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The Most Powerful Woman in the Middle Ages?
When you think about powerful women in the Middle Ages, women who made a lasting difference, you might mention Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegard of Bingen, or in China, Mu Guiying, but you probably would not name Matilda of Canossa (ca. 1046–1115).
The struggle between Henry IV, the German emperor, and Hildebrand, the Italian pope known as Gregory VII, is well known, and has often been portrayed as the forge of the modern papacy as well as modern Europe. Matilda’s role has been recognized before, but always as ancillary to the two men.
Enter her modern biographer, Michèle Spike. In her book, Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa (New York: Vendome Press), she convincingly argues that, without Matilda, for good and for ill, history would be quite different. The Roman Catholic Church might not be “Roman,” resembling the Anglican Communion in its governance; the German people might never have sought their “place in the sun,” spilling oceans of blood in the process. The Church in Italy might still be divided between Catholic in the north and Orthodox in the south: and the split might be an amicable one. The Crusades might not have happened at all, and the dreadful history of persecution of the Jews in Christian Europe might not have been written. Without the Reformation, the great reaction to Gregory’s reforms, the…
