Women who can — however tenuously — be described as ‘rebel girls' are big in publishing now. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls sold 3.5 million copies in hardback, reflecting a huge cultural push to discover and venerate women in history who kicked over the traces. To publishers, real-life rebel princesses have cool hard-cash value. In this context we come to this book, a scholarly work effortfully seeking out the ‘you-go-girl' moments of the notoriously woke 13th century.
Kelcey Wilson-Lee, who has a doctorate in medieval history from Royal Holloway and works in the development office at Cambridge University overseeing regional philanthropy, has an underlying agenda. But she also has the academic chops to execute it carefully, brushing off apocrypha and relying on contemporary records: wardrobe accounts, psalters, letters and seals. She imagines the experiences of the sisters who are the subject of Daughters of Chivalry with empathy and patience,as they jolt through endless wet horseback journeys while pregnant or recline on cushions in coaches, and ably manages to coax the few sparks of evidence into flames of personality.
To start with the book's subtitle: yes, the children of Edward I are largely forgotten, but one is reminded of their mother, Eleanor of Castile, every time one takes a train from Charing Cross. (Her son Edward II comes to mind every time one pokes a fire, but that's for later.) The Victorians rebuilt Eleanor's monument because as well as having a passion for Gothic revivalism they were moved by the love story of uxorious Edward and his pious Eleanor, who had 16 children and went on two failed Crusades together. With her interest in playing chess and a personal team of scribes, she seems to have managed to construct a family setting in which her daughters had a real — if sometimes Lear-like — relationship with their father. But our age finds dutiful Eleanor deathly dull, so it's her unpredictable daughters who get the accolade of a book.
Five of them survived to adulthood —not little Berengaria, who sadly never had a chance to show that girls can surf, whatever the patriarchy says — but Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth. All experienced dramas straight out of Game of Thrones,that TV parody of high medievalism. Eleanora, the eldest, arriving at a jousting tournament to celebrate her wedding, saw her famed father-in-law, the Duke of Brabant, champion of some 70 jousting matches, wounded so badly he died. Welcome to France, girl!
Wilson-Lee always recognizes as normal the highly circumscribed nature of their lives, while picking out their moments of rebellion with barely contained delight. Mary, who spent her life in the nunnery at Amesbury after being sent there aged six, nevertheless spent huge amounts expressing her personality via the medium of rich clothes, jewels and gambling debts.
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