Medieval Europe did not really have historians in the modern (or ancient Greek) sense of the word. It had chroniclers and propagandists. It was, in many ways, the original age of fake news. If it is hard for us today to interpret correctly the contradictory claims of the sources with regards to kings and popes, it is twice as hard to identify the thoughts and intentions of women, whose mere existence as political players was at best barely tolerated and at worst seen as an ab

How else can one try and recover the traces of the historical actions of medieval women? Apart from a few exceptions, writing was the preserve of men, often writing in monasteries, with a distant and at times distorted view of women as daughters of Eve. This is what makes the research on medieval women of power so interesting. Fate gave some of them access to power, but their tools were often blunt, as they did not write their own history. In the best cases, they managed to f