Joan, Lady of Wales

Power & Politics of King John’s Daughter

By: Danna R. Messer

Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon

The history of women in medieval Wales before the English conquest of 1282 is one largely shrouded in mystery. This misfortune touches even the most well-known royal woman of the time, Joan of England (d. 1237), the wife of Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd, illegitimate daughter of King John and half-sister to Henry III. With evidence of her hand in thwarting a full scale English invasion of Wales to a notorious scandal that ended with the public execution of her supposed lover by her husband and her own imprisonment, Joan's is a known, but little-told or understood story defined by family turmoil, divided loyalties and political intrigue.

From the time her hand was promised in marriage as the result of the first Welsh-English alliance in 1201 to the end of her life, Joan's place in the political wranglings between England and the Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd was a fundamental one. This first-ever account of Siwan, as she was known to the Welsh, interweaves the details of her life and relationships with a gendered re-assessment of Anglo-Welsh politics by highlighting her involvement in affairs, discussing events in which she may well have been involved but have gone unrecorded and her overall deployment of royal female agency.

©2020 Danna R. Messer (P)2022 Tantor

Detailed history of Siwan!

I loved the detailed story of Joan and her contemporaries, especially how women played an important role in the politics and events of the times. I was not so fond of the repetition of facts and themes...I feel it could have been much more concise/shorter and not lost any substantive info. The constant changing of Welsh pronunciation was also distracting, but I give the narrator points for attempting the difficult pronunciation. But she did not sound like a Welsh speaker...my apologies if she is!