A proposito di storia della corte 'al femminile'. Nuove prospettive di ricerca su sovrane, reggenti e cortigiane.

Women’s “political” power has been investigated in a considerable amount of studies for the last years. In virtue of this, it needs to be reformulated and defined both in the long term and in its specificities. In this paper we will try to discern what both women’s power and their political role in the court mean by referring to some recent studies which opened up new spaces for historiographic reflection on the history of women’s courts. We will try to give an answer to some relevant questions from the standpoint of historical narrative: namely, whether women management of power should be intended as capacity of choice and an ability of administrating spaces of autonomy and of concrete intervention in the private and the public sphere as well; and whether and when it would be likely to speak of a women’s power independent of men’s power that is capable of giving rise to a different category of the same concept.