Lobas

Four great women who reigned in a man's world Henry VIII's obsession with conceiving a man is one of the most crucial episodes in medieval history. To achieve this, he divorced Catalina de Aragón, killed Ana Bolena and broke all relationship with the Catholic Church. In 1553, as Edward VI, Henry's only male heir, was dying, England was about to experience the "unnatural" reign of a woman, that of her sister: Maria Tudor, granddaughter of the Catholic Monarchs. But the government of women in that country had a past. Four hundred years before Eduardo's death, Matilde, daughter of Enrique I and granddaughter of Guillermo el Conquistador, was very close to securing the crown. Between the 12th and 15th centuries, she and three other women -Leonor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth of France (daughter of Philip IV of France and Joanna I of Navarra), and Margaret of Anjou- challenged the social structure of the Middle Ages and openly fought for power. In this book, Helen Castor, a famous British historian and member of the Royal Society of Literature, guides us through the lives of these extraordinary women and shows, with elegant and dynamic prose, how they opened the way for other women to reign in a world dominated by men