Gendered Sovereignty: Numismatics and Female Monarchs in Europe, 1300–1800

Coins have provided specific and concrete markers of official, legitimate political sovereignty since the time of the Roman Empire. Europe’s female monarchs of the old regime, a group that has not been much studied, used numismatics in effective ways to enhance their official sovereignty. Throughout the entire period, most royal heiresses were married, and despite a persistent and widely circulated literature that preached wifely subservience, their coins (and, later, their medals) suggest their full political autonomy.