This book, based on a University of Edinburgh PhD from 2022, explores the reproductive history of eight royal couples of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, three cases from England (Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, and Edward II and Isabella of France) and five cases from Scotland (Alexander II and Joan of England, Alexander III and Margaret of England, Alexander III and Yolande of Dreux, David II and Joan of the Tower, and David II and Margaret Logie). A useful chart on pp. viii-ix summarizes the important details about these couples: their age at marriage, the number of children, with their dates of birth, possible miscarriages, and the king’s illegitimate children, if any. From this, one can see at a glance that, of the eight marriages discussed, five involved brides in the age range 11-13, one aged seven, and two in their twenties or early thirties.
After an exceptionally precise and informative introduction which surveys the eight cases (1-16), and then the obligatory trawl through the historiography (16-41), there follow five chapters that are thematic and discuss the cases comparatively. The writing style is clear, the topics are marked out by sub-headings and there is very little jargon. The only medical terms that might be unfamiliar are “sub-fertility,” meaning difficulty in conceiving, and “secondary infertility,” meaning difficulty in conceiving more than one child, but since these terms are used rarely and can be expressed quite simply anyway, this is not an issue.
The title of the book mentions “Reproductive Pressure” and this is a recurrent topic, as it should be. In a patriarchal, dynastic world like medieval Europe, whether a king had children was politically crucial and had long-term consequences. The death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 leaving no sons (his had predeceased him) initiated a succession crisis that transformed Anglo-Scottish relations from the relatively peaceful twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the forever wars of 1296-1560. In the following century, David II died childless in 1371, leading to the succession of the Stewart dynasty, who then ruled Scotland down to 1714 (picking up England and Ireland along the way). This need for fertile queens explains why brides were so often very young and why kings remarried so quickly if a first, childless wife died (14 months after the death of the first wife in the case of Alexander II).
But the author wishes to go beyond that simple (if indubitable) point. She wants “not to automatically place the burden of childlessness entirely on the queens, or to explain their queenship solely in terms of their ultimate reproductive success or failure” (19), and to stress “the previously overlooked importance of kings in contemporary perceptions of royal couples’ fertility” (72). The evidence for “contemporary perceptions” is sought mainly in chronicles, and these are quoted frequently and pertinently, though I would suggest that they are sometimes overinterpreted. Two comments by the monastic chronicler Matthew Paris about Henry III’s bride, Eleanor of Provence, provide an example. In 1236, the year of the royal marriage, Matthew comments that “it was not known whether the queen, being young, was fertile or sterile.” In 1238, after describing the birth of a son to the king’s sister and her husband, Simon de Montfort, he says the boy would be “a strength and comfort to the kingdom,” adding, “for it was feared that the queen was sterile” (59-60, citing Chronica maiora, 3, pp. 340, 518). While Dr Trivett acknowledges these remarks are “unique” (60), she goes on to use them as evidence for “rising anxiety over the royal couple’s childlessness” (100) in the 1230s and integrates them into a complex argument linking Henry III’s increased interest in the cult of Edward the Confessor, his awareness of reaching his thirties, and worries about childlessness. It should perhaps be reiterated that Eleanor was twelve when she married the king (the minimum age in canon law). A considerate gap between marriage and consummation was common in such circumstances (sometimes even prescribed in writing). Even so, Eleanor was pregnant by the end of 1238, less than three years from the wedding. It seems that Matthew Paris might have had fears and anxieties about her fecundity but improbable that anyone else did.
The book ranges widely and turns up memorable moments. In 1261 a messenger bringing news to king Alexander III of the birth of his first child, a daughter Margaret, was rewarded with a life grant of ten marks (a mark was two-thirds of a pound), while three years later, in 1264, a similar messenger reporting the birth of his son Alexander received ten pounds, a sum worth 50 per cent more. It is unlikely that the difference between the amount granted for news of a son and that for news of a daughter is to be explained by monetary inflation (57-8). Another intriguing section is headed “Fake Pregnancy Narratives” (83-94). The main example concerns Yolande of Dreux, the young and recent wife of Alexander III, who was widowed when her husband had a fall while galloping through the night to come to her. The crucial question for the Scottish nobles and churchmen was whether Yolande were pregnant or not, since the child, if it existed, would inherit the throne (whatever its sex, since the Scots had already accepted the principle of female succession to the kingdom). The only way to find out was to wait and see. Our main chronicle source for this, the Lanercost Chronicle, is so misogynist and fantastical that we can hardly believe its account of the scheming Yolande, pretending to be pregnant and attempting to smuggle in a substitute baby but being found out and leaving the country in shame. The situation is similar to the one that occurred in the kingdom of France in 1316, when Louis X died leaving a pregnant wife, though here the waiting was to determine whether the child would be male or female.
A particularly rich section concerns “Religious Patronage and Spiritual Support for Royal Fertility” (175-213), which treats the invocation of the saints to bring fertility or to help during labour, pilgrimages with the same purpose, and the use of relics, such as the cloak of St Edmund of Abingdon brought to Eleanor of Provence during labour in 1245 (as was the sark or chemise of St Margaret taken to Scots queens of the later Middle Ages, beyond the chronological limits of this book). Incidentally, English women were granted special rights by the pope to visit St Edmund’s relics in the abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy, even though it was usually barred to women, so perhaps women were regarded as his natural constituency. I do not think the statement, “Henry III’s devotion was the origin point for English royal patronage of St Edward the Confessor” (202) can be accepted: Edward was England’s first papally canonized saint, canonized in 1161 at the special petition of Henry II, who stressed his blood relationship with Edward, and his relics were solemnly translated two years later, at Henry’s request and in his presence.
Appeals to the saints did not make medical advice redundant. The foreign queens (seven of the eight cases) often brought their own physicians—male and usually with a high level of academic training—and medical literature. The mother of Eleanor of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, gave copies of Aldobrandino’s Régime du corps to each of her four daughters (they were, rather remarkably, the queens of England, France, Germany, and Sicily). A rare surviving list of ingredients from the apothecary of Isabella of France, dating to November 1313, is analysed here, and it is argued that the recipe is to help recovery from an (unrecorded) miscarriage between Isabella’s recorded childbirths of 1312 and 1316.
In the modern world, a childless couple who desire a child can check the fertility of both the man and the woman. In medieval circumstances, they could not, and pregnancy was the only evidence of a couple’s fertility, via evidence of a woman’s fertility. When David II of Scotland had no children by his wife Joan of the Tower after 34 years of marriage, he could not undertake effective fertility treatment, but took a mistress instead, and then remarried after Joan’s death, and was possibly seeking a third wife at the time of his own death. He was looking for a fertile wife, not accepting that he was an infertile man (if he was). Though the point is sometimes muffled by overuse throughout the book of generic terms such as “gendered” or “gendering,” “the focus” was indeed, as the author most lucidly says, “squarely on the queen's body” (212). It is clear that this is a valuable book, even if there are points where the reader will disagree. The most outrageous thing about it is the price.