A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [139]
Isabella’s life as an independent woman in a court of the usual amorous license could hardly have been sheltered or innocent. Ladies of the court were not reticent. Joan, widowed Countess of Holland, called the Fair Maid of Kent, whom the Black Prince married in 1361, was considered “the fairest lady in all the kingdom of England” and “the most amorous.” She wore daring and extravagant clothes copied from the dresses of the “bonnes amies of the brigands of Languedoc.” At tournaments, to the scandal of the people, there often came groups of questionable ladies, “the most costly and lovely but not the best of the kingdom,” dressed “in divers and wonderful male attire as if they were part of the tournay.” Wearing divided and parti-colored tunics, short capes, and daggers in pouches, riding fine coursers and palfreys, they exhibited a “scurrilous wantonness” that “neither feared God nor blushed at the scorn of the crowd.”
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead. For some reason a particular immorality was attached to it, perhaps because it altered God’s arrangements. Demons in purgatory were said to punish the practice by sticking “hot burning awls and needles” into every hole from which a hair had been plucked. When a hermit was frightened by a dream about a lady suffering this treatment, an angel comforted him saying, “She had well deserved the pain.”
As satirized by Jean de Meung through the mouth of the Duenna in the Roman de la Rose, the concerns of a 13th to 14th century lady were not peculiar to the Middle Ages. If her neck and bosom were lovely, she should wear a decolletage; to add color to her face she should use ointments daily, but in secret so that her lover does not know; if aware of bad breath, she should not talk with her mouth too close to others; she should laugh prettily and cry gracefully, eat and drink daintily, and take care not to get drunk or sleep at table. She should go to church, weddings, and parties in her best clothes to let herself be seen and gain renown, lifting her gown to show her fine foot and opening her mantle like a peacock’s tail to reveal the beautiful form beneath. She should spread her nets for all men in order to snare one, and if she hooks several, should take care they do not meet. She should never love a poor man because she will get nothing from him and might be tempted to give him something, nor love a stranger, for he may have a vagabond heart, unless of course he offers her money or jewels. While pretending to be won by love alone, she should accept all gifts and encourage presents to her servants, maid, sister, and mother, for many hands get more booty and they can press her lover to get her gowns or other pledges out of pawn.
The insistence on money may have been exaggerated by the author, but satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. Certainly in Isabella’s case money was of the essence. She was said to have always in her retinue two or three goldsmiths, seven or eight embroiderers, two or three cutlers, and two or three furriers who were kept busy filling her needs.
If Isabella had any love affairs by the age of 33, they did not reach recorded gossip, but, judging by example, they are not unimaginable. The high-born maiden of seventeen who seduced the elderly, gouty Guillaume de Machaut for the renown of having that celebrated poet and musician as her lover was said to have been Agnes of Navarre, sister of Charles the Bad. Whoever she was, she insisted that Machaut publicize their affair in songs and poems and in a long, lush, embarrassing verse narrative called Livre du Voir Dit (True Tale). She teased and kissed and gave the bemused poet the little gold key to the clavette or chastity belt that guarded her “precious treasure.” All the time, as he discovered