When Women Ruled the World
Making the Renaissance in Europe
In this game-changing revisionist history, a leading scholar of the Renaissance shows how four powerful women redefined the culture of European monarchy in the glorious sixteenth century. The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of chronic destabilization in which institutions of traditional authority were challenged and religious wars seemed unending. Yet it also witnessed the remarkable flowering of a pacifist culture, cultivated by a cohort of extraordinary women rulers—most notably, Mary Tudor; Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Catherine de’ Medici—whose lives were intertwined not only by blood and marriage, but by a shared recognition that their premier places in the world of just a few dozen European monarchs required them to bond together, as women, against the forces…
Maureen Quilliganis R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Duke University. The author of books about medieval and Renaissance literature, she was also coeditor of the groundbreaking essay collection Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe.