She Travelled With Her Husband’s Coffin for 8 Months – Then They Locked Her Away for 46 Years

She Travelled With Her Husband’s Coffin for 8 Months – Then They Locked Her Away for 46 Years In December 1506, near Burgos, Juana of Castile had her husband’s coffin opened. She was twenty-seven, pregnant and three months a widow. Centuries later Francisco Pradilla painted the scene in Doña Juana la Loca, which now hangs in the Prado, and it fixed her in the public mind as Joanna the Mad, a queen driven out of her mind by love. The documents tell a more complicated story. This documentary follows Juana from her birth in Toledo in 1479 as the third child of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. It covers her hurried marriage at sixteen to Philip the Handsome, the deaths that unexpectedly made her heiress to Castile and Aragon, the freezing nights at the gates of La Mota, and the Flemish court where her household was guarded and her letters were intercepted. Drawing on surviving correspondence from ambassadors, chroniclers and royal secretaries, it looks at how her husband and her father each put their names to papers declaring her unfit to rule, and how the Cortes of Castile refused to agree. The second half of the story takes place behind the walls of Tordesillas, where Juana lived from 1509 until her death in 1555, the lawful queen for all of those forty-six years. Her keepers withheld news of her father’s death for more than four years, her daughter Catherine was taken from her room through a hole in the wall, and her son Charles V ruled an empire in her name. During the Comuneros revolt of 1520, rebel leaders reached her and pressed her to sign, and she refused. The film separates documented fact from Romantic legend, compares the competing diagnoses offered by historians from Bergenroth and Pfandl to Bethany Aram and Gillian Fleming, and asks a question the evidence can only partly answer: was Juana mad, or was her incapacity exaggerated by the men who gained most from it? Sources: Antonio Rodríguez Villa, La reina doña Juana la Loca (1892) Correspondencia de Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida (1907) G. A. Bergenroth, Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Supplement (1868) Bethany Aram, Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (2005) Gillian B. Fleming, Juana I: Legitimacy and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Castile (2018) Museo del Prado, Francisco Pradilla, Doña Juana la Loca (1877)