03/25/2025
A new kind of kingdom needed a new kind of queen. The millennium-old and largely forgotten Mathilda of Flanders is being re-introduced as the groundbreaking ruler she was, thanks to Laura Gathagan, associate professor in SUNY Cortland’s History Department.
It took Gathagan’s new book, The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders, c. 1031-1083: Embodying Conquest, to bring to light one of the most remarkable monarchs of the Middle Ages. Now, her scholarship on the Anglo-Norman queen has drawn international attention, with Gathagan featured on one of France’s most prominent broadcast channels, French 3, and invited to the French city of Caen to speak at its 1,000th anniversary celebration starting March 20.
Gathagan’s work uncovered the prominent role that Mathilda had in building up the once pastoral town of Caen into a capital of her region that remains a major port city of France.
“She was ruthless in the best way,” Gathagan said. “She was adaptable, she was incredibly confident. She’d be successful no matter where she was. ... She would be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and she would be on the very top because she doesn’t let anything get in her way.”
Mathilda married William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, who later led the Norman Conquest and became king of England. While William has had many biographies that focus on his life, Mathilda was ignored, despite the impact she had on her kingdom.
Inspired by a lineage connected to German nobility, her leadership flipped her English subjects’ expectations of what expect from their monarchy.
“Mathilda rules like an empress, she doesn’t rule like a queen,” Gathagan said. “She uses these sorts of models from the German Imperial world to rule England.”
This style led her to take an active role in the doling out of justice, in spiritual matters and in building up Caen itself as a new center for her and William’s kingdom. Generations after Mathilda’s death, England’s queens, duchesses and countesses continued the tradition she brought to the country.
Despite Mathilda’s influence at the time, it was hard for Gathagan to rescue her from the hidden corners of history.
She credited the support of SUNY Cortland and the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (MSRH) at the Université de Caen-Normandie in France for fellowships that allowed her, over years of work, to explore a subject she’s been passionate about since graduate school.
“I’ve had to look for documents and search through manuscripts to find her,” Gathagan said. “And this is one of the reasons why no one has ever written a biography of Mathilda of Flanders.”
Mathilda rarely appears in the widely read chronicles of her era, but is featured heavily in more obscure documents that underscore the powerful influence she had.
“She is all over the place in legal documentation, the charters and agreements where she guarantees land and donates land, where she acts as a judge in legal disputes and wields royal justice. Those kinds of documents you can’t find easily, so you have to dig them out.”
When many of those sources were first examined it was in the 19th century by aristocratic men with the free time, money and education to do so, and when women’s rights were extremely limited.
“Women couldn’t inherit at all, it was illegal in England and in many parts of France,” Gathagan said. “So especially in English historical circles, there was no indication at all that women were important. They couldn’t imagine a woman who actually had military troops at her fingertips, or who sat in royal justice and adjudicated law cases for everyone.”
While Gathagan said she was a little nervous to present in French during her roundtable talk at the millennial celebration in Caen, she sees the book and her talk as chances to highlight that the modern world has assumptions about women’s roles in the past that are incorrect.
“That tradition is a lie,” she said. “Women in the Middle Ages had significant power. They were not passive. They were not legally helpless. They had agency and autonomy and real, honest-to-God power. ... If you want to think about how women are ‘supposed’ to act or how they acted in the past, you need to know what the past really looked like. And it didn’t look anything like that.”
Much like the relentless pace of Mathilda of Flanders, Gathagan is already planning a new general audience book that will again challenge historical assumptions. With a planned title of “25 Women who Shaped Medieval Lordship,” she wants as many readers as possible to know that the facts of history still have valuable lessons to teach.
"We’re in this moment where women are being erased right now,” Gathagan said. “If you listen to the news, you see that all the branches of our military have erased or are erasing women’s participation. ... So, we’re watching the battle for women’s visibility happening as we speak. It’s an old story, but it’s also a new story.”