> [H]ad Henry left the crown to a 33-year-old, intelligent, well-educated, politically experienced son, such a situation would not have arisen.
> However, even such a decisive military victory was not enough to overturn a genuinely deep-seated prejudice against a female monarch.
Clearly prejudice, and lack of precedent, materially hampered Matilda's attempt at the throne, but speculative and reductive statements like these carry a whiff of dubious history. It gives the impression that Matilda's failed succession hinged uniquely on her gender, when her own father Henry I only gained power after a long and violent succession struggle involving both of his siblings. I assume the author's book goes into much greater detail on the many reasons Matilda's succession never achieved critical mass in England, but I think this short an article is probably worse for giving so much emphasis to this particular detail.
>Designating a woman as his successor was such an unprecedented action that Henry felt obliged to compel his nobles, barons and churchmen to swear an oath of allegiance to Matilda. All of them did so, although some complied with greater reluctance than others. [...] her cousin Stephen (a younger son of Henry’s sister Adela, dowager countess of Blois) had rushed to England, seized the royal treasury and had himself crowned.
How refreshing to read something on my phone away from pihole which is actually prose and accompanying images, rather than thousands of adverts for al the trashiest scammiest adverts going and if you’re lucky a few sentences between
> The double standards are evident when we consider that all of this would sound ludicrous if aimed at a man who had been proclaimed king...
I don't know about that, the quoted criticisms sound a lot like those that would be levelled at a king too. The issue is more that nobody expects a man to care, even a little bit, if someone accuses him of being crude and arbitrary in his search for power. Obviously it is gendered, but the actual complaints are generic. Anyone with serious power has to bat through things like that.
I can give an example by swapping in Trump. The criticism holds up with a gender swap, adjusted for the fact that by default we expect a man to be in the office so it isn't explicitly gendered. This sounds like stock criticism of him that might turn up in any political conversation.
[Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.
No, the gender role stuff is absolutely critical and you can't just handwave it away. Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870.
In particular, the belief that a married woman had no agency separate from her husband, who would then be de facto king, continued all the way up to Elisabeth II. Much reduced and not ultimately a problem, but it was still discussed at the time of her coronation.
What is more interesting in all this is the reminder of the succession crisis. Monarchy is "supposed to" reduce chaotic power struggles like this by making it unambiguous, but quite often the English succession was disputed or passed down through a second degree relationship.
It's not a handwave - the article doesn't offer anything to handwave away. The article says that she was offered specifically gendered criticism, then quotes generic criticism.
I'm sure being a woman counted against her, bit if the article is going to put up a quote as evidence of sexism then it shouldn't be a passage that can be realistically adapted to any politician ever. If the article had a passage that says "we can't let this woman be king, she can't even own property!" that would be different. But the quote in the article doesn't sound ludicrous when applied to a man. It sounds like something that is routinely said of men in positions of power.
It could even keep the superficial gendering if you wanted it to, there is a lot of argument that men in positions of power should be exhibiting positive masculine bearing (stoicism, accountability, honour, etc, etc) that politicians routinely fail at to great public outcry.
I’m struggling to follow your point. The article isn’t giving a major thesis on why medieval people thought Matilda couldn’t rule England. From the perspective of the barons at the time, Matilda couldn’t be queen in her own right because women can’t rule. They didn’t think any deeper than that.
My point is the article claimed it would show evidence of something when in fact it did not. It should either not have bothered to include evidence or found better evidence
That's not sexist though, it is just equivalent to noting she's a woman (like calling her "her" and "she") because we can reasonably offer the same criticism about a man. A man can have an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the controlled gait and bearing proper to a man. And adjusting for language drift people do, I remember one criticism of Biden being that he walked in a frail way and fell over a lot - literally complaints about his gait and bearing giving a bad impression. Not a very strong criticism but he was male and it was made.
We might reasonably infer that she got called arrogant for doing something that wouldn't be considered arrogance in a man, but the article has unhelpfully elided that detail. But we've got to admit she might have actually been unusually arrogant, that does happen from time to time.
Er… no it didn’t? It just said the criticism being based on her womanhood was evident because of <reason>, it never promised to prove it, it was just a rhetorical device and they expect the reader to know the information already.
If you want to learn more about early medieval attitudes to women and power in England, it’s on you to learn, not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
> not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
Yes but that is my point. They're making the article longer by including evidence that undermines its claims. They should have either made the claim and let it stand without evidence, or they should have aligned what they said to the evidence they felt was worth including.
If they're going to claim gendered criticism then hold up generic criticism as the best example of criticism it confuses the picture. Assuming that there was gendered criticism happening somewhere off to the side out of sight, was that the decisive criticism? Or was it the criticisms that the article writer felt were important enough to include in the article?
Because the impression the article is giving is that people weren't complaining about her gender, but the fact she was behaving arbitrarily and arrogantly. That is good reason not to put a man in charge too - if you see a man acting arbitrarily and arrogantly it is also a mistake to put him in charge of anything and he would be criticised for it. I do that all the time, there are a lot of unprincipled men in politics who should be called out for their hubris. And they are.
Now it may be that what she was doing wouldn't be considered arrogance and hubris in a man (we don't know exactly because the article is short) but "double standards" and "sound ludicrous if aimed at a man" are simply not true. We hold men to the same standard and make the same criticisms of them.
The substance of your objection is “these criticisms are regularly levelled at men today,” and you skip the part that 900 years have passed since they were levelled at Matilda. You then demand the article provide evidence to overcome this comparison you have been 12th century norms and 21st century norms? Really?
Let me repeat: this is not intended as a thesis. It’s a small historical tale to explain the background of a period of time in early mediaeval England. It assumes you know how women were viewed during that time period and the example provides flavour. If you want to contradict its claims, just post the articles that shows differently.
Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.
Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.
I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.
I do think it’s fair to point out that both of these postage Matilda by a few hundred years. I’m actually struggling to think of many Christian European kingdoms that would have at this point.
France only had kings at that point (in fact, Matilda’s son Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Acquitaine comes about because she didn’t give the king of France a son!)
Germany (HRE) selected their emperor so didn’t have succession problems in that sense.
Italy was a collection of city states, Naples was yet to form a kingdom.
Maybe Poland had an earlier queen? But then I don’t know if English nobles paid much attention to Poland, to be honest!
it seems like the rest of the world (India, China, Thailand, Egypt, ...) had female monarchs of various sorts ('queen regnant' seems like a relevant terminology here, I'm not sure).
The closest ones to Europe (discounting ancient Egypt?) might be:
So there were some texts later discussing the problems of Elizabeth I being Queen Regnant when all laws and customs referred to a “King.” We also see a lot of her father’s behaviour (Henry VIII) being driven by his need for a male heir. It’s why he tries to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Further, there were specific reasons why Elizabeth I was treated differently to her father. For example, Henry VIII used to meet with counsellors when he woke up in the morning, still in bed. For obvious reasons, this was not done when his daughter reigned.
I think that’s more the western world. With no evil empire to compete against the decadence and greed gives the opportunity to shine through. No longer do you have to claim “our most unfortunate citizens are better off than 90% of your population”.
> [H]ad Henry left the crown to a 33-year-old, intelligent, well-educated, politically experienced son, such a situation would not have arisen.
> However, even such a decisive military victory was not enough to overturn a genuinely deep-seated prejudice against a female monarch.
Clearly prejudice, and lack of precedent, materially hampered Matilda's attempt at the throne, but speculative and reductive statements like these carry a whiff of dubious history. It gives the impression that Matilda's failed succession hinged uniquely on her gender, when her own father Henry I only gained power after a long and violent succession struggle involving both of his siblings. I assume the author's book goes into much greater detail on the many reasons Matilda's succession never achieved critical mass in England, but I think this short an article is probably worse for giving so much emphasis to this particular detail.
>Designating a woman as his successor was such an unprecedented action that Henry felt obliged to compel his nobles, barons and churchmen to swear an oath of allegiance to Matilda. All of them did so, although some complied with greater reluctance than others. [...] her cousin Stephen (a younger son of Henry’s sister Adela, dowager countess of Blois) had rushed to England, seized the royal treasury and had himself crowned.
G.R.R.M.: it's free real estate
How refreshing to read something on my phone away from pihole which is actually prose and accompanying images, rather than thousands of adverts for al the trashiest scammiest adverts going and if you’re lucky a few sentences between
> For the first time since 1066, the death of an English king did not result in an undignified scramble for the throne
Yes 1066 was a peaceful transition and certainly not a scramble
The naming in this one is so confusing
> The double standards are evident when we consider that all of this would sound ludicrous if aimed at a man who had been proclaimed king...
I don't know about that, the quoted criticisms sound a lot like those that would be levelled at a king too. The issue is more that nobody expects a man to care, even a little bit, if someone accuses him of being crude and arbitrary in his search for power. Obviously it is gendered, but the actual complaints are generic. Anyone with serious power has to bat through things like that.
I can give an example by swapping in Trump. The criticism holds up with a gender swap, adjusted for the fact that by default we expect a man to be in the office so it isn't explicitly gendered. This sounds like stock criticism of him that might turn up in any political conversation.
[Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.
No, the gender role stuff is absolutely critical and you can't just handwave it away. Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870.
In particular, the belief that a married woman had no agency separate from her husband, who would then be de facto king, continued all the way up to Elisabeth II. Much reduced and not ultimately a problem, but it was still discussed at the time of her coronation.
What is more interesting in all this is the reminder of the succession crisis. Monarchy is "supposed to" reduce chaotic power struggles like this by making it unambiguous, but quite often the English succession was disputed or passed down through a second degree relationship.
It's not a handwave - the article doesn't offer anything to handwave away. The article says that she was offered specifically gendered criticism, then quotes generic criticism.
I'm sure being a woman counted against her, bit if the article is going to put up a quote as evidence of sexism then it shouldn't be a passage that can be realistically adapted to any politician ever. If the article had a passage that says "we can't let this woman be king, she can't even own property!" that would be different. But the quote in the article doesn't sound ludicrous when applied to a man. It sounds like something that is routinely said of men in positions of power.
It could even keep the superficial gendering if you wanted it to, there is a lot of argument that men in positions of power should be exhibiting positive masculine bearing (stoicism, accountability, honour, etc, etc) that politicians routinely fail at to great public outcry.
I’m struggling to follow your point. The article isn’t giving a major thesis on why medieval people thought Matilda couldn’t rule England. From the perspective of the barons at the time, Matilda couldn’t be queen in her own right because women can’t rule. They didn’t think any deeper than that.
My point is the article claimed it would show evidence of something when in fact it did not. It should either not have bothered to include evidence or found better evidence
Evidence such as this quote?
> an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex
That is, the 'Gesta Stephani' is claiming that she should not be arrogant because it is not proper, because she is a woman.
That evidence?
That's not sexist though, it is just equivalent to noting she's a woman (like calling her "her" and "she") because we can reasonably offer the same criticism about a man. A man can have an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the controlled gait and bearing proper to a man. And adjusting for language drift people do, I remember one criticism of Biden being that he walked in a frail way and fell over a lot - literally complaints about his gait and bearing giving a bad impression. Not a very strong criticism but he was male and it was made.
We might reasonably infer that she got called arrogant for doing something that wouldn't be considered arrogance in a man, but the article has unhelpfully elided that detail. But we've got to admit she might have actually been unusually arrogant, that does happen from time to time.
Er… no it didn’t? It just said the criticism being based on her womanhood was evident because of <reason>, it never promised to prove it, it was just a rhetorical device and they expect the reader to know the information already.
If you want to learn more about early medieval attitudes to women and power in England, it’s on you to learn, not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
> not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
Yes but that is my point. They're making the article longer by including evidence that undermines its claims. They should have either made the claim and let it stand without evidence, or they should have aligned what they said to the evidence they felt was worth including.
If they're going to claim gendered criticism then hold up generic criticism as the best example of criticism it confuses the picture. Assuming that there was gendered criticism happening somewhere off to the side out of sight, was that the decisive criticism? Or was it the criticisms that the article writer felt were important enough to include in the article?
Because the impression the article is giving is that people weren't complaining about her gender, but the fact she was behaving arbitrarily and arrogantly. That is good reason not to put a man in charge too - if you see a man acting arbitrarily and arrogantly it is also a mistake to put him in charge of anything and he would be criticised for it. I do that all the time, there are a lot of unprincipled men in politics who should be called out for their hubris. And they are.
Now it may be that what she was doing wouldn't be considered arrogance and hubris in a man (we don't know exactly because the article is short) but "double standards" and "sound ludicrous if aimed at a man" are simply not true. We hold men to the same standard and make the same criticisms of them.
The substance of your objection is “these criticisms are regularly levelled at men today,” and you skip the part that 900 years have passed since they were levelled at Matilda. You then demand the article provide evidence to overcome this comparison you have been 12th century norms and 21st century norms? Really?
Let me repeat: this is not intended as a thesis. It’s a small historical tale to explain the background of a period of time in early mediaeval England. It assumes you know how women were viewed during that time period and the example provides flavour. If you want to contradict its claims, just post the articles that shows differently.
Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.
Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.
I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.
Jadwiga of Poland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadwiga_of_Poland crowned as king
Anna Jagiellon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Jagiellon
I do think it’s fair to point out that both of these postage Matilda by a few hundred years. I’m actually struggling to think of many Christian European kingdoms that would have at this point.
France only had kings at that point (in fact, Matilda’s son Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Acquitaine comes about because she didn’t give the king of France a son!)
Germany (HRE) selected their emperor so didn’t have succession problems in that sense.
Italy was a collection of city states, Naples was yet to form a kingdom.
Maybe Poland had an earlier queen? But then I don’t know if English nobles paid much attention to Poland, to be honest!
No idea, but from this handy page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_monarchs
it seems like the rest of the world (India, China, Thailand, Egypt, ...) had female monarchs of various sorts ('queen regnant' seems like a relevant terminology here, I'm not sure).
The closest ones to Europe (discounting ancient Egypt?) might be:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85sa_Haraldsdottir_of_Agde... (semi-legendary)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinar_of_Hereti (11th C. Georgian)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica (of course, also other less-well known Britons)
Actually, there are a fair few Greek and Spanish examples. One other possible might be:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronilla_of_Aragon (12th C.)
So there were some texts later discussing the problems of Elizabeth I being Queen Regnant when all laws and customs referred to a “King.” We also see a lot of her father’s behaviour (Henry VIII) being driven by his need for a male heir. It’s why he tries to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Further, there were specific reasons why Elizabeth I was treated differently to her father. For example, Henry VIII used to meet with counsellors when he woke up in the morning, still in bed. For obvious reasons, this was not done when his daughter reigned.
Not to mention the Privy Council, so named because they were trusted to speak to the King while he was on the toilet!
I don’t think the modern day Privy Council ever met with Elizabeth II in such a way!
> Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870.
This predates married women losing the right to control their own property https://lawandhistoryreview.org/article/married-womens-prope...
More importantly: a king was expected to embody the traits a queen was hammered for.
Nothing tore England apart like winning the cold war.
I think that’s more the western world. With no evil empire to compete against the decadence and greed gives the opportunity to shine through. No longer do you have to claim “our most unfortunate citizens are better off than 90% of your population”.