Reading Olga Van Marion, Rick Honings and Lotte Jensen's "Fact or Fiction: Literary Representations of Jacqueline of Bavaria 1600-1850"*, which is focused on depictions of her in Dutch literature and plays. There's a lot of "wow look at that misogyny go!"
For example, a seventeenth century poet Hugo Grotius imagines himself John the Pitliess (her uncle who fought to have her claims to Hainault, Zeeland and Holland nullified so he could inherit, abandoning his career as a bishop to do so) who scolds her:
Will not the next generations abhor this?
A woman who took up arms to avoid her guardian!
Take up your wool and your spindle. Do you not know what becomes a woman
and will you not return to your bobbins and balls?
That care you must take upon yourself, without troubling yourself
about borders, state affairs or the needs of the county.
Women are only fit for spinning wool and so ungrateful when their uncle benevolently disinherits them, I guess. John the Pitiless was apparently murdered through having the pages of his prayer book coated with poison and it's been long believed that Jacqueline was behind it. If he was anything like Grotius imagines, I hope she did it.
There are more "romantic" interpretations of her life, most of which focus on her fourth marriage to Francis van Borssele and the idea that she gives up politics for love~. These are more sympathetic but the authors describe one scene from a play by Theodor Rodenburgh where Jacqueline "deigns to accept Francis's invitation to sit on his knee" and I'm just. Full body cringing. It's not as virulently misogynist as Grotius telling her to go spin some wool and let the men take care of things - but it still has the same vibe of "the woman needs to be humbled and tamed, which means she will accept her subservience to men and become a dutiful wife".
There's also a tendency to slut-shame Jacqueline. Grotius labels her "loose", Rodenburgh's play has a third act in which Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy claims she is "wantonly on heat" - her lust is the source of all her troubles - but at least Rodenburgh has Jacqueline respond to these allegations by going, "no, you're the one wantonly on heat" (which - fair!).
By far the worst example in this paper is Willem Bilderdijk's nineteenth century work on Jacqueline. It's clear that his own biases are in play: Jacqueline was a Hook, Bilderdijk was "very anti-Hook", he had an intense, xenophobic dislike of the French, he was a virulent misogynist.
Bilderdijk complains constantly about Jacqueline's sexual behaviour, depicting her as a nymphomaniac or a succubus. He writes that John of Brabant's "physique was not such that he could satisfy her, and whose weakness of mind made him, moreover, despicable in the eyes of such a clever and cunning vixen". He claims that Jacqueline's sexual appetite was so strong that "no-one but a Frenchman could endure it". I'll quote this bit directly from the paper:
When in 1420 John of Brabant gave the counties of Holland and Zeeland into the custody of John the Pitiless against his wife’s wishes, the ‘frivolous woman’, with her ‘excessively hot temperament’ no longer kept herself in check but ‘gave full rein to the urges with which she was pervaded’. Then, her eye fell on the English Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who, she hoped, could ‘satisfy’ her. Jacqueline was, said Bilderdijk, a woman ‘who lassari, but not satiari poterat’ (could be tired out, but not satisfied) by her husbands. The duke was hardly keen on tying the knot but the ‘strumpet from Hainaut’ managed to ‘trap and force’ him so that he eventually, in 1422, married her.
To divert from the "look at the horrific misogyny" but look, Humphrey was a slut wantonly on heat.
Not content with imagining her as a succubus, Bilderdijk also claims that Jacqueline had Brabant murdered (there is no evidence of his death was anything but natural), mingled with the townspeople and farmers at popular feasts and became an object of ridicule (which seems to suggest she was just going around fucking peasants and attending orgies but I'm surprised he didn't just come out and say it), and that she had an severe problem with alcoholism.
He picked this and other themes up in a poem, where he wrote about the Jacqueline-kannetjen (or Jacoba jugs). These are jugs found in the moat of Teylingen, the place where Jacqueline spent her final years. The legend is that she made them herself, turning to pottery to fight her boredom, or Bilderdijk's preferred explanation (which seems to me singularly illogical): that she drank to excess from these jugs and once inebriated, threw the empty jugs in the moat rather than having them reused. AFAIK, there's no real link between Jacqueline and these jugs other from the fact they were roughly contemporary to her and were found in the moat of a location where she once resided.
You little jug, some three four centuries ago
Sucked dry by the mouth so keen to kiss,
And then with a truly graceful flourish
Flung out of the Teylingensch window,
Do you remind us of the sweet creature,
So beautifully accomplished at winking with her eyes?
Come, tell us of her courtship,
When the widow of her three husbands,
In the grip of awkward guardianship
Banned to the lonely castle dwelling,
Coaxed a fourth to her side,
Once more to yoke up with her!
Tell us, what that little lip spoke,
Whose border you once pressed so sweetly?
What honey was there in that kiss
That so delighted good Borslen,
And how that blinking eyelet broke
When he picked the wilted rose?
Reader, I had to stop and draw a vomiting face next to the poem and write "YUCK!" like i was five years old. It feels as thought he is both sexualising Jacqueline while also treating her as an object of disgust and abjection.
Other writers have given more positive spins on Jacqueline's life but focus more on the love story between her and Francis van Borssele. In what the paper's author call "a typically nineteenth-century, middle-class moral", one play concludes with Jacqueline celebrating "the most beautiful earthly reward ... DOMESTIC BLISS!"
The paper doesn't discuss more recent works on Jacqueline except briefly, talking of the attempts to draw a picture of "a strong, independent and liberated woman". I can only hope that these twentieth and twenty-first century offerings are better than Hilda Lewis's I, Jacqueline, where she should've just listened to her father and married Borssele to begin with.
* Olga Van Marion, Rick Honings and Lotte Jensen's "Fact or Fiction: Literary Representations of Jacqueline of Bavaria 1600-1850", Publications du Centre Européen d Etudes Bourguignonnes, vol. 54 (2014)
