Sometimes it takes just one strong woman to tame a pack of zealous
men. Meet Margaret of Sicily. For five years during the twelfth
century, Margaret of Navarre, Queen of Sicily, was the most
powerful woman in Europe and the Mediterranean. Her life and times
make for the compelling story of a wife, sister, mother and leader.
This landmark work is the first biography of the
great-granddaughter of El Cid and friend of Thomas Becket who could
govern a nation and inspire millions. In Margaret's story
sisterhood is just the beginning. The Basque princess who rose to
confront unimagined adversity became the epitome of medieval
womanhood in a world dominated by men, governing one of the
wealthiest, most powerful - and most socially complex - states of
Europe and the Mediterranean. This book is the result of original,
scholarly research in medieval chronicles and manuscripts - some
never before translated into English - yet its narrative is lively
and interesting, exploring the essence of the queen's personality.
In addition to its main text, the volume presents fourteen pages of
maps, four genealogical tables and numerous photographs, reflecting
information gathered by the author in Italy, Spain and England (and
even in the United States). Her research took her from the tiny
town in Navarre where Margaret was born to the locality in Sicily
where the queen died, and a lot of places in-between. The author's
keen knowledge of history and her mastery of Italian, Spanish,
French and Latin aided her in following every step of Margaret's
journey. If you could travel back in time to the twelfth century,
Ms Alio would be the perfect guide, and in this book she guides you
through an eventful life in a perilous age. Chapters detail
Margaret's life but also her world, from Pamplona to Palermo. The
chapter on Monreale's splendid abbey, erected on the orders of
Margaret and her son, is a sophisticated guide to this unique
place, offering the reader nuggets of information rarely mentioned
in travel books. Ten appendices provide information on the
chronicles of Hugh Falcandus, Romuald of Salerno and others, along
with the hard-to-find original texts of both surviving codices of
the Assizes of Ariano, the legal code enacted by Margaret's
father-in-law in 1140. There is a timeline and over 400 end notes,
and a bibliography with hundreds of sources cited. (The text was
peer reviewed.) There is much in these 512 pages for the armchair
historian but also for the hardcore academic, everything from the
analysis of sources like chronicles and royal decrees to maps of
medieval Palermo. This work is so exhaustively documented that the
'back matter' containing notes, appendices and the detailed
bibliography is almost as long as the main narrative text. This
book is full of interesting details. For example, Margaret was one
of the few women of her century to govern a population that
included a substantial number of Muslims. Closer to our times,
Palermo-based Jackie Alio stands out as the only Sicilian woman
writing books in English about the women of medieval Sicily. She
lives and breathes Sicilian history. Her previous titles include
The Peoples of Sicily: A Multicultural Legacy and Women of Sicily:
Saints, Queens and Rebels. She authored the first English
translation of the Ferraris Chronicle, written in Italy before
1228. A defining biography, Margaret, Queen of Sicily is the
longest monograph of its kind written in English by a Sicily-based
historian. At a time when academic publishers are reluctant to
publish anything this lengthy, it is an exhaustive work in the
tradition of the tomes published in decades past. It touches a
number of fields: Norman and Navarrese culture, the power of
medieval women, twelfth-century politics, the nature of
multicultural societies, the role of religion in the Mediterranean.
With the publication of this book, our knowledge of Europe's
complex twelfth century is one step nearer completeness. Queen
Margaret would be proud.
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