A review by eserafina42
Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe by Sarah Gristwood

4.0

A wonderful book detailing the often unacknowledged power of women in sixteenth-century Europe, as well as the web of relationships, influences and rivalries uniting and sometimes them. One thing I would love to have seen would be for it to be diagrammed as a sort of "family tree" of influences. For instance, Margaret of Austria, who, in some sense is linked to almost all the others, spent time in the court of Isabella of Spain and also at the French court under the tutelage of Anne de Beaujeau (sister and regent of Charles VIII) along with Louise of Savoy, had Katherine of Aragon as her sister-in-law, and in her turn had Anne Boleyn living in her court, as well as raising Mary of Hungary.