Royal materials

Abstract

As historicist as it is materialist, my dissertation both reads the fictional queens portrayed in romance against the fraught positioning of historical queens such as Isabella of France, Anne of Bohemia and Margaret of Anjou, and traces the ambivalent function in late medieval English society of objects including the sacring-bell, the Lollard bible and the royal sword. Merging the traditionally historicist field queenship studies with typically postmodern fields like thing theory and sound theory, I investigate how queens in late medieval romances coopt, queer and reconfigure material objects of masculine power. Each chapter examines a literary queen typically dismissed by subject-oriented ontologies as insubstantial. Analyzing romances that include Richard Coer de Lyon, Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Malory's Morte D'Arthur and the Marian romance of "The Child Slain by Jews" from the Vernon Manuscript, I argue for the overlooked significance of literary queens as figures whose circulation illuminates the construction of medieval masculinities. Through contact with charged material objects that are pivotal to romance plots, queens query patriarchal materials, exposing their underlying "thingness" and malleability. Whether tracking the disturbing afterlife of a church bell used to exorcise the hero's queen mother in Richard Coer de Lyon, or analyzing links between the "Britoun book" that rescues Chaucer's Custance and Anne of Bohemia's vernacular books, my chapters tell a new story about the foreign queens of late medieval English romances by showing how they blur boundaries between male and female, subject and object, West and East, priest and parish, Christian and Jew, orthodox and heterodox, mother and child.