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of Austria had lived in four realms by her early twenties, Elizabeth Tudor never set foot outside her own land. Neither woman bore a living child, yet Margaret would become known as ‘ La Grande Mère de l’Europe’ , while Elizabeth’s preferred identity was famously that of virgin.
    The Reformation drove fault lines across the continent, while conversely giving to some of these women a fame more enduring than they might otherwise have enjoyed. This book was born, though I didn’t realise it, when as a teenager I read Garrett Mattingly’s classic The Defeat of the Spanish Armada and noted his passing comment that in 1587, the year of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, sixty years had passed since the parties of religion had begun to form, the old versus the new, ‘and always by some trick of Fate one party or the other and usually both, had been rallied and led by a woman’.
     
    In the so-called gynocracy debate, concerning women’s fitness for authority, two writers influenced the political thinking of the times to a degree that requires special mention. One, of course, was Niccolò Machiavelli, whose The Prince was first privately distributed in 1513. The second is Christine de Pizan, the French-Italian author and some would argue, early feminist: the first woman to become a professional writer. Her work of the early fifteenth century, The Book of the City of Ladies , had lost none of its relevance by the sixteenth century (or even, perhaps, the twenty-first), as the interest demonstrated by a number of women in this story goes to prove. Anne de Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy inherited copies of Christine’s work, while Margaret of Austria’s three-volume set would have passed to her niece, Mary of Hungary. Anne of Brittany and Margaret of Austria also owned suites of tapestries based on the City of Ladies , as did Elizabeth Tudor. All too aware of the clerical portrayal of women as Eve’s daughters, weak and essentially untrust-worthy, Christine gives into the mouth of Justice a rebuttal of ‘certain authors’ who ‘criticise women so much’, pointing out that there is ‘little criticism of women in the holy legends and the stories of Jesus Christ and his Apostles’, despite what Christ’s later servants might say.
    Machiavelli, who portrayed fickle Fortune as a woman, saw war as a prince’s first duty, as well as pleasure. By contrast, Christine’s model of the virtuous ruler downplayed the ruler’s role as warlord (a practical problem for the female ruler, leaving aside the question of any innately pacific tendencies) and stressed the ‘prudence’ which, in the Aristotelian concept, was the entry point of all the other virtues. Prudence was a virtue attributed to the majority of these women, and The Book of the City of Ladies made a point of describing a number of women from both ancient and more recent French history who had successfully governed nations or territories.
    The continuity of experience – the repetition of tropes and patterns through the century – is something of a theme of this book. Most can be allowed to manifest themselves through the course of the narrative but one is so insistent as to require special note: the question of how frequently debate about these powerful women centres on their bodies. Each of these women would prove to have a role beyond the usual consort’s function of a breeding machine but nonetheless the story abounds with questions of debated virginity and fertility, of women most easily attacked through querying their chastity or their desirability. Questions, even, as to whether the division of a sovereign’s body natural and body politic might not be the best way to allow female rule. This was perhaps the idea behind Elizabeth I’s famous speech at Tilbury: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king . . .’
    Though the forceful women of fifteenth-century Italy are sadly beyond the scope of this