Flora Sophie Lemburg

The canon of the nine worthies embodied the medieval conception of the hero. Nine men, from different periods divided into triads based on religion, each embodying the characteristics of a valiant knight: these served as role models for chivalric society. While the male worthies are well-known, their female counterparts, the Nine Worthy Women, have featured much less in scholarship. My thesis aims to demonstrate how the original French concept, centring around women well-known from classical texts, was received in the literature of medieval England and Scotland, and how this tradition was then harnessed in the early modern period to reflect the significant political change of female monarchy (Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots). A central research question is: what were the qualities that led a woman to be regarded as ‘worthy’ and how did these change over time? Focussing on the women both as a group and on individual woman worthies, such as Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, I am examining ideas of female leadership and connections between gender and power.