“Exercising Authority and Exerting Influence”, covers considerable temporal territory to shed light upon the activity of a multiplicity of actors within the wider framework of monarchy. Applying cross-disciplinary thinking and methodologies, the chapters combine to scrutinize the mechanisms of sovereignty and legitimacy. In tackling the ways in which monarchies across time have sought to exercise authority and exert influence, the contributors to this section confront, problematize, and elaborate upon pivotal themes raised across the entirety of this collection – themes such as power, law, religion, the use of ceremony, display and representation, and dynasties, courts, and realms.

The seven essays contained in “Exercising Authority and Exerting Influence” re-calibrate the ways in which scholars perceive the exercise of authority and influence across a range of disciplines, time periods and geographies. “Exercising Authority and Exerting Influence” advances our understanding of the importance of masculinities and the sexualities of male monarchs and kings consort from the Crusader states of the Latin east to the European kingdoms of England, Sweden and the early modern period of pre-Revolutionary France. The chapters examine how the maintenance of ‘proper’ gender order defined the complementary roles of the king and queen, providing security and continuity to realms during times of upheaval and transformation. New perspectives on the importance of the ties that bound royal dynasties to their aristocracies are worthy and important contributions to this section as are those dealing with the importance of targeted advice and sound counsel to ruling, aspirant, and indeed declining dynasties in a variety of geopolitical contexts.

By Zita Rohr

Dr Zita Rohr is a specialist historian of the late medieval and early modern periods and has published widely in the field of gendered political and diplomatic history of this rich, diverse, and turbulent period of European political and diplomatic transformation. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, and course convenor and lecturer in early modern history at the University of New South Wales. In 2004, Zita was admitted to the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Chevalier) for her contribution to French education and culture. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

A gender conscious political historian with a longue durée approach, her research focuses upon the varied geopolitics and geographies of the Mediterranean, the Iberian Peninsula, France, Italy (insular and peninsular), and England. In 2016, she published a monograph based upon her PhD thesis with Palgrave Macmillan, Yolande of Aragon, Family and Power 1381-1442: The Reverse of the Tapestry and has published, with Lisa Benz, an edited collection of essays Queenship, Gender and Reputation in the Medieval and Early Modern West, 1060-1600, again with Palgrave Macmillan. Zita and Lisa are reprising their collaboration with a new publishing project, Tales of Fire and Ice: Queenship, Female Agency, and the Role of Advice in Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, scheduled to appear in print to coincide with the final series of Game of Thrones in 2019.

Her current research project, “Family Matters: A Gendered History of the Genesis of the Modern State”, will transform current ideas about the making of the early modern state, inaugurating an innovative gendered political history demonstrating that, far from being marginalized, pre-modern royal women were key nodes in early modern government, politics and diplomacy. The gendered history that it will produce will communicate the pervasiveness of female political agency in the emergence of territorial monarchies the geopolitical winners in early modern Europe, and the progenitors of the modern state.