ABSTRACT
WHEN HENRY V of England died in France his effigy, made of boiled leather, was carried on the top of the coffin to the coast. A few weeks later comes the first fully recorded use of an effigy at a French royal funeral, that of Charles VI in 1422. Ralph E. Giesey thinks that this was actually the first use of an effigy at a French monarch's funeral, and, since Charles VI's funeral was imitated from that of Henry V, he regards the custom as an importation from England. This view, based on his analysis of the meaning of the word représentation, hitherto thought to be synonymous with effigie, in references to French funerals prior to the fifteenth century, is not convincing. From 1422 onwards the effigy of the dead monarch is a well-documented feature of French royal funerals until the practice was abandoned at the death of Louis XIII. During the sixteenth century, the effigy gained astonishingly in importance and strange new rituals became associated with it. The effigy of Fran Çois I, fashioned by Fran Çois Clouet from the death mask, had ceremonial meals served to it for eleven days, and these elaborate effigy-rituals were carried on at the funerals of Henri II, Charles IX (there is, of course, a gap for Henri III), and Henri IV. Dr Giesey argues that the chief meaning of the effigy in the sixteenth century was that it served as the channel for the continuance of the undying royal dignity during the interregnum between the death of a king and the coronation of his successor. He bases this on a careful examination of how the effigy became separated from the body, and of how the new king's absence from the funeral rites indicated that the effigy, with which the royal insignia were placed, still held the royal power. These are novel and important observations, and Dr Giesey's deduction from them, that the royal dignity was in a manner magically stored in the effigy, is impressive. He regards this effigy-practice as belonging to medieval political theory which emphasized the kingly office as distinct from the person of the king, and sees in its discontinuance in the seventeenth century a reflection of the absolutist theory which concentrated kingship on the person of the king. An absolute king is sovereign from the moment his predecessor dies; his assumption of full kingly office does not have to wait until his coronation. Therefore an effigy of the dead king is not needed to carry the sacred royal dignity across the interval between the death of one king and the coronation of his successor, as in former times. Thus Dr Giesey would relate the abandonment of the use of the effigy to the shift to the new theory. This last point is argued with a wealth of detail, and it is interesting, though one wonders whether factors such as the change in taste and the rise of classical principles of decorum might not have something to do with the disappearance in the seventeenth century of the frighteningly realistic effigy and its queer rituals. The sixteenth-century theorists draw parallels between the French use of the royal effigy and Roman imperial practice, though Dr Giesey thinks that there is little real connection and that such allusions are but a surface classicizing of the basic medieval theory. Here he underestimates the force of the sacred imperial idea in relation to the French monarchy in the sixteenth century, which would give such allusions a living meaning. He gives no reason for the enormously increased prestige of the effigy, with its new and unchristian cult of the ceremonial meals, in the sixteenth century, as compared with the much simpler and more truly medieval usage of the fifteenth century. This reason may well be that the Roman imperial parallels, even when spurious (Jean du Tillet's belief that there was a funeral effigy of the Christian emperor Constantine was based, as Dr Giesey points out, on a misreading of Eusebius, nor were the effigies of the pagan emperors actually fed with ceremonial meals), related the sixteenth-century effigy to the developing imperialism of the French monarchy. Or, to put it in other words, the Renaissance ruler-cult gave greater potency to the ruler's effigy. This, incidentally, would provide a better background for the magical storing of the royal dignity in such an intensely personal image as the life-like effigy than the unadulterated medieval theory of the kingly office. By insisting so strongly on the purely medieval foundation of his Renaissance funerals, Dr Giesey seems to miss out a stage in the history of kingship, the intermediate stage between the Middle Ages and seventeenth-century absolutism. An immense amount of original research has gone to the making of Dr Giesey's book, which is a mine of detailed information on all aspects of his subject, and he is a pioneer in pointing out the relevance of the Renaissance funeral to wider historical issues. The question of the history and meaning of the royal funeral effigy, which he has tackled with so much courage, of course needs to be integrated with that of the effigy in general, and it bristles with problems and difficulties. Such criticisms of his work as we have ventured to proffer here should be taken as proof of its thought-provoking quality, and not in any negative sense.
