Abstract
Medieval queenship might be achieved because a woman was the wife or daughter of a king, but almost inevitably, a successful queen was a mother.1 Through her motherhood, she not only strengthened the royal lineage, but she also modeled and taught queenship and, therefore, one significant type of royal power. Thus, a queen who modeled her role for her children potentially had two gendered audiences. She demonstrated for her sons the queen’s expected roles as a wife, mother, helpmeet, and, in some instances, coruler. Her daughters might anticipate these roles as well, especially if they were to be queens themselves. But from their mother, daughters might also learn the art of intercession, management and protection of wealth, and the practice of patronage.
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Notes
Robert de Torigny, Chronica, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, 4 vols. (1882, repr. Weisbaden: Kraus Reprint, 1964), v. 4, p. 303. See also Miriam Shadis and Constance Hoffman Berman, “A Taste of the Feast: Reconsidering Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Female Descendents,” in Lord and Lady, pp. 182–85 [177-211].
Alfonso VIII 1, pp. 185, 787-89, and 793; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 235–39.
W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 223.
Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest, pp. 27, 47, and 69; Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-century León and Castile (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 54–55.
Alfonso X, Fuero real, ed. Azucena Palacios Alcaine (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1991), p. 65; see also Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest, pp. 69–70, and Barton, Aristocracy, p. 71.
Alfonso X, Las siete partidas, trans. Samuel Parsons Scott, ed. Robert I. Burns, S. J., 5 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 4.11.7, pp. 933–34.
For example, Documentación del monasterio de San Juan de Burgos, 1091–1400, ed. F. Javier Pena Pérez (Burgos: Ediciones J. M. Garrido Garrido, 1983): no. 49.
Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 38–43; Barton, Aristocracy, Appendix 3: no. 17.
Felipe-Gil Peces Rata, Paleografia y epigrafia en la catedral de Sigüenza (Sigüenza: Graficas Carpintero, 1988), p. 51
also Charles Rudy, The Cathedrals of Northern Spain (Boston: L.C. Page, 1905), p. 338.
Angel Gonzalez Palencia, Los mozarabes de Toledo en los siglos xii y xiii, 3 vols. (Madrid: Instituto de Valencia de don Juan, 1926–28), v. 1: no. 326; Alfonso VIII 2: no. 215; Alfonso VIII 3: no. 797.
Brigitte Bedos Rezak, “Women, Seals, and Power in Medieval France, 1150–1350,” in Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds. Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 61–82.
David Nirenberg, “Deviant Politics and Jewish Love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo,” Jewish History (2007): 21 [15-41].
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© 2009 Miriam Shadis
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Shadis, M. (2009). Mothering Queenship: Leonor of England, Queen of Castile, 1161–1214. In: Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the high middle ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103139_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103139_2
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