Heart of Europe by Ralph Adams Cram

The historians always call her Marguerite of Austria, but this is hardly fair, for even if she were a daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian she did not come into her own until she took up her residence in a beautiful castle in Malines and made that own the fortune and the destinies and the happiness of the Flemish people who had been given her. On both her father's side and her mother's she was English, if you go back far enough, her great, great, great-grandfather having been that "John of Gaunt (Ghent), time-honoured Lancaster" of whom we have heard before. Her mother, Mary of Burgundy, who died when she was a baby, traced her line back through Charles the Bold and Isabella of Bourbon to John of Gaunt's daughter, Philippa, who married John I of Portugal; and it is through Philippa's son Eduard and his daughter Eleanor who married Maximilian's father, the Emperor Frederick III, that the strain comes on the father's side. So "Margaret of Malines" let her be; and as well the well-beloved Regent of Flanders, for never, even in the great days of great kings and governors, was there ever a better sovereign or a more engaging lady.

The Middle Ages are as full of lovable and admirable women as the Renaissance is of sinister and regrettable representatives of the same sex. They had no votes and they claimed no rights; they were less welcome at birth than princes, and they were incontinently (and often prodigally) married off without a "by your leave" by their scheming fathers. Wholly subservient both in principle and in law, they were anything but this in fact, and a study of the Middle Ages reveals a certain feminine dominance that is startling to the male of to-day. It is well to remember that the clinging type, with the ringlets and facile emotions and tears, is a product of modern civilisation; medievalism knew nothing of it, and little of that even less attractive aspect that always becomes conspicuous when society is breaking down at the end of an era; a Catherine of Russia, while not without prototypes in the Middle Ages, would have been as anomalous then as a Blanche of Castile in the eighteenth century. Apparently, the only conspicuous differences between the men and women of medievalism were that the men did the fighting and most of the active or violent work, while the women directed their courses, corrected their mistakes, and built up their character and that of their children; and that the men confined themselves to the tactics while the women controlled the major strategy of the battle of life.