Chapter 3 - Tracing Mobility

Summary

The mobility of elite secular women due to marriage, exile, or ambition is often a key feature of genealogical narratives in medieval chronicles and genealogical rolls. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a particular literary interest in the political consequences and legacies attached to women’s movements, evinced by the prevalence of mobile female founders, such as Albina, Inge, and Margaret of Scotland. This chapter examines how transregional genealogies are constructed in the relationship between text and diagram in works associated with Queen Eleanor of Provence; her mother, Beatrice of Savoy; and her granddaughter Mary of Woodstock. It focuses first on female ancestors and strands of matrilineage in royal genealogical rolls, including the prominent ribbon between Margaret of Scotland and Edith/Matilda. It then turns to Nicolas Trevet’s little-studied Les Cronicles, dedicated to Mary, to discuss an unusual story of Margaret of Scotland’s mother, Agatha of Hungry, accompanied by a matrilineal diagram.