En/Gendering Representations of Childbirth in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Flemish Devotional Manuscripts

En/Gendering Representations of Childbirth in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Flemish Devotional Manuscripts Two Volumes Elizabeth Anne L'Estrange dL V ,0 Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degreeof Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies September2003 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from this thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go firstly to my supervisors, Tony Hughes and Eva Frojmovic, whose encouragementand close criticisms have been very much appreciated.Their ability to seethis thesis from many different perspectives has been extremely helpful. I also thank Oliver Pickering and Adrian Wilson for their time and comments, and Ian Moxon, whose assistancewith Latin has been invaluable. I am grateful to the University of Leeds for their financial assistancein the form of a ResearchScholarship. My friends have been a constant source of emotional support during this project and thanks go in particular to Rhiannon Daniels and Eva De Visscher. I am also grateful to Phillippa Plock and Cathy McClive for our lively discussions. I am especially indebted to those friends with whom I have escaped to sunnier climes: Eleanor Wilson, Kate Bingham, Rachael Morris, and Caroline Braley. I also thank Shane Blanchard for his support and for his supply of cricketing anecdotes. Finally I thank my Mum and Dad, and my brother Rob, whose continual love and encouragementallowed me to start and finish this thesis. It is dedicated to the memory of my Grandad, William Jones, who died just before its completion. ii ABSTRACT Representationsof childbirth in fifteenth-century devotional and historical manuscripts are invariably depicted aspostpartum confinement scenesin a domestic interior. These images appearto show a `genderedspace' in which women care for each other and men are marginalized. Neglected by medieval art historians, such pictures have been uncritically used by historians of obstetric and social history to prove that childbirth was the one time when medieval women exercisedpower and control in an otherwise patriarchal society. However, as with all historical evidence,these images do not offer us unmediatedaccess to the past. This thesis brings these domestic, postpartum pictures of childbirth to the centre of an art historical enquiry by undertaking a survey of this iconography in some fifty fifteenth-century manuscripts and incunables. Since the occurrence of this generic iconography cannot be consistently associated with female spectators, it has been necessary to reassess in what way they might be en/gendered: how they were received by their original viewers (male and female) and how we can bring them into meaning as sources for reconstructing the lives of medieval women. To avoid equating these images with reality and reducing the female sex at large to the maternal function, I develop a methodology to show how the social viewing positions occupied by certain spectators would have rendered them sensitive to images of maternity and childbirth. Specifically, I argue that the images of childbirth in a group of fifteenth-century Books of Hours made for male and female members of the houses of Anjou and Brittany would have been seen with a `situational eye' that was informed by the requirements of patriarchal, aristocratic families, and by the dangers surrounding childbirth. My thesis demonstrates that this situational eye can be extended beyond the field of art history to show how other sources from fifteenth-century childbearing such as charms, lying-in, and churching, can be brought into meaning for the women whose social position required them to conceive and give birth to male heirs. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME ONE Acknowledgements P. i Abstract p. ii Table of Contents p. iii Abbreviations p. vi List of Illustrations p. vii Introduction: En/Gendering Representations of Childbirth in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Flemish Devotional Manuscripts p. 1 Chapter One: Formulation of the Enquiry and Preliminary Findings p. 5 Formulation of the Enquiry p. 5 Primary Research and Preliminary Findings p. 20 Chapter Two: Reading the Feminine: Methodological Approaches to Images and Gender p. 28 Late-Medieval Manuscripts and Devotional Culture p. 29 Constituting Medieval Bodies p. 38 Gender and the Period Eye p. 50 iv Chapter Three: Childbirth Iconography in Manuscripts Relating to the Houses ofAnjou and Brittany c. 1415-1480: A Case Study p. 60 Manuscripts for the Angevin Dynasty: p. 62 The Grandes Heures de Rohan c. 1417 Manuscripts for the Angevin Dynasty: p. 76 The Paris Hours of Rene d'Anjou, c. 1434 Manuscripts for the Angevin Dynasty: p. 79 The London Hours of Rene d'Anjou, c. 1410 A Manuscript to Link Anjou with Brittany: p. 83 The Fitzwilliam Hours, c. 1418-31 A Manuscript for the Breton Dynasty: p. 100 The Hours of Marguerite de Foix, c. 1477 Chapter Four: Anna peperit Mariam: Prayers and Charms for Childbirth p. 111 Charmsfor Incantation p. 115 Charms to be Inscribed, Ingested, or Placed on the Body p. 126 Chapter Five: Maternity; Ceremonies; and Material Culture p. 133 Childbirth and Material Culture p. 134 The Rite of Churching p. 146 Conclusion: Engendered Representations p. 161 Appendices Appendix 1: List of Primary Sources Consulted p. 168 Appendix 2: Table of Manuscripts with Birth Scenes p. 171 Appendix 3: Genealogical Trees of the House of France, p. 194 and of the Dukes of Anjou, Brittany, and Burgundy V Appendix 4: Childbirth Prayer in the Hours of p. 199 Marguerite de Foix Appendix 5: Childbirth Prayer in a Prayer Book of p. 203 Anne de Bretagne Bibliography p. 207 VOLUME Two Table of Contents p. 1 List of Illustrations p. 1 Illustrations vi ABBREVIATIONS RS RenaissanceStudies JEBS Journal of the Early Book Society JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies EETS, o.s. /e. s. Early English Text Society, original series/extraseries Cat. Fitz. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895) Cat. Well. S. A. J. Moorat, Catalogue of WesternManuscripts on Medicine and Sciencein the WellcomeHistorical Medical Library: MSS written before 1650 AD (London: [Npub], 1962) Avril and Reynaud Francois Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Manuscrits ä peintures en France, 1440-1520 (Paris: Flammarion-Bibliotheque nationale, 1993) Rohan Hours Rohan Hours: Bibliotheque nationale, Paris (ms lat. 9741), partial facsimile with introduction and commentary by Millard Meiss and Marcel Thomas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973) CEO Catholic Encyclopaedia Online http://www. newadvent.org Signs Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society Note on the Bible English quotations from the Bible are taken from the Douai-Rheims version. Quotations in Latin are taken from the Vulgate. Both sources have been accessed from http: //www. bible. crosswalk. com vi' LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of the Virgin, Tornabuoni Chapel, Sta Maria Novella, Florence, c. 1490 Source: Musacchio, Ritual, p. 124 Fig. 2 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of St John the Baptist, Tornabuoni Chapel, Sta Maria Novella, Florence, 1486-87 Fig. 3 Andrea Pisano, Birth of St John the Baptist, Baptistery Doors, Florence, c. 1330-36 Source: http: //www. kfki. hu/-arthp/art/p/pisano/andrea/south d/3birth b. ipg Fig. 4 Rogier van der Weyden, St John Altarpiece (left-hand panel), c. 1450-60 Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Source: Kemperdick, plate 114 Fig. 5 Book of Hours, Sanctoral, Birth of St John the Baptist, late- fifteenth-century No. 13 (JRULM, Latin MS 39), f. 172v Fig. 6 Book of Hours, Sanctoral, Birth of the Virgin, late-fifteenth- century No. 13 (JRULM, Latin MS 39), f. 197v Fig. 7 Jean Wavrin, History of England, Birth of Constantine, fifteenth-century No. 39 (London, BL, Royal MS 15 E. vi), f. 72r Fig. 8 Desco daparto showing confinement scene,c. 1400 Alberto Bruschi Collection, Florence Source: Musacchio, Ritual, p. 48 Fig. 9 Les Faits des romains, Birth ofJulius Caesar National Library of Norway, Scheyen Collection, f. 199r Source: Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Caesareans,p. 71 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Viii Fig. 10 Commentaires de Cesar, Birth of Julius Caesar, fifteenth-century Oxford, Bodleian, MS Douce 208, f. Ir Fig. 11 Jan van Eyck (?), Milan Hours, Birth of St John the Baptist and Baptism of Christ, fifteenth-century Turin, Museo Civico d'Arte Antica, Inv. no. 47, f. 93v Source: Marrow, colour plate 2. Fig. 12 Endkrist, Birth of the Antichrist, Chiroxylographic block-book, c. 1450 Collection of Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Germany Source: Blumenfeld-Kosinski, `Antichrist', p. 603 Fig. 13 Pseudo-Methodius, Opusculum divinarum revelationum, edited by SebastianBrant and printed by Michael Furter in Basle, 1498 New York, Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations Source: Blumenfeld-Kosinski, `Antichrist', p. 607 Fig. 14 Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Prime, Birth of the Virgin, c. 1440 New York, Guennol Collection, f. 20r Source: Plummer, Hours of Catherine of Cleves, plate 43 Fig. 15 Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Matins (Hours of the Dead), Deathbed Scene, c. 1440 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M 917, p. 180 Source: Plummer, Hours of Catherine of Cleves, plate 41 Fig. 16 Giusto de' Menabuoi, Birth of St John the Baptist with female donors (?), Baptistery, Padua, c. 1375 Source: http: //easyweb.easynet. co. uk/giorgio. vasari/ iusto/picI8. htm Fig. 17 Hours of Jacques de Chätillon, Prime, Birth of the Virgin, fifteenth-century Paris,BN, ms n.a. 1.3231, f. 122r LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix Fig. 18 Hours ofJacques de Chdtillon, Donor portraits of Jacquesand Jeannewith fictional children, fifteenth-century Paris, BN, ms n. a.l. 3231, f. 58v-59r Fig. 19 Book of Hours, Calendar (June), Birth of St John the Baptist, fifteenth-century No.

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