Early Modern Women in the Low Countries

Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past

Susan Broomhall, Jennifer Spinks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754667421
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317146797
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

Combining historical, historiographical, museological, and touristic analysis, this study investigates how late medieval and early modern women of the Low Countries expressed themselves through texts, art, architecture and material objects, how they were represented by contemporaries, and how they have been interpreted in modern academic and popular contexts. Broomhall and Spinks analyse late medieval and early modern women's opportunities to narrate their experiences and ideas, as well as the processes that have shaped their representation in the heritage and cultural tourism of the Netherlands and Belgium today. The authors study female-authored objects such as familial and political letters, dolls' houses, account books; visual sources, funeral monuments, and buildings commissioned by female patrons; and further artworks as well as heritage sites, streetscapes, souvenirs and clothing with gendered historical resonances. Employing an innovative range of materials from written sources to artworks, material objects, heritage sites and urban precincts, the authors argue that interpretations of late medieval and early modern women's experiences by historians and art scholars interact with presentations by cultural and heritage tourism providers in significant ways that deserve closer interrogation by feminist researchers.

Chapter 1
Writing Elite Women into the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands

We travelled regularly to the Netherlands and Belgium while working on the research that unfolds in the following chapters. On one such trip, Sue was locating images and monuments depicting women in Bruges, and particularly women connected to the cultural and political flourishing of the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, which brought the Low Countries to wider European prominence. While visiting the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw church, her four-year-old daughter Fionn asked if she could help with the research. Sue explained that she was looking for images of ‘old-fashioned ladies’ but said that apart from the ‘big duchess lying down’ there were not many in the building. ‘But what about her, mummy?’ Fionn asked, pointing at a triptych. Yes, but they weren’t really the sort we were looking for, Sue replied, explaining that since her husband was pictured alongside her, it was really more about him. ‘What about that one? She looks like she’s a mummy,’ Fionn pointed to a memorial stone described on the plaque as ‘Jan van de Velde and family.’ Well that was really more about her husband too and what he wanted to say about himself, Sue answered. ‘Why don’t those ones count?’ Fionn asked.

It was a question, we realized, which demanded a response. This chapter is our answer. It explores the kinds of narratives that are created today about the past using women’s own voices and experiences from this period. What sources are used in different narrative contexts such as museums, galleries, churches, and academic books and articles, and why is this the case? How does such source selection and presentation affect the stories that can be told about women’s lives in the late medieval Low Countries? In asking these questions, we open this book with a chapter that positions our overarching, key historiographical argument at the foreground of the analysis. We argue that curatorial and academic historical practices intersect in important ways that have not been hitherto analysed in terms of their implications for scholarship on early modern women. We consider here how scholarly historical vision is produced – by which we mean how some original materials are in the line of sight of scholars while others are not – and examine the impact on scholarly interpretations of contemporary narratives about the past created in domains such as art and heritage tourism. To do so, we explore how a range of sources such as artworks, monuments, and written texts that were produced by and for women from the late medieval period are used to produce modern narratives about the Burgundian and Habsburg period for popular, touristic, and academic consumption.

In the first section of this chapter we explore why only certain women have entered into historical interpretations of the Burgundian and Habsburg period, where they are typically visualized as individual and exceptional women of power, rather than embedded in a wider analysis of female possibilities for action and political endeavour. We then move to examine what alternative and rarely used textual sources such as memoirs and letters produced by women could elucidate about their experiences. Recent exhibitions and catalogues are combining textual, visual, and material sources, we suggest, in ways which provide rich and productive opportunities to develop new interpretations of the period. In the third section, we explore how historical scholarship on ego-documents could enrich the presentation of material sources, especially visual ones, commissioned and thus in important respects produced by women, in art history and museological contexts where they have tended to be viewed in isolation. In each section we consider how sources are used in modern settings and presented to form interpretations of the past, and we consider how the connections among different contexts shape the narratives that can be developed. We suggest that to date a relatively limited view of female experiences has predominated, and that this could become more nuanced and detailed through an increasing interaction of sources and contexts, and a willingness to think more widely about what aspects of women’s achievements and lives are worth paying attention to.

Women in Power

The duchesses of Burgundy, and especially the biographical details of their lives, have featured prominently in both academic scholarship and more popular presentations of medieval women in the Netherlands. Women such as Isabel of Portugal, third wife of Philip the Good, and Margaret of York, third wife of Charles the Bold, have become iconic figures.1 The challenges faced by women as rulers and as regents have been articulated through the life stories of Mary of Burgundy and her daughter Margaret of Austria.2 Bookshops across Burgundy and Flanders are filled with richly illustrated texts on the various duchesses, their covers drawing upon the many well-known portraits of the women concerned. The titles offer an indication of the way the duchesses’ lives are often presented through their involvement in contemporary European high politics. Isabel of Portugal is successively a ‘woman in power in the fifteenth century,’ ‘the Duchess who played politics in the age of Joan of Arc’ and most recently, a ‘woman of power at the heart of Europe in the Middle Ages.’3 Mary of Burgundy, whose short life complicates the biographical approach, becomes the passive foil for contemporary events. Mary’s story is that of ‘the Revolt of Ghent,’ she is a ‘princess in chains,’ then ‘witness to a great enterprise at the birth of European nationalities,’ and represents ‘the fragility of the times.’4 These women, we are told, were no mere pawns of their fathers, brothers, sons, or husbands. Each is lauded for her political acumen, tenacity, and ingenuity. Isabel of Portugal ‘earned a reputation as a formidable diplomatic, political, and financial player.’5 Margaret of Austria, queen, princess, duchess, and regent in the service of Habsburg ambitions, was ‘the most willing, the most determined, the most cultivated’ of all the great women who graced the European political stage of her era who ‘together, founded a new European order.’6

Feminist scholarship may perhaps take some credit for these texts, having prioritized the recovery of documents and objects by and about women that underpin such biographical works. Indeed, feminism may also contribute more broadly to the number of female travellers seeking publications and especially souvenirs, as we explore in more detail in Chapter 7. An earlier generation of scholars of Burgundy such as Johan Huizinga, Otto Cartellieri, and Joseph Calmette generally had little to say about individual women of power.7 Feminist research has, however, highlighted the particular ways in which the various duchesses were able to manoeuvre politically through social and cultural means, and recent biographies such as those discussed above, by contrast to the earlier scholarship, often discuss the struggle of female access to power, or female forms of power, although they are rarely, if ever, explicitly grounded in a feminist theoretical paradigm.

Scholars have shown how artistic patronage and artistic representations offered women ways to exercise and display power.8 Dagmar Eichberger, Lisa Beaven, and Andrea G. Pearson have explored some of the possible meanings behind Margaret of Austria’s commissions for diptychs depicting herself and her mother. They have also examined the display of her portraits in distinct spaces, arguing that such images demonstrate a woman’s approach to her devotional practices as well as particularly female challenges of articulating connections to family, alliances, authority, and power.9 Eichberger has considered how Margaret raised her own status through collecting art and demonstrated both her piety and taste through a careful selection of objects and images. Through attentively ‘reconstructing’ the modes of display for this collection, she demonstrates the value of analysing display and spatial strategies of presentation for feminist research concerned with women of power.10 Eichberger’s research also informed her related exhibition project with curator Joris Capenberghs, part of the larger project Mechelen 2005, A City in Female Hands developed by Kris Callens.11 This year-long programme included town walks with a ‘specific focus on female, rather than the usual, rather male, history’ attesting to ‘an evolving conscience of the female contributions to the history of the city,’ while another, the Digitale Voormoeders project, worked with a range of university scholars and with equal opportunity sponsors.12 The tourist marketing of Mechelen as one in female hands during 2005 owes its development to the research of feminist scholarship and attests to the rich possibilities of such interactions between scholars, curators, tourist providers, and municipal councils.

In addition to elucidating elite women’s actual strategies of achieving, exercising, and maintaining power, feminist scholars have also argued for a new vision of political history that articulates the importance of gender to even the most traditional concepts of political action.13 Yet elite women’s particular political roles, strategies, and access to power, and their production of conventional historical evidence such as written sources, have rarely been integrated into broader political histories of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands. The rich correspondence of Margaret of Austria with her father, the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, during her time as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, has, for example, received much less recent attention from historians than her artistic patronage has from scholars of visual culture.14 On first reading, the letters may appear disappointing for scholars seeking evidence of female political participation comparable to that of male rulers. Margaret appears to present herself to Maximilian as the obedient instrument of her father’s will. Many of the letters are not concerned with what might be perceived as the key political events of her day but instead with placements or recognition for loyal subjects.15 However, the social aspects of politics have recently been emphasized through feminist studies of the importance of cultures of networks, gossip, and intimacy, which offered women distinctive forms of political action, and a means of access to the institutional structures of the political realm.16 In this light, we suggest that Margaret’s patronage of individuals at court, and her networks and alliances to subjects, may deserve closer study as signs of her own political force.

Certainly, we are yet to see political studies of the whole period written in ways that encompass the full spectrum of political engagement even of the duchesses, let alone a broader cohort of women.17 The production of biographically-based studies, as one of the more significant contributions to the field by both academic and popular authors alike, has had both advantages and disadvantages for the study of elite women and power. On the one hand, it has opened up new evidence and information of women’s experiences as political figures, and demonstrated the broad popular and academic interest in their stories. On the other, it has perhaps tended towards the isolation of individual women and positioned them as exceptional figures, rather than providing opportunities to understand female experiences of politics and power more broadly.

Textual Sources for Women’s Narratives of Their Experiences

Exhibitions including visual images of late medieval women provide another means by which their stories remain present in historical narratives.18 Their images are marketed through items such as magnets, calendars and postcards for sale in museum and gallery gift shops. Visual sources d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Writing Elite Women into the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands
• 2 Visualizing Women’s Work in the Textile Trades at the Dawn of the Golden Age
• 3 Memorializing Grief in Familial and National Narratives of Dutch Identity
• 4 Imagining Domesticity in Early Modern Dutch Dolls’ Houses
• 5 The Rembrandt House and the Rubens House: Encountering Early Modern Women through Heritage Sites
• 6 Sources and Settings: The Uses of Place for Tourism, Heritage, and History
• 7 Purchasing the Past: Gender and the Consumption of Heritage
• Conclusion: From Yesterday to Tomorrow: Seeing and Hearing Women in the Low Countries
• Works Cited
• Index