#kristen geaman used to post on tumblr

[shredsandpatches]

(1) You reblogged something the other day that my brain won't let go of. I fully admit to knowing next to nothing other than what you reblog and comment on about Richard and Anne (I follow you for content other than that) but this post struck a chord in me. It was discussing Anne's barrenness; the failure of her childlessness. And it's just ... how do we know she was the barren one in that relationship? Richard didn't have any children so why is the blame on her shoulders?

(2) Other than it's traditionally the woman's fault. Am I missing something?

No, you’re totally right--we don’t know exactly why Richard and Anne were infertile, or whose problem it was; there’s no way of knowing because it seems pretty likely that Anne was the only woman Richard ever had sex with. Usually you’ll even see historians point that out, just in passing, that there’s no evidence that Richard was fertile, and in fact, some more recent scholars argue that Richard was much more concerned with how their lack of children reflected on him as both a man and a king. 

Katherine Lewis has argued that Richard’s emphasis on his devotion to Edward the Confessor, who was believed to have had a chaste marriage (although historians of his reign don’t think he actually did), was meant to imply that he and Anne had done likewise. Kristen Geaman’s work has proved pretty conclusively that Richard and Anne didn’t have a chaste marriage, an idea that was always pretty improbable (they were both very conscious of their lineage and knew that they would need an heir to the throne), by bringing to light a letter Anne wrote to her brother, Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, around 1384, which may suggest that she had a miscarriage around that time, and certainly demonstrates that she was optimistic that she would have a successful pregnancy in the future. So they were definitely trying -- Geaman also analyzes an apothecary bill from 1393–94, the last year of Anne’s life, and concludes that, based on the medicines she purchased, she was probably still trying to conceive at the time of her apparently sudden death. If she did have a miscarriage (or more than one, but that must remain speculative*) it’s possible that the problem was on her end physically, and that she could conceive but not carry to term -- this may be supported by the fact that most of her (full and half) siblings had only one child or none at all, while Richard’s Holland half-siblings had lots of kids -- but that still doesn’t make it her fault, and clearly Richard didn’t hold it against her.   

Geaman’s dissertation devotes a lot of time to arguing that Anne probably wasn’t seen as the one to blame for the lack of an heir, and that Richard’s contemporary critics, during the reign and certainly after his deposition, would probably have placed the blame squarely on him for his immaturity and unmanliness** -- although there are other scholars who see the generally lukewarm treatment of Anne in the chronicles as a sign of her “ambivalent legacy” (a term used by Michael Hanrahan in his reading of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale as being focused on Richard and Anne’s lack of an heir; there’s also a good article by Anna Duch where she addresses why Thomas Walsingham, specifically, might have resented Anne, although it reflects much better on Anne than it does Walsingham). She follows Lewis in arguing that Richard was probably unnerved enough by this that after Anne’s death he wanted to imply that he and Anne had had a celibate marriage and thus prove his manly self-control, but concedes that any efforts made in this direction were not successful among his contemporaries (although they certainly worked on historians centuries later). I really love her work on Anne as queen and historical figure -- she is pretty much the go-to person for scholarship on Anne as a person rather than as a symbolic cultural figure -- but I’m not sure I’m convinced by the “Richard pretended to have a chaste marriage” argument for that basic reason; the primary audience for it would have been people who had been close to the couple, who had an unconventionally companionate marriage for the time period, built an island resort palace with unprecedented levels of privacy, and were actively trying to conceive to the degree that they sought medical intervention. (And it’s worth pointing out that @nuingiliath has suggested to me that perhaps Richard might also have wanted to protect Anne’s legacy by presenting her as a holy virgin rather than a barren queen, if Lewis’ and Geaman’s speculations are true.)

All that said: you do have a lot more attention paid to infertility by scholars/historians who are talking about Anne, and I think a lot of this is based on a) as you said, the unexamined assumption that infertility is the woman’s fault physically, and b) the assumption that infertility is the woman’s problem and that it’s the queen’s only job (except warrior queens like Isabella of France of Margaret of Anjou). Christopher Fletcher’s book on Richard and medieval masculinity goes so far to call Richard and Anne’s marriage a disaster, despite its incredible success on the personal level, because of their infertility. But queenship studies in the last couple of decades have made great strides in examining the role of queens beyond providing heirs -- which, of course, was part of the queen’s job, but not the entirety of it -- whereas fertility isn’t really represented as an issue for men most of the time, and I definitely hope that’s changing.  

*It’s what I do in my fictional writing, but I wouldn’t be able to support it in something scholarly. They’re different interpretive practices, obviously.

**You still sometimes get this today, like in Lisa Hilton’s book where she argues that Richard wasn’t mature enough to consummate his marriage to Anne, or John Bowers’ work where he argues -- based entirely on readings of Chaucer, like Chaucer would have known what was going on in the king’s marriage -- that Richard and Anne had a celibate marriage because Richard was using piety to hide his horrible deviant gayness. These people can fuck right off. You also sometimes get authors who argue that they had a celibate marriage on Anne’s initiative and in imitation of some important Bohemian royal saints, although nearly all of the saints in question had celibate marriages after having children, which is why Anne was able to exist in the first place! She would certainly have known this, and would not have had a chance to give up marital relations because she died childless while still of reproductive age. Anyway scholars who suggest that a celibate marriage was Anne’s idea seem to think it gives her more agency, like a sexually active married woman who wanted children can’t have agency. 🙄

#anne of bohemia is my forever girl #miscarriage for ts #pregnancy for ts #otp: my derlyng is a bundel of myrre to me #seashells-and-bookshelves #long post #i didn't realize it was gonna get this long #and going back to put in a cut will bork the post #sorry everyone #kristen geaman used to post on tumblr #i have met her in person and consider her a friend #(although we have sorta lost touch) #just for full disclosure #also i have references for all this hmu if you want them #i was just too lazy to put them all in