Queens, Queenship, and Natural Resource Management in Premodern Europe, 1400-1800

This innovative collection examines how European queens participated in the conceptualisation, mobilisation, and transformation of ’natural resources’ from the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.

Early modern queens interacted with human and nonhuman worlds through natural resource management activities that have rarely been the focus of sustained historical analysis. This volume engages with the wide range of nonhuman materials, living and inanimate, that premodern queens had the power to direct and dispose of, to utilise, enjoy, and commercialise, to visualise and commemorate, and even to destroy, on and in their lands, forests, waterways, and oceans. Both queenship and natural resource management were configured by contemporary gender ideologies, which structured a dynamic relationship between queenship and the more-than-human world. The case studies in this collection explore how queens’ natural resource management was impacted by their cultural and personal contexts, particularly their changing status as queens regnant, consort, dowager, or regent. The contributors draw on diverse materials and employ a variety of historical approaches--including political, economic, cultural, literary, legal, and animal studies--to demonstrate how queens interacted with the nonhuman world and how their engagements were embedded in premodern gender rules.

This collection will be of great value for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and scholars, in gender and women’s history, environmental history, queenship studies, and early modern studies.

Susan Broomhall is Director of the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre and Professor of Early Modern Studies at the Australian Catholic University. She researches women and gender in the early modern world, including the role of gender ideologies in premodern natural resource management.

Clare Davidson is a Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University. She works on the medieval and early modern history of emotions, law, gender, and belief, and the reception of medieval and early modern history in contemporary law and politics.