Royal women—ancient, medieval, and early modern—played much more influential and diverse roles than merely marrying the king and producing the heir. As reigning queens, consorts, dowager queens, or sisters, daughters, or mistresses of kings, women in regal courts sometimes wielded official authority and often influenced politics, culture, and religion through informal channels. Recent scholarship has questioned the public/private and formal/informal dichotomies that largely gender public authority male and informal influence female. Yet we see examples in this volume of royal women governing as well as influencing royal actions through more discrete channels.1 Even seemingly passive and private activities traditionally associated with women (bearing heirs, getting dressed by selected female courtiers) had official components that could generate loyalty to the dynasty.
Before the late 1970s, the role of women in monarchy (apart, perhaps, from that of regnant women) was often ignored, trivialized, or sensationalized. Biography was virtually the only way in which royal women appeared in political historiography. The development of women’s history and later gender history began to change this situation, though many who studied women’s history were uneasy about attention to female members of elites and, apart from that, the discovery or retrieval aspect of women’s history initially dominated the field (i.e. the rediscovery of “lost” female figures).2 Gradually greater comfort with combining political history and women’s history, including theoretical analysis, and recognizing the complex nature of gender construction led to more multilayered analysis of royal women and their social and institutional contexts. Acknowledgment of the importance of female patronage in sustaining a dynasty has played a significant role in our understanding of the role of women in monarchy.3 The growing importance of court studies and the willingness of historians to employ additional methodologies or evidence (for instance, kinship or dynastic studies or arguments based on material culture) have also contributed to a new framework that begins with the fundamental assumption that royal women (and other members of a ruling dynasty) were part of monarchy rather than simply decorative accessories to it.4
The existence of the very series in which this volume appears —“Queenship and Power”—speaks to how widespread recognition of the importance of royal women has become and yet examination of the tables of contents of the volumes in the series reveals that most of the articles in these collections relate to medieval or early modern history; only a smattering of articles on ancient or modern monarchies, or on non-western monarchies, appear. This chronological/cultural distribution of the series reflects the general pattern of publication on royal women, particularly in Anglophone scholarship, at least until recently.
This is certainly not to claim that no monographs or collections looking at women and monarchy exist for other periods and cultures.5 Examinations in English of the role of women in individual Middle Eastern and Asian monarchies have appeared.6 For the ancient world, monographs or collections relating to women and monarchy, as in other fields, focused on the biographical until the beginning of this century.7 Remarkably, though four works have now been published that examine the broader role of Roman imperial women, none of these was written in English and no collection in any language examines the role of women in multiple ancient monarchies.8 Similarly, no general study of the part women played in either pharaonic or Ptolemaic Egyptian monarchy exists.9 In addition, comparatively little book-length scholarship has been devoted to the study of royal women from the second half of the nineteenth century to the current day.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that serious analysis of the role of women and monarchy began, or at least acquired momentum, with the study of women in medieval monarchy and early modern monarchy, very soon after the “invention” of women’s history. Pauline Stafford’s 1983 book-length study of early medieval queens is a very early example because she looked at royal women in an institutional and non-biographical way. Her treatment of the consequences of royal polygamy was particularly important.10 In the early 1990s, two critical collections examining the role of medieval and/or early modern royal women appeared.11 After the beginning of the new century, a whole host of collections related to the relationship between women and monarchy began to appear.12 Works with a biographical aspect began to pay more attention to the cultural and institutional context of the women on whom they focused.13 And a recent textbook introduces students to theories and practices of queenship across medieval Europe.14
One can only speculate as to why medieval and early modern studies have proved so critical, at least in English-language texts, for analyses of the roles of women and monarchy. Despite variations within this long period and across regions, generally greater relevant evidence is available for medieval/early modern monarchies than for ancient monarchies, although the same cannot be said about modern royalty. It is noticeable that conferences or panels played an important role in the formation of this subfield and meetings specific to these periods were therefore important. Discussions about royal women of the medieval and early modern eras seem consistently more comparative and self-aware than those for ancient or modern periods. It is not by chance that Medieval Feminist Forum recently published an entire issue largely devoted to the development and future of the field of women and monarchy.15
Still, perhaps the most important reason for the medieval/early modern focus of so much scholarship on royal women is that monarchy, especially in British and French history, was always understood as a central institution, whereas in ancient and modern history this has been less true. Ancient historiography tended to treat monarchy as an institution defined by an office, held by a series of individuals, rather than as the rule of one family, a tendency that delayed recognition of the role of dynasty in general, let alone female members of the dynasty. Greek historiography has long treated non-monarchic government as normative, focused more on the classical period, and especially on the relatively androcentric culture of Athens. Greater attention to the Hellenistic period (one in which monarchy was dominant) and interest in court studies and the influence of other monarchic cultures (particularly the Persian) has finally led to change.16 The comparative dearth of work on Roman imperial women also relates to a denial of the importance of monarchy and dynasty, though in this case the denial was shared by ancient Roman sources, at least during the period of the Principate, when the pretense of a continued republic continued to be important in public life. The frequency of dynastic change and the prevalence of adoption (if only for a comparatively brief period) also complicates attempts at discussing the role of imperial women in anything other than a biographical way. In modern times, though monarchies persisted in considerable force until World War I and continue to exist today, historiography not infrequently tends to consign monarchy to the periphery of political history, often because the role of ritual and image-making in the politics of power has been ignored.17
Discussions that employ the specific term “dynastic loyalty” are rare, although biographies and political studies of monarchy often touch on the topic. Formation of dynastic identity and image via court and public ceremony, ritual (family and patriotic), and patronage often involved female members of a ruling dynasty and could generate dynastic loyalty.18 This collection assembles articles that explore the relationship between royal women and dynastic loyalty (and disloyalty), in diverse times and places. By covering an expansive chronological period (ancient to nineteenth century) and varied cultures and locations, the wider scope allows students and scholars to see the often-neglected roles played by women and to grasp patterns of formal and informal influence often disguised by narrower studies of government structures and officials. At the same time, these articles demonstrate the degree to which royal women’s involvement in issues of dynastic loyalty was shaped by the nature of specific monarchic institutions. This collection represents a selection of the broader conference that was its initial source; many other aspects of the topic could be pursued, though they are not addressed here. For instance, none of the articles in this collection examines the vocabulary of loyalty and disloyalty generated in a variety of cultures and monarchies, a topic that should prove fruitful for further research.
As wives and dowager queens, women could be central to the transmission and continuation of power. Palace women encouraged loyalty from both male and female courtiers and subjects at large, and at times provoked disloyal acts. Such discussions remain relevant today, when we consider that many governments, even if not monarchies, remain susceptible or even open to informal influence on official governing channels—even (or particularly) by family members or those allied to them. Though “monarchy” literally means one person rule, distinguishing between the authority of the current ruler and that of other family members is difficult and, in practice, not always a distinction that was made or even desired.
In many of their activities, royal women displayed behavior that reflected gendered norms. Hellenistic queens acted as public benefactors, or euergetai, in a manner that generated loyalty and offers parallels with the traditional gender roles taken up by the mothers of Ottoman sultans who established charitable foundations to help the poor during an era of economic distress (see Chap. 3 by Dolores Mirón and Chap. 11 by Renée Langlois in this volume). Queens and female kin acted as intercessors between rulers and diverse members of the local community, helping to create and maintain ties of loyalty.19 They acted to reiterate familial and communal ties initially established by their marriages and to mitigate frictions between the families of their birth and of their marriage. When, however, their enemies perceived them not as intercessors but advocates, even if their advocacy was for peace, they were vulnerable to attack and charges of disloyalty.
Royal women also fell victim to the goddess /whore trope, whereby they were either praised for their model behavior or vilified for alleged sexual sins.20 As we see in this collectio...