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7 - Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen: Beatrice d’Aragona (1457–1508) and Kinship in Early Modern Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter analyses how the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Beatrice d’Aragona (1457–1508), negotiated her shifting marital status and identity in central Europe and southern Italy. She was twice married—the first marriage resulting in widowhood, and the second in exile—with her entire adulthood spent as an outsider in Hungary, or on the edge of courtly Naples. A close analysis of Beatrice's exile shows that women could survive widowhood using natal networks, since, though their marital identities changed, their status as sister, daughter, and aunt did not. This chapter contributes to the literature on early modern European kinship networks by demonstrating that the presence of these networks protected women in difficult marital situations, and how their absence made widowhood without wealth a marginalised existence.
Keywords: Ippolito d’Este; letter-writing; exile; queenship; early modern Europe
In the final months of the fifteenth century, the banished Queen of Hungary and Bohemia lamented her isolation in the archiepiscopal seat of Esztergom. Writing to what remained of her family, Beatrice d’Aragona petitioned the husband and sons of her deceased sister, Eleonora d’Aragona, the Duchess of Ferrara, to remember her plight following her second husband's attempts to dissolve their marriage. In a sharp letter to Ippolito d’Este, the nephew she had raised as a son in the late 1480s and early 1490s, Beatrice condemned his lack of epistolary affection and concern for his beleaguered adopted mother:
We received a letter from your most Reverend Lordship and, despite its tardiness, we were extremely grateful to hear of your good health. But there was one thing that was very upsetting. Maybe it was the secretary’s fault, but the way you wrote treated us as if we were a foreigner and not your mother—which we always will be until the end of our days. It was as if your Lordship's letters were written with a stamp—they were nothing more than a “we are well, we hope the same for Your Majesty.” We ask you not to treat us as a foreigner and to not use that kind of tone because we promise Your Lordship that if you do, we will not reply because such behaviour does not merit a response.
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- Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe , pp. 139 - 158Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019