weird

theres 3 of us and 1 of england

“The time from the accession of Isabella of Castile to the throne in 1474 to France’s Massacre of St Bartholomew almost a century later (a horror which ruptured loyalties across the continent) was an Age of Queens. The period saw an explosion of female rule scarcely equalled in even the twentieth century. These years saw the birth of the new reformed religion, as well as the dawn of the world we know today and for much of them, large swathes of Europe were under the firm hand of a reigning queen or a female regent. This was a sisterhood which recognised both their bonds as women and their ability to exercise power in a specifically feminine way.

[…] As the century wore on, the daughters of the first powerful women found themselves at the forefront of the great religious divides that racked the sixteenth century. Most, though not all, attempted to exercise a measure of religious tolerance before those hopes foundered in the face of other, more extreme, opinions.

Religion helped bring many of them into prominence; religion, in the end, would drive them apart and bring the Age of Queens to an end. But the sheer scale on which the women of the sixteenth century exercised power (as well as the challenges they faced) remains both a spectacle and a warning to our own day.” — Sarah Gristwood, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth–Century Europe