With Chapter 6, the analysis moves from the German Empire to France, examining the claim that the gradual emergence of independent territorial monarchies from the fourteenth century led to the identification of nation and polity and the formation of proto-nation-states. The chapter shows that Pierre Dubois, Nicole Oresme, and Christine de Pizan – key figures in conceptualizing the nature and self-understanding of the late medieval French monarchy – all reject the ideal of world government and begin to theorize some of the elements of independent statehood. However, they do not (yet) think of the territorial kingdom or “state” in national terms. Dubois’ proposal for the recovery and settlement of the Middle East is especially revealing in this regard. In his work, the Holy Land functions as a conceptual blank slate for the projection of an ideal political order, and he envisions a multinational settlement where expatriates from all parts of Europe would live under a common legal and jurisdictional system. The chapter thus shows that the inevitable alternative to the empire was not the nation-state.

This chapter focuses on the literary debates provoked by the appearance of mechanical clocks – and “clockworks” more generally – in medieval England. Invented in China in the eighth century, the first European mechanical clocks were manufactured in the early fourteenth century. The contemporaneous literary record shows that clocks did not immediately impose a secular conception of time that regulated human life; instead, the population of medieval Christian Europe continued to reckon time through cycles of light and dark and according to the liturgical calendar. Drawing on readings of Christine de Pizan, Philippe de Mézières, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Lightsey argues that clocks were primarily received in the time of their invention as mechanical wonders, and primarily employed as displays of wealth.

Starting with the early Middle Ages and offering a broad survey through to the start of the early modern period, this essay examines a range of charms, incantations, prayers, talismans, amulets, recipes, and remedies. Many of these were certainly used for women and sometimes by women, such as charms on birthing scrolls or girdles. The analysis reveals the unexpectedly wide range of areas of expertise ascribed to medieval women, as is illustrated by Christine de Pizanߣs writings on warcraft and chivalry, and the guide to hunting, hawking and heraldry attributed to Dame Juliana Berners (The Book of St Albans). Finally, the essay looks at the extremely varied and encyclopaedic advice available to women found in the compendium known as The Kalender of Shepherds (c. 1490), an important source of folk belief, demonstrating the diversity of medieval womenߣs lore.

This essay focuses on what may seem an ideologically narrow genre: the conduct book, offering a broad and complex interpretation of the texts and their place in medieval culture. Ashley ranges across European examples, especially French works that were later translated into English, beginning with the celebrated early example of the book written by Dhuoda, a Carolingian noblewoman for her son. Louis IXߣs Enseignemenz (Teachings), by contrast, provided advice for both his son and daughter. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the readership of conduct books expanded to include the middle classes. The conduct works of Christine de Pizan illustrate the growing popularity of the genre, reflecting an assumption that the lower classes will learn from the examples set by aristocratic women. Ashley demonstrates the appeal to a wider readership of the late-fourteenth-century book of Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, written for his three daughters and focused on marriage rather than life at court, while, in the same period, Le Menagier de Paris provides an example of a work addressed to a bourgeois audience that anticipates the development of ߢhousehold anthologiesߣ.

This essay considers the influence and reception of the writings of Christine de Pizan, whose career was caught up in the Anglo-French conflict of the Hundred Yearsߣ War, as illustrated by her LߣEpistre dߣOthéa, a didactic treatise on chivalry and virtue, and her autobiographical LߣAdvision Christine. Warren explores the shifting significance of the Othéa during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, showing that Stephen Scropeߣs English translation reduced female agency and power, changes that reflected wider cultural anxieties concerning female lineage and virtue in the context of Lancastrian claims to the throne. The essay also explores Christineߣs connections to two other powerful women: Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou. By reworking Christineߣs treatments of women to reduce their political power and independent wisdom, translators of Christineߣs works also contained the political threats represented by powerful women. Strikingly, depictions of Christine as author shift her context from the court to the cloister, reaffirming traditionally gendered views of women even while her works continued to be circulated in England.

A copy of the Ancient History until Caesar today in the Vatican includes an early depiction of the Rape of the Sabine Women, a violent event from the early history of Rome (more on this in Section 6.2).1 It was probably produced in Genoa or Naples around 1300. The scene is placed in front of a classicizing colonnade with slender columns and depressed arches, potentially an allusion to the antique historical setting. The imagery is minimalist and remains two-dimensional, and compositional decisions limit the exposition of gender-related violence. Altogether there are five pairs of women and men equally distributed under the arches of the colonnade (Figure 6.1). The coifs, hats, and robes of men, together with the circlets and dresses of women, transposes the event into an aristocratic–patrician milieu: We witness what noblemen do to noblewomen. The image has a strong symmetrical structure: The same compositions are repeated on the sides, around the central image. There appears to be a sort of amplification of the gestures. On the flanks, the Roman aggressor embraces the shoulders of the Sabine victim and perhaps touches her breasts. The women here raise their arms with the palms turned towards the outside, which may indicate acceptance.2 One would even be tempted to say that they smile – the approach is welcomed. Quite the opposite, in the inner couplets the men clearly hold the women’s wrists, which signals coercion and use of force. In the center the female victim is embraced, the hands of Romulus (?), with a golden hat, rest on her back and caress her chin. She does not reciprocate the gesture, and this may express her rejection of the imposed intimacy. In any case, the image shows a mixture of negative and positive reactions to the abduction. It displays the major question of the illustrations that accompany romances: Whether or not the female protagonists consented to their capture and the ensuing sexual intercourse? The stories of Helen of Troy, the Sabine women, or Lucretia all revolve around this central issue. Produced primarily for the aristocratic and financial elite in Italy, these French texts and their imagery provide an important backdrop to the communal condemnation of sexual violence and point toward the emergence of erotized representation after 1400.

Charles V’s early death endangered the monarchical system he created, because his adolescent son faced massive urban rebellions, focused on the unpopular indirect taxes Charles V had created. Not long after the monarchy surmounted that challenge, Charles VI’s descent into madness led to a civil war between the Orléans and Burgundy branches of the family. The civil war necessitated a renewed series of theoretical justifications for monarchical power. The concurrent debates about papal v. conciliar supremacy had particular resonance in France because of Jean Gerson’s key role both in French political life and in the debates within the Church.Writers such as Jean de Terrevermeille, who transformed the “Salic Law” from a rarely cited myth into a largely accepted “fundamental law,” and Christine de Pizan, who created an explicitly French metaphor of the body politic, would have a determining influence on the next two centuries of French political discourse. The political prominence of multiple women placed gender at the center of French politics in this period, a pattern that repeated in the transition to the new vocabulary of State, after 1560.