Ana Maria SA Rodrigues he political history that has prevailed until a few decades ago was
based on the assumption that politics only involved men. Women were not supposed to
have exercised any kind of official power and one of the merits of women's history in its
prime was to bring to the public a great number of female rulers who had triumphed in a
male-dominated world." More recently, however, the broadening of the notion of power has
encouraged the study not only of the reigning queens, whose authority was inherited, but …