Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442) Family and Power: The Reverse of the Tapestry

A glance at the contents of this book reveals a study of a Spanish woman who became queen of Naples–Sicily–Jerusalem examined through the framework of familial power across a life span, from upbringing to marriage, from queen-consort to queen-dowager. But that brief description is, to say the least, an understatement.

The queen in question, Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442), was at the forefront of European politics who ‘employed diplomacy, political brinksmanship, military force, and celestial intervention’ to secure a stable future for her family and their subjects. This is more than a study of one woman: It is a densely contextual empirical study of events in France between 1400 and 1442. Her natal family ruled the Crown of Aragon; her husband’s was a cadet branch of the Valois dynasty. She lived in the tumultuous period that witnessed the assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orleans in 1407; the defeat of the French by the English at Agincourt in 1415; and Joan of Arc’s battle to save France. Yolande was not only at the centre of all this, she was instrumental to many of the key decisions that stabilized the French monarchy after the debacles of the later Hundred Years’ War.

Daughter and only surviving child of Aragonese King Joan I and his French-born queen, Violant de Bar, Yolande was well schooled in royal politics by her mother and her aunt, Queen Maria de Luna. Yolande was a mature twenty-year-old princess when she when she travelled to France to marry Louis II, king of Naples–Sicily–Jerusalem (1377–1417) and was his partner in politics. As queen-consort, she governed alongside him as lieutenant-general with authority that encompassed political, diplomatic, judicial, military and religious affairs. After her husband’s death, she governed as viceroy for their son, Louis III. As mother-in-law of King Charles VII of France, she supported him when he was disinherited by his mother and was instrumental in securing his coronation after the military successes led by Joan of Arc. As a stateswoman, Yolande used her affiliations with the Franciscans to repair the shattered ties that linked the European dynastic houses and to restore the integrity of the French kingdom.

It is insightful to observe the breath-taking events of Valois France through the eyes of someone at the centre of court, but who was overshadowed by contemporaries far more famous. Rohr surveys the historiography with a gimlet eye, critiquing generations of political historians who overlooked her to focus on the deeds of kings. Her method entails examining ‘the reverse of the tapestry’ not from a masculine standpoint, but rather by taking a close look at who was in the background. She also takes to task the newer generation of postmodern and feminist scholars who focus on theory at the expense of painstaking archival research, but it seems to me that she protests a bit too much. Rohr’s study is hardly theory-free; it is thoroughly grounded in a range of theories. She uses it judiciously for explanatory purposes and does not stretch the evidence to fit a theory. Rohr is fully attuned to the vagaries of chance and fate, of which there was a superabundance in the events leading up to the coronation of Charles VII. She credits Yolande’s success to healthy doses of sagacity, planning, patience and a prodigious personal and political network of allies to rally when she needed support.

As Rohr notes in her conclusion, ‘venturing behind the tapestry is often more instructive than merely contenting ourselves with the image commissioned for public view’. That, too, is an understatement. One of the strengths of this book is that it is also a longitudinal look at women and sovereignty with Yolande at the centre. Rohr glances backwards to Yolande’s dynastic foremothers (Elionor of Sicily, Yolande of Flanders, Marie of France and Violant to Bar); sideways at her more flamboyant contemporary, the queen of France, Isabeau of Bavaria; and toward the future to her granddaughters Marguerite and Yolande of Anjou and her great-granddaughter Anne of France. Her analysis is predicated on her observation that Yolande understood the benefits of pragmatic exercise of power that corresponded to her contemporary, Christine de Pizan, whose ideas on juste ypocrisie (a careful and prudent self-fashioning in order to further her family and for the benefit of her subjects) she regards as pre-Machiavellian. Rohr is interested in how women learn to be queens, and she casts her eye toward Anne of France’s handbook or ‘mirror for a princess,’ the Enseignements (ca. 1503–1504). By averting our gaze from the deeds of men, Rohr gives scholars and students of medieval France, queens and the practice of queenship a much richer, more nuanced, more meaningful portrait of a complex historic tapestry.