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Medieval queens led richly complex lives and were highly visible women active in a man's world. Linked to kings by marriage, family, and property, queens were vital to the institution of monarchy. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to the study of queenship, Theresa Earenfight documents the lives and works of queens and empresses across Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The book: - Introduces pivotal research and sources in queenship studies, and includes exciting and innovative new archival research - Highlights four crucial moments across the full span of the Middle Ages – ca. 300, 700, 1100, and 1350 – when Christianity, education, lineage, and marriage law fundamentally altered the practice of queenship - Examines theories and practices of queenship in the context of wider issues of gender, authority, and power. This is an invaluable and illuminating text for students, scholars and other readers interested in the role of royal women in medieval society.
Catherine of Aragon is an elusive subject. Despite her status as a Spanish infanta, Princess of Wales, and Queen of England, few of her personal letters have survived, and she is obscured in the contemporary royal histories. In this evocative biography, Theresa Earenfight presents an intimate and engaging portrait of Catherine told through the objects that she left behind. A pair of shoes, a painting, a rosary, a fur-trimmed baby blanket—each of these things took meaning from the ways Catherine experienced and perceived them. Through an examination of the inventories listing the few possessions Catherine owned at her death, Earenfight follows the arc of Catherine’s life: first as a coddl...
Queen María of Castile, wife of Alfonso V, "the Magnanimous," king of the Crown of Aragon, governed Catalunya in the mid-fifteenth century while her husband conquered and governed the kingdom of Naples. For twenty-six years, she maintained a royal court and council separate from and roughly equivalent to those of Alfonso in Naples. Such legitimately sanctioned political authority is remarkable given that she ruled not as queen in her own right but rather as Lieutenant-General of Catalunya with powers equivalent to the king's. María does not fit conventional images of a queen as wife and mother; indeed, she had no children and so never served as queen-regent for any royal heirs in their min...
This volume is an attempt to discuss the ways in which themes of authority and gender can be traced in the writing of chronicles and chronicle-like writings from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. With major contributions by fourteen authors, each of them specialists in the field, this study spans full across the compass of medieval and early modern Europe, from England and Scandinavia, to Byzantium and the Crusader Kingdoms; embraces a variety of media and methods; and touches evidence from diverse branches of learning such as language and literature, history and art, to name just a few. This is an important collection which will be of the highest utility for students and scholars of language, literature, and history for many years to come.
In this volume, the authors bring fresh approaches to the subject of royal and noble households in medieval and early modern Europe. The essays focus on the people of the highest social rank: the nuclear and extended royal family, their household attendants, noblemen and noblewomen as courtiers, and physicians. Themes include financial and administrative management, itinerant households, the household of an imprisoned noblewoman, blended households, and cultural influence. The essays are grounded in sources such as records of court ceremonial, economic records, letters, legal records, wills, and inventories. The authors employ a variety of methods, including prosopography, economic history, visual analysis, network analysis, and gift exchange, and the collection is engaged with current political, sociological, anthropological, gender, and feminist theories.
The twelve essays in Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe re-examine the vexing issue of women, money, wealth, and power from distinctive perspectives - literature, history, architectural history - using new archival sources. The contributors examine how money and changing attitudes toward wealth affected power relations between women and men of all ranks, especially the patriarchal social forces that constrained the range of women s economic choices. Employing theories on gender, culture, and power, this volume reveals wealth as both the motive force in gender relations and a precise indicator of other, more subtle, forms of power and influence mediated by gender.
The essays in this volume consider three aspects of queenship and politics: the institutional foundations and practice of politics, the politics of religion and religious devotion, and the literary and artistic representations of queenship and power. They address the distinctive Spanish political culture that resulted in a form of queenship similar to, yet also substantially different from, that of northern Europe.
The Queen who shaped the music, literature, architecture, and painting of late medieval Spain. This multidisciplinary volume was inspired by the quincentenary of the death of Queen Isabel I of Castile, early modern Europe's first powerful queen regnant. Comprising work by distinguished art historians, musicologists, historians, and literary scholars from England, Spain, and the United States, it begins with a theoretical examination of medieval queenship itself that argues - against the grain of the volume - for its inseparability from kingship. Several essays examine the complex ways in which the Queen and her advisers shaped the music, literature, architecture, and painting of fifteenth-ce...
Medieval queens led richly complex lives and were highly visible women active in a man's world. Linked to kings by marriage, family, and property, queens were vital to the institution of monarchy. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to the study of queenship, Theresa Earenfight documents the lives and works of queens and empresses across Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The book: - Introduces pivotal research and sources in queenship studies, and includes exciting and innovative new archival research - Highlights four crucial moments across the full span of the Middle Ages – ca. 300, 700, 1100, and 1350 – when Christianity, education, lineage, and marriage law fundamentally altered the practice of queenship - Examines theories and practices of queenship in the context of wider issues of gender, authority, and power. This is an invaluable and illuminating text for students, scholars and other readers interested in the role of royal women in medieval society.
The Favor of Friends offers the first book-length exploration of intercession—aid and advocacy by one individual or group in behalf of another—within early medieval aristocratic societies. Drawing upon a variety of disciplines and historiographical traditions, Sean Gilsdorf demonstrates how this process operated, and how it was ideologically elaborated, in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe, allowing individuals and groups to leverage their own, limited interpersonal networks to the fullest, produce new relationships, gain access to previously closed spaces, and generate interest in their agendas from those able to effect change. The Favor of Friends enriches our understanding of early medieval politics and rulership, offering a model of political interaction in which hierarchy and comity do not stand in ideological and pragmatic tension, but instead work in integrated and mutually-reinforcing ways.