ABSTRACT
Born between 1157 (when Sybil parents married) and 1161 (when her younger brother Baldwin was born), Sybil was the daughter and sister of kings, granddaughter of Count Fulk of Anjou, cousin of King Henry II of England and first cousin once removed of King Richard the Lionheart. In many respects Sybil’s life was typical for a royal princess or noblewoman of her time: educated in an elite women’s religious house, married in her mid-teens, widowed and remarried, regularly giving birth and seeing her children die in childhood, seldom mentioned by narrative records but regularly issuing legal documents. Sybil’s reign shows that although twelfth-century queens could have agency and wield power in their own right, not all of them did so. But Sybil’s contemporaries and surviving charters indicate that after she had seized the throne she handed her authority over to her husband and did not attempt to rule in her own name.
