She-Wolves — Helen Castor

Castor examines four medieval women who held or contested royal power — Empress Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, and Margaret of Anjou — asking what the exercise of political authority actually meant for women in a system that assumed it to be male. The book is not a celebration but an analysis: what strategies were available, how they worked, and where they failed, in a world that had no framework for female rule and punished those who attempted it.