8 - Revisiting Anne de Bretagne's Queenship: On Love and Bridles

Summary

Behind the windows, the dark blue sky hardly reveals that it is Christmas Eve 1508 (Cover Illustration) (BnF, Rés Velins 2780, frontispiece). A few courtiers luxuriously clothed witness the symbolic exchange by the entrance gate. A female audience in no less colorful guise attends the scene at the side of the queen. Anne sits on a canopied throne covered by a grey cloth decorated with ermines. Her royal coat of blue azure with golden fleurs de lis creates a striking contrast with her gold dress and her black Breton cap surmounted by an open lilied crown. The author kneels before the queen to present to her Les Louenges du roy Louis douziesme de ce nom, printed in a vellum copy by the publisher Anthoine Vérard. The book is bound in gold and red and Queen Anne accepts the gift with much solemnity. Is she aware that the text is about to arouse a controversy? Claude de Seyssel, its author, is most probably conscious of his provocative tone. The entire history of France is reviewed by this Savoy-born high servant, jurist and bishop who successively served at the court of Charles VIII and Louis XII. Seyssel systematically demonstrates in this book that Louis XII is more praiseworthy than all of his predecessors. There are no exceptions for Seyssel; he does not even hesitate to downplay the legendary Charlemagne and St Louis, to take Louis XI severely to task and even to criticize the late Charles VIII next to the dull Louis XII. All French mythography is denigrated in order to praise the father of the people – as Louis XII was nicknamed in the Estates General at Tours in 1506 – as the ultimate champion of virtue and true nobility. The book irritated more than a few of its readers and the attacks were sufficiently violent to convince Seyssel to reply to his detractors. Les Louenges were thus followed by an Apologie in which Seyssel tried to justify his overtly supportive prose. It was certainly important to him to make a clear distinction between loyalty and sycophancy, between legitimacy and flattery. His intention, he pointed out, was obviously not to write a servile adulation of the king, but a most useful work of moral edification.