The New Murrey and Blue blog

Having enjoyed ‘Blood Sisters’ and ‘Game of Queens’ by Sarah Gristwood and Helen Castor’s ‘She-Wolves’, I was interested to read this book on the daughters of Edward I and it is very much in-line with their re-evaluations of the lives of aristocratic medieval and renaissance women and their too-often overlooked contributions to statecraft and diplomacy.

It seems unnecessary in 2021 to point out that women’s lives are and have always been valuable, demanding and multi-faceted or that our female ancestors didn’t merely marry, breed and die yet these books are more than biographies of long dead humans. There is still a very real need to re-evaluate these women when the contemporary source material was so focused on their male relatives that ‘history’ has brought us little more than a vague impression of their personalities, drives and accomplishments and when we still regularly come across commentators who barely mention the…