Wife, widow, exiled Queen Beatrice d’Aragona (1457–1508) and kinship in Early Modern Europe

This chapter analyses how the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Beatrice d’Aragona (1457–1508), negotiated her shifting marital status and identity in central Europe and southern Italy. She was twice married—the first marriage resulting in widowhood, and the second in exile—with her entire adulthood spent as an outsider in Hungary, or on the edge of courtly Naples. A close analysis of Beatrice’s exile shows that women could survive widowhood using natal networks, since, though their marital identities changed, their status as sister, daughter, and aunt did not. This chapter contributes to the literature on early modern European kinship networks by demonstrating that the presence of these networks protected women in difficult marital situations, and how their absence made widowhood without wealth a marginalised existence.