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The dark queens [large type] : the bloody rivalry that forged the medieval world / Shelley Puhak.

by Puhak, Shelley, author.

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Waterville, ME : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage company, 2022.

Brunehaut, Queen, consort of Sigebert, King of Austrasia, 534-613.

Fredegund, Queen, consort of Chilperic I, King of Neustria, -597.

Queens -- France -- Biography.

Merovingians -- Biography.

France -- History -- To 987.

9781432899332 (large print) (hardcover)

1432899333 (large print) (hardcover)

Thorndike Press large print nonfiction series.

601 pages (large print), 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.

Large print edition.

A wedding in Metz -- Meeting the Franks -- The fall of Charibert -- New alliances -- A missive to Byzantium -- The slave queen -- All the king's men -- The siege -- The witch and the nun -- Back channels -- Uprising -- The laws of sanctuary -- Crime and punishment -- "Wise in counsel" -- Fredegund's grief -- Brunhild in the breach -- The regency -- Set ablaze -- Brunichildis regina -- The king is dead -- The vexations of King Guntram -- The Gundovald affair -- The diplomatic arts -- The dukes' revolt -- A royal engagement -- The defiant nuns -- Allies and assassins -- Forlorn little boys -- The fading of the kings -- The dual rule -- Brunhild's battles -- The fall -- Epilogue: Backlash.

"The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule. Brunhild was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet-in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport-these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms, changing the face of Europe. The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a decades-long civil war-against each other. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne's empire. Yet after the queens' deaths-one gentle, the other horrific-their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend. In The Dark Queens, award-winning writer Shelley Puhak sets the record straight. She resurrects two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture's stubbornest myths about female power. The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world"--

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