Empress Matilda is a fascinating historical character. She almost became queen of England in her own right but when her father, Henry I, died, her royal inheritance was stolen from her by Stephen, her first cousin. Matilda decided to fight and although she didn't become queen, her son claimed the throne through her. He proudly called himself Henry FitzEmpress, Henry "Son of the Empress". He is known to history as Henry II.
As stated by author Catherine Hanley, her book is not aimed solely at academic readership. There's never been an accessible bio of Matilda. Marjorie Chibnall's "The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English" was, so far, the best and the most detailed account of Matilda's political & private life, but it's a difficult book and requires a lot of beforehand knowledge of the period. Catherine Hanley, on the other hand, wrote a book with flowing narrative that is both easy to understand for a general reader and compulsively readable.
I'm sure that people who would like to gain more insight into Matilda's life would be satisfied after reading Hanley's book (I know I was!). The author restored Matilda to her rightful place in history, debunking all sorts of myths and misconceptions that arouse around Matilda over the centuries.
Most sources about Matilda were written by hostile clerics and monks who believed women should be subservient to men. Many historians assumed that Matilda truly was haughty and overbearing, and repeated these characteristics after the empress's first medieval biographers. Matilda's biographers in 1939 and 2017 even claimed that she was menopausal and suffered from mood swings because they trusted too much in biased clerical sources.
Catherine Hanley challenged such views in her sympathetic biography of Matilda, arguing that Matilda was condemned by her male contemporaries because she was a woman who reached for the crown. Had she been a man, nobody would have had any doubts that her claim to the throne was indisputable and valid.
I hope that the author will write more about medieval women in the future, because her style and approach are wonderful. I'm looking forward to reading more books by Catherine Hanley.
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