ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the crucial role that a group of royal female cousins, who ruled adjoining and often rival realms, could play in the highly charged political climate of the early sixteenth century. It focuses on the use of epistolary diplomacy, demonstrating how royal cousins used female and natal kinship networks to further their own political agendas, sometimes aiding and at other times undermining one another as they struggled to reconcile competing interests in a fraught and divided political scene. Kinship networks were crucial conduits for diplomacy, allowing both formal exchanges of envoys and correspondence between related rulers and informal negotiations through the medium of family news missives and trusted go-betweens. The chapter examines the use of epistolary diplomacy by Catalina, and her cousins on a sample of letters dispatched between Navarre, Aragon, Castile and France, demonstrates the significance of correspondence as a key form of diplomatic agency.
