I want to thank Netgalley and the author for gifting me the ebook. Wonderful history book! Highly recommend if you are a history buffs!

It was an interesting book about interesting women. We think that the woman in Medieval Court played the role of love objects for knights and troubadour. Wrong, they played the game but were also powerful and influencial.
This is a well researched and engrossing book, I learned a lot and want to learn more.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This book is well researched and full of diverse medieval women. As a history lover I appreciate books where women are the main focus. She goes into great detail about these women's achievements and how they got where they were. Marriage was essential to their lives as well as producing heirs. Most don’t come into their own until they are widowed. They were vulnerable without male protection. They often needed external support to keep their power.

Concubines are often known as mistresses and were able to have some power and becoming one often brought wealth and privilege. It seems like it could also be dangerous. The author goes into detail about several of them and their place in medieval society.

Altogether I enjoyed learning about these women and their lives. My only criticism is how chaotic it got at times which did cause some confusion.

This book shows us how strong medieval women dealt with challenges in male-dominated

society..Scant records show that even though women were limited by law, they found ways to achieve their

goals and wield power.. After being controlled by her father, a woman would be controlled by her husband,

The clever women in this book were able to succeed within such well-defined limits, both the official wife and

the official concubine, An extremely well-written and researched book..

This is an excellent analysis of powerful medieval women who have sometimes been forgotten, or regarded as unusual. This was because they lived in a patriarchal society but there were really many of them. Rebecca Holdorph analyses how these 'consorts and concubines' attained power, how they kept power, their culture and education, and their struggles to fight against their rivals - mostly powerful men. The women who she studies include Matilda of Canossa, Caterina of Cornero, Alice Perrers and (my favourite) Katherine Swynford. Marguerite of Anjou is another interesting one.

Some of these women like Matilda and Marguerite raised armies to defeat their enemies, and went to great lengths to defend their territories. Some queens became regents, governing on behalf of their sons. Caterina couldn't defeat the power of her homeland Venice, which took control of Cyprus away from her, but when she was sent back to Venice, she set up her own cultured court! She was popular with her subjects, but sometimes that is not enough to overcome enemies.

The 'concubines' were just as fascinating, or even more interesting. Being a concubine was even more dangerous than being a queen. Many of them were murdered, for example, Agnes Sorel was probably killed by her lover's son. They were often punished if they got too 'uppity'. Parliament even passed a law directed at Alice Perrers!

I enjoyed this extensively researched book, but there were so many women in it that it became a bit confusing at times.

I received this free ebook from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Fascinating and insightful, this book opens up oft-told histories to a new and important perspective, making the times all the more rich and interesting to the reader.

`I studied the Medievil period through art, so what I know was mainly through the arts, artists, and religion. The manuscript was nicley formatted. The book could be read front to back or just in sections. Although the manuscript was scholarly, I found the sections to be interesting and a pleasure to read. The author supplied enough information that the reader does not need to use any additional resource material. However, I'm the type of reader that once my interests are piqued, I want to learn additional information.
I was unprepared for the strength exhibited by the women of this period, assuming their worth was giving birth to heirs. However this was not the only ability that the Medievel women performed. One of the most interesting woman, in my opinion, was Urraca of Leon. She seperated from her husband so she could be queen, thus ruling not just one, but two kingdoms. The Queen was careful with her alliances, and often she played one enemy against another. Urraca "used her {...} children as kings did, she kept her sons single inorder to avoid creating a too powerful male figure in her kingdom".
I enjoyed the author's writing style and the scholarly elements of the book, and I believe this would be a good addition to any college syllabus. Thank you to NetGalley, Rebecca Holdorph, and Pen & Ink History for the privlege of reading the manuscript. As a result, I award this book a five out of five stars.

A little hard to follow since the stories of the powerful women in this book are broken up by topic such as ‘marriage’ and ‘children’ and not by telling each woman’s story as a whole. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who the author is talking about and there really isn’t a clean transition between women. But it’s a great, well researched, and interesting look into the lives of women who helped direct to course of Europe.

I really enjoyed this book a great deal. It was clever in that it began with Noble Women, and moved forward from there. This is a period I enjoy reading about. I learned about many women who might have seemed submissive, but really, as is usually the case "women run the world."
Thank you to NetGalley and Pen and Sword for an e-ARC of this title, in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

This book, looking at the oft-overlooked women in medieval courts, and their power and influence, immediately grabbed my attention. The author has clearly done a tremendous amount of research - women were scarce wrote about in this period - and I found parts of this absolutely fascinating, especially thinking about the impact concubines had.

However, on the whole, i found this book quite hard-going :

*it seems no-one has proof-read this with numerous grammatical mistakes / sentences which didn't make sense
*I found parts to be repetitive and unnecessary- I felt it could have been much more succinct
*for me personally, I didn't like the format - I hoped for a look at the different women individually; I understand that the author has chosen to interweave their stories to better compare and contrast, but with so many players, this led to confusion, and as I've put above, almost a necessity to repeat information to remind the reader of what was going on for the woman being discussed.

I feel almost like this is a draft that just needed to be edited down a bit, because the information, research and analysis of the author are good but the way it is being put across was, for me, poor.