Abstract
Isabel de Madariaga (1919–2014) was in her fifties when she secured her first permanent academic position but nonetheless emerged as one of the preeminent historians of Russia of her generation and the world’s leading specialist on Catherine the Great. This chapter examines de Madariaga’s representation of Catherine, arguing that her principal contribution was to present the empress as a highly talented politician, a female monarch who “ruled as well as reigned.” This view would go on to shape a profound reconsideration of Catherine in the latter part of the twentieth century, in effect rescuing her reputation from the disparaging assessments provided by preceding generations of mostly male historians. At the same time, de Madariaga’s portrait has little to say about gender directly, largely stepping around the issue. The chapter reflects on the reasons for this, linking de Madariaga’s representation of Catherine to the story of her own remarkable scholarly life and career.
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- 1.
For overviews of de Madariaga’s life and scholarship, see Janet M. Hartley and Hamish Scott, “Isabel de Madariaga (1919–2014),” Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the British Academy, 15 (2016): 217–244; Janet M. Hartley, “Professor Isabel de Madariaga: Historian and Inspirational Teacher Who Changed Our Perceptions of Catherine the Great and Ivan the Terrible,” The Independent, July 16, 2014; Hamish Scott, “Isabel de Madariaga: Obituary,” The Guardian, July 19, 2014; Rosalind Jones, “Isabel de Madariaga, FRHistS, FBA, 27 August 1919–16 June 2014: Professor of Russian Studies, University of London, Corresponding Member of the Royal Spanish Academy,” Government and Opposition, 49, 4 (2014): 569–571; Simon Dixon, “Isabel de Madariaga (1919–2014),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16, 4 (2015): 1012–1018; Janet M. Hartley, “Professor Isabel de Madariaga (1919–2014),” Slavonic and East European Review, 92, 4 (2014): 729–733; Michael Schippan, “Isabel de Madariaga zum Gedenken (1919–2014),” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 62, 3 (2014): 480; A. B. Kamenskii , “Isabel de Madariaga (1935–2013),” Revue des études slaves, 85, 3 (2014): 599–602 [Sic: De Madariaga’s dates appear incorrectly in this title]; and O. Novikova Monterde, “In Memoriam: Isabel de Madariaga,” Drevniaia Rus’: Voprosy medievistiki, 4 (2014): 133–134.
- 2.
Isabel de Madariaga, “Catherine the Great: A Personal View,” History Today, 11 (November 2001): 45.
- 3.
The book first appeared as Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), abbreviated hereafter as RACG. All following references are to the US edition that appeared that same year with Yale University Press. The quotation here is from RACG, ix.
- 4.
RACG, x.
- 5.
Hartley and Scott, “Isabel de Madariaga,” 243. Rosalind Jones, a friend and colleague of de Madariaga’s for many years, described her as “feminine rather than a feminist.” See Jones, “Isabel de Madariaga, FRHistS, FBA, 27 August 1919–16 June 2014,” 570.
- 6.
The best known distillation of the argument is Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91, 5 (1986): 1053–1075.
- 7.
For the fullest treatment of de Madariaga’s life and career, see Hartley and Scott, “Isabel de Madariaga.” Isabel had one sibling, an older sister, Maria de las Nieves (1917–2003).
- 8.
De Madariaga and Schapiro divorced in 1976. Hartley and Scott, “Isabel de Madariaga,” 228.
- 9.
Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality of 1780: Sir James Harris’s Mission to St. Petersburg during the American Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962). For the quotes that appear here, see the reviews in Russian Review (Robert Paul Browder), 22, 3 (1963): 318–319; The Journal of Politics (Victor S. Mamatey), 25, 1 (1963): 172–173; Slavic and East European Journal (Daniel Balmuth), 8, 4 (1964): 474; and Slavic Review (Andrew Lossky), 22, 1 (1963): 142–144.
- 10.
Another co-founder was Anthony Cross. For de Madariaga’s description of the early history of the Study Group, see her “Anthony Cross: An Appreciation,” in Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Huges (eds.), Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony G. Cross (Munster: Lit, 2004), 5–6.
- 11.
For de Madariaga’s recollections on this topic, see the remarks in Hartley and Scott, “Isabel de Madariaga,” 243.
- 12.
For the metaphor of the “ivory basement,” see Nijole V. Benokraitis, “Working in the Ivory Basement: Subtle Sex Discrimination in Higher Eduction,” in Lynn H. Collins, Joan C. Chrisler, and Kathryn Quina (eds.), Career Strategies for Women in Academe: Arming Athena (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 3–35; and Tanya Fitzgerald, Hard Labour? Academic Work and the Changing Landscape of Higher Education (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2012), 116. This also resonates with the experience of women academics in the same period in other Western societies. For comparisons, see the essays in Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri (eds.), Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).
- 13.
For allusions to de Madariaga’s “not straightforward” career, see Dixon, “Isabel de Madariaga (1919–2014),” 1013; and Jones, “Isabel de Madariaga, FRHistS, FBA, 27 August 1919–16 June 2014,” 570.
- 14.
Hartley and Scott, “Isabel de Madariaga,” 244. As to the number of lovers, as de Madariaga points out, Catherine had only twelve documented lovers over roughly forty-four years, which “by modern standards … was not really promiscuous.” De Madariaga, “Catherine the Great,” 45.
- 15.
Review of RACG by Nikolay Andreyev in Slavonic and East European Review, 60, 1 (1982): 113–115, here 113. The quote preceding is from Marc Raeff’s review of RACG in the Journal of Modern History, 54, 3 (1982): 635–638, here 635. In another context, Raeff offers a more colorful description of the pre-Madariaga historiography: “All the other so-called biographies were mere gossip and scandal-mongering hodgepodges of few facts and much fantasy.” See his “Introduction,” in Roger Bartlett and Janet Hartley (eds.), Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel de Madariaga (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 3.
- 16.
Dixon, “Isabel de Madariaga,” 112.
- 17.
John T. Alexander’s review of RACG in Slavic Review, 41, 1 (1982): 123–124, here 123. Nicholas Riasanovsky also mention’s the parallel with Brückner in his review in Russian Review, 41, 1 (1982): 73–74, here 73. The work in question is Brückner’s Katherina die Zweite (Berlin: G. Grote, 1983).
- 18.
RACG, 370. The reference to Catherine’s animus against Chappe d’Auteroche appears on page 338.
- 19.
RACG, 224.
- 20.
RACG, 178.
- 21.
RACG, 73.
- 22.
RACG, 287.
- 23.
RACG, 62. For more on Catherine’s careful management of national appearances, see Hilde Hoogenboom, “Catherine the Great (1729–1796),” in Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland (eds.), Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 82.
- 24.
RACG, 356, 354.
- 25.
RACG, 38.
- 26.
One example: on the next to last page of the book, de Madariaga praises Catherine for her achievements as a patron of the arts. Under the empress’ rule, she writes, “learning thrived, and the court itself acted as the source of literary, artistic, and musical patronage.” As almost an aside, she then adds, “A hundred years later, and with a lighter touch, as befits a woman, Catherine did for Russia what Louis XIV had done for France …” RACG, 587.
- 27.
Not all historians would agree with de Madariaga on this, of course. For recent studies that suggest important differences in male and female rule in different contexts in medieval and early modern Europe, see Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Katherine Crawford, Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For a study that, like de Madariaga, does not engage feminist theory and tends to downplay differences between male and female rule, see William Monter, The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
- 28.
RACG, 21, 581.
- 29.
RACG, ix.
- 30.
Gary Marker, “The Ambiguities of the 18th Century,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2, 2 (2001): 244; and Tony Lentin, “The Return of Catherine the Great,” History Today, 46, 12 (1996): 16. For insightful reflections on recent reappraisals of Catherine and her time, see Hilde Hoogenboom, “Catherine the Great and Royal Biographies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (forthcoming).
- 31.
For a few suggestive works, see: Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Sue Morgan, “Theorising Feminist History: A Thirty-Year Retrospective,” Women’s History Review, 18, 3 (2009): 381–407; Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Karen Harvey, “The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal, 45, 4 (2002): 899–916; Natalia Pushkareva, “Gendering Russian Historiography: Women’s History in Russia; Status and Perspectives,” in Marianna Muravyeva and Natalia Novikova (eds.), Women’s History in Russia: (Re)establishing the Field (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 2–15; Vera Proskurina, Imperiia pera Ekateriny II: literatura kak politika (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017); E. V. Anisimov, Afrodita u vlasti: tsarstvovanie Elizavety Petrovny (Moscow: AST, 2010); E. V. Anisimov, Zhenshchiny na rossiiskom prestole (St. Petersburg: Piter, 2008); Tat’iana Evgen’evna Novitskaia, Pravovoe regulirovanie imushchestvennykh otnoshenii v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (Moscow: Zertsalo, 2005); Pavel P. Shcherbinin, Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshiny v XVIII-nachale XX v. (Tambov: Iulis, 2004), esp. chap. 1; Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Natalia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (New York: M. E. Sharpe,1997), esp. Chap. 3.
- 32.
De Madariaga, “Catherine the Great,” 50. For more on Catherine’s own sense of “the strengths of women’s roles in society and... [how] these strengths could be … successfully employed in the management of the state,” see Victoria Ivleva, “Catherine II as Female Ruler: The Power of Enlightened Womanhood,” Вивлiоѳика: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies, 3 (2015): 20–46, here 46.
- 33.
Brenda Meehan-Waters, “Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule,” Russian Review, 34, 3 (1975): 293–307, esp. 302. In contrast to the eighteenth century, misogynistic views of female rule became more pronounced in Russia in the 1800s.
- 34.
On Catherine’s historical writings and her interest in history as well as keeping up with and occasionally criticizing historians, see L. M. Gavrilova, “G. F. Miller i Ekaterina II,” in Ditmar Dal’mann [Dahlmann] and Galina Smagina (eds.), G. F. Miller i russkaia kul’tura (St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2007), 312, 317; and Proskurina, Imperiia pera Ekateriny II.
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Sunderland, W. (2018). The Historian and the Empress: Isabel de Madariaga’s Catherine the Great. In: Smith, H., Zook, M. (eds) Generations of Women Historians. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_9
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