The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie de Brabant (1260-1321)

FAIN: FT-54366-06

Tracy Chapman Hamilton
Sweet Briar College (Sweet Briar, VA 24595-5001)

My project, the final draft of a book examining the commissions of Marie de Brabant (1260-1322), queen of France, analyzes how the dynamics of her patronage played a primary role in transforming conceptions of court, culture, and queenship. Nearly always political in nature, her commissions were nonetheless sumptuous to behold, whether secular or sacred in content. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, contemporary sources, the manuscripts, sculpture, monuments, finery, music, pedagogical treatises, and literature she commissioned, and the ceremonies in which she participated as my evidence, my book will have repercussions for study of the entire late medieval era as well as the broader analysis of women and culture.

Associated Products

Sur la route...Topographic Patronage and the Genealogy of Patronage in Late Capetian France (Article)
Title: Sur la route...Topographic Patronage and the Genealogy of Patronage in Late Capetian France
Author: Tracy Chapman Hamilton
Abstract: This article shows how a largely unstudied group of Late Capetian and Early Valois royal women manipulated the European landscape through patronage of monuments, objects, and ceremony, as well as collection and gift-giving, into a space of their own. As wives and widows they could ideologically and physically cross borders, a unique quality understood and exploited by the women and their marital and natal families, and most compellingly evidenced through multi-disciplinary analysis of the artistic record.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/vol2_3/current/fa4.pdf
Primary URL Description: This is a link to the article
Access Model: Open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Peregrinations
Publisher: Sarah Blick, Kenyon College

Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France. The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie de Brabant (1260-1321) (Book)
Title: Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France. The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie de Brabant (1260-1321)
Author: Tracy Chapman Hamilton
Editor: Johan van der Beke
Abstract: For her commissioning and performance of a French vernacular version of the Arabic Tale of the Thousand and One Nights – recorded in one of the most vivid and sumptuous late thirteenth-century manuscripts extant – as well as for her numerous other commissions, Queen Marie de Brabant (1260-1321) was heralded as a literary and intellectual patron comparable to Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. Nevertheless, classic studies of the late medieval period understate Marie’s connection to the contemporary rise of secular interests at the French court.My book, Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: the Artistic Patronage of Marie de Brabant (1260-1321), by reshaping the inquiry into court patronage, posits that the historical record reveals exciting and important contributions Marie de Brabant made to this burgeoning secular court. This emerging importance of the secular and redefinition of the sacred during these last decades of Capetian rule becomes all the more striking when juxtaposed to the pious tone of the lengthy reign of Louis IX (1214-1270), which had ended just four years before Marie’s marriage to his son. That Marie often chose innovative materials and iconographies – that would later in the fourteenth century become the norm – to create these images signals her importance in late medieval patronage. These themes of court, culture, politics, and gender reflect and connect the chronological and methodological organization of my fully drafted manuscript. A substantial revision and expansion of my dissertation, the book examines Marie’s commissions from her arrival in Paris in 1274 until her death in 1321 and analyzes the dynamics of her patronage and its impact on other women and men of the royal house.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9781905375684-1
Primary URL Description: Publisher website
Secondary URL: https://vcu.academia.edu/TracyChapmanHamilton
Secondary URL Description: Academia website
Access Model: no
Publisher: Brepols; Harvey Miller
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-905375-6
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Annual Book Prize
Date: 2/11/2021
Organization: International Center of Medieval Art

Moving Women Moving Objects (Book)
Title: Moving Women Moving Objects
Author: Tracy Chapman Hamilton
Author: Mariah Proctor-Tiffany
Editor: Surekha Davies
Editor: Asa Mittman
Abstract: This collection forges new ground in the discussion of aristocratic and royal women, their relationships with their objects, and medieval geography. It explores how women’s geographic and familial networks spread well beyond the borders that defined men’s sense of region and how the movement of their belongings can reveal essential information about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces. Beginning in early medieval Scandinavia, ranging from Byzantium to Rus', and multiple lands in Western Europe up to 1500, the essays span a great spatio-temporal range. Moreover, the types of objects extend from traditionally studied works like manuscripts and sculpture to liturgical and secular ceremonial instruments, icons, and articles of personal adornment, such as textiles and jewelry, even including shoes.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://brill.com/view/title/36380?lang=en
Primary URL Description: Publisher Website
Secondary URL: https://vcu.academia.edu/TracyChapmanHamilton
Secondary URL Description: Academia website
Publisher: Brill
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-90-04-3996
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---