WHEN WE ANALYZE the life trajectories of the women of the major dynasties of the Middle Ages, we are faced with a complicated historical object, which in recent years has generated an interesting historiographical discussion, shaking the foundations of a historical interpretation anchored in the conception of the woman as a passive agent, always in the background, regardless of her social status.

As women, they were relegated to the background behind the men of their family, who had preference before them in the inheritance of the crown and in social promotion. In some European monarchies, the women of the royal family could become queens in their own right if there were no other men in the dynasty who could take over the crown, as happened in Castile, with Queen Urraca and Isabel, in Navarra and in England, with Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, in the sixteenth century. However, we find other European scenarios in which women were displaced from their inheritance rights by giving preference to men with a lower position in the line of succession, as happened in France and with the Crown of Aragon. In the latter, the role of the only regnant queen, Petronila, was to transfer the rights of the Kingdom of Aragon to her son and to unite Aragon with the Catalan counties by her marriage to the count of Barcelona.

Current historiography seeks to locate the role of these infantas and queens consort in tune with the status they had rather than analyzing their position from a purely gendered perspective, since social status and the definition of the role that was expected of their status conditioned their life trajectories more than being women. These women were not limited to being mere decorative figures but, while fulfilling the functions that medieval society expected of them, they knew how to build networks and forms of social and political participation around them with a remarkable transcendence with regard to the biological, social, and political reproduction of the dynasties that led the Christian kingdoms of the European Middle Ages. For this reason, in the studies in which there has been the greatest progress, namely studies in queenship, the queen consort is placed within the monarchical institution and the political and power relations of the medieval court, analyzing the links and structure of their households and courts.