Chapter One

The First Clue

In 1999 the New British Library in London mounted a fascinating permanent exhibit: a replica of a medieval study, with a life-size figure representing Christine de Pizan (c. 1364-c. 1430) at work. She holds a quill pen in one hand and a penknife, for sharpening the quill, in the other. Beside her desk is a shelf containing numerous volumes together with other writing utensils. A window looks out onto a brilliant landscape reminiscent of a fifteenth-century Flemish painting. What is striking about this installation is that, rather than choose a monk to illustrate the life of a medieval scribe as they might have done thirty years earlier, the administrators of the British Library chose Christine de Pizan. Three decades of activity on the part of medievalists have brought this long-neglected author to the notice not only of scholars but to some extent of the general public as well¹

In the early 1970s, however, when I was engaged in research for an article about Christine de Pizan's relation to the humanist tradition, little was known about this fascinating woman. Although it has since received much attention, Le livre de la cité des dames, or The Book of the City of Ladies, completed in 1405, was not in print in any language but existed only in some twenty-five French manuscripts dating to the fifteenth century. A French critical edition had not yet appeared, and the modern English translation was a dozen years in the future. In the midst of my efforts to decipher a microfilm of one of these fifteenth-century manuscripts housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, I had the good fortune to be introduced to a tapestry historian who was interested in my work. She recalled having come across the phrase "City of Ladies" in one of the major histories of tapestry. This was soon tracked down to W.G. Thomson's History of Tapestry: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, first published in 1906. In his massive volume Thomson reproduces portions of an inventory of the royal treasures of Henry VIII taken at the king's death in 1547. Included in the list are the "six peces," or six panels, of a work of tapestry called the "Citie of Ladies," which is catalogued among the contents of the "Lady Elizabeth's Guarderobe." I quickly realized that the Lady Elizabeth was none other than the future Queen Elizabeth I, fourteen years old when the inventory was made. What, then, were these tapestries, and how had they arrived in Elizabeth's garde-robe, or storeroom? They must surely have been based on the Book of the City of Ladies, which was the only other such title in existence in the sixteenth century. Precisely what relation might they have had to Christine de Pizan? What might it have meant that Christine's protofeminist ideas, writ large, had at one point been hanging on Henry VIII's castle walls? What role did tapestries play in the cultural life of royal courts at this time? And could the Lady Elizabeth's tapestries possibly have survived?

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries woven tapestries were among the most precious treasures owned by aristocratic families and by royalty throughout Europe and Britain. Kings, queens, and regents, as well as prelates of the church, vied with one another to possess original designs or copies of these magnificent wall hangings. Tapestries symbolized wealth and power. But their beauty could be appreciated by high and low alike, for they were not only displayed in palaces but often hung along streets and from balconies at times of celebration. After the sixteenth century, the production of Flemish tapestries gradually declined, but the art of tapestry weaving has never altogether lost its artistic appeal. In the late nineteenth century, William Morris became fascinated by these intricate weavings and set about producing tapestries for clients of his well-known workshop. More recently, Henry Moore had the pleasure of seeing the massive figures of his wartime "shelter drawings" beautifully reproduced in woven hangings²

My original quest was for a very large set of sixteenth-century tapestries. However, I soon became at least as interested—perhaps more—in the patrons who owned them and in their relationship to the author on whose ideas the tapestries were based. My discovery, I realized, offered evidence that Christine de Pizan's ideas remained current more than a hundred years after her death, enmeshed in a complex cultural and political world. More than merely a detective pursuing the clues to unravel a mystery, I became a microhistorian, for whom the entry in Henry VIII's inventory represented what Carlo Ginzburg has called "the root of an evidential paradigm." In writing about something "totally forgotten" that one has "never actually seen," the historian Edward Muir explains, one must follow a "combination of evidential rigor and openness to creative proofs." I was indeed working with what Muir calls "a kind of historical uncertainty principle," in which it would be necessary to weigh possibilities to arrive at probabilities. In other words, my search would lead me deep into the realm of possible historical circumstances and events, and I hoped to be able to sift out the most likely of these in seeking answers to my questions. However, before I could address the specific issues surrounding the set of tapestries housed in the Lady Elizabeth's garderobe, a number of broader historical areas would have to be investigated. These included the history of tapestry, about which I knew very little, as well as the subject of Renaissance art patronage. I would also need to renew my acquaintance with the biographical details of Queen Elizabeth's life, especially those concerning her childhood, and to consult some of the manuscripts and printed books contained in the royal English libraries, including copies of Christine de Pizan's works, to determine whether the young princess was familiar with the Book of the City of Ladies or with its author.

I was keenly aware of the importance of the dissemination of literary works, particularly of the significance of the ownership of manuscripts and books during this period. I had thought about women as book owners at the time when manuscripts began to be overtaken by early printed books⁵ Could tapestries also have been important for the diffusion of knowledge and of religious and secular literature? Might they have mattered especially among women and those attached to royal courts, people who, in contrast to the members of monastic and scholastic communities, were not highly literate? As names like Anne of France, Anne of Brittany, Louise of Savoy, Margaret of Austria, and Anne Boleyn appeared again and again in the literature on artistic patronage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I gradually recognized an emerging cultural network among the women of Renaissance royal families. Could brides from such families, who brought to their husband's domain specific ideas and artistic styles in the form of books, also have brought them in the form of tapestries? What were the ideals and the realities of queenship in this period? Christine de Pizan had much to say on this topic. Was it possible that the Princess Elizabeth was influenced by Christine's work? Such questions about the potential sociopolitical and cultural ramifications of the City of Ladies tapestries crystallized in my mind during the decades of my search.

Apart from immersing myself in the literature of tapestry and of Tudor history, my first step was to ascertain whether the Lady Elizabeth's tapestries still existed in the royal English collections, now scattered among royal residences such as Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Greenwich Palace, Hampton Court, and the Queen's Gallery in London. Unfortunately, a letter of 3 April 1993 from Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, director of the royal collections, disabused me of any such hope. I subsequently discussed my discovery with the curators of textiles in numerous museums and visited or corresponded with tapestry experts throughout Europe and the United States. I have studied photographs of unidentified fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tapestries, notably those in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Art and History in Brussels. I have scrutinized a set of microfiches that describe remnants of tapestries preserved in the Hearst Collection in the United States⁶ I have stood or sat for hours, absorbing the beauty of originals hanging on walls of museums, châteaux, castles, and stately homes that display wall hangings of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. I have followed false trails to collections in St. Petersburg, and I have read countless books and articles about the art and history of tapestry. But, alas, in the almost thirty years since I first came across a reference to them, I have not found the original tapestries, or even a small part of any of the six panels. Reluctantly I must conclude that in all likelihood the tapestries have vanished, as have so many other splendid artifacts from the past.

More than most other artworks, tapestries have been undervalued and underprotected. Their fragility makes them vulnerable to heat, damp, light, dust, and mice, and to the greed of human scavengers who covet their gold and silver threads. The correct preservation of tapestries requires that they be stored or hung in places where the lighting, whether natural or artificial, is low, and where they will not be exposed to heat—that is, under conditions closely similar to those of a medieval castle. Reconstruction of torn or damaged parts of these weavings must be carried out very delicately, using natural vegetable dyes not unlike those in use centuries ago. In the days of the great dukes of Burgundy, tapissiers were employed at the French court to care for these treasured hangings, but later generations, failing to appreciate their beauty and ignorant of their worth, frequently mistreated them. Ancient tapestries were sometimes used as coverings—the Apocalypse tapestry now at Angers, for example, which served to protect trees in the orangery of the Abbaye de St. Serge from the cold⁷ Of the 213 tapestries present in 1551 in the collection of Francis I of France, only three still exist, now preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the Vatican, and in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna⁸ Toward the close of the French Revolution, the Directorate ordered that all tapestries belonging to the Crown be burned so that their gilt threads might be recovered. Out of the twenty-five hundred items of tapestry that Henry VIII owned, only thirty (barely over 1 percent) survive now—an equally dismal, if equally pertinent, figure⁹

Long before I came to understand this sad state of affairs, however, I went to the British Library in London to interrogate my original clue: the holograph manuscript of the inventory taken at Henry VIII's death¹⁰ Every historian knows how essential it is to consult the original manuscript rather than a reprint, to say nothing of a paraphrase or an extract. Even the manuscript in the British Library could be full of errors, depending on how carefully the various scribes worked. In addition, because Henry VIII's collection was so enormous, the list of his treasures must have been compiled by a number of different inventory takers, some of whom may not have been overly concerned with accuracy. Even so, this manuscript offers a great deal more information than the extracts reprinted in Thomson's History of Tapestry. The original inventory reveals that the six pieces of tapestry collectively called the "Citie of Ladies" were among the "stuff delivered to the Lady Elizabeth her grace, daughter to our late Soveraigne lorde King Henry the Eight and sister to our soveraigne Lorde that now is kinge Edwarde the sixte." A notation in the inventory further indicates that this "stuff" was delivered to Elizabeth's storeroom "towardes the furniture of her howse. That the tapestries were among the "stuff" delivered to Elizabeth's storeroom suggests that other items were earmarked for her from among her father's possessions as well. Moreover, evidently the Lady Elizabeth would occupy not merely her own quarters in one of the palaces of her brother, the new king, but a separate establishment, "her howse." Perhaps most important, however, the manuscript in the British Library specifies the dimensions of the set of tapestries. Each of the six panels was a rectangle roughly eight by five meters, making the combined area covered by the six tapestry panels very large indeed¹² To hang the entire set of the City of Ladies tapestries would require a room or hall of state with a perimeter of nearly fifty meters. It would be useful, I thought, to compare the dimensions of these tapestries to those of others in Henry VIII's collection.

Naturally, I also wondered why this particular set of tapestries had been set aside for the Lady Elizabeth. Before I could hope to answer such a question, I would need to learn all I could about Elizabeth's life, her youth in particular, and about the cultural and political milieu into which she was born.

Princess Elizabeth was Henry VIII's second daughter. In 1485 her grandfather, Henry Tudor founded an English dynasty by settling the bloody feuds between the house of York, whose emblem was a red rose, and the house of Lancaster, symbolized by a white rose. Known as the Wars of the Roses, these struggles had torn the country apart for the past three decades. They came to an end when Henry, the Lancastrian contender for the throne, defeated and killed Richard III, who in 1483 had usurped the throne of his young nephew, Edward V, the son of the Yorkist monarch Edward IV. Henry Tudor, now Henry VII, subsequently married Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, thereby uniting the two houses. Both Henry VII and his son, Henry VIII, were determined to avoid further civil strife and to consolidate their power by pursuing bold marriage alliances and establishing a firm line of male descendants. But they did not succeed. Henry VII's older son, Arthur, died at age fifteen, and Henry VIII's six marriages produced only two daughters and finally one son, Edward, who died in early adolescence.

In an effort to fulfill his goal of allying the Tudors with the Spanish Crown, Henry VII had arranged for his firstborn son, Arthur, to marry Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the "kings" of Arag{oa}n and Castile. When Arthur died during the first year of his marriage, Henry VII refused to abandon his Spanish policy, and Arthur's fifteen-year-old widow, Catherine of Arag{oa}n, soon became affianced to his remaining son, the future Henry VIII. Of Henry VIII's three children, the eldest, Princess Mary, was the daughter of Catherine of Arag{oa}n. Henry determined to divorce Catherine, however, when it became clear that she was unable to produce the desired son and heir. The difficulties of a royal divorce in the early sixteenth century were so complex that Henry broke away from the Catholic Church of Rome and proclaimed himself head of the Church of England in order to set Catherine aside. He did so with the intention of marrying the radiant and clever Anne Boleyn, hoping that she would bear the son whom Catherine, despite innumerable pregnancies, had failed to provide. As Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn became the mother of Princess Elizabeth but unfortunately failed to produce the longed-for future prince. Trumped-up charges of adultery and treason provided Henry with an excuse for executing his Queen Anne so that he could marry again. The third of Henry's six wives, Jane Seymour, bore the long-awaited male heir, Edward, but died of puerperal fever twelve days after his birth. Henry's subsequent three marriages produced no other children.

Although Elizabeth was only three years old when her mother was beheaded, the event must surely have left its mark on her, possibly later instilling in her a resolve to remain in charge of her own destiny. Growing up, Elizabeth watched her father's wives come and go—four of them in eleven years. She eventually became fondly attached to her last stepmother, Catherine Parr, with whom she was living when her father died and the "Citie of Ladies" tapestries were set aside for her own "howse." Why might Elizabeth have wanted to possess these particular tapestries? Perhaps the key lay in the ideas expressed in Christine de Pizan's book.

Notes

Chapter One

1. For a survey of the extensive scholarship on Christine de Pizan, see the Christine de Pizan Society Newsletter, no. 9 (March 1999). Equally important are four book-length bibliographies: Angus Kennedy, Christine de Pizan: A Bibliographical Guide (1984), Christine de Pizan: A Bibliographical Guide, Supplement 1 (1994), and Christine de Pizan: A Bibliographical Guide, Supplement 2 (2004).; EdithYenal, Christine de Pizan: A Bibliography, 2d ed. (1989).

2. See Ann Garrould and Valerie Power, Henry Moore Tapestries (London: Henry Moore Foundation, in Association with Lund Humphries Publishers, 1988).

3. See Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm." One of the first, and still one of the finest, examples of the microhistorical approach is Natalie Davis's Return of Martin Guerre (1983).

4. Edward Muir, "Introduction: Observing Trifles," in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, trans. Eren Branch, pp. vii-xxvii. See also the essays in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., History from Crime, trans. Corroda Biazzo Curry, Margaret A. Gallucci, and Mary M. Galluci.

5. See Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture."

6. See William Randolph Hearst, William Randolph Hearst Collection: Photographs and Acquisition Records.

7.  W.G. Thomson, A History of Tapestry: From the Earliest Times Until the Present Day, p. 67.

8. For the three surviving tapestries, see Sophie Schneebalg-Perelman, "Richesse du garde-meubles parisien de Fran{cc}ois Ier: Inventaires inédits de 1542 et 1551," p. 265. For the Boston tapestry, see Adolfo Salvatore Cavallo, Tapestries of Europe and of Colonial Peru in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1967), 1:66-68. For the Vatican, see M. Crick-Kuntziger, "La Cène de Léonard de Vinci et la tapisserie belge aux armes de Fran{cc}ois Ier," Revue Belge d'Archéologie et d'Histoire de l'Art 21, no. 2 (1952): 113-26. For Vienna, see Louis Dimier, Le Tenture de la Galerie de Fontainebleau {ag} Vienne (Paris: Gazette des beaux-arts, 1927).

9. Thomas P. Campbell, "The English Royal Tapestry Collection, 1485-1547," Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1998, abstract.

10. British Library, MS Harley 1419. Since I carried out my research in the 1970s, the manuscript has been edited and published. For the Lady Elizabeth's tapestries, see David Starkey, ed., The Inventory of King Henry VIII: The Transcript, especially item no. 15272, p. 381.

11. Ibid., p. 389 (fol. 439r).

12. Ibid., p. 381 (fol. 440v). More precisely, the dimensions of the six panels given in the manuscript are: panel 1, 9-1/2 yds. 4-3/4 yds.; panel 2, 7-1/2 yds. 4-3/4 yds.; panel 3, 8 yds. 4-3/4 yds.; panel 4, 9 yds. 4-3/4 yds.; panel 5, 8 yds. 4-3/4yds.; and panel 6, 8-1/2 yds. 4-3/4 yds.