Mary Hays's 'Female Biography' by Mary Spongberg Gina Luria Walker

Author:Mary Spongberg, Gina Luria Walker [Mary Spongberg, Gina Luria Walker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Women Authors, Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Gender Studies, Feminism & Feminist Theory
ISBN: 9780429603433
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

Isabella of Castile

The biography of Queen Isabella or Isabel (1451–1504) was a new incorporation in Hays’s Memoirs of Queens, as she was not included in the Female Biography, beginning thus a growing interest in this figure in nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon historiography, this coinciding with the accession to the throne of another woman in Britain.38 Interestingly, by the year of publication of Hays’s Memoirs of Queens, it looked increasingly likely that the eventual heir to the British throne could be a woman, as George IV had produced only a daughter, Victoria. Isabel’s presence deserves a special section in this study as she is the only one who is Spanish and a queen by birth. A regnant queen was an ill-defined figure, an anomalous entity in a patriarchal society.39 Important queens can be found in European history and, as well as Queen Isabel, we might note that Elizabeth I of England and Christina of Sweden are also included in Hays’s compilations. It is precisely their ambiguity and paradoxical position, being both public and private agents, which made them attractive subjects to women historians.40

In the case of the Spanish monarch, in order to challenge this atypical situation, she “associated herself and her reign with a single-minded religious mission”.41 That is, she crafted an image for herself as a messianic queen42 who would lead Spain to its true and promising future, guided by an unshakeable religious faith, a fact rendered to a certain extent in Hays’s biography. Apart from gender issues, such as a woman’s capacity to rule, there was another problematic concern affecting regnant queens: their marriage. Queens Elizabeth and Christina, mentioned above, chose to avoid a marital union and thus to escape possible future difficulties. Isabel, on the contrary, married Ferdinand her cousin and the heir to the throne of Aragon, another powerful kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula (MQ 327). Notwithstanding the unpopularity of a foreign husband and the possible imbalance caused by a royal wedding like this,43 Isabel constructed an image of a queen who was also a wife and a mother, hence exhibiting her ruling abilities instilled with womanly traits such as piety, care, devotion and compassion, which also emerge on occasions in Hays’s entry. This self-made image was emphasised by Castilian court chroniclers during her reign and grew over the years, as well as after her death, turning Isabel into an iconic and legendary figure, particularly in Spain, but also in the rest of the world.44 Hays, conscious of these circumstances, included the Spanish Queen in her Memoirs of Queens and, interestingly, she did not offer her sources. As Spongberg has noted, such entries without sources might be considered as “original”, because Hays was drawing materials from primary sources, including catalogues, genealogies and contemporary press articles, and did not employ earlier biographical compilations.45 The scarcity of materials about Queen Isabel in English until the second half of the nineteenth century46 might be the cause for Hays’s approach in this entry.

As a legend, the figure of the Catholic Queen has been understood and utilised differently depending on historical or contextual needs.

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