Never before have the women of the Capetian royal dynasty in France been the subject of a study in their own right. The new research in Capetian Women challenges old paradigms about the restricted roles of royal women, uncovering their influence in social, religious, cultural and even political spheres. The scholars in the volume consider medieval chroniclers' responses to the independent actions of royal women as well as modern historians' use of them as vehicles for constructing the past. The essays also delineate the creation of reginal identity through cultural practices such as religious patronage and the commissioning of manuscripts, tomb sculpture, and personal seals.

KATHLEEN NOLAN is Associate Editor of art history at Vanderbilt University, USA.

Introduction; K.Nolan Constance of Arles: A Study in Duty and Frustration; P.A.Adair Adelaide of Maurienne in History and Legend; L.L.Huneycutt The Tomb of Adelaide of Maurienne and the Visual Imagery of Capetian Queenship; K.Nolan A Capetian Queen as Street Demonstrator: Isabelle of Hainaut; A.G.Hornaday The Ingeborg Psalter: Queenship, Legitimacy, and the Appropriation of Byzantine Art in the West; K.Schowalter Blanche of Castile and Facingers Medieval Queenship: Reassessing the Argument; M.Shadis Queens as the Foreground for Aristocratic Anxiety in the Vie de Saint Louis; A.E.McCannon Queenship and Kinship in the French Bible Moralisée: the Example of Blanche of Castile and Vienna ÖNB 2554; T.Chapman Hamilton Isabelle of France and Religious Devotion at the Court of Louis IX; W.C.Jordan Isabella of France and her Manuscripts, 1308-1358; A.Rudloff Stanton Jeanne of Valois: The Power of a Consort; A.B.Mulder-Bakker Jeanne d'Evreux and the Queenly Transfigurations in Lineage in Valois France, 1328-71; B.Drake Boehm Historical Ironies in the Study of Capetian Women; K.A.LoPrete