Queenship follows a conceptual approach, i.e. it tries to understand not the life and work of one person, but the system, the role and the experience, i.e. what it meant to be a queen or a woman in the realm of rulership. This presupposes tracing the position of royal women over a longer horizon and examining their possibilities, strategies, resources, and share of power and rule. At the same time, not only a longer temporal but also a geographical perspective and comparisons with other parts of Europe or the world are necessary, as they can provide a deeper understanding of contemporary patterns of behaviour.

In short, Queenship is a translation of the Czech term reginalita, which can be understood as the office or role of queen. Parallel to e.g. the Spanish or Italian equivalents (reginalidad, reginalità), we propose the Czech neologism reginalita, which is based on the Latin word for queen (regina), although there is not quite an equivalence between reginality and queenship (queen originally referred only to the wife of the king, whereas regina refers to a female ruler).

The main goal of this project is a complete overhaul of writing and thinking about Bohemian royal women (that is queens, princesses, dowagers, and other females connected by familial bonds to the ruler) and gendered power in late medieval monarchy. Operating on the thesis that female power is not an exception and anomaly, it will aim to lay bare key elements of Bohemian queenship, shedding light on the modalities and ways the royal women exerted power and influence, how this power translated into material and written remnants and what sort of assets and tools were mobilised in doing so. Although our focus is broad in the range of tackled issues, our aim is not to produce an exhaustive picture of these topics (see more below) or the Bohemian queenship as a whole. Instead, we aim to provide a highly systematic comparative overview of particular and general aspects of female power.

Our goals are therefore: a) to evaluate the types of resources and options that allowed royal women to exercise power and influence, b) to clarify the quality and forms of power and influence that Czech royal women had in the 14th and 15th centuries in the Czech lands, Central Europe and beyond.

However, it is not only about observing the influence and position of women in the longer term, but also about reassessing the system of medieval rulership as a whole. For several decades, researchers have been working with the concept of the so-called corporate monarchy, i.e. a model of rulership according to which the monarch was only one, albeit the most important, cog in the machine. Recently, scholars such as Christian Raffensperger have shown the rich world of possibilities of medieval government: regional rulers in the Iberian Peninsula or Anglo-Saxon Britain called themselves “emperors”, kingdoms were often co-ruled by several siblings, royal daughters were legitimate co-regents, etc.

Our project follows studies by Louise O. Fradenburg (1992), Theresa Earenfight (2007) and others, who have argued that in order to be effective, medieval rulership was gendered, that is, it had to consist of both male and female elements. Female power was therefore an essential component of monarchical government and must be examined in relation to male power, because both interacted with and thus constructed each other. We therefore want to put a new light on this interconnection and the central role of women in the changing system of government, at least in a few selected areas.