Ladies, Lordships and Losses: The Lives of Three Generations of Aristocratic Women in the Fifteenth Century: Alice Montagu, Countess of Salisbury, Katherine Neville, Baroness Hastings, and Cecily Bonville, Marchioness of Dorset

This paper explores the life cycles of three generations of medieval aristocratic women: Alice Montagu (1407-1462), her daughter, Katherine Neville (1442-1504) and her granddaughter, Cecily Bonville (1460-1529).

The common themes of family background and networks, marriages, political events, widowhood, preparations for death, and burial, all demonstrate how these women attempted to assert agency over their lives in the face of social, political and economic barriers.

This paper employs a microhistorical approach, using a range of literary, documentary, and visual sources which illustrate how these aristocratic women were included or excluded from contemporary records.

It focuses on family background and networks, particularly their royal connections and links to influential families, analyses thirty-four marriages of Alice Montagu's extended family, evidencing typical patterns in line with most medieval English aristocratic families, examines relevant rebellions, wars, and exiles between 1400 and 1485.

Also, this paper assesses how twenty-six widows from this family, including Alice, Katherine and Cecily, coped after the deaths of their husbands, examining the advice given to medieval widows by Christine de Pizan. It analyses social, religious and economic details from seven surviving wills of Alice's immediate family.
Lastly, there is a focus on family burials, considering how their tombs would have reflected their wealth and status.

Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how aspects of the lives of three aristocratic women, who appear in few records, can be reconstructed from a variety of sources and comparisons with other contemporary noblewomen.