Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe

Description

An Amazon Best Book of December 2016: When chess was first played, all the human figures were male. Only around the eight century did the Queen appear and not until the sixteenth century did the Queen become the most powerful piece in chess. Credit for this development is given to Isabella of Spain, the “warrior queen,” herself a skillful and enthusiastic chess player. Coincidentally, from Isabella’s accession to the throne in 1474 through the next hundred years, an Age of Queens flourished to a degree not seen before or since, with women on the thrones of many European countries. Both the influence of chess and Isabella of Spain feature heavily in Game of Queens. Though few of the female regents met one another, the passage of power and influence (including strategic chess plays) flowed from mothers to daughters and from mentors to protegees, across borders and across generations. The stories of some of the greatest (and hated) queens are told here (in an amusing author’s note, Gristwood points out that in a story with sixteen protagonists, eight of them are named either Mary or Margaret and she absolves herself of responsibility for any confusion that may result). Against a backdrop of religious reformations and the innovations of the new age, Gristwood deftly shows how the explosion of female rule came about, the machinations and power plays behind the thrones, and how the Age of Queens ultimately played out; unsurprisingly, fidelity and fertility were used to create scandals that threatened to topple each Queen. From Isabella of Castile and her granddaughter Mary Tudor, to Catherine de Medici, Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth Tudor, what could be a dry examination of policy and power becomes, in Gristwood’s hands, a lively, accessible, occasionally hilarious, absorbing account of an astonishing era. --Vannessa Cronin, The Amazon Book Review