Abstract
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Tingle, Plymouth University, UK
The House of Guise has inspired numerous scholarly books in recent years. Stuart Carroll and Jean-Marie Constant have written on Guise dynastic politics, noble affinities and their roles in the religious Reformations and wars in France; Jonathan Spangler has taken the history of the family into the seventeenth century and Henri Pigaillem has produced a more popular work. The wealth of studies reflects the importance of this aristocratic family and also an on-going fascination with the Great. This collection of essays edited by Munns, Richards and Spangler, adds a welcome cultural dimension to our knowledge of the Guise.
The Guise family was a branch of the extended ducal house of Lorraine, whose power base lay on the eastern borders of France. In the fifteenth century, Lorraine allied with the French royal house through marriage and was closely involved in royal politics thereafter, largely through the maintenance of a cadet branch, the Guise, at the French court. Dukes Claude, François and Henri were prominent in the Italian, Hapsburg and religious wars, and also in the Church, principally as archbishops of Rheims. In the seventeenth century, the Guise supported Marie de Medicis and lost power with her exile, although influence was restored by the fifth duke, a soldier and courtier to Louis XIV. But the ambitions of this family transcended state boundaries. As the editors of this volume state, the Guise were members of a small, elite group of aristocrats who were subject nobility and sovereign princes, known as princes étrangers. They inhabited the Holy Roman Empire and France; they fought for and counselled monarchs on both sides; their status brought them privileges at court, including access to the Crown. It also gave them ambitions to regnal authority beyond these territories, such as the marriage of Margaret of Guise to James V, whose heir Mary was Queen of Scotland and (briefly) France.
The collection of essays has a twin focus: representations of the Guise, particularly their use of cultural media – portraits, print, material goods – and their deployment in the realization of their princely ambitions across Europe. There are three themes: exploration of the family’s trans-national royal claims; studies of Henri, fifth duke of Guise; and assessments of the family’s historic and literary legacy. The first part of the book concentrates on the sixteenth-century Guises. In the first chapter, Robert Sturges explores the family’s fascination with the crusades and its claim to the kingdom of Jerusalem, through their ancestor Godfrey de Bouillon and their links to the Sieur de Joinville, chronicler of the crusade of St Louis IX. Sturges argues that crusader ‘credentials’ contributed to Guise authority and legitimacy throughout the wars of religion, especially during the Catholic League occupation of Paris after 1589, conceived by its adherents as an earthly Jerusalem. The second chapter, by Marjorie Meiss-Evans, examines the Italianate material culture of the Guise in the sixteenth century, following the marriage of duke François with Anna d’Este. Meiss-Evans argues that the conspicuous display of Italian consumption was part of a Guise assertion of their European rather than merely French status.
The central chapters are devoted to the fifth duke, Henry of Guise. Michèle Benaiteau gives an account of the ‘deeds’ of the duke using contemporary pamphlets, writings and Henri’s Memoirs, which created and propagated an image of celebrity across Europe. Silvana D’Alessio analyses the duke’s campaigns to take the kingdom of Naples in 1647–48 and 1654 using pamphlets, letters and other political texts, while Charles Gregory evaluates the duke’s return to Naples in 1654 in the context of the foreign policy of Cardinal Mazarin. Gregory suggests that the failure of this attempt still allowed the duke to demonstrate his reputation and princely interests. David Taylor provides a close analysis of Anthony Van Dyke’s portrait of the duke and its adoption of royal styles. Jonathan Spangler turns to Guise women in his essay, especially the important role of the fifth duke’s mother, Henriette-Catherine de Joyeuse, in navigating family fortunes and reputations at the courts of Marie de Medicis (including in exile) and Anne of Austria.
The final two chapters are on literary representations. Penny Richards evaluates Guise representations of themselves in print, marble and paint and how these images were in turn used by later playwrights and novelists. Jessica Munn looks at the impact of their reputation on British drama, moving from Catholic villain in Elizabethan England (Duke Henri and the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres) to tragic heroine (Mary Queen of Scots), a favourite of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The collection would have benefited from a conclusion drawing the themes together, for it is mostly a study of the fifth duke of Guise with some additional essays on earlier/later periods. The common threads would have benefited from discussion. That said, the essays are lively, interesting, well researched and a good read. They underline the internationalism of the great European families and also how the (in)famous Guise continue to fascinate even today.