Medici Women

This volume of ten essays, edited by Judith C. Brown and Giovanna Benadusi, focuses on nine women—six outsiders who married into the Medici dynasty, and three Medici princesses who married into other princely families. The absences, perhaps surprisingly, are the two most famous Medici women of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—the French queen consorts, Catherine and Marie. That is not to deny the considerable value of this cohesive collection, as an exploration of the Medici family in European dynastic politics through the specific roles played by various female members. Throughout the collection there is an understandable emphasis on gender. The introduction sets the pitch emphatically, with a clear historiographical survey that looks back ultimately to the great eighteenth-century histories of the Medici, considering how Medici women have been marginalised over the course of more than two hundred years. As the introductory essay also notes, the balances in more recent scholarship have quite rightly shifted, and considerably more attention is paid now to female agency in court history across Europe more broadly; it might be added, the suggestions (made a couple of times in the volume) that the subject of female princely power remains an unstudied aspect of court history seem slightly wide of the mark in this respect

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