The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 by Wiliam Monter (review)

Monter takes the longue durée approach in his comprehensive study of European female rulers during the half millennium from 1300 to 1800. As the title suggests, this is not a book about queens; Monter confines his study mostly to sovereign women who served as legitimate heads of state from the high Middle Ages to the dawn of the modern era. He employs the term female king, first suggested in this reviewer's 2006 work, The Lioness Roared, to emphasize the fact that these women fulfilled the office of king, rather than the role of queen.¹ But Monter's approach is remarkably different from other scholars who have written about European female rulers in a similar fashion, such as Earenfight and Crawford, who employed gender analysis and feminist theory in order to explain the phenomenon of female rule.² In contrast, Monter seemingly has no use for feminist modes of analysis. Freeing himself from the restraints of theory, Monter attempts to impose an analytical approach to his topic that is occasionally contradictory. Claiming that conventional political theory is not helpful in analyzing female kings, he tries to downplay the differences between how male and female kings ruled, although much of the body of evidence offered suggests that men and women did, in fact, rule differently from each other. More salutary is Monter's use of numismatic evidence, which provides an informative portal into the ways in which female kings created iconographic representations of themselves in coins, medals, and other forms of literary and cultural texts.

Although this book lacks a recognizable analytical framework, Monter constructs a sort of roughly chronological quantitative interpretation—perhaps not the best approach to a historical problem that is by nature qualitative. Monter identifies two distinct phases of female rule, with the year 1500 as the chronological dividing line. In the first phase, characterized by a succession of female kings in the tiny kingdom of Navarre, the solution consisted of female heiresses jointly sharing power with husbands who functioned as reigning kings. But in the second phase, joint sovereignty became the exception rather than the rule; early modern monarchs such as Elizabeth I of England, Christina of Sweden, Queen Anne of Great Britain, and an entire procession of Russian empresses discarded the male consort entirely. In the final pages of this book, Monter's narrative about the discussion of Catherine II (The Great) of Russia becomes animated, exhibiting a level of enthusiasm normally reserved for Elizabeth I of England. It describes the remarkable career of a woman who defied the odds to emerge as possibly the most unfettered female sovereign in history, a fitting conclusion to this informative and well-written study.