The widow queen or the death of the symbolic body

Abstract

In the early modern age the queen’s figure was constructed on an ideal base of women as, wife and mother of the king. Accordingly, to be a widow queen would be faced as a drama: these women would die like queens but would still live as women; this situation would be marked in case of queens with no lineage to perpetuate the dynasty. This article faces the analysis of this problem across discourse of panegyrists and the moralists, on the crossroads of 1700, age where various queens coexisted. Two of these queens were widows without children (Marianne of Neoburg and Louise Elisabeth d’Orléans) and two other queen widows with descendants (Marianne of Austria and Elisabeth Farnese). These accounts tell how men built an ideal and an image, with the intention of spreading a representation model for the rest of the elite women, the rest of the common people and for the queens to come.