ABSTRACT
Melisende's role continues to divide opinion. On one hand she is seen as a scheming, ambitious woman who clung to power at all costs, even after her son came of age, and on the other as the legitimate heiress. This chapter considers the memory of her reign in narrative accounts, charters, manuscript illustrations, and her tomb, which survives to the present day. This line of enquiry will determine how authors and artists portrayed the queen as part of a royal unit, where they delineated her individual functions, how far these depictions were gendered, and how the representations of Melisende changed over time in both the Latin East and the West. In contrast to a strong contemporary commemoration of her, modern monographs define her as a ‘forgotten queen’ – particularly in comparison to other powerful medieval women such as Eleanor of Aquitaine. This chapter considers the memory of her reign in present-day popular culture, for example, Melisende as the proto Medieval feminist hero batting the patriarchy in Judith Tarr’s Queen of Swords (1997).
