THERE HAS BEEN a long tradition of interest in the history of queens, arguably stemming back to the classical period with treatments of the lives, reigns, and loves of Dido and Cleopatra. This interest was kept alight by contemporary chroniclers and biographers over the centuries, who documented and discussed the lives of royal women. An early example is Fan Ye's biographies of the Chinese empresses and consorts in the Hou Han shu of the fifth century CE. Queens featured regularly in European collections of women “worthies” from Boccaccio in the fourteenth century onwards, with many collective biographers creating collections dedicated exclusively to queens from the early modern period to the heyday of queenly prosopography in the nineteenth century. While many works, such as the well-known multi-volume Lives of the Queens of England produced by the Strickland sisters, take a nationalistic approach, Mary Hays's Memoirs of Queens (1821) is an example of collections that feature female rulers and consorts from beyond Europe. Indeed, Hays's work encompassed various periods and geographical locations, including figures such as Panthea, queen of Susa, and the Mughal empress Nur Jahan— demonstrating perhaps an early interest in the premise of global queenship.

The modern discipline of queenship studies has built upon this long-term interest in the lives of queens, but taken the study of their reigns in new directions. While biography has not been ignored by queenship scholars, there has been an emphasis on other areas that had been previously underexplored, such as queenly patronage, political agency household dynamics, reputation and representation, and, more recently, diplomatic activity. Queenship studies, like the aforementioned collective biographies of queens, have also seen nationalistic and dynastic groupings in various collections, such as Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (2005), Tudor Queenship (2012) and Early Modern Habsburg Women (2013). Queens have also been grouped by type, such as queens consort, which are the focus of the “Marrying Cultures” project, or queens regent, in the case of Katherine Crawford's insightful Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (2004).