Study Of Queens Research Articles

Introduction to Special Issue: Representing Queens

Introduction to Special Issue: Representing Queens Stephanie Russo (bio) Queens were at a unique nexus of gender and power in the medieval and early modern world. On one level, their power was inexorably tied to their bodies, as the mothers of future monarchs. However, the power exercised by queens could, and often did, extend far beyond their ability (or not) to bear an heir. As history has repeatedly shown, queens were key political players, not simply the wives of kings. The glamour and appeal of queens has hardly abated in the modern world, too; stories of queens are as easily consumed today as they ever were. The study of medieval and early modern queens reveals much about the relationship between gender, sexuality, politics, history, and power. The study of queens has been of much interest to a wide range of scholars, from historians to literary and cultural studies scholars, who have re-examined, or sometimes examined for the first time, the lives and reigns of queens from across the medieval and early modern world. The recent spate of publications relating to queenship studies is reflective of the strength of the field. The flourishing ‘Queenship and Power’ series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is a testament to the outstanding scholarship in the field currently being conducted by medieval and early modern scholars. The Royal Studies Journal, established in 2014 and run by the Winchester University Press, also regularly publishes scholarship on queenship studies. The ‘Kings and Queens’ conference series, organised by Dr Ellie Woodacre, is also a popular forum for the dissemination of the latest innovative queenship studies research. That queenship studies is enjoying a particularly rich period is demonstrated by the fact that there are two major publication projects currently in development. The first is the English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty project, which is a four-volume series to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. This project will incorporate biographies of all the English consorts, as well as thematic dynasty-wide essays. Alongside this project will be a monograph series on the Queens of England, published by Routledge, which aims to produce richly contextualised book-length biographies of all the queens of England. Both of these projects have been designed to supplement the popular Penguin Monarchs series of books, aiming to fill the lacunae left by the absence of queens consort from this series. Popular culture depictions of queens continue to be widely sought-after. 2018 saw the release of two major films about early modern queens: Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots. Both films are intensely interested in the role of the queen regnant, and focus on the nexus of gender, [End Page 1] sexuality, and power in the courts of Queen Anne and Elizabeth I respectively. Moreover, the ongoing fascination with the Tudor period, and, particularly, with the wives of Henry VIII, shows no signs of slowing down. The Starz series The Spanish Princess, about Catherine of Aragon’s entry into England and her first marriage, premiered in 2019. The series’ presentation of Catherine is comparable to the teen Mary Queen of Scots of the CW series, Reign (2013–17), in which the French court was imagined as a kind of early modern high school. Over the past year, there have been two television adaptations of the life of Catherine the Great: HBO’s Catherine the Great (2019), and Hulu’s The Great (2020). While Netflix’s flagship series, The Crown (2016–) takes us into the mid-twentieth century, the premise of the series—to take viewers into the private life of Queen Elizabeth II— attests to the ongoing fascination with the emotional lives of queens. What unites all of these texts is their interest in unpicking the space between the domestic and the political, and between the public and the private. What, they ask us, are queens really like? The focus on the domestic that characterizes historical fiction about queens suggests that, while we have a model for what masculine power and authority look like, when we think about queens, we consistently still turn to the private emotional lives of queens to make sense of female rule. Over the next three years...

Medieval queenship

AbstractThis essay surveys new identities and frameworks for the study of medieval queens that have emerged over the past 30 years and argues that the study of queens and the practice of queenship has transformed the study of monarchy. Queenship is understood by most scholars to be a cluster of customs, practices, and political theory that focuses on who queens were and what they did; how they were perceived by their peers; and how they were vital to family, culture, religion, and economics in the European Middle Ages. Empirical research on queens and empresses cuts across time and space and is grounded in feminist theory and methods; it rejects traditional masculine‐centered political history in favor of a nuanced understanding of women and power.

El ajuar funerario de Beatriz de Suabia: elementos para una propuesta iconográfica del simulacro de la reina en la Capilla de los Reyes de la Catedral de Sevilla

This article will analyze the importance of the personality of the Queen Beatrice of Swabia in the project of the Royal Chapel inside Seville’s Cathedral. For this reason, we will focus in the study of Queen’s grave goods, primarily her pillow, embroidered with secular scenes well connected with many productions of Frederick II and his circle, as the fresco painting of the Palazzo Finco in Bassano del Grappa, assuming a nuptial function. We will also provide historical accounts related to the fecho del imperio that help us to date the simulacro or statue of Beatrice inside the artistic production of Alfonso X. Finally we will make an iconographic proposal for the statue or Beatrice of Swabia in the Royal Chapel inside Seville’s Cathedral.

Early Modern Queens Revived and Revised

Early Modern Queens Revived and Revised Caroline Hibbard (bio) Karen Britland. Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. x + 292 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-521-84797-4 (cl). Susan Doran. Mary Queen of Scots: An Illustrated Life. London: The British Library, 2007. 191 pp; ill. ISBN 0-7123-4916-2 (cl). Natalie Mears. Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv + 311 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-521-81922-9 (cl). Louis Montrose. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xiv + 341 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-226-53473-1 (cl); 0-226-53475-8 (pb). Regina Schulte, ed. The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World 1500–2000. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. xii + 364 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-84545-121-X (cl); 1-84545-159-7 (pb). Kristen Post Walton. Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy: Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Politics of Gender and Religion. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. xiv + 220 pp. ISBN 1-4039-8835-8 (cl). The study of queens has become such a growth industry that it is hard to remember how little there was of it even in the 1970s. Then, only the work of a few pioneers like John Carmi Parsons on Eleanor of Castile escaped the "life and times" biographical model, or the gossipy, even steamy, coverage of some consorts, and attempted to provide some analytical framework within which to examine queens and queenship. The early days of women's history were far more focussed on the previously "invisible" figures than on elite figures who, although visible enough, remained relatively unexplained. The subsequent discovery of (especially English) queens has made clear what a wealth of documentary source material is available in the archives of a monarchy that never suffered from violent revolution and the attendant wholesale destruction of records. [End Page 181] In the British Isles, queens regnant are a rare breed, and one historian remarked that when Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne she had exactly two predecessors in that role, neither of whom inspired confidence—the Empress Matilda of the twelfth-century "anarchy," and her own sister Mary, aka "Bloody Mary," Tudor. While Mary's important reign was too short, and languished in too much historical disrepute, to attract the attention it deserved until relatively recently, Elizabeth I has always beguiled professionals as well as history buffs. This is equally true of her distant successor Victoria, for whom the massive documentation as well as the complex relationship with her prime ministers add to the attraction. Far more numerous, of course, are the consort queens, but they have been much later to emerge from anecdotal shadow into the light of serious dissection. One problem for modern historians has been the perceived lack of agency of these women, likely to be seen by feminists as object lessons in the horrors of sexual exploitation, arranged marriages, endless childbearing, and political marginalization. Only as political historians have recognized the central role of the court in early modern politics both in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe have they been able to—indeed forced to—recalibrate the importance of the consort. The picture is not always positive, for the aquifer of misogyny has always run deep, and drawing from it is very common in times of crisis or for the purpose of maligning an enemy. Two recent books on Mary Queen of Scots exemplify the renewed serious interest in this monarch, long romanticized or vilified in the public eye, often with the connivance of "serious" historians who had axes to grind. To John Neale, writing in the mid-twentieth century, Mary was the dangerous opposite of Elizabeth Tudor, a reckless sexual Catholic figure whose actions were dominated by heart rather than head. His classic and influential biography of Elizabeth set up the latter as a "masculine" and thus rational figure in favorable contrast to her "feminine" cousin, and paid little attention to the very different political landscapes that each encountered at the outset of her reign. Antonia Fraser began to rectify the picture of Mary in 1969, and others—including Jenny Wormald...