Political Rhetoric, Power and Renaissance Women
"Conflicting Rhetoric about Tudor Women: The Example of Queen Anne Boleyn"
Retha Warnicke
"The Blood-Stained Hands of Catherine de Medicis" Elaine Kruse
>These two essays regarding Anne Boleyn and Catherine de Medicis are often surprising in their similarities. Both Warnicke and Kruse illustrate the prevailing opinions of women, especially ruling women of the day in order to begin to explain why these Queens were seen as they were at the time and continue to be seen today by many scholars.
>The stories of Catherine and Anne were stories of women gone horribly astray from their accepted roles. In their day, the actual facts and proof surrounding the lives of Catherine, the plotting, poisoning King-wannabe and Anne, the sexually promiscuous mother of an equally abhorrent Queen (Elizabeth I) were of little consequence to those who wrote their stories. As Warnicke states, "[biographers] drew upon facts frm the individual's life that best fit the requirements of the specific convention they adopted" (Warnicke 39). In this respect, women could only be written about in "saintly or eulogist" pieces or "anti-heroic or demonic" pieces (Warnicke 39) making it next to impossible to glean the truth about the subjects from their biographies.
>Oftentimes, biographers about these two women appeared to have religious agendas. Catherine, incidentally niece to Pope Clement VII, was infamous for the 1572 Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Her biographers, particularly those of the "Marvelous Discourse" that Kruse mentions often in her essay, painted her as a villain in all respects. Catherine's actual involvement, according to Kruse, citing her earlier attempts to reconcile warring French Catholics and Protestants, is open to interpretation. To those Protestants who hesitated to blame their French King (Charles IX, who, from what I've heard, was a psychotic sadist), his Florentine mother was a perfect scapegoat. What an easy target! An assertive woman who often had to alternate between roles of Queen-Mother and Queen-Regent after the untimely death of her husband, King Henri II, Catherine had overstepped the line between dutiful wife/mother/helpmate to a sexually deviant tyrant who corrupted her children through the teachings of Machiavelli and her overall Italian-ness. Catherine was often likened to a witch, "the woman alone, uncontrolled by father or husband, sexually predatory, practicing evil arts to exercise her will or to wreak vengeance" (Kruse 145). It is interesting to note current suspicions of women's knowledge of healing and childbirth when Kruse describes how Henri II's mistress, Diane de Poitiers offered the help of her doctor in the couple's early childlessness. The "Marvelous Discourse" attributed Catherine's subsequent bearing of ten children to "the methods we have all heard about" which Kruse explains as being "an inference of women's secret knowledge" (Kruse 146). It is also interesting to note that Catherine is charged with being superstitious and resorting to astrology (which I didn't think was uncommon) and this is seen as a bad thing, but the "Marvelous Discourse" has no problem relaying, in minute detail, all of the evil omens and portents surrounding Catherine's birth and childhood.
>In Retha Warnicke's essay on Anne Boleyn, the religious affiliation of her biographers is also important. Protestant John Foxe included her in his "Book of Martyrs" as a woman who was loved for her charity. It is important to note that Foxe was employed as tutor by Mary, duchess of Richmond for her "Howard nieces and nephews" (Warnicke 42). This is important because, assuming these are the correct Howards, the pupils were related to Queen Catherine Howard who was a relative of Anne. One of her most famous detractors, Nicholas Sander, was a "leader of the Catholic refugees at Louvain" and could have held her responsible for the secession from the Catholic Church in Rome, being a result of Henry VIII's desire to divorce his first wife and marry her. She could also not have been too popular in his eyes by virtue of the fact that she was mother to Elizabeth I, who he felt was the "hour of Satan and the power of darkness" (Warnicke 44).
>One of the most interesting themes in this essay was the almost hereditary way in which sin, particularly that of lust could be transmitted. "Even during [Anne's] lifetime, the king had been forced to deny having had sexual relations with her mother, and thus of having been his consort's father as well as her husband" (Warnicke 45). In this respect, Anne was the daughter of a sexually deviant woman, though not proven, was sexually promiscuous herself and was the mother of a possibly illegitimate daughter.
>Both Warnicke and Kruse also emphasize the ways in which these stereotypes have continued to this day. Kruse in particular begins her essay with examples of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nancy Reagan stepped into the ruling realm and were seen as conniving shrews and continues by showing how the example of Catherine de Medicis was used in the prosecution of Marie Antoinette. For her part, Warnicke gives an example of a recent (1991) article on Boleyn by George Bernard who claimed that she was guilty of adultery and was not an unlucky victim of her husband's politics, as more modern biographies have claimed. Warnicke says, "Like Sander, seeing that many dignitaries thought that she was promiscuous, he concluded that the charges against her were true" (Warnicke 50). If there is one parallel between these two essays, it is that in order to understand portrayals of Renaissance women, we must examine, in close detail, the reigning opinions regarding women.