Project Participants
Below we have brief bios for all of our project participants, see the Publications page which features more of their work on related topics
Diane Antille
Diane Antille is a PhD candidate at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). Her research focuses on the possessions of French queens (1300–1500) and addresses questions of identity, power and gender through goldsmith works. She has published on the jewels of Valentina Visconti (in Moving Women Moving Objects, 2019). Her current research concerns the inventory of Charlotte of Savoy and the Vierge à l’Enfant de Jeanne d’Evreux.
Maria Barreto Dávila
Dr. Maria Barreto Dávila is a researcher at CHAM at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Her main research interests include Court Studies, especially the relationship of women and power, during the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, and the beginning of the Portuguese expansion. She is currently a member of Project MUNARQAS.
Lucy Dean
Dr. Lucy Dean is a Lecturer and Undergraduate Programme Leader at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research straddles the late medieval/ early modern divide and focuses on Scotland, and its place in the wider European cultural and political milieu of this period. She has a keen interest in monarchy, power and how it was communicated and received, material culture, public history, masculinity, coming of age and the life cycle. She is an expert in the study of ritual and ceremony of kingship.
Paula Del Val Vales
Paula Del Val Vales is a PhD candidate at the University of Lincoln. She is also part of the Spanish research group MUNARQAS and a founding member of the young medievalist researchers’ association ‘Asociación JIMENA’. Her PhD thesis is a comparative study of the queens’ households and courts in the thirteenth century across three kingdoms: Castile, England and the Crown of Aragon. Through her research she aims to explore the queens’ establishments, resources, revenues, personnel and networks. She is also working on the first ever edition of the household and wardrobe accounts of Eleanor of Provence.
Ana Echevarría Arsuaga
Ana Echevarría Arsuaga is Professor of Medieval History at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid. She has a background in publishing and is the author of numerous publications on the relations between Islam and Christianity and queenship. She has been a Visiting Researcher at several universities and research centres in Germany, the US and the UK. She is currently working on various aspects of queenship, such as coronation ceremonies, and the figures of Maria of Portugal and Beatrix of Swabia.
Murielle Gaude-Ferragu
Murielle Gaude-Ferragu is Professor of History at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. She is a specialist of funerals in Medieval France. She has published works which examine the power held by the French Medieval queens during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her recent research explores the relationships between power and resources, through the study of the prince’s and the princess’s treasure.
Ruben González Cuerva
Dr. Ruben González Cuerva is Permanent Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), in Madrid. He specialises in political communication and network interaction through diplomatic and female channels. He has researched the dynastic relations of the Habsburgs (1550–1640), focusing on the biographical profiles of empresses and ambassadors and the coordination of dynastic and confessional agents. He is currently working on cross-confessional and global diplomacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Maria Hayward
Prof. Maria Hayward is professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses mainly on the Tudor and Stuart courts in an English and Scottish context with a particular focus on textiles and clothing. However, she has a wider interest in material culture more generally including jewellery and gift-giving. Much of her research on early modern royal courts has drawn on household accounts. She is currently working on the volume on Catherine of Braganza for Ellie Woodacre and Louise Wilkinson’s Lives of Royal Women Queens of England series for Routledge.
Amy Hayes
Dr Amy Hayes is a Staff Tutor and Lecturer in History at the Open University. Her research focuses on the queen consorts of Scotland from c.1371 to c.1513, taking a socio-cultural approach that encompasses ideals of queenship, motherhood, households, landholding and finances. Amy is currently working on a monograph on Scottish queenship, and has published a series of articles on the queens of Stewart Scotland in History Scotland magazine. Amy is a founding member of the Trinity Network, an interdisciplinary network focussing on the Renaissance in Scotland.
Anna Jagos
Dr. Anna Jagos is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg (John the Blind´s charters related to the history of Bohemia). Since 2016, she has developed her project FEMPOW – Female Power: The ruling practices of queens descending from the House of Luxembourg (FNR Core junior project, duration 2019-2021). Her research examines the role and influence of the queens-consorts descending from the House of Luxembourg and female ruling practices in composite monarchy, considering queenly agencies and political activities, financial background, and networks.
Clara Kalogérakis
Clara Kalogérakis is a PhD candidate at the University of Lille and the University of Castilla-La Mancha. She participates in the MUNARQAS project and she is a member of associations for the development of Gender Studies and Women's History (Mnémosyne - AEIHM). Her thesis investigates the marriages of Spanish Infantas at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the seventeenth century. She seeks to understand the place of these Infantas on the European matrimonial scene and give a more accurate voice to the trajectory of these women.
Marguerite Keane
Marguerite Keane is a professor of Art History at Drew University in Madison, NJ. A specialist in medieval art, she has published on the patronage of the fourteenth-century French queen Blanche of Navarre. She is interested in the art patronage practices of medieval women more broadly, especially in questions of how value is characterised in the medieval collection and family exchange and gifting of possessions.
Katarzyna Kosior
Dr. Katarzyna Kosior is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Northumbria University and will become Lecturer in September 2021. She works on early modern Poland-Lithuania and France. Katarzyna is interested in royal financial accounts and the politics of financing the royal court in a parliamentary monarchy. She has published on the dower negotiations of Anna Jagiellon, and her book Becoming a Queen in Early Modern Europe: East and West was published in 2019.
Joanna Laynesmith
Dr. Joanna Laynesmith has taught at the universities of Oxford, York, Reading and Huddersfield. Her prize-winning monograph The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–1503 touched on queens' incomes and resources. More recently her studies of Cecily Duchess of York, mother of two English kings, have included articles on the duchess's household and on her exercise of 'ladyship' in her Lincolnshire estates.
Rocío Martínez López
Dr. Rocío Martínez López is a postdoctoral fellow at the Autonoma University of Madrid under the Juan de la Cierva-Formación program of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and University of the Spanish Government. Recently, she has focused her research both on the diplomatic relationship between the Spanish Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth century and the study of royal women’s succession rights in the Early Modern period.
Cathérine Annette Ludwig-Ockenfels
Cathérine Ludwig-Ockenfels is a doctoral researcher at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen, Germany, at the Departement of Early Modern History. Her PhD draws on the correspondence and accounts of Anna Maria Luisa de‘ Medici (1667–1743), Electress Palatine and Grandprincess of the Grand Duchy in Tuscany. Her research will provide insights into early modern politics through everyday courtly life, spending on leisure, charity and alms, wages of the royal household, and the politics of representation via art patronage and gift-giving.
Andrea Silen-McMillin
Andy Silen-McMillin is a PhD researcher at the University of Winchester in History, specializing in early modern queens, focusing on Queen’s lands and Anna of Denmark. Her previous research explored aspects of religious patronage of Edward IV and Richard III. Andy is also a member of the marketing team and layout assistant for the Royal Studies Journal and contributor for the newly launched #TeamQueens blog.
Jessica Nelson
Dr. Jessica Nelson is the head of medieval, early modern, legal and map collections at The National Archives of the United Kingdom. Her doctoral thesis researched the queens of Scotland in the 12th and 13th centuries, including an examination of their lands and resources. She has presented the results of her research widely and published articles based upon it in Thirteenth Century England journal, along with publishing biographies of the women in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Inês Olaia
Inês Olaia is a PhD candidate in Medieval History at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. She’s working on a thesis titled “By the Grace of God Queen of Portugal: queens’ functions and practices in Medieval Portugal”, for which she was granted a Scholarship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. Her previous work explored the jurisdictions of Alenquer and Aldeia Galega da Merceana and the queens’ rule over these towns.
Fabian Persson
Dr. Fabian Persson is a Senior Lecturer in History at Linnaeus University and a Visiting Scholar at University of Oxford. His main expertise lies in the history of the early modern court, but he has also written on patronage, corruption, élites, gender, aristocratic marriage and duelling. His recent works have examined the monarchy of Sweden and women at the Swedish royal court during the early modern period.
Martina del Popolo
Dr. Martina del Popolo is a researcher of Medieval Cultures and Historical Sciences (University of Barcelona-University of San Marino). Her research reconstructs the urban manor of Sicily and Catalonia granted in 1470 to Isabel of Castile as queen consort of Aragon. Her research analyses the political and economic administration of the queenly manor, especially the rights the queen had in her jurisdiction and those maintained by the king and the towns.
James Ross
Dr. James Ross is Reader in Late Medieval History at the University of Winchester. His research interests focus on late medieval England and its political society and culture, and in particular the nobility, their relationship with the crown, the law, and their estates and affinities. He is also very familiar with the records of the royal administration, both financial and legal, having worked for eight years as a senior medieval records specialist at the National Archives in London before joining Winchester.
Michele Seah
Dr. Michele Seah is a scholar of queens and queenship. Her doctoral research examined the economic significance of medieval English queens. Focusing on the economic and financial resources of the later fifteenth-century queens consort of England, she examined their scale and extent in an attempt to shed greater light on how queens consort were provided for during periods of unrest and upheaval. Her research facilitates a greater understanding of how queenly households and affinities were established and maintained.
Gabrielle Storey
Dr. Gabrielle Storey is a historian of Angevin queenship, with a particular interest in familial relations and the exercise of power and authority. She is currently working on the production of a monograph, which is a comparative study of Angevin queens, focussing on co-rulership, competition, and co-operation with their royal husbands and sons. She is also producing a biography of Berengaria of Navarre.
a contributing member of #TeamQueens, an educational history blog on queenship.
Laura Tompkins
Dr. Laura Tompkins is Research Manager at Historic Royal Palaces. Her research interests focus on the political culture of fourteenth-century England, in particular the topic of royal favourites and the life of Alice Perrers, royal mistress of Edward III in the later years of his reign. As a former Medieval Record Specialist at the National Archives, she is also familiar with the financial records of medieval government, especially those of the royal household.
Jan Vojtíšek
Jan Vojtíšek is a Czech medievalist whose main fields of research include the urban history of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the late Middle Ages and queens consort of the House of Luxembourg. Jan is currently working on a doctoral thesis at the Charles University and on the 'Dower towns of the queens of Bohemia' project at the University of Hradec Králové. He is also the head of the Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books of the National Library of the Czech Republic and a member of the National Archives of the Czech Republic.
Anaïs Waag
Dr. Anaïs Waag is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln. Anaïs specializes in gender studies in medieval Europe, with a particular focus on power (its management and representation) and political communication, which she approaches from a comparative perspective. Anaïs is currently working on a monograph drawn from her doctoral work, while pursuing her new research, the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Female Royal Rulership in Theory and Practice: Queens Regnant, 1109–1328’.
Louise Wilkinson
Prof. Louise Wilkinson is Professor of Medieval Studies in the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln. After completing her doctorate at King's College London in 1999, she worked at the National Archives and Canterbury Christ Church University, before joining Lincoln in 2020. She is a councillor of the Lincoln Record Society, joint general editor of the Pipe Roll Society, and was a co-investigator of the AHRC-funded ‘Henry III Fine Rolls’ and ‘Magna Carta’ projects. She has published widely on medieval women and co-edits with Ellie Woodacre Routledge’s Lives of Royal Women Series.
Sara Wolfson
Dr. Sara Wolfson is a Staff Tutor and Lecturer in History at the Open University. Her research interests chiefly concern the female court and household of Queen Henrietta Maria. She has published on Henrietta Maria’s female bedchamber in the 1630s; the wedding negotiations of 1625; and, on how mixed marriages shaped the cultural, socio-political, and religious practices of aristocratic court women in the 1620s. Sara is presently working on diplomatic relations between the Dutch Republic, the House of Nassau and the Stuart crown centred upon Henrietta Maria's journey to the Low Countries in 1642–43.
Chris Woolgar
Prof. Chris Woolgar is a Fellow of the British Academy and editor of the Journal of Medieval History. He has a long-standing interest in the history of the everyday in the medieval period in England, in patterns of documentation and in editorial work. His publications on medieval social and economic history engage with the establishments of queens at many points.
Chris’ current research centres on the objects of daily life, their significance and the meaning of material culture at all levels in the later Middle Ages.
Penelope Nash
Dr Penelope Nash is an Honorary Associate in the Medieval and Early Modern Centre, the University of Sydney. She is a historian of medieval Italy and Germany, with a particular interest in the study of ruling women and their ability to retain their wealth and power. She has published widely on the Carolingian, Ottonian and Salian dynasties, covering dynastic change, medieval households, manuscript art and historiography. Her two recent monographs are The Spirituality of Countess Matilda of Tuscany (2021) and Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda (2017).
Silvia Z. Mitchell is associate professor of history at Purdue University. Her research and publications focus on the history of the Spanish Monarchy and the House of Habsburg in the seventeenth century. As a queenship scholar, she emphasizes the role of royal women in shaping political and diplomatic outcomes, including her work on Mariana of Austria. Her current projects include a history of the Spanish Habsburgs, a co-authored biography of María Teresa of Austria, and a book on the Palace of Uceda, in Madrid. She is interested in understanding the financial aspects of royal women’s lives as they relate to their agency, but also dynastic strategy, court politics, and European diplomacy.
Susan Phillips
Sue Phillips is a PhD candidate at the University of Lincoln. Her thesis is a study into how family dynamics and female intergenerational relationships influenced the religious beliefs and attitudes of younger elite females. Her interest began with royal women and to what extent they used their status to contribute to the spread of Roman Christianity in Merovingian Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England.
Zita Eva Rohr
Zita Eva Rohr is a specialist political historian of the late medieval and early modern periods with her research interests spanning gender, family, households and courts, female networks, epistolary, and collaborative rulership as well as the longue durée premodern political and diplomatic history of France and certain Iberian and Italian kingdoms. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University, an Honorary Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, and in 2004 she was admitted to the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. She has published widely including a monograph of Yolande of Aragon, and collaboratively edited works regarding queenship, agency, court cultures, and the history of monarchy. Zita is currently working on a longue durée inter-generational study focused on Anne of France and her family between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Cristina Mª García García
Dr. Cristina Mª García García is a researcher at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), and she also collaborates with the Spanish research group CEMA (Aragonese Medieval Studies Centre). On her PhD 'Elites, Monarchy and Conflict in the Crown of Aragon. The Political Crisis of the Reign of Juan I (1387-1396)' she has focused on the political crisis that took place in the Crown of Aragon during the reign of Juan I (1387-1396) through the study of the parliaments, the royal household, and the royal administration of the Crown of Aragon. Her main research interests include court studies, royal affinities, and the finances of the monarchy.
Manuela Santos Silva
Manuela Santos Silva is a Professor of Medieval History at the School of Artes and Humanities (FLUL) of the University of Lisbon (ULisboa). Her earliest research, on a coastal region of Portugal where queens had their main domains, lead to her interest on the power and authority of the Medieval Queens of Portugal. Together with two other
colleagues, she coordinated an 18 volumes series of biographies on these queens (2011- 2014) and, later on, four books on the Marriage of the Portuguese Royal Family (2016-2018). She was a researcher of MUNARQAS’ project on Women of the Iberian Monarchies and, presently of ERA’s project on Writing and Queens. Queenly Chanceries as Power Instruments.