Anne Neville

The last medieval queens of England were Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville, and Elizabeth of York - four very different women whose lives and queenship were dominated by the Wars of the Roses. This book is not a traditional biography but a thematic study of the ideology and practice of queenship. It examines the motivations behind the choice of the first English-born queens, the multi-faceted rituals of coronation, childbirth, and funeral, the divided loyalties between family and king, and the significance of a position at the heart of the English power structure that could only be filled by a woman. It sheds new light on the queens' struggles to defend their children's rights to the throne, and argues that ideologically and politically a queen was integral to the proper exercise of mature kingship in this period.

The Wars of the Roses and the implications they had on kingship have been
studied at length by scholars. But these wars also had implications on queens and queenship since queens shared the king’s central role at court and in government. Questions of legitimacy were at the heart of the Wars of the Roses, so queens were necessarily involved as the person who would produce an heir and, for some, as they participated actively to the politics. Many questions drove my research. How did a woman become queen? What role was she expected have? Where did she drew her power from? How did she exercise it? To focus my study of the queens to the Wars of the Roses allowed me to bring out the regular aspects of queenship that had been practised for a long time, but also to study the power that queens could have and how they exercised it in times of political troubles. Moreover, the four queens I studied come from four different backgrounds and accessed the throne under different circumstances.

O xadrez na cultura ocidental, mais do que um simulacro de guerra, constituiu, na Idade Média, uma analogia para “Sociedade”: o significado do jogo e das próprias peças tornam-se instrumentos oportunos do modelo metafórico do corpus político, do jogo de amorus e da morte como derradeira niveladora. A incidência na história do xadrez e na importância do jogo vem de encontro ao propósito deste trabalho - compreender a centralidade que Anne Neville, filha mais nova de Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, conhecido para a história como “The King-Maker”, deteve nas aspirações de uma família ao trono inglês, num palco de batalhas, contendas, intrigas e traições constantes, sucessivas revoltas, quedas e ascensões de reis e rivalidades acérrimas entre famílias que constituiu a Guerra das Rosas. Pretende-se criar uma analogia entre a promoção de Anne de mero peão a Rainha de Inglaterra. O seu destino foi traçado pacientemente, e a progressão no tabuleiro de xadrez da sociedade inglesa do século XV foi-se paulatinamente desenvolvendo graças, em muito, à Fortuna, até que em poucas jogadas oportunamente bem executadas nas mãos de outros, e tirando proveito das situações vigentes, Anne alcançou o prémio máximo para os Neville: a coroa.