstantial. Analyzing romances that include Richard Coer de Lyon, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur and the Marian romance of “The Child Slain by Jews” from the Vernon Manuscript, I argue for the overlooked significance of literary queens as figures whose circulation illuminates the construction of medieval masculinities. Through contact with charged material objects that are pivotal to romance plots, queens query patriarchal materials, exposing their underlying “thingness” and malleability. Whether tracking the disturbing afterlife of a church bell used to exorcise the hero’s queen mother in Richard Coer de Lyon, or analyzing links between the “Britoun book” that rescues Chaucer’s Custance and Anne of Bohemia’s vernacular books, my chapters tell a new story about the foreign queens of late medieval English romances by showing how they blur boundaries between male and female, subject and object, West and East, priest and parish, Christian and Jew, orthodox and heterodox, mother and child. Keywords Child, Christian and Jew, orthodox and heterodox. 1,2Department English, Bharath Institute for Higher Education and Research, Selaiyur, Chennai-600073, Tamil Nadu, India. Article History: Received 01 October 2020; Accepted 10 December 2020 c 2020 MJM. Contents References.......................................3734 1 Introduction......................................3729 1.1 Iron ladies and feminine (mis) rule: why medieval 1. Introduction queens matter...................... 3729 1.1 Iron ladies and feminine (mis) rule: why me- 2 Here belles to Ryng..............................3730 dieval queens matter 2.1 Maternity and the sacring bell in richard coer de When future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher vehe- Lyon............................. 3730 mently spoke out against the Russians during the nuclear arms race detente´ in 1976, she was quickly labelled the “Iron Lady,” 3 Containing the Bell..............................3730 a derogatory epithet that couched critiques of her tenacity as a 3.1 Harnessing the Demonic in Her Heraldic Arms 3731 woman. The Russian military journalist and war captain, Yuri 4 Custance, anne of BOHEMIA, and lollard books in Gavrilov, suggested the unnatural nature of Margaret’s power; Chaucer’S man of law’e tale . 3732 as a hard, ‘Iron’ militaristic woman, she lacks the softness and femininity characteristic of ‘real women.’ More than thirty 5 Maria regina and the project of displacement in the years later, in an article entitled “The Iron Lady,” Ryan Lizza, vernon Manuscripts the child slain by Jews . 3732 writing of Hilary Clinton’s final weeks in the 2008 presidential 6 Morgan le fay and feminine misrule in Maloory’S morte primary campaigns in Ohio and Texas, called attention to her Darthur...........................................3733 unnatural thirst for power as she “defiantly ignored” falling 7 Conclusion.......................................3733 support and “pounded away” at her opponents, leading Lizza Royal materials: The object of queens in late medieval English romance — 3730/3734 to compare her to Freddy Krueger and Jason, psychopathic seem an unlikely place from which to explore anxieties over serial killer horror movie mainstays. “[E]erily unflappable,” queen consorts in late medieval England. In the last decade, the powerful former queen/First Lady gave way to her cor- Richard Coer de Lyon, hereafter RCL; has been singled out poreal femininity as she struggled to become the first female not for its inclusion of a fictional and demonic queenmother, President of the United States: during her “fusillade” of verbal but rather for the unabashed episodes of Richard’s cannibal- barrages, she fell into a fit of coughing, her feminine body un- ism. Admittedly, the fictional queen consort Cassodorien oc- able to sustain the strain of masculine martial political attack. cupies only a small section of the sprawing romance; comprise Indeed, “she lost her voice.”1 In this moment, Lizza implies, moments of fantastical transposition which continue to attract Clinton’s body betrayed her sex, unable to meet the demands the majority of critical attention. As Geraldine Heng, Alan of her mannish ambition. Ambrisco, Heather Blurton and several others have demon- I see medieval conceptions of female power inform ques- strated, rather than injuring the English king’s reputation, tions Americans ask now, like “Is America ready for a female Richard’s acts of cannibalizing Saracens in this exceptional President?” Though I am by no means suggesting that me- romance reinforce a sense of his English national identity. The dieval queens and contemporary female presidents and prime cannibalism episodes appear only in RCL ’s later revisions, ministers are the same, the ways in which their power is cri- the two later and longer a versions, which are distinct from tiqued through gender is striking. Tellingly, both accounts of five earlier and shorter b versions.2 By all standards a pro- Thatcher and Clinton mirror similar attacks leveled by chron- lific romance in late medieval England, RCL currently exists iclers at late medieval English queen consorts like Isabella in seven versions purportedly derived from a lost thirteenth- of France and Margaret of Anjou. Isabella, like Thatcher century French manuscript, including seven manuscripts and and Clinton, was derided as a “ferrea virago,” Latin for Iron two early sixteenth-century Wynkyn de Worde printed edi- Lady, when she successfully invaded England in 1326 and tions. The main general difference between the a and b ver- established herself regent with her lover, Roger Mortimer.2 sions is the addition of shocking scenes like Richard’s acts Margaret was derided as “a grete and strong labourid woman” of anthropophagism. Cannibalism is not the only outrageous who “spareth noo peyne to sue hire thinges to an intent and aspect of the later fourteenth-century revised RCL, however; conclusion to hir power.”3 Both Gavrilov and Lizza, like acer- among these fantastical additions is a striking demon bride bic medieval chroniclers like Geoffrey Le Baker and John episode involving Richard’s fictional mother, Cassodorien. 3 Bocking, employ a rhetoric of gendered power and female In this added episode placed at the beginning of the romance embodiment that figures female power as inherently unnatu- to explain Richard’s origins, a reluctant Henry sends his men ral. Modern Western media and governments employ similar abroad to find him a suitable bride and they encounter Cas- rhetoric and even the same terminology in continuing to cri- sodorien of Antioch on a strange golden boat and bring her tique female power, and this critique crosses party lines: Sarah back where she is hastily wed to the king. However, the beau- Palin and Hillary Clinton have been attacked just as much for tiful young bride harbors a demonic secret: she cannot hear their wardrobes as for their platforms, while critics have fo- the Mass. cused on Sarah Palin’s maternity whilst others have castigated After bearing Henry three children the oldest of which is Hillary for her cold marriage. Richard, the queen is restrained during the Mass at the behest Queens undoubtedly occupied unique and anxious positions of Henry’s steward and his frightened subjects. As the Mass in late medieval England. At once local and foreign, fecund bell rings, Cassodorien breaks free of her captors and reveals and virtuous, their bodies became the site of medieval anxi- her demonic nature as she flies through the roof of the church, eties. As unusually public women, they were some of the first never to be seen again. female “celebrities” in Western culture. Their royal position One reason critical attention has eluded Cassodorien and placed them in opposition to many medieval models of chaste focused almost exclusively on Richard’s cannibalism is that behavior that relegated women to the private sphere. The pub- she never resurfaces in human form in the romance after her lic nature of their sexual bodies made quite a few of their male flight from the church. Scholars who have acknowledged the clerical chroniclers and poets nervous. Implored to model demon queen’s importance read her as a source for Richard’s themselves after seemingly irreconcilable feminine models martial prowess. Ambrisco, addressing Cassodorien through like the virginal yet maternal Virgin Mary and the biblical the lens of Richard’s cannibalism, attributes Richard’s de- sexualized intercessor, Queen Esther, medieval queens were monic nature in the romance to Cassodorien, linking the ex- simultaneously urged to behave chastely and to produce male orcism with demon