For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh, and: Medieval Gentlewoman: Life in a Gentry Household in the Later Middle Ages, and: Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, and: Young Medieval Women (review)

For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill. New Middle Ages Series. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, 221 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Medieval Gentlewoman: Life in a Gentry Household in the Later Middle Ages by Ffiona Swabey. New York: Routledge Press, 1999, 210 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, 270 pp., $49.95 hardcover.

Young Medieval Women edited by Katherine J. Lewis, Noel James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, 202 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

Elizabeth de Burgh, a fourteenth-century English noblewoman perhaps best known as the founder of Clare College, Cambridge, is the benefactor of all medievalists in the sense that her efficient management of her estates generated detailed records, unrivaled as sources for information about daily life, social relations, and cultural mores in her time and place. Moreover, she was conveniently related to all of the major players in the political upheavals of the late Plantagenets, and appears to have shrewdly used all of her available resources to protect and advance her legitimate interests during this tumultuous and threatening period. Frances Underhill, Professor of History Emerita, at the University of Richmond, takes a particular interest in the intersection of gender and power. Noting that women were excluded from royal service and military exploits--the usual routes to wealth, status, and power--she notes that Elizabeth and some of her women friends prospered by finding alternative avenues: "friendships, patronage of ecclesiastical and semi-clerical charities and foundations, exploitation of kinship ties and the practice of good lordship" (3).

Elizabeth was born in 1295, the daughter of Earl Gilbert de Clare of Gloucester and Joan of Acre, the daughter of Edward I. Her sister Margaret, married Piers Gaveston, whose relationship with Edward II brought him a spectacular ascent to influence and power but also an early execution at the hands of jealous magnates. Her sister Eleanor married Hugh Despenser, Junior, who likewise came to greatly influence the king, generated similar resentment, and was finally hanged as a traitor in 1326 when Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer returned to England with an invading army and captured the king. Elizabeth's marriages further complicated the tangle of personal loyalties and political alliances. Her first husband, John, was the heir to the earl of Ulster, and although he died young, Elizabeth appears to have maintained friendly ties with her former father-in-law, a useful ally in the political upheavals to come. She returned to England from Ulster in 1316, when heavy rainfall was disrupting the agricultural economy and the Scots were invading the northern part of the country. Soon thereafter, it appeared that Edward II was planning to marry Elizabeth to one of his favorites, but her abduction by Theobald de Verdon, and their marriage without the king's license, saved her from the matrimonial fate of her sisters. Underhill speculates that Elizabeth may well have conspired in her own "abduction." When Theobald died shortly after their marriage, the king again pressured her to accept a match of his design. As a widow, she lost access to her deceased husband's lands, and her ancestral home at Clare had not yet passed to her. She was forced to name attorneys to work on her behalf for return of her dower lands. In 1317, she conceded to the king's wishes and married Roger Damory, who was succeeded in the king's favor by Despenser and became a leader of the...