An interview with Shelley Puhak, author of Dark Queens
Adam's Notes for June 6, 2024
This week I spoke with Shelley Puhak, author of one of my favourite non-fiction books of the last few years, Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World (Bloomsbury, 2022). Dark Queens is a dual biography of the Merovingian queens Fredegund and Brunhild, following their forty year rivalry. The Merovingian period is one I’ve long found fascinating, but always somewhat opaque. Dark Queens really helped clear a lot of that up for me, there’s an almost cinematic feel to the way the narrative rolls out, and Puhak has a knack for reading into the motives and emotional states of these distant actors.
You can find Dark Queens on: Goodreads | Bookshop | Amazon | Amazon Canada
Adam: Can you tell us about how this book came to be? You mention in the book’s intro about being inspired by a horned Hallowe’en viking helmet, but I wonder if that path could have just as easily led you to the vikings or to Wagner.
Shelley Puhak: This book is, in all honesty, the result of going down a research rabbit hole. My encounter with the Halloween helmet overlapped with another project I was working on at the time about a formidable Viking queen and her feud with a Scandinavian king. I came across a mention in a source about how this feud paled in comparison with the forty-year rivalry between queens Brunhild and Fredegund. I had never heard of either woman, and once I learned more, I couldn’t believe this bit of history wasn’t more widely-known.
Adam: Your book is a dual biography of the queens Fredegund and Brunhild, two women who came from outside of the Merovingian elite and managed to rule huge swathes of territory. Maybe this is putting you in a hard spot, but if you had to choose between the two, if you were a baron in sixth century France, who would you go with?
Shelley Puhak: Team Brunhild or Team Fredegund? I think that would depend on exactly where I was in the pecking order and my appetite for risk. If I was from an old established family, I would choose Brunhild; we’d have the most in common and she’d be the most likely to guard my privileges and share my dream of restoring the Roman Empire. If I was a more recent entry into the nobility, I would gamble on Fredegund, a fellow newcomer. She seemed to intuitively grasp that there was no going back.
Adam: The rivalry between the Merovingian queens Fredegund and Brunhild is really fascinating. On the one hand there’s this soap opera element that’s filled with ruthless skullduggery, and on the other hand the history we have of them seems to be a reactionary backlash, written by men resentful at having had to share power or be ruled by these women, men who were often outright vilifying these two. Was it a struggle to balance these elements while reconstructing their lives in Dark Queens?
A terrible struggle! I tried to accept nothing outright, question the motives of everyone involved, and seek outside corroboration. My goal was to capture the scale and drama of their rivalry without reducing either woman to a caricature.
Adam: We tend to think of the medieval world as very rigid hierarchically, but that’s really not the case in the Merovingian world, is it?
Shelley Puhak: I was astounded at how fluid the social structure was. Fredegund is, of course, a former kitchen slave who becomes queen. And she’s not a complete outlier. Take, for example, one man named Leudast: he was enslaved and, after trying to run away, he has his ear mutilated as punishment. So he’s very visibly marked as not from the upper class. But he then manages to become the queen’s stablemaster and then assumes the position of palace constable (from the Latin comes stabuli, or “Count of the Stable”). Okay, I was thinking at first, maybe Leudast is just really talented at handling horses. But then Leudast rises even further and becomes a count, and not just any count, but of Tours, which is an immensely important city for the Franks.
Leudast falls afoul of Queen Fredegund at one point, and we end up with a feud between two former slaves who are now a queen and a count, which would be remarkable in nearly any time but the sixth century.
Adam: A lot of the history of Dark Queens draws from Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks. It’s a fascinating book but a difficult one. He’s an extremely biased partisan in the history he’s recounting, but he doesn’t often ‘fess up to it, plus it’s not exactly a linear narrative. And there’s like six guys just named Theuderic. How do you make sense of it? Does your background in poetry help?
Shelley Puhak: I can liken reading Gregory of Tours to listening to someone’s drunken roommate tell you an anecdote about their ex that unfolds during a hurricane. You just want information about the hurricane—when did it start? how heavy were the rains?— but all they want to do is ramble on about how terribly their ex has treated them. Your agenda as a researcher and their agenda as a storyteller are completely at odds.
The thing I found most challenging was the chronology. Gregory of Tours did not believe in topic sentences and he loved to go in circles. I created these giant timelines to keep track of everything, as a single incident might end up doled out across several chapters. And then I also had to compare my timeline against a list of major events, to track what else was happening at the time and what Gregory might be leaving out. This is all to say that a single page could take hours to slog through and untangle exactly what happened, or was most likely to have happened, and in what order.
I think my background in poetry came in handy at the level of the sentence or the individual word. There’s the added problem that Gregory wrote in this really clumsy Latin, and I was usually reading his work in translation. Sometimes the meaning of a passage might hinge on a single word. For example, is the queen ordering an execution out of vengeance or out of fear, because she is genuinely afraid she or her child are in immediate danger? Revisiting that single word could shed new light on someone’s motive in a complex sequence of events. I would often compare a few translations, then go back to the original Latin and pull in an expert to help.
Adam: I guess I consider myself a small-r republican, in that I’m against monarchism, but I find it so easy to be spellbound by dynastic writing, whether it’s based in actual history or something entirely fictional like Game of Thrones. And I know I’m not unique in that. What do you think it is that keeps drawing us back to these kinds of stories, even as society has moved on?
Shelley Puhak: This is such a great question. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it but I’m afraid I don’t have a great answer. I wonder if it has something to do with these stories all being about family drama and dysfunction writ large? They manage to be both familiar and strange. We all know, or can imagine, what it’s like to get into an argument with a stepmother, or be betrayed by a spouse, or worry for the health of a child. But now the stakes are so much higher — that argument or breakup might cost you or your life, that worry can lead you to execute a bunch of innocents.
Adam: You make a convincing case that Fredegund must have had a network of common folk—household servants and slaves—who acted as her spies and assassins. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Shelley Puhak: As a former slave, Fredegund doesn’t have the same resources that other royals do. Most have family connections; they have friends in high places who can tip them off to a backstabbing rival or potential coup. Despite this, Fredegund was incredibly well-informed. This suggests that either she is psychic (and quite a few people did think she was a witch!) or that she has access to different sources of information. She’s able to save the king more than once by knowing things that he and his royal council don’t. Fredegund also does quite a few things behind the king’s back, sometimes for his benefit, sometimes for her own. Given the logistics and distance involved, it would be impossible for her to be handling this all on her own.
Fredegund worked in the palace for a long time before she was queen. She was raised among cooks, scullery maids, stableboys, and messengers. It defies logic that someone as savvy as she was would not have developed, and then maintained, some connections with her former colleagues. And while servants are often overlooked and underestimated, they are also uniquely positioned to observe and learn all sorts of things.
Adam: I’ve always really liked—or I guess felt sorry for—Rigunth. She gets beaten by her own mother in a scene that feels like it’s out of a wrestling promo, and then her wedding is an epic disaster, too—some of her servants supposedly hang themselves to get out of going, and even that’s before her father dies and the caravan falls apart. Aside from Fredegund and Brunhild, do you have any favourite Merovingians?
Shelley Puhak: Poor Rigunth! I also find Radegund to be really fascinating. She’s a foreign princess who was captured as a child and forced to marry the Merovingian king who slaughtered her family; she managed to wriggle out of that marriage by founding a prestigious convent and becoming a nun. Radegund stayed involved in politics, though, performing top-level diplomatic negotiations, running literary salons, but also performing these really extreme and gruesome mortifications of the flesh.
I’m also very intrigued by Clotilde and Basina, the princess-nuns who led an armed revolt. They walked out of their convent with forty other nuns and marched 64 miles through chilly February floodwaters to plead their case. They returned home, but when the reforms they were promised didn’t materialize, they walked out again—and commandeered a nearby church, hired a band of armed men, and laid siege to their abbey.
Adam: This is maybe a longshot, but considering you’ve written a book on Merovingian history and poetry with Arthurian themes, do you have any interest in the medieval chansons de geste?
Shelley Puhak: This is a topic I would love to know more about— if you have reading suggestions, please let me know. What little I know tells me these are great case studies in how history is both preserved and garbled by literature, in how certain stories get coopted and others erased.
Adam: Michael Newth’s Heroines of the French Epic is one I always recommend, it’s a good selection of the gestes from across the period they were popular, arranged in such a way that you can track the ‘progress’ of women in the stories as they go from prizes to be won in the early stories and then eventually becoming protagonists in their own right towards the end, when the gestes take on almost a fairy tale quality. Speaking of recommendations, can you recommend some books for people who found Dark Queens interesting and are looking for something similar?
Shelley Puhak: For all things Merovingian, I can recommend E.T. Dailey’s great new book on Radegund: Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen.
For those who like history that skews a little earlier, check out Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire.
For fans of medieval history, I recommend:
Nancy Gladstone’s Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe
Helen Castor’s She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth
Adam: Do you think you’ll return to this period of history for your next work, or is it on to something new?
Shelley Puhak: I really want to revisit this era in the future—I love its energy and ingenuity. There are a few women’s stories that didn’t make it into Dark Queens that I’m hoping to dig into more fully.
Even though my next book is set a thousand years later, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there are a few elements that have carried over: extreme weather events, witchcraft trials, cutthroat court intrigue, and a ridiculous number of assassinations. The Blood Countess: A Tale of Deception, Disinformation, and History’s Deadliest Woman is a deep dive into the alleged crimes of the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory, who was either the world’s most prolific female serial killer or an incredibly unlucky target of political slander.
You can find Dark Queens at: Goodreads | Bookshop | Amazon | Amazon Canada
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"I can liken reading Gregory of Tours to listening to someone’s drunken roommate tell you an anecdote about their ex that unfolds during a hurricane. You just want information about the hurricane—when did it start? how heavy were the rains?— but all they want to do is ramble on about how terribly their ex has treated them."