Legitimizing the Queen

Isabel I's reign in Castile responds to the ostensible needs expressed throughout the fifteenth-century for moral and political regeneration. Isabel is seen in many works as a just and wise monarch, as a redeemer of her people, and as a divine sovereign. This book reviews changes in the gendered construction of Isabelline sovereignty from the theoretical perspective of the speculum principum dedicated to her. It offers a Bourdieuian approach to the more literary specula texts used to legitimize and uphold Isabel's power.