Princess

Princess – Fifty Feisty Noblewomen reveals how fifty royal women wielded power, navigated courtly constraints, and transformed roles into influence, ambition, and survival, reshaping history with audacity and strategy.

Princess – Fifty Feisty Noblewomen is not a gallery of tiaras and fairytales. It is a book about power – and the price of wearing a crown. In fifty sharp, vividly researched portraits Dr Katharina Van Cauteren and Dr Leen Kelchtermans bring to life women who were far more than decorative consorts. Some ruled outright. Others governed through letters, lovers, wardrobes, or wombs. All of them manoeuvred within systems that were never designed for them – and bent those systems to their will. From Habsburg archduchesses to Bourbon rebels, from queens who carried empires in their dowries to widows who turned mourning into political theatre, these women lived where blood, faith and strategy collided. Their bodies were battlegrounds. Their marriages were treaties. Their jewels were propaganda. Yet within the strict choreography of court ritual, they found room for audacity, wit and sheer survival instinct.

This is a book about dynasties, desire, and diplomacy – but also about loneliness, ambition, and resilience. It explores how a princess could be at once a pawn and a player, a mother and a monarch, an ornament and an architect of history. Written with scholarly precision and narrative flair, Princess dismantles the myth of passive royalty and replaces it with something far more compelling: women of flesh and blood, who refused to dissolve into courtly foam. Because a title was never just a title. It was a destiny.

Dr Katharina Van Cauteren (b. 1981) is head of the Chancellery of The Phoebus Foundation. A passionate art historian and exhibition maker, she has showcased artists from Flanders and the Low Countries around the world. She took Rubens to India for the first time, introduced the Dutch to Jacob Jordaens, and brought Emile Claus and Rik Wouters to the UK. She has sent Memling, Metsys, Rubens and Van Dyck from Tallinn (Estonia) to Denver (USA) and points beyond. In Belgium she has spotlighted the Flemish masters of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a variety of new ways and masterminded exhibitions on such diverse themes as the Antwerp Academy, lace, and portraiture. She also collaborates with other creatives – fashion designers, contemporary artists, production houses and radio makers. Invariably the result is a total experience, a roller-coaster ride through art history.

Dr Leen Kelchtermans (b. 1986) studied Art History at KU Leuven and completed a Research Master’s in the same discipline at the University of Amsterdam. While a pre-doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), she wrote her dissertation on the topographical battle scenes of Brussels painter Peter Snayers (1592-1667). In this first oeuvre study, she applied an interdisciplinary research method to explore the layers of meaning in early modern war paintings. Her doctorate was awarded the Erik Duverger Prize of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. She went on to work as a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven and as a visiting professor at LUCA School of Arts. Currently, Leen is an art-historical researcher at the Chancellery of The Phoebus Foundation. She immerses herself (and delights) in its extensive top collection of Baroque masters. Among other things, she studied Jacob Jordaens’ family network in The Hague and succeeded in reconstructing his Antwerp home’s reception room, where the ceiling pieces about the love story of Cupid and Psyche were on display. Leen lectures at national and international conferences, and publishes her research in national and international books and journals.