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eBook details

• Title: Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (Book Review)
• Author : Journal of International Women's Studies
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 184 KB

Description

Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History. 2008. Anne Walthall (ed.). Berkeley: The University of California Press. 381 pp. (Includes illustrations, photographs, maps, tables, and index). $60.00 (Hardback), $24.95 (Paperback). Servants of the Dynasty does something no other study has done before: the fifteen original essays commissioned for this project provide the First comparative examination of the lives of women in royal courts in a genuinely world-historical context. In doing so, editor Anne Walthall and her contributors offer important insights to two subjects of history often kept entirely separate: the history of monarchy, and the history of women. Recognizing that scholars from both camps may question the need for this study, Walthall pointedly asks in the introduction: "What can a study of palace women bring to our understanding of how different monarchies functioned?" and "What can a study of palace women bring to our understanding of what women did in the past?" (18, 20). These are good questions. Monarchies and royal courts have nearly always been configured around the maintenance of masculine power and authority (one fact this collection makes abundantly clear is that ruling queens, empresses, sultanas, begums, or any other title you can name are astonishingly uncommon historically all around the world). When royal women and other female palace inhabitants have received historians' attention, they have most often been situated in a biographical context, and often as not with a romantic or salacious bent. This tendency is especially evident within the evergreen genre of biographies about the queens and royal mistresses of France and England. (2) Although readers anticipating another set of romantic or voyeuristic biographies will be coming to the wrong book, I doubt they will leave disappointed. This study is a compelling read of an entirely different sort: each chapter opens new vistas into the lived realities of palace women across the globe at all social levels, from the expected consorts, concubines, and royal mistresses, down to the lowest levels of relations and servants; there are even detours--some of them surprising--into female opportunities to become economic entrepreneurs and armed soldiers.

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