Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- 1 Introduction: Bodies, Fluidity, and Change
- PART 1 TRANSFORMATIVE AND MANIPULATIVE TEARS
- 2 Where Did Margery Kempe Cry?
- 3 Elusive Tears: Lamentation and Impassivity in Fifteenth-century Passion Iconography
- 4 Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality, Affective Performance, and Gender at the Sixteenth-century French Court
- PART 2 IDENTITIES IN BLOOD
- 5 Piers Plowman and the Blood of Brotherhood
- 6 Performative Asceticism and Exemplary Effluvia: Blood, Tears, and Rapture in Fourteenth-century German Dominican Literature
- 7 “Bloody Business:” Passions and Regulation of Sanguinity in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear
- PART 3 BODIES AND BLOOD IN LIFE, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION
- 8 Saintly Blood: Absence, Presence, and the Alter Christus
- 9 The Treatment of the Body in Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
- 10 Augustine on the Flesh of the Resurrection Body in the De fide et symbolo: Origen, Manichaeism, and Augustine’s Developing Thought Regarding Human Physical Perfection
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality, Affective Performance, and Gender at the Sixteenth-century French Court
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- 1 Introduction: Bodies, Fluidity, and Change
- PART 1 TRANSFORMATIVE AND MANIPULATIVE TEARS
- 2 Where Did Margery Kempe Cry?
- 3 Elusive Tears: Lamentation and Impassivity in Fifteenth-century Passion Iconography
- 4 Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality, Affective Performance, and Gender at the Sixteenth-century French Court
- PART 2 IDENTITIES IN BLOOD
- 5 Piers Plowman and the Blood of Brotherhood
- 6 Performative Asceticism and Exemplary Effluvia: Blood, Tears, and Rapture in Fourteenth-century German Dominican Literature
- 7 “Bloody Business:” Passions and Regulation of Sanguinity in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear
- PART 3 BODIES AND BLOOD IN LIFE, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION
- 8 Saintly Blood: Absence, Presence, and the Alter Christus
- 9 The Treatment of the Body in Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
- 10 Augustine on the Flesh of the Resurrection Body in the De fide et symbolo: Origen, Manichaeism, and Augustine’s Developing Thought Regarding Human Physical Perfection
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI'S tears were a significant part of diplomatic interactions and the subject of intense study by foreign political agents at court. In courtly receptions and formal audiences, both words and gesture were considered vital aspects of the political messages being conveyed. These presentations were complemented by other sources of information and observation gathered by diplomats in the courtly environment in order to understand the character, corporeal and affective behaviour, and thus meanings of the performances, of their French hosts. Moreover, as I will explore, diplomatic political agents considered the emotional and social, as well as political, implications of Catherine's tears for them. Their perceptions were founded upon understandings about the power of female tears to permeate their own bodies in complex ways.
From the early 1560s to her death in 1589, Catherine de’ Medici (1519– 1589) occupied roles of significant power as a regent for her son Charles IX (1550– 1574), and as informal advisor to his brother Henri III (1551– 1589). Broadly speaking, her political behaviour tended towards the protection and propagation of the House of Valois, safeguarding the integrity of France from international interests and seeking peace among France's divergent religious groups and political factions. Scholars of art and architecture have long highlighted the importance of tears as part of a concerted visual and material grief programme that Catherine introduced after the untimely death of Henri II (1519– 1559), who had been fatally injured in a jousting accident in July 1559. Tears were one component of a conventional visual scheme for mourning employed by other contemporaries. However, for Catherine de’ Medici, they were also integral to her identity as a political protagonist protecting the Valois dynastic legacy of her husband and sons. Catherine's corporeal and emotional experiences as a grieving widow were performed as visual and material presentations through which both the gendered body and political agency were simultaneously produced. At her husband's death, Catherine replaced her device of the rainbow, with one understood by contemporaries to be
“appropriate and fitting to her mourning and tears, which was a mountain of quicklime, on which drops of water fell abundantly from the sky, and with these following words in Latin: Ardorem extincta testantur vivere flamma.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern EuropeBodies, Blood, and Tears in Literature, Theology, and Art, pp. 55 - 72Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019