Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens.
- Author/Editor
- Black, Nancy B.
- Title
- Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens.
- Published
- Black, Nancy B. Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xviii, 261 pp. 42 b&w illus.
- Review
- As Nancy Black acknowledges, Margaret Schlauch--in her "Chaucer's Constance and Accused Queens" (1927)--long ago traced the development of the Constance figure in medieval literary tradition from early oral folktales to the more sophisticated narratives of Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer. Black's concern, however, is with the social and manuscript contexts of these Constance narratives, along with those of various analogous accounts that pertain to the Empress of Rome. Black identifies a "coherent narrative type" (188) in these grouped tales, where a slandered or wrongly accused queen (or other noble female protagonist) falls from grace or suffers exile, returns to social status, falls again from grace or into exile, and experiences a second return. The type, Black argues, "counterbalance[s] negative depictions of women in the Middle Ages" and offers model women who are good, powerful in this world (as opposed to being martyred for spiritual glory), steadfast, assertive, chaste in marriage (rather than virginal), and, often, "agents of social change" (189). Black distinguishes these narratives from misogynistic discourse generally, and from saints' lives, accounts of Susanna and the Elders, romance analogues, and more, discussing each of many examples in light of relatively immediate social concerns and/or contextual environments, often codicological. Trevet's story of Constance, for example, is not only physically central to his "Cronicles" and written for Mary of Woodstock, Black points out, but is offered as actual history, in effect, presenting a "'founding mother' for Britain" (110, 127). Observing that critics' focus on Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" has had a "deleterious effect on appreciation of Trevet and Gower" (109), Black reinforces her own structural/stylistic/thematic analysis of Chaucer's tale with discussions of its Prologue and manuscript glosses. Beginning her discussion of Gower's story of Constance, Black points out that the miniature in Morgan Library, MS M.126 fol. 32v (here fig. 20, though fuzzy) actually pertains, not to "the story of Constance, but rather that of the empress of Rome." Even though this illustration is "unlike any other" depiction of the empress that Black has seen, she thinks that the "audience" of the manuscript "was apparently expected to recognize the tale of Constance from the illustration provided" and that the "confusion" between the tales "is not difficult to understand" because "features of the two stories intermingle" in the fourteenth century, and the "empress of Rome becomes the dominant type in England by the fifteenth century" (118-19), presumably before Morgan 126 was produced. Black follows this observation with a very broad summary of the structure of the "Confessio Amantis" and the placement of the Constance narrative in Book 2 (on detraction), focusing rather generally on how Gower's account of Constance "fits admirably within the literary context he has created for it." As elsewhere in the CA, Gower's concern for just governance is here a "message" for "Gower's royal patron," Black tells us, just as Philippe de Remi and Jehan Maillart had earlier seen the "potential of the Constance-type story to provide lessons for rulers . . . . However the generic requirements of [Gower's] exemplum impose an economy of words, minimal character development, and little expansion of potential themes such as marriage or poverty, suffering or spiritual growth." In short, Gower "cannot be faulted" for omitting from his exemplum "the themes developed by later romance writers" (123-24). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society, eJGN 44.2]
- Date
- 2003
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations