Myra Miranda Bom

Constance of France lived a life which was fairly typical for women of her background in twelfth-century Europe: she entered into two marriages which were arranged for her by her family, had children, witnessed charters, and after the end of her second marriage spent time in Jerusalem before returning to spend her final years near her birth family. Myra Miranda Bom works diligently to recover as much evidence as is possible about Constance from the contemporary sourcebase, and to place her in the context of her time.

However, there simply isn't much documentary material for Bom to work with, nor archaeological evidence (we don't know where she was buried, and the estate she purchased south of Jerusalem has never been excavated), nor even a strong historiographical tradition to engage with. Unlike near contemporaries such as Eleanor of Aquitaine or the Empress Matilda, Constance didn't attract the interest of chroniclers or of 19th-century historians. As I read, I found myself wondering who this book was for—for specialists in medieval women, much of the contextualizing information is very basic and Bom doesn't offer up any real new archival discoveries or ways of approaching her subject. The interested general reader may well find Bom's book to be accessibly written and the contextual framing new and interesting, but the price of a volume in The New Middle Ages series is surely going to put this out of reach of most such readers.… (mehr)