To browse Academia. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female auth Methodologically, it attempts to integrate the study of gender into our understanding of high politics by demonstrating that gender performance and prevalent notions about femininity and masculinity shaped the French monarchy's ability to wield power.
As Katherine Crawford states, she hopes to explicate "how gendered assumptions allowed certain political moments to happen" 5. In addition, she seeks to rethink French political history by illustrating the surprising strength, malleability, and influence of France's repeated regencies: "Paradoxically, weakness and instability allowed regents to create new practices that strengthened the monarchy" 7.
Ultimately, Crawford aims to intertwine these two levels of analysis and illustrate the centrality of gender politics to the construction of the French state.
Crawford takes as her point of departure a fascinating characteristic of regencies that emerges from late medieval politics. At moments when the king was a minor, male relatives were suspected of wanting to increase their own powers or perhaps even bring about the king's demise so that they could inherit the throne themselves.
The queen mother, meanwhile, had a weak position as a woman and a foreigner, but, as Crawford argues, her feminine weakness could be a strength. According to the Salic law, no woman could inherit the throne.
