Susan Broomhall

Emotions in the Household

The pre-modern household was a critical social unit. It defined interactions and relationships both inside and beyond its walls. No relationship, be it created by ties of blood, marriage, social need or economics, can be devoid of emotional content. Studying this content matters because, as Schwartz and Finucci have argued, ‘there is no obvious delimitable area of the inner life that is not impinged by the external world’ and ‘to the extent that social and economic “necessities” are expressions of inner impulses, conflicts, desires and expectations, the external landscape changes in response to the internal one’.1 Here we chart a history of the dynamics and range of the emotional realm that developed within one specific location: the European household. This collection asks what the emotional dynamics of this environment have been, and how the space of the household has created, constructed or obstructed forms of affective sociability. Our focus is not the relationships created by the family connected through blood and marriage, but rather the connections forged by members of household communities. When people lived, ate and/or worked together in a household, what kinds of relationships were created? What was the nature of emotional content formed in the household among people drawn together by shared economic, social and biological needs, rather than necessarily by blood or marriage?

In the Name of the Father: Conceptualizing Pater Familias in the Letters of William the Silent's Children*

For much of their childhood and adult life, the twelve surviving children of William the Silent were separated linguistically and geographically. Many of the children forged important relationships with male primary carers who were not their biological parents. This paper explores the childrens correspondence with their biological father William and with paternal figures to understand competing forms of familial authority among Williams children. This paper places particular interest on analysis of the gendered negotiation of paternal bonds in the letters of Williams sons and daughters, as they established multiple relationships with father figures during their childhood.

Corresponding affections: Emotional exchange among siblings in the Nassau family

This article examines the nature of emotional exchange among the siblings who were the children of William the Silent, the leader of the nascent Dutch Republic. Using evidence from extensive familial correspondence, it asks how the language of emotions could constitute forms of power within the family, by analyzing how actions and expressions of emotion were presented, discussed, and interpreted in epistolary form, to whom, and with what intention and impact. The article studies social, geographic, linguistic, and other distinctions between siblings in their use of affective discourses in correspondence and argues that attention to affective language can help to elucidate the agentive force of emotions in both reflecting and informing notions of power within the family.

'My daughter, my dear': the correspondence of Catherine de Médicis and Elisabeth de Valois

This article explores the evolving relationship between Catherine de Médicis and her daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, as the latter became Queen of Spain. The particular dynamics of their changing political roles juxtaposed with their relative status within the Valois familial hierarchy can be analysed through the extant correspondence that became their main conduit for communication after Elisabeths marriage and removal to Spain. This correspondence highlights epistolary strategies of emotional rhetoric, silence, and even delay, as well as meaning conveyed through the use of scribes and the physical placement of messages upon paper. These letters between a mother and daughter further reveal complex patterns of involvement of a wider group of individuals at court within the epistolary network, which meant all communication was subject to supervision, interference and mediation.

Imagined Domesticities in Early Modern Dutch Dollhouses

Early modern prescriptive literature about household spatial and social ordering primarily informs us of elite male views. Few contemporary sources exist to suggest womens notions about these issues. Early modern dollhouses could shed some light on the views of both sexes, as makers, patrons, and collectors of such objects. Such artefacts have rarely been considered a source for historic perceptions of households and family in scholarly analyses. In particular, by interpreting the meanings of extant structures, their furnishings, dolls, and surrounding documentation produced by the elite Dutch women who created and collected them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an important female-oriented vision of the idealised early modern household emerges.

Emotions of the Past in Catherine de Medici’s Correspondence

This essay explores emotional performances about the past in the letters of Catherine de Medici. It analyzes Catherine’s interpretation of emotional practices at the court of her husband Henri II and that of his father Francois I, into which she arrived as a fourteen-year-old in 1533. Reflecting on the reigns she had witnessed, Catherine spoke about and for kings, in powerful acts of royal ventriloquism that were emotionally potent and commanded authority. Her advice sought to produce for her sons an emotionally persuasive history of father figures. In Catherine’s texts, historical feelings operated as a tool for emotional manipulation in the present. Her letters performed careful emotional work with her sons as particular interlocutors in this dialogue, visualizing them not only as kings in their own right but as active protagonists in a historically powerful Valois political project. Catherine displayed an acute sensitivity to emotion work, past and present, as a tool to regulate courtly atmosphere and to influence courtiers to the interests of the Valois—that is, instrumentalizing emotions as a form of power. These documents revealed frank advice to employ explicit strategies of emotional management of the court that involved king, courtiers, key officials, and day-to-day personnel in corporeal performances and emotional labor, enacted both socially and spatially. For Catherine, just as the production of history was founded upon emotions, so too was the creation and wielding of political power.

“The Ambition in My Love”: The Theater of Courtly Conduct in All’s Well that Ends Well

This chapter explores the gendered nature and language of courtly conduct in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, a work concerned with the ambiguity of gendered courtly conduct, in words, objects, and deeds, which can be interpreted as a critical commentary on contemporary French court life and its leading, female protagonists. Verbal play, material culture, and actions are shown to be key to an articulation and practice of emotions that underpins the successful operation of the court. In this context, coupling may be less a meeting of hearts than a joining of well-matched individuals, each able to perform a range of courtly behaviors successfully by learning to dissimulate through words, attire, and deeds to achieve their goals.

Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France eds. by David P. LaGuardia, and Cathy Yandell (review)

backers saw themselves in a post-Roman Iberia. Philip Rousseau posits that while Gregory of Tours inhabited a ‘new’ age, his thought-world and moral compass — both as a historian and as a bishop — remained firmly rooted in the ‘ancient practices and edifices’ of a vanished Roman world. Shifting to the late antique Muslim East, Jack Tannous’s chapter on the Life of Simeon of the Olives (c. 750) highlights the difficulties of uncovering accurate details about Christians living under Muslim rule when our sources are limited and defective. Yannis Papadogiannakis, on the other hand, sees in the seventhcentury erotapokriseis by Anastasius of Sinai a revealing day-to-day guidebook for Christians in a freshly Muslim world. Stefan Elders argues provocatively that Amandus of Maastricht’s (c. 584–676) missionary activity in the region of Ghent in the 620s and 630s must be understood from the wider vantage of late antique politics at a time when the Merovingian and Byzantine courts allied. Stressing the similarities between Amandus’s forced baptisms with East Roman imperial tradition, Elders proposes that the missionary worked under the auspices of the Merovingian king Dagobert I (r. 623–638), rather than the papacy in Rome as is commonly supposed. Janet Nelson concludes the study by revisiting the contested notion of a Carolingian renaissance through the historiographical lens of law. Overall, the disparate approaches found in this stimulating volume reveal the fresh perspectives that late antique scholars can offer. Yet, their somewhat disjointed vision of the age also points to some continuing challenges. This study clearly exhibits Peter Brown’s unique gifts as a linguist, writer, and historian. Some of late antiquity’s current malaise may indeed be attributed to the difficulty for the new guard to match Brown’s brilliance as both a synthesizer and story-teller. michael edward stewart, University of Queensland

Aspiration, Representation and Memory: The Guise in Europe, 1506–1688 eds. by Jessica Munns, Penny Richards, and Jonathan Spangler (review)

Occasionally, we get a glimpse of the slippage between ideal and reality — Mooney touches on it lightly in an extended footnote (p. 246 n. 57). No less real than the strictures of the rule was the capacity of some houses for conceptual sleight-of-hand. Cases in point are the manifestly rich Clarist double-monasteries like those of the Bohemian Přemyslid princesses, Agnes and Anna (Prague, 1233; Wrocław, 1257). These foundations were able to follow Clare’s rule with its uncompromising commitment to altissima paupertatis by having their physical needs provided for by an adjoining hospital, control over which was vested in the Knights Crosier of the Red Star, an order the Přemyslids founded specifically for the purpose. One thing for sure, whatever rule or forma vitae the Vatican held to be in force, the reality of what was actually obtained amongst communities of women who thought of themselves as followers of St Francis could be very far from optimal. As Bert Roest reminds us (Order and Disorder, p. 10 n. 100), ‘for a community without in-depth knowledge of the different rules used in the Clarissan order, the “rule of Saint Clare” could have been anything’. Catherine Mooney has provided not only an invaluable handbook for the study of the Clarist rules but also a thought-provoking reappraisal of the traditional portrait of St Clare and the origins of the order that bears her name. robert curry, The University of Sydney

Fit for a King? The Gendered Emotional Performances of Catherine de Medici as Dauphine of France, 1536–1547

This essay explores the early years of marriage of Catherine de Medici , queen consort of Henry II of France , at the French court. Henry’s unexpected rise to become heir to the French throne changed her political position and shaped a number of the significant new pressures upon her. This chapter analyzes Catherine’s action in word and deed at this period through the lens of performativity extended into scholarly considerations of emotions, to demonstrate how Catherine employed gendered affective display and emotional rhetoric to situate herself as a viable dauphine and potential queen consort for Henry, at a period in which her position at court and within the Valois dynasty was fundamentally at stake.