Juana of Castile (Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Candace and I were talking about King Louis the Fat around the same time we both found out our pets are slightly obese. (OK, Jupiter is the one who’s only slightly obese. My cat Lilac is 16 pounds. Did you know there’s such a thing as prescription food? Because there is.) You’ll come across several names like that in history — someone who’s identified only by a single characteristic.

Joanna the Mad, or Juana la Loca, is another one of those (although, to be fair, she’s also known as Juana de Castile). Appropriately, she was married off to a man of the court of Burgundy known as Philip the Handsome. It sounds like a Disney cast list, but it’s not.

The conventional story goes that Joanna was very much in love with her husband, and he with her, but after a time, his eye began to wander, and she wasn’t the look-the-other-way type. She got rid of all the pretty servants and exhibited increasingly strange behavior, culminating in her screaming outside the castle gates in the bitter cold. This is around the time people decided she’d been driven mad by jealousy. She wouldn’t even let nuns near her Philip. Her obsession didn’t end after her husband’s death — she cradled his decomposing body and slept in the fields with his coffin.

Or so the story goes.

This much is true: She was in love with Philip, and she was devastated by his death. But left out of that story are the even sadder realities. Juana, like so many women throughout the centuries, was a pawn in her family’s political games. Due to unexpected events, she ended up in positions of power no one wanted her in. She became queen of Castile and later Aragon, but there were powerful men who wanted that control instead. She was betrayed by her father, her son and her husband when it came her time to rule — Philip was the one to begin spreading rumors about her unfitness, saying that she didn’t take care of herself and had let her religious practices lapse. The fact that her grandmother was insane just added to the backstory.

It’s also true that she was put into confinement by her own family, but then again, this was more about political power than Juana’s mental health. When she died, after being jailed for 47 years without access to sunlight, she was partially paralyzed and suffering from ulcerated, gangerous wounds on her legs. Her guardians, who were really her jailers, were authorized to torture her if they wished.

Was Juana truly La Loca? We don’t know and we never will, but that’s missing the point. The story of the woman mad from her jealousy, passionate and uncontrolled, is a story more about the public than Juana. The story of the woman feared for her power, unable to fight back effectively, is a story about gender politics. The real Juana is somewhere in there.

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