Maureen Quilligan - When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe

Making the Renaissance in Europe

Maureen Quilligan

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

Independent Publishers Since 1923

To Maggie Malone and

Maisie Malone Shakman.

May they rule long and well.

I n 1558, when John Knox, the radical Scottish religious reformer, published his misogynist tract, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, he called attention to what was strangely true in the middle of the sixteenth century in Europe: a remarkable number of women had ascended to supreme governmental power. Knox was outraged and argued that To promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city is: A. Repugnant to nature. B. Contumely to GOD. C. The subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.

Knox was focused on two women then ruling in Britain: Marie de Guise, who was governing as regent for her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Mary Tudor, who had only five years earlier ascended to the throne to become the first independently ruling queen in England. At the time Knox wrote, Isabella of Castile had already ruled in Spain on her own, her husband Ferdinand of Aragon having no executive power whatsoever in her domain. She had been involved in the martial reconquest of Granada, and of course on her own had funded Columbuss first voyage to the New World. And even though France had outlawed rule by women with the Salic law, many women had exercised supreme power when they were acting as regents for sons or brothers. Many Hapsburg women assumed positions of great authority over the familys far-flung lands, including the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain; following his father Charles Vs lead, Philip II of Spain in particular continued to use his female relatives to administer a vast family network of European powers. Because his grandmother Isabella of Castile had ruled alone, he seems to have been more amenable to rule by women than other Renaissance royalty.

The Hapsburg dynasty, in fact, provides a paradigmatic example of how the exercise of vast administrative authority on the part of its women enables a family to achieve and maintain supreme political power. Margaret of Austria, Mary of Hungary, and Juana of Austria provided excellent exemplars of the regiment of women in Northern Europe. Although Knox ignored them in his tirade, they clearly had an important effect on Philip II of Spain. Related through close marriage ties to three of the ruling queens, and ruling throughout the same decades as they, experiencing the same history, he deserves a place in this history by offering an important gauge by which to judge the overall success of monarchy in the sixteenth century.

Catherine de Medici came to power two years after Knoxs blast, so she escaped his blistering opprobrium; she ruled France for twenty-nine years (156089) as La Reine Mre, mother of three French kings. Although Knox was using the term Regiment primarily to mean rule, or governance, in his provocative title he was also playing with a newer use of the term regiment, as if women were making a warlike attack on male dominance, against which a soldiers trumpet blast had become necessary.

With some nice historical irony, Queen Elizabeth I of Englandprobably the most famous of the women who ruled in sixteenth-century Europecame to power only a few short months after Knox published his rant. Although he tried to apologize to her as a Protestant queen, saying he only meant to interdict Catholic women rulers, she was profoundly offended by his anti-woman diatribe. She was not amused. In consequence, Elizabeth never allowed Knox to travel through her realm again. On the number of trips he took to and from Scotland and the continent thereafter, he always had to go around England by ship, a far more perilous way to travel.

However daunting Elizabeths rejection of him might have been, Knoxs First Blast has done history a real service by calling our attention to the remarkable number of European women who were in positions of premier authority in the sixteenth century and by suggesting that they were rightly to be understood as a regiment. Like fellow soldiers in a sororal troop, they did try to protect and aid each other, keeping each others backs, as it were, asking each other to aid any one of them who might be in peril. They called each other sistersin the case of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, they actually were sisters. Mary, Queen of Scots was also their first cousin once removed. Save for Catherine de Medici, they were all born royal, and their nearness to monarchal power that had descended to them through generations had given them divinely sanctioned authority to rule over men.

Rather than narrate the experiences of the remarkable number of individual women who exercised executive authority in sixteenth-century Europe, I have chosen to focus on these four, the best known women rulers, because their history has exerted the greatest influence and also because this history has previously been told from a prejudiced point of view.

It is possible to imagine a far different story for these queens not only because of recent developments in twentieth-century historiography; new scholarship, often by women, has delved into an untouched archive of evidence that Renaissance womens lives were culturally consequential at all levels of society. But a different story may now also be told because of recent (and heretofore underused) new anthropological theory that has rewritten the rules of human society. These very different new rules help us to understand the kinds of connections women create among themselves, connections that we have rejected as being beneath notice. In brief, women give each other gifts. The gifts are no mere signals of affection but are massively central agents in the creation of a steep social hierarchy that allows women to assume political authority powerful enough to trump their usually disabling gender. These gifts are inalienable possessions handed down the generations of a family, enlarging that familys social prestige, increasing it so much that the women of the family may ascend in time to positions of supreme political authority over men. Unlike the gifts men give each other that are meant to be widely circulated throughout society, gifts between women are meant to be possessed as private treasure forever, accruing vast social powers for the family over succeeding generations.