In 2019 I travelled to Caen in Normandy to go to the Abbey of Holy Trinity and by chance attended a baptism. The church was constructed by Queen Mathilda of Flanders in 1066, the identical 12 months her husband, Duke William, efficiently subjugated England and have become King William I. Mathilda’s tomb – the explanation for my go to – is within the choir, marked by its unique black marble slab, round which the baptism service was happening. The baptism of a kid over the corpse of a protracted useless queen, within the church she constructed, broached a millennium of handed time.
It’s normally solely when standing subsequent to a grave containing their thousand-year-old bones that the tangibility of historic figures turns into unavoidably obvious. In The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders Laura L. Gathagan reveals how Mathilda got here to embody the Norman Conquest of England, exploring her queenship by means of her bodily presence and bodily acts.
Mathilda was born to the ducal household of Flanders round 1031. She had royal in addition to aristocratic blood; her mom Adela was the daughter of Robert II, king of France; her father, Baldwin, grew to become the depend of Flanders in 1035. By 1049 she was betrothed to Duke William of Normandy. The wedding was controversial; it was forbidden by the pope, who supported the Salian emperor Henry III, to whom Normandy and Flanders have been rival polities. Mathilda’s marriage went forward in 1051 in defiance of the papal ban, and he or she grew to become duchess of Normandy. In 1066, the 12 months she constructed her monastery in Caen, her husband sailed throughout the Channel to make his declare on the English throne, culminating within the Battle of Hastings. Along with his rival Harold Godwinson useless on the battlefield, William was topped king of England at Christmas within the just lately constructed Westminster Abbey. Mathilda joined him in England in 1068, closely pregnant with the long run Henry I, her ninth recognized youngster. She was topped queen in Westminster Abbey at Pentecost in a ceremony presided over by the archbishop of York and attended by a mix of the brand new post-Conquest lords and pre-Conquest earls. Like William, she spent her remaining years between Normandy and England, intermittently ruling in her husband’s absence. She died in 1083, 4 years earlier than her husband, and was buried at Holy Trinity in Caen.
Gathagan’s ebook is just not a conventional historic biography, delineating a life from starting to finish. As an alternative, she makes use of Mathilda’s physique because the governing theme. Within the first chapter, ‘Blood’, we learn the way Mathilda took inspiration from her familial background on the Flemish courtroom and from different distinguished royal ladies. ‘Palms’ explores Mathilda as a builder of each Holy Trinity and of the Mora, a warship that she commissioned to help within the conquest of England. ‘Fingers’ seems to be at Mathilda as a compiler of an intensive assortment of saints’ relics for the group at Holy Trinity; ‘Head’ focuses on the individuality of her coronation as England’s first conquering queen in 1068, in an revolutionary ceremony up to date particularly for her. ‘Womb’ highlights Mathilda’s 9 recognized pregnancies and her participation in two of her kids’s lives – Robert, who Mathilda financially supported when he rebelled in opposition to the authority of his father, and Cecilia, who Mathilda devoted to Holy Trinity as a baby. ‘Flesh’ focuses on Mathilda’s donations of eucharistic vestments to church buildings; ‘Mouth’ reveals her function as a choose, a accountability no English queen had beforehand undertaken. Lastly, ‘Corpse’ recounts how Mathilda’s bodily stays have been manipulated, each bodily and ideologically, since her loss of life.
Using physique elements to construction the ebook is extra metaphorical than anatomical, but it surely succeeds in foregrounding Mathilda as an actual individual in addition to a queen in a fashion that brings to thoughts Ernst Kantorowicz’ The King’s Two Our bodies (1957) – viewing monarchy as concurrently corporeal and incorporeal. Gathagan herself cites a special inspiration, Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has By no means Been Instructed: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014). The topics are starkly completely different: Baptist wrote about folks disadvantaged of their rights and autonomy, whereas Gathagan explores the lifetime of one of many wealthiest and strongest people in Eleventh-century England. What enslaved folks and medieval queens do have in frequent is that their our bodies have been disproportionately objectified in scholarship. Historians who view their topics as physique elements should achieve this with an energetic dedication to humanise them. By titling a chapter ‘Womb’, Gathagan reminds the reader that Mathilda bodily birthed her progeny, one thing simply misplaced from sight in household tree diagrams; ‘Head’ reminds us that coronations weren’t merely spiritual ideas or metaphors, however occasions that bodily occurred to an actual individual. Within the concluding chapter, ‘Corpse’, Gathagan explores how Mathilda’s physique has been defiled over the centuries by a succession of males obsessive about analysing her pelvis within the identify of science, most just lately Elizabeth II’s personal doctor Sir John Dewhurst in 1981. There is a vital distinction between Gathagan’s overt concentrate on the completely different roles Mathilda’s physique performed in her expressions of energy and scholarship that’s preoccupied with the our bodies of queens as nothing greater than royal incubators.
Whereas the method is great – I want I had considered it – the execution is just not excellent. The coronation chapter is factually confused, and among the Latin translations include vital inaccuracies. However whereas these would pose points for an educational researcher, an lay reader will end the ebook with an knowledgeable sense of Mathilda as a uniquely influential lady worthy of historic research. The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders is one in every of solely a handful of educational biographies of particular person queens from this era – how Mathilda compares to her contemporaries, successors, and predecessors can be simpler to evaluate if extra of them had been handled in the identical element.
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The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders, c.1031-1083: Embodying Conquest
Laura L. Gathagan
Boydell Press, 280pp, £85
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Florence Scott is a visiting fellow in Historical past on the College of Leeds.
