Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe

Written by Bethany Aram

280 pages

Published by Johns Hopkins University

Review by Wendy J. Dunn

Receives:

Juana of Castilla – mad queen or a woman betrayed by her family?

In a work described as part biography and part study of the concept of medieval royal authority, Bethany Aram explores this question to its very disturbing conclusion.

History generally remembers Juana as the grief crazed queen who set off across her kingdom, refusing to give up the body of her husband, Philip the Fair, a man in life very undeserving of the name. In this work, Aram builds up a picture of the medieval mindset and believable political reasons why Juana took her husband's body through Castilla. She wanted him to rest with her mother in the family tomb at Granada because in a sense that confirmed his status as King, strengthening the rights of their children to the throne through an unbroken line of descent.

As Aram stresses in her work, Juana is a queen and woman very little understood – in her own times and in ours. There are obvious reasons for the lack of empathy in her own times – all of them rooted very much in the desire of others, and sometimes herself, to keep true ruling power from her hands.

Born November 6, 1479, the third child and the second daughter of Queen Isabel I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Juana was the older sister of Katherine of Aragon. Not expected to inherit the throne from her mother, Isabel the Catholic, and the only one of the queen’s four daughters to not marry a king or heir to a throne, death struck her family four times (her brother Juan, the stillbirth of his child, her elder sister Isabel, followed two years later by the death of her infant son) before Juana became Princess of Asturias and the heir to her mother’s throne. Not so for the lesser Kingdom of her father: Aragon only allowed male rule.

From this work emerges an interesting question about Juana’s younger years. With early death so much a part of this society, it is intriguing that Juana’s parents (especially her mother) did little to aid Juana to build up the necessary connections she needed if she ever inherited her mother’s crown. Perhaps it is simply because she was the queen’s third child and second daughter that the focus of the court remained centered upon her brother and elder sister.

Becoming herself a queen after the death of her brother and finding her way through a labyrinth of political games in her early life, Isabel believed wholeheartedly that God Himself gave her backing for her rule. She could have never imagined first the loss of her beloved son, followed shortly after by the stillbirth of his only child, then the death of her eldest daughter and her infant son. Thus, Juana stayed very much off centre stage and given very little credence other than as a marriageable infanta. This was to cost her sorely when the time came for her to take stage as queen.

Juana the Mad probes new scholarship in four areas: Spanish constitutional thought, female sovereignty, princely courts, and cultural understanding of madness, making the modern reader appreciate the very real connection between the “body” of monarchs and their kingdom. She also constructs another bridge for clearer understanding about the medieval and renaissance world and how its patriarchal society imprisoned and controlled women. For Juana, with her father, husband, and later her own son desiring to keep the power of the crown from her, this imprisonment was not only through the usual constraints of society but also a very real physical imprisonment.

Why did Juana refuse to exercise her royal authority? Was she really mad? Was it a religious distancing, a desire to emulate the life of her ancestor Saint Isabel – so much so that she willingly allowed her husband, father, and later her son take the reins from her hands? Did her family simply come first with her and she put their desires before her own? Aram's Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe helps us draw our own answers to these questions.

Whilst we can only infer what was in Juana’s heart and soul, Aram’s insightful work of thorough scholarship gives women, in those parts of the world fortunate enough to possess them, much reason to reflect why they should never take their modern freedoms for granted. ______________________________________________________________

Wendy J. Dunn is an Australian writer obsessed by Tudor History. She now has a new passion: Medieval Castile. The author of the award-winning novel Dear Heart, How Like You This?, Wendy is currently working on a trilogy based on the life of Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII.