Chapter 2: Marrying the Monarchy: The Queen’s Coronation

Abstract

While marriage made the queen, for a long time only one ceremony truly established her power: the coronation. The female sovereign, who was not consecrated with the Holy Chrism, did not share the same miraculous power as her husband (the ability to heal scrofula). Her anointment nonetheless gave her an exceptional, almost sacerdotal, status—at least for the length of the ceremony. She was the only woman to take communion of both kinds, the body and blood of Christ, a rite otherwise reserved for priests and the king at the moment of his coronation. During the fifteenth century, however, the coronation appeared less important in the light of a new vision of the queen’s role as bearer of the ‘blood of France’.