In Joan de Valence, Linda Mitchell puts forward two interrelated propositions of interest to historians, especially scholars of women's history. First, its painstaking reconstruction of the life of the English heiress to the Marshal estates supports the claim that she was “one of the most influential and powerful women of the thirteenth century” (2). Second, Joan's relative invisibility in the historical record—both medieval and modern—is based on gender assumptions demeaning to women that have long governed the writing of history.
The difficulty of documenting the life of any medieval person in enough detail to write a “biography” is widely acknowledged by medievalists, and that difficulty is compounded in the case of a female subject. Linda Mitchell's narrative of Joan de Valence's life is, simultaneously, an account of where the historian finds her data and how she interprets it. Not only was Joan rich in her own right, but she married William de Valence, a half brother to King Henry III. Because Joan de Valence was an aristocrat with close ties to the royal court, she appears (albeit tangentially) in court and chancery records and in royal chronicles. Some accounts from her estate survive that reveal her management skills in widowhood, and there are household accounts that provide insight into daily life. However, the personal details that a modern reader would expect in a biography about Joan's early life, her subjective responses, and even her death, are simply not recoverable. Mitchell therefore supplements the available archival data about Joan with generalizations about the lives of elite women drawn through micro-historical and prosopographical methodologies common in medieval biography writing. Early chapters where specifics about Joan are lacking contain more “might have,” “must have” and “if” locutions, whereas later chapters benefit from Mitchell's analysis of the richer documentation to tease out Joan's personality and activities. Throughout, Mitchell's explicit attention to her own interpretive techniques is a useful demonstration of the medieval historian at work.
Beyond the challenges of finding biographical information about any medieval person, Mitchell draws attention to the role of gender bias. Women are typically mentioned in the historical records only as adjuncts to a male figure and are rarely ascribed agency. Even in recent studies—which use paradigms based on post-eighteenth century women's history—the focus tends to be on women in a domestic setting. It is a focus relatively inapplicable to medieval noblewomen, whose administration of their “household” could involve fiscal, agricultural, legal, judicial and occasionally military responsibilities on large and widely dispersed estates. Mitchell includes a long list and several maps of properties that Joan had inherited or acquired and actively managed in England, Wales, and Ireland, illustrating the range of her power. Mitchell makes a convincing case for Joan's ability to foster the strength of the dynasties with which she was affiliated through marriage and other political alliances, ensuring her descendants' influence into the fourteenth century.
Mitchell's study is strongest in its reconstruction of the litigation Joan and her husband pursued throughout their lives to establish their rights over their possessions. The suits involved competing heirs in the Marshal family, other nobles, retainers managing the estates, and even the king. One of the more intriguing and puzzling cases concerned Dionysia, the minor daughter of Joan's half brother William de Munchensy. Joan and her husband William de Valence attempted to remove Dionysia from the line of succession on the basis that she was a bastard. The litigation drew in the archbishop of Canterbury, Parliament, and the king, who maintained his prerogative to control Dionysia's marriage arrangements. Mitchell disagrees with other scholars about Joan's motives: “It seems a bit extreme to ascribe to Joan a 40-year-long enduring hatred of her half-brother and stepmother” that would motivate her legal suits, although she admits it's “plausible ” that they would object to permitting a child born out of wedlock to inherit (76). Joan's denial of Dionysia's property rights culminated in conflict over the manor of Painswick, which both claimed. The king wanted to award Painswick to Dionysia and her husband for their services but, knowing Joan would be upset, he instructed his chancery to take precautions to hide his machinations. Mitchell comments, “It seems extraordinary that Joan, in her early seventies, could intimidate the brother of the earl of Oxford—and create such a level of anxiety in the scarcely faint-hearted King Edward” (137). Clearly, Joan had clout.
Mitchell has reconstructed Joan de Valence's place as a major “political actor” in the thirteenth century, but she also insists that historians have overlooked many other highly influential royal and elite women: “rarely do historians of ‘mainstream’ political history explore how frequently women appear in the public records and how compellingly their activities suggest the dynamic place and contribution of medieval women in social and political contexts formerly ascribed only to men” (150). In Joan de Valence, Linda Mitchell takes up a number of challenges that face any scholar attempting to write the life history of a medieval woman. The result is a book making the case not just for this one powerful noblewoman, but for a return to the archives to reassess the underappreciated but important roles that women played in medieval society.
