Erika Graham-Goering
Princely Power in Late Medieval France; Jeanne de Penthièvre and the War for Brittany
(Cambridge University Press, 2020), 288 pp. $99.00
The war over the succession to the duchy of Brittany which formed a substantial sub-theatre during the fourteenth century phases of the Hundred Years War is sometimes nicknamed the War of the Two Jeannes. This is not an unreasonable approach. The Montfortist claim would probably have been extinguished well before Edward III of England could be persuaded to intervene but for the actions of Jeanne de Flandre, wife of the Montfortist claimant. Even if the tales of her heroics at the siege of Hennebont in 1342 were much exaggerated in Froissart and then in Breton folklore, her contribution was vital. It was however short lived; by 1343 she was in England, where she spent the rest of her life in what amounted to house arrest, deliberately marginalised by Edward and largely estranged from her son, the later Duke Jean IV.
Her counterpart on what has come to be called the Blois-Penthièvre side had a much more sustained engagement with the conflict. For one thing, she was the actual claimant to the ducal title. Her cause owed its legitimacy to her lineal descent from the Breton ducal line and her claims outlived the death of her husband Charles of Blois on the field of Auray in 1364, even if she was obliged to renounce them by treaty. During the years between 1347 and 1356 when Charles was in English captivity she was the focus of her party’s activities. After Charles’ death she pressed for his canonisation as a saint; his cause was apparently accepted by the papal court but his sanctity was never formally proclaimed. She also remained an active player in Breton affairs to her death. In the troubled years after Jean IV was forced into exile by the Breton nobility in 1373 she moved back to Brittany and sought to revive her claims before the French court- only to see them waved away by an opportunistic Charles V who planned to annex Brittany to the French crown. This she could not accept and she can be found acting de facto as an ally of Jean IV in the murky maneuvering surrounding his return to reclaim the duchy in 1379.
Jeanne was clearly a very substantial figure who deserves a proper scholarly biography. Erika Graham-Goering’s fascinating but at times frustrating book has a significant biographical element but does not quite fill that gap. The frustrations partly derive from its structure. The explicitly biographical chapter puts considerable weight on the years of Jeanne’s widowhood, on the reasonable argument that these have been rather neglected by studies focused on the Breton war. Life was clearly very difficult as she struggled with an inadequate income (Jean IV failed to meet the financial obligations he had assumed when she was obliged to abandon her claims) while faced with substantial debts run up in sustaining her cause and, despite complex financial engineering and a certain amount of debt forgiveness, it is doubtful whether her creditors were ever fully paid off. The chapters which deal with Jeanne’s role in managing land, people and wider responsibilities like diplomacy, however, are almost entirely focused on the years of her marriage. The final two chapters, which examine the arguments advanced in the 1341 court case over the Breton succession and then look at the ways Jeanne asserted her legitimacy throughout her life (including in the 1370’s, when she was edging towards renewing her claims on the ducal title), though in themselves very interesting, are somewhat self-standing items.
Another frustration can probably be ascribed to the work’s origins in a postgraduate thesis- a perceived need to fit Jeanne’s actions (especially those taken during her husband’s lifetime) into theoretical models of princely power, especially when this was exercised by a married woman, and relate these in turn to ongoing historiographical debate. This leads to lengthy and often opaque analyses of the ideology/ideologies of lordship, especially in co-lordship situations. The practical conclusion which emerges from Jeanne’s case is that medieval ideologies of power were flexible enough to allow Jeanne considerable effective power alongside her husband, especially but not solely when he was removed from the scene in captivity. It is clear that Jeanne was far more than a mere figurehead of her party. At times the issues around co-lordship could be used tactically by the co-lords- for instance when Jeanne and Charles passed responsibility for not settling property claims from disliked relatives to and from while continuing to draw revenue from the lands concerned. If seeking a long term tax exemption (rather than a one-off concession) it was advisable to ensure both husband and wife signed off on it. At times it is possible to discern a kind of functional division of roles between the couple- Charles, when available, was more likely to handle issues requiring attendance at the French royal court, for instance.
On some occasions however Jeanne does seem to have pursued a separate policy from her husband. Graham-Goering takes Jeanne’s apparent willingness to make a separate peace with Edward III in the mid-1350’s- including recognising him as king of France in return for abandoning the Montfort claim and freeing her husband- very seriously indeed. In her view, Jeanne was nothing like as committed to the Valois cause as has been suggested- quite possibly much less than her husband who was after all a member of the French royal family. This flexibility, which eventually came to nothing, in some ways prefigures her willingness to align herself even with the Montfortist enemy to preserve Breton separateness from the French crown in the 1370’s.
From the perspective of a site specialising in medieval military history, it is also somewhat frustrating that so little material illustrating how Jeanne interacted with the military side of sustaining her cause appears to have survived beyond the odd land grant to captains in the Blois-Penthièvre service. Unlike her namesake, there were never any suggestions that she appeared in the field at the head of her army (though intriguingly she also appears to have been present at the siege of Hennebont), while hints in memoir literature and even in the witness testimonies for Charles’ canonisation that she was the driving force behind the military actions on her behalf may correspond more to misogynistic tropes than reality. Perhaps it is a bit anachronistic to look for much central control in what was for long periods a highly decentralised war of ambushes and small scale actions driven by local garrisons often with substantial non-Breton elements. From a military historical perspective it would nevertheless have been nice to hear a little more about Jeanne’s dealings with men like Bertrand du Guesclin (barely mentioned in the book) or Olivier de Clisson.
Jeanne de Penthièvre was clearly a strong, even formidable, woman who survived a string of tragedies. She was also an effective ruling figure- even a devious one- who managed to operate effectively within the constraints of medieval attitudes to female lordship. Despite the issues over the present book, it is good that she finally has a study dedicated to her and her exercise of power.
Brian Ditcham
Independent Scholar
