True Lies and Strange Mirrors: The Uses and Abuses of Rumor, Propaganda, and Innuendo During the Closing Stages of the Hundred Years War

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the closing stages of the Hundred Years War, when stories were seeded both to discredit and to enhance the reputations of key players, particularly queens and politically active women. Isabeau of Bavaria is claimed to have undermined her popular sister-in-law, Valentina Visconti, accusing her of sorcery in 1389; Jean the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, incited pamphleteers to denigrate Isabeau’s prestige (working to enhance his image as a reformer) in 1405, a year when Paris was preoccupied with tongue-wagging regarding her alleged wicked, wicked ways. The Joan of Arc episode is riddled both with instances of positive rumor and propaganda designed to embellish her prestige as well as “English” efforts to denigrate her presence as a “limb of the Fiend.” The very conscious fashioning by Yolande of Aragon of her own image as Charles VII’s Bonne mère to contrast with the blackened image of Charles’s “other mother,” his birth mother, Isabeau of Bavaria, both benefited from and added to this busy rumor/propaganda/innuendo mill.