Medieval She-Wolves

Ruthless, methodical, direct, unrelenting, driven. Just some of the words that might be used to describe some of the most powerful and influential women of the long, dark medieval era. Of course different terms may have been used about them at the time. Manipulative, conniving, duplicitous, power-hungry and so on. In fact such terms were probably still being passed around until fairly recently when we began to reassess centuries of gender-driven bias against these women.

Does that alone make them people to be admired? No, not necessarily. No more than we might admire the men of this era who were similarly motivated or compelled towards power. Their stories are, however, hugely compelling and are hard to view without some admiration given the societal hurdles they were forced to overcome in a world where power more often than not lay in the hands of men. Still, the medieval queens and consorts navigated the halls of power and managed to carve for themselves some portion of political influence that was not only used to protect themselves against the tides of fortune that might otherwise scupper them, but used as a foundation from which they struck out and made advances for themselves.

Such women, who came to be deemed she-wolves as a derogatory epithet, a term that has been somewhat reclaimed as an empowering association in the centuries since, remain massively interesting figures. And with the success of shows like with its fictional versions of similarly powerful and driven women, we can’t help but think that they remain as influential now on our understanding of the way women are expected to wield power as they would have been in their own time. So, what follows is a series of profiles on some of the most important ‘she-wolves’ of medieval history from the 10th to the