The five queens of Navarre were the largest group of female sovereigns in one European realm during the Middle Ages, but they are largely unknown beyond a regional audience. This survey fills this scholarly lacuna, focusing particularly on issues of female succession, agency, and power-sharing dynamic between the queens and their male consorts.

The five queens of Navarre were the largest group of female sovereigns in one European realm during the Middle Ages, but they are largely unknown beyond a regional audience. This survey fills this scholarly lacuna, focusing particularly on issues of female succession, agency, and power-sharing dynamic between the queens and their male consorts.

Berengaria of Navarre was queen of England (1191–99) and lord of Le Mans (1204–30), but has received little attention in terms of a fully encompassing biography from Navarrese, Anglophone, and French perspectives. This book explores her political career whilst utilising the surviving documentation to demonstrate her personal and familial partnerships and life as a dowager queen. This biography follows Berengaria’s journey from a Navarrese infanta, raised in the northern Iberian kingdom, to her travels across Europe to marriage and the Third Crusade, venturing through Sicily, Cyprus, and on to the Holy Land in 1191. Berengaria’s reign and early years as dowager queen are examined in the context of the Anglo-French conflict and domestic disputes, before her decision to negotiate with the king of France, Philip Augustus, and become lord of Le Mans, for which she is far better known in local memory. The volume flows chronologically discussing her roles as infanta, queen, dowager, and lord, and is an ideal resource for scholars and those interested in the history of gender, queenship, lordship, and Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

From the 14th-century king consorts of Navarre to the modern European prince consorts of the 20th century, the male consort has been a peculiar yet recurrent historical figure. In this impressively broad collection, leading historians of monarchy analyze how male partners of female rulers have negotiated their unique roles throughout history.

This book is the first full-length biography of Joan of Navarre, a fascinating royal woman who became duchess of Brittany and queen consort of England through her two marriages in 1386 and 1403 respectively. Joan was enmeshed in the turbulent politics of the later Middle Ages as her extensive family and marital connections meant she was related to most of the royal houses of Western Europe—as well as the key protagonists of the Hundred Years War. The large foreign entourage that Joan brought with her to England, and her family ties across the Channel, made her unpopular with her subjects and her loyalties suspect, provoking several purges of her household and culminating in a charge of treason on which she was detained for several years. Yet Joan returned to court in her later years and fought vociferously to the end to retain queenly rights, revenues, and position. Ultimately, this book highlights Joan’s political agency and tenacity, bringing her out of the historical shadows and into the foreground of high politics in fifteenth-century England and Europe. Joan of Navarre is a useful resource for all students and scholars interested in queenship studies, women’s history, and European politics during the later Middle Ages.

In The Monstrous Regiment of Women , Sharon Jansen explores the case for and against female rule by examining the arguments made by theorists from Sir John Fortescue (1461) through Bishop Bossuet (1680) interweaving their arguments with references to the most well-known early modern queens. The 'story' of early modern European political history looks very different if, instead of focusing on kings and their sons, we see successive generations of powerful women and the shifting political alliances of the period from a very different, and revealing, perspective.

The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation explores the historical and cultural structures that underpin the early modern Borgia family, their notoriety, and persistence and reinvention in the popular imagination. The book balances studies focusing on early modern observations of the Borgias and studies deconstructing later incarnations on the stage, on the page, on the street, and on the screen. It reveals how contemporary observers, later authors and artists, and generations of historians reinforced and perpetuated both rumor and reputation, ultimately contributing to the Borgia Black Legend and its representations. Focused on the deeds and posthumous reputations of Pope Alexander VI and his children, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, the volume charts the choices made by the family and contextualizes them amid contemporary expectations and reactions. Extending beyond their deaths, it also investigates how the Borgias became emblems of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish criticism in the later early modern period and their residing reputation as the best and worst of the Renaissance. Exploring a spectrum of traditional and modern media, The Borgia Family contextualizes both Borgia deeds and their modern representations to analyze the family’s continuing history and meaning in the twenty-first century. It will be of great interest to researchers and students working on interdisciplinary aspects of the Renaissance and early modern Italy.