Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms, by Lucy K. Pick
Anthony John Lappin
Lucy Pick draws to a close her impressive study of royal females in the eleventh-century kingdom León with glance across Anglo-Saxon nunneries Ely, Barking, Wimbourne, Repton and slightly later house at Wilton, their strong connections daughters, putting them parallel similar developments Carolingian Francia and, perhaps crucially, under Ottonians. Princesses-becoming-abbesses is recurrent trope hagiography, but pains differentiate women she depicts from that hagiographic norm. The kings León, unlike weaker Iberian Christian rivals, preferred keep daughters unmarried. This state affairs came about, argues, because north-western Spain inherited (perhaps pre-Roman) matriarchal traditions, which sought circumvent: right rule passed down female line, inevitably converting sons-in-law into rivals throne, certainly bypassing direct male heirs. These Leonese princesses were thus...
The English Historical Review