Roundtable Feature: Medieval Queenship

The Royal Studies Podcast

In this episode, host Ellie Woodacre interviews three guests on their recently released works on medieval queens in Routledge's Lives of Royal Women series. We talk to Matt Firth, Gabby Storey and Caroline Wilhelmsson about the development of queenship in the early and high Middle Ages, the key elements of the exercise of the queen's office, how these women were styled (or styled themselves) with titles and which queens have been often overlooked but deserve much more attention.
Guest Bios:
Matt Firth is an Associate Lecturer of medieval history and literature at Flinders University and a 2025 Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. His research primarily focuses on historiography, cultural memory, and the transmission of historical narrative across time and place. His most recent article, revising the transmission history Alfred the Great’s sobriquet has just been published in The English Historical Review. His first monograph, Early English Queens 850–1000: Potestas Reginae, released earlier this year, examines the history and evolving legacies of England’s tenth-century queens.
Gabrielle (Gabby) Storey is a historian of monarchy, gender, and sexuality. She has published widely in both popular and academic print on medieval monarchy, rulership, and representations of queenship and power in modern media. Her first book, Berengaria of Navarre, queen of England, Lord of Le Mans, was published by Routledge in 2024. She is currently working on her second book which will be for the general public. Gabby is the founder of Team Queens, an online global queenship resource, and her most recent publication is an edited collection with Zita Eva Rohr on Premodern ruling sexualities, published MUP in 2024.

Caroline Wilhelmsson is an early career historian of state formation and national identity in medieval Sweden. She studies the legal, political, and religious frameworks which led to the emergence of Sweden as a concept. Her first monograph, a group biography of Sweden’s earliest recorded queens, sheds light on the inner workings of the nascent Swedish "state" at a time when the monarchy was still ill-defined, and the Church was weak. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork where she is mapping medieval Irish walled towns.