Zita Eva Rohr - Böcker

Significant Others explores the transformative possibilities of alterity or otherness and offers concrete case studies that provide a greater understanding and nuance with regard to aspects of deviance and difference in premodern court cultures. Both public and nominally private spaces were subject to the important influence of significant others, such as women, ethno-religious minorities, and marginalized and/or difficult-to-categorize men. From their positions within and ties to court cultures, these diverse outsiders - ‘others’ - played crucial roles in maintaining a fluidity essential for the successful sustaining of territorial monarchies and polities, challenging our understanding of the more narrowly defined elite behaviours that shaped premodern dynasties, rulers, societies, and cultures of the past. By exploring a variety of case studies from history and literature, such as Moroccan Jews as dhimmis (‘protected persons’), to bastards, mistresses, and sodomites in ancien régime France, to the transformative role of magic in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this volume makes use of empirical and contextually informed research to respond to theoretical questions posed by recent historiography.With a cross-disciplinary approach, this collection of essays will be a valuable resource for all students and scholars interested in the diverse aspects and contexts of premodern ‘others’.

Significant Others explores the transformative possibilities of alterity or otherness and offers concrete case studies that provide a greater understanding and nuance with regard to aspects of deviance and difference in premodern court cultures. Both public and nominally private spaces were subject to the important influence of significant others, such as women, ethno-religious minorities, and marginalized and/or difficult-to-categorize men. From their positions within and ties to court cultures, these diverse outsiders - ‘others’ - played crucial roles in maintaining a fluidity essential for the successful sustaining of territorial monarchies and polities, challenging our understanding of the more narrowly defined elite behaviours that shaped premodern dynasties, rulers, societies, and cultures of the past. By exploring a variety of case studies from history and literature, such as Moroccan Jews as dhimmis (‘protected persons’), to bastards, mistresses, and sodomites in ancien régime France, to the transformative role of magic in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this volume makes use of empirical and contextually informed research to respond to theoretical questions posed by recent historiography.With a cross-disciplinary approach, this collection of essays will be a valuable resource for all students and scholars interested in the diverse aspects and contexts of premodern ‘others’.

Yolande of Aragon is one of the most intriguing of late medieval queens who contrived to be everywhere and nowhere, operating seamlessly from backstage and center stage. She is acknowledged as having been shrewd and intelligent - an éminence grise whose political and diplomatic agency secured the throne of France for her son-in-law, Charles VII.

Yolande of Aragon is one of the most intriguing of late medieval queens who contrived to be everywhere and nowhere, operating seamlessly from backstage and center stage. She is acknowledged as having been shrewd and intelligent - an éminence grise whose political and diplomatic agency secured the throne of France for her son-in-law, Charles VII.

This volume explores a range of premodern rulers and their depictions in historiography, literature, art and material culture to gain a broader understanding of their sexualities. It considers the methodologies and motivations of premodern writers and rulers when fashioning royal and elite sexualities and offers new analyses of an array of texts and artwork from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean.

This volume explores a range of premodern rulers and their depictions in historiography, literature, art and material culture to gain a broader understanding of their sexualities. It considers the methodologies and motivations of premodern writers and rulers when fashioning royal and elite sexualities and offers new analyses of an array of texts and artwork from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean.

For scholars of medieval and early modern women, they offer a unique vantage point from which to study the intersections of elite women and popular understandings of the premodern world.

For scholars of medieval and early modern women, they offer a unique vantage point from which to study the intersections of elite women and popular understandings of the premodern world.

This book demonstrates that premodern elite and royal women were critical to the geopolitical success of late medieval territorial monarchies, the progenitors of early modern states. It aims to communicate the 'un-exceptionality' of female political influence in medieval and early modern Europe. Manifesting sophisticated and informed leadership in times of challenge and transformation, women such as Anne de France, her matrilineal line, and the elite women and girls in her orbit were key to early modern government, politics and diplomacy. Through a longue durée case study, this book examines generations of a premodern matriline culminating in Anne, beginning with Elisabetta di Carinzia and her daughter, Elionor de Sicília, continuing with Elionor's daughters-in-law, moving into the territories of the insular and peninsular kingdoms of Naples, into France with Elionor's granddaughter, Yolande d'Aragon, and into England with Yolande’s granddaughter, Marguerite d'Anjou, to influence and underwrite powerful and influential territorial monarchies. Together, these women, and the others discussed in this study, form an important part of Anne de France’s matrilineal heritage, providing her with a historical template of lived political experience on which to construct her own gendered political theory and practice.

This edited collection opens new ways to look at queenship in areas and countries not usually studied and reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary work and geographic range of the field.