When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe

In this game-changing revisionist history, a leading scholar of the Renaissance shows how four powerful women redefined the culture of European monarchy in the glorious sixteenth century.

The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of chronic destabilization in which institutions of traditional authority were challenged and religious wars seemed unending. Yet it also witnessed the remarkable flowering of a pacifist culture, cultivated by a cohort of extraordinary women rulers―most notably, Mary Tudor; Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Catherine de’ Medici―whose lives were intertwined not only by blood and marriage, but by a shared recognition that their premier places in the world of just a few dozen European monarchs required them to bond together, as women, against the forces seeking to destroy them, if not the foundations of monarchy itself. 

Softcover
320 pp.
5.5 x 8”