Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (32 page)

Read Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship Online

Authors: Jo Eldridge Carney

Tags: #History, #Europe, #England/Great Britain, #Legends/Myths/Tales, #Royalty

48. Julie D. Campbell, “Literary Culture and Women,” in 
Encyclopedia of
Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England,
 eds. Diana Robin, Anne R. Larsen, and Carole Levin (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio: 2007), 202–05.

49. Frieda, 77.

50. Jean Orieux,
Catherine de Medicis ou La Reine Noire
 (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 155.

51. King, 36.

52. In addition to Helen King and Holly Tucker, see also Monica Green,
Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in
Pre-Modern Gynaecology
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Lianne McTavish, 
Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early
Modern France
 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005).

53. King, 40.

54. Ibid., 38.

55. Jennifer Gordetsky, MD. “The ‘Infertility’ of Catherine de Medici and its Influence on 16th Century France,” 
The Canadian Journal of
Urology
 16, no. 2 (April, 2009), 4586.

56. Qtd. in Gordetsky, 4587.

57. King, 36.

58. Ibid., 40. See also Ivan Cloulas, 
Catherine de Médicis
 (Paris: Fayard, 1979), 131.

59. Tucker, 62.

60. Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, 
The Medical World of Early Modern France
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130.

61. See Holly Tucker’s brief discussion of concerns over Marie de Médicis’s fertility, 1–5.

62. Gelis, 16–18.

63. Ruth Kleinman, 
Anne of Austria: Queen of France
 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 140–48.

64. Tucker, 92–96.

65. See Judith Richards, 
Mary Tudor
 (New York: Routledge, 2008) and Anna Whitelock, 
Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen
 (New York: Random House, 2010) for excellent assessments of Mary’s achievement and reputation as queen.

66. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2, September 18, 1554. Item 60.

67. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2, October 2, 1554. Item 71.

68. 
England Under the Reigns of Edward and Mary
, ed. P. F. Tytler, 2 vols. (London: 1839), 455.

69. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2, Nov. 23, 1554. Item 108.

70. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2, Nov. 30, 1554. Item 116.

71. John Foxe, 
Acts and Monuments,
 8 vols., ed. Stephen Reed Catley (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1838), vol. 5, 587.

72. Ibid., 588.

73. Qtd. in Richards, Bodl. MS Gough Misc Antiq, 3, fo. 114.

74. Foxe, vol. 5, 580.

75. Richards, 176.

76. 
CSP Venice,
 vol. 6, April 1, 1555. Item 42.

77. Foxe, vol. 6, 125–26.

78. Catherine Mann, “Clothing Bodies, Dressing Rooms: Fashioning Fecundity in 
the Lisle Letters,
 ” 
Parergon
 22, no. 1 ( January 2005), 137–57. See also Janelle Jenstad, “Lying-in Like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil Family, and a Chaste Maid in Cheapside 
,
 ” 
Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
 34, no. 2 (Spring 2004), 373–03.

79. Foxe, vol. 6, 125.

80. Foxe, vol. 6, 126.

81. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2. May 22, 1555. Item 193.

82. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2. June 1, 1555. Item 204.

83. 
CSP Venice,
 vol. 6, June 26, 1555. Item 142.

84. 
CSP Venice,
 vol. 6, July 23, 1555. Item 163.

85. Qtd. in Jean Mary Stone, 
The History of Mary I: Queen of England, as Found in the Public Records.
 Sloane Manuscript, 1583, fol. 15. London, 1901, 350–51.

86. Ibid., 351.

87. 
CSP Venice,
 vol. 6, August 5, 1555. Item 174.

88. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2, June 24, 1555. Item 216.

89. David Loades, 
The Tudor Queens of England
 (New York: MJF Books, 2009), 200; Richards, 177.

90. Foxe, vol. 6, 126. See also 
Idem Iterum, or the History of Queen Mary’s
 
Big Belly, from Mr. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Dr. Heyling’s History of the Reformation
 (London: 1688).

91. John Patrick O’Grady and Miriam Rosenthal, “Pseudocyesis: A Modern Perspective on an Old Disorder,” 
Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey
 44, no. 7 ( July 1989): 500–11.

92. 
The Lisle Letters,
 vol. 4, 241.

93. Patricia Cholakian, 
Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 234.

94. Ibid., 240.

95. 
L & P,
 vol. 1, November 1, 1509. Item 220.

96. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 2, May 25, 1510. Item 7.

97. Ibid.

98. 
CSP Spain
. Supplements to vol. 2, May 29, 1510.

99. David Starkey claims that “Catherine had lied to her father. And earlier, she had deceived her husband about her phantom pregnancy, or at least acquiesced in the deceit and muddle.” This accusation does not take into account the difficulties early modern women and those advising them experienced in assessing the state of their reproductive bodies. 
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII
 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 119.

100. D’Aulnoy, “The Hind in the Woods” in Macdonell, 347–76.

101. 
The Diary of Samuel Pepys,
 vol. IV, eds. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 348.

102. Ctd. in Antonia Fraser, 
The Wives of Henry VIII
 (New York: Knopf, 1992), 276.

3 Maternal Monstrosities: Queens and the Reproduction of Heirs and Errors

1. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, “Babiole,” in 
The Fairy Tales of Madame D’Aulnoy,
 trans. Macdonell (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1892), 232–48.

2. Kathryn A. Hoffmann, “Of Monkey Girls and a Hog-Faced Gentlewoman: Marvel in Fairy Tales, Fairgrounds, and Cabinets of Curiosities,” 
Marvels & Tales
 19, no.1 (2005), 67–85.

3. For more information on the Gonzales family see Merry E. WiesnerHanks, 
The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and their Worlds
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) and Jan Bondeson, 
The
Two-Headed Boy and Other Marvels
 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

4. Hoffmann, 74; Wiesner-Hanks cites a contemporary reference to Antoinetta as a girl “whose face resembles that of a monkey,” 26.

5. Bondeson, 1–6.

6. Hoffmann, 70.

7. Stith-Thompson,
Motif Index of Folk-Literature,
 6 vols., rev. and enlarged ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) 
,
 450–99.

8. Giovanni Staparola, “The Pig Prince,” in Zipes, 52–56.

9. D’Aulnoy, “The Wild Boar,” in Zipes, 57–81.

10. Henriette Julie de Murat, “The Pig King,” in Zipes 83–96.

11. Straparola, “Ancillotto, ” in Zipes, 220–29.

12. Michel Foucault,
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
 (New York: Random House, 1977), 104.

13. D’Aulnoy, “Princess Belle-Etoile and Prince Cheri,” in Zipes, 229–63.

14. On the subject of early modern practices and attitudes toward breastfeeding, see Valerie Fildes, 
Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History
of Infant Feeding
 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986); Marilyn Luecke, “The Reproduction of Culture and the Culture of Reproduction in Elizabeth Clinton’s 
The Countess of Lincolnes Nurserie,”
in 
Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture,
 eds. Mary E. Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda Dove, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 238–52; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, 
Women in Early Modern England
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 152; 
Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early
Modern Period,
 eds. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000); Gail Kern Paster, 
The Body Embarrassed: Drama
and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England,
 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993),163–280.

15. The literature on infanticide in the early modern period is extensive. See Frances E. Dolan, 
Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic
Crime in England 1550–1700
 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Peter Hoffer and N. Hull, 
Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in
England and New England, 1558–1803
 (New York: New York University Press, 1981).

16. Eustache le Noble, “The Bird of Truth,” in Zipes, 264–70.

17. Antoine Galland, “The Jealous Sisters and Their Cadette,” in Zipes, 270–305.

18. Magnanini, 101.

19. The primary and secondary literature on the marvelous and the monstrous in the early modern period is vast. Significant works include Kathryn Brammall, “Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England,” 
Sixteenth
Century Journal
 27, no. 1(1996), 3–21; David Cressy, 
Agnes Bowker’s
Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Lorraine J. Daston and Katharine Park, 
Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750
 (New York: Zone Books, 2001); 
Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern
England,
 eds. Laura L. Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); 
Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters
in Early Modern Culture,
 ed. Peter G. Platt (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999); and Dudley Wilson, 
Signs and Portents:
Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
 (New York: Routledge, 1993).

20. Daston and Park, 172.

21. In addition to Daston and Park and Cressy, see Julie Crawford,
Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Mary Fissell, 
Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern
England
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I am also grateful to Sheila Wright for directing me to the story of Mary Adams who in 1652 was said to deliver “the most ill-shapen monster that ever eyes beheld; which being dead born, they buried it with speed, for it was so loathsome to behold...for it had claws like a toad.” According to the broadsheet that recounted this story, Mary’s monstrous birth was a result of her heresy. Ctd. in Stephen T. Asma, 
On Monsters
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 142–43.

22. A. W. Bates
,
 
Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe
 (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2005) and Cressy, 31–32; Julie Crawford also lists the 30 broadsheets and pamphlets she examined in her bibliography.

23. Francis Bacon, 
The New Organon
, eds. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149.

24. Bates, 215–85.

25. Daston and Park, 187.

26. Fissell, 53.

27. J. Crawford, 4. Not all scholars agree on the nature of the impact that “cheap print” had on the explosion of interest in monster births. See Tessa Watt, 
Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Fissell, 7–8.

28. J. Crawford, 14. Fissell also claims that whereas some authors saw aberrations as divine punishment for an entire community, others associated the monstrous birth primarily with women. See John Sadler’s 
The Sick Woman’s Private Looking-Glasse
 (London, 1636) for an example of the acknowledgment of the role of God or natural causes, but as Fissell points out, “in the context of his book, which depicts the many ways in which the female body is dangerous and unstable, the attribution of monstrosity to the female becomes another instance of the transformation of the female body from the wondrous to the terrible,” 66.

29. Ibid., 66, 152.

30. See Cressy, chapters 1 and 2.

31. Huet, Marie-Hélène. 
Monstrous Imagination
 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1.

32. Huet,16. See also Jane Sharp, 
The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,
 ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92.

33. Montaigne, “On the Power of the Imagination,” 
Montaigne: Essays,
trans. John M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1958), 21. 34. Ibid., 1.

35. Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in SeventeenthCentury England,” 
Past & Present
 156, no. 1 (August, 1997), 87. 36. Julie Crawford discusses how even “early modern women’s prayers for pregnancy often presented childbirth as a joint project between the pregnant woman and God to which the human father is almost entirely absent,” 18.

37. 
CSP Spain,
 vol. 13, pt. 2, April 21, 1555. Item 178.

38. For examples of references to childbirth fears in writings of early modern women, see Mendelson and Crawford, 151–56 and Patricia Crawford, “The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England” in 
Blood, Bodies, and Families in
Early Modern England
 (New York: Longman, 2004), 95–97. See also Linda A. Pollack, “Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early-Modern Society,” in 
Women as Mothers in
Pre-Industrial England,
 ed. Valerie Fildes (New York: Routledge, 1990), 39–67 and Wendy Wall, 
The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and
Publication in the English Renaissance
 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 283–96. In a section titled “The Female Legacy,” Wall provides a careful analysis of advice books by early modern mothers to their children, especially Elizabeth Joceline’s 
The Mothers Legacie
to Her Unborn Child
, as she anticipated her possible death in childbirth (Oxford, 1624).

39. R. Schofield. “Did Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality in 
The World We Have Lost
,” in L. Bonfield, et. al., eds. 
The
World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Although higher maternal mortality rates have been assumed, Schofield estimates a rate of no more than 6 percent or 7 percent during a woman’s procreative career, but as Mendelson and Crawford point out, “this was not how women themselves calculated the danger,” 152.

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