The Iconography of Queenship: Sacred Music and Female Exemplarity in Late Medieval Britain

This dissertation investigates the relational, representative, and most importantly, constitutive functions of sacred music composed on behalf of and at the behest of British queen-consorts during the later Middle Ages. I argue that the sequences, conductus, and motets discussed herein were composed with the express purpose of constituting and reifying normative gender roles for medieval queen-consorts. Although not every paraliturgical work in the English repertory may be classified as such, I argue that those works that feature female exemplars—model women who exemplified the traits, behaviors, and beliefs desired by the medieval Christian hegemony—should be reassessed in light of their historical and cultural moments. These liminal works, neither liturgical nor secular in tone, operate similarly to visual icons in order to create vivid images of exemplary women saints or Biblical figures to which queen-consorts were both implicitly as well as explicitly compared.

The Iconography of Queenship is organized into four chapters, each of which examines an occasional musical work and seeks to situate it within its own unique historical moment. In addition, each chapter poses a specific historiographical problem and seeks to answer it through an analysis of the occasional work. Broadly speaking, the first two chapters are concerned with establishing continuity between Jewish and Christian traditions of exemplarity, while the latter two chapters address the convention of name parallelism, by which women were aligned with the saints that shared their given names. The dissertation traces the development of late medieval exemplarity in music as the roster of female exemplars available to illustrate model queenship continued to expand, ultimately minimizing the Hebrew matriarchs in favor of constructed saints such as Katherine of Alexandria and Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. This research reveals hitherto unobserved thematic links and practical connections between English paraliturigcal works. By interrogating the historicity of these occasional pieces, I demonstrate that medieval sacred music had multivocal and multivalent available meanings beyond the purely devotional.