Lucy K. Pick

Her Father’s Daughter is a thoughtful consideration of the power and authority exercised by a group of royal women in northern Iberia in the early Middle Ages. Lucy Pick examines how royal daughters operated within the ruling system of the time, arguing that they were integral to it rather than passive objects of it. She brings together a broad array of materials—charters, liturgical manuscripts, architectural and more—to make this case. Pick’s reading of a charter issued by Urraca Fernández as a liturgical performance is particularly of interest. Her assertion that power was never something exercised in isolation, even by male rulers, is a convincing one, while her conclusion that it was not exceptional for elite medieval women to wield power aligns well with the thrust of much scholarship on the topic over the last 30 or 40 years. Now, as Pick points out in her conclusion, the challenge is for those writing mainstream histories of the Middle Ages to incorporate these findings into their work.… (altro)