Parergon

Queens were at a unique nexus of gender and power in the medieval and early modern world. On one level, their power was inexorably tied to their bodies, as the mothers of future monarchs. However, the power exercised by queens could, and often did, extend far beyond their ability (or not) to bear an heir. As history has repeatedly shown, queens were key political players, not simply the wives of kings. The glamour and appeal of queens has hardly abated in the modern world, too; stories of queens are as easily consumed today as they ever were.

The study of medieval and early modern queens reveals much about the relationship between gender, sexuality, politics, history, and power. The study of queens has been of much interest to a wide range of scholars, from historians to literary and cultural studies scholars, who have re-examined, or sometimes examined for the first time, the lives and reigns of queens from across the medieval and early modern world.

The recent spate of publications relating to queenship studies is reflective of the strength of the field. The flourishing ‘Queenship and Power’ series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is a testament to the outstanding scholarship in the field currently being conducted by medieval and early modern scholars. The Royal Studies Journal, established in 2014 and run by the Winchester University Press, also regularly publishes scholarship on queenship studies. The ‘Kings and Queens’ conference series, organised by Dr Ellie Woodacre, is also a popular forum for the dissemination of the latest innovative queenship studies research.

That queenship studies is enjoying a particularly rich period is demonstrated by the fact that there are two major publication projects currently in development. The first is the English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty project, which is a four-volume series to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. This project will incorporate biographies of all the English consorts, as well as thematic dynasty-wide essays. Alongside this project will be a monograph series on the Queens of England, published by Routledge, which aims to produce richly contextualised book-length biographies of all the queens of England. Both of these projects have been designed to supplement the popular Penguin Monarchs series of books, aiming to fill the lacunae left by the absence of queens consort from this series.

Popular culture depictions of queens continue to be widely sought-after. 2018 saw the release of two major films about early modern queens: Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots. Both films are intensely interested in the role of the queen regnant, and focus on the nexus of gender, [End Page 1] sexuality, and power in the courts of Queen Anne and Elizabeth I respectively. Moreover, the ongoing fascination with the Tudor period, and, particularly, with the wives of Henry VIII, shows no signs of slowing down. The Starz series The Spanish Princess, about Catherine of Aragon’s entry into England and her first marriage, premiered in 2019. The series’ presentation of Catherine is comparable to the teen Mary Queen of Scots of the CW series, Reign (2013–17), in which the French court was imagined as a kind of early modern high school. Over the past year, there have been two television adaptations of the life of Catherine the Great: HBO’s Catherine the Great (2019), and Hulu’s The Great (2020). While Netflix’s flagship series, The Crown (2016–) takes us into the mid-twentieth century, the premise of the series—to take viewers into the private life of Queen Elizabeth II— attests to the ongoing fascination with the emotional lives of queens. What unites all of these texts is their interest in unpicking the space between the domestic and the political, and between the public and the private. What, they ask us, are queens really like? The focus on the domestic that characterizes historical fiction about queens suggests that, while we have a model for what masculine power and authority look like, when we think about queens, we consistently still turn to the private emotional lives of queens to make sense of female rule.

Over the next three years...