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Legitimizing the Queen deals with a genre particular to the Middle Ages: the specula principum (mirror of prince). Its importance as an object of study may be understood in light of the political instability that wracked the Castilian fifteenth century. The many works written for and dedicated to Isabel I of Castile depict her kingdom as a shipwrecked boat, a wayward realm, and a land of bankrupt people. These works suggest the kingdom's need for redemption through the strong leadership of theCatholic monarchs. These largely propagandistic works were designed to garner power, and once maintained, further Isabel's agenda. This book frames the concept of sovereignty from the theoretical perspective of the speculum principum dedicated to her. It offers a Bourdieuian approach to the more literary specula texts used to legitimize and uphold Isabel's power. This book reveals propagandistic qualities promoting the ideology necessary to legitimize and support Isabel's claims to the throne. Written primarily between 1468 and 1493, these works are literary artifacts that mark the rise to power of a female sovereign. The study discusses the various strategies of legitimation employed by these propagandists whose works circulated within noble androyal courts, and presumably extended into Castile as justification for her sovereign claim to the throne. By analyzing fifteenth century texts from within a modern critical framework, this book reexamines Isabel's position as queen and contributes to the understanding of her shared sovereignty in a period political and social evolution.
The only woman in the Bible who is noted to have loved a man, Queen Michal was King David's childhood sweetheart, his first wife, and daughter of his great friend and greater enemy, King Saul. Married to and then abandoned by David at age 14, Michal is forced to marry him again and become his first queen ten years later. Thrown into transition and turmoil, Queen Michal resists the ambition and greed that have become integral to David's personality and kingship. Acting nobly as his queen, but refusing to compromise her soul, Michal is drawn in friendship to the women in the king's court. Among his concubines and mistresses is Bathsheba, who becomes the mother of David's son, Solomon. In Queenmaker, Michal emerges as a wise and loving woman whose female family sustains her and establishes the spiritual foundation of the entire kingdom. Queenmaker depicts in unforgettable detail the characters of one of the greatest periods in Biblical history-their public deed and private thoughts-and gives readers the court of the kings as only a woman could see it.
“Helen Castor has an exhilarating narrative gift. . . . Readers will love this book, finding it wholly absorbing and rewarding.” —Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall In the tradition of Antonia Fraser, David Starkey, and Alison Weir, prize-winning historian Helen Castor delivers a compelling, eye-opening examination of women and power in England, witnessed through the lives of six women who exercised power against all odds—and one who never got the chance. With the death of Edward VI in 1553, England, for the first time, would have a reigning queen. The question was: Who? Four women stood upon the crest of history: Katherine of Aragon’s daughter, Mary; Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Lady Jane Grey. But over the centuries, other exceptional women had struggled to push the boundaries of their authority and influence—and been vilified as “she-wolves” for their ambitions. Revealed in vivid detail, the stories of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Margaret of Anjou, and the Empress Matilda expose the paradox that England’s next female leaders would confront as the Tudor throne lay before them—man ruled woman, but these women sought to rule a nation.
This volume explores a range of premodern rulers and their depictions in historiography, literature, art and material culture to gain a broader understanding of their sexualities. It considers the methodologies and motivations of premodern writers and rulers when fashioning royal and elite sexualities and offers new analyses of an array of texts and artwork from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean.
The religious and political spheres of the later medieval and early modern periods were tightly and indisputably interwoven, as illustrated by the papal schism, the Hundred Years War, the Reconquest of Spain, and the English Reformation. In these events as well as in the larger religiopolitical systems in which they unfolded, female saints, devout lay women, and monastic women played central roles. In Women of God and Arms, Nancy Bradley Warren explores the political dimensions of the religious practices of women ranging from St. Colette of Corbie to Isabel of Castile to English nuns exiled during the reign of Elizabeth I. Just as religious and political systems were bound up with one another, so too were the internal and external politics of England and several continental realms. Blood and marriage connected the English dynasties of Lancaster and York with those of France, Burgundy, Flanders, and Castile, creating tangled networks of alliances and animosities. In addition to being linked through ties of kinship, these realms were joined by frequent textual and cultural exchanges. Warren draws upon a wide variety of sources—hagiography, chronicles, monastic records, devotional treatises, military manuals, political propaganda, and texts traditionally designated as literary—as she examines the ways manifestations of female spirituality operated at the intersections of civic, international, and ecclesiastical politics. Her exploration breaches boundaries separating the medieval and the early modern, the religious and the secular, the material and the symbolic, the literary and the historical, as it sheds new light on well-known figures such as Joan of Arc, Isabel of Castile, and Elizabeth I.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1858. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason. Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in medieval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.
Offering a fascinating survey of European queenship from 1500-1800, with each chapter beginning with a discussion of the archetypal queens of Western, Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, Charles Beem explores the particular nature of the regional forms and functions of queenship – including consorts, queens regnant, dowagers and female regents – while interrogating our understanding of the dynamic operations of queenship as a transnational phenomenon in European history. Incorporating detailed discussions of gender and material culture, this book encourages both instructors and student readers to engage in meaningful further research on queenship. This is an excellent overview of an exciting area of historical research and is the perfect companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of History with an interest in queens and queenship.
What do the physical characteristics of the books acquired by elite women in the late medieval and early modern periods tell us about their owners, and what in particular can their illustrations—especially their illustrations of women—reveal? Centered on Anne, duchess of Brittany and twice queen of France, with reference to her contemporaries and successors, The Queen's Library examines the cultural issues surrounding female modes of empowerment and book production. The book aims to uncover the harmonies and conflicts that surfaced in male-authored, male-illustrated works for and about women. In her interdisciplinary investigation of the cultural and political legacy of Anne of Brittany and her female contemporaries, Cynthia J. Brown argues that the verbal and visual imagery used to represent these women of influence was necessarily complex because of its inherently conflicting portrayal of power and subordination. She contends that it can be understood fully only by drawing on the intersection of pertinent literary, historical, codicological, and art historical sources. In The Queen's Library, Brown examines depictions of women of power in five spheres that tellingly expose this tension: rituals of urban and royal reception; the politics of female personification allegories; the "famous-women" topos; women in mourning; and women mourned.