This is the first full-scale biography of two early English queens: Emma, queen first to Aethelread and then to Cnut, and Edith, queen to Edward the Confessor. Through detailed study of these women the author demonstrates the integral place of royal queens in the rule of the English kingdom and in the process of unification by which England was made.
The careers of Emma and Edith span the troubled decades of eleventh-century English history, and the book reassesses their role in the story of foreign conquests, succession dispute and political murder. Their biography is illuminated by a detailed study of the structures of tenth- and eleventh-century English Queenship - motherhood, marriage, inheritance and succession, the royal household and patronage, consecrated and holy Queenship. It moves from the partial stories told of them by others, and the unique narrative worlds they themselves commissioned, to a new and detailed biography in which Emma especially emerges as one of the most significant political actors of her day and in which both women are shown as both imprisoned by but contesting the inexorable female lifecycle.

The book is an important contribution to our understanding of eleventh- and twelfth-century rule but also of medieval England in general, and, crucially, the role of women within that world.