THIS BOOK HAS explored how dynastic wives played critical roles within their marital and natal families as political agents and diplomatic mediators. Using the examples of King Ferrante and his daughters, Eleonora and Beatrice d’Aragona, I have shown that courtly women accessed familial networks to procure political favours and realize diplomatic goals. Over the course of four chapters, we have seen how family correspondence and diplomatic reports can be employed to reveal women's participation in intradynastic negotiation. Close analysis of letters, in particular, has been critical to illuminating the familial interactions within the Aragonese dynasty and the centrality of married women to their network.

The first chapter of this book showed how Eleonora d’Aragona managed her father's expectations for her political behaviour during the Pazzi War (1478–80) in which Ferrante I and Ercole were enemies. The king of Naples wrote a series of letters to his daughter during the war which—coupled with the fact that he had guardianship of two of her children who remained in Naples for most of their childhood—placed pressure on the duchess of Ferrara to remain loyal to the Aragonese dynasty. Fatherly and kingly rhetoric alternated to extract appropriate emotional reactions in Eleonora and other letter recipients and were deployed in conjunction with a royal intermediary who visited Ferrara during the war.

Eleonora's correspondence, on the other hand, revealed how she sought to deflect Ferrante's expectations and encourage her natal family, including her brother Alfonso, to negotiate peace. Her behaviour shows that Eleonora was considered, and considered her-self, to be bound to her kinfolk. However, her loyalty was largely based on retaining access to her hostage children in Naples and to her father's broad political and social network. Her goals differed from those of her father, and even her husband, based on the changing policies of her marital court and the time spent away from Naples. In short, Eleonora was used by Ferrante as a mediator in Ferrara to negotiate with Ercole in order to facilitate knowledge sharing between Aragonese kinfolk and to secure safe passage for his agents. However, correspondence addressed to her and the drafts of her diplomatic instructions, reveal how she too in turn manipulated her connections in the context of two wars.