Review by New York Times Review
THE 13th century was a very long time ago. But you'd never know it from Nancy Goldstone's breezy account of the careers of four sisters - Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia and Beatrice - born to Raymond Berenger V, the Count of Provence, and his wife, Beatrice of Savoy. Some might call that a victory. After all, making the past accessible to present-day readers is the goal of any popular historian. But Goldstone's method raises some questions. "Four Queens," she explains, is the story of "a family of four sisters who had risen from near obscurity to become the most celebrated and powerful women of their time." But just how obscure was this family? Raymond Berenger wasn't a king, but the Provence he ruled as a fief of the Holy Roman Empire - flush with vineyards, dotted with chateaus and boasting an important trade route through Marseille - was highly desirable to his neighbors. And his four daughters led, as Goldstone puts it, "a life of gaiety, affluence and leisure" in a court "padded by elaborate manners and conspicuous expenditure." When Blanche of Castile, queen of France, sent an emissary to assess the 12-year-old Marguerite Berenger's fitness for marriage to her son, Louis IX, the man was feted for days and returned well satisfied with the girl, who had dressed in fine silks and whose accomplishments included falconry and a working knowledge of Latin. Although her father didn't have the 10,000-mark dowry in ready cash, he owned enough castles to serve as collateral. Goldstone makes a passing observation that during the Berenger sisters' formative years, "an excessive obsession with outward appearance, careless largesse" and "a disdain for physical labor" emerged in the French nobility, setting the country "on the path that six centuries later would lead directly to Robespierre and the guillotine" - which seems more plausible than her thesis about the Berengers' obscure origins. And how powerful did all the sisters become? Each made a marriage to a man who was already a king or destined to become one, but two of the sisters held their thrones for less than five years, and at no time did all four reign simultaneously as the queens of France, England, Germany and Sicily. Goldstone repeatedly asserts that one episode or another showed the Berenger sisters influencing events, but her evidence doesn't always support her claims. Queen Eleanor of England made what Goldstone argues was a fateful decision to sail from England to France in 1254 to join her husband, Henry III, who was busy shoring up his holdings in Gascony, apparently under threat from Alfonso of Castile. "This act of courage and decisiveness was rewarded," Goldstone writes. "Alfonso did not attack Gascony." Then, parenthetically, she acknowledges that Alfonso never intended to attack in the first place. The power the sisters actually did wield - at least the two who reigned as the queens of England and France - lay in brokering the marriages of their children and other close relations, ensuring their family's dynastic sway. Yet Goldstone merely touches on this fascinating subject. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the Berenger sisters' story, also neglected here, was that after the two older sisters married Louis IX of France and Henry III of England, their younger sisters married the younger brothers of these same kings, at considerable personal cost. Beatrice died at 35, less than two years after her husband claimed the throne of Sicily, succumbing to "bacterial infections" contracted in the "oppressive summer climate of southern Italy." Sanchia died at 33, after traveling with her husband through the "cold, brutal" countryside of Germany. If only Goldstone had been content to situate the Berenger sisters as four women of privilege struggling to hold their own in a tumultuous aristocratic arena where personality counted nearly as much as birthright. This is the story, and the vivid world, that hovers at the edges of a narrative that sacrifices complexity and texture to advance a shaky thesis about the sisters' crucial roles in the politics of the Middle Ages. Although Goldstone has done her homework - a lengthy bibliography supports a text chockablock with dramatic incident - her prose minimizes the distance between the book's subjects and its readers, making the 13th century seem strangely modern. "Heretic killing was a warm-weather sport," she remarks jauntily, making little effort to explain the religious beliefs at issue. As Sanchia's marriage deteriorates, Goldstone offers poppsych insights: "Richard drew away from his wife and instead threw himself into his work." Sanchia, in turn, sought the comfort of women friends and "even belonged to a book group." (The slim evidence for this anachronism is a letter showing that the countess of Arundel was once asked to pass along a book for Sanchia to read.) Does it really help to be told that "nunneries were the assisted-living facilities of the Middle Ages," as Goldstone writes when Eleanor takes the veil? We want to know, instead, what made the priory where Eleanor sequestered herself in 1286 different from a retirement home in 2007. We expect a work of history - especially a popular one - to satisfy an elemental curiosity: What was it like back then? Goldstone's "Four Queens" leaves us still wondering. Two of the sisters married the kings of England and France. The two others married the younger brothers. Megan Marshall, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is the author of "The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Historian Goldstone tracks the historically and politically significant lives of four thirteenth-century sisters born into the minor nobility of medieval Provence. Although their origins were not as lofty as many others, Marguerite married Louis IX of France, Eleanor was wed to England's Henry III, Sanchia was married to Richard of Cornwall, who eventually was crowned king of Germany, and Beatrice assisted her husband, Charles of Anjou, in seizing the Sicilian throne. Goldstone deftly analyzes what separated these women from their peers--beauty, ambition, familial connections, political aspirations, and timing--in compulsively readable detail. This fascinating collective biography will appeal to students of the period and should generate some crossover appeal for fans of intelligent historical fiction featuring strong female protagonists a la Philippa Gregory. --Margaret Flanagan Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The four beautiful, cultured and clever daughters of the Count and Countess of Provence made illustrious marriages and lived at the epicenter of political power and intrigue in 13th-century Europe. Marguerite accompanied her husband, King Louis IX of France, on his disastrous first crusade to the Holy Land, where straight from childbirth she ransomed him from the Mamluks. And with her sister Eleanor, queen of England, Marguerite engineered a sturdy peace between France and England. Ambitious Eleanor walked a narrow line while she struggled to build her own power base without alienating her cowardly husband, Henry III. Beatrice's coronation as queen of Sicily was the culmination of her long, hard-fought campaign to earn respect from her world-famous, mightily accomplished older siblings. Sanchia wed one of the richest men in Europe, but her reign as queen of Germany, brought her only misery. On Goldstone's (coauthor of The Friar and the Cipher) rich, beautifully woven tapestry, medieval Europe springs to vivid life, from the lavish menus of the royal banquets and the sweet songs of the troubadours to the complex machinations of the pope against the Holy Roman Emperor. This is a fresh, eminently enjoyable history that gives women their due as movers and shakers in tumultuous times. Illus., 4 maps. (Apr. 23) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bibliophile and novelist Goldstone (coauthor, The Friar and the Cipher) has spent much of the last decade writing books with her husband, Lawrence Goldstone. Their shared output revolves mainly around their experiences as collectors of rare books and manuscripts. Goldstone has chosen a new direction for her first solo title in almost ten years. She takes us back to the 13th century with an interesting and entertaining treatment of the four daughters of the count and countess of Provence-Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia, and Beatrice-whose marriages resulted in their becoming queens of France, England, Germany, and Sicily, respectively. There are not many modern biographies of the sisters; Beatrice and Sanchia in particular have received very short shrift, which makes a title that presents their stories intertwined all the more absorbing. While this work is more riveting narrative than scholarly history, Goldstone does draw heavily on modern publications of primary sources, including period correspondence and the work of well-known chroniclers of the age, such as Matthew Paris and Jean de Joinville. Recommended for academic and public libraries wishing to expand their women's history holdings.-Tessa L.H. Minchew, Georgia Perimeter Coll., Clarkston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Goldstone's latest recondite foray (The Friar and the Cipher, 2005, etc., co-authored with husband Lawrence Goldstone) tracks the spectacular rise of four well-positioned sisters in 13th-century Provence. The daughters of Raymond Berenger V and Beatrice of Savoy, Count and Countess of Provence, were neither terrifically rich nor highly well born, but they were comely, cultured and the right age just as Provence was growing more strategically important for both the French and English crowns. Blanche of Castile, the formidable mother of young Louis IX, hoped to neutralize Provence's bellicose neighbor of Toulouse with the arranged marriage in 1234 of her son to eldest sister Marguerite, then 13. The scheming White Queen wasn't wrong: The marriage lasted until Louis's death in 1270, having produced ten children and endured two disastrous crusades and consolidated French power. Meanwhile, England's 28-year-old Henry III thought a match with a fiefdom of the Holy Roman Empire--namely, Provence--might work to his advantage in the nation's decades-long civil war and keep the White Queen in check as well. He chose Marguerite's sister Eleanor, in 1236 a bright, literate young lady of 13; theirs, too, was a strong, fruitful alliance that ultimately prevailed through the uprising of Simon de Montfort in the 1260s. Third sister Sanchia, the most beautiful and timid, was married off to Henry's gruff younger brother, Richard of Cornwall, and endured an unhappy, short life as queen of Germany before dying at age 35. Last came Beatrice, who at 13 became the sole heir of her father's fortune; besieged by suitors, she was finally forced to wed King Louis's youngest brother, Charles of Anjou. Husband and wife lustily raised an army and seized the kingship of Sicily, though Beatrice's hope of ruling it over her sisters ended with her early death. The author's synthesis of much research is impressive, though her jam-packed history requires relentless attention to chronology and lineage. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
