Traditional scholarship argues that the changes fostered by the growth of royal power and feudalism in Western Europe directly impacted women's public power and authority in the later twelfth and ...thirteenth centuries. Focusing on the inheriting countesses of Boulogne (1160-1260) and their neighbours in northern France, this monograph investigates the influence of the rise of centralized government on elite women's power. This chronological and comparative analysis highlights successive countesses' governance of inherited lands, the roles they played in their spouses' lands and in political affairs outside their inherited lands, along with crucial assessments of the social identity and status of the family. It challenges the established interpretation and shows that the establishment of feudalism and the elaboration of bureaucracy did not curtail elite women's access to or exercise of lordship to any significant degree.
Captive of the Labyrinth is reissued here to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester in 1922. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband ...in 1881, Winchester purchased a simple farmhouse in San JosÉ, California. She built additions to the house and continued construction for the next twenty years. When neighbors and the local press could not imagine her motivations, they invented fanciful ones of their own. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San JosÉ house was done to thwart death and appease the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle. Author and historian Mary Jo Ignoffo's definitive biography unearths the truth about this reclusive eccentric, revealing that she was not a maddened spiritualist driven by remorse but an intelligent, articulate woman who sought to protect her private life amidst the chaos of her public existence and the social mores of the time. The author takes readers through Winchester's several homes, explores her private life, and, by excerpting from personal correspondence, one learns the widow's true priority was not dissipating her fortune on the mansion in San JosÉ but endowing a hospital to eradicate a dread disease. Sarah Winchester has been exploited for profit for over a century, but Captive of the Labyrinth finally puts to rest the myths about this American heiress, and, in the process, uncovers her true legacies.
An alderman of fifteenth-century London had to be worth £1000, and the lower civic ranks were not immune from financial evaluation. A wealthy marriage could propel a man up the civic hierarchy, and ...it was the best source of capital with which to trade. The richest catch was a widow, with or without children, for London custom protected the estates of both, and there was a plentiful supply of widows. Examples are culled from the 181 aldermen from 1400-1499, and show the coincidence of election with marriage. Some of the wealthiest widows were mayoresses more than once.
