Ruling Women in the Pre-modern World

Q3 Arts and Humanities
Erika Graham-Goering
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

A lthough queenship studies is by now a flourishing field, this collection is one of the first to move the spotlight away from Western Europe and to query the extent to which the theoretical models of queenly roles developed in medieval and early modern Europe can be consistently applied across diverse socio-cultural contexts. It does so by juxtaposing twenty-one case studies, most often of one or a handful of women though occasionally taking a more generalized view, divided into three analytical themes. The first two of these main sections focus on different categories of ruling women: Part , ‘Perceptions of Regnant Queenship’, looks at examples of women who came to the throne in their own right, while Part , ‘Practising Co-Rulership’, considers women who exercised power in conjunction with others as wives or mothers, though as several essays demonstrate, there could sometimes be only the thinnest of lines between outright and contingent rulership. Part , ‘Breaking Down Boundaries: Comparative Studies of Queenship’, takes a different approach by focusing on parallel case studies across cultural, religious, and geographic lines. In each section, the contributions progress over more than a millennium of history from the seventh century to the nineteenth, and highlight the interest of exploring beyond the ‘core’ of Western European monarchy by looking to the European periphery (both East and West) and beyond to the Arabic Mediterranean, South and East Asia, and to a lesser extent subSaharan Africa and New Zealand. The result demonstrates that the fundamental issues of how women obtained and exercised power, and how this authority was displayed and perceived, responded to specific social frameworks, while conforming more often than not to certain consistent, cross-cultural norms. This broad remit necessarily entails transplanting the concept of ‘queen’ (and so ‘queenship’) which, as Woodacre acknowledges in her Introduction, is ‘an entirely European construct’ (p. ). On a linguistic level, it is not always a simple matter to assess the equivalency of titles used by elite women elsewhere (especially in the absence of a feminine analogue to a kingly title), while on a cultural level major differences in social structures complicate any parallels that might be drawn. While Woodacre proposes an effective general solution, that the aim is to study the role(s) of the ‘pre-eminent woman in the political and societal context of the realm’ (p. ), several of the essays continue, rightly, to grapple with the implications of this comparison. Among the most effective in this regard are Jane Hooper’s study of Queen Béti of Madagascar c., and Aidan Norrie’s survey of the Māori women who acted as rangatira (chiefs) a century later. Both consider the implications of using colonial sources to view fundamentally dissimilar structures of authority, and the impact of European interactions with these leaders on the perceptions and practices of rulership: while French and English colonial powers
前现代世界的统治女性
尽管女王身份研究现在是一个蓬勃发展的领域,但这本书是第一批将焦点从西欧移开的书之一,它质疑了中世纪和近代早期欧洲发展起来的女王角色理论模型在多大程度上可以持续地应用于不同的社会文化背景。它将21个案例研究并列在一起,这些案例研究通常是一个或几个女性的,尽管偶尔会采取更广泛的观点,分为三个分析主题。这些主要部分的前两个部分关注不同类别的统治女性:部分,“对统治女王的看法”,研究了以自己的权利获得王位的女性的例子,而部分,“实践共同统治”,考虑了与他人一起行使权力的女性作为妻子或母亲,尽管正如几篇文章所证明的那样,有时在直接统治和偶然统治之间可能只有最细微的界限。部分,“打破界限:皇后身份的比较研究”,通过关注跨文化、宗教和地理线的平行案例研究,采取了不同的方法。在每一部分中,这些贡献都是在七世纪到十九世纪的一千多年的历史中进行的,并突出了探索超越西欧君主制“核心”的兴趣,通过关注欧洲周边(包括东方和西方)以及阿拉伯地中海,南亚和东亚,以及较小程度上撒哈拉以南非洲和新西兰。结果表明,妇女如何获得和行使权力,以及如何展示和感知这种权力的基本问题,对特定的社会框架作出反应,同时往往符合某些一致的跨文化规范。这种广泛的职权范围必然需要移植“女王”(以及“女王身份”)的概念,正如伍德阿克在她的引言中所承认的那样,这是“一个完全欧洲的结构”(p.)。在语言层面上,评估其他地方精英女性使用的头衔的等价性并不总是一件简单的事情(特别是在缺乏女性类似的国王头衔的情况下),而在文化层面上,社会结构的重大差异使任何可能绘制的相似之处复杂化。虽然Woodacre提出了一个有效的通用解决方案,其目的是研究“在该领域的政治和社会背景下杰出女性”的角色(p.),但有几篇文章继续正确地与这种比较的含义作斗争。在这方面最有效的研究是Jane Hooper对马达加斯加女王bsamuti c.的研究,以及Aidan Norrie对一个世纪后担任rangatira(酋长)的Māori女性的调查。两者都考虑了使用殖民资源来看待根本不同的权威结构的含义,以及欧洲与这些领导人的互动对统治观念和实践的影响:而法国和英国的殖民大国
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Court Historian
Court Historian Arts and Humanities-History
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
14
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