Introductory Study: The Wreath of Women’s Power

Abstract

Writing about Hungarian Queen regent Isabella Jagiellon (1519-1559) in the middle of the sixteenth century, an Italian chronicler called her: “A masculine and learned-spirited lady” A century earlier, another Italian chronicler, Bonfini used the term “virago” to describe the Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Szilagyi (1410- 1483) when she had employed power, if not the outright authority, to place her younger son Matthias Hunyadi (1443-1490) on the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary. Moving south in space, and earlier, the fourteenth-century Serbian Empress Helena of Bulgaria (Srb. Jelena) (c.1310-1374), the wife of Serbian Emperor Stefan Dušan (c.1308-1355), was seen by her contemporary John VI Kantakouzenos as the person whose support for Kantakuzenous was the decisive factor in the securing the favourable outcome of the negotiations with Dušan. The common theme running through the above-given examples is that of a virago, a woman who appropriated and exhibited character features and behavioural characteristics expected in men of a certain social position in the late medieval and early modern period and was notoriously seen in connected to the notion of the politically active women.4 Despite their political activity having been regularly connected to the implementation of the seniorial “lordly powers” within the prescribed restrictions of contemporary women’s roles, such endeavours had not involved a “contradiction in gendered logic,” as Kimberley Lo Prete argued in the case study dating as early as the beginning of this century. All these stories tell of the power some of these women wielded throughout their lives, whilst others were able to exercise it only for short periods and under specific circumstances