Noblewomen, Court Service, and Crossing Borders: England c. 1500-1550

There are significant difficulties in defining aristocracy when it comes to women in sixteenth-century England, because women were so often agents of social mobility and might in theory move between social classes by dint of multiple marriages. Exactly who “counted” as a member of an aristocratic dynasty could get complex extremely quickly. This issue is further complicated when considering court service, because intimacy with and proximity to the monarch was not usually defined by aristocratic title. Moreover as princesses moved across borders to marry, they brought women with them as ladies-in-waiting who often then married into the aristocracy of their new country, necessitating a “meshing” of systems of nobility that might suggest that actual titles were less significant than sometimes thought.