![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() While the general focus of this bibliography is on European queens and queenship, it is important to recognize the experience and lives of royal women and queens, or their equivalents, beyond Europe, which are featured in the Global section.īecause of nationally oriented scholarship and the diverse nature of queens’ experiences, as well as the breadth and depth implied in the term medieval, few effective general overviews of medieval queens and queenship are available, with the exception of the full-length monograph Earenfight 2013, which provides an excellent overview of and starting point for medieval queenship. The article concludes with sections on the liminal but comparatively important queens/empresses of Byzantium, and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. In some instances, queens who have merited extensive scholarship are treated in separate sections. Because queens were always queens of a realm, however, and because the extent (and number) of European monarchies on both the continent and in Britain changed radically in the post-Carolingian era, the remainder of the article is organized both geographically and chronologically, with sections on England (General, Anglo-Norman Queens, Plantagenet Queens, and Lancastrian, York, and Early Tudor England) Scotland, France (sections on Capetian France and Valois France), Germany and Early Medieval Italy, Scandinavia, and the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula (sections on Iberia generally as well as Crown of Aragon, León-Castile, and Portugal). The first principle of organization for this article is chronological, with sections on Early Medieval Queens (Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Germanic) and Merovingian Queens and Carolingian Queens. Currently, scholarship simultaneously seeks to recover the histories of individual queens, to understand the specifics of the queen’s office within the institution of the monarchy, and to understand how gender operated at the highest levels of political, cultural, and economic power in the Middle Ages. The historiography of medieval queenship is equally varied, beginning with positivist-inspired biographies of the 19th century and subsequently influenced by developments in social history during the 1960s and 1970s and by interdisciplinary and feminist approaches in recent decades. Queens thus served as intercessors, patrons, and cultural innovators as well as operated as great lords, as rulers, and often, but not always, as mothers. Often women who became queens were not native to the territory with which they became associated and, thus, the names by which they are known, for example, Blanche of Castile, may be misleading: Blanche, who was from Castile, was queen of France through marriage. Women who became queens through marriage often shared the experience of straddling two cultures and two families (natal and marital), and, thus, they were alien outsiders who simultaneously had the greatest access to the center of power, the king. The experience of being a queen, in particular as partner to the king, the development of the office of the queen, and the role of queen regent evolved over time with medieval monarchy, and queenship varied across regions as different legal codes and customs informed female inheritance. As the wives, mothers, and daughters of kings, medieval queens acquired their status in one of two ways, either through marriage or, less commonly, through inheritance. ![]()
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