Modern historians have found it difficult to disrupt the narrative inherited from past scholars, who argued that even prominent women lacked any genuine political role in the early modern world. However, in many ways, the personal influence that women exercised in court and salon society was highly political, as was that of men. An examination of the power of highly visible women...
Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I, and Catherine de Medici, mother of the last three reigning Valois kings—Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III—were two sixteenth-century women whose maternity gave them access to power and provided the foundation for their claims to exercise it legitimately. While their contemporaries either accepted or contested those claims, some nineteenth...
Many women formerly regarded as harridans, vixens, or worse by historians throughout the ages have been rehabilitated in recent years. It is therefore discouraging to find old narratives of female promiscuity, intriguing, incompetence, frivolity, cupidity, obesity) continuing to circulate, in the form of what we might think of as female "subplots
This paper considers the factors which enabled women to access power via developing mechanisms for royal succession in medieval Europe and how this access was mediated through partnership with co-rulers, including consorts, sons and other co-opted family members and councilors. Finally the paper considers the relationship between the female rulers of the Middle Ages and the...
Questions are asked about how we study medieval women in positions of power, with particular reference to elite Italian and German women in the earlier Middle Ages. The essay calls for scholars to search for nuances in former understandings of women’s opportunities to exercise power while re-examining locality, time period, life cycles, and female and male power. The essay...
By Kathy M. Krause, Published on 04/15/16
By Amy Livingstone, Published on 04/15/16
By Kathy M. Krause, Published on 04/15/16
By Hailey LaVoy, Published on 10/30/15
By Jennifer Thibodeaux, Published on 10/30/15
In the winter of 1328-1329, Cristina, widow of Thomas Scot, potter of London, was convicted, imprisoned in Newgate and sentenced to hang for the crime of murdering her husband. Her execution was delayed due to her pregnancy. In January or February 1329, Cristina sent a letter to Isabella of France, queen mother, requesting a King’s pardon. On March 2, Edward III pardoned Cristina...
In the mid-fourteenth century, two women headed opposing parties in a civil war for control of the duchy of Brittany in France. Conventional scholarship explains their involvement in politics and warfare as exceptions possible only during emergencies. Contemporary chronicles and the letters of the two women themselves, however, tell another story, one in which these two women...
By Olga V. Trokhimenko, Published on 06/24/15
By Kate Staples, Published on 06/24/15
By Kathy M. Krause, Published on 06/24/15
By Elena Woodacre, Published on 06/24/15
By Candace Robb, Published on 06/24/15
By Linda E. Mitchell, Published on 06/24/15
By Kriszta Kotsis, Published on 06/24/15
By Laura Michele Diener, Published on 06/24/15
By Daisy Black, Published on 01/01/15