ABSTRACT

Perpetuation of the dynasty was of vital concern in hereditary monarchies, but not every royal couple could produce the much-needed heirs without substantial delay – if at all. Conventional wisdom in the Middle Ages was based on statements such as that of Alcuin, adviser to Emperor Charlemagne, in 793: ‘The king’s virtue equals the welfare of the whole people, victory by the army, good weather, fertility, male offspring, and health.’ 2 He was emphatic that without a queen to bear children, there would be no question of fertility, and therefore no male offspring, and by extension, nothing but humiliating defeat, bad weather and poor health. Alcuin’s comment highlights the fundamentally heteronormative attitudes towards sexuality that privileged childbearing as inherent to the institution of monarchy. Scholarly work on queens, notably that of John Carmi Parsons, has prioritized the importance of marriage and motherhood, a vital task for all married women in a pre-industrial society that depended on heirs to both secure the family line and increase household labour output. Other work argues that queenship can be seen as a type of motherhood, whether that involved physically bearing a child or metaphorically representing the realm as a family. 3 For English queens, maternal duty was part of the coronation oath (as was intercession, which was explicitly linked to maternity). Janet Nelson argues that royal maternity was the matrix of future kings, with the pregnant queen the guarantor of the realm’s survival and integrity and so of peace and control. Without a queen who provided an heir to give licit proof of his powers’ survival, a Christian monarch had no legitimate way to manifest his authority. 4 Charles Wood, looking a little further afield than the British Isles, argues that medieval society allowed greater political leeway to a royal mother than a wife, citing Eleanor of Aquitaine, Blanche of Castile and Isabella of France as queens with greater authority as mothers than as wives. 5 For regnant queens, such as Isabel I of Castile, emphasizing the feminine aspects of motherhood could offset the masculine practice of governance that stirred anxieties among their subjects. 6