Elite Women in Early Modern Catholic Europe

This collection comprises 10 chapters by scholars outside the Anglophone world, focusing on the actions of elite women in the transformation and preservation of social structures in Catholic Western Europe, including Spain, Italy, and France, from the mid-16th to the mid-19th century. Princesses, queens and future queens, wealthy aristocrats, and other high-ranking women arranged matrimonial alliances, created new lineages and then wrote about them, established charitable associations that also funded luxuries for themselves, established familial and friendship networks that stretched across political boundaries, wrote wills that determined the destiny of family assets and letters that sought to determine this, and trained their daughters and other younger family members to continue in their footsteps. These were women born into power and wealth, so it is unsurprising that, as the editors note, “women’s action in the social, political, or religious world is usually aimed at maintaining the status quo” (p. 7). Still, the range of their actions is surprising, particularly for those who might still think of Catholic Europe as offering fewer opportunities for women’s agency, influence, and power than Protestant areas. Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.

M. E. Wiesner-Hanks, emerita, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee CHOICE November 2025 Vol. 63 No. 3.