All the King?s Women: Polygyny and Politics in Europe, 900?1250 by Rüdiger, Jan;

Series: The Northern World; 88;

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Product details:

Publisher BRILL
Date of Publication 24 September 2020

ISBN 9789004349513
Binding Hardback
No. of pages452 pages
Size 235x155 mm
Weight 812 g
Language English

Short description:

In All the King?s Women Jan Rüdiger investigates medieval elite polygyny and its ?uses? in Northern Europe with a comparative perspective on England and France as well as Iberia.

Long description:

Polygyny, in Europe? The grand narrative of Western history is the development of monogamous marriage, culminating in the central Middle Ages. Other kinds of relationships have often, perhaps too lightly, been dismissed as ?just lust?. In this book, Jan Rüdiger investigates the plurality of man-woman relationships in medieval Scandinavia and analyses the social and political ?uses? of elite polygyny.

By way of comparison the findings from the North are then applied to England, France, and the Iberian Peninsula, in order to propose a new overall image of elite polygyny, including marriage, in the medieval West.

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"All the King?s Women challenges the traditional historiographical emphasis on the role of marriage in elite political relationships, and offers
a much broader and more nuanced examination of a range of relationships with women in which elite men engaged. [...] Overall, this is a fascinating study that reveals a much greater flexibility than scholars heretofore have recognized in the ways in which elite men could use relationships with women of a variety of social and legal statuses to achieve a range of political goals. Although the majority of the study focuses on the north and draws on sources that are unique to the north, Rüdiger is successful in drawing significant parallels with other regions of Europe,
despite the persistence of important cultural differences. In light of Rüdiger?s findings, it is now incumbent upon historians of elite social and political history to reconsider the traditional focus on marriage as the only type of ?legitimate? union for rulers and magnates in other parts of Europe."
David S. Bachrach, in Francia 2021 (3).