To browse Academia. This paper explores the complex narratives of marriage, power, and sexuality in the context of the Capetian dynasty, focusing particularly on royal women and their roles within the political framework of medieval France.
Through the examination of historical events and texts, the paper highlights the implications of societal perceptions surrounding female agency and lineage, especially in relation to marriage practices and the inheritance laws impacting royal succession.
They were both ardent defenders of the kingdom of France and the Valois dynasty, politically engaged public intellectuals who used their writings to meet the combined threats of external and civil war, to safeguard the authority of the king, and to shape and proclaim a distinctly French national identity. Indeed, Jean de Montreuil would be among those massacred during the Burgundian takeover of Paris in , from which Jean Gerson, busy at the Council of Constance, was fortuitously absent.
Although the nature of their textual production differs, Montreuil and Gerson both employ the language and categories of gender and sexuality, particularly as they relate to real and The present essay draws upon material that I develop further in my monograph entitled Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France.
Medieval and Early Modern Murder, ed. Larissa Tracy, This collection of primary texts offers readers a vivid sense of the various hagiographic and liturgical materials that might have formed part of the devotional tradition surrounding a saint in the later Middle Ages. In a paperback book that fits comfortably into the hands, Cecilia Gaposchkin presents editions of various Latin texts related to the cult of Saint Louis b.
