Within recent years, the pioneering research of Margaret Howell and John Carmi Parsons has brought into sharper focus the importance of personal and dynastic ties forged through marriage in shaping the fabric of thirteenth-century politics. Together their work permits us to reconsider the question of women's agency, in the light of some interesting models for female involvement in political life. Continually recurring themes are the roles played both by kings' wives and by kings' daughters as benevolent counsellors and intercessors with their husbands, fathers and sons, following the biblical examples of Esther and the Virgin Mary.

Although thirteenth-century English queens have been well served by biographical studies in the last decade, the lives of the daughters, wives and widows of the native Welsh princes are only beginning to attract renewed interest. This paper will place the eventful life of Joan, the illegitimate daughter of King John and wife of Llywelyn the Great, prince of North Wales, within the context of existing scholarship on royal women. Joan is one of the few wives of a native Welsh prince who emerges as more than a name from the sources. In charters, letters, English government records, and the accounts of both English and Welsh chroniclers, she appears as a politically active figure in her own right, nurturing relations between the royal courts of England and Gwynedd. Admittedly, her prominent participation in politics did not meet with universal approval. Robin Chapman Stacey has recently argued that the compiler of at least one early thirteenth-century Welsh legal text remodeled the traditional material on the king’s wife in order to criticize Joan’s involvement in Welsh affairs.