Because female rulers have been so rare throughout recorded history, they have almost always been treated as isolated individuals. To the best of my knowledge, no previous work has tried to examine the political record of every female monarch throughout Europe across several centuries and attempt to discover long-term trends of female rule in European civilization. There is a useful resource, constantly updated, for identifying all sorts of politically influential women throughout history—<www.guide2womenleaders.com>—and several recent books have discussed “queenship.” However, because the academic field of gender studies rarely intersects with that of comparative politics, such works tend to collapse the political status of these women by failing to discriminate between divine-right female sovereigns and wives of kings with no formal political authority. Palgrave Macmillan offers a series entitled Queenship and Power, currently with ten titles either produced or announced. Half are about Elizabeth I of England; one of these—Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock, eds., Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (New York, 2010)—deals with Europe's only pair of autonomous old-regime female monarchs to reign consecutively. Among current feminist scholars, Sharon Jansen has provided the most ambitious recent attempts to survey female rule in early modern Europe. Both of her books, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2008), mix female sovereigns with female regents; more important, both promote a resolutely pessimistic view, which is the exact reverse of my approach.
Recent attempts by Charles Beem and the late Thierry Wanegffelen (2009) to place women rulers into broader historical contexts offer contrasting merits and defects. In The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Beem examined “the long view of female rulership as a particular category of English kingship” from the twelfth century to the twentieth, and he also introduced the useful phrase “female kings.” The greatest defect in his work is the limiting adjective “English” insularity prevents Beem from placing any of his subjects in the context of other contemporary female rulers throughout Europe. Wanegffelen's Le Pouvoir contesté: souveraines d'Europe à la Renaissance (Paris: Payot, 2008) reverses both Beem's shortcomings and his virtues; it offers a more cosmopolitan approach to a period that was unusually rich in female monarchs and regents, but it lacks Beem's chronological depth. Furthermore, because Wanegffelen remains centered in France, the most important kingdom in Europe to prohibit female inheritance, he (like Jansen) paints early modern Europe's widespread experiences with female rule in essentially negative colors. For very different reasons, neither Beem nor Wanegffelen pays much attention to the most important female sovereign of this era, England's Elizabeth I.
Although abundant scholarship surrounds Europe's most successful female rulers, all of whom have useful and often superb biographies in English, these women have nearly always been treated in isolation from each other. Only one author, Katharine Anthony, ever published well-researched and well-written biographies of two extremely successful European female monarchs from different countries and centuries, and she did so over eighty years ago. Both her Catherine the Great (New York, 1925) and her Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1929) have sold more than a hundred thousand copies, and both have been reprinted within the last decade (2003 and 2004). Neither biography mentions the other woman. The remainder of this survey lists the works—overwhelmingly biographies of individual women rulers—that I have found most useful for discussing the more important women rulers featured in each chapter. This selection privileges titles in English and French, although occasional titles in Spanish and German are included when they offer invaluable information not available elsewhere.
The best study of the first truly historical female sovereign is Joyce Tyldesley's Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (New York: Viking, 1996). Her Ptolemaic successor Cleopatra VII (r. 50–30 B.C.) ranks among the world's best known (if not necessarily best understood) female rulers, with new studies about her appearing almost annually. Two recent biographies, Duane Roller's Cleopatra: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 2010), provide serviceable introductions, while Joyce Tyldesley's Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (New York: Basic Books, 2008) examines her from an Egyptologist's perspective. Recent exhibitions, especially Susan Walker and Sally-Ann Ashton, eds., Cleopatra Reassessed (London: British Museum, 2003), also offer useful information on her reign, and Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra: Reading an Icon Historically, 2d ed. (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008), is informative on her representations.
On China's only female empress, Jonathan Clements, Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God (Stroud: Sutton, 2007), is lively and informative, but there is more political context in R. W. L. Guisso, Wu Tse T'ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T'ang China (Bellingham, Wash., 1978). On Japan's early female tennos, see Joan R. Piggott, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). On Byzantium, Judith Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), offers the best introduction. Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), provides a valuable introduction to women rulers in Islamic history. It must be supplemented by the essays in Gavin Hambly, ed., Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).
Historians of art and architecture have provided the most valuable approaches to the Christian female monarchs of the high Middle Ages. The most useful introduction to the reign of the Greek Orthodox Tamar of Georgia is Antony Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). For medieval Latin Christendom, the most enlightening work is Therese Martin, Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2006). A small bibliography has grown up around Martin's central figure, Urraca of Castile-León, since Bernard Reilly's The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); those who read Spanish can profit from Maria del Carmen Pallares Mendez, La Reina Urraca (San Sebastian, 2006).
Chapter 2
The last author to attempt any general discussion of female rulers in Western history was Mrs. [Anna] Jameson, whose two-volume Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (which she admitted might have been more properly entitled “Comparative Studies”) appeared at London in 1831. It intended “to present, in a small compass, an idea of the influence which a female government has had generally on men and nations, and of the influence which the possession of power has had individually on the female character” (ix–x). After 180 years, Jameson's choice of twelve major female monarchs still seems excellent: her first volume reached from Semiramis to Elizabeth I, and her second began with Christina of Sweden and ended with Catherine II. However, Jameson's questioning how far any woman sovereign could “render [her] inseparable defects as little injurious to society, and [her] peculiar virtues as little hurtful to herself, as possible” (xiii) predicted Queen Victoria almost perfectly but seems badly outdated today. I have tried to provide a general criterion for isolating de jure female rulers in states above the level of duchies in “Gendered Sovereignty: Numismatics and Female Rule in Europe, 1300–1800,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41 (2011), 533–64.
Chapter 3
There are few useful English-language biographies of Europe's late medieval royal heiresses, although its first major female monarch, Joanna I of Naples, has been examined recently both in a readable biography by Nancy Goldstone, The Lady Queen (New York: Walker, 2009), and in an unpublished doctoral thesis by Elizabeth Casteen (Northwestern University, 2009). The two most notable female sovereigns to emerge shortly after Joanna I's death also possess politically oriented biographies in English: St. Jadwiga, by the well-known Polish historian Oscar Halecki, Jadwiga of Anjou and the Rise of East Central Europe, ed. Thaddeus Gromada (Boulder: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, 1991), and the remarkable Scandinavian ruler Margaret of Denmark, by Vivian Etting, Queen Margrete I (1353–1412) and the Founding of the Nordic Union (Leiden: Brill, 2004). On the two female monarchs of fifteenth-century Cyprus, see essays by Peter Edbury and Joachim G. Joachim in David Hunt and Iro Hunt, eds., Caterina Cornaro: Queen of Cyprus (London: Trigraph, 1989); there is a French translation of the invaluable Egyptian sources on these events: M. Tahar Mansouri, Chypre dans les sources arabes médiévales (Nicosia, 2001).
For Isabel of Castile, the best introduction in English is Peggy Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Barbara Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), also contains useful insights. These supplement rather than replace the thousand-page biography by a Benedictine monk writing under the name Tarsicio de Azcona: Isabel la Católica: Estudio crítico de su vida y su reinado (Madrid: BAC, 1993); I have used the more recent 650-page abridgment, Isabel la Católica: Vida y reinado (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2004). The same scholar subsequently composed a lively defense of Isabel's doomed female rival: Tarsicio de Azcona, Juana de Castilla, mal llamada La Beltraneja: vida de la hija de Enrique IV de Castilla y su exilio en Portugal (1462–1530) (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2007). Isabel's successor has a revisionist biography in English: Bethany Aram, Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); the original Spanish edition, published in 2001, has a better preface. A fine study of joint rule in Navarre is Alvaro Adot Lerga, Juan de Albret y Catalina de Foix, o la defensa del Estado navarro (1483–1517) (Pamplona: Pamiela, 2005).
Apart from Catherine de Medici, the major female regents of early modern Europe lack recent biographies in English. The great sixteenth-century Netherlands regents have occasionally been treated together; chapters 3–7 of Helmut G. Koenigsberger, Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), provides a useful assessment of their political roles. Both Margaret of Austria and Mary of Hungary have had biographies by the same author: an earlier set in French by Ghislaine de Boom, published in 1936 and 1951, and later in Dutch by Jane de Iongh, with revised versions appearing in 1966 and 1981 (only the earlier versions of de Iongh's biographies have been translated into English, in 1953 and 1958, respectively). Margaret's most recent biographers are Austrian and French: Ursula Tamussino, Margarete von Osterreich: Diplomatin der Renaissance (Graz, 1995), and Jean-Pierre Soisson, Marguerite, Princesse de Bourgogne (Paris, 2002), while the outstanding modern biography of Mary of Hungary by Laetitia Gorter-van Royen is in Dutch. Recent international congresses devoted to each woman have generated some literature in English: Dagmar Eichberger, ed., Women of Distinction: Margaret of York/Margaret of Austria (Louvain: Brepols, 2005), and Orsolya Rethelyi, ed., Mary of Hungary: The Queen and Her Court 1521–1531 (Budapest: Budapest History Museum, 2005).
Spain's young mid-sixteenth-century female regent has a good biographer in Antonio Villacorta Baños-Garcia, La Jesuita (Barcelona: Planeta, 2005). Among the later Low Countries regents, useful biographies of Margaret of Parma exist in Dutch, Italian, and French, but not in English, while no English-language study of the long-serving archduchess and governor general Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia has appeared since 1910. Matters are very different with the prominent French female regents. There are a dozen serviceable biographies of Catherine de Medici in French, and an almost equal number in English. Among the former, that by Ivan Cloulas (Paris: Fayard, 1979) still ranks among the best, although it lacks footnotes; among the latter, that by R. J. Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici (London: Longman, 1998), is most recommendable. No equally recommendable modern life of Marie de Medici exists in English; the recent thousand-page effort by Jean-François Dubost, Marie de Medicis: la reine dévoilée (Paris: Payot, 2009), supersedes all its predecessors.
Chapter 5
Good Queen Bess seems an inexhaustible topic. English-language biographies of Elizabeth I continue to appear almost annually, but one should still begin with the classic life by Sir John Neale, first published in 1934 and never equipped with footnotes. Katharine Anthony's biography is even older (1929) but still worth reading. For purposes of studying female rule, the two outstanding recent explorations are Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), and Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). No less indispensable is the magnificent critical edition by Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); three additional volumes have since appeared from the same publisher, providing the foreign-language originals of Elizabeth's original compositions (2003) and two volumes of her own translations (both in 2009). She has been relatively little studied outside England and America, although a satisfactory French biography, Bernard Cottret, La monarchie au féminin: Elisabeth Ire d'Angleterre (Paris: Fayard, 2009), has recently appeared alongside two German theses: Ursula Machoczek, Die regierende Königin-Elizabeth I. von England: Aspekte weiblicher Herrschaft im 16. Jahrhundert (Pfaffenweiler, 1996), and Robert Valerius, Weibliche Herrschaft im 16. Jahrhundert: Die Regentschaft Elisabeths I. zwischen Realpolitik, Querelle des femmes und Kult der Virgin Queen (Herbolzheim, 2002).
Among Europe's other mid-sixteenth-century female rulers, Elizabeth's predecessor Mary Tudor remains politically incorrect and consequently has received relatively little attention until recently. The useful brief study by Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor (New York: Routledge, 2008), updates the classic biography by David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), later abridged and updated by Loades himself as Mary Tudor: The Tragical History of the First Queen of England (Kew: National Archives, 2006). For Scotland's Mary Stuart, the classic biography by Antonia Fraser, first published in 1969, still dominates the field through thirty reprints—although the resolutely negative portrait by Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: G. Philip, 1988), updated as Mary, Queen of Scots: Politics, Passion and a Kingdom Lost (New York: St. Martin's, 2001), is also worth reading. The last female monarch of Navarre is still best approached through the classic biography by Nancy L. Roelker, Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d'Albret, 1528–1572 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), although additional useful material has appeared subsequently in French.
In complete contrast to the erudite but insular Elizabeth I, biographies of Europe's next female monarch, Sweden's Queen Christina, have, like their subject, always been remarkably cosmopolitan. Even modern expositions about her have been unusually international; the organizing committee for a major exposition at Sweden's National Museum in 1966 represented ten European governments, including Vatican City-State. Since 1800 approximately equal numbers of biographies of Christina have appeared in German, English, and Swedish, followed closely by Italian and French. This trend persists into the twenty-first century. Verena von der Heyden-Rynsch, Christina von Schweden: Die rätselhafte monarchin (Weimar, 2000), has been translated into French (2001) and Spanish (2001), while other recent biographies have also appeared in Flemish (2001), Italian (2004), and Norwegian (2005). Her most notable recent biography, by Veronica Buckley, Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric (London: Fourth Estate, 2004), has already been translated into Swedish (2004), German (2005), and Italian (2006). The most provocative title remains Bernard Quilliet, Christine de Suède: un roi exceptionnel (Paris, 1982). All these biographies rely on an eighteenth-century Swedish scholar who collected information on her throughout Europe: J. Arckenholz, Mémoires concernant Christine, reine de Suède, 4 vols. (Amsterdam/Leipzig, 1751–60). The bulk of her personal papers, many still unpublished, gather dust in the library of the Medical Faculty of the University of Montpellier, where they must be consulted through a nineteenth-century manuscript inventory (H 587); a copy exists in Stockholm's National Library (Ms. U 205).
The few biographies of Mary II—none of them recent—present Europe's last female figurehead as a mere auxiliary to her husband: in English, Lady Hamilton, William's Mary (London, 1928); in Dutch, Jacqueline Doom, Die vrouw van de Stadhouder-Koenig, Mary Stuart II (Zaltbommel, 1968). Her recapitulatory memoir for 1688, in French, was found in the Netherlands and printed in Mary II, Lettres et Mémoires (The Hague, 1880). Those from 1689–93, in English, were printed from copies in the Hanoverian archives: Richard Doebner, ed., Memoirs of Mary, Queen of England (Leipzig, 1896).
Chapter 6
Both old and new scholarship on the greatest female monarch of Mitteleuropa, Austria's Maria Theresa, is predominantly in German. Still fundamental to any biographer is the unbelievably detailed ten-volume study of Alfred Ritter von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresiens (Vienna, 1863–79). Von Arneth also edited four volumes of Maria Theresa's letters to children and friends (Vienna, 1881); three volumes of her correspondence with her oldest son and successor, Joseph II (Vienna, 1867–68); and, in conjunction with the French scholar M. Geoffrey, three volumes of secret correspondence between Maria Theresa and the French court during Marie Antoinette's residence (Paris, 1874). New works about Maria Theresa, usually in German, appear almost annually, although none has yet emerged from von Arneth's shadow into international prominence. Meanwhile, the best available biographies in English, by Edward Crankshaw (New York: Viking, 1970) and the short study by C. A. Macartney in a series called “Men and Their Times” (London, 1969), are beginning to show their age alongside a solid French biography by Jean-Paul Bled (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
Among Europe's other eighteenth-century royal heiresses, England's last female monarch of the old regime has only one important biographer, Edward Gregg, whose Queen Anne (London: Routledge, 1980) was revised and reissued by Yale University Press in 2001. Sweden's Ulrika Eleanora remains mysterious to anyone unable to read Swedish; very few of her forty entries in Stockholm's National Library are genuine biographies, and only two brief funeral orations are in foreign languages. A recent work in English offers some information about Europe's final female monarch of the old regime: Jenifer Roberts, The Madness of Queen Maria: The Remarkable Life of Maria I of Portugal (Chippenham: Templeton Press, 2009).
Chapter 7
The French have traditionally been interested in Catherine II, including the recent biography by a female academician, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Catherine II: un âge d'or pour la Russie (Paris: Fayard, 2002), but the outstanding living expert on her writes in English. Isabel de Madariaga's exemplary life-and-times study, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981), preceded her brief sketch, Catherine the Great: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Also valuable is John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), provides a major contribution toward understanding the last two decades of her reign.
Russia's other women rulers have also been well served in English. Its first female autocrat has an excellent biography in English: Lindsay Hughes, Sophia: Regent of Russia 1657–1704 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). In 1997 Russia's leading eighteenth-century expert, Evgeny Anisimov, wrote a five-part collective biography in Russian, available in English as Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004). Anisimov's earlier study of Catherine II's immediate predecessor, published in 1986, is also available in English as Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her Russia, 1741–1761 (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1995), but Anisimov's revised version remains in Russian. Those who read French will enjoy Francine Lichtenhahn, Elisabeth Ire: l'autre impératrice (Paris: Fayard, 2007).
Chapter 8
Because so few women have become heads of state in recent times, collective studies of them are still unusual; a welcome exception is Blema Steinberg, Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008). For an introduction to twentieth-century American cinematic portrayals of women sovereigns, see Elizabeth Ford and Deborah Mitchell, Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007).