Early Modern
Telling Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sarah Gristwood
A couple of weeks ago, responding to a question from Vanya Eftimova Bellinger, I said that Sarah Gristwood’s Game of Queens and Blood Sisters:the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses transformed the way I think about women’s roles in medieval and early modern European power politics. I must admit that I reached out to…
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Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen
Sixteen century Irish clan leader Grace O’Malley was the most famous “pirate queen” in the English-speaking world, and in fact the woman for whom the term seems to have been coined. Ireland in the sixteenth century was a decentralized society, ruled by independent clan chieftains who were continually at war with each other. It…
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From the Archives: Isabella Who?
I recently took a little research detour to find out something about Isabella Jagellion, who has been popping up in my reading for roughly a year now, usually in the form of a one-liner to the effect that she was the first ruler in history to issue an edict of universal religious toleration in 1558–an…
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