Juana de Castilla: Conspiración, locura y poder en la Castilla renacentista: 109

The definitive biography of Juana of Castile and the invention of her madness. Long relegated to the myth of her supposed insanity, Juana I of Castile was in fact one of the most decisive--and most mistreated--political figures of the European Renaissance. Daughter of the Catholic Monarchs, wife of Philip the Handsome, and mother of Charles I, she inherited the kingdom of Castile from Isabella the Catholic and remained its queen de iure for nearly four decades, at a crucial moment in the formation of the Hispanic Monarchy. In this definitive biography, Eduardo Juárez Valero reconstructs Juana's true trajectory with rigor and precision, dismantling the clichés that have reduced her to a passive figure. Drawing on extensive research and access to previously unpublished documentation, the author reveals a sovereign fully aware of her role, capable of governing and of understanding the political significance of her inheritance, yet pushed aside by the interests of those around her. From the court of Flanders to her long confinement in Tordesillas--through the death of Isabella the Catholic, the succession crisis in Castile, the power struggles between Ferdinand the Catholic and Philip the Handsome, the Revolt of the Comuneros, and the rise of Charles I--this book restores Juana of Castile to her true political, cultural, and human dimension: that of a sovereign educated in the liberal arts and in the humanist culture of her time. An essential work for understanding the birth of the modern state and the story of a queen who was denied the throne for being a woman.