{"title":"Ruling Women in the Pre-modern World","authors":"Erika Graham-Goering","doi":"10.1080/14629712.2019.1675327","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":37034,"journal":{"name":"Court Historian","volume":"24 1","pages":"282 - 285"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14629712.2019.1675327","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Court Historian","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14629712.2019.1675327","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
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