Las Huelgas — Royal Women with Institutional Power
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Transcript
Alfonso VIII and Eleanor of England founded Las Huelgas in the late twelfth century as a royal Cistercian monastery for women. Its abbess exercised unusually broad authority over estates, communities and dependent houses.
Royal burials and precious textiles reinforced the monastery’s dynastic role, but reducing it to a royal cemetery misses the institution itself. Elite religious women could administer property, patronage and legal privileges on a substantial scale.
The monastery therefore complicates a male-centred picture of medieval power. Queens and abbesses were not peripheral spectators in Castile’s political order; institutions like this gave them durable resources and authority.