International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2005 Abstracts

The queen of France arrived in Paris/ With numerous people gladly present/ They took her nobly along the great road.../ The celebration continued in Paris for eight days/ and none more noble or lavish could be recalled.
Adenet le Roi, Berte aus grans pies, (3347-3360).

This text by thirteenth-century trouvère, Adenet le Roi, describes the fictional entry of Berte aus grands pieds, fiancé of the Merovingian king, Pepin le Bref, into Paris. It is likely, however, to have been inspired by the arrival of queen Marie de Brabant (1260-1321), wife of Philippe III (d. 1285), to the city a few years before Adenet composed this romance in the late 1270s. By considering in unison the literary constructions of Adenet le Roi, the chronicles of the royal court historian, Guillaume de Nangis, and the illumination program of Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 3142, a manuscript that Marie commissioned, I will illustrate how an image of the late Capetian court and queenship was created under the influence of Marie de Brabant’s patronage. In a search for innovative forms, secular themes, and wide-ranging types of material, Marie supported and promoted some of the most important authors and artists of late medieval Paris. Ceremony and display, dynastic and casual relationships, and the overlap of story and history all contribute to the ideological vision of a court that stood in stark contrast to the preceding one developed under Louis IX (1212-1270). This merging of two worlds is indicative of the atmosphere that Marie fostered at court; for her, invention, performance, and reality were often one and the same.