"A Straunge Succesour Sholde Take Youre Heritage:" The Clerk's Tale and the Crisis of Ricardian Rule

Abstract

Reporting the death of Queen Anne of Bohemia in 1394, the Evesham chronicler notes that she died childless: "This queen, although she passed away without children, was still held to have contributed to the glory and reign of England, insofar as she was able." 1 The chronicler's notice calls into question the extent to which Anne, because she failed to produce an heir, could have contributed to the glory and reign of England at all. Anne's "failure" cast a long shadow over her other contributions, and the Evesham chronicler drives this point home by recording his notoriously scornful reference to Bohemian fashion immediately after the notice of her death: "With that queen came those accursed abuses into England from Bohemia, those shoes with the long beaks, . . . called 'cracows' or 'picks' in English." 2 According to the chronicler, Anne's two legacies are no heir and bad fashion. A final implicit reference to her childlessness appears in the Latin epitaph inscribed on her tomb in Westminster Abbey: "Devoted to Christ, she was well-known for her deeds: always ready to give gifts to the poor, she settled quarrels and relieved pregnant women; finely shaped in body, kind and beautiful in face, she offered solace to widows and medicine to the sick." 3 While attesting to her devotion, the inscription moves from the queen's aid to pregnant women to a description of Anne's physical beauty. The shift from pregnant bodies to the beautiful body of Anne, which failed to produce an heir, secures a final reminder of the dead queen's ambivalent heritage--good deeds but no heir. 4

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.