Rosalind K. Marshall- Scottish Queens, 1034-1714

I enjoy history, but I don't often get a chance to read about it as most of my time is consumed with reading books and articles for school. I've really been into British and Scottish royal history lately, probably because of my "Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing" class, so I picked up this book the last time I was at the public library. It's about three things that I'm interested in- women, royalty, and Scottish people (I'm mostly Scottish, with a bit of English, Irish, and French thrown in)- so it caught my eye.

The nice thing about this book is that Marshall has done all of the work for you. She researches all of the queens who she profiles from other people's histories, and then cuts the information down to manageable, and interesting, chapters on each. She profiles nearly twenty Scottish queens, from Lady Macbeth to Queen Anne, the last Stewart monarch, and their lives are fascinating. Most were of royal blood, or at least from noble families, and they surprisingly came from quite a number of countries: England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Denmark, and Norway.

All of them had to worry about providing their husbands, or themselves, with a male heir, and some of them succeeded (a notable failure was Queen Anne, who endured seventeen pregnancies, only to lose all of her children to miscarriage, stillbirth, childbirth, or childhood illness). None of them died a Protestant, even those who reigned after the Reformation, which quite interests me. None of them ever fully gained the respect of their subjects and courtiers, especially the male ones, as a ruler in her own right, even with the example of Elizabeth I just to the south. Most of them were considerably younger than their husbands (the largest age gap was twenty-six years), and the average age at marriage was fifteen-and-a-half.

The most interesting parts of the book come between the middle and the end when we get to the queens who kept journals and wrote letters, and whose portraits we have. There seems to be something about being able to read a woman's own words and see her face that really attracts us as readers; we talk about this a lot in my Early Modern class. I suppose we're looking for some kind of connection, something that we can relate to, and Marshall's writing makes these women and their lives very accessible. I have to admit that many of these women's lives and stories have run together in my mind, but I feel like I understand them and the pressures that they faced as a group much better.