Berengaria

Berengaria
Author: Ann Trindade
Publisher:
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Richard the Lionheart is one of the most famous of medieval heros, but what is known about the young woman he married, in Cyprus in May 1191, on the way to the Third Crusade? History has marginalized her, and popular tradition has all but overlooked her but the early sources, sparse though they are, reveal a woman of remarkable courage and tenacity who endured loneliness and hostility both as a queen consort and during her long years of widowhood. Her life tells us much about the fortunes of women in a male-dominated era and the role of a queen in the struggle between England and France at the time.

Berengaria of Navarre

Berengaria of Navarre
Author: Gabrielle Storey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2024-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040035833

Berengaria of Navarre was queen of England (1191–99) and lord of Le Mans (1204–30), but has received little attention in terms of a fully encompassing biography from Navarrese, Anglophone, and French perspectives. This book explores her political career whilst utilising the surviving documentation to demonstrate her personal and familial partnerships and life as a dowager queen. This biography follows Berengaria’s journey from a Navarrese infanta, raised in the northern Iberian kingdom, to her travels across Europe to marriage and the Third Crusade, venturing through Sicily, Cyprus, and on to the Holy Land in 1191. Berengaria’s reign and early years as dowager queen are examined in the context of the Anglo-French conflict and domestic disputes, before her decision to negotiate with the king of France, Philip Augustus, and become lord of Le Mans, for which she is far better known in local memory. The volume flows chronologically discussing her roles as infanta, queen, dowager, and lord, and is an ideal resource for scholars and those interested in the history of gender, queenship, lordship, and Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Moving Women Moving Objects (400–1500)

Moving Women Moving Objects (400–1500)
Author: Tracy Chapman Hamilton
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2019-08-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004399674

This collection forges new ground in the discussion of aristocratic and royal women, their relationships with their objects, and medieval geography. It explores how women’s geographic and familial networks spread well beyond the borders that defined men’s sense of region and how the movement of their belongings can reveal essential information about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces. Beginning in early medieval Scandinavia, ranging from Byzantium to Rus', and multiple lands in Western Europe up to 1500, the essays span a great spatio-temporal range. Moreover, the types of objects extend from traditionally studied works like manuscripts and sculpture to liturgical and secular ceremonial instruments, icons, and articles of personal adornment, such as textiles and jewelry, even including shoes.

Gender, Memory and Documentary Culture, C.900-1300

Gender, Memory and Documentary Culture, C.900-1300
Author: Customer Laura L Gathagan
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2025-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783277890

Considers the role gender played in the production, use and preservation of documents. How was the world of medieval documentation and memory creation affected by gender? This question is central to the essays collected here, which bring together aspects of gender and documentary culture that are usually studied only in isolation. Covering the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the volume offers a broad geographical reach - England, France, Flanders, Germany, Spain - and an array of sources, from charters, letters and court proceedings to seals, iconography, and illumination. There is a particular focus on lay female communities, including women's collective legal action in pre-Conquest England, documentary initiatives of Castilian peasant widows, and urban Flemish women's sealing practices. Re-examinations of noblewomen's centrality - and erasure - in charters focus on Ermengarde of Brittany, Mathilda of Boulogne and Berengaria of Navarre. Contributions on gender and historical writing explore their development in Ottonian courts, tenth-century English coronation portraits, Orderic Vitalis' Historia Ecclesiastica, and French chroniclers' rhetorical strategies for writing noblewomen's rage. Further chapters consider monastic spaces, including women's houses at Auxerre and Marcigny and at Holy Trinity, Caen, and explore women's memory preservation efforts, at Spanish houses - San Salvador de Oña and Santa María de Piasca - and a community at Bouxières. This volume demonstrates the new insights that can be gleaned by viewing various processes, such as legal disputes and monastic narratives and foundation, through a gendered lens.