ABSTRACT
The notion of monarchy as sole rulership by a king has potent mythic power, even though we recognize that in practice power was not isolated in one person. Rather, it had a corporate character that admitted a plurality of power and permitted a range of power-sharing options situated in dispersed and localized sites of power clustered around the king.1 The queen, linked intimately and officially to the person of the king, occupied one of these sites. Unlike kingship, however, which assumed direct rulership, queenship encompassed a spectrum of ruling practices bounded by two extremes, a queen ruling in her own right and outright prohibition of female rulership. Most queens, however, occupied the middle zone between these two poles, where the range of practices was the greatest and political theories were the least developed. This zone, filled with queens-regent, queens-dowager, queen-mothers, and unofficial co-rulers, offers rich possibilities for examining the practical limits of the theoretical boundaries of kingly power and the rightful place of a female ruler in society.
