Abstract

Modern notions of patronage focus on the commission of images, painted or sculpted, contracts that bind two living individuals. We propose to enlarge these terms to include another modality by which cultural goods circulate : inheritance, especially significant for women, who often found themselves in possession of an important artistic patrimony that they had not commissioned. Examination of the exceptionally detailed testament of Blanche de Navarre (d. 1398), wife of Philip VI of Valois and dowager queen for almost half a century, shows that the bequest of her most precious objects, jewels and books alike, was an occasion to create meaningful social facts. For it is through the attentive distribution of her objects that Blanche was able to memorialize for her successors, in concrete things, the ties that bound her scattered kin, living and dead.