From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples by Elizabeth Casteen (review)

Johanna I of Naples (r. 1343–82) is one of medieval Europe’s infrequent queens regnant, women who inherited a throne in their own right. Her reign presents a paradox: at nearly forty years, it represents an obvious case of successful female rule. Yet it was also the subject of scurrilous gossip among contemporaries who accused her of avarice, insatiable lust, and even the murder of her first husband (Andrew of Hungary). That depiction of Johanna has continued to dominate scholarly discourse about her, and Casteen’s book offers an important corrective.

As Casteen explains at the outset, “This is not a biography of a woman but of a reputation” (p. 26). Although she marshals an impressive array of primary and secondary sources to elucidate the details of Johanna’s life, her real concern is with fama and the performance of public identity. Casteen shows how Johanna herself, her allies, and her opponents all sought to use public opinion about her in their own interests, playing on stereotypes and changing their tactics to adapt to rapidly shifting circumstances.

Perhaps the book’s most valuable contribution is in its sensitive handling of medieval preconceptions about femininity. Johanna’s opponents made abundant use of negative tropes about women—their irrationality, their lust, their physical and moral weakness—to discredit her claim to authority. But Casteen also explores how Johanna and her partisans manipulated more positive constructions of femininity—such as piety, humility, and obedience—as a means to promote her power while seeming, rhetorically, to limit it. For example, Johanna assiduously portrayed herself as a loving and dutiful daughter of the pope. In doing so, she subsumed her own authority beneath his and paradoxically gained greater freedom of action insofar as she claimed to act on the pope’s behalf rather than her own.

This stratagem, although successful, could not survive Johanna’s entanglement in the Western Schism, when she shifted her allegiance from the Roman pope, Urban VI, to the Avignon pope, Clement VII. The decision turned many former friends and allies, including St. Catherine of Siena, against her and sparked new rounds of invective. Casteen analyzes the Clementist and Urbanist portrayals of Johanna, focusing on the use of rhetoric and reputation as weapons. The queen’s allies and adversaries both “[sought] explanations for her behavior in the glories or flaws of her sex” (p. 248). Their depictions of Johanna thus serve as a sort of referendum on the “woman question” in general, and on women in power more specifically. However, Casteen’s attention remains on rhetorical approaches to queenship rather than queenship in practice. So, for example, although she makes valuable observations about Johanna’s relationship to each of her four husbands, there is no place here for an in-depth study of the king consort’s role. Casteen expresses her own hope that other studies will take up such questions in the future.

The book concludes by contrasting Johanna’s posthumous reputation in Naples as a “she-wolf” (to use Boccaccio’s term) with her legacy in Provence, another part of her domains, where she was remembered as a pious, almost saintly, maternal figure. It is a testament to Casteen’s thorough and evenhanded scholarship that the reader is left not only convinced of the equal legitimacy of these two depictions but also unsurprised by their coexistence.