Cultural exchange, the dynamic give and take between two or more cultures, has become a distinguishing feature of modern Europe. This was already an important feature to the elites of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and it played a central role in their fashioning of self. The cultures these elites exchanged and often integrated with their own were both material and immaterial; they included palaces, city-dwellings, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, dresses and jewellery, but also gestures, ways of sitting, standing and walking, and dances. In this innovative and...

In this lively and pathbreaking book, William Monter sketches Europe's increasing acceptance of autonomous female rulers between the late Middle Ages and the French Revolution. Monter surveys the governmental records of Europe's thirty women monarchs--the famous (Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great) as well as the obscure (Charlotte of Cyprus, Isabel Clara Eugenia of the Netherlands)--describing how each of them achieved sovereign authority, wielded it, and (more often than men) abandoned it. Monter argues that Europe's female kings, who ruled by divine right, experienced no...