Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda: Medieval Female Rulership and the Foundations of European Society by Penelope Nash (review)

In so many ways, Penelope Nash's first monograph is a very useful and welcome addition to Palgrave Macmillan's 'Queenship and Power' Series. Its user-friendly and eminently instructive 'Notes on Names' (pp. xv–xvi) and the inclusion of detailed and accurate chronologies for Nash's 'masterful and formidable ladies' are a boon to the reader, especially if one is not entirely au fait with Ottonian queens and empresses of the early to High European Middle Ages (pp. xvii–xxii). These handy tools are followed by a map of 'Adelheid's and Matilda's World' (p. xxiii), and the two well-drafted genealogical tables, respectively of 'Adelheid's and Matilda's Family Connections and the Burgundian Rudolfings' and 'Adelheid's and Matilda's Family Connections and the Liudolfings' are indispensable assets to those of us navigating our way through unfamiliar waters. Additional maps are contextualized and included to assist the reader in the more complicated parts of Nash's analysis (pp. 101, 144, 147, 165, 170, 174), Nash moreover providing the reader with detailed notes, a very helpful index, and an extensive bibliography. However, in the interests of a fair and balanced reading of Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda, there are several issues to be highlighted to frame both the merits and shortcomings of Nash's very interesting study.

While this reader is by no means a specialist historian of Ottonian royal women, in Chapter 1 'Masterful and Formidable Ladies', Nash's uncritical acceptance of the paradigm that 'changes in the eleventh century' (p. 6) in European polities excluded women from power and influence is somewhat troubling. Her over-reliance on the half-century-old interpretive methodologies of Georges Duby, Richard Southern, Carl Leyser, David Herlihy, and others is strikingly démodé. Like the refuted conclusions of Marion Facinger, the work of scholars such as Miriam Shadis and Theresa Earenfight have consigned such interpretive methodologies to the dustbin of women's history. Moreover, because medieval and early modern European power structures were anchored in the domestic orbit of the dynastic family and its households, the most effective way to 'retrieve' a woman's political agency and influence is to refer to her family, her lineage, her kinship, her networks, and the structure and nature of her domestic household.

This Nash does in part towards the end of Chapter 2, 'Kin and Kith: Keeping Friends and Placating Enemies', and her central paradigm discussed supraseems not to hold in light of this ostensible disconnect. The other slightly discordant feature of Nash's study is the inclusion of an anthropological framework of comparison, highlighting the case of the Arrernte people of Central Australia (pp. 15–16) to make a point about the weakening of property rights and mutual obligations to family members as they aged. Apart from the intrusion into her discourse of this 'right-thinking' anthropological model, she never engages with it again, providing the reader with no real basis for weaving this anachronistic example into the fabric of a discussion pertaining to tenth- and eleventh-century conceptions of property rights and familial obligations within the Empire. Nash's digression is interesting, but it adds very little to the context of the protagonists she has chosen to compare. The role played by governments is hardly mentioned, which is surprising in light of current scholarship pointing to the intersection of public and private spheres in premodern polities. None of this is to denigrate the considerable amount of useful and engaging information to be had from this chapter. It just does not seem to be woven together tightly enough by a unifying argument.

Chapter 3 presents the reader with a relatively brief foray into 'Land: Building and Maintaining a Property Portfolio'—of interest to aspirational Sydney-siders and medieval royal women both. Nash structures her analysis...