The Salic Law, French Queenship, and the

Defense of Women in the Late Middle Ages

Craig Taylor

The Lex Salica (Salic Law) was a legal code written around the time
of Clovis (476–96) for the Salian Franks. After being revised and ex-
panded under the Merovingian and Carolingian kings, it was slowly for-
gotten until the middle of the fourteenth century, when it was redis-
covered by Richard Lescot and the monks of Saint-Denis.1 The Salic
Law enjoyed a second lease on life from the beginning of the fifteenth
century, when it was officially adopted by the French Crown as the post-
factum justification for the exclusion of women from the royal succes-
sion.2 The pivotal moment probably occurred around 1413 when Jean
de Montreuil added a marginal note to A toute la chevalerie, a polemical
treatise supporting the Valois monarchy against the English. Defend-

Craig Taylor is lecturer in medieval history at the University of York. He is author of Joan of Arc, La
Pucelle (Manchester, 2006) and Debating the Hundred Years War: ‘‘Pour ce que plusieurs (La Loi Salique)’’
and ‘‘A declaracion of the trewe and dewe title of King Henrie VIII’’ (Cambridge, 2006). He is preparing
a monograph on French attitudes toward chivalry and warfare during the late Middle Ages.
The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable advice and assistance of the anony-
mous readers for French Historical Studies, as well as Rowena Archer, Françoise Autrand, Peggy
Brown, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Emma Cayley, Pierre Chaplais, Philippe Contamine, Rachel Gib-
bons, Ralph E. Giesey, Sarah Hanley, Joanna Laynesmith, Peter S. Lewis, Alastair Minnis, Nicole
Pons, John Watts, and especially John Carmi Parsons.
1 Katherine Fischer Drew, trans., The Laws of the Salian Franks (Philadelphia, 1991), 28–55;
William H. Daly, ‘‘Clovis: How Barbaric, How Pagan?’’ Speculum 69 (1994): 647–55.
2 There is an extensive secondary literature on the use of the Salic Law in the late Middle
Ages, including most recently Ralph E. Giesey, ‘‘The Juristic Basis of Dynastic Right to the French
Throne,’’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 51, no. 5 (1961): 3–47; Philippe Con-
tamine, ‘‘ ‘Le royaume de France ne peut tomber en fille’: Fondement, formulation et implication
d’une théorie politique à la fin du Moyen Age,’’ Perspectives médiévales 13 (1987): 67–81; Contamine,
‘‘Le royaume de France ne peut tomber en fille’: Une théorie politique à la fin du Moyen Age,’’ in
Institutionen und Geschichte: Theoretische Aspekte und mittelalterliche Befunde, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne,
1992), 187–207; Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Medi-
eval France (Berkeley, CA, 1991), 245–65, 345–50; Jacques Krynen, L’empire du roi: Idées et croyances
politiques en France, XIIIe–XVe siècles (Paris, 1993), 125–35; and Fanny Cosandey, La reine de France:
Symbole et pouvoir, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2000), 19–54. See also the articles by Sarah Hanley cited
in note 6.

French Historical Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Fall 2006) DOI 10.1215/00161071-2006-012
Copyright 2006 by Society for French Historical Studies
544 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

ing the exclusion of women from the royal succession, the royal notaire
et secrétaire cited a clause from the chapter ‘‘De allodio,’’ which dictated
that men should receive ancestors’ heritage (their landed property, the
‘‘terra salica’’) and women just personal property. To make this state-
ment apply to the French kingdom, Montreuil inserted the words in
regno into an inaccurate transcription of the clause.3 Thereafter a series
of writers employed by the Valois monarchy, all connected with the
French royal chancellery, used the Salic Law to defend the exclusion of
women from the French royal succession.4 The boldest statement was
provided in 1464 by Pour ce que plusieurs, a work key to the dissemination
of the myth of the Salic Law thanks to its being printed eleven times in
Paris, Rouen, and Caen between 1488 and 1558, most commonly under
the title La Loy Salique, première loy des François.5
Despite extensive discussion of the late medieval use of the Salic
Law, modern scholars have paid little attention to its role in the wider
story of developing attitudes toward women and French queenship.
One notable exception is Sarah Hanley, who argues that Montreuil and
his colleagues adopted the Salic Law as a weapon in a debate between
the sexes, responding to a challenge laid down by Christine de Pizan.6
The war of words began between 1399 and 1402 with a heated exchange
of letters over Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la rose. Pizan
continued the dispute in 1405, according to Hanley, when she directly

3 Nicole Grévy-Pons and Ezio Ornato, ‘‘Qui est l’auteur de la chronique latine de Charles VI,
dite du religieux de Saint Denis?’’ Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 134 (1976): 91–93 and plate 1;
Jean de Montreuil, Opera, ed. Nicole Grévy-Pons, Ezio Ornato, and Gilbert Ouy, 4 vols. (Turin,
1963–86), 2:7–17, 132.
4 For the problems faced by these writers, see Colette Beaune, ‘‘Histoire et politique: La
recherche du texte de la Loi Salique de 1350 à 1450,’’ in 104e Congrès des sociétés savantes, Bordeaux
1979: Section de philologie et d’histoire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981), 1:25–35; Kathleen Daly and Ralph E.
Giesey, ‘‘Noël de Fribois et la Loi Salique,’’ Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 151 (1993): 5–36; and
Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Les écrits politiques, ed. P. S. Lewis, 3 vols. (Paris, 1978–93), 1:156, 2:20–22.
5 I have explored the late medieval French debate in ‘‘The Salic Law and the Valois Succes-
sion to the French Crown,’’ French History 15 (2001): 358–77, arguing principally that the Salic Law
offered a uniquely French, historical anchor for the rules governing the royal succession and pro-
vided specific advantages for defending the Valois succession against the rival claims of Edward III,
king of England, and his heirs. I have also edited both Pour ce que plusieurs and a detailed English
response written during the reign of Henry VIII in Debating the Hundred Years War: ‘‘Pour ce que plu-
sieurs (La Loi Salique)’’ and ‘‘A declaracion of the trewe and dewe title of King Henrie VIII’’ (Cambridge,
2006). Note that Colette Beaune and Jacques Krynen refer to this treatise as La grand traité sur la
Loy Salique.
6 Hanley’s arguments are presented in a series of overlapping articles: ‘‘Identity Politics and
Rulership in France: Female Political Place and the Fraudulent Salic Law in Christine de Pizan
and Jean de Montreuil,’’ in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. Michael Wolfe (Durham,
NC, 1997), 78–94; ‘‘La Loi Salique,’’ in Encyclopédie politique et historique des femmes, ed. Christine
Fauré (Paris, 1997), 11–30; ‘‘Mapping Rulership in the French Body Public: Political Identity, Pub-
lic Law, and the King’s One Body,’’ Historical Reflections 23 (1997): 1–21; ‘‘The Politics of Identity and
Monarchic Governance in France: The Debate over Female Exclusion,’’ in Women Writers and the
Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge, 1997), 289–304.
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 545

challenged the exclusion of women from the French royal succession

in her Le livre de la cité des dames.7 Thus ‘‘Montreuil’s fraudulent Salic
Law represented his last hope for defeating Pizan’s influential argu-
ment validating rule by women in Le livre de la cité des dames and his best
hope for restoring his own reputation, damaged by the earlier conflict
with Pizan.’’ 8
It would certainly be appropriate if the Salic Law, an antifeminist
pillar of the French constitution, had first been deployed in a desper-
ate attack on the most famous female writer of the late Middle Ages.
Yet there are problems with this argument. None of the letters or trea-
tises exchanged during the querelle de la Rose made even a passing ref-
erence to the exclusion of women from the French royal succession.
Rather, Pizan and her ally, Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of
Paris, were concerned about Meun’s use of indecent language and alle-
gorical descriptions of sexual intercourse; his representation of women
as naturally and universally immoral, deceitful, and cunning; and the
absence of a clear authorial voice to guide the reader to an appropri-
ate moral response to the text. Pizan’s fundamental argument was that
all writers had a moral imperative neither to encourage sinful behavior
nor to say anything that might be injurious and harmful to the public,
specifically women.9 Similarly, in Le livre de la cité des dames Pizan sought
to defend women against the scurrilous attacks of such famous misogy-
nist works as the Liber lamentationum Matheoluli and also to demonstrate
that the achievements of certain women proved that they were equal or
superior to men. In book 1 she may have questioned why women were
denied the role of judges, but her concern was not to overturn what she
defined as a divinely ordained division of labor but rather to reject the
false conclusion drawn from this, that females were insufficiently wise,
courageous, and sensible to be judges or rulers: she proceeded to dem-
onstrate that history had provided many examples of women who had
shown exactly those qualities.10
Hanley has also suggested that in book 3 Pizan used a remarkable
catalog of female saints to attack the exclusively male connotations of

7 Hanley, ‘‘Identity Politics,’’ 80–81.

8 Ibid., 88.
9 Eric Hicks, ed., Christine de Pisan, Jean Gerson, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier et Pierre Col: Le débat
sur le ‘‘Roman de la rose’’ (Paris, 1977), 22, 49–57, 59–87, 125. Montreuil argued that Meun was a
satirical poet who introduced characters that spoke according to their appropriate attributes. This
was a continuation of a long-standing debate; see Alastair J. Minnis, Magister Amoris: The ‘‘Roman
de la rose’’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001), 208–59.
10 There is no modern scholarly edition of Le livre de la cité des dames, but see Christine de
Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (Harmondsworth, 1999), 29–87,
esp. 29–30.
546 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

quasi-sacerdotal monarchy and thus open ‘‘the route . . . for anoint-

ment of a queen called to coronation.’’ 11 Yet Pizan made no allusion to
the coronation at all, and literary critics agree that she simply wished to
demonstrate that men and women had an equal capacity for faith and
courage, responding to Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, which deliber-
ately confined itself to pagan women, and Vincent de Beauvais’s Specu-
lum historiale, which depicted male and female saints as distinct and
separate, if almost equal.12 It may well be that the exclusion of women
from the French royal succession can be partly explained by the misogy-
nist assumptions and discourse of the late Middle Ages. Yet a defense
of women need not be viewed as an attack on the constitutional situa-
tion in France. Indeed, it would have been remarkable if Pizan had
attempted even a covert assault on the exclusion of females from the
French royal succession, thereby undermining the position of the Valois
monarchy and the princes of the blood who provided her with such
important patronage.13
Was Montreuil thinking about or arguing against Pizan in his writ-
ings on the French royal succession, A toute la chevalerie and the ensu-
ing Traité contre les Anglais? His public debate with Pizan had certainly
appeared heated, with Montreuil stating at one point that Pizan showed
the acumen of the Greek whore who had dared to write against the
philosopher Theophrastus.14 Such statements, shocking to the modern
reader, suggest that the protagonists had a personal stake in the debate.
Yet one needs to see the querelle de la Rose in the context of the literary
debates or games in which Montreuil and his colleagues in chancery
circles participated. Violent rhetoric was characteristic and did not nec-
essarily represent real emotion; for example, Montreuil had previously
referred to one correspondent, Ambrogio Migli, as a venomous snake,

11 Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, 201–40, discussed in Hanley, ‘‘Identity Politics,’’ 85; Hanley,
‘‘Politics of Identity,’’ 299–300.
12 Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s ‘‘Cité des dames’’
(Ithaca, NY, 1991), 196–206.
13 Scholarship on Pizan has not identified any connection between her work and the exclu-
sion of women from the French royal succession, or associated the querelle de la Rose and her defense
of women with the debate over the Salic Law. See Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and
the Moral Defence of Women: Reading beyond Gender (Cambridge, 1999), which does not include the
terms queenship or Salic Law in its index; see also Christine Fauré, Democracy without Women: Femi-
nism and the Rise of Liberal Individualism in France (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 16–23; Helen Solterer,
The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 156–62;
and David F. Hult, ‘‘The Roman de la rose, Christine de Pizan, and the Querelle des femmes,’’ in The
Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writings, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cam-
bridge, 2003), 184–94. Criticisms of Pizan by some modern feminists for her acceptance of some
of the more entrenched aspects of French society are somewhat anachronistic. See, e.g., Sheila
Delany, ‘‘History, Politics, and Christine Studies: A Polemical Reply,’’ in Politics, Gender, and Genre:
The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, CO, 1992), 193–206.
14 Hicks, Christine de Pisan, 42.
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 547

implicitly challenging him both as a foreigner and as a traitor.15 Of

course, the querelle de la Rose did differ from other literary exchanges in
which Montreuil had participated: first, Pizan rhetorically transformed
the literary dispute into an argument between the sexes; more impor-
tant, she moved the debate from the private circle of chancery officials
and other intellectuals associated with the courts of Paris and Avignon
into the public sphere by presenting a compilation of the documents
to Queen Isabeau of Bavaria and Guillaume de Tignonville, provost of
Paris, in 1402.16 Pizan’s unwillingness ‘‘to play the games on his terms’’
not only secured her remarkable public standing as an authority but
also led Montreuil to disengage from the debate, forcing his colleagues,
Gontier Col and his brother Pierre, to step in to defend Meun.17 Did
Montreuil’s withdrawal from the debate amount to a defeat and ‘‘an
embarrassing denouement witnessed in theological, literary, and politi-
cal circles’’? 18 Either way, it is unclear how A toute la chevalerie could have
restored his reputation, given that it only circulated in ‘‘private’’ among
his colleagues in the royal chancery, the very people who had taken his
side in the original querelle.19
Montreuil was writing about the royal succession not to spite Pizan
but in the context of polemical treatises, intended for a specific audi-
ence of royal officials and diplomats and setting out the legal justifica-
tions and framework for the ongoing conflict with the English. Hanley
dismissed this significant problem by denying the claim that Edward III
and his successors had designs on the French throne as ‘‘a popular
theme invented by French propagandists.’’ 20 Yet there is overwhelming
evidence that the polemical treatises produced by Valois officials in the
fifteenth century were used by administrators and diplomats as sum-
maries of the complicated disputes with the English and other oppo-
nents of the Crown, because they offered clear statements of the Valois
position on most points that might be raised during negotiations.21

15 Emma Cayley, ‘‘ ‘Tu recites, je replique; et quant nous avons fait et fait, tout ne vault
riens’: Explorations of a Debating Climate in Early Humanist France,’’ Nottingham Medieval Studies
48 (2004): 43–46.
16 Hicks, Christine de Pisan, lv–lxxxiii. Pizan did not include Montreuil’s letters or text in the
dossier that she prepared, which now survives in three manuscripts, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale
MSS Français 12779 (copied in 1402) and 604 (copied after 1407) and Chantilly, Musée Condé,
MS 492 (early fifteenth century).
17 Cayley, ‘‘ ‘Tu recites,’ ’’ 50–51; Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan, 8.
18 Hanley, ‘‘Identity Politics,’’ 86; Minnis, Magister Amoris, 255–56.
19 Hanley argues that A toute la chevalerie was written for a wide audience because it was
composed in French (‘‘Politics of Identity,’’ 293–94). Yet Montreuil had expressed horror at the
thought of being ridiculed if one of his vernacular texts were disseminated publicly (Opera, 1:179).
20 Hanley, ‘‘Identity Politics,’’ 80; Hanley, ‘‘Politics of Identity,’’ 293.
21 Craig Taylor, ‘‘War, Propaganda, and Diplomacy in Fifteenth-Century France and En-
gland,’’ in War, Government, and Power in Late Medieval France, ed. C. T. Allmand (Liverpool, 2000),
548 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Moreover, there can be no doubt that pressure from English claimants

to the throne throughout the Hundred Years’ War played a central role
in the development of French justifications for the exclusion of women
from the royal succession. English lawyers and diplomats outlined a
detailed justification of the Plantagenet claim to the French Crown at
successive negotiations to end the war.22 They may not have champi-
oned the right of women to succeed to the throne, but they did claim
that the French Crown had passed to Edward III through his mother,
Isabella, sister of King Charles IV of France. Indeed, the first direct
reference to the Salic Law in the debate over royal succession appears
to have come from the English during negotiations in 1389. The origi-
nal English arguments are not recorded, but the French reply appears
in a compilation of diplomatic documents that Montreuil owned, the
Memoire abregée grossement.23 It may well be that the English kings did
not consistently view the French Crown as their primary goal, but that
did not make it any less necessary to defend against the Plantagenet
claim, especially when it provided an essential bargaining chip in nego-
tiations over territories like Aquitaine, Ponthieu, Normandy, Anjou,
Maine, and Touraine and also a crucial justification for their apparent
rebellion against their sovereign lords.24 As I have argued elsewhere,
the appropriation and redefinition of the Salic Law by Montreuil and
his colleagues must be understood first and foremost in the context of
such diplomatic debates.25
In short, there is no evidence that Montreuil regarded his writ-
ings on the French royal succession as a continuation of his debate with

70–91; Taylor, ‘‘Salic Law.’’ Even when the English threat receded, the Salic Law provided an
important weapon in the struggles between the Crown and the appanages, which Juvénal argued
were subject to the same rules of inheritance as the Crown to which they ultimately belonged.
This argument was used by Guillaume Cousinot II and other Valois writers to justify the resump-
tion of the duchy of Burgundy after Charles the Bold died without a male heir in 1477. See Paul
Saenger, ‘‘Burgundy and the Inalienability of Appanages in the Reign of Louis XI,’’ French Historical
Studies 10 (1977): 1–26; and Kathleen Daly, ‘‘French Pretensions to Valois Burgundy: History and
Polemic in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,’’ Publications du Centre Européen d’Etudes
Bourguignonnes 44 (2004): 9–22.
22 Craig Taylor, ‘‘Edward III and the Plantagenet Claim to the French Throne,’’ in The Age of
Edward III, ed. James Bothwell (Woodbridge, 2001), 160–61. English administrators and diplomats
certainly had dossiers to match those produced in France, as Montreuil observed in September
1416, reporting that they commonly brought books ‘‘les plus beaulx et les plus notables qu’ilz
puent faire de ce qu’ilz demandent en France’’ (Opera, 2:266).
23 ‘‘Encores par l’estatut que vueullent alleguer les gens du roy dAngleterre qui est en la
loy salique, la terre doit venir au sexe masculin qui est la ligne masculine en excluant la ligne
femenine, tant les femmes comme les masles qui d’elles seroient descenduz,’’ Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale MS Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises 6215 fol. 28v, which does not differ in substance
from the transcription of Montreuil’s copy in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 10306–7, in Opera,
3:77.
24 For a recent summary of the debate, see Anne Curry, The Hundred Years War, 2nd ed.
(London, 2003).
25 Taylor, ‘‘Salic Law.’’
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 549

Pizan. He made no reference to the Roman de la rose, Le livre de la cité

des dames, or Pizan herself in any of these writings, and the Salic Law
hardly overturned her central contention in Le livre de la cité des dames
that the exclusion of women from legal or political roles was no proof
of the essential inferiority of women to men. Moreover, Montreuil did
not seriously engage with any of these arguments of Pizan. For example,
when he discussed Semiramis, a pagan queen lauded in Pizan’s Le livre
de la cité des dames, he made no reference to Pizan’s unusual and poten-
tially fragile argument that Semiramis had committed no crime in her
sexual relationship with her son because incest was not forbidden at
that time.26
Nevertheless, it is appropriate to consider whether Montreuil and
his colleagues were attracted to the Salic Law not because it provided
an additional weapon against Pizan but because it reduced the need for
misogynist arguments against women and clarified the constitutional
position of French queens like Isabeau of Bavaria. In a world full of
women who held effective political power as regents and guardians, the
familiar repertoire of misogynist arguments against female rulership
and succession was clearly problematic. As a result, Valois writers led
by Montreuil defended the exclusion of women from the French royal
succession in a new manner, fundamentally reshaping a discourse that
was almost a century old.

In 1389 Honoré Bouvet, prior of Selonnet in the diocese of Embrun,

dedicated a revised and extended version of his Arbre des batailles to
Charles VI.27 Before providing the king with a detailed discussion of
the laws of war, he paused to defend the recent attempt by the childless
queen of Naples to adopt Louis, duke of Anjou, as her heir.28 This was
clearly an issue close to Bouvet’s heart, not least because of his close
connections with the duke and the Angevin party. Yet he could not have
failed to see the potential problems caused by drawing attention to a

26 Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, 35–37; Montreuil, Opera, 2:173–74; both discussed in
Hanley, ‘‘Identity Politics,’’ 86. See also Irene Samuel, ‘‘Semiramis in the Middle Ages: The History
of a Legend,’’ Medievalia et humanistica, o.s., 2 (1944): 32–44; Liliane Dulac, ‘‘Un mythe didactique
chez Christine de Pizan: Sémiramis ou la veuve héroïque (du De mulieribus claris de Boccacce à la
Cité des dames),’’ in Mélanges de philologie romane offerts à Charles Camproux, 2 vols. (Montpellier, 1978),
1:315–43; and Quilligan, Allegory, 70–85.
27 Gilbert Ouy, ‘‘Honoré Bouvet (appelé à tort Bonet), prieur de Selonnet,’’ Romania 80
(1959): 255–59. See also n. 29.
28 Joanna (1326–82) succeeded to the throne of Naples in 1343 with her husband, Andrew
of Hungary, who was murdered two years later. Despite marrying two more times, Joanna remained
childless and adopted Charles of Durazzo as her heir. When Pope Urban VI, angered by Joanna’s
support of the antipope Clement VII, urged Charles to dethrone her, she disinherited Charles
in favor of Louis of Anjou (David Abulafia, ‘‘The Italian South,’’ in The New Cambridge Medieval
History, vol. 6, ed. Michael C. E. Jones [Cambridge, 2000], 508–14).
550 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

reigning queen of a foreign kingdom, when supposedly no female could

inherit the French throne. Certainly Bouvet rushed to emphasize that
women were excluded from all positions of judgment because of both
law and natural reason, arguing that the only possible exceptions were
situations in which they had been entrusted with such authority by a
man. Thus, he argued, no woman was allowed to succeed to the French
throne because France was an independent, self-governing kingdom,
but in Naples, a kingdom subject to papal sovereignty, the pope had
permitted gynecocracy in the form of Queen Joanna.29
The knots into which Bouvet tied himself highlight the problems
that French intellectuals faced as they tried to deal with the prece-
dent set by the exclusion of women from the French royal succession.
On June 5, 1316, Louis X had died, leaving a four-year-old daugh-
ter, Jeanne, by his first wife, Marguerite. The situation was confused
by the fact that his second wife, Clemence of Hungary, was pregnant,
and so the matter was put on hold until November, when she gave
birth to a son, Jean. The infant died within a few days, and the fol-
lowing month Philippe de Poitiers, brother of Louis X, assumed the
royal title. Philippe was crowned in January 1317, and his succession
to the Crown was ratified by an assembly in Paris early the following
month.30 Thus Louis’s daughter, Jeanne, was passed over in favor of
his brother, Philippe, setting a precedent against female succession to
the throne that was confirmed when the daughters of Philippe V were
ignored after their father’s death in 1322. The custom was extended to
males claiming through women with the death of Charles IV in 1328,
when Edward III, son of Charles’s sister Isabella, was ignored in favor
of Philippe de Valois.31
Valois lawyers, intellectuals, and diplomats were quickly called on
to defend the exclusion of women from the royal succession. On the
one hand, Edward III, king of England, and Charles, king of Navarre,
refused to accept the accession of Philippe VI in 1328.32 On the other
hand, the dramatic events of 1317, 1322, and 1328 fundamentally chal-

29 Honoré Bonet [Bouvet], The Tree of Battles, ed. George W. Coopland (Cambridge, MA,
1949), 193–95, 295–97.
30 Philippe Lehugeur, Histoire de Philippe le Long, roi de France (1316–1322), vol. 1 (Paris,
1897); Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State
(Paris, 1958), 149–54; Charles T. Wood, The French Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy, 1224–1328
(Cambridge, MA, 1966), 37–66; Wood, ‘‘Where Is John the Posthumous? Or Mahaut of Artois
Settles Her Royal Debts,’’ in Documenting the Past: Essays in Medieval History Presented to George Peddy
Cuttino, ed. J. S. Hamilton and P. J. Bradley (Woodbridge, 1989), 99–117; Elizabeth A. R. Brown,
‘‘The Ceremonial of Royal Succession in Capetian France: The Double Funeral of Louis X,’’ Tra-
ditio 34 (1978): 227–71.
31 Raymond Cazelles, La société politique et la crise de la royauté sous Philippe de Valois (Paris,
1958), 35–73; Wood, French Apanages, 117–34.
32 For the English arguments, see Taylor, ‘‘Edward III,’’ 155–69.
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 551

lenged the hereditary principle governing the royal succession. In Prac-

tica aurea libellorum, written between 1311 and 1329, Pierre Jacobi argued
that the Crown ought to pass in direct line of inheritance, without con-
sideration of the heir’s sex or quality, just like any other piece of prop-
erty: ignoring the rightful heir threatened to undermine the continuity
of the royal succession.33 In short, the decisions to omit the daughters
of the last Capetians implied that a public assembly had the right to
override the hereditary principles governing the royal succession. The
enormous danger that this created was amply demonstrated by the pub-
lic debate over the suitability of Jean (II) to succeed to Philippe VI dur-
ing his father’s lifetime and by the interregnum following the death of
Jean II, before what was effectively an élection of his son Charles.34
The solution to the problem was to argue that the Crown was not
private property and hence could not be subject to the normal rules
of inheritance. François de Meyronnes employed this distinction in
1322 in his gloss to Saint Augustine’s discussion of the Lex voconia in
De civitate Dei. This law had been introduced by the Romans in 169 BC
to prevent women from being instituted in wills as heirs to estates of
the top property class. Meyronnes certainly agreed that women should
be allowed to inherit property, citing the scriptural precedent of the
story of Salphaad: after the latter died without a son, his five daugh-
ters were named as his heirs by God, who declared through Moses that
whenever a man died without sons, his inheritance should pass to his
daughter (Num. 27). Nevertheless, Meyronnes carefully distinguished
between private property and a public dignity (dignitas) like priesthood
or monarchy, which was unsuitable for females.35 Following Meyronnes,
Valois writers throughout the late Middle Ages consistently argued that
the French Crown was a hereditary public office that passed by spe-
cial rules appropriate to its public nature, rather than by the normal
laws of inheritance. For example, Raoul de Presles cited the Lex voconia

33 Albert Rigaudière, ‘‘Etat, pouvoir et administration dans la Practica aurea libellorum de

Pierre Jacobi (vers 1311),’’ in Droits savants et pratiques françaises du pouvoir (XIe–XVe siècles), ed.
Jacques Krynen and Albert Rigaudière (Bordeaux, 1992), 171–73.
34 Cazelles, Société politique et la crise de la royauté, 72–73; Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et
couronne sous Jean le Bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 7–8, 455–60.
35 François de Meyronnes, Theologicae veritates de Aug. civ. (Basel, 1515), bk. 3, chap. 21. The
argument was also employed by Thomas Waleys in his commentary on the De civitate Dei, in Saint
Augustine, De civitate Dei, cum commentariis Thomae Valois necnon additionibus Jac. Passavantii (Basel,
1515), 3.21. For the earlier use of this argument in relation to the French royal succession, see Eliza-
beth A. R. Brown, ‘‘Vincent de Beauvais and the Reditus regni francorum ad stirpem Caroli imperatoris,’’
in Vincent de Beauvais: Intentions et réceptions d’une oeuvre encyclopédique au Moyen Age, ed. M. Paulmier-
Foucart, S. Lusignan, and A. Nadeau Bellarmin (Montreal, 1990), 167–96; and Brown, ‘‘La généa-
logie capétienne dans l’historiographie du Moyen Age: Philippe le Bel, le reniement du reditus et
la création d’une ascendance carolingienne pour Hugues Capet,’’ in Religion et culture autour de l’an
mil: Royaume capétien et Lotharingie; Actes du colloque Hugues Capet, 987–1987; La France de l’an mil, ed.
Dominique Iogna-Prat and Jean-Charles Picard (Paris, 1990), 199–214.
552 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

and the story of Salphaad’s daughters in his translation of the De civitate

Dei: ‘‘Le royaume n’est pas heredite, mais est dignite regardant toute
l’administracion de la chose publique.’’ 36 Throughout the fifteenth cen-
tury almost all of the French polemical writers defending the Valois
monarchy cited the story of Salphaad’s daughters, or at least the dis-
tinction between a private inheritance and a public office.37
The problem was explaining why women should not be allowed to
hold a public office. For Augustinian commentators like Presles, this
was the logical consequence of the comparison between the Crown and
a priestly dignitas, ‘‘car combien que la dignite de prestrise descend-
ist par succession, touteffoies ny succedoit ne succeda nulle femme.’’ 38
This was a very powerful argument, given the special Christian status
attributed to the French monarchy. A woman could not be anointed
with the Holy Chrism, which was the source of superiority of French
kings over other rulers and of their thaumaturgic power to cure scrof-
ula. As Jean Golein declared in the Traité du sacre, the queen lacked the
sacral qualities of the king such as the power to cure scrofula, and her
inability to rule was further demonstrated by the fact that she did not
receive the special divine gifts granted to the kings of France.39
Yet there was also a very real danger that the sacerdotal qualities of
the monarchy might be used to justify papal authority over the tempo-
ral sphere: if the French king held a ‘‘priestly’’ office, did that not imply
that the pope was his ultimate sovereign? These were very real concerns
for writers in the entourage of Charles V, such as Nicole Oresme, trans-
lator of Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics, and Evrart de Trémaugon, author
of a wide-ranging study of the relationship between the lay and eccle-

36 Raoul de Presles, Les dix premiers livres de la Cité de Dieu (Abbeville, 1486), bk. 3, chap. 21.
The same argument was used by Nicole Oresme and Evrart de Trémaugon, author of the Som-
nium viridarii. Albert D. Menut, ‘‘Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le livre de politiques d’Aristote,’’ Transactions
of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 60 (1970): 155a–b; Somnium viridarii, ed. Marion Schnerb-
Lièvre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1993–96), 1:276, 281, 286, 297, trans. by Jean Le Fèvre as Le songe du vergier,
édité d’après le manuscrit Royal 19 C IV de la British Library, ed. Marion Schnerb-Lièvre, 2 vols. (Paris,
1982), 1:243, 246, 252, 259. On the authorship of the Somnium viridarii and the Songe du vergier,
see Pierre Chaplais, ‘‘Jean Le Fèvre, Abbot of Saint-Vaast, and the Songe du vergier,’’ in Recogni-
tions: Essays Presented to Edmund Fryde, ed. Colin Richmond and Isobel Harvey (Aberystwyth, 1996),
203–28.
37 Montreuil, Opera, 2:173, 275; Nicole Pons, ed., ‘‘L’honneur de la couronne de France’’: Quatre
libelles contre les Anglais (vers 1418–vers 1429) (Paris, 1990), 174; Juvénal, Ecrits politiques, 1:164–65,
2:42–43, 46; Daly and Giesey, ‘‘Noël de Fribois,’’ 30, 34; Pour ce que plusieurs, fols. 9r–10v. Juvénal
was the only fifteenth-century polemical writer to cite Meyronnes’s original gloss.
38 Presles, Dix premiers livres, bk. 3, chap. 21.
39 Richard Jackson, ‘‘The Traité du sacre of Jean Golein,’’ Proceedings of the American Philo-
sophical Society 113 (1969): 323–24; Presles, prologue to the Cité de Dieu, transcribed in William M.
Hinkle, The Fleur de Lis of the Kings of France, 1285–1488 (Carbondale, IL, 1991), 162–65. The litera-
ture on the theme of the roi très chrétien is extensive, but see, e.g., Jacques Krynen, ‘‘Rex Christia-
nissimus: A Medieval Theme at the Roots of French Absolutism,’’ History and Anthropology 4 (1989):
79–96.
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 553

siastical spheres, the Somnium viridarii. These important intellectuals

used this argument quite sparingly in their writings on royal succes-
sion in the 1370s.40 Instead, they principally defended the exclusion
of women from the royal succession on the grounds that the Crown
was a public office that required specific skills and qualities only found
in men. In short, they used the typical misogynist litany to claim that
women were simply inferior to men. Nicole Oresme based his case on
Aristotle’s belief that the male was naturally superior to the female and
so ‘‘par nature un a princey et l’autre est subjecte.’’ Monarchy required
‘‘excellence en vertu et en prudence et . . . industrie de bien gouver-
ner le peuple,’’ but according to Aristotle, women had a feeble ‘‘vertu
consiliative’’; thus Oresme argued that because they were malicious
and unable to deliberate wisely, their counsel was good only for petty
domestic matters. Moreover, Aristotle had claimed that women were
not as temperate or courageous as men, while Saint Paul had prohibited
them from teaching. Oresme concluded that women did not have the
virtues or capabilities for rulership, particularly because they lacked
the ‘‘vertu principative,’’ and so should be excluded from the succes-
sion.41 Trémaugon also viewed kingship as a virile office and cited Digest
50.17.2: women were barred from all civil and public functions, includ-
ing the offices of judge, magistrate, and lawyer.Thus Trémaugon argued
that no woman could exercise the office of king, marquis, duke, count,
or baron.42 He justified this by referring to a comprehensive array of
misogynist arguments, based on the contention that the condition of
females was opposed to the government of the public sphere. A ruler
needed to be virtuous, firm, and stable to safeguard the peace and
stability that the realm was created to achieve; not only was the man
better able to defend the realm, but he was also more virtuous and con-
stant than the female. Trémaugon listed nine evil conditions of women,
each supported by citations from civil and canon law. For example, he

40 When discussing the coronation ceremony in a different context, Trémaugon accepted

that the king of France enjoyed certain special powers and privileges, such as the ability to cure
scrofula, but he argued that these were the direct gift of God and the Holy Spirit and thus did
not come from the consecration ceremony itself. Ironically, one of his arguments against papal
claims to temporal power was that queens were crowned but could not exercise the office of king,
marquis, duke, count, or baron. Somnium viridarii, 1:237 and, in general, 229–40; Songe du vergier,
1:129 and, in general, 122–33.
41 Menut, ‘‘Maistre Nicole Oresme,’’ 153a, 153b, 155b; see also 71a.
42 Somnium viridarii, 1:237, 289–90; Songe du vergier, 1:129, 254–55. Digest 50.17.2 (‘‘Feminae
ab omnibus civilibus vel publicis remotae sunt’’) was a commonplace authority in discussions of
gynecocracy in both the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, which generally ignored argu-
ments in canon and civil law that supported rule by exceptional women, such as those outlined
briefly in Maria Teresa Guerra Medici, ‘‘La régence de la mère dans le droit médiéval,’’ Parliaments,
Estates, and Representation 17 (1997): 8–11.
554 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

claimed that women were by nature contrary, prone to lie, make false
accusations, and do the opposite of what was commanded; he cited the
legal prohibitions on their being teachers, priests, or judges.43
Yet the misogynist claim that women were intellectually or emo-
tionally inferior to men was strongly contested by contemporary
writers, including not just Pizan but also Laurent de Premierfait in his
translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (1400).44 More directly,
the supposed inability of women to hold public office was clearly con-
tradicted by contemporary reality: there were queens in other king-
doms, such as Portugal, Castile, Sicily, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Den-
mark, and even Naples, as Bouvet recognized.45 Indeed, despite being
excluded from the French royal succession, Louis X’s daughter Jeanne
inherited the kingdom of Navarre, which in turn passed to her son
Charles the Bad, who would later put himself forward as an heir to the
throne of France.46
At the same time, even if no queens reigned in France, there was
no doubt that women played prominent roles in public affairs. Pizan’s
famous literary creation, the city of ladies, included a number of histori-
cal figures, including Queen Blanche of Castile, mother of Saint Louis,
and contemporary figures such as Queen Isabeau of Bavaria and Valen-
tina Visconti, wife of the duke of Orléans.47 Moreover, any list of influ-
ential women in late medieval France would surely include such figures
as Yolande of Aragon, mother-in-law of Charles VII; Isabella, duchess of
Portugal; Agnès Sorel; and, of course, Jeanne d’Arc.48 If Pizan had any
direct influence on the debate over royal succession, it was in reminding
the establishment that contemporary women played important politi-
cal and constitutional roles. Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of Charles VI, was

43 Somnium viridarii, 1:286–87, 289–91; Songe du vergier, 1:252, 254–56.

44 Patricia May Gathercole, ed., Laurent de Premierfait’s ‘‘Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes,’’
Book 1, Translated from Boccaccio: A Critical Edition Based on Six Manuscripts (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968);
Carla Bozzolo, ed., Un traducteur et un humaniste de l’époque de Charles VI, Laurent de Premierfait
(Paris, 2004).
45 Armin Wolf, ‘‘Reigning Queens in Medieval Europe: When, Where, and Why,’’ in Medieval
Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (Stroud, 1994), 169–88.
46 Louis X and his father, Philippe IV, had defended the rights of specific Capetian prin-
cesses to both the kingdom of Navarre and even the English Crown (Cazelles, Société politique et la
crise de la royauté, 49–50; Lewis, Royal Succession, 153). Philippe IV demanded that if his daughter
Isabella had only a daughter by her husband, Edward II, their child should be provided for within
the English royal succession (Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘‘The Political Repercussions of Family Ties
in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Marriage of Edward II of England and Isabelle of France,’’
Speculum 63 [1988]: 584–85).
47 Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, 191–92, 195–97.
48 Malcolm Vale, Charles VII (London, 1974); Monique Sommé, Isabella de Portugal, duchesse
de Bourgogne: Une femme au pouvoir au XVe siècle (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1998). Pizan was one of a number
of contemporary writers who lauded Jeanne d’Arc, in Le ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, ed. Angus J. Kennedy
and Kenneth Varty (Oxford, 1977).
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 555

so prominent in the government of the realm between 1402 and 1420

that traditional arguments that women were mentally, physically, and
emotionally unable to hold public office would have been tactless, to
say the least.49 Pizan drew attention to the activities of Isabeau in Le
livre de la cité des dames, a work that also stressed the maternal bond that
made the queen the natural choice to act as guardian and regent on
behalf of her husband and children.50 The examples of such women
made it difficult to argue that women lacked the necessary skills and
abilities for public office. As a result, attempts to justify the exclusion of
females from the succession ran contrary to the slowly emerging sense
of constitutional roles for the queen consort or mother.
The coronation ceremony for the queen was quite different from
that of her husband, in part to underline the fact that she could not
hold temporal power in her own right. Nevertheless, the coronation
honors did accept that the wife of the king would exercise some politi-
cal functions: she was granted the right to pardon criminals as an exten-
sion of the royal dignity held by kings; she also received a scepter, a
rod, and a ring, symbolizing her duty to be just and to combat heresy.
Thus the liturgy called on God to grant the queen the necessary quali-
ties to discharge her duties and highlighted the moral obligation to act
as an intercessor before the king on behalf of the people.51 Pizan cer-
tainly alluded to this role in Le livre des trois vertus in 1405, arguing that
the queen should be a stabilizing force in society, a mediator between
the people and the king to ensure that he ruled undisturbed by rebel-
lion. Pizan called upon the queen to restore peace between the king
and his nobles during times of discord, a notion of great contemporary
relevance in the context of mounting tension between the princes.52

49 For the career of Isabeau of Bavaria, see Rachel Gibbons, ‘‘Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen
of France (1385–1422): The Creation of an Historical Villainess,’’ Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996): 51–75.
50 Pizan, Livre de la cité des dames, 195–97; Quilligan, Allegory, 85–139.
51 Marion F. Facinger, ‘‘A Study of Medieval Queenship: Capetian France, 987–1237,’’ Studies
in Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (1968): 18–19; Claire Richter Sherman, ‘‘The Queen in
Charles V’s Coronation Book: Jeanne de Bourbon and the Ordo ad reginam benedicendam,’’ Viator 8
(1977): 255–98; Sherman, ‘‘Taking a Second Look: Observations on the Iconography of a French
Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon,’’ in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude
and Mary D. Garrard (New York, 1982), 100–117; Elizabeth McCartney, ‘‘Ceremonies and Privi-
leges of Office: Queenship in Late Medieval France,’’ in Power of the Weak: Essays in the History of Medi-
eval Women, ed. Sally-Beth Maclean and Jennifer Carpenter (Urbana, IL, 1995), 182; Cosandey,
Reine de France, 127–62. For the coronation of English queens, see Joanna L. Laynesmith, ‘‘Fer-
tility Rite or Authority Ritual? The Queen’s Coronation in England, 1445–87,’’ in Social Attitudes
and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Tim Thornton (Stroud, 2000), 52–68.
52 Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies; or, The Book of the Three Virtues, trans.
S. Lawson (Harmondsworth, 1985), 47–52. For the queen’s role as mediator in internal and inter-
national conflicts, see Rachel Gibbons, ‘‘Les concilatrices au bas Moyen Age: Isabeau de Bavière
et la guerre civile,’’ in La guerre, la violence et les gens au Moyen Age: Actes du 119e congrès des sociétés
556 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Indeed, she made the point in a letter to Queen Isabeau in October

1405, entreating her to persuade the princes to stop quarreling for the
sake of the common people, who were likely to suffer if France were
attacked during this civil strife; the queen had to decide whether to
be remembered as a Blanche of Castile, who quelled a rebellion by the
barons against her infant son, or as a false Queen Jezebel.53
Indeed, this highlights the most important way in which the queen
could become involved in the government of the realm: through the
office of regent. At the start of the seventeenth century Jean Savaron
and Pierre Dupuy defended the right of queens to serve as regents for
their sons by arguing that women could not inherit the throne in their
own right and hence posed no threat to the real heir.54 Yet the prac-
tice developed long before the exclusion of women from the royal suc-
cession was first recognized at the start of the fourteenth century; it
may well have originated in the customary practice in the Ile-de-France
of entrusting the protection of noble children to their mother, often
assisted by a consilium familiae; this was perhaps reinforced by Castil-
ian practices and attitudes brought to France by Blanche of Castile.55
Thus Louis VIII entrusted the realm and his young son Louis to his
wife, Blanche of Castile, after his death on November 8, 1226, giving her
almost unlimited authority; Blanche also ruled after her son Saint Louis
departed on a crusade in 1248. Philippe IV declared in 1294 that his
wife, Jeanne of Navarre, would act as regent if his eldest son, Louis (X),
was a minor on assuming the throne; he placed no institutional limita-
tions on Queen Jeanne, though he did rule that if she remarried, she
would lose the regency. In August 1338 Philippe VI entrusted his wife
with control of financial and judicial matters while he took charge of the
military effort against the English.56 This practice was generally ratio-

historiques et scientifiques, 26–30 oct. 1994, Amiens, vol. 2, ed. Philippe Contamine and Olivier Guyot-
Jeannin (Paris, 1996), 23–33.
53 Christine de Pizan, The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life, with an Epistle to the Queen of France,
and Lament on the Evils of the Civil War, ed. and trans. Josette A. Wisman (New York, 1984), 70–
83. In 1410 Pizan appealed both to the duke of Berry and to Queen Isabeau to halt the civil war
afflicting France (88–92).
54 Harriet Lightman, ‘‘Political Power and the Queen of France: Pierre DuPuy’s Treatise
on Regency Government,’’ Canadian Journal of History 21 (1986): 299–312. The French term régent
or régence first appeared in official documents in 1316 (Elie Berger, ‘‘Le titre de régent dans les
actes de chancellerie royale,’’ Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 61 [1900]: 413–25). For the office of
regent, see Paul Viollet, Histoire des institutions politiques et administratives de la France, 3 vols. (Paris,
1890–1903), 2:86–96; and André Poulet, ‘‘Capetian Women and the Regency: The Genesis of a
Vocation,’’ and Elizabeth McCartney, ‘‘The King’s Mother and Royal Prerogative in Early Sixteenth
Century France,’’ in Parsons, Medieval Queenship, 93–116, 122–25.
55 Medici, ‘‘Régence,’’ 1–11; Ursula Vones-Liebenstein, ‘‘Une femme gardienne du royaume?
Régentes en temps de guerre (France-Castille, XIIIe siècle),’’ in Contamine and Guyot-Jeannin,
Guerre, 9–22.
56 When Philippe Auguste departed on crusade in 1190, he entrusted the regency and
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 557

nalized in terms of the queen’s pietas and love for her sons or brothers.
Philippe IV, Charles V, and Charles VI simply supported the right of
their queens to act as guardians, because ‘‘selon raison, escripte & natu-
rele, la mere aime plus tendrement ses enfanz, & a la cuer plus doulz &
plus piteux de eulx garder soigneusement & nourrir amoureusement,
que quelconque autre personne.’’ 57 The same argument was used in
1525 when Louise of Savoy told the Parlement of Paris that her right to
act as regent for her son François I during his absence from the realm
derived from the king’s will and also from her position as his mother;
she was no doubt inspired by works like Le compas du dauphin, Vers sur la
naissance et bapteme de France I, Dominus illuminatio mea, and Les gestes de la
reine Blanche de Castille, which celebrated the importance of the mother
of the heir to the throne. Charles Grassaille also defended the right
of French queens to the regency in Regalium Franciae libri duo in 1538,
citing her role within the family as wife and mother.58
The queen’s role as regent inevitably involved her in public affairs
and thus compromised the theoretical distinction between the pri-
vate and public spheres that was so central to the position adopted
by French intellectuals: women could not inherit the throne as pri-
vate property because it was a public office, but they could admin-
ister the kingdom as regents because of their domestic relationship
with their husbands or children. For a short period, Charles V and
his successor did try to separate the guardianship and protection of
the royal heir from the actual regency. In 1374 Charles V entrusted
the ‘‘tutelle, garde & gouvernement de Charles nostre dit ainsné filz’’
to the queen and the dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon but promised
the regency to the duke of Anjou, to ‘‘gouverner et administrer sage-
ment toute la chose publique.’’ In January 1393 Charles VI followed the
model established by his father: he committed his heir to the guardian-
ship of Queen Isabeau; Jean, duke of Berry; Philip, duke of Burgundy;
and Louis, duke of Bavaria, but he entrusted ‘‘le gouvernement, garde
et défense de nostre royaume’’ to Louis, duke of Orléans.59 Yet the

guardianship to his mother, Adèle of Champagne, and her brother Archbishop Guillaume of
Reims, together with a council. Nevertheless, queens did not automatically act as regent in this
period (Poulet, ‘‘Capetian Women,’’ 106–13).
57 Poulet, ‘‘Capetian Women,’’ 110–11, 113–14; Eusèbe de Laurière et al., eds., Ordonnances
des roys de France de la troisième race, 21 vols. (Paris, 1723–1849), 6:49, 7:531.
58 McCartney, ‘‘King’s Mother,’’ 117–42; McCartney, ‘‘Ceremonies and Privileges,’’ 185–96.
59 Laurière et al., Ordonnances, 6:26–32, 45–55, 7:530–38. See also Jacques Krynen, ‘‘ ‘Le
mort saisit le vif ’: Genèse médiévale du principe d’instantanéité de la succession royale française,’’
Journal des savants (1984): 187–221; and Françoise Autrand, ‘‘La succession à la couronne de France
et les ordonnances de 1374,’’ in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Age: Actes du colloque
organisé par l’Université du Maine les 25–26 mars 1994, ed. Joël Blanchard (Paris, 1995), 25–32. Poulet
has explained the exclusion of Jeanne of Bourbon from the regency in 1374 by the ‘‘apprehension
558 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

mounting tensions between the princes of the blood, together with the
illness of Charles VI, required Queen Isabeau to take a more active
role than mere guardianship of the persons of the dauphin and his
royal siblings. In 1402 Charles authorized the queen to resolve disputes
between the dukes and to deal with governmental business of any type
in his absence. Her powers were reduced in April 1403, when Charles
declared that the government in the king’s absence would fall not just
to the queen but also to the dukes and those of royal blood then at
the court. Nevertheless, it was clear that the queen would continue to
have an important role in the government of the realm during the inca-
pacities of the king, and this was reflected in the new arrangements
that Charles VI made in 1407 in case of his death before the majority
of his heir: the dauphin would be crowned immediately, regardless of
his age, and the council of the queen, dukes, princes of blood, and
royal councillors would govern in his name, making decisions based on
the will of the majority without regard for inequalities of status; mean-
while, the queen would have the ‘‘garde, nourrissement et gouverne-
ment’’ of the new king and any of the other royal children who were
minors.60 This new ordonnance reflected the collapse of the artificial dis-
tinction between the queen’s private and public roles, caused by Isa-
beau’s central importance in the politics of the reign of Charles VI.
Female regency was thus reintegrated into French political life: between
1483 and 1652 women governed the realm as regents on six occasions,
and in a seventh case, in 1483, Anne de Beaujeu served as coregent with
her husband Pierre.61
It is therefore not surprising that fifteenth-century defenders of
the Valois monarchy slowly abandoned the more misogynist arguments
used by Oresme and Trémaugon in favor of a new authority that did
not require them to assert the inferiority of women. Late in the reign
of Charles VI, perhaps in 1413, Montreuil cited the Salic Law in a mar-
ginal note to a text that he had originally written in 1406. Thereafter
Montreuil and his fellow royal administrators, including Jean Juvénal
and Noël de Fribois, carefully manipulated the Salic Law, which in fact
said nothing about royal succession, making it the centerpiece of their
defense of the Valois monarchs against the Plantagenet claim to the

that the widowed queen might become so powerful that when the time came, her son would not be
able to free himself from her control’’ (‘‘Capetian Women,’’ 113). Yet it seems unlikely that Charles
would have had such anxieties about his wife, given their very close and genuine relationship.
60 This arrangement was confirmed ‘‘par manière de Loi, d’Edit, de Constitution &
d’Ordonnance perpetuelle & irrévocable’’ at a lit de justice on Dec. 26, 1407 (Laurière et al., Ordon-
nances, 8:581–82, 9:267–69, discussed in Richard C. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of
Charles VI, 1392–1420 [New York, 1982], 26–31, 65–71, and Cosandey, Reine de France, 36–40).
61 Lightman, ‘‘Political Power,’’ 299.
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 559

French throne. This new authority was attractive because it offered a

far more coherent historical context for the customs that the Valois
identified as governing the royal succession and, moreover, because it
was a uniquely French law.62 At the same time, the Salic Law offered a
simple juridical proof that women were excluded from the royal succes-
sion, thus reducing the need to justify this unique French custom ratio-
nally. In the first draft of the Traité contre les Anglais, Montreuil did claim
that women were not allowed to take up ‘‘l’administration et gouvern-
ment des dignitéz et offices’’ because of their ‘‘fragilité,’’ particularly
their inability to handle military and legal matters on a day-to-day basis.
Yet he did not support this argument with any citations from the typi-
cal array of medieval misogynist arguments, and he gave up the point
altogether in the subsequent drafts of the work, increasingly emphasiz-
ing the authority of the Salic Law.63
In contrast those fifteenth-century writers who were most uncer-
tain about the new authority, such as Juvénal and Fribois, also offered
the most misogynist approach to the problem of the fifteenth-century
polemical writers. Juvénal’s increasing concern about the authority of
the Salic Law made it necessary to provide additional justifications for
the exclusion of women from the royal succession. Thus he placed great
emphasis on the inability of women to inherit the priestly dignitas of
kingship and also argued that a woman could not fulfill the duties of
such a virile office as kingship, citing, for example, Digest 50.17.2 and
the fact that women were not ‘‘de ferme et stabilement entendement,
et pour ce sont comparees a enfans mineurs.’’ 64 Most striking is Fri-
bois’s resurrection of the worst misogynist arguments when he vaguely
referred to twelve arguments that had convinced the ancient French to
adopt the Salic Law. This was undoubtedly the list of misogynist argu-
ments used by Trémaugon in his Leçon and the Somnium viridarii to jus-
tify the exclusion of females from the royal succession. Fribois did not
see any need to rehearse them in his text ‘‘pour cause de briefté.’’ 65
The fifteenth-century writers also gave up the discussion of great
queens that had featured so heavily in their fourteenth-century sources.
Presles denied that any women had succeeded to the thrones of Judah
or Israel, rejecting the example of Queen Athaliah of Jerusalem, who

62 Taylor, ‘‘Salic Law.’’

63 Montreuil, Opera, 2:172–73. Pour ce que plusieurs simply stated that a woman could not
fight to defend the faith and was incapable of being a judge because her thoughts and judgments
could be too quick (fols. 9r, 11r).
64 Juvénal, Ecrits politiques, 1:162–63, 2:48–50. See also Craig Taylor, ‘‘Sir John Fortescue
and the French Polemical Treatises of the Hundred Years War,’’ English Historical Review 114 (1999):
112–29.
65 Daly and Giesey, ‘‘Noël de Fribois,’’ 34.
560 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

had usurped the throne by killing everyone of the royal blood except
her grandson Joash and so was herself murdered. Oresme also cited
Athaliah, together with the Amazonian queens, but he was especially
interested in the story of Semiramis, who was accepted as a ruler only
because she dressed up as her son. Of the fifteenth-century writers,
only Montreuil mentioned Semiramis, exclusively in the first draft of
the Traité contre les Anglais, when he argued that no woman had ever held
even the lowest position in the judiciary in any ancient state or mon-
archy. He abandoned this highly dubious claim, and all references to
Semiramis, in subsequent drafts.66
In short, Montreuil and the polemical writers almost entirely ig-
nored the misogynist materials in their sources, particularly the Som-
nium viridarii, and instead based the exclusion of women from the royal
succession on the Salic Law.67 They supported this authority with dif-
ferent logical arguments: for example, if women could succeed to the
throne, then the daughters of Louis X, Philippe V, and Charles IV
would all have had better claims than Isabella, sister of these last Cape-
tian kings, and Isabella herself would have succeeded ahead of her son
Edward III.68 Many of the writers also continued to emphasize that the
royal succession was subject to different rules than a private inheri-
tance, invoking the notion that the Crown was a quasi-sacerdotal office.
This reflected the growing importance of this rhetoric in the context
of the war against the English, especially thanks to Jeanne d’Arc, as
well as the rising strength of Gallicanism against the weakened papacy
during the Schism and the Conciliar movement. Thus Juvénal followed
Montreuil in arguing that a woman could no more be monarch of
France than pope, given that the king was consecrated as an ecclesi-
astical officer. He also invoked the argument of Meyronnes that the

66 Presles, Dix premiers livres, bk. 3, chap. 21; Menut, ‘‘Maistre Nicole Oresme,’’ 73b, 155b.
Montreuil was almost certainly drawing his knowledge of Semiramis directly from Orosius (Opera,
1:330–31, 2:172–74).
67 Fifteenth-century Valois writers did not try to argue that inheritance was an essentially
masculine function transmitted through blood or semen ties, as Hanley has asserted in ‘‘Mapping
Rulership,’’ 6–9. Jean de Terrevermeille (Terre Rouge) may have invoked the authority of Aristotle
to argue that there was an unbreakable seminal link between father and son, so that the dau-
phin had an automatic right to be regent during his father Charles VI’s incapacity, but he did not
develop this notion into full-fledged support for exclusively masculine succession to the French
throne. More important, his work was effectively unknown in France until its first publication in
1526 (Contra rebelles suorum, in François Hotman, Consilia [Arras, 1586], bk. 1, chap. 2, sec. 1). See
also Gianna Pomata, ‘‘Blood Ties and Semen Ties: Consanguinity and Agnation in Roman Law,’’ in
Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History, ed. Mary Jo Maynes et al. (London,
1996), 43–64.
68 Montreuil and his colleagues also pointed out that if the Crown could be inherited by a
woman, then she might marry a poor man, or worse a foreigner (Opera, 2:132, 163–65, 169–71,
209–12, 225–26, 270–72, 275–76, 318, 320–21, 325; Pons, ‘‘Honneur,’’ 61–62; Juvénal, Ecrits poli-
tiques, 1:158–59, 166–67, 2:19, 50; Pour ce que plusieurs, fols. 7v–8r).
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 561

Crown was a priestly dignity that could not be inherited by a woman, as

God had demonstrated through the special gifts of the sainte ampoulle,
which could not be used to anoint a woman, and through the arms
of the fleurs-de-lis, which could not be borne by a female. The trea-
tise Pour ce que plusieurs argued that the Crown was a priestly dignity
that could be inherited only by men, as emphasized by the divine gifts
granted to the French monarchy.The anonymous author had no qualms
about invoking the coronation, particularly since Charles VII’s great
rival, Henry VI, had not been crowned king of France according to ‘‘les
solemnites tellez qu’il appartient et qu’il est requis à une telle dignité et
mistère comme de enoingdre, sacrer et couronner les trescrestiens roys
de France.’’ 69
On occasion, both Montreuil and Juvénal compared the kingdom
to a fief, which according to the Libri feudorum could not be inherited by
women or passed on except by the direct male line.70 Yet neither writer
justified this by directly claiming that women were inferior. Juvénal
simply declared that since women could not hold the office of ‘‘bailly
ou prevost,’’ they must surely be barred from the Crown itself, ‘‘qui est
plus grant dignité ou administration.’’ 71 Both writers echoed Bouvet’s
careful argument that women could hold public office only if it were
delegated to them by men. Montreuil simply claimed that the female
holders of fiefs in France had not inherited such positions but had
received them as usufructaries for life, as a gift and dowry, because they
shared the royal blood; the king always retained sovereignty over these
grants so that he could supervise them and thereby prevent any prob-
lems, an arrangement impossible for the French Crown itself, which
recognized no superior.72 Juvénal offered a more sophisticated distinc-
tion between a fief and an appanage, which as part of the Crown was
also subject to the prohibition on female succession: ‘‘Ce qui se part de
la couronne pour forme d’empanage ne vient point a filles, et s’il est
baillé a filz, en deffaulte de hoirs masles il revient a la couronne.’’ Thus
he observed that if a woman had held an appanage in the past, it must
have been through a dowry, gift, or other just cause, and he emphasized

69 Montreuil, Opera, 2:173; Juvénal, Ecrits politiques, 1:160, 163–65, 2:42–44; Pour ce que plu-
sieurs, fols. 10v–11r, 20r–v. One consequence of the unusual emphasis on coronation in Pour ce que
plusieurs was its author’s contention that the posthumous son of Louis X, Jean, ‘‘morut en alant
Rains pour le faire sacrer. Et pource nest il point mis ou nombre des roys de France’’ (ibid., fol. 3r).
70 Somnium viridarii, 1:284, 286, 288, 303; Songe du vergier, 1:249–53, 266; Montreuil, Opera,
2:172; Juvénal, Ecrits politiques, 1:161, 2:22–24, 44.
71 Juvénal, Ecrits politiques, 2:26, 43.
72 Montreuil, Opera, 2:172, 227–28, 274. This argument may have originally derived from
canon law: Guglielmo Vasco and other lawyers justified women’s exercise of governmental and
administrative authority, despite the weakness of their sex, by arguing that this power was dele-
gated by the emperor or pope (Medici, ‘‘Régence,’’ 8).
562 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

that the lordship then remained under the supervision of the grand con-
seil and the Crown, which could not be the case for the Crown itself,
which recognized no sovereign except God.73

Thanks to the adoption of the Salic Law, Montreuil and his colleagues
had less need to examine the inability of women to rule: the law’s simple
authority obviated the need for detailed arguments about women’s
moral qualities or physical and intellectual capabilities. As a result, the
Salic Law provided the means to limit the impact of the exclusion of
women from the royal succession.74 An early-sixteenth-century printed
edition of Jacques de Cessoles’s Le jeu des eschez moralisé argued that
the Salic Law could have no relevance to the role of the queen con-
sort, as it merely affected the rights of women to inherit the Crown.
Louise of Savoy defended her right to be guardian and regent for her
son François I in 1525 by arguing that the Salic Law’s limitations on her
right to inherit the throne did not affect her role as regent as mother of
the king. In 1538 Charles Grassaille stated that the Salic Law regulated
succession and inheritance but could not hinder a woman’s responsi-
bilities to her family, which were sanctioned by divine law, or hamper
the queen’s exercise of other privileges and honors that were part of her
husband’s prerogatives of office. He regarded the Salic Law as a unique
component of French public law that did not indicate any moral or bio-
logical inferiority of women. Underpinning these views, held by both
Grassaille and Barthélemi de Chasseneuz, his teacher, was a wholly
positive view of women: they were strong, courageous, magnanimous,
and pious, and their lack of temporal authority did not diminish their
virtue, honor, or dignity.75
Tensions remained over the public roles of French queens, particu-
larly in the late sixteenth century, when the Wars of Religion focused
attention on the royal succession, concerns mounted over the authen-
ticity of the Salic Law, and England demonstrated the very real possi-
bility of gynecocracy. This inevitably forced French writers to place even
more emphasis on the rationale behind the exclusion of women from
the royal succession. Jean Bodin argued that gynecocracy was opposed
to the law of nature, citing, for example, God’s judgment against Eve,
the Libri feudorum, and a number of civil laws, including Digest 50.17.2,
which forbade women from acting as judges or holding public office.
François Hotman defended the exclusion of women from the royal suc-

73 Juvénal, Ecrits politiques, 1:157–58, 2:26. Juvénal’s arguments were particularly important
in the debate over the succession to the duchy of Burgundy (Saenger, ‘‘Burgundy,’’ 18, 21–23).
74 For the postmedieval impact of the Salic Law, see Cosandey, Reine de France, 43–54.
75 McCartney, ‘‘King’s Mother,’’ 133–41; McCartney, ‘‘Ceremonies and Privileges,’’ 185–96.
SALIC LAW AND FRENCH QUEENSHIP 563

cession by referring to practices and customs of the French nation that

had acquired the force of written law, together with the Libri feudorum:
women could be regents only by the personal delegation of the king and
with the approval of the public council of the realm, though Hotman
advised against such a course of action, citing the calamitous conse-
quences of women’s governance in the past.76 In the early seventeenth
century Cardin Le Bret complained that the very fact of female regency
violated the Salic Law, while Pierre Dupuy observed that the practice
contradicted the spirit of the Salic Law. Dupuy offered a resolution
to the problem in his Traité de la majorité de nos rois, published posthu-
mously in 1655 by his brother Jacques: the guardianship of the heir to
the throne might be entrusted to the queen, but the realm should be
administered by a council including the princes of the blood; though
the queen might lead this council, she could not rule the kingdom inde-
pendent of its authority or contrary to the guidance and advice of Par-
lement. Dupuy’s model was, ironically, the royal ordinance of October
1374, which initially had sought to resolve the tensions by distinguish-
ing between the private role of the queen as guardian and the public
role of the regent.77
The situation in early-fifteenth-century France was paralleled by
that in Scotland and England in the mid-sixteenth century, when politi-
cal realities also muted the attacks on women by opponents of gyne-
cocracy. Genevan exiles such as John Aylmer and Richard Bertie de-
fended the new Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, against the attacks on
gynecocracy directed by their fellow Calvinists, John Knox and Christo-
pher Goodman, against the Catholic queen Mary. These writers found
gynecocracy no more appealing than Knox and Goodman did, but their
central concern was peace and stability in England, and so they con-
soled themselves with the thought that Elizabeth was an exceptionally
virile female who would receive excellent guidance from her council
and Parliament.78 It is certainly possible that the same political dynamic
was at work in France during the early fifteenth century, when the posi-
tion of the queen as regent provided the most visible contradiction

76 Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la république, ed. C. Frémont, M.-D. Couzinet, and H. Rochais
(Paris, 1986), 232–47; François Hotman, Francogallia, ed. Ralph E. Giesey, trans. John H. M.
Salmon (Cambridge, 1972), 268–74, 478–94. Bodin also cited historical examples, including
women who killed kings to secure power (Semiramis, Athaliah, Cleopatra), and noted the prob-
lems that gynecocracy had recently caused in countries such as England and Scotland.
77 Lightman, ‘‘Political Power,’’ 299–312.
78 Constance Jordan, ‘‘Women’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Thought,’’ Renaissance
Quarterly 40 (1987): 421–51; Patricia-Ann Lee, ‘‘ ‘A bodye politque to governe’: Aylmer, Knox,
and the Debate on Queenship,’’ Historian 52 (1990): 242–61; Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘‘The Two John
Knoxes: England, Scotland, and the 1558 Tracts,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42 (1991): 555–76;
Amanda Shephard, Gender and Authority in Sixteenth-Century England (Keele, 1995).
564 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

to the male domination of public power. On the one hand, women

were explicitly barred from the royal succession, supposedly because
they were incapable of holding such an important public office; on the
other hand, French queens played an enormously important role in
the political life of the kingdom, particularly when acting as regents
for their husband or son. The diplomatic and legal debates with the
English provided the primary context for the adoption of the Salic Law
by Montreuil and his fellow polemical writers. Yet their preference for
this new authority, rather than the misogynist diatribe offered by their
fourteenth-century sources, may be related to the important position
of the queen in the French polity as consort and regent, and in particu-
lar to the contemporary role of Isabeau of Bavaria in the deepening
civil war.