St. Isabella of France

It’s Women’s History Month and y’all know what I study, so I’m going to torture this captive audience and tell you allllll about some of my very favorite ladies. First up: Saint Isabella of France, 13th century princess of I Don’t Give A FUCK. Lemme school you on Isabella.

-Isabella was the only daughter of Louis VIII, king of France, and Blanche of Castile, aka the scariest woman in 13th century Europe. (This makes sense when you understand that Blanche was Eleanor of Aquitaine’s granddaughter. Some things are genetic and being badass is one of them, that’s just science.)

-AS the only French royal princess, you might assume that her potential marriage was a Very Important Issue for her parents, and you would be right. The French kings were super tired of living on just one tiny goddamn island while uppity counts and also the English kept trying to run things all around them, and a marriage alliance through Isabella would have gone some way toward fixing that shit. And BOY did her parents try it. Multiple times. And every time Isabella went “Uhhhh, NO” and just flat-out refused to get married. At one point the pope sent her some letters, trying to convince her to go along and do what she was told, and her replies were so amazing that he wound up going back to the king and queen and being like, I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do, y’all will have to let this shit go. So they did.

-Pope onside or not, though, Isabella knew that she had to do SOMETHING, otherwise she’d just keep getting pressure, so she decided she wanted to run an abbey. I mean, she was also religious, so there was that. But not just any abbey, oh no, she needed a whole new one. So her brother Louis, now king of France, built her one.

-Isabella moved on in, taking some of her BFFs with her, but did she become a nun? SHE DID NOT. She ran the abbey but refused to take the veil or be the abbess, because money.

-Like most religious communities of the time, the female abbey was associated with a male monastery. In these situations, it was usually the male-led community that came up with all the rules and ran the show, and the female-led community acted as subordinate. Not Isabella’s abbey. She got back on the horn with the pope and came up with all of the rules herself. When she *was* forced to use male clergy as an intermediary, she had no qualms about just tearing their letters to shit right in front of them and standing over them until they sounded the way she wanted them to. She also corrected sermons and essentially performed her own confessions, complaining that the male clergy who did them (since only men *could*) were incompetent and lazy.

-Back to the money. Isabella was generous with her cash, which was nice. Except for when she would get overly generous and just invite a whole flood of poor folks into the hall and feed them whatever they wanted, all the time, to the point where she passed on eating herself. She also cared directly for the sick people who would show up at the abbey. Still not a nun, though.

-She was never officially canonized, despite the best efforts of the women she left behind when she died, but she nonetheless was associated with many miracles, mostly related to women and children. The abbey she founded was ransacked and destroyed during the French Revolution, and we know from the documents that were indexed then (but sadly are lost now) that the 18th century nuns still had the original biography written about her by one of her close friends, which means they held on to that shit for 500 years. Abbesses into the 17th century were still going on record to talk about how awesome she was and how much they loved her. Her younger brother, Charles of Anjou, who notoriously got along with absolutely nobody, thought she was the bee’s knees.

Lesson for today: everybody thinks that medieval women, even royal women, could either get married or become a nun, there was no other option for independence, but Isabella said fuck that and basically got the king to build her a house, put all of her friends in it, and spent royal money on helping poor people while making monks cry. Legend.