EMMA OF NORMANDY receiving the Encomium, in The Encomium of Queen Emma, c. 1050, British Library MS 33241 (Source)
"The Encomium demonstrates how central queenliness was to Emma's own self-image. The whole work is royal and queenly. The manuscript intended for Emma herself picked out royal names in half uncials, capitalized or highlighted them, and none more consistently than that of Emma herself. It opens with an illustration of her as a crowned, enthroned woman, with the author kneeling before her and her royal sons standing, slightly bowed, behind him. This is one of the earliest representations of a seated, majestic secular royal figure. It is an image of authoritative maternity but especially of regality. It is as queen, regina, that she is most often described in the Encomium, and her regal dignity is stressed at key points where it might be considered under- mined, as in her exile in Flanders. For the Encomium’s author and scribe Emma was always and overwhelmingly a queen. It is a common presentation of the king’s wife as patron, as in the chronicles which describe Emma and Edith in this role. It is the flattery of the commissioned author. But flattery works by playing to self-image. If this title summed up the author’s perceptions of a middle-aged king’s widow and mother who was his patron, his closeness to Emma suggests that it best reflected her preferred view of herself. In no other story is Emma as much the queen as in her own.
Her story is, however, no general praise poem. It is a specific justification and explanation of her actions geared to circumstances. Like the eleventh-century English chroniclers, or Henry of Huntingdon later, Emma too saw herself as a Norman-born wife and mother of Danish kings. She basked in the glory they reflected on her. Yet whilst the chroniclers telescoped her life and understood it through these identities, she used them to justify and explain it. Her apologia takes us closer to the problems which a woman’s several identities could pose: the tensions between her loyalties as a mother and wife, particularly to her sons by a first marriage after she has married again; the inadequacy of maternal ideals to provide a script for a woman faced with several children, especially by different husbands. Her self-presentation used the same identities, but more selectively than the Chroniclers; from what it omits and elides as well as from what it includes and emphasizes we learn what being a wife and mother meant in practice for a powerful woman.
The story she tells is not a whole-life narrative but a highly political one, appropriate to a particular stage. She chooses to present herself as the wife of a king, Cnut, not of kings, Ethelred and Cnut, and as a mother of all her sons. Emma’s is a Danish story, written in the reign of Harthacnut. It has no need to stress her first marriage, but nor could it have done. Emma’s story in 1041 had no place for Ethelred; it might have been different had it been written in 1043 during Edward’s reign, though not appreciably so. Family politics determined the dramatic events of 1035-40 in which Emma was so deeply involved and of which she has given us the most detailed surviving account. The family structures which produced them and the ideals available to discuss them were too much at odds to allow her case to be presented in other ways. Specific to circumstances as it is, it is Emma’s story as 1035-40 determined it should be told. This is not Emma’s narrative recollected in tranquillity on the eve of death, weighed, assessed and revalued when the end was apparent, but it is not clear that she could have told these years very differently even had she commissioned it then. The years 1035-40 might have figured less prominently. We might have heard more about Emma’s doings as queen, an identity of considerable importance to Emma herself. The set pieces about the much-loved queen, the hints of her sensitivity to queenly and royal dignity, and especially the equal share in rule which she stressed for herself as queen-wife of her husband and queen-mother of her sons might have been fleshed out with more details of the court politics and activities through which her queenship was exercised. That ‘might’ assumes an interest in and language to describe such exercise. The other eleventh-century stories, concerned with dramatic events rather than day-to-day politics, cast doubt on the existence of such a language. But Edith’s story suggests that it was being forged and was particularly appropriate to a queen."
— Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England
