Gendered Reputations and Aristocratic Partnership

Re-Presenting the Breton Civil War from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries

With a case study of the duchess and duke of Brittany, and their fight to claim the ducal throne at the start of the Hundred Years’ War, this book probes gender expectations by examining how reputations and shared power are related by elite audiences in contemporary chronicles.

Medieval rulership is increasingly understood as the exercise of shared power, and nowhere was this partnership more evident than between married couples. The study of reputation provides a new way of assessing how the expectations of martial lordship adapted to this joint authority. This book examines the messy legacies of Jeanne de Penthièvre and Charles de Blois, duchess and duke of Brittany, and their fight to claim the ducal title at the start of the Hundred Years’ War. Their story was retold across a prolonged period of political turbulence by successive generations of narrators, who justified legitimate leadership according to disparate standards of sanctity, chivalry, and dynasty. This process shows how the gendering of one reputation influenced the gendering of the other, and how aristocratic attitudes towards violent conflict worked through positive and negative models for both the women and the men in charge.

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