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Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe examines queens dowager and queens consort who have disappeared from history or have been deeply misunderstood in modern historical treatment.
Divided into eleven chapters, this book covers queenship from 1016 to 1800, demonstrating the influence of queens in different aspects of monarchy over eight centuries and furthering our knowledge of the roles and challenges that they faced. It also promotes a deeper understanding of the methods of power and patronage for women who were not queens, many of which have since become mythologized into what historians have wanted them to be. The chronological organisation of the book, meanwhile, allows the reader to see more clearly how these forgotten queens are related by the power, agency, and patronage they displayed, despite the mythologization to which they have all been subjected.
Offering a broad geographical coverage and providing a comparison of queenship across a range of disciplines, such as religious history, art history, and literature, Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe is ideal for students and scholars of pre-modern queenship and of medieval and early modern history courses more generally.
Divided into eleven chapters, this book covers queenship from 1016 to 1800, demonstrating the influence of queens in different aspects of monarchy over eight centuries and furthering our knowledge of the roles and challenges that they faced. It also promotes a deeper understanding of the methods of power and patronage for women who were not queens, many of which have since become mythologized into what historians have wanted them to be. The chronological organisation of the book, meanwhile, allows the reader to see more clearly how these forgotten queens are related by the power, agency, and patronage they displayed, despite the mythologization to which they have all been subjected.
Offering a broad geographical coverage and providing a comparison of queenship across a range of disciplines, such as religious history, art history, and literature, Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe is ideal for students and scholars of pre-modern queenship and of medieval and early modern history courses more generally.
212 pages, Hardcover
Published October 22, 2018
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About the author
Valerie Schutte
16 books4 followersValerie Schutte earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Akron, USA. She is author of Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion. She has published two articles on Anne Boleyn, an article on The Merchant of Venice, and three articles on royal Tudor women and print.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 25, 2026
Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe is a very well-researched and enjoyable book. I really liked getting an overview of several queens who are often overlooked in historical narratives. The book does a great job of bringing these women into focus and showing their political and social importance.
It’s informative without being dry and very interesting throughout. A great read if you’re curious about queenship, power and women’s roles in medieval and early modern Europe.
It’s informative without being dry and very interesting throughout. A great read if you’re curious about queenship, power and women’s roles in medieval and early modern Europe.
August 20, 2019
"History has often displayed a schizophrenic attitude towards queenship. On the one hand, women who remain silent and modest are praised but then forgotten and ignored. On the other, women who wield significant political power are endless sources of fascination but usually portrayed as evil and manipulative." - Dr. Estelle Paranque
I was sent "Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Political Agency, Myth-Making, and Patronage" to review. Born from Routlegde's "History of Monarchy" series, this collection of ten papers has the self-set aim of focusing on different aspects of queenship from the medieval period to the end of the eighteenth century, focussing on queens dowager and consort, rather than regnant. Its editors, doctors Valerie Schutte and Estelle Paranque, provide a useful introductory chapter in which they define the primary focus - forgotten queens - as those "whom history, and historians, have glossed over, made little mention of, or dismissed as a 'non-event'." Queenship is a fruitful area for medievalists and early modernists at the moment, and rightly so; as Paranque and Schutte remind us queens "wielded significant power, developed political networks, influenced kings and princes, and contributed to the cultural development of their period."
For me personally as a reader, this collection is a welcome addition to the literature on queenship. Admittedly, I am biased on the subject. I wrote my postgraduate dissertation on the queen's household and corresponding concerns about queens consort in the 1540s, and my friend Lauren is now completing her Ph. D. on sixteenth-century cultural representations of medieval queens, mistresses, and paramours. There are once again for us many a discussion on the early modern period. I include the personal tidbit as both an admission and a caveat for potential readers, who should be made aware that this is a specialist text, compiled by experts in their field. I tend to think academic writing often gets an unfairly hard knock, dismissed unseen as dull or inaccessible. "Forgotten Queens" is not that. However, it is not aimed at a reader with little prior knowledge of the subject or the relevant debates.
Among the contributors, it is pleasing to see a healthy number of Ph. D. candidates - Andrea Nichols, Gabrielle Storey, and Lledó Ruiz Domingo, the latter of whom wrote the moving "Power, patronage, and politics: Maria of Navarre, queen of the Crown of Aragon," which perfectly illustrates the book's intention by focusing on the career of Maria of Navarre, who became queen at eight and died in childbed at seventeen. The tragic brevity of Maria's life reminds us, if one needed reminding, of the capricious brutality of biology, often a queen's most lethal enemy, as well as the utility of splendour in augmenting monarchical authority and national stability.
Maria of Navarre's case also reminds us that queenship mattered, vitally so, in the medieval and early modern polity. The point is further invigorated by Professor Lois Honeycutt's "Becoming Anglo-Norman: The women of the House of Wessex in the century after the Norman Conquest", which emphasises not just royal women's adroit, and consciously uneven, celebration of their ancestry but also the extent to which that ancestry mattered to their husband's subjects. The marriage between Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, and Matilda of Scotland, a descendant of the pre-conquest royal line, played an important role in soothing the fraught relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, at a time when the majority of the English population, we are told, "felt that the English throne should be occupied by a descendant of Alfred the Great."
As ancestry could be used to solidify a queen's position, the spectral figure of a dead queen could equally be used as a force to criticise. The penultimate paper, "Queenly Afterimages: The visual and historical legacy of Marie Leszczinska", is an intriguing case in point, showing how the pious gentleness of Louis XV's consort became one of the first sticks used to beat her successor. Indeed, after reading Professor Jennifer Germann's discussion on it, it is hard not to see the posthumous Marie Lecsczinska as a force used to lacerate poor Marie-Antoinette. Germann includes the fascinating point that one of Marie-Antoinette's most famous paintings - the LeBrun portrait of the Queen en famille with Madame Royale, the Dauphin, the future Louis XVII, and the heartbreaking empty cradle of the deceased Princess Sophie-Hélène - was deliberately designed to mirror the most widely disseminated portrait of the irreproachable Marie Leszczinska. The colour of the two queens' gowns, the fur-trimmed red, are strikingly similar and the family portrait was commissioned at a time when Marie-Antoinette was attempting, valiantly if pointlessly, to resurrect her reputation in light of the Affair of the Necklace court case and a torrent of anti-monarchist libelles from the mental gutter and fevered printing presses of Paris.
She, of course, failed in that regard - although, had Marie Leszczinska survived until 1793, her demureness would no more have saved her from the guillotine than Marie-Antoinette's vivacity condemned her. The flood, when it came, came for them all and Marie-Antoinette's execution understandably traumatised her sister, Maria-Carolina, the sibling to whom she had been closest during their shared childhood in Vienna. Cinzia Recca rounds off "Forgotten Queens" with a reflection on Maria-Carolina's career in "The Eagle Eye of the Habsburg Family on the Kingdom of Naples: Lights and shadows of Queen Maria Carolina at court". Like most of the women in her family, Maria-Carolina was an industrious letter writer and Recca makes full use of her surviving correspondence, through which she credibly argues Maria-Carolina "revealed some of her deepest beliefs and emotions" that help us to see her as "a queen who was determined to fulfil her political role."
She did so under particularly difficult circumstances, largely due to the widespread chaos unleashed by the Revolution in France that took her sister's life, her nephew's, and her brother-in-law's. Some of the collection's most stimulating articles emerge from the study of queenship in evolution. Some times, as in the case of the Maria-Carolina piece, at a time of unprecedented change, a buckling and distending of the status quo which presented potentially lethal threats to a queen or her family. In other instances, it is through times of less dramatic if still fraught challenges. This is the case, for instance, with Dr. Eilish Gregory's "Catherine of Braganza's relationship with her Catholic household". Gregory's skilled use of the Privy Purse expenses and relevant sources from ladies in waiting is vital in breathing life into the porcelain doll which Catherine of Braganza has been rendered into in British histories. Charles II's consort navigated a climate of mounting anti-Catholic sectarianism in the 1660s and 1670s, while clinging to her faith and, as Gregory illustrates, sustaining and helping her co-religionists.
Professor Sybil Jack's "Katarina Jagiellonica and Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow: Power, piety, and patronage" likewise shows queens adapting in a changing polity, in this case by comparing the contrasts and similarities in the careers of a queen of Sweden and a queen of Denmark in the aftermath of the break-up of the Union of Kalmar. Here, too, there is a reiteration of the utility of splendour, the centrality of what might seem extravagant to a modern eye and, as with Matilda of Scotland in Honeycutt's piece, they helped create a concept of national identity, to use a much later word with the hope of avoiding reductiveness for the sake of clarity. Queen Sophie's inclusion is particularly interesting for those with a working knowledge of the current study of queenship and the extent to which it can reinvigorate a queenly reputation - one of her daughters, Anna, became Queen of Scots, then of England and Ireland, through her marriage to James VI & I. Long dismissed as a self-absorbed, gaudy dilettante thanks to her passion for masques and court life, Anna of Denmark's reputation has, in the past decade or so, been given a makeover to render her all-but unrecognisable. We now generally see Anna as a tenacious politician and a patroness of the arts, and collections like this will hopefully help to re-dress the imbalance when it comes to other queens, including her mother.
Not all queens who are in need of revision had the spark, or inferno, of personality possessed by the likes of Anna of Denmark and Maria-Carolina of Austria, and it is a central contention of "Forgotten Queens" that the gentle is not axiomatic with the dull. This is most forcefully expressed in the contribution of one of the editors, Dr. Estelle Paranque, who, in her gem of an article "Elisabeth of Austria and Marie-Elisabeth of France: Represented and remembered" conveys well her passion for this topic as well as, arguably, the core of the discussion when she points out, "It is difficult to comprehend how history can forget, or at least barely remember, a beautiful, virtuous, and benevolent archduchess and queen consort, essentially as neither her own contemporaries nor later scholars had a bad word to say about her character or reign."
Paranque's subject, Elisabeth of Austria, the Habsburg archduchess who married King Charles IX of France in 1570, was condemned to historiographical oblivion by the force of her own goodness. Amid the massacres and mayhem of the Valois dynasty in its death throes, Queen Elisabeth and her daughter, Marie-Elisabeth, were praised and then forgotten. On the injustice of this collective amnesia, Paranque is particularly strong and I re-read this article, chapter 8 in the book, twice. I am fascinated by the final generation of the Valois; it is a compellingly magnificent story, with the generation into which Elisabeth married providing a memorable roll call of characters - her mother-in-law was Catherine de Medici; she had has siblings-in-law the quixotic "La Reine Margot" and the utterly intriguing King Henri III. It would be hard for most not to be outshone in such historical company, yet it has always seemed to me that Elisabeth of Austria merited far more attention than she received, mercifully she does so in Dr. Paranque's paper. Hitherto, Elisabeth's one brief shining appearance in modern culture has been to have her portrait, which graces the cover of "Forgotten Queens", appear numerous times in the animated children's movie "Shrek 2". Apparently, the designers took a shine to it, as a dimly-lit Elisabeth flits by in several portraits on the animated castle's walls and, yes, upon noticing that years ago I was forced to concede that I was overly interested in the Valois.
There are two problems which threaten any study like this. The first, particularly with the earlier queens, is the paucity of sources. Gabrielle Storey confronts this in her "Berengaria of Navarre and Joanna of Sicily as Crusading Queens: Manipulation, regency, and agency", in which she convincingly discusses the risks of leaping too eagerly on a source simply because so few are available. An anecdote recorded by the thirteenth-century Islamic chronicler, Ibn-al' Athīr, in which the Christian queen, Joanna of Sicily, shows agency by rejecting a marriage proposal, is intriguing, but as Storey wisely counsels, we should be wary of building too much on too little.
The second problem is the near-inevitability that some arguments founded on the quasi-forgotten figures of history are going to feel like a bit of a reach and that does seem to be the case in Dr. Valerie Schutte's piece on Catherine Howard. Catherine's inclusion is, itself, a problematic one, when one considers that as the fifth of Henry VIII's six wives, Catherine is one-sixth of one of the most famous collectives in royal history. The editors engage with this point by arguing that Catherine has not been so much forgotten as misunderstood and then focusing on one under-explored incident during her career - when the midwifery textbook "The Byrth of Mankynde" was dedicated to her. In "Beyond Patronage: Richard Jonas's 'The Byrth of Mankind' as counsel to Queen Katherine Howard", Schutte gives an excellent analysis of books belonging or dedicated to queens, including the extent to which an intelligent queen, like Anne Boleyn, could actually reject proposed dedications or invocations for patronage, as she did with Tristam Revel's translation of a treatise attacking Transubstantiation in 1536.
Jonas's text was initially dedicated "vnto our most gracyous and vertuous Quene Kateryn onely". Except, of course, it was not to her only, since she had fallen from favour by November 1541 and lost her head in February 1542 while "The Byrth of Mankynd" was so popular in England that it remained the most prominent book on midwifery there, well into the reign of Charles II, by which point dedications to Catherine Howard had, needless to say, long since been excised. Schutte points out that there is no evidence, whatsoever, that Catherine ever read Jonas's book which undercuts her argument that it was intended as "a serious attempt to provide useful advice to the young queen". Jonas's prose in the dedication does not seem to be anything other than the de rigueur craven didacticism typical in many such early modern dedications to elite women. Given that Catherine's involvement in the project is, from a documentary point of view, non-existent, the argument linking the book to its author's self-selected patroness can be a little like attempting to see modern reporting on royals in the light of advice bestowed upon them. It is not impossible; it does still feel like a reach. Even here, however, if one does not necessarily agree with the conclusion, Schutte's piece is well researched, well argued, and it offers a superb history of Jonas's work and the ways in which Tudor queens engaged with, or avoided, literary patronage.
The opening article in this collection is "The Power of the Mythological Past", in which Andrea Nichols explores how texts and myths shaped the memory of queenship. The queens Nichols focuses on were fictional, but birthed into a kind of reality by the legends that accrued around them in later centuries. The reverse process was true for many of the queens studied in this beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful, and thought-provoking collection. The intervening years have obscured or erased the achievements of this diverse confederacy of queens, on whom a welcome light has been shone by this expertly edited and authored collection of essays. This reads like gushing on my part, but "Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe" is a superb example of academic insight and research.
I was sent "Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Political Agency, Myth-Making, and Patronage" to review. Born from Routlegde's "History of Monarchy" series, this collection of ten papers has the self-set aim of focusing on different aspects of queenship from the medieval period to the end of the eighteenth century, focussing on queens dowager and consort, rather than regnant. Its editors, doctors Valerie Schutte and Estelle Paranque, provide a useful introductory chapter in which they define the primary focus - forgotten queens - as those "whom history, and historians, have glossed over, made little mention of, or dismissed as a 'non-event'." Queenship is a fruitful area for medievalists and early modernists at the moment, and rightly so; as Paranque and Schutte remind us queens "wielded significant power, developed political networks, influenced kings and princes, and contributed to the cultural development of their period."
For me personally as a reader, this collection is a welcome addition to the literature on queenship. Admittedly, I am biased on the subject. I wrote my postgraduate dissertation on the queen's household and corresponding concerns about queens consort in the 1540s, and my friend Lauren is now completing her Ph. D. on sixteenth-century cultural representations of medieval queens, mistresses, and paramours. There are once again for us many a discussion on the early modern period. I include the personal tidbit as both an admission and a caveat for potential readers, who should be made aware that this is a specialist text, compiled by experts in their field. I tend to think academic writing often gets an unfairly hard knock, dismissed unseen as dull or inaccessible. "Forgotten Queens" is not that. However, it is not aimed at a reader with little prior knowledge of the subject or the relevant debates.
Among the contributors, it is pleasing to see a healthy number of Ph. D. candidates - Andrea Nichols, Gabrielle Storey, and Lledó Ruiz Domingo, the latter of whom wrote the moving "Power, patronage, and politics: Maria of Navarre, queen of the Crown of Aragon," which perfectly illustrates the book's intention by focusing on the career of Maria of Navarre, who became queen at eight and died in childbed at seventeen. The tragic brevity of Maria's life reminds us, if one needed reminding, of the capricious brutality of biology, often a queen's most lethal enemy, as well as the utility of splendour in augmenting monarchical authority and national stability.
Maria of Navarre's case also reminds us that queenship mattered, vitally so, in the medieval and early modern polity. The point is further invigorated by Professor Lois Honeycutt's "Becoming Anglo-Norman: The women of the House of Wessex in the century after the Norman Conquest", which emphasises not just royal women's adroit, and consciously uneven, celebration of their ancestry but also the extent to which that ancestry mattered to their husband's subjects. The marriage between Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, and Matilda of Scotland, a descendant of the pre-conquest royal line, played an important role in soothing the fraught relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, at a time when the majority of the English population, we are told, "felt that the English throne should be occupied by a descendant of Alfred the Great."
As ancestry could be used to solidify a queen's position, the spectral figure of a dead queen could equally be used as a force to criticise. The penultimate paper, "Queenly Afterimages: The visual and historical legacy of Marie Leszczinska", is an intriguing case in point, showing how the pious gentleness of Louis XV's consort became one of the first sticks used to beat her successor. Indeed, after reading Professor Jennifer Germann's discussion on it, it is hard not to see the posthumous Marie Lecsczinska as a force used to lacerate poor Marie-Antoinette. Germann includes the fascinating point that one of Marie-Antoinette's most famous paintings - the LeBrun portrait of the Queen en famille with Madame Royale, the Dauphin, the future Louis XVII, and the heartbreaking empty cradle of the deceased Princess Sophie-Hélène - was deliberately designed to mirror the most widely disseminated portrait of the irreproachable Marie Leszczinska. The colour of the two queens' gowns, the fur-trimmed red, are strikingly similar and the family portrait was commissioned at a time when Marie-Antoinette was attempting, valiantly if pointlessly, to resurrect her reputation in light of the Affair of the Necklace court case and a torrent of anti-monarchist libelles from the mental gutter and fevered printing presses of Paris.
She, of course, failed in that regard - although, had Marie Leszczinska survived until 1793, her demureness would no more have saved her from the guillotine than Marie-Antoinette's vivacity condemned her. The flood, when it came, came for them all and Marie-Antoinette's execution understandably traumatised her sister, Maria-Carolina, the sibling to whom she had been closest during their shared childhood in Vienna. Cinzia Recca rounds off "Forgotten Queens" with a reflection on Maria-Carolina's career in "The Eagle Eye of the Habsburg Family on the Kingdom of Naples: Lights and shadows of Queen Maria Carolina at court". Like most of the women in her family, Maria-Carolina was an industrious letter writer and Recca makes full use of her surviving correspondence, through which she credibly argues Maria-Carolina "revealed some of her deepest beliefs and emotions" that help us to see her as "a queen who was determined to fulfil her political role."
She did so under particularly difficult circumstances, largely due to the widespread chaos unleashed by the Revolution in France that took her sister's life, her nephew's, and her brother-in-law's. Some of the collection's most stimulating articles emerge from the study of queenship in evolution. Some times, as in the case of the Maria-Carolina piece, at a time of unprecedented change, a buckling and distending of the status quo which presented potentially lethal threats to a queen or her family. In other instances, it is through times of less dramatic if still fraught challenges. This is the case, for instance, with Dr. Eilish Gregory's "Catherine of Braganza's relationship with her Catholic household". Gregory's skilled use of the Privy Purse expenses and relevant sources from ladies in waiting is vital in breathing life into the porcelain doll which Catherine of Braganza has been rendered into in British histories. Charles II's consort navigated a climate of mounting anti-Catholic sectarianism in the 1660s and 1670s, while clinging to her faith and, as Gregory illustrates, sustaining and helping her co-religionists.
Professor Sybil Jack's "Katarina Jagiellonica and Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow: Power, piety, and patronage" likewise shows queens adapting in a changing polity, in this case by comparing the contrasts and similarities in the careers of a queen of Sweden and a queen of Denmark in the aftermath of the break-up of the Union of Kalmar. Here, too, there is a reiteration of the utility of splendour, the centrality of what might seem extravagant to a modern eye and, as with Matilda of Scotland in Honeycutt's piece, they helped create a concept of national identity, to use a much later word with the hope of avoiding reductiveness for the sake of clarity. Queen Sophie's inclusion is particularly interesting for those with a working knowledge of the current study of queenship and the extent to which it can reinvigorate a queenly reputation - one of her daughters, Anna, became Queen of Scots, then of England and Ireland, through her marriage to James VI & I. Long dismissed as a self-absorbed, gaudy dilettante thanks to her passion for masques and court life, Anna of Denmark's reputation has, in the past decade or so, been given a makeover to render her all-but unrecognisable. We now generally see Anna as a tenacious politician and a patroness of the arts, and collections like this will hopefully help to re-dress the imbalance when it comes to other queens, including her mother.
Not all queens who are in need of revision had the spark, or inferno, of personality possessed by the likes of Anna of Denmark and Maria-Carolina of Austria, and it is a central contention of "Forgotten Queens" that the gentle is not axiomatic with the dull. This is most forcefully expressed in the contribution of one of the editors, Dr. Estelle Paranque, who, in her gem of an article "Elisabeth of Austria and Marie-Elisabeth of France: Represented and remembered" conveys well her passion for this topic as well as, arguably, the core of the discussion when she points out, "It is difficult to comprehend how history can forget, or at least barely remember, a beautiful, virtuous, and benevolent archduchess and queen consort, essentially as neither her own contemporaries nor later scholars had a bad word to say about her character or reign."
Paranque's subject, Elisabeth of Austria, the Habsburg archduchess who married King Charles IX of France in 1570, was condemned to historiographical oblivion by the force of her own goodness. Amid the massacres and mayhem of the Valois dynasty in its death throes, Queen Elisabeth and her daughter, Marie-Elisabeth, were praised and then forgotten. On the injustice of this collective amnesia, Paranque is particularly strong and I re-read this article, chapter 8 in the book, twice. I am fascinated by the final generation of the Valois; it is a compellingly magnificent story, with the generation into which Elisabeth married providing a memorable roll call of characters - her mother-in-law was Catherine de Medici; she had has siblings-in-law the quixotic "La Reine Margot" and the utterly intriguing King Henri III. It would be hard for most not to be outshone in such historical company, yet it has always seemed to me that Elisabeth of Austria merited far more attention than she received, mercifully she does so in Dr. Paranque's paper. Hitherto, Elisabeth's one brief shining appearance in modern culture has been to have her portrait, which graces the cover of "Forgotten Queens", appear numerous times in the animated children's movie "Shrek 2". Apparently, the designers took a shine to it, as a dimly-lit Elisabeth flits by in several portraits on the animated castle's walls and, yes, upon noticing that years ago I was forced to concede that I was overly interested in the Valois.
There are two problems which threaten any study like this. The first, particularly with the earlier queens, is the paucity of sources. Gabrielle Storey confronts this in her "Berengaria of Navarre and Joanna of Sicily as Crusading Queens: Manipulation, regency, and agency", in which she convincingly discusses the risks of leaping too eagerly on a source simply because so few are available. An anecdote recorded by the thirteenth-century Islamic chronicler, Ibn-al' Athīr, in which the Christian queen, Joanna of Sicily, shows agency by rejecting a marriage proposal, is intriguing, but as Storey wisely counsels, we should be wary of building too much on too little.
The second problem is the near-inevitability that some arguments founded on the quasi-forgotten figures of history are going to feel like a bit of a reach and that does seem to be the case in Dr. Valerie Schutte's piece on Catherine Howard. Catherine's inclusion is, itself, a problematic one, when one considers that as the fifth of Henry VIII's six wives, Catherine is one-sixth of one of the most famous collectives in royal history. The editors engage with this point by arguing that Catherine has not been so much forgotten as misunderstood and then focusing on one under-explored incident during her career - when the midwifery textbook "The Byrth of Mankynde" was dedicated to her. In "Beyond Patronage: Richard Jonas's 'The Byrth of Mankind' as counsel to Queen Katherine Howard", Schutte gives an excellent analysis of books belonging or dedicated to queens, including the extent to which an intelligent queen, like Anne Boleyn, could actually reject proposed dedications or invocations for patronage, as she did with Tristam Revel's translation of a treatise attacking Transubstantiation in 1536.
Jonas's text was initially dedicated "vnto our most gracyous and vertuous Quene Kateryn onely". Except, of course, it was not to her only, since she had fallen from favour by November 1541 and lost her head in February 1542 while "The Byrth of Mankynd" was so popular in England that it remained the most prominent book on midwifery there, well into the reign of Charles II, by which point dedications to Catherine Howard had, needless to say, long since been excised. Schutte points out that there is no evidence, whatsoever, that Catherine ever read Jonas's book which undercuts her argument that it was intended as "a serious attempt to provide useful advice to the young queen". Jonas's prose in the dedication does not seem to be anything other than the de rigueur craven didacticism typical in many such early modern dedications to elite women. Given that Catherine's involvement in the project is, from a documentary point of view, non-existent, the argument linking the book to its author's self-selected patroness can be a little like attempting to see modern reporting on royals in the light of advice bestowed upon them. It is not impossible; it does still feel like a reach. Even here, however, if one does not necessarily agree with the conclusion, Schutte's piece is well researched, well argued, and it offers a superb history of Jonas's work and the ways in which Tudor queens engaged with, or avoided, literary patronage.
The opening article in this collection is "The Power of the Mythological Past", in which Andrea Nichols explores how texts and myths shaped the memory of queenship. The queens Nichols focuses on were fictional, but birthed into a kind of reality by the legends that accrued around them in later centuries. The reverse process was true for many of the queens studied in this beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful, and thought-provoking collection. The intervening years have obscured or erased the achievements of this diverse confederacy of queens, on whom a welcome light has been shone by this expertly edited and authored collection of essays. This reads like gushing on my part, but "Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe" is a superb example of academic insight and research.
May 1, 2019
There are several Queens in history who have been largely forgotten and I always applaud any book that attempts to bring these women to the surface. Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe has chapters on Queen Gwendolen – a legendary ruler of ancient Britain – the women of the House of Wessex in the century after the Norman Conquest, Berengaria of Navarre and Joanna of Sicily, Maria of Navarre, Katherine Howard, Katarina Jagiellonica and Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, Elisabeth of Austria and Marie-Elisabeth of France, Catherine of Braganza, Marie Leszczinska and lastly, Maria Carolina of Austria.
Overall, I enjoyed the wide variety of subjects but I was surprised by how at least two of the authors admit that “their” Queens hardly count as forgotten Queens. It seems like a strange comment and does not fit with the point of this book. Though it seems to be primarily aimed at the academic world, it is quite readable even without having an academic background, but some of the essays are a bit dry.
Overall, I enjoyed the wide variety of subjects but I was surprised by how at least two of the authors admit that “their” Queens hardly count as forgotten Queens. It seems like a strange comment and does not fit with the point of this book. Though it seems to be primarily aimed at the academic world, it is quite readable even without having an academic background, but some of the essays are a bit dry.
November 11, 2018
On the whole, an intriguing collection of essays on little-known queens of medieval and early modern Europe. Some of the chapters are more successful in their aims than others. Often, there is a reason why these queens remain 'forgotten' - there simply aren't the sources.
November 15, 2019
Awesome, awesome series of studies. There wasn’t a single one of these essays that didn’t offer something new or exciting to me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews