East and West, Palgrave McMillan 2019
Queens of Poland are conspicuously absent from the study of European queenship—an absence which, together with early modern Poland’s marginal place in the historiography, results in a picture of European royal culture that can only be lopsided and incomplete. Katarzyna Kosior cuts through persistent stereotypes of an East-West dichotomy and a culturally isolated early modern Poland to offer a groundbreaking comparative study of royal ceremony in Poland and France. The ceremonies of becoming a Jagiellonian or Valois queen, analysed in their larger European context, illuminate the connections that bound together monarchical Europe. These ceremonies are a gateway to a fuller understanding of European royal culture, demonstrating that it is impossible to make claims about European queenship without considering eastern Europe.
Katarzyna Kosior is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Northumbria University, UK.
“This well-researched and venturesome book gives us a new way of thinking about royal women, power, ritual, and religion that should influence our thinking on these topics for a long time. Anyone working in the early modern period—or on women’s history, monarchy, power, rituals, or religion—will need now to consult and consider Kosior’s new model for royal culture.”
(Russell E. Martin, Professor of History, Westminster College, USA, author of A Bride for the Tsar)
Source: https://www.palgrave.com/
