Written by Harry Fry
“Ardorem extincta testantur vivere flamma / After the flame is extinguished, [tears] testify the ardour that lives on” – Catherine de Medici Lamenting Henry II, Pierre de Bourdeille, Vie des dames illustres françoises et étrangères.
Resulting from or chosen upon the death of her husband, Henry II of France, in 1559, Catherine de Medici’s emblem of tears situates affects within the altering early modern European ideas of the body. Deeply symptomatic of the visual, socio-political fabric at the time, the body as a history reveals early modern thought concerning subjectivity, exteriority and interiority, knowledge and the art of doubting. Catherine’s affective behaviour in response to her husband’s death and, importantly, consequential wariness of her own and her family’s authority, could be read as Susan Broomhall’s “visual scheme for mourning”. Nonetheless, in the context of intertwining classical and early modern philosophy, I argue the theorisation of Catherine’s grief starts to demarcate premodern understanding and uncertainty on the historical body. The rupturing of nature’s singularity, embodiment, and the distinction of body and soul were concepts pioneered by antiquity and what inspired early modern reliance on classical texts and ideas. Therefore, in the case of Catherine’s tears as a dually physical and mental performance, the interplay of classically inspired thought on an emotional body stretches the concept of body performativity.
In an effort to preserve and defend her husband’s legacy and son’s ascension through the Royal House of Valois, and whether successful or not, Catherine suddenly began styling herself to public court as unapproachable through her distinct appendage of tears. To Broomhall, the performance of her body granted Catherine power to stabilise or control her political situation. Understanding the ingrained divisions of courtly gender where male nobles conventionally reacted to a noblewoman’s tears, the use of emotions in early modern politics becomes a discussion on inauthenticity and manipulation. A heavy resemblance to William Reddy’s later frameworks on emotives as a modifying instrument, Catherine’s grief can be seen as intentional or unintentional, yet nevertheless as a device for change: “appropriate and fitting to her mourning of tears, which was a mountain of quicklime, on which drops of water fell abundantly from the sky”. Pierre de Bourdeille’s chronicle on her tears certainly suggests there was something remarkable about her grief, which forefronts the idea of subjectivity in the case of using the body as a site of emotions. In this case of Catherine’s “lacrimal persuasion” as Broomhall would have it, then, the emotional body is a navigation around silence and sound, as well as hardwired versus manmade reactions in the body.
This period of European thought was a foregrounded redrafting of intellectual Christianity and Classical philosophy on the body. Displaying a proto-rejection of what would later become Descartes’ Cartesian mind-body dualism – after the medieval period and its centring of humours in medicine – the body’s portrayal as too undefined and adaptable made its danger explicit. As such, the revival of Augustine’s De Fide et Symbolo/On the Faith and the Creed and its principle on the body as a working tradition and practice was apropos. Framed though the existence of God as both corporeal and conceptual, Augustine reflects on the ability to envision divine presence, but simultaneously his ultimate inaccessibility to us. The required union of the flesh, blood, and body is essential to our understanding of agency and the human body. The performance of Catherine’s body or even her humanity was distrusted but necessary, otherwise “there will no longer be flesh and blood, but only body”. Read under the premises of Augustinian theology – with a figurative transformation of incorporeal air into fleshy and potent water – and the origins of Christianity and Jesus’ human becoming, Catherine awards herself substance in the face on others. The physicality of tears presents her own (re)becoming as a corporal weight or barrier, indicating the subjectivity of one’s use of their body to grasp its almost dormant liquidity.
Directly reproducing the ancient Roman orator Cicero, Antoine Fouquelin’s notions of the body’s “gesture” and “movement”, contemporary to Catherine, is indicative. Using oration in a non-vocal context, Fouquelin frames the eyes and face as a method through which to make an address to others or elevate oneself in public. It crucially “requires long experience and practice […] the sadness and gaiety of which must be moderated”. Given Catherine predominantly faced the court, but also the astute spying of ambassadors, her presumed decision to weep fits into the wider developments of emotional history frameworks, recently modified by Monique Scheer on embodied affects as practiced. This swooning for public sympathy, being viewed by ambassadors as either trained or instinctual, highlights early modern considerations of the body itself as a production for what the mind feels. Particularly, it establishes the discursivity of understanding the body’s emotions as consciously or unknowingly complex, querying the agency one has and can have over displaying or hiding their feelings. Imparting a Ciceronian ideal on a different, silent example of rhetorical skill, Catherine’s tears can be theorised as learned and intentional. On the other hand, there appears to be an early modern realisation of all emotions being to an extent, authentic; or rather, the inevitability of their perception as genuine. The image of tears at once creates a physicality through one’s mentality and elicits a response from observing bodies.
In the mind of poststructural feminist Judith Butler, the body’s performativity does not mark performativity as inherently gendered, but gender itself as a performance. Equally, Butler’s theorisation of constructed acts as repeated to become concrete is witnessed in Catherine’s insistence on mourning. The distaste towards male tears and the courtly constructed expectation of sympathy towards female tears pierces into the changing realisations – and the appreciation of unrealising – knowledge on emotions and the body as history. The materialisation of affects as visual performance, linked inextricably to antiquity’s concepts of gaining fleshly power, expresses the studied early modern art of crying as a reimagination of the classical body.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
De fide et symbolo. Translated by E. P. Meijering. Amsterdam: Gieben, 1987.
Fouquelin, Antoine. La rhétorique française. Paris: André Wichel, 1555.
Secondary Sources
Barbezat, Michael David. ‘Augustine on the Flesh of the Resurrection Body in the De Fide et Symbolo: Origen, Manichaeism, and Augustine’s Developing Thought Regarding Human Physical Perfection’, in Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe, edited by Anne M. Scott and Michael David Barbezat, 175-192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Barbezat, Michael David, and Scott, Anne M. ‘Introduction: Bodies, Fluidity, and Change, in Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe, edited by Anne M. Scott and Michael David Barbezat, 1-12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Broomhall, Susan. ‘Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality, Affective Performance, and Gender at the Sixteenth-Century French Court’, in Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe, edited by Anne M. Scott and Michael David Barbezat, 55-72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999.
Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220.
Featured image credit: https://www.factinate.com/people/42-scandalous-facts-catherine-de-medici-deadly-queen-mother-france.
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