Theresa Earenfight, ed., Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: More than Just a Castle. Explorations in Medieval Culture 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. 416 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-251
Author(s):  
Charlotte A. Stanford
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe

This collection of sixteen essays examines the households of royal and aristocratic figures from the ninth through sixteenth centuries in Western Europe. Based on a variety of sources, ranging from economic records to letters, wills, legal charters, and inventories, the studies in this volume showcase the complexity of great households with their large cast of characters. While length restrictions make detailed discussion of individual essays impractical here, the different contributions complement each other along several thematic strands, notably court studies, economic history, and especially gender studies. Nine contributors focus on female households (Megan Welton, Penelope Nash, Linda E. Mitchell, Eileen Kim, Sally Fisher, Caroline Dunn, Manuela Santos Silva, Zita Rohr, and Theresa Earenfight), five on primarily male households (David McDermott, Alexander Brondarbit, Alana Lord, Audrey M. Thorstad, and Hélder Carvalhal), and one deals equally with the households of a king and queen (Isabel de Pina Baleiras). Many of the contributors focus on English material, although several essays give insights on France, Germany, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.

Royal Regencies in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, 1400–1700

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. William Monter
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
General Term ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Personal Authority ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Close Relatives

“Regent” is a convenient general term to describe persons temporarily replacing the official sovereign of a major state who was either too young to govern, physically absent for a lengthy period, or undeniably insane. Such surrogate rulers might serve anywhere from a few months to more than twenty years, and their powers varied with the circumstances for appointing them; adult princes living abroad tried to retain as much personal authority as possible. In Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, such representatives were generally close relatives of the sovereign, uncles or mothers being the most common choices. Male regents might make themselves sovereigns, usually through violence; this occurred four times between 1483 and 1683 in states as different as England and Russia (a fifth regent married his employer’s daughter). Or they might suffer violence themselves; three of Scotland’s four regents were either murdered or beheaded between 1570 and 1581. Entrusting regencies to women prevented both usurpation and violence, and Renaissance Europe saw an increasing acceptance of women as suitable regents, particularly in France—Europe’s only major kingdom that completely prohibited female succession. While both traditional types of female regents—mothers of underage boys and wives of absent kings—continued to serve in this capacity, one also finds aunts, sisters, daughters, and even a grandmother governing major states in western Europe by the time John Knox published his notorious First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. However, there were limits to accepting women as regents. No wife or female kin ever became the official substitute for a mentally incapacitated ruler, and female regents seem rare throughout northern and eastern Europe; Knox’s Scotland had many extremely long royal minorities, but no female regents before 1513 or after 1560.

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