© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291003_004 chapter 2 Lessons for My Daughter: Self-fashioning Stateswomanship in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon Zita Rohr This essay is in part inspired by a 15th-century book of advice, admonitions, and warnings, Lessons for My Daughter, penned by Anne of France for her only surviving child, 12-year-old Suzanne of Bourbon.1 Anne descended from the house of Aragon via her maternal great-grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, daughter of Joan I and Violant of Bar. The purpose of this brief study is not to analyze the literary leavings of Anne of France; instead I will discuss the ways in which a particular dynasty of royal women consciously self-fashioned their identities to advance their projects as “representative” stateswomen.2 The “players” to be examined here are Elionor of Sicily, queen-consort of Pere IV of Aragon; Violant of Bar, queen-consort of Pere’s son, Joan I of Aragon; María de Luna, queen-consort of Joan’s brother and successor, Martí I of Aragon; and Yolande of Aragon, sole surviving child of the union of Violant of Bar and Joan I of Aragon. Sibil.la de Fortià, Elionor’s successor to the post of Pere’s IV’s 1 Anne de France, Enseignements à sa fille; suivis de l’Histoire du siege de Brest, eds. Tatiana Clavier and Eliane Viennot (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2006); Anne of France, Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, ed. and trans. Sharon L. Jansen (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). Anne’s father, king spider, Louis XI, commissioned a “Lessons for my Son,” The Rosebush of Wars, for Anne’s brother, Charles VIII. Louis XI, Le Rosier des guerres: enseignements de Louis XI, roy de France pour le Dauphin son fils, ed. André Gillois (Paris: F. Bernouard, 1925). Anne of France had another child, a son, when she was about 15 years of age. There is no record of his birth, death, baptism, or burial, “only the stained glass figure of a boy commemorated 25 years later in the window of Moulins cathedral known as the ‘vitrail des ducs’.” Pauline Matarasso, Queen’s Mate: Three Women of Power in France on the Eve of the Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 11. 2 See M. Bella Mirabella, “Feminist Self-Fashioning: Christine de Pizan and the Treasure of the City of Ladies,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 6, no. 9 (1999): 9–20. To explain Christine de Pizan’s intent, Mirabella discusses, analyzes, and deploys Stephen Greenblatt’s ideas regarding self-fashioning and his analysis of the act of self-creation to her (re)reading of Christine’s Treasure of the City of the Ladies (1405). Mirabella’s ideas coincide with the period under investigation here. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).