‘The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders’ by Laura L. Gathagan review

In 2019 I travelled to Caen in Normandy to visit the Abbey of Holy Trinity and accidentally attended a baptism. The church was built by Queen Mathilda of Flanders in 1066, the same year her husband, Duke William, successfully subjugated England and became King William I. Mathilda’s tomb – the reason for my visit – is in the choir, marked by its original black marble slab, around which the baptism service was taking place. The baptism of a child over the corpse of a long dead queen, in the church she built, broached a millennium of passed time.

It is usually only when standing next to a grave containing their thousand-year-old bones that the tangibility of historical figures becomes unavoidably apparent. In The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders Laura L. Gathagan reveals how Mathilda came to embody the Norman Conquest of England, exploring her queenship through her bodily presence and physical acts.

Mathilda was born to the ducal family of Flanders around 1031. She had royal as well as aristocratic blood; her mother Adela was the daughter of Robert II, king of France; her father, Baldwin, became the count of Flanders in 1035. By 1049 she was betrothed to Duke William of Normandy. The marriage was controversial; it was forbidden by the pope, who supported the Salian emperor Henry III, to whom Normandy and Flanders were rival polities. Mathilda’s marriage went ahead in 1051 in defiance of the papal ban, and she became duchess of Normandy. In 1066, the year she built her monastery in Caen, her husband sailed across the Channel to make his claim on the English throne, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. With his rival Harold Godwinson dead on the battlefield, William was crowned king of England at Christmas in the recently built Westminster Abbey. Mathilda joined him in England in 1068, heavily pregnant with the future Henry I, her ninth known child. She was crowned queen in Westminster Abbey at Pentecost in a ceremony presided over by the archbishop of York and attended by a mixture of the new post-Conquest lords and pre-Conquest earls. Like William, she spent her remaining years between Normandy and England, intermittently ruling in her husband’s absence. She died in 1083, four years before her husband, and was buried at Holy Trinity in Caen.

Gathagan’s book is not a traditional historical biography, delineating a life from beginning to end. Instead, she uses Mathilda’s body as the governing theme. In the first chapter, ‘Blood’, we learn how Mathilda took inspiration from her familial background at the Flemish court and from other prominent royal women. ‘Hands’ explores Mathilda as a builder of both Holy Trinity and of the Mora, a warship that she commissioned to aid in the conquest of England. ‘Fingers’ looks at Mathilda as a compiler of an extensive collection of saints’ relics for the community at Holy Trinity; ‘Head’ focuses on the uniqueness of her coronation as England’s first conquering queen in 1068, in an innovative ceremony updated specifically for her. ‘Womb’ highlights Mathilda’s nine known pregnancies and her participation in two of her children’s lives – Robert, who Mathilda financially supported when he rebelled against the authority of his father, and Cecilia, who Mathilda dedicated to Holy Trinity as a child. ‘Flesh’ focuses on Mathilda’s donations of eucharistic vestments to churches; ‘Mouth’ reveals her role as a judge, a responsibility no English queen had previously undertaken. Finally, ‘Corpse’ recounts how Mathilda’s bodily remains have been manipulated, both physically and ideologically, since her death.

The use of body parts to structure the book is more metaphorical than anatomical, but it succeeds in foregrounding Mathilda as a real person as well as a queen in a manner that brings to mind Ernst Kantorowicz’ The King’s Two Bodies (1957) – viewing monarchy as simultaneously corporeal and incorporeal. Gathagan herself cites a different inspiration, Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014). The subjects are starkly different: Baptist wrote about people deprived of their rights and autonomy, while Gathagan explores the life of one of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in 11th-century England. What enslaved people and medieval queens do have in common is that their bodies have been disproportionately objectified in scholarship. Historians who view their subjects as body parts must do so with an active commitment to humanise them. By titling a chapter ‘Womb’, Gathagan reminds the reader that Mathilda physically birthed her progeny, something easily lost from sight in family tree diagrams; ‘Head’ reminds us that coronations were not simply religious concepts or metaphors, but events that physically happened to a real person. In the concluding chapter, ‘Corpse’, Gathagan explores how Mathilda’s body has been defiled over the centuries by a succession of men obsessed with analysing her pelvis in the name of science, most recently Elizabeth II’s own physician Sir John Dewhurst in 1981. There is an important difference between Gathagan’s overt focus on the different roles Mathilda’s body played in her expressions of power and scholarship that is preoccupied with the bodies of queens as nothing more than royal incubators.

While the approach is wonderful – I wish I had thought of it – the execution is not perfect. The coronation chapter is factually confused, and some of the Latin translations contain significant inaccuracies. But while these would pose issues for an academic researcher, an interested lay reader will finish the book with an informed sense of Mathilda as a uniquely influential woman worthy of historical study. The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders is one of only a handful of academic biographies of individual queens from this period – how Mathilda compares to her contemporaries, successors, and predecessors would be easier to assess if more of them had been treated in the same detail.

• The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders, c.1031-1083: Embodying Conquest
  Laura L. Gathagan
  Boydell Press, 280pp, £85
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Florence Scott is a visiting fellow in History at the University of Leeds.