#maybe the queens (and duchesses in his version) are supposed to like stand in for antigone?

[suits-of-woe]

I’m reading Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” and I knew that was the source for Two Noble Kinsmen and I knew vaguely what era it was supposed to be set but I never put two and two together until now that Palamon and Arcite’s tyrant uncle is fucking CREON, like from Antigone. This fact has rocked my world. (Edit: I just went back and they DO say his name in the play, I just haven’t revisited it in a hot minute and never noticed)

I kind of assumed that Creon had learned his lesson about the whole desecrating prominent people’s dead bodies thing and had a depressing but peaceful reign after that but APPARENTLY NOT.

[english-history-trip]

Adventures in Image Hunting

So I was working on a Tumblr post and I was looking for a source image for the Empress Matilda. Unfortunately, the only one I knew that was remotely contemporary was this one:

Supposedly it shows her marriage to her first husband, Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. But it is small and blurry. So I was like There’s gotta be a clearer version, so I went searching. And I found one! I found the WHOLE SOURCE! The digitized manuscript of The Gospels of Henry the Lion (definitely have a look through; it’s gorgeous):

http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=mss/105-noviss-2f&imgtyp=1&size=

But now that I’ve got a clear image in context, I can see the caption above their heads... which clearly says Mathilda, Duchess. This is the wedding of Henry the Lion and Matilda of England, Empress Matilda’s granddaughter, which honestly makes a lot more sense considering this is the Gospels of Henry the Lion. Just like that, we’ve lost our only image of Empress Matilda. :(

BUT WAIT

Because later in the book, there’s an image of Henry and Matilda’s ducal coronation (because if you pay for the book you get whatever you want):

And WHO’S THAT STANDING BEHIND DUCHESS MATILDA

A double whammy of Matilda and her son Henry II!!! Contemporary images of Henry are rare enough, but this may be the only one of Matilda. (Obvo it’s not from life, and was made about 20 years after her death, but it gives an impression of how she might have looked, what clothes she may have worn, how she was regarded.) As disputed as her claim was to the throne of England, here she is clearly marked “Regina Mathilda”.

At first I thought maybe the artist was confused and thought that Henry II’s queen was named Matilda (Eleanor doesn’t show up for some reason, unless that’s supposed to be her in green on the end), but Henry the Lion is also flanked by his father and grandmother.

So I stayed up way later than I should have swapping out Wikipedia’s outdated pictures for these and here I am.