Introduction

Abstract

Across all of the periods and cultures, motherhood was considered to be the definitive female role; indeed, it was one of the few roles available to women throughout history—if not as wives or whores and goddesses or saints, as Susan Pomeroy noted in 1975 in her Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. The popular image that emerges paints the historical mother broadly either as a sinner—ambitious, power-mad, neglectful of what ought to be instinctive duties—or as a saint, in hagiography or metaphorically against the Virgin Mother. Motherhood itself has been investigated in several excellent works, including, for example, Suzanne Dixon’s The Roman Mother (1988) and other volumes focused on Medieval and Early Modern motherhood such as Medieval Mothering (1999), Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe (2011), and Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (2000). However, none of these works specifically address the critical issue of motherhood and political authority and agency.