Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria. The influence of a Mary Tudor´s lady-in-waiting in the Spanish Court of Philip II. Kings and Queens VI -At the shadow of the throne - Madrid, September 12th -15th, 2017. (original) (raw)
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In January 1607, the second Duke of Feria died in Naples on his way to Rome during the embassy of obedience to the Pope Paulo V. As it had happened in 1571 when the first Duke of Feria deceased, the Duchess, Jane Dormer, became the head of the household protecting the interests of the linage and supporting the new Duke’s career. Lady Dormer (1538-1612) had been a lady-in-waiting within the court of Mary Tudor until the sovereign’s death, when the direction of the political winds in England started to change. She arrived to Spain turned into the Countess of Feria and from the very beginning, she acted as a committed ambassador in favour of the English Catholics. Lady Jane was also known in the court as a cult woman who kept an active role in the intellectual spheres, as the encounters organized in her house with great figures at that moment as the Jesuit Ribadeneyra, who joined them regularly. This paper aims to illustrate how the high nobility women expressed the power within the Spanish Monarchy at the beginning of seventeenth century, by the hand of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, and how cultural and devotional elements appear as relevant mechanisms. Within this context, the Ducal Palace of Feria In Zafra becomes an excellent scenario to provide an insight into the ways noblewomen were able to exercise their influence at power spheres.
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563
2018
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483—1563 explores the ways in which a range of women “ as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage “ wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female auth...
Female Agents at the Royal Palace of Madrid: Political Interests, Favors and Gifts (ca. 1598-1640)
Culture & History Digital Journal, 2022
The rise of the New Diplomatic History in the late twentieth century led to a methodological revolution altering the foundations of traditional historiography. One of the principal consequences were a new recognition that there were multiple sorts of diplomatic agents that included artists, businessmen, men of the church, travelers, and women. It is this last group to which we devote this essay. In this paper we will analyze several case studies in order to offer a general perspective of the mechanisms used by these female agents so as to establish a pattern of behavior. We will focus on aristocratic women at the Madrid court during the reign of Philip III and Philip IV in order to know how the foreign ambassadors approached these women seeking information. These women get in return gifts and mercedes for them, their families and members of their patronage networks. Finally, we will study the multiple fidelities developed by female agents.
While most formal institutions of power, Parliament, the law courts and the Privy Council, were closed to English aristocratic women, the patron-client relations that characterised elite society were, as Sharon Kettering points out in her study of France, "informal, fluid, non-institutional, and well suited to the exercise of indirect power through personal relationships by women". 1 Similarly, in her analysis of Jacobean court women, Helen Payne has argued that women had the power "to influence or to mediate, the power to recommend a person or a suit, and occasionally the power to broker, but this power was wholly dependent on relationships with powerful men". 2 According to Payne, the one exception was Jane Drummond, Anna of Denmark's First Lady of the Bedchamber, whose influence was dependent solely on her mistress's favour, as well as on the mistaken assumption that Anna wielded significant political influence over James I's foreign policy. 3 Though attendance at the Caroline court provided aristocratic women with similar influence, access and favour, necessary to engage in early modern politics, a position within Queen Henrietta Maria's Bedchamber offered more opportunities for women than under the first Stuart queen consort. This was due to three main factors: first, the reorganisation of Henrietta Maria's household structure in 1627; second, the close personal relationship of Charles and Henrietta Maria; and third, the ability of Caroline court women to engage in politics not only through their dependence on powerful men, but also through the favour of the 1
After Catherine de Medici became the mother-in-law of Philip II of Spain in 1559, as a result of her daughter Elisabeth of Valois' marriage to the Spanish king, she set out to augment and multiply the family ties between the Valois and the Habsburgs by negotiating further marriages. These efforts have been ridiculed by her biographers, who accuse her of a naïve faith in marital bonds. In line with more recent French historiography, this article re-evaluates Catherine's efforts by placing them in the context of other kinship networks, especially the very dense one connecting the royal houses of Portugal and Spain. Seen in this light, it makes perfect sense for the French queen mother to weave an ever more intricate web of marriage alliances herself. It also means that most kinship relations between members of early modern ruling families were multi-layered and being 'only' a mother-in-law to a son-in-law was rare, complicating the conceptualisation of this particular role.