The initial phase of the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Project was intended to bring together scholars and postgraduate students to share their research on the economic agency and activity of queens and royal women. As the previous blog posts have noted, the three workshops provided an excellent opportunity for researchers in our network to not only present their individual findings but to have rich conversations about the connections between their work as well as note the divergences between the experiences of women living in different regions and centuries.

The numbers of researchers in our network grew steadily over the course of this initial phase, as we shared our activity and more scholars and students became aware of the project and wished to take part in the workshops. By the time the final workshop was complete our network included over 80 researchers, from very senior scholars to new graduate students, spread all over Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia. The call for papers for the Queen’s Resources conference was open to all and brought more researchers to share their work, expanding out numbers yet further and bringing links to South America and New Zealand as well. We are grateful for the support of Past & Present for a conference grant which was used to subsidise the fees for postgraduate students and early career scholars, enhancing their ability to participate in person at the event.

The diversity of the researchers and their research is reflected in the conference’s programme – we had a mix of full length (20-minute papers), lighting rounds of short 10-minute papers ideal for developing research and a special roundtable session to finish the event, which will be discussed further shortly. While our workshops had been completely online to make them feasible in terms of funding and the difficulties posed by the pandemic, our conference was a hybrid event, offering the first opportunity for researchers on the project to meet in person to exchange ideas over coffee and glasses of wine instead of solely via Zoom.

Coins Inscribed With Initials of Henry VIII’s First Three Wives © The Trustees of the British Museum

The conference started with a half-day session on 4 September, beginning with a session on account books as sources which reflected an ongoing theme of the project activities to dig into what kinds of sources are available to study the economic activity of royal women and the opportunities and challenges that we have in working with them. Following on we had our first lightning round, focused on the consorts of Henry VIII with four short papers which offered a rich comparative perspective on the lands of the Tudor consorts, the management of their dowers and the composition of their households and wider networks. The day was completed with an excellent keynote from Professor Katrin Keller (Vienna) who gave us an insightful discussion of the situation of princely women in the Holy Roman Empire, drawing on a wide range of examples including several princesses who were so wealthy and astute with their resources that they were able to provide crucial financial support in times of war. One particular example highlighted by Keller was Anna, Electress of Saxony, who was praised for her excellent understanding of economics and impressive management of finances by contemporaries claimed made her a true “Landes-Mutter”. Keller’s keynote gave much fodder for discussion in the wine reception which capped the first day’s events.

The second day, on 5 September, was intensive with four full sessions and two lightning rounds – a total of seventeen papers were given over the course of the day. As in the previous workshops, there was a strong emphasis on the dowers of queens and royal women – both in terms of the changing composition of these portfolios and the management and administrative elements of these landholdings. One of the major points of comparison over the workshops and conference is the point at which royal women had access to these dower lands and resources – whether it was accessible from the moment they wed their husband and/or the dower was granted, to provide an economic foundation for their household and expenditure, or if it was intended only to provide financial security for a widow during her dowager years. The papers given offered examples of both possibilities, taking in the situation of royal women from England, Iberia and Central Europe and noting how patterns of dower holding could change over time, as the English situation in the Middle Ages demonstrates. Another recurring element of the programme which linked to previous workshops was a session which drew out the vital financial basis of royal household, affinities, and networks, with papers that noted the two-way flow of money and financial gifts between royals and those who served them. A distinctive feature of Monday’s programme was a session on banking and credit which highlighted the often difficult relationship between queens and moneylenders – either due to the excessive debt of a royal woman as in the case of the Empress Maria or due to pressure placed on lenders by queens, leveraging their exalted position and kingly connections, to comply with their investment objectives as shown by the example of Eleanor of Castile.

The final half-day of the conference offered a strong session of papers which took in royal women in Sweden, Portugal and Central Europe, considering ‘island’ and ‘spider’ models of queenly networks, the challenging financial situation of illegitimate royal women and the agency of royal brides on their bridal journeys. The last session of the conference allowed us to collectively look forward to the next stage of the project, which focuses on a proposed database which will bring together our collective findings to date and enable further research on the economic activity of royal women in the future. To help us design this proposed database in the most effective way in order to achieve our shared research objectives, we invited a range of specialists who all had considerable experience in database design and digital humanities projects. As these experts were geographically very widespread, from North America, Scandinavia and Central Europe, most of them participated virtually, with the exception of Jason Sadler, who is based at the neighbouring University of Southampton and was able to join us in person. All six experts shared their experiences from their own projects and tips on the key considerations which were vital to ensure the success of the database which we hope to build.

We ended the conference on a note of collective excitement about what we could achieve together now that we had created this vibrant network of international researchers who are all interested in the financial activity and economic role of royal women. The next steps for the project is to produce output which reflect the strong research and lively discussions which were a feature of the workshops and conference in this phase of the project. Plans are already in the works for multiple collections and special issues which draw out key themes from the events of this phase including the political significance of royal dowries, the role of queens and royal women as ‘businesswomen’ and a deeper discussion of the key sources and main income from lands for studying their economic activity. In addition we aim to move forward our plans for the aforementioned database which will make the fantastic research highlighted in the events of this phase of the project accessible and enable greater comparative analysis as well as further investigations in the future. For details of the project and more information on our activities, past, present and future, visit the project website.

This post is the four in a series reflecting on the recent Queen’s Resources workshop series and conference. Part of the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe project.

Past & Present was pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.